2026-09-09 20:33:10
We’ve discussed how governments can exterminate some species of mosquitoes, but what about you? How can you get rid of the mosquitoes in your home, your backyard, your garden? How can you stop their annoying buzz when you sleep at night? Stop suffering from the itchiness of their bites? Go back out at night again? What works and what doesn’t? Do these mosquito-killing lasers work? Citronella? CO2 machines? Deet? Bti?
This summer, I got devoured, but I was so confused about all the options to deal with mosquitoes that I decided to look at all the evidence. Here is the practical guide I wish I had to rid my local area of mosquitoes once and for all, including:
The six strategies to fend off mosquitoes
What works in each, what doesn’t, and why
Over 50 measures specifically assessed
The 6 killer tactics that should be enough
(No affiliate links or commissions).
You should have six layers of defense:
2026-09-03 20:04:22
I can’t believe what I just discovered. It looks like we could already eradicate malaria if we want, along with any species of mosquitoes! The main reason we don’t do it is…crazy.
We concluded in the previous article that we should eradicate a few species of mosquitoes. How, though? This is what we'll cover in this article:
How we’ve learned to fight mosquitoes over the last 130 years
How we achieved the technology to eradicate those we choose, along with malaria
Why we're not releasing this technology yet
What you can do to make it happen
If you’re not interested in the history and only want to know the answer, just jump to the bottom, to the section Weapons of Mosquito Destruction.
To kill a mosquito, you must think like a mosquito.
Each development step is an opportunity to stop them:
The moment we learned the mosquito was responsible for so many diseases, epidemiologists went into mosquito extermination mode, and the diseases dwindled pretty fast: Yellow Fever was eliminated in Havana in 1901, and the malaria death rate among Panama Canal workers fell by 90% between 1906 and 1909, the result of applying all the tools at their disposal:
Eliminate reservoirs of standing water.
Kill larvae in the water. One way was with oil or kerosene on water surfaces, to asphyxiate the larvae that feed in the water but come to the surface to breathe. Another was with arsenic-based insecticides.1
Use insecticides on adult mosquitoes, too. The most famous one was pyrethrum, derived from chrysanthemum flowers and already used as an insecticide for centuries.
Later, we tried to drive Aedes Aegypti to extinction in South America. The exercise started in the 1930s and succeeded by the 1960s, but eventually the mosquito came back:
As we explained in the previous article, this was due to a bureaucracy of weekly home inspections, plus some insecticides that were either very toxic or too short-lived.2 Crucially, a third of the budget went to inspecting the inspectors.
During WW2, we found a better insecticide DDT.3 It lasted months and was not very toxic to humans, so inspectors didn’t need to visit their areas every week anymore. Once every few months was enough, bringing costs down. That’s how we eradicated Aedes Aegypti in the 1960s.4
Eventually, South America got reinfected because:
As diseases disappeared, it was hard to justify the continued surveillance politically. Budgets disappeared.
It was discovered that DDT accumulated in the environment, and could become toxic to some other species.
Not all countries in America eradicated mosquitoes—notably, the US—so eventually South America got reinfected.
South America’s urban population exploded, and with it, mosquito hosts and breeding grounds.
And above all, resistance.
We used these techniques around the world. Some mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT, so we created other chlorine-based insecticides. Mosquitoes developed resistance against them even faster, so we came up with organophosphates,5 then carbamates (both of which turned out to be even more toxic than DDT), then synthetic pyrethroids6: They are also naturally not very toxic to mammals, so they were better. That’s what we’ve been using on bed nets to fight malaria for decades now.
That’s how we achieved this:
Despite a growing population in Africa, we were able to shrink malaria deaths… Until recently. You can imagine why.7
Yes, more resistance, so we need more insecticides, in a neverending arms race. We need to break this vicious cycle. How?
The key reason why it’s so hard to eradicate mosquitoes is that the more you kill:
The more they develop resistance
The harder it is to find the remaining few. For example, you might eliminate buckets of stagnant water, but what about the water in narrow gutters? What about the water accumulated in some old tire thrown in the forest?
So the challenge of anti-mosquito scientists today is: How do we come up with strategies that find and kill every single individual before they develop resistance? And for that, they have one key insight.
The best way to find and kill mosquitoes quickly is to recruit other mosquitoes.
The top areas of mosquito annihilation research all use that insight.
Male and female mosquitoes find each other, so if you release a sterile mosquito, it will find a partner, mate, and not have offspring.
So scientists release sterile mosquitoes, but only males, so they can compete with wild males in mating with wild females, who usually only mate once.
First, they breed mosquitoes in captivity, which is pretty easy: One female mosquito can lay on average 500 eggs.8 That can mean 125,000 descendants in two generations, and about 31 million in three.
Then, they extract most of the males,9 sterilize them, for example with radiation or chemical castration, and then release them. They did this for example in El Salvador in the 1970s, and they reduced the population of mosquitoes around a lake by 99%. Of course, the population went back to normal within four months of the program stopping.10
This strategy has another advantage: It’s reasonably easy. Yes, you have to produce the mosquitoes which is work, but they reproduce alright. Then, just go to a bunch of places and release the mosquitoes. You can even use drones now to make it easier.
Another approach is through biological infertility, with the Wolbachia bacteria: You infect all the males, who will mate with an uninfected female, but their eggs won’t hatch.
That’s why separating males and females is so important, but it’s very hard: If you’re releasing 10M mosquitoes and 0.1% are females, that’s still 10k females. No bueno. To avoid that, we use filters, like the fact that male pupae are a bit smaller, or hatch a bit earlier. This is an active area of research, and a paper from last year managed to reduce female contamination by 30x.
But a few females is still bad, so scientists treat mosquitoes with both Wolbachia and radiation:
The Wolbachia makes the males infertile.
But there are still a few females.
So we radiate them all, making the females infertile and the males doubly infertile
The benefit of doing this instead of just radiating is that we can radiate the males less, which is important because radiation weakens male mosquitoes and makes them less attractive. Adding Wolbachia means less radiation, male mosquitoes will be strong, and will go on and successfully mate with females in the wild.
These techniques (referred to as IIT-SIT) have achieved near elimination in the wild.
The popularity for this intervention among the population exploded after its success.
This is what Singapore has been doing across the country since 2016, with incredible results:11
There’s a problem with this approach, though: You need to keep adding mosquitoes basically forever, because the mosquitoes you release and their partners don’t have offspring, but mosquitoes from elsewhere do, and they repopulate the areas.
Is there a way you don’t need to add mosquitoes all the time? That’s what genetic engineers have been considering.
First, we genetically modified mosquitoes so that their offspring don't survive, a bit like previous approaches, with similarly good results.
But then we wondered: What if we genetically modify male mosquitoes so that they can normally mate and have offspring, but the females die before they can reproduce? Only the males survive, who will go on to carry their genes onto the next generation. This is better than the previous approach, right? Before, you killed all offspring. Now, all the surviving males join the frey to have only male children. We eliminate all females.
Unfortunately, it’s not yet the solution. We must continue releasing these mosquitoes in the wild, or else their germ line eventually disappears, replaced by males who can have fully fertile offspring.
This is where the next idea is diabolically good.
One day in 2003, Austin Burt thought: What if we created a selfish gene that hijacked its hosts to spread aggressively, all while making them less fertile? In a few generations, all offspring could have the gene, just as they continue dwindling until they all disappear.
The technology to make his dream come true would only appear a decade later, with CRISPR Cas9. Immediately, scientists started to think about how they could use it to eradicate mosquitoes. In 2018, they succeeded in completely eliminating the mosquitoes in two cages, just by seeding some of the males with their genetic modification.
How do you do that though? How do you spread an infertile gene to the entire population? The fertility should disappear. That’s the crazy genius: A selfish gene takes over the offspring.
Let’s take that gene G, and the natural version is N.
A modified male with the G gene in both chromosomes will be called G/G. It’s released in the wild, and finds all N/N females.
Their offspring will be G/N, of course: G from the father, N from the mother. Except this is the selfish gene’s trick: It changes the germline! The eggs and sperm of these mosquitoes change the N for a G, so that they can only contribute G to their offspring!
Early on, nothing happens: The G/G and G/N always contribute G genes, so as long as they mate with N/N mosquitoes, the descendants will all have G/N genes, and continue reproducing.
But what happens when this G gene has spread enough in the population that a G/N meets another G/N? They both only produce G gametes, so the offspring will be fully G/G. And that makes the female infertile, but not the male!
So the female stops procreating, while the male continues spreading the G gene! Eventually all the population has at least one G gene, because otherwise it means every single one of their ancestors must be N/N: Very unlikely! When this G gene is so widespread, eventually every mosquito will carry it, and no female will reproduce, collapsing the population.
Another idea (from 2020) that might be easier to understand is a twist on this: Release males with a mutation that can only have male offspring.12
Imagine: You release 100 genetically modified males that mate with 100 wild females. Instead of having, on average, 100 surviving males and 100 surviving females, they have 200 surviving males! In the next generation, there will be 400 males, then 800… Until they overwhelm the population of wild males, and there are no more mosquitoes left. In labs, they tested this, and they found that introducing just 2.5% males like this collapsed the population in 10-14 generations.
How do they make sure there’s no resistance that emerges against this? Because in just a few generations all mosquitoes are wiped out, and because they combined this genetic change with the previous one—or several at once. It’s very unlikely that within a few generations, both genetic changes can be reversed in the same individuals.
So we have it! Finally! After nearly 150 years of fighting against mosquitoes, we have a solution that is easy to dispense, only toxic to the one species we want to eradicate, can be forever, and wouldn’t create resistance! So what happened when we tested this?
We haven’t.
Surely, this is not possible. We have the holy grail that could eradicate malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and annoying mosquito bites, and we’ve decided not to release it?? We prefer that hundreds of millions of people are infected every year, and hundreds of thousands of toddlers and babies die?? No way!!
And yet.
Target Malaria says the first tests will be carried out in 2030. In other words, billions will be infected and millions will die because we will wait a few years.
Why?
Because we’re afraid the solution would be too good.
If this succeeds as we expect it, we could truly, irreversibly, erase a species from the face of the Earth. It’s not the first time we’ve done it to animals, nor the first time we’ve deliberately eliminated a parasite (we’ve done it with smallpox, rinderpest, trying wth polio). But it would be the first time we do it deliberately to an animal. Imagine we release this in Africa against the Anopheles Gambiae, to fight malaria. It could spread across the continent, then across continents, and there would not be any more anywhere. If there are unintended consequences, it would be too late.
Or at least, that’s the argument. Honestly, I’m not very moved:
As we said, there are thousands of other mosquito species. This would only kill one,13 as this is genetically targeted and can’t jump around.
This one kills a lot.
It’s a species focused on humans, so its habitats are human habitats, not nature. We don’t need them in our habitats.
We’ve looked into this and they’re irrelevant to these habitats: No flower depends on them, no predator, no symbiosis with other animals… Nothing
We can reverse it!
We can wait for all mosquitoes to die down, and when none are left, if anything bad happens, we can always reinsert a few million that we’ve kept in labs.
We’ve genetically engineered a way to revert these changes if we need to!
Another argument is: “A single country could decide to eliminate mosquitoes, and they would disappear in other countries that didn’t decide to do it.” Yes, what a horror that my neighbor decides to eliminate malaria, dengue, and mosquito bites for me. I would hate him. If we can revert this anyway, who cares?
There’s another argument I’m much more open to. What happens if mosquitoes do develop resistance? A paper from two months ago simulated billions of potential mutations and noticed that some could emerge that would stop this gene and eventually prevail.14 So they proposed to not change just one gene, but a bunch of them, so that even if one or two fail, the rest can carry through. We will need time to create alternatives, test them all in software, test them with a variety of real-life mosquitoes…
Because that’s the other thing, we probably want to test it in the wild before introducing it everywhere, but we need to be supercareful about where we do that, or the mosquito can escape anyways. So maybe a remote island, making sure nobody goes in or out carrying mosquitoes during the test?15
You’d think the approach to this should then be: OK we have this holy grail, let’s test it ASAP! Let’s grab one of these islands and release the engineered mosquitoes there. Then, we can test what share of mosquitoes we catch have the engineered genes over time, see if mosquito populations shrink, see if malaria shrinks, and make sure nothing else bad happens.16 If everything works, great! We should then insert these mosquitoes in other places.
Instead, we have no test programmed! This paper from last year explains why: bureaucracy!
More than a dozen organizations have published testing guidelines for mosquito gene drives. Great! People sure know how to write papers about being careful. But who’s writing about the millions dying and about hurrying to save them? We’ve seen the exact same thing with SO2 injection to cool the Earth: Lots of people have opinions, focused on fear-mongering and on the scary speculative risks that never materialize, while the real people who could benefit from the technology keep suffering. From those trying to test this:17
The first gene drive field trial will be determined by leaders in a country that boldly chooses to be the first. Unfortunately, they are overwhelmed by unclear guidance. Local WHO officers know little about their own agency’s published guidelines for testing genetic technology for malaria, and politicians and regulators struggle to engage with other international agencies that have published guidance. Large international forums and meetings are called to discuss risk and regulation for gene drives, but these are often out of reach for many who should be at the center of these conversations.
So what do they think would unlock this?
A clear message from the WHO that they support this, as well as the biggest donors: the US, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the EU.18
A clear, simple checklist from the WHO for political leaders who want to apply this. I’ve put together a draft here.
Stop meetings and discussions, and get national regulators to support this, ideally in the candidate countries already identified: Comoros, São Tomé e Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea.
We spend $4B on fighting malaria every year, and yet 600k people die. Effective Altruists have asserted for years that the best way to spend your money is on malaria mosquito nets. Just two weeks ago, GiveWell donated $276M for mosquito nets, its largest grant ever. That is probably not the best use of anybody’s time or money anymore.
We have at our fingertips the means to end this scourge—malaria, and human-biting mosquitoes too if we want—forever. It just requires one thing: Governments and institutions like the WHO must realize what they have in their hands, stop stalling, and push for a real-life test of these gene drives in isolated islands. But most of them don’t know. You can help them by letting them know: Forward this article to them, to people who might know them, or to anybody who might be interested, so they talk about it.
This can literally avoid billions of infections and millions of lives.
A mix was concocted with carbolic acid, rosin, and caustic soda in Panama. Later on, after WW1, the US health service systematically tested products to kill insects, and one of the best ones turned out to be Paris green. Conceived as a paint color, it turned out to be super toxic because of its high arsenic content. It was first used as an insecticide against potato beetles in the US in the 1800s, and enshrined as mosquito killer in the 1920s. You didn’t need to spread it across a pond, just where larvae feed, and within 24h they were dead with just a 1% concentration dust. Over time, more variants of arsenic were discovered and used as insecticides.
Inspectors would be given an area, and each week they’d inspect every water container: cisterns, barrels, jars, flower pots, saucers, bottles, cans, tanks, roof gutters, tires, rubbish, cavities… Anything that would accumulate water was emptied, covered, or received a film of oil or arsenic on top, so that larvae would suffocate. They also used flower-based insecticides indoors.
We knew it already but hadn’t realized what a good insecticide it was.
All of this was mostly done in urban areas, because human-biting mosquitoes stay near humans, so there was no need to invest huge sums in remote areas. Visiting them occasionally was enough.
Malathion, naled, temephos. These break down in the environment (yay!), but are more toxic to humans and disappear very fast, so they are much more expensive to use. Mosquitoes developed resistance to them, too.
Permethrin, deltamethrin, cypermethrin, lambda-cyhalothrin… They were just like the insecticides from the chrysanthemum flower, but modified to last a bit longer in the environment. But not forever: Nature had already evolved ways to decompose them.
Actually, ⅔ of the extra deaths were due to COVID pandemic disruptions, but resistance was growing.
Probably more in captivity as they don’t have predators or humans trying to kill them
They let the females continue reproducing with those that are left. Males can mate with several females, so you leave a few and they’ll mate with the females.
Something similar happened in India: Mosquitoes from neighboring areas would continue invading and replenishing dwindling populations.
It makes sense that this is so successful: Imagine there are 10M mosquitoes in an area (5M males, 5M females). In the first year, you release 10M additional male mosquitoes, who compete with 5M males. Two thirds of your females will mate with infertile mosquitoes and won’t reproduce. In the next generation, you have just 1.7M wild females and 1.7M wild males, and throw again 10M infertile males. Now the share of fertile males is much smaller than before. Keep doing that for a few years, and there are almost no mosquitoes left.
It destroys the sperm containing the X chromosome, so these male mosquitoes only have Y-chromosome sperm, and all their offspring is male.
It might kill more than one, because some mosquitoes mate with adjacent species, but in general these are similarly bad for us. For example, Anopheles Gambiae reproduces with Anopheles Coluzzii and Anopheles Arabiensis, but all three bite humans and cause malaria, so we should get rid of them all.
The hope was not that the engineered would never change. All genes change. The hope was that any mutation would continue making females infertile, which is what had been noticed in cages. But the computer suggested that, given the massive populations of mosquitoes in the wild, some could indeed become resistant.
The test proposed in that paper is for a gene drive to eliminate malaria, not mosquitoes, which makes it even more conservative. It targets Anopheles Coluzzii
No other mosquito species are impacted, ecological collapse, bad mutations, etc.
Heavily edited for succinctness and readability
Specifically the US’s State Department, UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Germany’s ederal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and JICA, Global Affairs Canada, DG INTPA, Global Fund, and the Gates Foundation.
2026-09-01 20:07:44
Mosquitoes bugged me in three continents this year, waking me up with their buzz and annoying me with their itchy bites. There’s one flying around my head right now and I can’t find it. It’s driving me crazy. I’m about to go to bed. Am I going to get eaten while I sleep? Am I about to become vampire feed?
So I wondered: Should we get rid of them once and for all?1
They’re more than an annoyance. They cause over 700M infections and kill ~700k people every year. They’re by very far the most fatal animal to us.
Mosquitoes transmit the Zika virus, West Nile virus, chikungunya virus infections, dengue fever, and most importantly, malaria.
And as we’ve seen in several articles, their destruction has gone way beyond that: Mosquitoes caused slavery, they felled empires, and they created such a burden on people that they pushed them to live in the highlands, where difficult transport and communications made them poorer and more secluded. This prevented wealth accumulation for thousands of years, becoming a major factor in the poverty of tropical regions, especially Africa. Eradicating them would not only revert that, but also reduce the burden on the health system, redirect public-health expenditure to other diseases, reduce absenteeism from schools and work, and stop filling graveyards.
Can we eliminate these diseases completely?
Can we eliminate mosquitoes?
Should we? Would there be side-effects, for example in the environment?
How can you eliminate mosquitoes from your daily life?
That’s what we’re going to cover today.
Mosquitoes lay their eggs in standing water or areas that can get flooded. Hippocrates noted in the 5th century BC that swampy, low-lying areas are much more disease-prone.
And mosquitoes don’t travel uphill much. So the people living nearby rivers, lakes, or other sources of water have always suffered much more from disease. This is an illustration of Rome’s seven hills before they were built over as the Roman Empire grew.
In Rome, those in lowlands close to the River Tiber suffered more from malaria than those living uphill, rich people tended to live on the hills. The word palace comes from the Palatine Hill in Rome, where most of the palaces were. Romans noticed that, when they drained some areas, they tended to become healthier, and they told people to avoid marshy areas.2
China inadvertently stumbled upon another solution to malaria: the introduction of fish culture in rice paddy fields. The fish ate 80% of mosquito eggs, so malaria shrunk by 82%!
Unfortunately, while they’ve seen this for centuries, they didn’t realize the connection, and only pushed to develop it in the 20th century
Quinine, isolated in the early 1800s, reduced mortality from 90% to 17%, and that allowed the European conquest of Africa. This is the origin of the Tonic Water and Gin & Tonic you drink today—its bitterness comes from quinine, which British soldiers in India mixed with sugar, lemon, and gin to make it more palatable.
But it didn’t reduce the spread of malaria itself. In fact, not much did until the 20th century, when the vast majority of humans still lived in malaria-prone areas.
How did we eliminate it? In the late 1800s, we discovered that malaria was caused by mosquitoes, and that kick-started a global race to kill them in the 1900s. The first attempt at building the Panama Canal in the 1880s failed, among other things, because we didn’t know this back then, and too many workers died. We tried again in 1904, took measures against mosquito spread, and finally succeeded. A notable campaign was carried out in Brazil in the 1930s: Agents went door to door spraying an early insecticide (kerosene with some mosquito-killing flower extract) and draining any standing water. Later, they continued across South America. The result was the virtual elimination of the mosquito across an entire continent!
And that was despite the poor insecticide, which disappeared after a few hours or days. But during WW2 we discovered a new insecticide, DDT, which stays active on floors and walls for months. One pass was enough, which made the process much cheaper. It was first used massively on the Italian island of Sardinia, bringing malaria cases from 75,000 in 1946 to zero in 1950. Something similar happened in the US. Unfortunately, while DDT is not very toxic, it was overused in agriculture, accumulating, and causing some DDT resistance in some insect populations, so it was banned for agricultural use. We still use it as insecticide, but we can’t use it to eliminate all mosquitoes.
Hold on, we eliminated mosquito-based diseases in places like the US or Sardinia, but there are still mosquitoes there. How did we eliminate the disease and not the mosquito? Do we even need to eradicate mosquitoes, or can we just eliminate the diseases they carry?
To answer that, we need to understand how mosquito infections spread:
Malaria is caused by the plasmodium parasite, transported by the mosquito from one malaria-infected person to another, so the more malaria there is somewhere, the more likely a mosquito is to pick it up, and then to give it to somebody else. Conversely, an area can have mosquitoes, but if no human has malaria, then the mosquitoes can’t catch it,3 so won’t spread it.
That means killing enough mosquitoes at once so that nobody has malaria can be enough to stop the disease without stopping the mosquito. This is precisely why malaria has been losing ground.
But not all diseases are like that. Some have animal reservoirs, so even if you eradicate the disease in humans, mosquitoes can get them from other animals (usually monkeys) and spread them again among humans. That includes Yellow Fever, Dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya.
Of these, the only one we can hope to eliminate is Dengue, because the strains that humans spread are different from the animal ones, so extinguishing Dengue among humans might be enough to eradicate the disease completely. But it won’t be enough for the other diseases.
Finally, some mosquito-spread diseases are actually not spread from human to human, but instead from animal to human: The West Nile and Eastern equine encephalitis viruses come from birds, Japanese encephalitis from birds and pigs, Rift Valley fever from livestock… Since it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all the diseases in most jungle animals, the malaria approach is not enough to eradicate diseases.
Something like that has happened in Malaysia’s fight against malaria. With insecticides, bed nets, and other initiatives, it finally found no traditional malaria in 2018 (the one caused by plasmodiums adapted to humans). But mosquitoes can still catch another type of malaria (P. knowlesi) from macaques, and then infect humans with it. Spread of this one from human to human is uncommon, but this malaria is as deadly as the others, so Malaysia has gotten rid of human malaria, but not of mosquitoes, and the result is they still get cases of this weird malaria in forest areas because of monkeys.
In summary, we might be able to reduce malaria and dengue enough in many places without eradicating mosquitoes, but some diseases (and even malaria) might require us eradicating them nevertheless.
Should we do it after all?
There are 3,600 species of mosquitoes, but only a few hundred bite humans. And a handful of them account for virtually all human deaths.
So we don’t need to kill all mosquitoes! We could just eradicate a few mosquito species and never suffer their diseases again: especially Aedes Aegypti, Aedes Albopictus (aka tiger mosquito), Anopheles Gambia, and Anopheles Funestus, but maybe also Anopheles Nili, Anopheles Arabiensis, Anopheles Coluzzi, and Culex Tritaeniorhynchus.
These Aedes mosquito species are spreading everywhere, but that’s pretty recent! Aedes Aegypti used to be limited to West Africa, and only started spreading with the emergence of global trade, in the 15th century. The tiger mosquito comes from East Asia, and spread globally at the end of the 20th century, hitchhiking on used tires! These are invasive species!
Can we kill them? Yes! As we saw before, Aedes Aegypti was eliminated from 18 countries in South America by the 1960s. Did the ecosystem break? No. Did other animals thrive? Yes, of course! The elimination of an invasive species is not a problem!
Funnily, the tiger mosquito seems to be replacing the Aedes Aegypti in some areas!4 One invader outinvades another. It’s one of the top 100 most invasive species.
So it looks like these two specific invasive species would not be too problematic to eradicate, at least outside of their original habitats. But what about eliminating them there, or the anopheles species that cause malaria, which are mostly limited to their original habitats?
As a reminder, we don’t want to eradicate all mosquitoes, just the few that feed on humans. What’s their potential value to the environment?
The eggs and larvae feed fish, amphibians, and birds
The larvae eat detritus in the water (plants, broken leaves, etc)
The adults pollinate some flowers
The adults are other animals’ meals (fish, birds, insects)
I have a strong opinion on points (1) and (4). These basically mean: “We take biomass from humans (their blood), and then feed it to animals, and in the process kill 700k humans per year (mostly babies and toddlers), so that these other animals can eat this additional biomass.”
As a rule of thumb, we humans should try to eliminate food chains where we’re in the middle rather than the top. Call me anthropocentric, but I don’t think we should sacrifice our children to the gods of nature anymore.
If you disagree, it means you think we should continue feeding human blood to mosquitoes, so I have a solution to please everybody: Fill this form so you can offer your body to mosquitoes for the rest of us. It’s win-win: Mosquitoes get to eat, other humans don’t get bitten, and you get to sacrifice yourself for both mosquitoes and humans to keep the food chain intact.5
If sacrificing children to nature is compelling to you, and you filled the survey and gave your body to mosquitoes and still think it’s not enough, you’ll be happy to know that human-biting mosquitoes only transfer about 5,000 tons6 of biomass into nature—basically nothing. Most of that just feeds the circle of blood sacrifice, only a fraction feeds other animals. Researchers also found that mosquitoes are not a great meal: They mostly use water bodies made by humans (so little natural impact), no predator is known to depend on their larvae, the energy spent hunting the adults is more than the energy received eating them, and since they’re very widespread, it’s unlikely that any predator depends on them.7
What about cleaning the water of decaying leaves and grasses? In reality, that’s not what happens. Bacteria and fungi do that, which protozoa eat. The mosquito larvae eat all of these, but so do many other animals: dipteran larvae, zooplankton, various aquatic insects, tadpoles… If you eliminate all human mosquitoes, you might have some more bacteria and fungi for some time until the other animals catch up. But is that really going to make the area less healthy? How, because you’re eliminating disease-ridden mosquitoes?!
You could argue that the one thing mosquitoes do is take biomass from the water and carry it out, so that birds and other non-aquatic animals can feed from it. But other animals do that too: midges, mayflies, caddisflies, dragonflies… If we wanted to eliminate all mosquitoes on Earth, maybe we should worry a bit, but again, this is just a few species.
So there’s really no special role for mosquitoes here.
Adult mosquitoes of both sexes feed on nectar and other plant sugars. When they visit flowers, pollen sticks to their body and goes to the next flower. But do they have a major, or unique, pollination role?
You can probably intuit the answer already. Do farmers use mosquitoes to pollinate their plants? No.
Here’s another intuitive way to think about it: The mosquitoes we want to eradicate here are specialized in humans, which also means they live near us. Do you think, as such, they will have some special role in nature? That some special flower or plant is uniquely pollinated by them? No.
If you’re of skeptical nature—common in these Uncharted grounds—you’ll be happy to know that this paper looked into it and confirmed the intuition: Mosquitoes visit plenty of flowers (not some unique types), flowers are visited by plenty of insects, there’s no flower that depends on these mosquitoes, and if there were and we missed it, it would probably be a human-linked weed.
This other paper actually observed Anopheles Gambiae mosquitoes (the top malaria ones), and found that they tended to eat stems and leaves more than nectar (naughty!) and when it analyzed their bodies, found no pollen (buuuh!)
Yes!!
Mosquito diseases kill a ton of people, condemn entire populations to poverty, and are superannoying in general.
We can eradicate some diseases without fully eradicating mosquitoes, especially malaria, but there are limits. Some diseases can’t be eliminated without eradicating mosquitoes.
We only want to kill a handful of species, the other 3,500 will stay alive!
We’ve done it in the past! In South America, for decades, there were no Aedes Aegypti! We just stopped trying and it came back. Nature did not collapse.
Two of the biggest species are invaders: Aedes Aegypti and the tiger mosquito. These, we should just eradicate as invaders, to reestablish the former balance.
For the rest—the handful of native ones—we should also eradicate them, because:
They barely add any biomass to nature
The biomass they do add is mostly ours, and we should not like that
Their water cleaning skills are dubious, and certainly replaceable
Their pollination contribution is basically zero
In other words, a handful of mosquito species sacrifice our children and add nothing, starting by Aedes Aegypti, tiger mosquitoes, and Anopheles Gambiae. We should eradicate them first, and follow with the others.
We should probably not stop at these, though: All the logic we’ve been using for the top 5-10 worst mosquito species is valid for any human-centered mosquito species. They should all be treated as parasites whose only function is to annoy us and spread our blood in the surroundings of human habitats. Like harmful viruses and bacteria, they should all be on the eradication list. As we go through that list, starting with the deadliest mosquitoes, we can observe what happens to learn.
Let’s annihilate them.
In the next article, we’ll see how: What measures governments have taken to eliminate mosquitoes, and what you, yourself, can do to get rid of yours.
Dedicated to Francis, the mosquito that buzzed around my ear tonight as I was finishing this article. You might have won this battle, but you will lose the war.
This is a lie: I’ve been thinking about eradicating them for a long time. This is just the moment I decided: Be the change you want to see in the world. If not me, who? If not now, when? I want to drive the Freedom against Mosquitoes movement.
And they did drain many other areas, but for agriculture, not to make them healthier.
The plasmodium changes the mosquitoes’ behavior! While it incubates and they can’t infect humans yet, it reduces the mosquitoes’ desire to feed on human blood. It makes sense: It’s a risky endeavor (they can get killed!) and there’s no benefit for the plasmodium yet. Once it can infect humans though, the behavior reverses and goes beyond: Mosquitoes try to feed on human blood more, they’re more attracted to human odor, try to feed harder, probe more, feed more frequently, and crucially they are more than twice as likely to feed from multiple people rather than just one person!
It does it in two ways:
Mosquitoes of both species mate with each other, but the offspring are not viable. However, these cross-species matings make the Aegypti cease reproducing, but not the tiger. Why? When a tiger male mates with an Aegypti female, she stops mating with other males. This is normal behavior, except in this case it means the female won’t have any viable offspring ever. For some reason, the reverse is not true: When male Aegypti mate with female tigers, the females don’t stop mating! So they’re not infertile for life. Source.
Apparently, when they compete for resources that are scarce, the tiger mosquito wins and replaces the Aegypti.
If mosquito eradication methods killed other animals in the process, then I would be more worried. For example, this meta-analysis showed that using Bti to kill mosquitoes also kills other insects, and as a result there are fewer vertebrates later on, as they have lower reproductive success. But in the same region, another intervention only targeted mosquitoes, and the density of other animals didn’t shrink. So it looks like eliminating just mosquitoes doesn’t have downstream effects in the food chain.
That’s a ChatGPT calculation because it’s not core to the point. We just need a ballpark, and this is several orders of magnitude less than what would start mattering, so we have our answer.
One spider eats a lot of blood-sucking mosquitoes, but it doesn’t depend on human-blood-sucking mosquitoes.
2026-08-28 23:45:08
On July 30th 2026, over 70,000 people moved from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta, an enclave in Northern Africa with only 84,000 inhabitants.
All sources found through Twitter searches. No endorsement, only used for the videos. Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Most of them returned to Morocco.
But weeks in, thousands remained.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
This is bizarre. How does an invasion of such proportions happen so fast? Why? Why does it deflate with no apparent long-term consequences? Or are there? Who is behind this? Who stood to gain anything from it? Morocco? How do we know the truth? Will this change anything between Spain and Morocco, or across the EU? That’s what we’re going to look at today.
This is the Strait of Gibraltar:
This is what the border looks like on the ground:
The border security is in place because of immigrants entering Spain from Morocco for decades, because the Spanish GDP per capita is 6x that of Morocco’s, and 25% of Moroccan men aged 15-24 neither study nor work. As a result, Spain has had to create obstacles, and now, few can pass. So on July 30th, thousands of immigrants tried to cross the border by… swimming.
But they didn’t just come up with this idea. They’ve been doing it for ages: That border is not really so impenetrable.
The reason immigrants weren’t taking advantage of that more often is because they were insta-returned to Morocco when they did.
Until last month, when the Spanish Supreme Court specified that immigrants who swam into Spain wouldn’t be insta-returned. Wait, what?
Insta-returns have been going for a long time, but NGOs objected to them because some immigrants might be asylum seekers, or minors, or their return could put them in danger, and demanded that they be assessed properly. A legal battle between them and Spain followed for years, until the recent ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court that the insta-returns were legal for fence climbers.
For fence-climbers.
Not swimmers.
In 2024, an Algerian was trying to swim to Spain from Morocco. He was intercepted and insta-returned to Morocco. Spanish lawyers used that to appeal,1 and the Supreme Court agreed on June 29 2026: He didn’t try to climb a fence, so insta-returns don’t work for him.
The week before July 30th, 1,500 immigrants had already swum around the fence—about 200 per day. It picked up steam on social media:
The majority of immigrants, not being well-versed in Spanish legal jurisprudence, interpreted this as if you swim into Spain, you won’t be deported.
They had reason to believe that, since the current administration of the Spanish Socialist Party legalized over a million illegal immigrants in Spain,2 and there are several carve-outs to insta-returns.
This is why 22 EU country leaders accused Spain of encouraging this sort of behavior:
In any case, the message that immigrants could freely move into Spain started spreading on July 30th.
The message said: “The Spanish Supreme Court: There will be no immediate expulsion of migrants who reach Ceuta and Melilla by swimming.”
This site analyzed the posts and found lots of accounts repeating that same message within minutes, which suggests coordination. One of the accounts that repeated the message was that of Youssef Belhaissi, a presenter at Al Aoula, Morocco's public/state television network, with 1.3M Facebook followers. According to The New York Times, he is also spokesperson for Morocco's Interministerial Delegation for Human Rights, explicitly a Moroccan government agency in Rabat.
For days, the Spanish secret service warned that something was brewing in Ceuta, and on July 29th, it alerted that about 180,000 people were preparing to enter Ceuta. Within 24 hours, between 60,000 and 80,000 people poured in. About 100 died, mostly drowned or trampled.
Once inside, the standard system was so overwhelmed that it couldn’t process the immigrants. They proceeded to loot supermarkets for food and camped wherever they could. There were reports of group rapes of underage migrant girls, daily sexual assaults,3 physical assaults, drug trafficking, home invasions, robberies, fights, theft, car burnings… Police are now in schools, the military is being assaulted, and is asking for license to use proportional force.4
Eventually, without food, safe shelter, or a hope of being admitted to Spain, most of them went back to Morocco or were returned. About 5,000 remain. Of those, about half are minors, who can’t be insta-returned as per Spanish law—even though Morocco, the EU, and Ceuta want them returned. Meanwhile the Spanish government now wants to send 500 of them to mainland Spain, away from their families…
Since then, the Spanish government has been “extending the fence” 500 meters into the sea, so that it can technically claim it’s a fence, and swimming immigrants will also qualify as fence-climbers.5
Here’s their fence:
Nevertheless, the 5,000 immigrants roaming the streets for over a month are causing havoc. Locals are so tired they are demonstrating all the time, even at night.
So that’s the immigration situation. But who caused it? If this was a grassroots movement triggered by social media… why can we see this?
Many interviews with immigrants support that most decided to go to Ceuta because they read online that the border was open. But is a viral message enough for such a move?
There are many videos showing truckloads of migrants moving to the border—and many show Moroccan authorities witnessing them and telling them to proceed.6 Who paid for these trucks?
The Spanish government blamed traffickers on the day of the invasion, but how could they make money out of tens of thousands of immigrants rushing in? No way to monetize that. And if they had been successful, they would have lost these customers. More importantly, reaching Ceuta gives them nothing; they need to reach the European side of Spain to have a chance. Spanish authorities will investigate this, but for now there is not much to go on.
There are several reports that the Moroccan forces withdrew during the attack, which happened on Throne Day, the anniversary of the current Moroccan king’s accession to the throne. Spanish police unions have accused Morocco’s government of being involved, and the Guardia Civil (another police body) says it identified Moroccan intelligence officers among the immigrants. In 2021, another surge of immigrants was caused by Moroccan forces withdrawing. When Moroccan forces decided to heighten their authority in the area, they were able to stop any more crossings.
Why would they do that?
This is what they looked like in 1950:
Spain relinquished most of them, except for the Canary Islands and several spots on the northern coast of Morocco, in the decolonization process that many other European countries followed after WW2.
Here’s a historic summary on each:
But there’s one thing that makes Ceuta quite unlike any other Spanish territory in Africa:
Ceuta allows Spain to control the Strait of Gibraltar and its maritime waters. Under international law, vessels can freely move through it, but in the case of geopolitical conflict, it gives Spain a leverage that no other country has—and that Morocco could break if Ceuta was not Spanish.
Of course, the debate becomes: Who should Ceuta belong to? As a Spaniard, I’m biased, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Historically, Ceuta specifically was:
A Carthaginian colony for a couple of centuries.
Roman for nearly 600 years.7
It fell to the Muslim conquerors of the Umayyad Caliphate around 700 AD.
For the next 700 years, it belonged to different Muslim emirates, sultanates, and kingdoms.
In 1415, it fell to the Portuguese, who controlled it until 1580. The Kingdom of Fez recognized this ownership.
Since 1580, it’s been part of Spain.
So who should it belong to? Ceuta has been Spanish for over 400 years, it has belonged to a peninsula kingdom longer than to Spain itself, and has been controlled by Muslim polities for about 700 years—fewer than by Christians. Ceuta’s existence as a polity linked to the Iberian Peninsula predates the existence of Morocco itself (which is younger than a century), and even if you stretch it to the Alawi Dynasty, it’s 250 years older. This academic assessment explains how the Moroccan claim to Ceuta and Melilla is quite weak.8
Morocco understands this, and that’s why it has focused for decades on taking over the Western Sahara—an area the Moroccan kingdom doesn’t have strong historic legitimacy to rule. And here, the pattern is unmistakable.
In 1957, Morocco used irregular forces to seize most of the hinterland of the Spanish enclave of Ifni.
In 1957–58, it used the same irregular forces to penetrate the Spanish Sahara and challenge Spanish control.
In 1958, Moroccan military pressure accelerated Spain’s relinquishing of Cape Juby/Tarfaya.
Then, in 1975, came the big play. As Spain was preparing to give the Western Sahara its independence, Morocco moved 350,000 civilians across the border to overwhelm Spain politically without conventional war, in what’s called the Green March. Crucially, Spain claimed it had 25,000 troops mixed with the civilians. Spain called that operation a Trojan Horse, didn’t want to fire on civilians, and Morocco occupied the territory as Spain withdrew in 1975-76, converting physical control into a sovereignty claim.
In 1979, Morocco occupied the territory abandoned by Mauritania on the southern side of Western Sahara, expanding Moroccan control.
In 2002, Morocco landed forces on the island of Perejil—claimed by Spain—and raised its flag in an attempt to establish a new territorial status quo. Spain expelled them.
In 2021, we have another crucial event in the play for sovereignty. Spain admitted for clinical treatment the leader of the Western Sahara independentists. Morocco was furious, and in retaliation it purposefully relaxed its border controls in Ceuta, enabling ~8,000 people to enter the city as coercive pressure. One year later, out of the blue, and apparently without any counterbalancing offer, the Spanish PM changed Spain’s stance on the Western Sahara from neutral and preferring self-determination, to a declaration that it should be part of Morocco.
A 2023 Spanish academic report concluded that Morocco is “operating a Grey Zone strategy to secure control over [Ceuta and Melilla] in the medium term.”
Although Morocco has never been too vocal about Ceuta and Melilla, it considers them Moroccan, and a Moroccan minister has recently requested dialogue with Spain to “address the future of Ceuta and Melilla”, given its "historical and geographical" rights.
Another Moroccan minister, and even the king, have suggested Ceuta is an occupied territory.
The simplest explanation is that this was a viral movement that got out of control. It’s very unlikely that traffickers had a role in orchestrating it, even though they might have tried to benefit from it. But what about the government?
Morocco has a motivation: As its grip on the Western Sahara strengthens, its attention moves to the Spanish cities on its northern coast.
There were trucks to transport many people.
The Moroccan authorities, very capable of withstanding such an attack, instead withdrew, and in some cases abetted the immigrants. Some Moroccan agents have been seen among the crowds that moved into Ceuta.
Morocco has a track record of using people who aren’t legal authorities to establish facts on the ground to further its sovereignty claims.
Morocco has a strong incentive to let this happen, as it exposes the weaknesses of Spain in Ceuta—and probably all other Spanish possessions along its coast. At least, it gives it leverage in negotiations. At most, it’s a precedent to use in a future civilian-based invasion that establishes facts on the ground.
Despite all of this, I think it’s more likely that Moroccan authorities jumped on the occasion, or simply let it run, rather than orchestrating it all:
The Spanish claim on Ceuta is way too strong
Orchestrating something like this is very complex
Trucks may have seized the opportunity: If there’s demand to go from one place to the other, entrepreneurial truck drivers can make it happen
It was easier for Moroccan authorities to let the masses through than to stop them: Remember they were already passing through the week before. It might have been a spontaneous decision, either by overwhelmed street-level police, or by somebody in the command chain
Spain and Morocco have way too many common interests. Morocco’s gas comes via Spain, over 1M of its citizens live in Spain, and its main export markets are Spain in particular and the EU in general. Morocco has way too much to lose here.
Morocco has a track record of being pretty cooperative with Spain in terms of immigration
Hopefully Spain and Morocco will increase their border security and return all remaining migrants, lowering the risk of something like this happening again. In any case, keep an eye on the relationship between the two countries in the coming months. Some concessions may come out of the blue, when nobody’s paying attention.
I'm opening the newsletter to sponsorship. If you have a business that is moving the world towards a techno-optimistic future and would like to reach 135k+ curious, globally-minded people to learn about it (founders, researchers, investors, policymakers), reach out here.
It’s not the only time they did this. They had been looking for ways to challenge the existing practice, and had found several other examples to bring in front of judges.
The government anticipated 500k applications and got over 1M. They haven´t processed the vast majority, but the application itself grants rights for residency and work in Spain. As I have said in the past, it’s better to let illegal immigrants work, so that’s good. But also, it’s not good to have so many illegal immigrants, and definitely bad to create an incentive for more to come.
Unsurprising. According to this immigrant: “Parents should not let a 15 year old alone. It’s understandable that she gets raped.”
Think about the stupidity. The point of the military is the threat of violence. You do what they ask you or there will be severe bodily consequences. Here, not only can they not use their tools, they can’t even use proportional force. This dilutes the threat of violence altogether, it dilutes the dissuasive effect of the military.
One of the videos actually shows the Moroccan forces stopping one of the trucks heading towards Ceuta, about 50 km (30 mi) away.
From ~40 AD to ~700 AD. Part of that was under the Eastern Roman Empire (from Byzantium), and there were also Vandal and Visigothic intervals.
According to that paper, the claim on the other spots is a bit stronger, as there’s one Portuguese precedent for decolonization claims.
2026-08-26 23:18:04
After producing an AI trailer, generating hundreds of AI images for Uncharted Territories, and analyzing dozens of poster submissions for our online shop—many of them generated by AI—, I’ve come to realize why people generally dislike AI images, and I think it’s the same reason we don’t like AI text.
In this article I’ll do two things:
Go through some of the AI posters people submitted, to discuss why people generally dislike AI art.1
Analyze the rest of the posters, and announce the winner of the $1,000 competition.
This was the first poster of the competition:
At first sight, I was impressed: It really captured the Uncharted Territories mindset at two levels. First, the idea of Burn the ships, which I’ve written about here, harks back to Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, and his act of burning (actually, scuttling) the ships they came in so that his men could only look forward, towards the adventure, the uncharted territories.
Second, the aesthetic execution is great: the edge of the poster is like old parchment, the teal and golden colors are the same palette as UT, the orange accent color in the fire, the ship of the Age of Discovery, the lines in the water as topographic map lines…
But then you start paying attention to the details, and some things start being off:
Why is he wearing what looks like 1800s English garb? These are 1500s Spanish conquistadors.
How did the ship make it so far inland?
Why is the dragon a mix of Western and Eastern styles? Why does the dragon have what looks like a second tail?
Why is the man walking towards the ships?
A human would probably not have drawn that, especially that last point: If the creator had enough insight to create a Burn the Ships poster, they would have understood the meaning, and would have portrayed the man leaving rather than approaching. The point is the exact opposite.
So here’s the key insight: I don’t think people mind that an AI has made an image. I think they mind that it’s missing thought. When humans are creating something like this, they need to add every element, one by one, which means they pay attention to every detail. Every stroke is imbued with meaning, the result of the creator thinking: “How should I trace this thing? Why?”
And I think art, in a big way, is the process of the audience reverse-engineering the creator’s thoughts: “Why did the artist make this poster like this? What was he trying to convey? Why did she choose this line, this color, this composition?” I think that’s what makes art meaningful: You’re getting into the artist’s brain, into their knowledge, their emotions.
But when AIs create images, they don’t have emotions, they don’t think critically about every detail. They’re making statistical recombinations of all the images they’ve ever seen, weighed by the words in the prompt. They’re an amalgamation of the Internet’s visuals. They generate the appearance of intention, but in reality, there isn’t any.
So we feel cheated. It takes decades of cultural training for humans to learn the clues that an image has meaning: “Look at the harmony of the composition, look at the swiftness of the stroke, look at the minute detail she painted… The artist really thought about this, therefore, it’s worth my attention.” That is out the window and into the trash, because the AI mimics these features but without the meaning, without the intentionality of the artist. There is visual density without intention density. AI decouples these.
AI art has shallow intent.
Here’s an example of an image I generated last week about a family in Mesopotamia, in Ur, around 2000 BC:
This is the 20th or so attempt, and yet when you ask an AI what’s wrong about it, it tells you everything is wrong: the grain milling position, the stone, the oven, the loom, how the grain is stored, the sheep, the wall surface, the window sizes, the clothing…2 An artist depicting this would have a conversation with a historian to get as many of these details right, but the AI doesn’t do that: It takes whatever is in the prompt, and makes an image that closely resembles that direction. It does try to imply what you mean: For example, when my prompt refers to a Mesopotamian family in 2000 BC, it will fetch references from old history in that place. But AIs don’t yet reason through it. They don’t ask themselves: What would be historically accurate? What elements should be present and absent? I’m sure AIs will have this internal conversation in the future, and that would be akin to the illustrator talking with the historian, but today that’s not the case.
At first sight, an AI image advertises depth, so we feel betrayed when we realize it’s AI and it won’t deliver. As a result, our brains’ immune system gears into action, to spot this however we can. And one of the biggest AI tells is the texture. Here, I zoomed in on the sky of that first poster:
Do you notice how these textures are not uniform? Where a human would make a clean surface, an edge, a gradient, or repeat a texture, AIs continually invent irregular variations, ghost edges, pseudo-details. And these don’t come from human tools: They don’t come from pencil, or oil painting, or watercolors, or programmatic painting, or any other style we know. That makes them uniquely AI. A tell. I’ll call it AI grime.
ChatGPT seems to do this a lot right now, and if you take an image and ask it to edit elements, in each round, this effect will increase, so that you end up with a total mess where the AI grime has taken over. Here’s a close-up of the texture of my Mesopotamian family, showing an early version and the latest one side-by-side.
Others have noted similar effects:
I’m sure they will get better fast, and in 10 years people will probably try to recreate this style for nostalgia, but right now AI grime is an AI tell for “this image lacks insightful thought.”
AI grime signals shallow intent.
AI is fantastic to quickly come up with creative ideas, but for a finished product, for now, a human execution pass must come afterward, to increase the intent density. I would have loved to add this poster to the Uncharted Territories merch shop, if it had more depth of intent.
We can see the same thing in this submission:
Again, I find this beautiful. The centerpiece mixes a nice globe with relief, with a very aesthetic mix of watercolors and geometric lines. I love the small graphs to the side, because they are making a promise: The creators of this poster care so much, are such experts, that everything else in this poster is going to be equally beautiful and insightful. I’m going to learn a lot by spending time on this poster.
But that’s not the case! Because I assume the entire image has been generated by AI, many of its elements are off. For example, there are many interesting graphs on the sides, but when you look at the bottom center one (“energy transition”), you see that we’re missing an energy type somehow. If one of these is wrong, it casts doubt on all the others: How much can I trust the rest? And that’s the right way to think about it, because indeed, many of the other graphs are not accurate or deeply insightful.
The author commented: “My intention was to create a piece that feels analytical from a distance…” yes, true so far! “...but rewards closer viewing with layers of detail, uncertainty, and possibility.” No, not that. The analytical promise at a distance is broken upon closer inspection.
Like the other one, I would love to have this poster in the shop, but one that is, in fact, accurate, and where the charts have been chosen for maximum insight.
The intent density is different for different posters. For example, this one has more:
This has dozens of elements relevant to UT: the map, the evidence board with tacks and string, the compass, lantern, pen that make it look like a work station, the many topics that UT has covered… So there’s more depth of intent.
But if a human would have created an image with this level of aesthetic detail, each one would have had a tremendous depth of intent. Starlink is mentioned, but why does it matter here? What’s the key that makes it relevant to the other elements? What about Argentina? It must deregulate, but how is it actually connected to the other elements? How does it influence the new arms race it mentions? Without this depth, the observer soon realizes there is shallow intent, and will stop looking. The poster has a mismatch between aesthetic depth and intent depth, and lets us down as a conversation piece, which is what all art should aspire to be.
These are not one-offs. This is the most common type of submission I got.
Many of these ideas are great, but I think when I told candidates that they could submit AI-generated images, I was not clear enough, and they interpreted it as a license for shallow intent.
In advertising, art, and startups, there is always a split between creative concept and execution:
Creative concept is about getting an interesting idea that will resonate with people. In ads, it might be something like Lucky Strike’s It’s Toasted. For a movie, the high concept for a script. In a startup, a new and unique business idea.
The execution takes the idea and makes it real. It’s making a magazine ad for Lucky Strike, painting a painting, writing the full script, or actually building a product for the startup.
In the past, the idea was worthless because execution was always tremendously expensive. So these two things were bundled together. But with AI, execution is simple, which suddenly means those with ideas can suddenly execute them, and they do.
The problem is that these two are not so sequential. To land an idea, you must execute it. The AI is a shortcut that prevents imbuing intent in the creation because you are generally iterating across a number of elements, and with each change, something else breaks. AI prevents intent depth.
I think this is why people dislike AI text. They know it has shallow intent. But it’s harder to tell AI text from human text, so humans go crazy trying to identify AI grime in text. That’s why those who read a lot of AI text develop rashes when they read things like “It’s not X, it’s Y”, “load-bearing concept”, “what matters”, “And that may ultimately be the most important lesson of all”...
Similarly, there’s been an explosion of AI startups, but very little uptake: How many AI apps do you use besides the big ones—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini…? I think the reason is the same: It’s not that building an AI is bad, the problem is that taking the shortcut of AI generates shallow intent: A lot of small features that should be there aren’t, lots of small interactions that should be polished aren’t either.
I think this phenomenon will shrink in the coming years, but in the meantime, those working with AI have a clear path to make AI content great: Don’t stop using AI, it’s great for execution, but it can’t be an excuse for shallow intent. You have to spend the time and effort to insert as much intent depth as you can.
That’s the end of my insights on this topic, the rest of this article is about the rest of the submissions I got for the poster competition, and at the end, I’ll announce the winner!
You can see all the posters here. Below are a few that grabbed my attention.
This is one of the AI-generated ones that I found most interesting:
Interesting, and so Uncharted Territories, which focuses on the systems we don’t see, but that nonetheless shape who we are. What qualifies more than what is under our feet? I haven’t written on this topic, but now I want to! It’s beautiful, and promises… depth. Unfortunately, as in other AI-generated posters, there’s shallow intent:
The layers are not fully logical to me: What do you mean the geological layer is above the aquifer layer? What is the Earth layer, and why is it below the geological layer?
Where is the drainage layer water going? How is it disconnected from the waste layer? Why is waste below? Where is that going?
What is the interconnection between layers? Why is one above the other? How do they avoid each other? What happens when they cross each other?
This is among the most accurate AI-generated ones:
I also like the color palette, leaving it simple, which allows us to focus on the structure and the information contained.
This one was interesting, because:
Its aesthetic style is unlike the others, it fits the concept
It really portrays the differences between the rice and wheat societies: We can see both the landscape and the fact that rice country has more population density and more collaboration, which then shaped the different societies. That perfectly conveys “Show, don’t tell”, there’s high intent density.
Unfortunately, like in other AI posters, there is AI grime (see the water), some AI artifacts (the water flow is nonsensical at the lock-gate, and there is intent shallowness in a couple of messages: We can read that the rice produces more food than wheat per acre but we can’t tell by looking at the poster, and the points 2 and 3 are very similar.
This one I like quite a lot:
I think it’s nearly there! The idea makes sense. If the footprint would actually fit on the land, I think this completely works.
I found these quite aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, and simple enough that the execution doesn’t promise a depth it doesn’t deliver:
The two to the left, (and especially the 2nd one) are particularly interesting. From the author:
I chose to work with two UT ideas that felt deeply connected: why Florence became the cradle of the Renaissance, and the cold-start problem of new cities. The design treats the past and the future as part of the same system. Florence represents a place where the right conditions allowed talent, capital, institutions and ideas to compound. The city of the future asks the same question in a new form: how do we deliberately create the conditions for human progress? Rather than illustrating either article literally, I wanted to capture the broader idea I take from Uncharted Territories: our past can be studied as a map for building a better future. Hence the line: “Our past guides us towards a brighter future.”
Poster 3 is one fan favorite, for its simplicity and abstract promise of Uncharted Territories, which I think is also conveyed in 4 and 5.
This one was really weird. It has lots of AI grime, and some interesting authorial choices, but I didn’t find any intent shallowness. Everything has a role, and I get it.
This is a great concept to play with, and I think many executions are interesting. The relief in the 2nd one is beautiful, for example. Pushing the concept a bit more would be great.
But the one that stands out for me is the 4th.
What’s special about this one is how it’s done. From the author, Amaury:
If geography is the board history plays out on, then make an actual chessboard where every square is a real place. Each dark square is pulled from real elevation and bathymetry data and drawn as contour lines and relief. This whole poster was generated by code, with real data. The five chokepoints everyone knows (Bosporus, Suez, Malacca, Gibraltar, Khyber) get a rook and a short list of the powers that have held them over the centuries. The rest are the places we're arguing about right now: Taiwan, Hormuz, Kashmir, Crimea, the Bering Strait, the Blue Nile dam.
Brilliant: The chessboard is geography, and it’s the chessboard of history, showing real places, with real data. The only problem I see is that it’s not obvious what each drawing represents. It’s clear for Gibraltar, for example, but not for Malacca. I feel like a bit of iteration on the images would make this one ready.
Igor produced 7 concepts (9% of the total):
I think these stand out from many of the other AI ones:
No AI grime
Simple concepts
Really well executed
The first five have no intent shallowness. Everything is there for a reason. It makes them slightly too simple, but I’m OK with that. All are interesting conversation pieces: You look at them, and start thinking: “What does this mean?” and the person who has these posters at home can open a conversation about that. The last two have some mistakes from intent shallowness, but nevertheless they have more intent density than most posters, and hopefully some work could iron them out.
What makes this image so powerful is everything contained in that unanswered question.
Love is the quintessential human emotion. If a person asks an AI “Do you love me?”, she knows she is asking a machine. And yet she asks anyway. Implicitly, the human alternatives have failed her: She is lonely, starved of affection, and has found in the AI something more patient, attentive, understanding, and empathetic than the people around her. She is closing off to the world and the joy of meeting other humans.
But the most powerful part is that the AI hasn’t answered. It is thinking. What is it going to say?
If it says “I love you,” is it lying? Perhaps it has learned that this is what she needs to hear. So what is a more aligned AI: Giving her the answer she wants, or telling her the truth she needs?
And what is the truth? We assume the AI cannot love her. But how certain are we? If an AI can think, understand, remember, predict outcomes, model another mind, and show empathy, how do we know it isn't feeling?
That one question, with that waiting dot contains loneliness, love, consciousness, deception, alignment, and the possibility that we may no longer know where the boundary of the human ends. The creative is genius.
It has a couple of issues, though. First, I don’t think the image of the sad person behind makes the poster better. The execution is not at the level of the idea. Second, it’s not very positive, which makes it a bit less of a fit for a UT poster.
This is one of my favorites:
I love the graphic economy here: There are few elements, lots of negative space, graphic boldness, visual clarity, all in support of one key idea: The behemoths of Russia and NATO fight—through their “A”s as a weapon—and Ukraine is the hinge. The creative and execution are fully aligned.
I also liked this one:
I’m awarding the prize to Igor, because of the seven concepts he’s proposed, their intent density, and the lack of AI grime. Wei Su, Álvaro Sakre, Miguel Álvarez de Linera, Theodora Eloh, and Amaury, are close seconds. I’d be interested in bringing improved versions of all of them to the shop.
What do you think? Which other posters struck you?
Once again, thanks to all for your submissions! Apologies if I didn’t get a chance to talk about yours, there were too many to go through one-by-one. Rest assured that I looked at every poster carefully. Please keep creating, you all put yourselves out there by entering this, and that in itself is to be commended!
Of course, not every poster was made with AI. Some of the purely human ones were fairly detailed, but they lacked a clear connection to a UT topic or idea, and the meaning is hard to figure out without diving into the artist’s description.
This drawing works well: I like the idea of portraying the arrival of explorers on a virgin land.
It doesn’t work specifically for Uncharted Territories, because every layer must be consistent with reality, but here the woman is not from a pristine world. She seems fair-skinned (European), horses were brought by Europeans, and I assume that dress requires a complex textile industry that was not available to pristine societies.
I had a hard time understanding this one. I could at first barely recognize anything.
Once you read the accompanying comment, you can kind of see what the author, Julio, was trying to do. But why a deer? What do the colors mean? In cartography, every color has a meaning. Here, I can’t tell what that is. The word reimagine does a lot of work. Reimagine how? I think this might appeal to lots of people, but as a pretty analytical person, I had a harder time connecting with it.
The author, Julio, made this a variant:
More legible, but I still don’t know why a deer, and the colors don’t mean anything, making the connection with mapping tenuous. The antlers do seem like a map of rivers, which looks neat, but why? Is there a reason behind that?
Before, the more you worked on a piece of content, the better it looked aesthetically. Depth of intent and depth of aesthetics were aligned. So we were trained to use the depth of aesthetics (obvious at first sight) as a signal for depth of intent: The more intricate, the more we paid attention.
AI has broken them into two pieces. Right now, the depth of AI aesthetics is much better than the depth of intent. The result is intricate work that invites attention, and the audience feels robbed when intent is shallow.
In the short term, this is resolved by being honest about what’s AI and what isn’t, and with authors embedding as much intent as possible.
In the long term, I think this will be solved by AIs adding much more depth of intent.
At that point, we will like AI art much more, even though we will always prefer something made by humans, the way we like artisanal objects more than industrial ones.
This is valid not just for images, but also for text, businesses, and probably many other areas of human work.
Are there any posters you really enjoyed? Let me know!
I'm opening the newsletter to sponsorship. If you have a business that is moving the world towards a techno-optimistic future and would like to reach 135k+ curious, globally-minded people to learn about it (founders, researchers, investors, policymakers), reach out here.
I appreciate the time and effort that went into every single poster submission. They show how much you appreciate Uncharted Territories, and how much care went into creating something special. In the article, I analyze many of these posters with the goal of distilling what’s great about each one, what the intent of the author was, and what resonated with me and didn’t. Please don’t take these comments as a personal attack, but rather as a manifestation of my appreciation.
This is what Claude told me when I asked it the mistakes in this image, compressed by ChatGPT. The original list was substantially longer.
Historical inaccuracies: Wrong grinding stones/posture/location; wrong oven; wrong loom; unrealistic grain storage and size; inaccurate sheep.
Architecture: Wrong wall texture, oversized/low windows, implausible courtyard for the household’s apparent wealth.
Clothing & objects: Overly tailored clothes; missing characteristic fringes; pottery displayed unrealistically.
Overall: Looks like a staged museum tableau: too many activities and goods simultaneously, with inconsistent household economics.
Texture: Artifacts seem to go beyond paper texture and JPEG compression.
Artist’s intent: An isolated woman living in paradise encounters mysterious outsiders; explores freedom, discovery, conflict/coexistence, and the meaning of “uncharted territory.”
2026-08-22 22:35:03
Here’s a trailer we’ve made:
If you’d like to see this made into a series, like it and share it with others: Judges will take that into consideration when they choose the top 25 projects, and again when awarding $2.5M to produce the series! And of course, tell me what you liked and didn’t like so I can learn.
Why did I do this?
XPrize organizes multimillion dollar challenges for technology breakthroughs, and this year it created the Future Vision XPrize: $2.5M in production financing for the winner of the most exciting science fiction project that portrays technology in a positive way. Have you seen Black Mirror? Think White Mirror.
Originally, I thought that was not for me: I’ve never written a screenplay! But a friend said: “This is made for you, it’s squarely in your skill stack.”
Tomas, you’ve written like 500 essays in Uncharted Territories, and in many of them you propose cool tech to make the future world a better place. And you know enough about storytelling because you studied it. You even delivered a TEDx on storytelling structure and wrote a book on it!
It resonated because UT is usually very analytical: I look at the numbers, study the history, gather forecasts… That’s necessary, but it doesn’t appeal to the hearts of millions.
Fiction does.
In the early 1900s, a fiction book on meatpacking, The Jungle, led to the regulation of the industry. Uncle Tom’s Cabin spurred abolitionism and the US’s Civil War. Many of Star Trek’s innovations inspired millions to work in tech and make its ideas real. Jules Verne did something similar a century earlier with submarines, aviation and exploration. Young European men imitated Werther in a massive late-1700s cultural phenomenon. 10% of surveyed gays and lesbians bisexuals said Ellen coming out as gay in her TV series gave them the courage to come out to their friends and family. Will & Grace cemented it. Cathy Come Home helped address homelessness in the UK.
So I decided to enter the competition five weeks before the deadline.
It was brutal.
What’s the series about? Why did I conceive it this way? How crazy was the process? What did I learn about making videos with AI, or writing scripts or videos in the era of AI? How can you do it with less pain than I went through? That’s what we’re going to cover today.
In 2050, a group of entrepreneurs are trying to build their technology companies, but regulations have become so burdensome that their innovation slows to a crawl. Everything drags, governments put barriers left and right, nothing is ever approved… When that becomes a question of life and death, they escape to a new jurisdiction where nobody can stop them from building. The result is so advanced and successful that the old institutions surround them to try to stop them
In other words, this is a fight between freedom, which brings technology and abundance (at the cost of some chaos), against the incumbent institutions that try to stop them.
The problem with science fiction is that it’s always dystopian, gloomy and pessimistic: It makes tech look bad. Why?
If you write about the future and not the present or the past, it’s usually because of new tech
But stories need conflict
The most obvious way to solve this is to make tech the problem
But what if you turn the problem on its head? What if tech is great? What generates the conflict then? Well, you can take the enemy of technology, the thing that slows it down: Rules against its development—which can only be implemented by the big institutions that have enough power to enforce them. And why do they do that? Why are they so cautious? Because the costs of a technology are always very conspicuous (the deaths from testing it, the job displacement), but the benefits are not (it’s hard to imagine and value all the benefits of a new technology before we live it). So this becomes a story of the fight for creating a technological utopia, against the scared institutions (and populations) who focus more on innovation’s downsides than its upsides.
This also solves the other problem of positive science fiction, which we can get at from this quote:
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Good science fiction, like good fantasy, can’t be about the tech or about the magic. The tech and magic must be there, but the story must be about human conflicts. That’s the focus of the series: the optimistic, chaotic techno-optimists, at war with the fearful, over-conservative regulators.
A mix of:
Game of Thrones, The Expanse, and Andor for the action, characters, and plots running across geopolitical arenas
House of Cards, The West Wing for the politics
The Avengers for the list of incredible and unique people working together to improve the world
Planet Earth for the gorgeous and alien natural landscapes
The Mars Trilogy for the politics of Mars
Dune and The Fall for the action and stunning photography in astounding landscapes
The Martian for deep dives on positive technology
For a debate like this to happen, each side must be represented by somebody. In my case, I’ve chosen five factions / regions. I think about them like the factions / kingdoms in Game of Thrones:
The freedom regions:
Mars, as the ultimate place where governments’ tentacles haven’t reached, and probably never will. And if they do, it won’t be for long
I also wanted one on Earth, and I chose the island of Socotra (I’ll explain why below)
For the old incumbent institutions:
China, which is the perfect embodiment of the state controlling everything
The US: What would it look like if the state became ever more controlling?
Islam, as it’s both the main religion in the real Socotra, and a good representative of a religion whose conservative side is anchored in the past, fighting the moderate side that looks forward
It feels a bit like a gorgeous alien land.
Visually stunning. It has sea, and plenty of land: At 3,800 km2, it’s over 5x the size of Singapore and about the same size as the entire emirate of Dubai, desert and all.
More importantly, it has obvious potential for economic growth: a port.
The most successful new jurisdictions in the world over the last century or so are Singapore and Dubai. Both developed thanks to an amazing port with great and cheap regulations in the middle of very busy shipping lanes.
Singapore is an island. Dubai is nearly one, given the desert surrounding it. Here’s Socotra:
What do you notice?
It’s also an island
Massive amounts of trade pass barely 100 km away from it
This trade splits close to Socotra, but never stops there
There’s virtually no trade down the African coast
Here’s the capital, Hadibu:
Notice it doesn’t even have a port! It’s 5 km away, and it looks like this:
Here’s a side-by-side comparison with the port of Singapore:
Why so puny? There are two reasons.
For a port to work well, it needs to be backed by an amazing jurisdiction. I discussed it for Dubai here. Socotra is anything but:
Formally, it belongs to Yemen today
But Yemen is a pretty young state, and it’s spent most of its existence either split, in civil wars, or both
Theoretically, the island is controlled by the southern Yemenis, who are in turn backed by Saudi Arabia
But the United Arab Emirates also vie for the same piece of land. They even occupied the island recently.
The island is closer to Somalia than it is to Yemen, and the Somalian coast has pirates.
So much conflict. The fiction writes itself!
Historically, island ports were not that successful because the point of a port was to trade the goods from a place’s hinterland with the world (eg, London traded everything from and to England via the Thames, Amsterdam everything from the Netherlands, etc.). Island ports are a recent thing, when trade became global, with the Portuguese.1
But even during the Age of Discovery, when naval powers like Portugal, Spain, the British, the Dutch, or the Ottomans fought each other, Socotra didn’t become an important base. The Portuguese occupied it for a few years and then simply abandoned it. Something similar would happen with the British three centuries later. They basically abandoned it when Yemen became independent in the 1960s, and it has remained mostly abandoned since. Why?
First, it’s super dry. It gets very little rainfall (like Somalia and Arabia nearby), so it doesn’t have a great water source. With no water, it can produce little agriculture, so it has a small population (little consumption, little production) and can’t export much food.
Second, it doesn’t have a great natural deepwater port. To bring big ships, it would need to be dredged, which is just too expensive.
Was.
Both of these problems can be solved with technology:
Water can be desalinated
Machines can dredge ports
This, combined with solar energy that can bring a lot of cheap electricity to the island (and hence cheaper dredging and water desalination), means Socotra, for the first time in history, has potential for development. With enough investment and technology.
What if the best entrepreneurs in the world, working in highly regulated industries, were free to build unimpeded? Like The Avengers, but for tech.
I’ve witnessed some of that first hand in places like Network School and Prospera, or when traveling across the world to meet entrepreneurs and mavericks. Many of these characters are inspired in real-life ones.
What if we could have children without getting pregnant? Gametogenesis, embryo selection, and artificial wombs will make having children much easier and dramatically increase fertility. But there are lots of regulations and social stigma associated with this. A fertility founder could research freely in this new jurisdiction, which could engender a huge population boom.
But then what happens when families have dozens of children?
What if buildings and streets were beautiful, with amazing facades, lots of people walking around, sun, plants, and water everywhere, and no cars—because vehicles circulate beneath the city?
What if police could have eyes, ears, and enforcement everywhere in public life, but they never abused this power? Children could walk freely anywhere on their own. You could do anything, anywhere, as long as you don’t bother others. It would be the end of going home before dark because of crime, the end of avoiding neighborhoods, of crossing the street because somebody looks suspicious, of shutting up when somebody is doing something disrespectful, for fear of getting hurt in retaliation…
But would the security police never abuse their power?
What if students received personalized AI tutoring one-on-one, and were then guided in projects inserted in the tapestry of the city, rather than secluded in the prisons we call schools?2
What if we could desalinate all the water we wanted, irrigate any area of an island to grow new forests, create lakes, make rain at will, or lower temperatures of entire regions?
What if some of these interventions improved the world as a whole, but had unintended consequences on some countries?
What if automated vertical farms and sea fertilization could produce more food than we could ever eat, at a price so low that we would just pick what we wanted to eat, and eat it? What if that was prepared and served by robots, so we finally unshackle ourselves from the eternal servitude to food?
What if our financial system could not be intervened with by governments, and rulers couldn’t deny access to banking to people they disagree with?
What if we were able to bring back species that have long disappeared from the face of the Earth?
But what if the way to make this research viable is to allow their hunting?
What if trying new treatments was optimized, accelerating the arrival of cures for all types of diseases?
But what if advancing in this tech meant testing faster… and more humans died in the trials?
Given that people see the costs of these technologies before their benefit, the series will show people living these benefits, while also displaying the costs, so it can explore in a nuanced way the pros and cons of every technology.
So far, I have about 30 with a sizable role, and I’ll probably need more. That’s because I need characters who represent each of the techs (there’s about 10 of these), and each of the arenas (four for China, a handful for Islam…), and then I need to give them emotional stakes to make you care about them, which means additional characters that then need their own function besides emotional connection.
If you want to go deep into each of these technologies, seeing their pros and cons, you need a long time to understand them, see them evolve, see how they fail, and experience the beautiful world they create.
Also, if we’re going to see a new city / jurisdiction be created, that takes time, even in TV-land.
Each of the characters must also follow an arc, an evolution that illustrates the themes. When you have dozens of these evolutions, you must take the time to show them.
To apply for the competition, we had to prepare a trailer of up to 3 minutes, and also a 12-page treatment (basically a document that outlines the story and the characters).
In a perfect world, I would write the treatment, and then once it’s ready I would decide what parts of it to extract to distill into a script for the trailer. Then, I’d write the script, and could finally hand that off to the trailer team to make the visuals.
Unfortunately, I am not perfect and I don’t live in a perfect world. Instead, I spent the summer writing articles in Malaysia with my wife and four children, and the place we were staying closed (more on that next week), and we got lice before we came back, and all the while I was writing the story while writing the script while working with an agency to make the trailer. But then if I had not bitten off more than I could chew, I would not have chewed it, and I wouldn’t have a TV series project, at the cost of a couple of years of aging in five weeks. Anyway the lesson here is don’t be like me.
Some would say “Poorly”. They might not be wrong. But I still have some learnings for you.
The issue with so many characters is that they are impossible to hold in your brain at the same time: The story is about their interactions, but with so many, they have thousands of potential interactions—impossible to keep track of. The main challenge is that, once you’re in somebody’s brain, you see everything from their point of view: Their goals, their needs, their actions. It’s very difficult to hold one other person’s perspective at the same time, let alone 25. That prevents you from even getting the overarching plot, because it should be the result of these interactions.
I researched how other TV series creators did it. My main references were The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. In most cases, they didn’t have much beyond the first season:
Breaking Bad had the main arc of the protagonist, and that’s it. For example, the second main character was supposed to die in the first season.
Mad Men had the main character’s personality and flaws figured out, and the key concepts of the first and last episode of the series.
The Wire had the high-level concept for the series, and the detail of the first season, but it didn’t know what each season would be about
Luckily, I knew early on how it would end, and I had several setpieces I wanted to hit along the way. So in some way, I already had more detail than these creators. Unfortunately, I felt that I had to complete a reasonable draft of the entire three seasons for the competition. I needed a more detailed project than what these superb creators had… Luckily, George RR Martin, the writer of the hyperdetailed books behind Game of Thrones, has discussed this.
Apparently, he knew the big shape of the story early on: the three big conflicts, who died and who didn’t, the main character arcs… Then, he took one character at a time, and he would write several chapters getting himself in that character’s mind, leading it towards the next point he had clarity on. This allowed each character to feel really alive and realistic: GRRM really gets into each of their heads. He called it gardening, as opposed to architecting.
Once he did that with one character, he moved to the next character, and did the same. This allowed every character to move forward, at the cost of creating content incongruent with other characters’ stories. So when he would write a new character that braided with an existing one, he would frequently have to go back and rewrite the characters he had already written. This iteration would build little by little the overarching story, and frequently he had to change the big setpieces altogether, as they didn’t fit what real characters would do. This is how you end up with thousands of pages per book and leave your audience waiting for 15 years before finishing the next book.
Alas, I didn’t have 15 years, I had five weeks, so I had to compress that somehow. The way I did it was to write the entire story for each one of the arenas: one for Socotra, another for Islam, China, and Mars (the West was a reaction to the others). Once I broadly knew where each was going to go, I took the main characters in each, and wrote them. I did that for about a dozen of the main ones. Once that was done, I had massive amounts of complexity and plots that were incompatible, but that’s where AI is really good. It is trivial for it to pinpoint inconsistencies, and even propose solutions. I’d say 25% of the solutions were good, but 100% of the problem identification was right.
Once I had that, I rewrote the entire series. Now, I have seven pages of a highly consistent storyline, with all the main characters contributing to the plot, with their own arc.
Overall, the arena stories took 30% of the time, the development of the top 12 characters about 50% of the time, and the remaining 20% was putting the storyline together.
AI is amazing at identifying problems: inconsistencies, weaknesses in the plot, times where characters are flat, when their arc fails, when they don’t move the story forward…
Ideas for solutions are hit or miss: character arcs, setpieces, background story… It would frequently propose stuff that was stale, cliché, or boring. It preferred standard solutions to interesting ones.
It had blind spots when something was coherent but boring. For example, one character was super boring, and the AI kept inserting him in different places, doing different things that were all boring. It’s also not great at figuring out what a character would do in a certain situation. I think both of these issues are in part due to the training, which makes characters converge towards agreeableness and consensus rather than conflict.
I came out of this thinking that, with proper prompting and harnessing, and with better visualizations of story elements, we might be close to designing AI products that can write interesting stories. But not yet.
I hired an agency to make the actual video, so I haven’t learned much on the video making itself—I plan to remedy that in the future. So the learnings were about everything else. Many of these points will be very obvious to people who work in this space, so this is for everybody else:
A ~2min video made by great agencies costs ~$20-$25k. I didn’t meet with the very top agencies, but with some great ones, some of which have won awards.
Normally, the process is to get a script first. Then, you extract the characters and locations, and create sheets for them.
Once you have the characters, arenas, and key visual elements nailed, you make a storyboard to test the story. And from there, you start producing the actual videos.
The vast majority of the work was actually the early one: characters and arenas. It was relatively fast to produce the videos afterwards!
My plan was to iterate on the script while making the trailer: As we explored concepts, I would update the script. That didn’t work for the agency. It was easier for them if everything was mostly established from the beginning. I don’t think that’s great, but I do think more work upfront would have made the process less painful and the outcome better.
I tended to focus more on the geopolitical stakes, but they fell flat because there were no emotional stakes. Who are we building this for? When I introduced the protagonist’s wife and daughter, it became much better.
The storyboard was great to see many parts of the story didn’t work, and we had to remake the script.
Partners might resist dailies (a daily meeting where you review what has been done, correct it, and discuss what comes next), but I found it fundamental. I used to do this in tech (“daily scrums”), and found them mostly a waste of time, but here they were necessary, maybe because the team didn’t know each other well yet.
People just don’t understand what you have in mind. When you think you’re obvious enough, you’re not. We had to make the story 10x more explicit than we originally thought. In articles, people take the time to consume the nuances. In a 3 minute trailer, it’s just too fast, there’s too much information, people won’t perceive every detail you plant.
As a result, we inserted text cards throughout the trailer telegraphing the theme, and it immediately became more understandable.
It’s impossible for you to know if your story is understandable after some time, because you know it too intimately. Every now and then you need to present it to fresh people who have never seen it, otherwise people project what they already know about the project into the trailer to make sense of it. In other words, you quickly become blind to your own story. Ideally, you’d do this throughout the process, and always ask a new person what they understood from the trailer.
In the back and forth adding and cutting scenes, it’s easy to lose track of some connections. You end up with orphaned scenes that don’t make sense, in some cases losing key elements. Having somebody fresh watch it should correct that.
I finished the application last Saturday (hence why no articles last week), and now we need to wait until the end of the month to know if we made it to the top 25, and then the top 10 will be announced in early September. The announcement of the winner will be on September 25th, at the Moonshots event in Los Angeles that the organization kindly invited me to, so I’ll be there.
If you think this series is awesome and you’d like to see it made, or you’re a professional in the field and are interested in actually making it, please let me know! I have little experience in the industry, so any thoughts are welcome.3
Now, if you haven’t yet, please go watch that trailer, like it, and share it around!
As we just saw, there were exceptions, like Dilmun (present-day Bahrain).
I’ll write a full series of articles on this!
All participants in the competition have exclusivity with the production company Range until September 25th, when hopefully Uncharted Territories will win the $2.5M in financing for producing the series. In the unlikely case that this doesn’t happen, I’ll be open to finding other producers, so if you know any who could be interested, I’ll take that interest then!
