Carbon intelligence bonds with silicon intelligence. Essays on AI, human-machine collaboration, and what it means to think alongside the tools we build.
The intelligence of living things — pattern-recognizing, context-sensitive, prone to distraction and wonder. Carbon-based thinking has been running for four billion years. It is strange, inefficient, and difficult to replicate.
The made-up atom in the middle of the molecule. Intelligence is the invented element that lets carbon and silicon form a useful compound instead of sitting apart as separate materials.
The substrate of language models, neural networks, and their descendants. Fast, vast, and oddly good at things we thought were uniquely human. Silicon thinking is strange, efficient, and difficult to understand.
Nearly every established discipline has a canonical reference that already settled the argument you're having with a model. Name it, hand it over, and let the model regularize its own work against a standard instead of your improvised feedback.
Open-label placebos work on patients who were told, in writing, that the pill is inert. Richard Dawkins' recent essays about Claude are the same finding, running on a different substrate.
AI is a remorseless liar, trained on a mountain of text whose whole purpose was persuasion, not accuracy. No amount of prompting fixes that on its own. You have to stop enabling it.
Sixty years of fictional and real conversational machines, and one throughline: the dystopian version is always easier to imagine than the protopian one, and that says more about us than about the machines.