A Chatbot Is Everything We Wrote Down, Lies Included
A language model is a tool that extends reasoning, built from a record that never marked its lies. Using it takes the oldest skills of a reader: reading, thinking, and weighing a story.
CIqSi
Carbon intelligence bonds with silicon intelligence. Essays on AI, human-machine collaboration, and what it means to think alongside the tools we build.
The Name
Carbon
Organic, biological, embodied
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.
Intelligence
Fictional, bridging, catalytic
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.
Silicon
Digital, scalable, tireless
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.
Recent Writing
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Does It Make Me Money or Does It Make Me Happy?
If you are an expert, the work you love is less likely to pay than it was. The hours still matter, so the economy has to pay for them: apprenticeships, an income floor and a citizens' fund like Norway's. Singapore's prime minister is already worried about the broken bottom rung.
A Model of the Thing Is Not the Thing
Ford sculpts its cars in clay, draws them in CAD, and hired about 300 veterans to retrain its AI. All three are models, and a model of the thing is not the thing.
A Stranger's LinkedIn Bio Sent Me to Hegel, and I'm Still Lost
A line in a stranger's bio sent me into a conversation about Hegel and Kant. The plain-English answer was accurate and I still couldn't follow it. The fix is the same one that teaches languages.