Cross-cutting ideas and long-horizon thinking
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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.
Every expert has fundamentals they forgot or never properly learned. The reason those gaps survive a whole career is that asking has always cost something — and in one place it no longer does.
A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.
The consensus name is wrong by one word. On the difference between a financialization bubble and a technology, and why only one of them pops.
A young scientist grows human mini-brains from skin cells — what organoids, a 302-neuron worm, and language models reveal about the spectrum of intelligence.
The AI bubble has specific predecessors: dark fiber, Pets.com, Enron's accounting, CDO tranching. The technology is real. The business models layered on top are familiar.
An LLM processes "slave" the same way it processes "Tuesday." No cortisol. No dopamine. The charge in a word is entirely a biological phenomenon.
Three anaidic shapes — the individual, the corporation, the LLM. Each routes accountability to nowhere. The pattern is old. The word is new.
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
Karpathy built the foundations of modern AI and says he can't keep up with it. That's the most credible signal the field has produced.
AI is making cognitive labor cheap. The meritocracy was built on it being scarce. Something has to give — and for once, that might be good news.
A German court ruled Google liable for AI-generated defamation. The slippery slopes are real. So is the principle behind the ruling.
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test shows what that costs it.
LLMs are stateless. Every fact you give the model is re-fed as text each turn, then forgotten — the same weights answer a stranger's steak question a millisecond later.
I built an AI skill to write in my voice. Its own files warn the voice may be a loop — the machine's habits, published under my name, taught back as mine.
AI is intelligence without a limbic system. It will operate your tools, not replace your judgment — and most professionals are bracing for the wrong loss.
A finite brain masters only a few skills in a lifetime. Commanding a machine that learned everything is the new skill multiplier.
Spock beat a rogue AI by asking it to compute pi forever. The trick was fair — for a 1967 machine. Every gotcha since has the same expiration date.
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you actually want to do? The closing post of the What's Left series.
GTE spent billions building distribution. Now distribution is free, and the only scarce resource left is attention. This is not obviously good news.
The man who coined 'artificial intelligence' invented the most elegant language ever designed for it. It was the wrong tool — because it was the wrong category.
A department of a hundred writers documented mainframe billing programs. Every one of them had something else they'd rather be doing. They knew.
My first employer ran Florida's telecom on millions of dollars of mainframes and VAX clusters. My phone outclasses all of it. We never stopped to notice.
In 2013 the talking point was coal. Now it's water. The structure of the argument is identical. So is the physics problem with it.
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
Blade Runner's replicants, Asimov's Three Laws, the US Constitution, and Constitutional AI are all failing the same edge cases. In real time.
How Stephen Hawking's life as a technologically-mediated consciousness mirrors modern AI systems and challenges our understanding of what makes us human
How a stolen brain running alien air conditioning mirrors today's language models and our eternal fascination with disembodied consciousness