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The Thoughtsmith’s Forge
Essays on artificial intelligence, language, collective knowledge, philosophy, and other spaghetti-bowl topics a sensible person would probably avoid.
The Information Tsunami: Big Data
More data does not automatically mean better decisions. The hard part is turning information into understanding.
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Right Is Smart
What if “might makes right” has it backwards, and right is simply smarter? For those who regard ethical conduct as part of a life well lived, the argument that…
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The Rise of PrometheanAIsm™
When Technology Stops Being a Tool and Becomes a Belief System Silicon Valley has had an artificial intelligence church. Literally. Anthony Levandowski, the…
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Prohibition, Monopoly, and the AI Wild West
Artificial intelligence is often described as a Wild West . Usually, this is meant as shorthand for lawlessness: rules lag behind reality, somebody is shooting…
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Software as a Burden (SaaB)
For years, software companies have sold us a simple promise: convenience. Software as a Service, or SaaS, was supposed to free ordinary people and businesses from…
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Take Away the Objects
If quantum reality is relational, the line between physics and mathematics becomes difficult to defend. Quantum mechanics has never suffered from a lack of success.…
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The Fluid Frontiers of Conspiracism
I used to think that conspiratorial thinking was, at bottom, a failure to understand emergence. This did not mean that I thought powerful people never plotted,…
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The Real Moat Between Humans and AI
The Agentic Revolution The weakest argument against AI is that it “doesn’t really think.” That line is tired. It sounds less like philosophy and more like a…
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Time as the Measure of Change
Philosophy has long recognized that the concepts through which we understand reality are not always neutral. Sometimes they illuminate the world. Sometimes they…
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Laughter and the Crisis of Authorship
On self-censorship, failed recovery, and the body’s veto power There is a peculiar kind of laughter that seems to reveal a temporary conflict between systems.…
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Quantum Flatland: When the Impossible Is Only a Projection
One of the strangest features of quantum mechanics is the appearance of discrete events where our classical imagination expects continuity. A particle is detected…
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Nature Runs Production, Not Customer Satisfaction
Evolution does not separate assets from bugs as cleanly as we do. A trait can be useful at one scale and disastrous at another. The relative autonomy of different…
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Still Running
A biological device built for uptime, not closure. There is a difference between closure, forgetting, and termination. Take the stupidest possible example: a pen. I…
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The Cerberus Market
Commodity, Broker, Consumer: Marx, Keynes, and Smith on AI Capitalism The economic problem is simple enough to state plainly: if capitalism weakens the consumer,…
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Technology & National Boundaries: A Civilization Mismatch
One of the stranger realizations that emerges from studying Big History and complexity theory is that technological progress and social maturity do not necessarily…
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A Moat That Keeps Moving: AI & Human Exceptionalism
Those of us who grew up around early personal computers inherited a fairly clear picture of what computers were and were not. Machines followed instructions. Humans…
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Career Advice Is Not a Social Contract: AI & the Redesign of Society
Had Melquíades, the wandering merchant from Gabriel García Márquez's mythical town of Macondo, arrived today, he might have abandoned magnets and alchemy…
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AI, Collective Learning, and the Planetary Layer of Thought
AI is best understood not as something outside human knowledge, but as a new formation within the collective knowledge ecosystem itself. In David Christian’s Big…
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AI & the Theory of Complex Landscapes - The Problem of Climbing the Wrong Hill
There is a comforting story people like to tell about technological revolutions. A new tool appears, productivity rises, old inefficiencies disappear, and society,…
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AI Metaphysics: Why Embodiment May Matter More Than Intelligence
Modern discussions about artificial intelligence often assume that minds are basically software. According to this view, consciousness is computation. The brain is…
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AI Metaphysics: Can Machines Enter the Moral Universe?
Artificial intelligence has revived one of humanity’s oldest habits: building something powerful and then immediately asking whether it has a soul. At first glance,…
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