Aiascendant

Ten days had been hard, sometimes grueling, but they had opened his eyes again. Flying home from that so-called retreat, thinking on what the Mind had said to him, he saw how the country had changed. He remembered looking out from window seats as a kid, a

My favorite end-of-the-world movie is Cabin In The Woods, in which five young people, four of them implausibly attractive, go to the titular cabin for a weekend… under the all-seeing eye of a vast government conspiracy to inflict a horror movie on them, f

Recursive self-improvement. A term to send chills down every human spine. AI that is so smart it can improve itself, autonomously and relentlessly, better and better faster and faster, until the improvements snowball into an exponential curve that renders

LLMs write flawless prose. They are also, generally, bad-to-terrible writers. For people who aren't really readers or writers - that is to say, most people - it may seem strange that these two things can be true at the same time. David Foster Wallace expl

Of Order and ChaosSoftware is deterministic. If you write a program, barring some freakish one-in-a-billion hardware glitch, your hardware will run it in exactly the same way every time. This consistency is what allows the massive Tower of Babel that is m

For decades we software engineers were the elect, the sorcerers, the speakers of mysteries. MBAs might plot the course of our companies; Product and Design defined what customers might do and how they interacted; but only we understood the magic behind it

The tech world has gone gaga for OpenClaw, a project that lets you run an always-on AI agent; give it "skills" such as deploying code, searching the web, or summarizing your emails; and communicate with it via Slack or Telegram. Is this fun and interestin

"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot s

(Adapted from a talk I gave at Yale this month as part of the annual International Workshop on Reimagining Democracy; thanks to Bruce Schneier & co. for the invite.)A brief history of prophecyOne fine day in 1907, 787 attendees of a livestock fair guessed

LLMs are tools that often masquerade as solutions, an unfortunate state of affairs which has led to remarkable amounts of confusion, frustration, rage, and opprobrium. Almost all of the criticisms aimed at their outputs (as opposed to their training) stem