THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE

What the people of New Jersey knew about Bell Labs that some of us had to learn from the inside. Why am I writing this? I am aware of the trap. I look back at the place where I was a long time ago and remember a golden age that, examined closely, turns ou

What happens when anyone can build software, and where the value goes once building is free. I happened to listen to a February 2026 interview with Mark Cuban on the Technology Brothers podcast and he stated very boldly: "Software is dead because everythi

Why we expand information to compress it later. Many years ago I read a book called Hitchcock on Hitchcock, and one small passage in it has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about films, which is one of my passions. Surprisingly,

On teaching the history of the field not as a chronology of methods but as a record of the bets we made, and lost. In January of 2023 I was in Doha, at the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, sitting on a panel with several other people who had been

Is working on machines built by others AI research? It can be. Usually it is not… A few weeks ago I was at one of the many AI gatherings that seem to happen in New York on any given evening now. The discussion was lively and well informed: the current sta

On the feedback loop that AI's democratization left behind What happens to a technology once it stops being the property of the few who understand it deeply and becomes available to the many who simply want to use it. We have come to call this democratiza

Three kinds of work, three success criteria, and why confusing them is costly. Early in my career I worked at Bell Labs, where one could work on any intellectually challenging problem, whether or not it had immediate relevance to the mothership AT&T. Late

Where Does the Bridge Get Built? This is the third essay in the From Spark to System series. Part I: "Why the Real AI Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet." Part II: "The Bridge That Was Never Built." The previous two posts in this series built a framework. The

The Bridge That Was Never Built. This is the second of three posts on innovation: what it actually is, how it differs from invention, and how technologies evolve through the construction of domains, translation into products, and the specific kind of lead

Why the Real AI Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet. This is the first of three posts on innovation: what it actually is, how it differs from invention, and how technologies evolve through the construction of domains, translation into products, and the specifi