Pascal Bets Again
I am working on a book and have been rereading something I wrote in 2018 as part of the process. The old post is called “Pascal’s AI Wager.” Eight years have turned it into an exam I did not know …
The Expanding Blast Radius
“Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain.” — Attributed to Aristotle Today is September 11. Twenty-five years have passed since the towers fell, and we are still learning what that morning did to us. Some pain announces …
Agentifying Me
“Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” — John Culkin, A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, 1967. The line is nearly always given to McLuhan, and nearly always in a slightly different form than the …
Thinking in AI
“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it. They will appear wise, but not be so.” — Thamus to the god Theuth, on the invention of writing, in Plato’s Phaedrus Sometime in the …
The Habit of Emergence
The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts. –Aristotle Many years ago, during a particularly wayward period of my misspent youth (i.e.: my cowboy period), having pulled a calf from …
The No-Regret Portfolio
You cannot win a bet on a future impossible to predict. You can only become a human who survives regardless of outcome. Three AI fears walk into a bar. The first tries to order everything on the menu at once …
What Will Endure in Agentic AI
The most durable advances in Agentic AI are not what the demos suggest.They are what the plumbing demands. Convening the Ministry Thirteen years ago I came back to hands-on software engineering and data science after a long stretch in management …
AI: The Only Benchmark that Matters
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” — William Bruce Cameron (often misattributed to Einstein) Thirteen years ago, when I began my journey back into hands-on coding after years of management consulting, …
Liquid Software
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus I have been thinking a lot recently about permanence. In our industry, we have spent the better …
The Convergence at the Edge of Understanding: When AI Starts Seeing the Ghost in the Matter
There’s a moment in every scientific revolution when the instruments start agreeing with each other too perfectly; when the thermometers, barometers, and galvanometers begin telling the same story not because they’ve been calibrated together, but because they’ve all stumbled upon …