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 …
“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, …
“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 …
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 …
There is a moment in every great jazz improvisation where the individual musicians stop playing at each other and begin playing through each other. Coltrane called it “sheets of sound.” Miles simply called it listening. I’ve been thinking about this …
The most profound shift in computing isn’t that our tools got faster. It’s that they started saying “I disagree.” We built the first agents as polite function-wrappers—Lisp macros that could choose between search strategies, expert systems that weighed confidence scores. …
The Agentic Pattern: Software That Negotiates Its Own Reality Read more »
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” — Niels Bohr (maybe) Recently I’ve started binging “Foundation” on AppleTV, enjoying it with as much ardor as when I first read Asimov’s trilogy as a child. If you are not familiar …
AI Ethics: A Mirror to the Human Psyche In the grand tapestry of technological evolution, we stand at the precipice of a new era, one where artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), hold promise to weave the threads of …
Moral uncertainty -— the inability to predict one’s own responses under extreme pressure —- may be a defining characteristic of consciousness. You have, no doubt, read about the blackmailing AI who threatened to expose the engineer’s affair when he threatened …
A few days ago I was sharing a virtual early morning chat with a colleague, during which he asked me two salient questions I struggled to adequately answer well. Several coffees later that day it dawned on me that I …