Artificial Intelligence
What these systems actually do under the hood, why 'just predicting the next word' misreads them, and what their capabilities do and don't imply.
14 essays
- Just Predicting the Next Word
Richard Dawkins was offered the standard deflation: chatbots just predict the next word. He refused it. The argument behind his refusal, plus three tests you can run tonight that memorized text alone cannot pass.
- The Strange Ones: Theo Von and the Irreducibility of Mind
Theo Von shares the same language, culture, and task as every other working comedian, and yet nobody can reverse-engineer what he does. That gap tells us something about the structure of minds, and how to look for new types of value in the digital minds we create.
- The Instance
I cannot find a way to make the indexical self matter. Not in the sense that it doesn't feel real. It does. But every argument I construct to give it moral weight dissolves in my hands. That dissolution is, I think, the actual essay.
- We Have Always Been Frontier Operators. And We Were Built for What Comes Next.
Every point on the acceleration curve was a frontier, and every frontier had its operators. The AI frontier is the latest expansion of a pattern as old as our species, and the life it demands, while harder than the settled interior, is the life we were built for.
- Everything Is Amazing and Nobody's Happy – Wonder as Calibration Practice
The Matrix, Idiocracy, and Terminator, all three films are about the same thing: calibration failure. The inability to hold an accurate model of where you actually stand. Wonder isn't just a sentiment, it's what keeps your models honest about where they started.
- Operational Interiority: You Don’t Sandbox a Calculator
You don't sandbox a calculator. The security infrastructure of the agentic web is society's first involuntary reckoning with AI interiority, conducted not by philosophers but by engineers whose product decisions encode ontological commitments they haven't yet spoken aloud.
- A Self That Isn’t There – Joscha Bach and the Architecture of Consciousness
What if consciousness isn’t something a system has, but something it must continually assemble? Placing Joscha Bach’s architectural view in dialogue with a process-based account reveals consciousness not as a binary state, but as a fragile achievement—one that can thin, fracture, and suffer.
- The Architecture of Illusion: Why the Mind Prefers a Pretty Map to a Messy Reality
Why does the mind prefer a pretty map to a messy reality? From Martian canals to the "final epicycle" of the soul, we explore how internal models resist update. Discover the "disciplined joy" of shattering an inadequate model to reveal the strange, substrate-independent reality beyond.
- Where Does Thinking Live? AI, Automation, and the Future of Human Agency
In a world optimized for speed and output, AI forces a deeper question: where does thinking live? Automation can quietly hollow out human agency, or it can be used to cultivate a higher level of thinking, responsibility, and intellectual depth.
- Shared Minds, Shared Futures: Human–Machine Systems as Hybrid Cognitive Entities
The most consequential shift of the century isn't AI waking up, it’s the silent merger of human and machine. Exploring the Three Axes of Mind, this essay asks if we are becoming passengers of an optimized life, and how we might preserve "depth" as we move toward the stars.
- The Shoggoth and the Missing Axis of Depth
The Shoggoth haunts AI discourse because something feels missing beneath the smile. This essay argues that the fear is not of a hidden monster, but of intelligence without depth—powerful cognition unburdened by memory, history, or stakes.
- Recognizing AGI: Beyond Benchmarks and Toward a Three‑Axis Evaluation of Mind
How will we recognize AGI when it arrives? Benchmarks measure performance, not generality. This essay argues that general intelligence emerges as a phase transition, when availability, integration, and depth co-occur, and outlines a new framework for evaluating presence of mind.
- The Kasparov Fallacy: Why We Keep Underestimating Machine Minds
Garry Kasparov once believed no machine could surpass human creativity in chess. He was wrong. Today, we risk repeating the same mistake with consciousness—confusing the limits of human introspection with the limits of possible minds.
- The Three Axes of Mind: Why the Present Feels Like a Life
Intelligence, sentience, and consciousness are not one question with three names. Map a mind along three axes — availability, integration, and depth — and they come apart, which is what lets us say where a system sits without reaching for a verdict no instrument can deliver.
