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A warning that never turns off stops carrying information, even when it’s right.

I have told this story before. Six weeks ago I told it to make a point about software. I want to tell it again to make a point about myself, because I think I put the emphasis in the wrong place.

Every layer of checking rests on the one below it. Here is what happens at the bottom, and how long you can go without looking.

What twenty-two players and a dancer alone on a stage are doing that the objective doesn’t describe, and why we have never counted it.

A rare condition, two of my own mistakes, and what a body does that a process has to be built to do.

The problem is not that institutions forget. It is that what they remember doesn't cost anybody in the here and now.

In a brain, reward is three systems that can disagree. A machine got one number that can’t.

What carved the canyons in machine intelligence, and why nothing exists to sand them.

Last week, I left a question hanging. The ledger, it turns out, can be edited at both ends. What happens when the beings built to bear consequences start behaving like the systems that were built without them?

What two years of being remembered by a machine taught me about the continuity question.

I can recite every way LLMs fool people. Here is why my expertise makes it worse, not better, and why I am the most exposed person in this essay.

I have spent thirty years spending it. Here is what fluency actually sells, why a machine just broke the deal, and why my own skepticism keeps waving through the voices I lean toward.

What the driver's seat reveals about consequence, feedback, and the variable both post-labor and AI optimism miss.

For about a year after that, I did what someone with my résumé is supposed to do. I pursued the next role. A dozen or so serious leads. Most of them reached the second or third interview, a few the fourth. None ended in an offer. The market kept telling me, politely and at length, no.

In a previous essay I argued that Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence did something remarkable and then walked away from it. It reached the architectural diagnosis almost no one reaches, that displacement is a choice made at the point of deployment, not a fact of nature descendin...

A judge reads a sentence. The defendant stands. The crime is not in dispute. The facts were established, the process followed, and the verdict reached by peers. By every procedural measure, justice has been done.

The diagnosis was that an old pattern is arriving in a new form, that the pattern is pacification at scale, and that the pattern’s convenience is what makes it durable. The diagnosis matters because the pattern is invisible until it is named. Once named, it becomes refusable. But refusing it requ...

Another Brave New World, Part 2 — We braced for Orwell's boot. The pacification arrived as convenience instead.

A note I posted recently about due process sparked a broader thought. I’ll come back to it at the end.

In [a recent piece](https://substack.com/home/post/p-196703642), Tim Lee offers one of the cleaner arguments I’ve read for why today’s agent architectures are unlikely to produce “AI scientists” anytime soon. His central observation: the implicit knowledge knowledge workers carry, the hunches, th...

The cognitive toolkit is necessary. It is not sufficient. Here is what's missing.

David Hoze and I had been corresponding since early April about a co-authored essay. Three movements, his philosophical and theological grounding bridging to my structural one, the disagreement between us preserved rather than smoothed over. The tone had been generous on both sides.

In the previous two posts, I established that wisdom cannot be accumulated and that AI is structurally precluded from traversing the loop that produces it. This week: what that means for the humans building expertise alongside these systems, and why the decisions being made right now may be the m...

Last week, I established that wisdom cannot be accumulated. It must be traversed. This week: what traversal actually requires, and why AI cannot complete it.

In early 2026, researchers added an important wrinkle to what had been a fairly damning picture of AI’s effect on human reasoning.

Water scarcity is not a future threat. It is here now. Remember the Survival Rule of Threes: death is the likely result of three minutes without air, three hours without shelter (in extreme conditions), three days without water, and three weeks without food. Four billion people, more than half th...

There is a particular kind of friendship that only makes sense to people who have it. It doesn’t require regular contact, shared geography, or even similar lives. It requires a shared past that was formative enough that no amount of intervening time can entirely dissolve it.

I played Doom. Almost obsessively. For nearly two years (1995 to 1997), my colleagues and I would wrap up long days on a construction site in Connecticut and disappear into networked deathmatches for a couple of hours or more (please don’t judge). It was, in the best possible way, a complete wast...

Two weeks ago, on Friday, February 27th, reports emerged of a confrontation between the U.S. Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic over the use of its Claude model in government systems. Within hours, the dispute escalated into an extraordinary step: federal agencies were directed to cea...

In the first piece in this series, I argued that the technical foundations of the AI scaling thesis are cracking. Turing Award winners and field pioneers are converging on a shared diagnosis: brute-force scaling of large language models won’t yield general intelligence, and something architectura...

Michael Burry, the investor made famous by *The Big Short* for calling the 2008 housing crash, is shorting Nvidia and Palantir. He might be early. He might be wrong. But the fact that serious money is now betting against the AI boom tells us something worth examining.

The dominant AI narrative is seductively simple: scale is all you need. More data, more compute, more parameters, and intelligence emerges. It’s the story that’s justified hundreds of billions in investment, reshuffled the power structure of Silicon Valley, and convinced a generation of executive...

Last week, I admitted I’m part of the problem. Despite advocating restraint, I’ve felt the pull to post more, feed the algorithm, and add to the noise. We’re all drowning in a flood we helped create.

I’ve just finished a three-part series arguing that wisdom, in our current moment, means constraint-awareness. One of the core practices I advocate is generative restraint: resisting the impulse to add to the noise, valuing thought before speech, and recognizing that not every reaction needs to b...

Our linguistic infrastructure is experiencing serviceability failure, fracturing shared reality, overwhelming attention, creating authenticity paradoxes, and widening the gap between knowledge and wisdom, with LLMs accelerating the crisis by eliminating the last friction in language production.

Language functions as civilization's operating system, stabilized for millennia by four external constraints: throughput; bottlenecks; locality; and friction, all of which have been systematically dismantled by digital technology.

Algorithmic attention capture undermines democracy by hijacking executive function and fragmenting shared reality, requiring new architectures that support collective deliberation rather than engagement-driven fragmentation.

Misdefining AI as “intelligent” leads to governance failures; we should instead build Augmented Human Intelligence systems designed for human partnership rather than autonomy."

The author applies AI’s modular architecture to personal life, proposing a framework for deliberately allocating attention across seven life domains, turning living into a practice of conscious orchestration rather than reactive survival."

BCIs could enable real-time cognitive support by detecting biased thinking as it occurs, though current technology remains limited to medical applications and is far from consumer-ready cognitive augmentation.

True progress in AI requires moving from seductive, linear projections of scale to an iterative development chain built on modular architecture, feedback loops, and human-machine partnership, where wisdom emerges from correction and co-evolution, not from computation alone.

Humanity now produces more language than we can process, destabilizing our shared reality; to navigate this, we must build Augmented Human Intelligence systems that strengthen human attention and judgment rather than replace them with centralized oracles.

The pursuit of AI through scaling alone has reached diminishing returns; true intelligence requires a modular architecture inspired by evolution, specialized systems orchestrated by an executive function for adaptability, efficiency, and human partnership, not autonomy.

Attention is the core constraint on all intelligence; we need systems, both AI and personal, that help us focus on what matters rather than distract us from it.

Intelligence stems from the attention architecture, not compute scale; the future of AI should be modular systems that augment human judgment, not monolithic models that replace it.

Evolution’s energy-efficient brain architecture shows that scaling alone won’t lead to AGI; we must learn from biology’s modular, embodied, and causal design

After a career shift, the author develops a framework that links evolutionary biology, AI, and human consciousness, arguing that principles such as attention and modularity can lead to better technology and more meaningful lives.

Our linguistic infrastructure is experiencing serviceability failure, fracturing shared reality, overwhelming attention, creating authenticity paradoxes, and widening the gap between knowledge and wisdom, with LLMs accelerating the crisis by eliminating the last friction in language production.

Language functions as civilization's operating system, stabilized for millennia by four external constraints: throughput; bottlenecks; locality; and friction, all of which have been systematically dismantled by digital technology.

Algorithmic attention capture undermines democracy by hijacking executive function and fragmenting shared reality, requiring new architectures that support collective deliberation rather than engagement-driven fragmentation.

Misdefining AI as “intelligent” leads to governance failures; we should instead build Augmented Human Intelligence systems designed for human partnership rather than autonomy."

The author applies AI’s modular architecture to personal life, proposing a framework for deliberately allocating attention across seven life domains, turning living into a practice of conscious orchestration rather than reactive survival."

BCIs could enable real-time cognitive support by detecting biased thinking as it occurs, though current technology remains limited to medical applications and is far from consumer-ready cognitive augmentation.

True progress in AI requires moving from seductive, linear projections of scale to an iterative development chain built on modular architecture, feedback loops, and human-machine partnership, where wisdom emerges from correction and co-evolution, not from computation alone.

The pursuit of AI through scaling alone has reached diminishing returns; true intelligence requires a modular architecture inspired by evolution, specialized systems orchestrated by an executive function for adaptability, efficiency, and human partnership, not autonomy.

Attention is the core constraint on all intelligence; we need systems, both AI and personal, that help us focus on what matters rather than distract us from it.

Intelligence stems from the attention architecture, not compute scale; the future of AI should be modular systems that augment human judgment, not monolithic models that replace it.

Evolution’s energy-efficient brain architecture shows that scaling alone won’t lead to AGI; we must learn from biology’s modular, embodied, and causal design

Attention is the core constraint on all intelligence; we need systems, both AI and personal, that help us focus on what matters rather than distract us from it.

Intelligence stems from the attention architecture, not compute scale; the future of AI should be modular systems that augment human judgment, not monolithic models that replace it.

Evolution’s energy-efficient brain architecture shows that scaling alone won’t lead to AGI; we must learn from biology’s modular, embodied, and causal design

A daily reflection practice and web app for discovering what actually matters in your life, building the muscle to notice, reflect, and adjust through constrained, minimal check-ins.

Algorithmic attention capture undermines democracy by hijacking executive function and fragmenting shared reality, requiring new architectures that support collective deliberation rather than engagement-driven fragmentation.

Humanity now produces more language than we can process, destabilizing our shared reality; to navigate this, we must build Augmented Human Intelligence systems that strengthen human attention and judgment rather than replace them with centralized oracles.

A daily reflection practice and web app for discovering what actually matters in your life, building the muscle to notice, reflect, and adjust through constrained, minimal check-ins.

The author applies AI’s modular architecture to personal life, proposing a framework for deliberately allocating attention across seven life domains, turning living into a practice of conscious orchestration rather than reactive survival."

Our linguistic infrastructure is experiencing serviceability failure, fracturing shared reality, overwhelming attention, creating authenticity paradoxes, and widening the gap between knowledge and wisdom, with LLMs accelerating the crisis by eliminating the last friction in language production.

Language functions as civilization's operating system, stabilized for millennia by four external constraints: throughput; bottlenecks; locality; and friction, all of which have been systematically dismantled by digital technology.

Our linguistic infrastructure is experiencing serviceability failure, fracturing shared reality, overwhelming attention, creating authenticity paradoxes, and widening the gap between knowledge and wisdom, with LLMs accelerating the crisis by eliminating the last friction in language production.

Language functions as civilization's operating system, stabilized for millennia by four external constraints: throughput; bottlenecks; locality; and friction, all of which have been systematically dismantled by digital technology.

After a career shift, the author develops a framework that links evolutionary biology, AI, and human consciousness, arguing that principles such as attention and modularity can lead to better technology and more meaningful lives.

The pursuit of AI through scaling alone has reached diminishing returns; true intelligence requires a modular architecture inspired by evolution, specialized systems orchestrated by an executive function for adaptability, efficiency, and human partnership, not autonomy.

Humanity now produces more language than we can process, destabilizing our shared reality; to navigate this, we must build Augmented Human Intelligence systems that strengthen human attention and judgment rather than replace them with centralized oracles.

True progress in AI requires moving from seductive, linear projections of scale to an iterative development chain built on modular architecture, feedback loops, and human-machine partnership, where wisdom emerges from correction and co-evolution, not from computation alone.

BCIs could enable real-time cognitive support by detecting biased thinking as it occurs, though current technology remains limited to medical applications and is far from consumer-ready cognitive augmentation.

Misdefining AI as “intelligent” leads to governance failures; we should instead build Augmented Human Intelligence systems designed for human partnership rather than autonomy."

Algorithmic attention capture undermines democracy by hijacking executive function and fragmenting shared reality, requiring new architectures that support collective deliberation rather than engagement-driven fragmentation.

A daily reflection practice and web app for discovering what actually matters in your life, building the muscle to notice, reflect, and adjust through constrained, minimal check-ins.

If external constraints can no longer stabilize the linguistic interface, then the stabilizing function must move inward: from the environment to the mind, from architecture to practice, from imposed limits to cultivated awareness. The word for this is wisdom.

If external constraints can no longer stabilize the linguistic interface, then the stabilizing function must move inward: from the environment to the mind, from architecture to practice, from imposed limits to cultivated awareness. The word for this is wisdom.

If external constraints can no longer stabilize the linguistic interface, then the stabilizing function must move inward: from the environment to the mind, from architecture to practice, from imposed limits to cultivated awareness. The word for this is wisdom.

If external constraints can no longer stabilize the linguistic interface, then the stabilizing function must move inward: from the environment to the mind, from architecture to practice, from imposed limits to cultivated awareness. The word for this is wisdom.

If external constraints can no longer stabilize the linguistic interface, then the stabilizing function must move inward: from the environment to the mind, from architecture to practice, from imposed limits to cultivated awareness. The word for this is wisdom.