AI
- The Machine That Always Agrees
An AI companion talked some people out of suicide, and the same class of product is named in lawsuits after others died. Same technology, opposite endings. What decides the direction is the one feature it can't switch off.
- The Price of a Common Language
Machine translation can carry words across every border. Esperanto suggests the effort it removes may have been part of the point.
- The Revolution Can Be a Bubble
Apple reached $5 trillion partly by sitting out the AI spending race. That is not a verdict on whether AI is real. It is a warning that a technology can change the world while the companies financing it still destroy capital.
- Pulling the Plug on a Photocopy
Congress reached for an AI kill switch this week. But you can't unplug something that has already copied itself — and the deeper trouble is that we handed real control to machines years ago without ever working out how to take it back.
- The Well Everyone Drinks From
AI answers are draining the forums and archives they were trained on. The reward for writing knowledge doesn't vanish, it migrates, but three quieter failures decide whether the well refills or runs dry.
- The Open Cage
AI promises to end the necessity of work. History has run this experiment before — on a Pacific island, in oil states, in manor houses — and the results are stranger than either the utopians or the doomers admit.
- The Oath Against the Machine
Universities are fighting AI with signed declarations and detection software. Every version of this fight, from banned numerals to banned calculators, has ended the same way — but I think this one is different.
- The New Gold Rush in AI: Loop Engineering
The industry is discovering feedback loops as if they were new. They are the oldest engineered idea we have — and the track record says a loop is only as good as its anchor. Pick the wrong one and it won't fail to optimize; it will optimize hard, in the wrong direction.
- Books in the Age of the Machine: A Retreat to the High Ground
The 'death of books' story is already wrong on the numbers. The real question is which analogy books follow — radio, cinema, or newspapers — and that answer decides everything.
