Essays
Thinking in public about technology, evolution, and minds.
The Consciousness Corridor
We may never get a test that says which machines are conscious. Medicine has managed for sixty years with a test that says which brains are not. A research question for the people who want to pace AI, and for the people who study minds.
The Same Two Animals
OpenAI and Anthropic are replaying Microsoft and Apple with uncanny fidelity, and the places where the replay breaks are the most revealing part. Not a coincidence, not a copy: convergent evolution, with corporations as the organisms.
What Do Machines Price?
Abundance will not abolish markets — it hands them to machines. Money unbundles, price becomes a field, algorithms collude on the abundant while rent collects on the scarce. A sequel to "What Is Still Hard to Get?"
What Is Still Hard to Get?
AGI, energy, and the scarcity that keeps moving. Why abundance won't abolish money — and why post-poverty is the better idea hiding inside the post-scarcity dream.
The Left Arm I Didn't Raise
What dental pain, meditation, and a hand left at my side taught me about suffering, control, and the value that can remain inside a negative experience.
The Mirror Will Sing Back
AI content looks empty when we imagine fake artists broadcasting to everyone. The stranger future is media generated for one person — where the human behind the song is you.
The Fourth Wound
The argument that machines are alive is intellectually addressable. The recoil it triggers is not. Freud counted three blows to human self-love. The fourth has already been struck.
Three Landmarks
The 2020 crossover was the headline. It was also the least interesting thing that has happened to the planet's biomass in modern history. The two landmarks ahead of us matter more — and one of them is already nearly impossible to undo.
Manifest, Don't Import
The Markdown Interface Manifesto. Stop loading code from every corner of the internet. Depend on specifications. Let the implementation be summoned.
Neanderthals Didn't Lose a War. They Lost a Trade Network.
The AI-replacement debate assumes a fight. The most thorough extinction in our lineage happened without one — and that should unsettle you more than any war.