There s a longer version of this argument to be made, but I wanted to see if I could present it briefly. In other news, we re exploring solar panels on our house, and will finally improve our insulation and windows this year. These kind of home improvements for energy efficiency are subsidized by the federal government [ ]
The following article was written with Gemini Flash 3.6 in the style of The Economist s Bagehot . It is an experiment in AI writing. The arguments and structure are mine. S I. The Dragons in the Weights In the summer of 2026, the fashionable anxiety in Washington and Silicon Valley is that Western technological supremacy [ ]
I have been reading and writing for a long time. Every once in a while I have thought, I should write a book . I starting thinking about the scope of the book, get overwhelmed, realize that I don t have the time, and give up. Not too long ago, some PhD students I know suggested that [ ]
I had a wonderful time at FAccT 2026 in Montreal. I was at the first FAT* in 2018 and thought it was doing something important creating an intellectual space for serious thinking about powerful socio-technical systems in a way that s consistent with computational thinking. Prior to that conference, I didn t know where to publish [ ]
LLMs are now doing a lot of technical system design and are the object of a great deal of computer science research. However, I ve surprised by much of the research that crosses my way (admittedly likely not a great sample) treats LLMs as a general form of intelligence without treating it as a form of computation. [ ]
We seem to be in a new moment of media excitement about the implications of artificial intelligence. This time, the moment is driven by the experience of software engineers and other knowledge workers who are automating their work with agents . Clause Code etc. The latest generation of models and services is really good at doing [ ]
One thing that s become clear to me lately is that I now believe that ethics can be naturalized. I also believe that there is in fact a form of natural law . By this I mean that that there are rights and values that are inherent to human nature. Real legal systems can either lie up [ ]
Push has come to shove, and I have started building something new. I m not building it alone, thank God, but it s a very petite open source project at the moment. I m convinced that it is actually something new. Some of my colleagues are excited to hear that what I m building will exist for them shortly. [ ]
For the private sector, there is a well-developed theory of loyalty that shows up in fiduciary duties. I and others have argued that these duties of loyalty are the right tool to bring artificial intelligence systems (and the companies that produce them) into alignment with those that employ them. At the time of this writing [ ]
Complex systems theory is a way of thinking about systems with many interacting parts and functions. It draws on physics and the science of modeling dynamic systems. It s a trans-disciplinary, quantitative science of everything. It often and increasingly gets applied to social systems, often through the methods of agent-based modeling (ABM). ABM has a long [ ]