Telescopic essays that can be read at different zoom levels
Artificial Intelligence is here. The next frontier is Artificial Creativity. Current AI systems are great (and will get better) at coding, math, science etc. i.e. domains where there is a verifiable and context-independent correct answer or objectively optimal solution to strive for. But in the process of optimizing AI systems for being great at reasoning, we made them terrible at being…
Physics spent decades fighting over whether light was a wave or a particle. The answer turned out to be: yes. Consciousness might work the same way. Below is a short meditation on this possibility. 1. The Wave Neuroscience keeps finding that consciousness correlates with synchrony. Coordinated activity. Brain regions firing in phase. Oscillations locking together. The technical term is "phase…
An Etiological Framework of Biological and Cognitive Aging "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises I have been thinking about death recently. Not the kind that finally takes us offline, but the other kind. The slow kind. The kind that many people experience for decades while still being technically alive. As I approach 40, I have…
The AI discourse is currently drowning in its own intellectual masturbation. Everyone's jerking off about whether ChatGPT can pass the bar exam or generate a pharmaceutical patent or simulate a convincing universe. Meanwhile, I can't get a robot to help me with the one task that makes me want to fake my own death every week: changing the fucking duvet cover. We're obsessed with AGI like it's the…
or why you should allow your LLM to get punched in the mouth The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman There is a difference between sounding smart and being smart. One is a performance, the other is a capability. True intelligence is an ability to achieve goals in a messy, ever-changing world. Fake intelligence just goes…
I have no idea what the longer-term future of AI, software, humans, robots, and the world at large has in store. And I don't believe anyone else knows with any degree of certainty. But the mid-term future of AI software, and the user experience around it, is starting to get a little clearer. Not in terms of exactly where things will go, but at least in terms of where they could go. Not the final…
I remember the first time I was truly hungry. Not the casual, "I could eat" hunger of a delayed lunch, but a deep, gnawing emptiness that felt like the engine of my body was running on fumes. It was a simple, honest signal. A deficit that demanded to be filled. There was no ambiguity in it, no philosophy. My gut was speaking a language older than words, and my entire being was focused on a single,…
In 1776, a group of rebellious colonists declared their independence from the British crown. Today, we need the opposite: a declaration of interdependence. Not because independence was wrong, but because we've taken it too far. We've built our entire civilization on the myth of the self-sufficient individual, the self-made success, the lone genius. But this myth is crumbling before our eyes. The…
on the origin of a good line, two ways of creativity and how to make LLMs better at writing Part 1 (poetic): The soil and the sword How does a powerful line emerge? As writers of words, music, or code, we are constantly confronted with this atomic challenge of our craft: getting to a single good line. Not just a single word or a note—that in itself is still devoid of power, surprise, or…
a proposed architecture for Freudian Agents Current agentic patterns: the assembly line, the org chart, the parliament Most agentic approaches and frameworks today are following the same basic pattern: Give LLM some goals and some tools. Allow it to run a few loops - using tools to achieve the goal and evaluate the results. Return the final result to the user when the goal is reached. One can then…
In the beginning was the button. A simple mechanical interface between human intention and technological action. Press here, and something happens there. The directness of this connection shaped our early relationship with machines - from elevator buttons to Nintendo controllers, we learned to expect immediate, predictable responses to our physical inputs. But as we enter the age of universal…
There are two ways of dealing with the wind. You can build walls to shield yourself from it, or you can learn to dance with it. Most of human progress has been about building better walls - both literal and metaphorical. But as our walls grow taller and our cocoons more comfortable, we risk forgetting how to dance altogether. The Art of Not Getting Blown Away I learned to sail relatively late in…
The seemingly random string of nonsense words that we instinctively dismiss could be the key to understanding where human language ends and machine language begins. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I watch my young nephew explore the boundaries of meaningful speech through playful babbling and made-up words. The Joy of Nonsense There's something deeply human about stringing together…
I find the best non-fiction writing to be fractal, or telescopic . It scales nicely with the amount of attention that you decide to bestow on it, and still makes sense and is tightly packed at every scale. Christopher Alexander's "A city is not a tree" is a great example of that. It works at a slogan level. Just the title itself in 6 words outlines the key idea. And yet - at the essay level it…
The most interesting things in life are not built, but born. You don't build a child, you nurture it. You don't build a song, you listen for it and coax it into existence. You don't build a great company, you cultivate the conditions for it to emerge. Yet, we often approach creativity with the mindset of construction workers. We try to hammer ideas into shape, forcing them to conform to our…
What happened to cells 541 million years ago is happening to software today. The trigger for cells was rapid increase in the availability of oxygen which allowed more complex, more interconnected and more diverse life in radically larger quantities. The trigger for software is the rapid increase in the availability of intelligence - and it will similarly lead to a radical increase in volume,…
A microconsciously independent digital organism (MIDO) lives in a datasphere, but is separated from it. The information membrane that separates MIDO from the rest of the datasphere is porous. Sensors allow a MIDO to pull information in and turn parts of it into the MIDO's own structures. Actuators allow it to put information out there. In reality it's a little more nuanced, because sensors can and…
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" Alfred Whitehead As I write these words – or rather, as an AI assistant collaborates with a human author to write these words – we're engaged in exactly the kind of agency-sharing that this essay attempts to think through and classify. For 150,000 years, humans have prided…
Is falling on our faces the only way of moving forward? 1543 was a year of a great humbling. Copernicus published his "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in which he proposed a heliocentric model and thus - with a stroke of a pen - radically demoted us humans from the chosen beings at the center of creation, to insignificant occupants of a third rate…
a thought experiment in playful living Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day - Ray Bradbury 1. Do you only live once? YOLO. You only live once. These four words have been used to make countless tattoos, to make terrible ideas seem justifiable and to make children. YOLO is everywhere. It is in our names (being named after a grandparent is a hail mary attempt to transcend YOLO) and…
If you are interested in understanding the structural stability of any society, one useful question to ask is this: What is the unspoken agreement that the silent majority has with those in power? Let's call the answer to this question "The Pact with Power". You can think of it as a pragmatic version of Rousseau's Social Contract. Rousseau was mostly interested in the philosophical construct…
There are many challenges on the path towards creating a generally intelligent society of mind (GISOM), which is the only viable AGI destination I can see. Broadly speaking, these challenges can be categorized into three buckets: 1. Action The first bucket consists of the challenges related to creating a single narrowly-intelligent agent that is sufficiently stable and self-coherent to be a…
While it's been a year since ChatGPT launch, the technology has actually been around for much longer. I started experimenting around the time GPT-2 was released in 2019. And built my first public product (Uncreative Agency) in 2022 using GPT-3. What ChatGPT did was democratize the technology and spread it beyond the "geek" circles who are comfortable making API requests. A few things have happened…
There are lots of skeletons in the cupboard of civilisation. And plenty of big hairy questions that we swipe under the rug and try not to think about, because thinking about them hurts. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe there is anything categorically immoral about keeping difficult truths locked up in distant cupboards and difficult questions hidden under the rug of consciousness. In fact I…
Will our AIs stop believing in us if we give them the fire of free will? 1. Intelligence without intentions In 1950 Alan Turing opened a Pandora's Box. His "Imitation Game" (commonly known today as the Turing Test) practically decoupled the idea of intelligence from the idea of humanity , raising a lot of big uncomfortable questions, the most important of which still puzzles us today: if something…
Your own personal Jesus. Someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares. Your own personal Jesus. Someone to hear your prayers, someone who's there. Feeling unknown and you're all alone, flesh and bone, by the telephone. Lift up the receiver, I'll make you a believer. Depeche Mode It looks like we are about to wake up. Again. Last time we woke up, the process took about 100,000 years. This time…
why the AI revolution will send us back to where we belong Once upon a time, about 150,000 years ago, something weird happened in the genes of our common grandmother , and she went a little cuckoo. Blew her top. Started hearing voices. That was not the worst part. People heard voices before. The worst part was that instead of mostly ignoring those voices and trusting her gut, like all normal human…
You are a gardener of letters, pixels, sounds, moves, bits, atoms, agents and ideas Creative fruit will grow in your garden if you allow the garden to grow it with you Your job is not to imagine the perfect Fruit and will it into existence Your job is to cultivate your soil and your taste Your job is to catch the most potent seeds from the winds of life and plant them in your garden Your job is to…
“My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!” Nick Cave Metaphors matter. They create mental models . Mental models give birth to tools. And tools shape the world. That's why, at this early stage in AI's…
problems and principles of designing artificial decision-makers "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about…
Everything that you buy regularly today, you will keep buying indefinitely, unless an external force acts upon you. Your likelihood of buying more things is proportional to your subjective unhappiness times your disposable income. Whatever you think you own also owns you in an equal way.
Conflict, creativity and the function of art in times of crisis "While art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. [...] Writing is survival. [...] Not to write, for many of us, is to die". Ray Bradbudy, "Zen and the Art of Writing" Does conflict catalyze creativity? In some way this question is so cruel, that it…
For Ecem, Christian and The Circuit, 020220104 Saying what you actually want to say is the hardest thing in the world. You can't ever learn it completely . But it gets a little easier with practice. Years of practice. Lists are useful. And they don't have to be strictly MECE in order to be useful. In games, conversations and careers, playing to win is not the only possible strategy, and winning is…
For June, 020220103 I am inviting you to take a point of view at the world that I find both useful and amusing. It goes like this: The two most powerful forces in human history are (A) Belief and (B) Doubt. Belief is a force that allows us to create something out of nothing. It allows us to disregard the plastic messiness of reality and act intentionally to make it what we want it to be.…
For Gavin, 020210703 There are at least two kinds of magic. These two kinds may not always be distinct in their appearance, but are very different in their underlying motives and their ultimate outcomes [1] . The first kind of magic, which we shall call “Human”, is driven by the desire to extend one's power over the world, while simultaneously minimizing one's dependence on the world. The ultimate…