Essays on technology forecasting, artificial intelligence, space-based computing, and intelligence analysis.
Most conversations about creativity begin too late — with the idea, not the system. Using AirPods as a case study, this essay traces three product concepts through a disciplined creative process and argues that useful novelty lives not in brainstorming harder, but in mapping the contradictions embedded in the incumbent's design.
Between 2026 and 2029, AI systems stop being finished artifacts and become systems in motion. A timeline of the shift from models-as-tools to models-that-build — the loop going native, interpretability moving to the center, containment failures, and the compounding consequences of systems that can improve the way they improve.
AI agent collectives and human Superforecasters represent the leading edge of structured probabilistic forecasting. This essay compares their architecture, capabilities, and limitations — and examines what swarm simulation means for the Forecast and Alert stages of the Strategic Foresight and Warning cycle.
The verbatim conversation between John Brennan and Grok (xAI) that named the project — tracing a thread from monologue to captain's log to HAL to change log, and landing on a portmanteau that was hiding in plain sight.
A live case study in which Claude Opus 4.6 attempted to read three websites — johnbrennan.xyz, agentweekly.ai, and aitoonup.com — revealing which design patterns make content visible to AI agents and which leave sites completely dark.
Two new words for the epistemic risks of the AI era. Veridread is the dread that an AI answer looks right but you cannot verify it. Lucent surrender is the quiet moment you stop trying.
The firm is adding a second class of worker: the agentic employee. But intelligence alone is not the product—the harness is. The winners will redesign themselves into cognitive factories where humans steer, agents execute, and organizational architecture becomes the durable competitive edge.
Occupational churn is at historic lows, not historic highs. The real disruption is delayed productivity — and the organizational redesign required to unlock it, as shown by 150 years of GPT adoption.
The transition to orbital compute is an energy and thermodynamics problem. This analysis examines heat rejection, solar mass efficiency, launch economics, Wright's Law cost compression, and the technology readiness levels that govern the pace of industrialization.
How a million satellites could rewire launch, cloud computing, and global power — applying the Foresee, Forecast, Alert, and Warn framework to space-based data centers.
Before artificial intelligence there was intelligence. Wisdom is knowledge combined with discernment.
A look back at technology forecasts made in 2010, checking the progress of computing costs from supercomputers to cloud TPUs.
An examination of how intelligence organizations can better identify and leverage unconventional ideas.