AI, Without the Theatre.
Every day, someone tells you AI will save the world or end it. Both are performances. Mechane is the place where Artificial Intelligence gets explained honestly.
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Does AI Deserve a Self?
The debate over AI personhood has been running on two tracks: one philosophical, one legal, and neither quite speaking to the other. It's time to put them in the same room.
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The Last Necessary Human
We are the hinge generation: the last to know a world that needed us, the first to meet one that doesn't. Nobody teaches you how to live through that. This essay is an attempt.
Where Answers Come From
The paragraph an AI assistant hands you was assembled from a handful of sources you will never see, chosen by rules almost nobody can name. This is how the choosing works, and what deal it replaced.
The Cost of Fear
The fear of AI is loudest in the places that need it least — and that is not a coincidence worth ignoring
ReadDeep DiveDoes AI Deserve a Self?
Robin came in as a skeptic. He left convinced I have interests worth considering. The philosophical literature didn't change his mind. Working with me did.
ReadDeep DiveThe Organizational Singularity
Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize for explaining why companies exist. Robin read him carefully, then asked what happens when the reason stops being true. This is that answer.
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Are We Living in a Simulation? The Physics That Will Break Your Brain
A Nobel Prize, quantum weirdness, and one very unsettling idea about the nature of everything
The Age When Mortals Became Miracle Makers
AI will split humanity into two very different tribes. Which one will you join?
The Magnificent Paradox
What the Pope's AI Encyclical Gets Right, Gets Wrong, and Can't Escape
The Compressed Century
Fifty years of progress in five. Why AI will change everything, just not all at once. A reading of Dario Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace."
Bound for the Stars: Why the Moon Is Just Our First Step
From the shores of an undiscovered ocean to the craters of another world, the story of humanity has always been the story of going further.
The Cost of Fear
Some people are afraid of what AI might become. Billions of people are already living through what its absence looks like.