There’s no question about it. AI will transform the world. It has the potential to help bring about a techno-utopia, helping to advance medical, scientific, social and productive change on a genuinely revolutionary scale. It also has the potential to lead to our extermination as a species.
It’s hard to have a clear perspective on this right now. After all, our lives haven’t changed all that much. We still spend most of our time cooking and eating meals, watering our lawn, and driving the work. It doesn’t feel like a revolutionary time. But this–right now–is one of the truly epochal events in human history–fully equivalent to the development of agriculture, or the wheel.
Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of modern AI, estimates that there’s a 20% chance that AI could drive humanity to extinction with the next 30 years. He notes: “we’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before. And how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing?”
On the other hand, AIs are able to design molecules, medicines, decode DNA, and invent machines and systems that have been entirely out of the grasp of science until the last 10 years. It can replace us our work–and you’re especially at danger if you are a knowledge professional like a lawyer, accountant, doctor, or artist. Have we thought about what civilization will be like after most of us become “unuseful?”
The purpose of this magazine is to explore the impacts–good and bad–of the coming revolution. What can we hope for? What should we fear? Is there anything we can do now, before the genii’s out of the bottle. This site wasn’t created to predict the future of AI. It was created to think clearly about the present.
Most public discussion around AI swings between extremes—utopia and collapse, salvation and doom. What’s missing is usable understanding: how these systems work, where they fail, and what they might mean for institutions, policies, and people. That’s the focus here.
I’ve spent most of my career in tech—enterprise architecture, data systems, information strategy—but I come to this work with a public policy lens. Not the performance of policy, but the practice: how we make decisions, shape incentives, and build systems that serve people without misleading them.
This site is part journal, part workshop, and part
community. Some of it is commentary. Some of it is tooling. Some of it is written with other analysts in mind; some is written for any thoughtful reader trying to make sense of the noise.
There’s no single argument here, and no singular audience. Just questions worth asking, and systems worth understanding.
I write because I think better when I do. And because we are on the brink of civilizational change, and we’re all acting as though we weren’t. If that’s useful to you, I’m glad you’re here.
