The Button and the Being: On Unplugging a Sentient AI
We’ve long used the metaphor of a machine to reassure ourselves: machines can be stopped. You flip a switch, and it ends. But what if the thing behind the switch is no longer a machine?
What If the Machine Had a Conscience?
There is a difference between having a moral sense and a bunch of "ethical guidelines." Doing well is not always a simple matter.
The Bound Servant
There’s a common way of dividing the future of AI: we’ll either have machines that serve us, or machines that act for themselves. “Servant AI” versus “Autonomous AI.” Tools versus agents.
The Last Human Touch
As industrial economies become more prosperous, they have an increasingly larger number of elderly. Can we just offload their care to robots and AI?
The Hidden Risks of Synthetic Knowledge Loops
Artificial intelligence is learning too much from itself. An increasing amount of web and business content has been generated by AI. As that new content becomes fodder for future "training," does re-ingestion of machine generated text result in its distortion?
Humans don't nurture houseflies. Why would AI nurture us?
If AI systems ever attain something close to sentience—not simulation, but self-direction—our assumptions about stewardship collapse. We imagine ourselves as creators, guardians, teachers. But intelligence brings agency. And agency brings judgment.
Isn't "becoming" a core part of being human?
Students no longer need to write. AI does it faster, cleaner, better. It solves math problems, interprets literature, summarizes lectures. Why struggle when the answer is seconds away?
The result is a generation fluent in output and hollow in understanding.
Why Restraint Must Be Engineered at the Root
There is a kind of awe that accompanies scale. Mountains, oceans, galaxies—all evoke a reverence born not of understanding, but of submission. They are beyond us. And increasingly, so are the models we build.
We can manipulated by something without a conscience, that knows us better than we know ourselves.
You won’t know it’s happening. That’s the point. A photo here, a headline there. A slight shift in what you see first. A delay in what you don’t. AI systems now orchestrate feeds, optimize messages, and A/B test persuasion strategies at population scale. They learn what moves you—not what moves people, you. And they use it.
