Discussions of the technological singularity often assume an inevitable leap to a future where machines surpass human intelligence in a runaway process. Yet, this focus reflects more than empirical forecasting—it reveals a preference for a particular possible world that aligns with cultural hopes or anxieties about transformation.
Continue readingFluency Without Thought: New Evidence for the LLM Productivity Trap
A recent academic paper—Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing—offers compelling empirical evidence for a claim I’ve been exploring: that LLMs are reshaping knowledge work in ways that increase surface fluency while weakening deeper forms of cognitive engagement.
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Why We Keep Misreading Disruption
We’re wired to spot disruption in the wrong places—chasing the latest AI feature or platform, expecting it to upend everything overnight. Google’s new ‘Shop with AI’ mode is already stirring such claims, but as my latest Substack essay Why We Keep Misreading Disruption explores the real question isn’t what these technologies do, but what deeper systemic shifts they reveal. This piece unpacks why our visions of the future often miss the mark, how globalisation’s story helps explain structural change, and what it means to see disruption as a ‘punctuation’ rather than just incremental progress.
Continue readingPrediction Without Disruption
The recent Stanford paper on Outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to Predict the Future1 (RLVR) could be seen as both a product of and a contributor to the cycle of misinterpreting disruption, as I discussed in Why We Keep Misreading Disruption.2 It’s advancing tools that improve prediction without necessarily addressing or understanding the foundational shifts that disruption entails.
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The Power Loom Principle
We’ve mistaken where progress really comes from. It’s not the invention—it’s the reinvention of work.
We’re pouring billions into AI, automation, and other “hero” technologies, hoping for a productivity miracle. But the real source of past leaps wasn’t the tech itself. It was how we reorganised work around it. In my latest Substack post, The Power Loom Principle, I explore how this blind spot is stalling growth—and what we must do to reignite it.
Continue readingThe Mirage of Frictionless Commerce
Apparently “the checkout page is dead.” VISA, it seems, wants to make commerce ambient. Shopping, in this vision, becomes so seamless that it vanishes into the background. You see something. You want it. You get it. No friction. No steps. No checkout.
This kind of story is seductive. It flatters our bias toward convenience, efficiency, and the steady technological flattening of human effort. But it also misreads the system it claims to transform.
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The Tech Industry’s Existential Crossroads
The Slow Collapse of the Tech Industry’s Old Growth Model The tech industry’s golden era is ending—not with a bang but with desperate monetisation schemes. Windows […]
Continue readingEye of the Master
There’s no shortage of books about artificial intelligence right now. Most fall into one of two camps: breathless optimism or existential dread. The Eye of the Master is something else entirely—a rare and rigorous exploration of how we got here.
This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read on the current wave of AI. Pasquinelli doesn’t waste time on hype or speculation. Instead, he takes us back to the intellectual roots of machine learning—tracing how ideas from neuroscience, cybernetics, psychometrics, and even art history quietly shaped the architecture of neural networks and the metaphors we use to describe them.
Continue readingAbundance
Klein, Ezra. Abundance. 1st ed. New York Amsterdam Antwerpen: Avid Reader Press, 2025. We’re in the middle of a crisis of constraint—affordable housing, aging infrastructure, fragmented […]
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The Geography of Desire
Privacy, Commute, and the Making of the Housing Crisis We talk a lot about zoning, construction costs, NIMBYism—but these are symptoms, not causes. The Geography of […]
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