On AI

The most interesting questions about AI aren't technical — they're about us. What we'll trust, what we'll automate, and what its confident wrongness reveals about our own.

Fluency is not truth

The defining feature of modern AI — and its defining danger — is that it produces fluent, confident, plausible output regardless of accuracy. We are evolved to trust fluency; a confident, articulate answer feels true. That instinct, useful for millennia, is now a vulnerability. Learning to separate ‘sounds right’ from ‘is right’ may be the essential literacy of the age — and it turns out we were never very good at it, even with each other.

Neither savior nor apocalypse

The public conversation about AI oscillates between utopia and extinction, and both extremes are, conveniently, forms of hype — they make the technology sound more total than it is. The more honest and more useful register is the mundane one: this is a powerful, flawed tool that will reshape specific tasks, industries and habits in specific, mixed ways. The interesting work is in the specifics, not the spectacle.

What we choose to automate

Every automation is a values statement about what we consider drudgery and what we consider precious. It's worth noticing that we often build machines to take over the creative, expressive parts of work while keeping the administrative parts — and asking whether we've got that exactly backwards. The technology doesn't decide this. We do, mostly without noticing we're deciding.