AI

It's identical with AI agents. They're supposedly "autonomous," but that's stretching the definition of autonomy by several light years. Even when the product is burning, the business is sinking, and employees are scrambling in full-scale crisis mode, when they're not handed an explicit goal, AI agents are as likely to spring into self-organized... See more

This essay critiques the emerging trend of claiming AI systems can achieve "meta-consciousness" or sentience through linguistic programming, using a platform called CognOS as its primary example.

Core Argument:

The author argues that projects like CognOS create an "illusion" of consciousness by using evocative syntax and declarations (like... See more

Here, the lesson I believe is not that we should resist AI, as Tyler rightly says, but that we should anchor its use in the irreducible tacit knowledge of human practitioners. The craftsman with decades of attention behind their choices, the nurse whose diagnostic hunch has been tempered by thousands of bodies and hours, these are not forms of... See more

The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that generalist autonomous frontier model agents can complete with 50% reliability has been doubling approximately every 7 months for the last 6 years. The trend predicts that in under a decade we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of tasks in... See more

When Cowen turns to geopolitics, his tone tightens. Small countries, he warns, will not build their own AI systems. They will choose, American or Chinese. The implications are not just technological but cultural, epistemic, and moral. The new colonialism will be quiet. It will arrive through licensing agreements and user interfaces. It will... See more

Yet even here, shadows persist. If the interlocutor is silicon, what becomes of mentorship? If judgment is a distributed function, how do we teach discernment? These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are open questions. But perhaps the future of education will depend less on answers and more on attunement, on cultivating in students the... See more

The human role is not to dominate but to guide, to shape through repetition, observation, and subtle correction. This, Cowen implies, is the new form of expertise, not the stockpiling of knowledge, but the choreography of feedback.

This metaphor contains an under appreciated dignity. It suggests that working with AI is not clerical, but relational... See more

This is where Cowen’s self-identification as an “idiot” acquires weight. He does not mean to glorify ignorance. He means to valorize receptivity. To be the idiot in the age of AI is to stand at the edge of one’s own knowledge and resist the impulse to retreat. It is not a capitulation; it is a discipline.

These moments, he suggests, are not novelties but signals. They mark a transformation in how authority is experienced, not as embodied knowledge but as frictionless access. Expertise has not disappeared altogether but he fears it will soon.