AI

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the... See more

How bad could it be? If you ask the researchers at Anthropic, even if progress stalls out here, current algorithms will automate all white collar work within the next five years: it’s just a matter of collecting the relevant data and spoonfeeding it to the models. In the worst-case scenario, highly repetitive manual labour becomes the last frontier... See more

A 12-Step Guide to Bullshit Work in the Age of AI

Step 1: Schedule a Meeting to Align on Priorities

Launch with a sync to "get everyone on the same page"—a page nobody reads. Auto-invite 12 people who won't attend. Record everything for "transparency," guaranteeing zero future views.

Step 2: Auto-Transcribe the Meeting

Deploy AI to transform... See more

They’re seeing what most miss: successful AI agent deployment isn’t about the technology . It’s about the human systems surrounding it.

The companies winning right now aren’t those with superior algorithms. They’re the ones who decoded human-agent collaboration. They’re solving the trust problem, the liability question, the orchestration challenge.

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.

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

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

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