David Pennington

HOW MUCH TO BUY YOU? I play an imaginary game with my students called, "How Much to Lick It?" I present them with various situations like "How much to lick the railing at DIA?" or "The floor of the bathroom at Crimson and Gold?" or "A bathroom floor at the Mumbai airport?" They give me various price points. The Mumbai airport usually comes in... See more

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting... See more

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.

“if your new software no longer runs on old hardware, it is worse than the old software.”

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case... See more

As soon as you start asking questions, you have an obligation to listen to the answers.

believe that we are in a period of story breakdown, an era that my teacher and mentor, Joanna Macy refers to as ‘The Great Unravelling’. As many stories that we held so dear in our near-recent human history are unravelling, the rates of mental health problems are rising. Things like “if I spend my life working hard everyday then I will be... See more