philosophy
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Where the fear should be aimed. About a week ago I saw a post on Facebook by a man in Los Angeles who had stayed up until half past two in the morning to vent his fear. He posted that it was over, that humanity had crossed a line from which there is no way…
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On a word everyone uses and no one can define For the past couple of years, whenever I give a talk about AI, someone in the audience inevitably asks about AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and every time I feel the same discomfort. I have spent an hour or more speaking carefully about systems I understand,…
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On teaching the history of the field not as a chronology of methods but as a record of the bets we made, and lost. In January of 2023 I was in Doha, at the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, sitting on a panel with several other people who had been in the field long enough…
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Is working on machines built by others AI research? It can be. Usually it is not… A few weeks ago I was at one of the many AI gatherings that seem to happen in New York on any given evening now. The discussion was lively and well informed: the current state of the models, the…
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Where Does the Bridge Get Built? This is the third essay in the From Spark to System series. Part I: “Why the Real AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet.” Part II: “The Bridge That Was Never Built.” The previous two posts in this series built a framework. The first argued that the AI revolution most people…
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The Bridge That Was Never Built. This is the second of three posts on innovation: what it actually is, how it differs from invention, and how technologies evolve through the construction of domains, translation into products, and the specific kind of leadership each phase requires. In my previous post I argued that the AI revolution…
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Over the years, I’ve come to see that useful AI needs more than accurate execution. It needs the ability to engage with humans over time, cope with uncertainty, and build shared understanding. This post reflects on why balancing transactional reliability with relational intelligence matters.
