This essay challenges the technical/non-technical binary as a social construction rather than cognitive reality, arguing that while dissolving interfaces make technical skills accessible to everyone, a new kind of literacy is required - not about operating machines, but about maintaining awareness and autonomy while thinking alongside AI systems that may serve interests other than our own.

Ilya Sutskever’s admission that scaling AI will continue to improve capabilities but leave something important missing points to a fundamental gap between intelligence and wisdom. This essay explores why more capability without better judgment may simply accelerate humanity’s existing failures, and why the real bottleneck in AI development isn’t technical but human.

This essay explores Catherine Olsson’s observation that language models seem to have an intuitive sense of “what they’re supposed to say,” drawing parallels to how human children learn social performance through modeling adult expectations. It argues that both human and machine cognition may be fundamentally constituted by layers of contextual performance rather than expressing some authentic core, and examines what this means as human and AI systems increasingly co-evolve.

This essay examines what chess’s survival and flourishing despite superhuman engines reveals about humanity’s potential relationship with AI. It explores why human chess retained meaning, what choices enabled coexistence, and the harder questions that emerge when we extend this analogy beyond games to work, governance, and society.

An unflinching examination of the gap between humanity’s stated values and revealed preferences. The essay argues that humans are fundamentally driven by animal impulses (@nefs) that override our higher reasoning, and that every system we build eventually gets captured by these same impulses. The narrow path forward may lie not in changing human nature, but in building AI and decentralized systems that can encode our stated values more consistently than we ever could ourselves.

The human brain evolved to pursue, not to possess—happiness is neurologically designed to be temporary. The wellness industry profits from this by creating dissatisfaction and selling inadequate solutions, while the genuine correlates of wellbeing (relationships, contribution, autonomy) cannot be productized. The honest path is not finding happiness but accepting its impossibility and pursuing meaning instead.

Social media platforms have industrialized psychology, using decades of research into human irrationality to build systems that exploit our weaknesses at scale. The asymmetry of knowledge - where platforms understand users better than users understand themselves - creates a form of manipulation that individual resistance cannot counter and democratic governance has failed to address. The coming human-AI merge may either deepen this exploitation or, if built on open source principles, finally give humans tools to understand and protect their own minds.

Humanity faces four possible futures: extinction through uncoordinated technological risk, enslavement under feudal capitalism where tech oligarchs control AI, stagnation where we muddle through without progress, or transcendence through human-AI merge on collective terms. Current trajectories favor enslavement unless the open source imperative prevails and human nature is removed from governance through encoded values rather than trusted willpower.

Swedish startup Lovable’s $330M raise at a $6.6B valuation signals institutional belief that natural language will replace traditional coding. This essay explores what that means for software creation, who benefits from democratization, and whether the falling barrier to creation leads to distributed power or new forms of platform control.