Category: AI

  • Do We Care What Is Real?

    Beyond being able to tell what is real and what is AI-generated, how important is that ability to us? In my last post, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short story called Best Laid Plans about Piers Elder, a man who tries to unite people by inventing a common enemy, only to suffer unexpected…

  • Best Laid Plans, a Microfiction

    What happens when somebody invents an enemy nation?  I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve within the technology transformations happening all around us. Here, then, is another microfiction, “Best Laid Plans.” Next time, I’ll dig into how realistic…

  • The Human Filter

    How to get around the volume problem with AI sales pitches. Spoiler Alert for Charles Dickens’ 1853 novel Bleak House (skip to the next paragraph if this is too soon). At the end of the book, the decades-long Jarndyce and Jarndycelawsuit that has taken up much of the plot finally resolves. However, in the process legal fees have sucked…

  • AIs are Genies

    It’s time to rethink the metaphor of AIs as monsters out to eradicate or colonize us.  Artificial Intelligence is the subject of at least as much human fear and greed as it is of hope and altruism. Some of the dominant metaphors for where AI can go horribly wrong come from science fiction: the Skynet…

  • Keywords: Hedgehogs and Foxes (and AI, oh my!)

    What kind of thinker are you? Knowing the difference between when you’re a hedgehog & when you’re a fox can be empowering. The following piece is part of a “Keywords” series that I’ve slowly built over the history of The Dispatch. Before we start, though, I want to share that Claude was helpful developing my argument in a…

  • Is AI Slop Good for Brick and Mortar?

    Will untrustworthy AI products and advertising breathe new life into retail because that’s where trustable humans are?  It was spring. I walked the streets of New Delhi reckoning with an urgent Number Two and no place to deposit it. Public toilets, at least in that hood, seemed not a high municipal priority. Then, through gastrointestinal-distress-blurred…

  • Retro Futures: “Sneakers” (1992) and Anthropic’s Mythos (2026)

    How does an early 1990s caper movie help us understand the threat and promise of today’s sharpest-edged AI models?  On April 7th, Anthropic announced that it had created Mythos, an AI so powerful that it can find long-undiscovered software bugs, making banks, hospitals, and other key holders of personal data vulnerable to hackers and scammers.…

  • The Cosplay Reality Collapse

    With humans pretending to be AIs, fiction pretending to be history, and chatbots encouraging humans to commit despicable acts, it has never been harder to know what is real. A couple columns back, I asked “Do We Already Think AIs Are Conscious?” The provocation was an interesting “hit piece” that an AI agent had written…

  • No Experience is Wasted…

    …if you can think analogically: a mini-memoir. Last week, a young colleague and I visited La Profesora’s Digital Skills class at Portland State University. We were there to talk about career readiness and what my friend Rishad Tobaccowala, in his terrific book Restoring the Soul of Business, calls “the turd on the table.”** In this case, the…

  • Do We Already Think AIs Are Conscious?

    When an AI Agent wrote a hit piece about a human, the press paid attention. But they didn’t look at the user comments. Here’s what they missed. When it comes to AI, my writerly beat is how human behavior changes in the face of AI. While I am interested in existential questions around AI, I’m…