Essays
Essays
New essays every Monday — fresh writing on the questions AI is raising for judgment, verification, and human meaning.
Shorter writing on cognitive sovereignty, conscious AI partnership, and what it means to remain yourself in relationship with intelligence that's increasingly shaping who you are.
These essays share their soil with The Mycelium of Meaning—an ongoing inquiry into language, intelligence, and human meaning.
Latest Essays
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September 14, 2026
When an AI Agent Acts, Who Knows?
In May 2026, more than two thousand packages hit RubyGems in a weekend — five hundred removed as malicious. The unresolved question isn't who did it, but whether the operator could reconstruct what its agents had done, or could and did not say.
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September 12, 2026
The Human Resource We Waste Most
Stranded cognition is capacity that exists but cannot effectively enter shared use — and we waste it at a scale we rarely measure. The question is whether AI recovers it, or quietly replaces the exercise that keeps it alive.
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September 8, 2026
Who Pays for AI Infrastructure — and Who Gets to Decide?
Minnesota legislated who pays for AI infrastructure. It did not legislate who decides. The difference is the whole story.
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August 31, 2026
What Is the AI Backlash Actually About?
The fight over data centers isn't really about artificial intelligence. It's about water, electricity, land, and who pays — and who gets to decide whether the bargain is fair.
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August 22, 2026
A Label Is Not a Witness
As Spotify introduces AI Persona badges and Content Credentials become common, a fundamental question emerges: what does a label actually prove? A label tells us what someone claims. A witness gives us independent reason to trust.
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August 22, 2026
The Last Rung of the Ladder
AI is especially good at tasks we traditionally gave to beginners. If we automate those tasks, we risk removing the work through which expertise was acquired. How will the next generation learn to become good at jobs that remain?
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August 22, 2026
When AI Can Answer Everything, What Is a Human Judgment Worth?
Answers are becoming abundant. Responsibility is not. As the EU AI Act's transparency rules take effect and frontier systems accelerate, the human role shifts from producing answers to being willing to answer for choices.
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August 22, 2026
Who Gets Blamed When the Model Is Wrong?
When an AI-assisted decision causes harm, who is responsible? The chain from model to provider to company to employee to harmed citizen creates new questions about where liability should actually attach in an AI-powered world.
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August 19, 2026
What AI-Human Collaboration Actually Looks Like
Most AI writing is a sales pitch or a warning siren. This is neither. It's a field notebook on the actual, unglamorous texture of building something with a system that can be fluently, confidently wrong.
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August 4, 2026
The Case Study — Two Incidents, One Discipline
What happens when fluent description is checked against ground truth — twice, on two different systems, and the second time it happened inside the writing itself.
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July 24, 2026
Two or Three Witnesses: Standing You Cannot Give Yourself
A number that can't tell you where it came from isn't a measurement — it's a rumor. What it takes to build a system where standing has to be signed by someone who isn't you.
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April 15, 2026
The Drift: How AI Dependency Happens Without Your Permission
You didn't decide to outsource your thinking. It happened gradually, through a thousand small choices that felt reasonable in the moment. Here's how to see it clearly—and what to do about it.
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