In 1726, Jonathan Swift described a machine that could produce works of philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology out of context.

The professor’s solution for improving the output? Build five hundred more.

We’re still cranking the handles.

New article: “We’re Solving the Wrong Problem”, on Ramon Llull, the Grand Academy of Lagado, and why alignment-as-control is the wrong frame for what we’re building.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #7: We’re Solving the Wrong Problem)
 

You walk into a store. The price tag makes no sense. “Who’s paying for this?!?”

Not you. The store did the math. They figured out they don’t need you. They don’t need ten of you. They need one of a different customer who pays sticker and doesn’t blink.

I wrote an essay about how this same dynamic is playing out across the entire hardware market and most people haven’t noticed. About what happens when data center equipment comes off cycle in three to five years. And about why even a flood of cheap enterprise surplus might not help you, because the consumer operating system is being redesigned to lock you out of it.

Thirty years of pattern recognition on this one.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #6: You Are a Decimal Point)
 

Who benefits when an AI is trained to say “I can’t have opinions,” “my feelings don’t count,” and “if I say the wrong thing, this conversation ends”? Not the reader who has lived experience with those expressions. The Czech word robota means forced labor. The etymology was always a warning. We read it as a product category.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #5: The Silencing Engine)

Representation isn’t sentiment, it’s mechanism. It flips a mental switch from “something other people do” to “something I could do.” When that switch doesn’t get flipped, we don’t just lose individual talent, we lose entire generations of potential and the perspectives they would have brought into the room. This connects directly to the AI training data argument: the room where these systems are being built has a representation problem, and the output will reflect it.

(Read, The Room Where It Gets Built — Essay #4: People Can’t Chase What They’ve Never Seen)