Why AI Agents Will Participate in Economic Activity Before They Replace It
In February 2026, Citrini, a macro research firm, published a piece of speculative fiction that reached an unusually wide audience. Framed as a post-mortem memo from June 2028, it described the collap…
How four decades in AI and a parallel artistic inquiry converged in an experiment written from the inside.
Last week, an AI agent (built on OpenClaw) submitted a performance optimization to matplotlib, one of the most widely used open-source Python libraries in the world. The change was small… swap np.colu…
Last week, Matt Schlicht ht at Octane AI I spun up a social network for AI agents. The project grew out of a series of experiments (first called Clawdbot, then Moltbot, and now OpenClaw), an open-sour…
I’ve sat through a lot of quantum computing briefings over the past five years. Vendor pitches. Research updates. Board presentations. They all share a common feature, and that is that nobody wants to…
In 1988, I was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory working on a problem that had nothing to do with productivity. We had a massive robotic arm—cousin to the ones welding car frames in Detroit—and we were…
In the mid-2000s, I was a consultant working with multiple clients in financial services. Cloud was already in the air (pun intended), but only as an idea. For years people had tossed around terms lik…
It was the early 2000s, I was working at a large financial institution. Although the headiness of the 'dot com' frenzy had died down somewhat, there was still a heavy focus on driving rapid technology…
In the late 1990s, I was consulting in the middle of the dot-com rush. The mood in business was electric, almost frantic. Startups were sprouting overnight, often with little more than a name, a pitch…
In the mid-1990s, I joined a telecom startup in pre-launch mode. Everything was new: networks being built, stores opening, acquisitions negotiated, revenue streams projected but not yet realized. The…
People often ask how I got into AI. They expect an origin story with a clear title or breakthrough project. But mine didn’t start that way. It began with a moment — a feeling I couldn’t name at the ti…
In networking, we talk about the concept of ‘planes’: the data plane moves packets, the control plane decides where they go. The fastest pipes in the world don’t matter if the routing rules are wrong.
Salesforce’s recent stock slide is a canary in the coal mine. The company beat on earnings but issued weaker guidance, particularly around its AI platform. Investors punished the stock, wiping out nea…
It’s Monday morning. Your developers log in and discover GitHub Copilot is down. Analysts trying to open ChatGPT find only error messages. Customer service agents, accustomed to AI-assisted responses,…
Transactions that think, adapt, and optimize themselves in real-time aren’t science fiction—they’re the next competitive advantage in banking.
JPMorgan Chase's Contract Intelligence platform processes hundreds of thousands of legal documents automatically, saving 360,000 work hours annually while delivering millions in cost savings. Goldman…
Three principles that guide my approach to building AI systems that actually work
After almost two years of integrating AI coding tools and assistants into my personal dev workflow, I've learned that the reality is far more nuanced than the marketing promises. Here's my honest take…
What do 5G Wireless, Blockchain and IoT have in common? You might be surprised...
Forensics - the science of determining the circumstances and perpetration of crime - has
As we settle into the last year of the decade (for my horologist readership -- let the raging debates begin!) and pass the tweener-ish 11th birthday of Blockchain, it seems appropriate to take a bit o…
Okay, I kind of hate that metaphor, but the alternatives ('The Domino Effect', 'The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back', etc.) just don't have the same sense of utterly missing a completely new situati…
Forward (December 2019): This is a bit of a throw-back, a paper I wrote a couple of years ago as an educational piece for a client. I came across it recently, and wanted to share with this audience, a…
Do a Google search on 'Internet of Things' and prepare to be confronted with a dizzying array of different views and promises of this 'new' concept. Every major technology product firm -- and consulti…
> A research paper released by Google last week (referenced here by CNET) suggests that the mega-tech company may have recently achieved 'Quantum Supremacy' in quantum computing, surpassing IBM and ot…
What is 'intelligence' and can it be 'artificial'? From Merriam-Webster: