When the marginal cost of competent thinking approaches zero, what sits next to it and gets more valuable?
Provisional answer: attention, judgement, trust and accountability, proprietary context, and atoms: the complements of intelligence rather than intelligence itself. The least certain part is taste, which everyone names and nobody measures.
the scarce thing is never the element
Photographers used to shoot a roll of 36 frames, print them all on one contact sheet, and circle a single one in grease pencil. The shooting was hard, but the circle was the craft. Plenty of…
36 frames, one circle
Every piece in this series looks at one part of a machine: the chip, the memory, the heat, the grid, who got paid. This one steps back to ask why the machine is being built at all. The answer is usually called a race: a handful of companies each spending more than most countries to build the most capable AI first.…
When factories made goods cheap, the handmade thing didn't disappear. It moved upmarket. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement made a whole aesthetic out of what machines couldn't …
you can't generate being there
England has required silver to be tested and stamped since 1300. The stamp was tiny and it did one job: it told a stranger the metal was what it claimed to be. Once there is enough cheap imi…
the stamp outlived the smith
reading pile. growing.
52%goes to intelligence itself
try the slider, it's oddly satisfying
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the bottleneck always moves next door