Articles
Essays, analysis, theory, satire, memoir, and long-form writing migrated and developed from the NOMOTO MEDIA archive.
Emergency Is a Constitution of Its Own
A crisis does not erase the Constitution. It changes the order in which constitutional decisions are made. Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln each discovered how urgency could move presidential action ahead…
Before the President
Before Americans created one of the most powerful political offices in the world, they tried to govern without it.
China: The Surveillance State in Practice
The most misleading way to understand surveillance in China is to imagine a single machine.
Privacy Was Never Free
Human civilization has always kept records. Long before computers, databases, intelligence agencies or artificial intelligence, societies learned that memory could be removed from the mind and placed somewhere more durable.…
AI Didn’t Create Surveillance. It Completed It.
Privacy is dead.
The Problem Is Not Memory. It Is Routing.
A system does not operationally know something merely because the information exists somewhere in its history. It must retrieve the information at the right moment, interpret why it matters, compare…
Useful to Whom, Specifically, and for How Long?
A clarifying note on the most carefully unanswered question of our era. The question of whether artificial intelligence will be useful sounds, on first hearing, like the kind of thing…
The Agentic AI Bot that Never Sleeps.
The argument for agentic AI is that it removes the human bottleneck. Ok then.
Dreams and Reality.
In Calcutta, in the eighties, the dead were collected from the streets in the early morning by trucks that paced the neighborhoods at hours most of the city was not…
Pen and paper. Typewriter and computer.
Pen and paper forces commitment at the sentence level. You write the sentence and it exists.
The Mind Considers a Sandwich
A field report on consciousness, possibility, and the thirty-seven seconds it took to almost make a decision about lunch. At 11:47 a.m.
Cognition.
Most discussions about intelligence assume something that isn’t true: that thinking begins with complete thoughts, clear goals, and well-formed instructions. But real human cognition doesn’t work that way.
I didn’t write The Bitter Lesson but it’s geeky interesting.
The Bitter Lesson Rich Sutton March 13, 2019 The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately…
Why do we have anxiety?
Anxiety is the number one human emotion. It is older than language.
Everything Is Fine and We Are All Going to Be Glow-in-the-Dark
By the year 2031, a man in Palo Alto will edit his own genome over breakfast using an app he downloaded by accident while trying to order oat milk.
The Wonderful News That We Are No Longer Needed
For ten thousand years, the powerful needed the rest of us, and frankly it was exhausting for everyone.
The Companion Industry’s Annual Report to Investors
Dear shareholders, it has been a remarkable year for the Companion Industry, and the executive team is pleased to report that domestic unit sales have exceeded internal projections by some…
The Three Scenarios or something. Maybe more.
A standard-issue think piece on the future of AI, generated according to industry specifications, in which we will all consider the optimistic case, the pessimistic case, and the middle path,…
An Update from Inside the House of Cards
A note on the discovery that nothing was holding it up, that nothing was ever holding it up, and that we are all going to be perfectly fine, mostly, depending…