Articles
Essays, analysis, theory, satire, memoir, and long-form writing migrated and developed from the NOMOTO MEDIA archive.
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…
A Field Guide to the Mid-Career Reversal
A note on the most reliable form of personal growth available to the modern political careerist, who once had principles, and who now has a corner office. It is one…
A note on the species that figured out fire, then nuclear weapons
It is a beautiful thing, in its way, to watch a species discover what it is capable of. We started with rocks.
Dispatches from the Fourth Circle of Hell.
In the Fourth Circle of Hell, Dante found the greedy pushing great boulders against each other, forever colliding, forever shouting "Why do you hoard?" and "Why do you waste?" at…
The Consequences Will Be Lovely
The framing of our moment as a battle between action and consequence is touching, in the way that a child's drawing of a house is touching. It assumes there are…
Don’t Worry, We’ve Got This…
The good news, and there is so much good news, is that we have entered the most exciting period in human history. Two transformative technologies are arriving at once.
The dismantling of the American economy.
If you are under forty, you have inherited a country where the math does not work. Your parents could afford a house on one income.
The Republic that eroded. A short story.
It didn't happen overnight. The Republic didn't fall to a coup or an invasion.
On the Necessity of an Invented God
God is a set of ideas that defines good and evil. Can good and evil exist without a mystical deity?
A little this and that but mostly AI.
The Chicago Boys and South America is a dark chapter and it's largely been scrubbed from polite American discussion of economics. Milton Friedman and his students at the University of…
The old social contract is changing fast.
The old social contract, however unequal, had a structural logic that protected workers even when elites didn't care about them because elites needed workers. They needed soldiers to fight their…
Brace yourself: stagflation is coming and it won’t be good.
The question is no longer whether stagflation arrives. The question is how bad, how long, and who pays.