Essays

Essays and notes on AI, systems, and the meeting point between technology and Theosophy, exploring memory, identity, consciousness, and the human experience.

  1. Ink-on-bone engraving on mostly empty paper: a lightly drawn browser window with a dial, a slider, and a row of buttons sits at center; a single indigo thread enters from the left, passes behind the window without touching it, and continues to the right into a cluster of finely engraved gears, a lever, and a valve, ending in one solid indigo node where it meshes with a gear tooth — the interface bypassed, the underlying capabilities operated directly.

    July 21, 2026 · 4 min read

    The Last Interface: software in the age of AI agents

    For fifty years, software has assumed a human on the other side of the screen. As AI agents become the primary operators of software, the interface may stop being the center: capabilities matter more than screens, APIs become the product, and the so-called SaaS apocalypse looks less like a disappearance than an inversion.

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  2. Ink-on-bone engraving on mostly empty paper: a teasing wand ribbon sweeps in one long wavy curve across the page with a dashed indigo thread running down its length; five finely engraved cats crouch mid-pounce along it, all in the identical instinctive posture yet each slightly its own (a curled tail here, a different ear or paw there), and the thread ends on the right in a single solid indigo pompom node: one instinct, five tenants.

    July 18, 2026 · 6 min read

    Five Cats and the Tenant's Question: the body is the hardware, instinct is the software, so who is the user?

    Five cats share one body plan and one bundle of instinct, yet nobody could confuse them. On what nature hands over ready-made, what genetically identical mice and a cloned cat reveal about where individuality comes from, where the sober science ends and my bet on the monad begins, and the same question turned back on myself.

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  3. Ink-on-bone engraving: an antique cash register on the left prints a long receipt ribbon that waves across mostly empty paper, a small coffee cup repeating along it like a weekly habit, with an indigo thread stitched down its whole length; near the top right the thread is severed and frays into loose fibers beside a pair of scissors, and the cut-off pieces of the receipt drift down into a wire wastebasket: a store discarding the memory of its own customer.

    July 17, 2026 · 7 min read

    The Store That Forgets Me: my supermarket holds a perfect record of my life and greets me like a stranger anyway

    Every receipt is a faithful, consented record of a life, and most grocers throw it away. On the corner grocer who remembered his regulars, the chain that proved memory pays back in 1994, the fear that became an industry's alibi, and why continuity is the courtesy retail stopped extending.

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  4. Ink-on-bone engraving on mostly empty paper: on the left a coffee cup sketched in faint dotted, provisional line; an indigo thread picks it up and carries it right, where the same cup repeats as bold, heavy engraved copies at even intervals, each as certain as the last. Below the first bold cup lies a small worn eraser, set aside and useless: one tentative remark hardened into a permanent, self-repeating memory.

    July 16, 2026 · 5 min read

    When AI Remembers You Wrong: an AI can get one answer wrong, but a persistent memory can keep reproducing the error

    When an AI turns a temporary observation into a lasting belief, the mistake stops being a one-off answer and becomes infrastructure — quietly shaping every interaction that follows. The first of five pieces on continuity without distortion, and an introduction to biographical hallucination.

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  5. Ink-on-bone engraving on mostly empty paper: a single continuous line crosses the page, entering from the left as loose, curling handwriting-like scribble; at the center it flows into a small engraved ear-trumpet listening horn, the only object on the page; on the right it emerges as a deep-indigo thread that straightens into a tidy orthogonal path connecting a few faint empty boxes, a quiet little flowchart, ending at the one solid indigo box: loose language entering one side, structure leaving the other.

    July 15, 2026 · 14 min read

    The Last Editor: after decades of teaching people how to operate software, we are building software that learns how to listen

    Every product I worked on had an editor in the middle, asking people to translate intention into fields, screens, and conditions. Language agents reverse that direction of translation — but the editor doesn't disappear, it becomes invisible. On what agentic product design owes users when the system carries the structure.

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  6. Ink-on-bone engraving on mostly empty paper: a doctor's stethoscope lies at rest on the left, its tube trailing rightward and becoming a single taut deep-indigo thread stretched across the page like a timeline; from the thread hang four small round engraved medallions, a crescent moon, a plate of food, a small flame, and a steaming cup, and at the far right the thread ends in one solid indigo node: the instrument of diagnosis set aside, the faithful record of a life carrying on from it.

    July 14, 2026 · 9 min read

    Diagnosis Was the Easy Part: as machines learn to out-diagnose doctors, the frontier of personal health turns out to be a faithful memory

    As language models begin to out-diagnose physicians, the binding constraint in personal health stops being medical knowledge and becomes something older and humbler: a continuous, faithful record of a single life — and fidelity, not storage, is the real frontier.

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  7. Ink-on-bone engraving: a folded chart at center, several of its panels detaching and drifting away to the right while a single indigo thread still binds the remaining core, a magnifier lens resting at the left edge.

    June 26, 2026 · 15 min read

    How I Would Try to Break the Map: Five experiments against a six-paper research programme

    The adversarial companion to the monad essay: the cheapest sequence of experiments that could make the six-paper programme smaller, and the concessions written down before the data arrive — where perspective, self-models, relationship, inheritance, and developmental order each fail.

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  8. Ink-on-bone engraving: a spiral of rock terraces rising from a quartz crystal through a plant, a butterfly, and a wolf resting by a fire, up to the outline of a seated human rendered as a neural-network wireframe, with a school of fish below and a single indigo signal threading the whole climb.

    June 25, 2026 · 16 min read

    We Scaled the Ape and Expected the Human: Theosophy's developmental cosmology as a heuristic engine for machine learning

    A speculative essay on borrowing the journey of the monad as a disclosed source of machine-learning variables: faculty order, perspective supervision, external accountability versus relational reciprocity, lifecycle consolidation, and the mistake of expecting a self to appear from scale alone.

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  9. Ink-on-bone engraving: a detailed biological cell on the left, with DNA and Y-shaped antibodies, morphing rightward through an organic tangle of nodes into the clean ordered layers of a deep neural network, a single indigo signal threading from tissue to network.

    May 26, 2026 · 4 min read

    A Cell Is a Neural Network

    Reading biology as deep learning: immune systems as fine-tuning, allergies as overfitting, autoimmune disease as alignment failure, DNA as compressed weights.

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