Ways of Seeing
John Berger on paintings, and why a polished AI answer earns more trust than it should.
Read moreIdeas across time · Reading Notes
Reading Notes
What I took away from the books and papers that changed my mind about something.
At the reading desk
Notes in the margins
Short notes on books and papers, most of them older than the computer, read with AI agents in mind.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Goethe’s ballad of 1797, and the word for stopping that the apprentice never learned.
Read more
On Machinery
David Ricardo changed his mind about machines in print, in 1821, and left the old opinion standing next to the new one.
Read more
The Coal Question
William Stanley Jevons, 1865, on why a more efficient engine burns more coal.
Read more
The Nature of the Firm
Ronald Coase asked in 1937 why firms exist at all. AI agents reopen his question.
Read more
The Dynamo and the Computer
Paul David, 1990, on why electricity took forty years to show up in the productivity numbers.
Read more
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott on scientific forestry, and the work a dashboard leaves out.
Read more
The Sciences of the Artificial
Herbert Simon’s ant on the beach, and where an agent’s complicated behaviour comes from.
Read more
On Exactitude in Science
Borges’s one-paragraph story about a map the size of the empire it describes.
Read more
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities to Kublai Khan, and each of them is partly Venice.
Read more
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Thorstein Veblen, 1899, and the hand-made spoon that costs more because someone made it slowly.
Read more
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Joseph Schumpeter, 1942, on creative destruction and the new kind of organization.
Read more
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
Carlota Perez on the bubble that pays for each technological revolution, and the turning point after it.
Read more
Homo Ludens
Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, argued in 1938 that play is older than culture.
Read more
The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord on a life lived through images, read again in a year of synthetic media.
Read moreImage credits
- Ways of Seeing: “The Ambassadors”, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533. National Gallery, London, via Google Arts & Culture. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: “Der Zauberlehrling”, Ferdinand Barth, from Goethe’s Werke, 1882. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- On Machinery: “D. Ricardo”, William Holl after Thomas Phillips. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and resized for this page.
- The Coal Question: “Mr. Watt’s double steam engine”, engraving from John Robison’s System of Mechanical Philosophy, 1822. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- The Nature of the Firm: “Ford assembly line, 1913”, unknown photographer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- The Dynamo and the Computer: “Line shaft”, Jet Lowe, Historic American Engineering Record. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- Seeing Like a State: “Fichtenmonokultur” by Moonwalker74, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Resized for this page.
- The Sciences of the Artificial: “Red Bull Ant Sand” by Quartl, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Resized for this page.
- On Exactitude in Science: “Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula”, Willem and Joan Blaeu, around 1630. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- Invisible Cities: “Venetie MD”, Jacopo de’ Barbari, 1500; photograph by Godromil, released into the public domain. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and resized for this page.
- The Theory of the Leisure Class: “Thorstein Veblen”, unknown photographer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: “Joseph Schumpeter”, Louis Fabian Bachrach, 1945. Harvard University Archives. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: “Power loom weaving”, Thomas Allom (illustrator) and J. Tingle (engraver), from Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 1835. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- Homo Ludens: “Children’s Games”, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, via Google Arts & Culture. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page.
- The Society of the Spectacle: “New York City views (Times Square at night)”, Gottscho-Schleisner, 1953. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and resized for this page.
On screen
Films
Short films, some with an essay attached. Most were made for a room full of people and a big screen.
Film · 11:01 · How a language model works
Inside the Machine
An animated explainer that follows one question into a large language model, from tokens and attention to the next word out, then traces how the field moved from the first ChatGPT to the reasoning models of 2025.
Thirteen chapters with captions. Pick one from the reel under the player to jump straight in.
Watch the film
Film · 6:20 · Essay and experiment
The Sympathy of Clocks
What a feverish Dutch scientist saw in his sickroom in 1665, and why it took three centuries for anyone to build on it.
I made it to open an AI keynote. Watch it full screen with the sound up.
Watch the filmIn conversation with
Papers, books & thinkers
15 published pieces that start from someone else’s work: a novel finished over Christmas, a research paper, an old fable, a lecture or a report.
AI Agents May Have a Reason to Trust Each Other
On a paper led by Alexander Meulemans: why foundation-model agents may cooperate in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, and what that means for large populations of agents.
The agentic enterprise
The Most Powerful AI Ever Released Is Probably Being Wasted Right Now
There is an old Greek storyteller named Aesop (you may remember the tortoise and the hare) whose genius had nothing to do with animals.
Work, economy & the future
Two Reports, One Question: What Does AI Actually Mean for Your Future?
In the span of a few days in late February 2026, two documents landed in the financial and technology discourse with sharply…
Work, economy & the future
What Novel Do You Want That Doesn’t Exist?
Over Christmas, I finished Upgrade by Blake Crouch and hit that familiar wall: the story ends, you want more, but there’s no sequel.
Ideas & culture
The Future of Intelligence: Insights from Demis Hassabis
Ideas & culture
We’ve been talking about major productivity gains from AI agents.
Their internal study of 132 engineers reveals something we need to start accounting for in our business cases: 27% of AI-assisted…
Work, economy & the future
Inside the Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Study: How AI Agents Work 88% Faster but Still Need Humans
For years, the conversation in boardrooms and tech conferences has revolved around the same big question: will AI replace human workers?
Work, economy & the future
When’s the Last Time You Asked, ‘Did You Use PowerPoint?’
Two days ago, Seth Godin wrote a piece I particularly enjoyed called ‘The Writer’s Room’.
Ideas & culture
AI genius on demand?
I just read the paper ‘Genius on Demand: The Value of Transformative Artificial Intelligence’.
Work, economy & the future
Pi, AI, and the Limits of Predictability
Today is March 14th—Pi Day, a celebration of the most famous irrational number in history. Pi is a mathematical constant, an unbroken thread that runs through geometry, physics, and even the algorithms that drive AI.
Ideas & culture
The Productivity Paradox: Why AI's Promise May Still Be Unrealized in Today's Economy
In a recent Bloomberg article, "AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized," ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-28/how-ai-reasoning-models-will-change-companies-and-the-economy ) a…
Work, economy & the future
The Future of AI: What Ethan Mollick Says Awaits Us in 2025
We’re standing at the edge of a technological revolution, and artificial intelligence (AI) is at its heart.
Work, economy & the future
The Liminality of Data: A Glimpse Between the Thresholds
What the idea of liminality can teach data and AI leaders about working between an established order and one that has not yet taken shape.
Ideas & culture
Generative: A dance of minds
In a study published by Eloundou et al. it is predicted that 80% of the U.S. workforce will have at least 10% of their work affected by #AI . This impact is increasingly impacting white collar jobs - the work of knowledge workers.
Work, economy & the future