A new, powerful definition of intelligence is emerging out of the AI field: “boundary intelligence.” I first came across it in this excellent piece To Know Is To Stage by Venkatesh Rao, which appropriately, was co-authored by an LLM. Let me step back and explain what boundary intelligence means (mixing my own words with paraphrasing…
I remember the exact moment I was radicalized about climate change. Standing on the front porch of our new home in Southern California in the summer of 2020, I watched the sky turn a burnt orange as wildfires blazed in the inland summer heat. The particles of smoke didn’t just fill the air—they filled our…
In 1997, a young hip-hop producer from Detroit named J Dilla did something that violated every rule in music: he programmed his drum machine to play “off beat.” Not just slightly off, but deliberately off—breaking up the rigid timing that had governed musical performance in every genre. What happened next confounded the music industry. Instead…
I’m proud to introduce Death Clock, a life expectancy calculator that predicts the day of your death based on 17 personalized variables. Give it a try for free! This is not only the first “app” I’ve ever created myself, but also my first experience with AI-assisted coding, which has become known as “vibecoding.” I can…
Two books I read recently helped me tremendously to understand what’s happening now with Artificial Intelligence: Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction (affiliate links) by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. The authors are economists and professors at the University of Toronto, one of the leading institutions studying the economic impacts of AI. Their…
Imagine a product manager sitting down with his team on a Monday morning to plan the next week. The main item on the agenda is the decision of whether to create a mobile app for their e-commerce website. The team quickly gets excited about the idea, imagining all the possibilities it could entail. They propose…
One of my current obsessions is understanding exactly how a new idea, such as the “Second Brain” meme I’ve spent the last 5 years working on, moves from the fringes of society to become a part of mainstream culture. This isn’t idle speculation: in 6 months, on August 2, 2022, my book Building a Second…
Our vision is that every single person in the world has the opportunity to create a Second Brain – a personal system of knowledge management – of their own. Everyone should have the chance to gather information and ideas, turn them into valuable knowledge, and use that knowledge to improve their own lives and the…
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA. Known in her early years as “Estelle,” she was raised by a single, widowed mother who worked domestic jobs to make ends meet. Painfully shy and introverted from a young age, Estelle became an easy target for bullying at school. Her shyness combined with slight…
We’ve been led to believe that we are at the precipice of an Artificial Intelligence explosion. Yet the progress in our digital assistants and self-driving cars seems to have stalled. Computers choke at even the simplest requests, and most of the digital world continues to be handcrafted by humans. But quietly, hidden in plain sight,…
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in my high school U.S. History class. We watched in horror as the aftermath of the twin towers’ collapse unfolded on live TV. I was in my third year, and at 16 years old thought I was just beginning to understand the world and my…
This is the first interview I’ve done that was recorded on video, with Nicholas McCay on his podcast Eclectic Spacewalk. Originally published on their Substack newsletter, you can also read the full transcript. Here’s the show notes: How growing up in a diverse cultural household shaped his worldview. (03:02) Reading and books were always a…