articles
Unplugged: What One Country’s AI Kill Switch Reveals About All of Us
On a Friday evening in June 2026, the most capable AI models on the planet went dark. Not because they failed. Not because a company changed its mind. Because the US Department of Commerce sent a letter, and a private company in San Francisco had forty-eight hours to...
Writing on the Wall
When the people building the most powerful technology in human history start buying the silence of those meant to govern it, we should all be paying attention. Most of us aren't. John O'Farrell left Andreessen Horowitz in May. He was the firm's first outside general...
AI Governance Weekly: The Week of May 29, 2026
The Pope Enters the Room -- and He Comes With 42,000 WordsThe most talked-about AI governance development this week did not come from a legislature or a regulatory body. On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released his first major papal teaching document, a 42,300-word encyclical...
The Shell Problem
Strip away the shell and we are startlingly identical. Narcissism, empathy, grief, ambition, shame, love – these do not belong to any race, gender, nationality, or religion. They are the human operating system, running the same core code across every population on...
Curiosity Is the Prompt
I use AI. I'll be upfront about that. I'm also fully aware of what that means: the data annotators working in difficult conditions, the communities whose voices are underrepresented or outright missing from the training data, the structural exclusions baked into the...
AI Didn’t Write Itself: The Humans Behind the Model, and Why It Matters
There is a story we are frequently told about artificial intelligence. It goes something like this: a brilliant system, trained on the sum of human knowledge, can now write your emails, summarise legal documents, explain complex medical conditions, and generate code...
The Water and the Well
There’s a story about almond farms in California. Massive industrial operations that consumed so much water that communities across the border in Mexico started running dry. The companies made billions. The people lost their water. Then, somehow, the public...
Curiosity Is the Skill AI Cannot Replace and We Are Losing It
We are handing the most powerful tool in human history to a population that is increasingly unprepared to question what it tells them. That is not a technology problem. It is a human one. Artificial intelligence is accelerating at a pace that no policy, curriculum, or...
The Sea of Grief Has No Shores
Primo Levi’s words echo a truth that many of us have felt, yet perhaps don’t know how to put into words: “The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.” We often underestimate the journey of grief and even judge others by how long it takes...