There is a strange new ritual happening in offices, classrooms, and kitchens around the world. A person types a question into a glowing box. The box responds with confident, polished prose. The person nods, copies the text, and moves on with their day. No verification. No second source. No raised eyebrow. We have, in record […]
Don’t Let Your AI Deceive You: Learn from Descartes’ Doubt Read More »
Francis Bacon never saw a cryptocurrency ad. He never sat through a keynote where a CEO in a black turtleneck promised to change the world. He never scrolled past a sponsored post claiming that some new platform would “democratize” something that was working fine already. And yet, if you dragged him into the present day,
Spot the Scam: How to See Through the Latest Tech Hype Read More »
You opened the app to check one notification. Forty minutes later, you are watching a stranger in Norway restore an antique clock while another part of your brain composes a witty reply to a comment someone left on your vacation photo from three weeks ago. You did not plan any of this. And yet, here
Beyond Likes: The Four Reasons You Post on Social Media Read More »
We like to believe that science marches forward. That every discovery builds on the last. That the arrow of knowledge points in one direction, and that direction is up. Thomas Kuhn thought this was a beautiful story. He also thought it was mostly wrong. In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book
The Problem of Progress Without Purpose: A Kuhnian Existential Crisis Read More »
In 1977, Richard Nelson asked a question so simple it was almost embarrassing. If we can put a man on the moon, why can we not fix the ghetto? The question was not rhetorical. Nelson, an economist at Columbia, genuinely wanted to understand why a society capable of extraordinary technical feats seemed incapable of solving
The Moon and the Ghetto Paradox: Why Tech Advances While Society Stagnates Read More »
There is a man who died in 1626 from stuffing a chicken with snow. He was trying to see if cold could preserve meat. He caught pneumonia and that was the end of him. His name was Francis Bacon, and he might be the most important person in the technology industry today, even though he
The Tech War Is a Philosophy War: Bacon vs. Everyone Else Read More »
There is a surgeon in an operating room. She nicks an artery. The patient bleeds out on the table. There will be lawsuits. There will be investigations. Her career might end. Her name will appear in newspapers. Strangers on the internet will call her a murderer. Now imagine a robotic surgical system does the same
Why We Forgive Robots for Mistakes We Would Kill a Human For Read More »
A man who died 2,300 years before the invention of the iPhone has more to say about your screen time than any wellness influencer on the internet. That is not a joke. It is barely even an exaggeration. Aristotle never saw a push notification. He never doomscrolled. He never felt the peculiar shame of picking
How Aristotle Can Fix Your Relationship with Technology Read More »
In the cutthroat halls of Renaissance Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli observed a peculiar pattern among those who survived political intrigue versus those who ended up exiled, imprisoned, or worse. The survivors, he noticed, rarely charged headfirst into uncharted territory. They waited. They watched. They let others test the waters, and only when the coast proved clear—or
The Machiavelli Rule on Innovation: Never Be the First to Implement a Dangerous Idea Read More »