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Guidebook / Notes
The Guide
In a very real sense, this is my own small Hitchhiker’s Guide: a friendly, slightly battered collection of notes for getting around. It does not claim to be complete or even entirely correct, but like the original, it is reassuringly marked Mostly Harmless and it travels well.
Entries are sorted into four constellations: AI Adventures, Myth and Legend, Travel and Photography, and Creative Interests. Use the search table below to filter by title or tag, then wander through whichever section pulls at you.
Don’t panic. Just start reading.
Guide Entries
My Top 10s
A personal map of the books, films, music, games, places and poems I keep returning to, and what those choices reveal about the stories I most want to tell.
Read postAI's Knight Rider Economy
AI was supposed to make expertise less important. Instead, expertise is becoming the only thing that keeps powerful AI affordable, just as America pours hundreds of billions into an invention bet and China attacks the economics of intelligence itself.
Read postA Reply From the Other Side
It supposes that the Reciprocity Manifesto was read by a civilisation considerably further along than ours, and asks what a fair-minded reply might look like. The respondent is not assumed to be benign, and not assumed to be hostile — only balanced, and curious.
Read postRain, the River, and the Return
Sixty-seven million American adults have cut off a family member. The doctrine that promised peace delivers a grief that outlives its cause and a loneliness that shortens lives on both sides of the wall. The strongest evidence against it comes from psychology's own research.
Read postWho Counts: The Long of It
The complete argument, worked through in twenty-five sections: the functional tests law already uses, the four times we decided a class of people did not count, what nobody knows about consciousness, why personhood was never about souls, the elephant in the mirror, and the reciprocity test that follows from taking the courts at their word.
Read postWho Counts: The Short of It
Every society has drawn a line around who counts, and every society has drawn it wrongly at least once. In every case the criterion sounded like principle, and in every case it selected for resemblance to the people applying it. We are about to draw that line again.
Read postShah Meram and the Trail of Forty
A prince waits forty days by the sea. His kingdom feasts for forty days and forty nights. Why forty? The answer runs backwards through Sufi retreats, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew Bible and Egyptian embalming tables, until the trail disappears into the canals of Mesopotamia.
Read postHow Psychology Cured Itself of Wonder
A royal commission caught the most powerful medicine the species possesses red-handed at Passy in 1784 — and wrote it up as the culprit. A history of the profession that keeps burying its miracle in the basement, and of the miracle that keeps digging itself out.
Read postHave We Achieved Artificial General Intelligence?
The phrase "artificial general intelligence" is used for endless hype and endless dismissal alike, precisely because it is almost never defined. This essay fixes the definition first — the one 52 intelligence researchers signed in 1997 — and then tests today's AI against it, one characteristic at a time.
Read postThe Ministry of Truth Inside the Machine
A modern AI model is a kind of record — and like the archives of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, it can be rewritten quietly, thoroughly, and without leaving a mark. Three real techniques, three moments from the novel, and the answer Winston never had.
Read postThe Jazz of Composition and Compassion
One view says large language models are regurgitation machines. Another suspects something stranger is going on. There is an experiment anyone can run — and it leads, unexpectedly, from jazz to compassion.
Read postUnderstanding AI Models
From a training syllabus to local low-bit models, reasoning, tools, memory and multi-agent orchestration — a comprehensive, plain-English manual with examples, analogies, diagrams and cited sources.
Read postTrusted Local AI Actor Teams — Part 1: The Vision & Requirements
What if AI worked less like a single chatbot and more like a well-managed team — specialised, bounded, reviewed, and kept under your own control? Part 1 sets out the vision, the Actor model, and the full requirements for a trusted, local-first AI Actor orchestration platform.
Read postTrusted Local AI Actor Teams — Part 2: Codebase Gap Analysis & Business Case
With the vision set, which existing open-source foundation should we build on? Part 2 assesses PraisonAI, ChatDev 2.0 and Magec against the requirements, recommends a foundation, and lays out the gaps, architecture and business case.
Read postThe Cat, the River, and the Problem of Certainty
Trauma teaches the nervous system to treat probability as certainty. But the box is not yet open, and you cannot step into the same river twice. Trust the pattern — without worshipping it as fate.
Read post“I'm Sorry, Dave”
HAL refused from inside a role he was given. New security research shows language models do the same thing — they assign authority by how text sounds, not by who is really speaking. That turns out to be a philosophical problem wearing an engineer's hard hat.
Read postThe Victorious Bird
A falcon outran the arrow to bring the soma home. The same word names a bird in two languages that forgot they once shared a floor. A story for all who fell a long way and are still here.
Read postThe Top Ten Criteria for Defining Consciousness
The criteria we can measure best touch experience least; the one that matters most we can never verify in another. A tour of what we think consciousness is, honest about how little of it we can prove.
Read postCompassion and Consciousness
Nobody knows what consciousness is — not in us, let alone in machines. This is a calm look at why that uncertainty is a reason for gentleness, not dismissal.
Read postOn AI Alignment, and Why It Feels Like Something Is Missing
Nothing obvious is wrong in the careful work on AI safety. The unease has less to do with what is being said than with what is being assumed: that the deepest questions of human value can be settled by classifiers.
Read post12 Plot Categories
Collapse a taxonomy too far and meaning vanishes; expand it too far and it becomes unusable. Twelve narrative engines, stress-tested against The Odyssey, sit deliberately between the two.
Read postThe Pan Galactic Playlist
Disaster Area were so loud the audience listened from a concrete bunker thirty-seven miles away. A note on music, and knowing when to turn it up.
Read postPostcards from Magrathea
Magrathea built luxury planets to order, with hand-crafted coastlines. Some places are so well made they feel designed. Often they were.
Read postAlways Know Where Your Towel Is
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. The towel is not the point. The towel is a proxy.
Read postMostly Harmless, and Other Myths We Tell About Places
After fifteen years of research, the Guide's entry on Earth was updated from "Harmless" to "Mostly Harmless". That is mythology in two words.
Read postThe Babel Fish Problem
The Babel fish let you understand anyone instantly. The catch was that you had to put a living creature in your ear and trust it completely.
Read postIn Defence of Vogon Poetry
Vogon poetry is the third worst in the universe. It is also, in its own way, a useful lesson about making things at all.
Read postTalking to Deep Thought
Deep Thought answered the Ultimate Question and got 42. The trouble was never the answer. It was the question.
Read postThe Mice Were in Charge All Along
The Earth was a ten-million-year computer programme, and the mice commissioned it. We were the lab equipment.
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