May 29, 2026
The Ecology of Work
Nobody wanted the job. That is the detail that gets lost in every retelling of what happened at General Motors' Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961. The…
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Archive page 3 of 73
May 26, 2026
Ohtani Is What Baseball Looked Like Before It Got Soft
In 1973, the American League decided that one of its nine players did not have to play baseball. The pitcher would hit, they ruled, only until he wouldn't. The designated hitter rule…
May 22, 2026
Economics Is Not the Study of Money
Somewhere along the way, someone got the idea that economics is about money. It is not, at least not in the way people usually mean that. Economics is about choice: what people…
May 20, 2026
The Rule-Based Interregnum
The first AI winter did not kill artificial intelligence. It redirected it. The researchers who survived the funding cuts of the early 1970s did not abandon the project of building intelligent machines.…
May 18, 2026
AI Doesn't Take Jobs, It Takes Tasks
Every few weeks, a new study lands claiming to have counted the jobs artificial intelligence will eliminate. The numbers are always alarming. The methodology is always the same. And the methodology is…
May 13, 2026
The First Winter
Every technology that attracts serious money eventually attracts serious scrutiny. Artificial intelligence attracted both faster than most, and the scrutiny, when it came, was devastating. By the early 1970s, the promises made…
May 12, 2026
The Infrastructure We Dismantled
A cruise ship called the MV Hondius departed Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1, 2026, carrying 147 passengers and crew from 23 countries on an expedition through the South Atlantic. Three of those…
May 11, 2026
Who Makes the Rules for the Machine
In 1995, the European Union adopted the Data Protection Directive, a framework for protecting personal data that was, at the time, largely theoretical in its ambitions. The internet was new. Data flows…
May 8, 2026
The Data Center Water Crisis That Isn't
Someone on the internet is wrong, and it is apparently my job to fix it. In this case, the someone is nearly everyone who has written about AI and water consumption over…
May 6, 2026
When the Theory Ran Ahead of the World
In the summer of 1956, ten researchers gathered at Dartmouth College with a proposal that reads, in retrospect, with the particular poignancy of someone who is right about the destination and wrong…
May 4, 2026
Whose Values Drive Your Car
When DeepSeek arrived in January 2025, the conversation in American technology circles turned immediately to cost and capability. How much compute did it take? How does it benchmark against GPT-4o? Is the…