The Journal
Essays on AI - its impact on us, the questions it raises, and the tools worth knowing. For people who think in the margins.
Your AI Doctor Is Gender-Profiling You
Same symptoms. Different gender. One patient gets sent to the ER, the other gets an appointment. And the model delivers both answers with equal confidence.
Read essay →Is the Pope the only world leader who really understands AI?
Pope Leo XIV's encyclical isn't anti-technology. It's a warning that AI must serve human dignity, not power, profit, or a new digital Tower of Babel.
How to critically assess AI answers before acting on them
AI gives confident answers fast. A practical guide to the questions you should ask before trusting any high-stakes AI response - for health, money, or anything that matters.
The intelligence we built doesn't think the way we do - and that might be the point
We've spent decades imagining AI as a mind like ours, only faster. But what if the most interesting thing about it is precisely where it diverges?
On the slow erosion of expertise - and why it might not matter
If AI can replicate the outputs of a decade of skill-building in minutes, what do we lose? More than we think, and less than we fear.
MCP changed how I think about software, not just how I use it
The Model Context Protocol is nominally a plumbing spec. But it encodes a particular theory of what agents should be.
Autonomy, delegation, and the question of who's responsible
As we delegate more decisions to AI systems, the moral calculus gets genuinely hard. We should be talking about this more.