This is the first post in a series I’m calling “Through a Glass, Darkly: Brains, Machines, and the Stories That Shape Us”. In this series, I will explore the thesis that brains, AI systems, and cultures are all different kinds of information compression systems, and that , like all information compression, they pay a price for the efficiency gains. I sat down to write this after noticing a convergence among four topics I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about: how the brain works and fails, the large software systems I’ve spent my career building, technological progress outside of computing, and cultural belief systems I think about as I raise children. The Human Brain “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—” -Emily Dickinson The human brain may be the most efficient general learning system we know of. A child enters the world essentially helpless – able to do little more than

This post is part of a series where I talk about technologies and make guesses about how they’ll deliver value in the future. One of my goals in life is to be a great technologist – an expert at identifying technology that can deliver value and improve the human condition. I hope that writing this blog series and reviewing what I write will help me with that. Updates Since Last Time Winter 2025 was my most recent post in this series. I don’t expect everything I write about in this series to change in so short a period. Things that matter tend to take a decade or more to be proven right or wrong. That said, I’d like to get in the habit of checking in to see if my previous statements are revealing themselves correct or if there are things to learn from. Foundation models – I argued a

This post is part of a series where I talk about technologies and make guesses about how they’ll deliver value in the future. One of my goals in life is to be a great technologist – an expert at identifying technology that can deliver value and improve the human condition. I hope this blog series will help me with that. Updates Since Last Time Summer 2024 was my most recent post in this series. I don’t expect everything I write about in this series to change in so short a period. Things that matter tend to take decades to be proven right or wrong. That said, I’d like to get in the habit of checking in to see if my previous statements are revealing themselves correct or if there are things to learn from. Brain interfaces – since I last discussed this we’ve gone from one human with a confirmed

This post is the first in a new series where I talk about technologies and make guesses about how they’ll deliver value in the future. I’ve actually been doing this privately for a few years now and recently decided I should share my thoughts publicly, as I’ll surely learn more that way – both from the responses as well as from the extra thought I’ll put into it before I hit publish. One of my goals in life is to be a great technologist – an expert at identifying technology that can deliver value to consumers and businesses. A lot of people try to be great technologist, but many of them miss. Sometimes it is poor understanding the technology, sometimes it is delusion or denial, sometimes it is lack of execution. I hope this blog series will help me with the former two. With the hope of improving over time