Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Hank Green took some heat recently for using artificial intelligence in his work. Vanity Fair framed the controversy around the anger of some fans who believed his use of AI crossed a line between technological assistance and creative authenticity. One Hank would like to stand up for another. The criticism raises a larger question that Read More “Hank Green, AI, and the Economics of Authenticity”
Over the past several years I put together a set of lecture notes for teaching bioinformatics, pairing classic Python/BioPython methods with AI-assisted workflows so students could see both approaches side by side. I’ve cleaned them up and organized them into a free 14-chapter book: Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction. It moves from the basics Read More “Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction”
Every so often a small, unglamorous fact arrives that tells you more about the character of a nation than any speech does. Last week, a company almost nobody outside a narrow community of software engineers had heard of released a piece of software that, on its own modest terms, may matter more than most of Read More “The Quiet Company Challenging China’s Open AI Lead”
A data center does not sleep. It does not observe weather, or seasons, or the particular slant of light at four in the afternoon in November. It draws power at the same punishing rate at midnight as it does at noon. The newest ones, the ones built to train and run artificial intelligence, draw more Read More “AI after dark”
A mail route is one of those ordinary systems that reveals a civilization’s moral life better than most speeches do. Doreen has carried hers for twenty-six years, all of it on the same rural circuit. The route looks, from any administrative distance, like logistics. Addresses. Parcels. Envelopes. Weather. Timing. Fuel. Dogs. Traffic. Scanners. A route Read More “Meaning, the Seventh Moat: What Is Worth Doing”
Most of what matters in technology arrives quietly. Not with a keynote. Not with a countdown clock and a curtain drop. Just a file, a version number, and a few paragraphs of technical notes that almost no one reads. That is what happened on June 3, 2026, when Google DeepMind released a model called Gemma Read More “The Model T moment for AI”
Andrew Morton may have written one of the most important leadership memos of the year, and almost no one outside the Linux kernel community will ever read it. That is partly the point. The memo was not built to be read by the rest of us. It went to a mailing list, it concerned the Read More “Ownership, the Sixth Moat: The People Who Keep the Promise”
Thank you, Andrew Morton. Andrew Morton may have written one of the most important leadership memos of the year, and most people outside the Linux kernel community will never read it. That is understandable. The announcement was posted to a Linux mailing list. The subject was the future of memory-management development. The prose was practical, Read More “Great Systems Outlive Their Heroes”
A society that cannot think systemically will use intelligent machines to automate its confusion. That sentence may sound severe. It likely is not severe enough. The great danger of artificial intelligence is not simply that the machines will become too powerful. The more immediate danger is that institutions will become more powerful without becoming wiser. Read More “Systems Thinking, the Fifth Moat: The Human Skill of Seeing the Whole”
Consider a man like Marcus, who teaches automotive technology at a regional career center in central Ohio. He has been teaching for twenty-three years, and in that time the cars have changed three times underneath him. He started with carburetors and distributor caps, the kind of engines a student could understand by looking at them. Read More “Adaptation, the Fourth Moat: Learning Without Losing Ourselves”