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Thoughts on AI systems, architecture, and building.
A friend who trusts a spreadsheet with his whole life freezes at the word AI. The fear tracks the word, not the machine, and the word is a category mistake. Gilbert Ryle's Oxford-visitor illustration shows why "where is the intelligence in the AI" is the wrong kind of question — and what falls away when the right word arrives.
The trope keeps asking whether AI will take your job, or whether someone who understands AI will. The phone era already answered that question. The 2003 desk lost six objects to one phone by 2014, and the people who used that desk are still working. The right question is the one nobody on a feed has asked yet. What will be the next thing that does to our lives what the phone did. The phone grew with us across years. Whatever comes next will have to do that too. And we don't have the word for it yet.
