Series · Illuminations
On what happens when you ship the output and forget to ship the wisdom.
Long-form investigations into the systems, incentives, and blind spots shaping AI. Each Illumination takes a single thread — a root crop, an invisible hand, a borrowed myth — and follows it until the architecture of a problem becomes visible. For those who read to think, not skim.
Illuminations · Epistemology & XAI
Issue 01 · Inaugural Essay
In the lowland forests of Brazil, indigenous peoples spent ten thousand years developing a multi-step process to make a poisonous root edible. The Portuguese took the root. They left the manual. People died for five hundred years. This is a story about AI deployment.
Illuminations · Economics & Power
Issue 02 · Long Investigation
The opacity of AI systems is not an accident or an oversight. It is the predictable, perhaps inevitable, consequence of how AI was funded, who funded it, what they wanted from it, and how governments responded. A 75-year history of the most consequential design choice in technology.