When the pie grows but the slice shrinks: what black cabs and handloom weavers know that AI evangelists don't
It's Tuesday evening in Marylebone. I'm in the back of a black cab. The driver is sixty-something, second-generation cabbie, did the Knowledge in 1987. He's telling me he now drives twelve-hour shifts to clear what eight hours used to bring him a decade ago. "My boy is driving an Uber now. Pays the same." He looks at me in the mirror. "Maybe less, after the rent on the car." I give him a tip and walk the last couple of minutes home thinking about handloom weavers. The promise
3 days ago10 min read
The Silicon Ceiling: Why AI's Biggest Bottleneck Isn't Intelligence - It's Atoms
Saturday morning, packing for another trip to Singapore, halfway through a three-hour interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Dylan Patel (I know, I lead an exciting life) - founder of SemiAnalysis and arguably the most cited analyst in AI infrastructure - and I realise I've paused the video four times to type notes and WhatsApp friends. Not because I understand all the detail of semiconductor manufacturing. I absolutely do not. But because the numbers Dylan was dropping made me
Mar 148 min read
Why Shallow AGI Will Beat You at Everything and Not Truly Understand: A Professional's Guide to Working With Brilliant Imposters
It's 9:12 AM on a Wednesday in 2027. I'm stress-testing a scenario model I've been building, when the AI finishes something in forty seconds that would have taken my team a full sprint. The output is better than what we'd have produced. More thorough. Better structured. And when I push it on a specific regulatory edge case that requires real-world judgement about how a regulator actually behaves in practice, it gives me an answer that is technically correct, impressively argu
Feb 225 min read
Nobody Has a Map: What Matt Shumer's 80 Million Readers Still Need to Hear About AI
Wednesday morning. I'm at my desk when my I check my phone and it shows the fourth forwarded link in two hours. "Have you seen this?" Each message points to the same place: Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening" post on X. By lunchtime it had 20 million views. By the end of the week, 50 million. At the time of writing, 80 million. Friends who normally send me articles about resilience risk or cat videos were sending me this instead, each asking some version of the same qu
Feb 156 min read
