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There’s no such thing as ‘fully autonomous’ agents
In September of last year, I spoke with Evan Ratliff , the journalist and host of Shell Game about what it might be like to live in a...
Charley Johnson
Apr 64 min read


The Infinite Manosphere. We need a positive vision of masculinity ASAP
In response to the election, many pointed their finger at the young, male swing to the right to explain Trump’s victory. In 2016 we had...
Charley Johnson
Mar 27 min read


Trapped by the Pursuit of Efficiency
The newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aims to drastically cut the U.S. federal budget and workforce. Just this...
Charley Johnson
Feb 25 min read


The Age of Participatory Media
Let's generate 'cold media,' shall we? In “Fragment the media! Embrace the shards!” I argued that we need to shift in seeing ourselves...
Charley Johnson
Jan 126 min read


The Church of Number Go Up Is crypto a casino? A church? A new kind of infrastructure? The answer is: yes!
Crypto is having its moment in the sun following the election of President Trump. Across the board, crypto-backed candidates won Senate...
Charley Johnson
Dec 1, 20245 min read


The media is fragmented. Embrace it!
For this election, think less about our ‘shared reality’ and more about information integrity The U.S’s pursuit of a multiracial...
Charley Johnson
Nov 3, 20246 min read


The Myth of the Invisible Hand
When I wrote “ How do we work our way towards utopia? ” a question kept ringing in my head: ‘uh, what about the economic system we...
Charley Johnson
Oct 6, 20246 min read


We don’t know the difference between AI risk and uncertainty and it shows
I’ve expressed concern about our over-reliance on direct, authoritative responses from chatbots. There’s no space to go back and forth...
Charley Johnson
Sep 1, 20244 min read


How do we work our way towards utopia?
In the summer of 1956, a group of 47 AI pioneers were invited to Dartmouth College to discuss the future of AI. All were men. All were...
Charley Johnson
Aug 4, 20247 min read


If the medium is the message, what is the message of AI?
Marshall McLuhan famously argued that the medium matters more than the content it carries: the medium is the message. E.g. TV has made...
Charley Johnson
Jul 7, 20245 min read


An AI model will take your place when you die
…and it will misrepresent your personality to your friends and family. Enjoy! AI chatbots are being used by people to chat with synthetic...
Charley Johnson
Jun 2, 20247 min read


Is AI a religion?
Come, human. Ensconce yourself in the fine swaddling robes of rational perfectionism I’ve written a lot of words about how we...
Charley Johnson
May 5, 20245 min read


In crypto, everything is a ponzi...until sometimes, it's not.
Imagine if Uber built its driver network by offering drivers ‘Uber Tokens.’ Imagine further that these tokens functioned like equity,...
Charley Johnson
Mar 3, 20246 min read


The ongoing tug of war between open and closed AI
Should AI be open or closed? This is one of the most confusing debates raging in AI discourse at the moment. Those pursuing ‘open’ models...
Charley Johnson
Feb 4, 20246 min read


🧠 Synthetic social media
Internet users, brace for the emergence of E-Swift In May of 2022, I tried to look around the corner and imagine the future of social...
Charley Johnson
Jan 7, 20245 min read


🧠 ‘AI Alignment’ isn’t a problem — it’s a myth.
Come with me on a journey through ordered and unordered systems I ’ve written about the false promise of emergence , and why AI doomers...
Charley Johnson
Dec 3, 20235 min read


The problem with Elon Musk’s ‘first principles thinking’
A while ago I wrote an Untangled piece called The Artificial Gaze , where I asked what society would be ‘optimized’ for if it was one big...
Charley Johnson
Nov 5, 20235 min read


Building alternative AI futures
August 9th marked the nine-year anniversary of when police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black...
Charley Johnson
Oct 1, 20237 min read


The artificial gaze
Imagine if society — for all its messy, entangled, complexity — were one big algorithmic system: what would it be optimized for? What are...
Charley Johnson
Sep 3, 20236 min read


The Doom Loop of Synthetic Data
Apparently AI systems will continue to improve forever — but is that even possible? If you’ve only got a minute this Sunday, here’s the...
Charley Johnson
Aug 6, 20235 min read
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