About Me

I build things and I write about why they matter. For most of history, the people who moved civilization forward were builders who also thought, polymaths: engineers who read philosophy, statesmen who wrote, founders with a theory of the world. Somewhere in the last century we decided a person should pick one field and stay in that field for sixty years. I think that arrangement is ending, and I intend to live as if it already has.

I believe a few things my generation was taught not to. That excellence is real and unevenly distributed, and a society should be built to find it. That history is moved by small groups of people who decide to do something difficult. That the West is not one culture among many but the one that invented the idea of progress, and the only way to defend it is to keep progressing. And that the institutions meant to carry it forward, from the university to the HR department, have mostly forgotten what they were for.

I think artificial intelligence is the hinge of this century. It will take over most of the work people do today, and most of that work was never worthy of a human life anyway. What it cannot settle is what comes after. That question belongs to philosophy, theology and art as much as to engineering, and I want to work on it from both sides: building the systems, and arguing about the kind of life they make possible.