Sci-Fi Saturday - Future Shock Newsletter

Watercolor illustration of a park bandshell where a conductor leads a small ensemble, but musicians have spilled across the park in breakaway clusters

Sci-Fi Saturday

When Your Swarm Disagrees

AI agents disagree. One wants to cancel your meeting, another insists you need it. Nobody built a tiebreaker. Welcome to the coordination problem that gets harder with every agent you add.

Watercolor illustration of a small robotic figure climbing a steep desert cliff face with layered sandstone strata, sagebrush at the base, and purple mountains in the distance

Sci-Fi Saturday

The Imperfection Engine

A robotics startup discovers that broken data produces better robots. Two Cold War-era novelists already knew why.

Sci-Fi Saturday

The Problem with The Hard Problem (of Consciousness)

Watts asked in 2006 what three lines of inquiry confirmed in 2026: consciousness might not be a binary. It might be a spectrum.

Split watercolor illustration: warm hearth with welcoming figures on the left, lone figure in rain beside wreckage on the right, with pages drifting between the two scenes

Sci-Fi Saturday

What Roguelikes Knew About Memory That Agent Designers Forgot

The unlikely overlap between permadeath games and AI agent architecture.

Watercolor illustration of a library table with papers and index cards being pulled into a vortex while books on shelves remain undisturbed

Sci-Fi Saturday

The Weight of Remembering

How the KV cache gives every AI conversation a physical weight in silicon, and what happens when the memory runs out.

Watercolor illustration of a gun barrel view with branching timeline paths radiating from the center, rendered in teal ink with amber branches and red watercolor drips

Sci-Fi Saturday

Sci-Fi Saturday: License to Operate

Bond films predicted AI agent architecture. M is the human director. Q is the tooling layer. 007 is the agent with a license to operate.