what-if
We Made AI Agents Negotiate the End of the World
The same model behaved completely differently depending on who else was in the room.
what-if
weekly
What If Intelligence Is Knowing What to Ignore?
Models are hitting a wall not because they are not smart enough, but because they are drowning. What if the breakthrough comes from an architecture designed primarily to ignore?
what-if
What If a Wellness Cruise Could Offer What Your Doctor Can't?
In the fall of 2029, a motor yacht sat anchored twenty-eight miles offshore. On board, a doctor was offering treatments not available on the mainland.
what-if
What If Your Writing Style Is a Fingerprint?
LLMs can now identify anonymous internet users by their writing style alone, for about four dollars per person. Every pseudonymous post ever written is retroactively exposed.
weekly
What If — February 26, 2026
WHAT IF: What if Google had renewed Project Maven in 2018? In June 2018, Google announced it would not renew its contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven, a program that used AI to analyze drone surveillance footage. Around 4,000 Google employees had signed a petition opposing the work,
weekly
What If — February 19, 2026
Three scenarios. Two from the past, one from the future. Each follows the thread wherever it goes. A. WHAT IF: What if Fei-Fei Li had kept ImageNet behind a paywall in 2009? In 2009, Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li and her team finished assembling ImageNet — 14 million labeled images sorted