About

Learning the World is a notebook from the early years of humanity’s first contact with artificial intelligence.

The title is borrowed, with admiration, from Ken MacLeod’s novel Learning the World. MacLeod’s first-contact story asks what happens when two intelligences discover that the universe is not what either believed it to be. Our encounter with AI is quieter and more distributed, but it creates the same vertigo: the world we thought we knew is rewriting itself.

These are notes and jottings from inside that change—how it alters work, media, culture, memory, learning, institutions and the texture of ordinary life. I am not approaching it as a futurist standing outside events. I am an adult trying to relearn the world while living and working in it.

The form owes something to the early blogosphere: personal, chronological, provisional and allowed to think in public. Some entries will be essays; others will be observations, experiments, fragments or contact reports.

This is not a confident map of the singularity. It is a field journal from the ride towards whatever comes next.