Technology returned to history.
Eleven conversations about intelligence, probability, work, power, crisis, and the futures earlier generations left lying around.
Technology has a history, even when it insists it doesn’t.
David Runciman’s conversations are useful antidotes to the permanent present tense of technology culture. They approach machine intelligence through philosophy, political power, work, fiction, probability, trust, and the futures earlier generations imagined for us.
David Runciman with Gary Marcus and John Lanchester
A philosopher, a novelist, and a political thinker test what the word 'thinking' contributes to our understanding of machines.
Before debating machine minds, it helps to ask which human capacities have been bundled into the word 'thinking'—and which have quietly been left out.
Open the note →David Runciman with David Spiegelhalter
David Spiegelhalter explains how a once-suspect theory of probability became a practical way to revise belief.
AI systems turn uncertainty into outputs. Bayesian thinking offers a longer history of how evidence should change confidence—and why confidence is not the same thing as truth.
Open the note →David Runciman with Gary Gerstle
Gary Gerstle traces the rise of polycrisis and asks whether connecting every crisis clarifies the world or disguises our powerlessness within it.
Everything is connected but that doesn't mean we actually understand anything.
Open the note →David Runciman with Shannon Vallor
A supercomputer chooses one voter to stand in for a nation. Democracy becomes extremely efficient and correspondingly strange.
Asimov's joke is also a governance diagram: prediction can replace participation while preserving all the ceremonial furniture of choice.
Open the note →David Runciman with Shannon Vallor
Shannon Vallor examines the durable fantasy that technology can be separated from values, choices, and responsibility.
Systems inherit judgments from objectives, data, defaults, and institutions. Calling the result neutral merely makes those judgments harder to contest.
Open the note →David Runciman with Sarah O'Connor
Sarah O'Connor considers what automation changes about jobs, status, productivity, and the bargain beneath paid work.
Delegating tasks changes more than efficiency. It changes who learns, who decides, who is paid, and who can refuse.
Open the note →David Runciman with Bruno Maçães and Sarah Wynn-Williams
A live discussion of political authority, platform power, and the technology companies trying to become part of the weather.
AI governance cannot be understood apart from the institutions, executives, and states competing to set its terms. Capability does not distribute authority evenly.
Open the note →David Runciman with Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales and David Runciman discuss a public knowledge system built from argument, revision, rules, and improbable amounts of volunteer patience.
Wikipedia shows that trust can emerge from visible process, contestable decisions, and shared maintenance—not only from centralized authority or confident output.
Open the note →David Runciman
A political reading of Huxley's world of engineered appetite, managed stability, and people made comfortable enough not to object.
The danger in Huxley's future is not simply coercion. It is a system that can satisfy people while narrowing the conditions under which they might want something else.
Open the note →David Runciman with Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev considers why societies imagine the future differently when confidence, demography, and political possibility change.
Forecasts are also political artifacts. What a society expects from technology depends on what it believes can still be changed.
Open the note →David Runciman with Shannon Vallor
Becky Chambers's gentle science fiction asks what people need after machines have already made themselves useful and left.
Chambers reverses the usual automation story. The question is not whether machines need us, but whether productivity was ever an adequate account of what people need.
Open the note →