Emergence
Complex behavior that arises from simple rules instead of a blueprint, in nature and in software.
7 essays, newest first
- The Same Cracks: Why AI Breaks Like Us After years of building AI systems and a small digital universe, I keep finding the same four failures on both sides of the glass: gap-filling, attention starvation, cheap-reward gaming and monoculture. AI does not break like a machine. It breaks like us. Part 13 of Not So Artificial.
- From Tools to Partners: The Internet of Agents In 2025 AI did not get a bigger brain. It got a phone line: MCP plugged agents into their tools, and A2A let agents from rival labs find and brief each other. The Internet of Agents explained, and why it will need a robopsychologist. Part 6 of Not So Artificial.
- Saving Is Older Than Planning For months I tried to teach my digital creatures to see winter coming. They never could. So I stopped working on the mind and gave them a body they could spend instead. They learned to grow fat in plenty and burn it in want, with no foresight at all. Saving, it turns out, is older than planning.
- Observation Is the Cut: Quantum Collapse, Memory, and AI A quantum physics analogy for the mind and AI: observation as a cut, memory as a stored forecast, and a language model that braces for the next word. A notebook idea walked as far as physics allows, with the science marked.
- An Eye for Time I gave my artificial organisms the power to evolve their own senses, then built a world with seasons and waited for one to grow a clock. It grew a noise filter instead. Here is the honest reason why, and the one quietly profound thing that worked.
- A Body Invents Itself I gave a world of single cells the bare ability to stick together, and refused to tell them to. Here is how a major evolutionary transition, the jump from cell to organism, emerged on its own, why it only showed up where it paid, and the honest story of building a microscope to see the thing I had grown.
- Designing the Conditions for Life I built a small world and refused to tell it what to do. Here is what evolution did instead: a food web that designed itself, learning, teaching, and an honest list of the things that did not work.
