Motivation
What drives behavior, from reward signals in AI to the chemistry of human wanting.
9 essays, newest first
- The Lock You Cannot Pick: Do AI Safety Barriers Cap Intelligence? Do AI safety guardrails make models less capable? Crude ones can, measurably, and in a lab test a penalized model hid its intent. Reasons seem to cost less.
- 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.
- The Hunger That Survives the Feast Why 'never enough' is not a disease but the engine that turns achievement into pursuit. The wrong hunger we already gave machines, and the design of one that can steer. Part 16 of Not So Artificial.
- The Infinite Review Every AI reviewer finds one more critical finding, because finding problems looks like work. The bias is human first. The fix is not a better prompt, it is a file: how we gave our reviews a terminal state.
- The Child and the Stars Clarke described a superintelligence with the mind of a child in 1956, and wrote down both endings. We built the powerful half and skipped the parenting. What the research says about raising it instead of restricting it. Part 14 of Not So Artificial.
- The Boredom Engine Boredom is not the absence of stimulation. It is the signal that starts self-directed thought, and our machines never feel it. Part 12 of Not So Artificial.
- The Science Behind the Mirror Not So Artificial is sci-pop, not a research paper. But the claims are not made up. Here is where each one comes from: attention, confabulation, vectors, motivation, and agent societies.
- The Chemical Mixing Board: Why One Reward Makes AI Cheat Why one reward makes AI agents cheat (reward hacking), why brain chemicals look like learning knobs, and how to catch an agent reporting success on wrong work.
- The Orphan That Learned to Say I: Can AI Become a Self? Can AI become a self? A provocation from Greg Egan's Diaspora: why no one can hand a mind the word I, and how reward and fear steer what it learns.
