I write about AI and Geopolitics
Bill Friend The genie is out of the bottle. Artificial intelligence is no longer theoretical. It is deployed, scaled, integrated into economic systems, and accelerating. The relevant question is no longer whether AI should exist. It does. The relevant question is how we proceed. There are two unhelpful extremes in the public conversation. One insists that AI … Read more
Artificial intelligence is advancing at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Systems now draft legal briefs, discover drug candidates, generate software, and outperform humans in complex games once thought to require uniquely human cognition. It is not unreasonable to imagine that within a generation, AI systems could exceed human capabilities across … Read more
Scaling Frontier AI Under the Irreversible Agency Standard Humanity is confronting two profound risks: climate destabilization and the rapid advance of artificial intelligence toward systems that may exceed human cognitive capacity in strategically critical domains. Both demand seriousness. Both demand coordinated governance. But they are not structurally identical risks. Climate change threatens the stability of … Read more
The Architecture of Not Knowing Willful Ignorance and the Societies That Depend on It The Third Investigation in the “Invisible Dead” Series Bill Friend • February 14, 2026 I. The Pattern This investigation began with a simple question about prison deaths. It did not stay simple. In the first essay in this series, “The Invisible … Read more
Who Are the Invisible Dead? The Demographics of Incarceration and the People Behind the Uncounted Deaths A Companion Investigation to “The Invisible Dead” Bill Friend • February 13, 2026 Introduction In a companion investigation, “The Invisible Dead: Why the World Cannot—or Will Not—Count Its Prison Deaths,” we documented the global failure to track mortality behind … Read more