I write about AI and Geopolitics
Bill Friend When I look at where power is shifting in the world, especially around AI, I don’t start with software. That’s not where the real story is. I look at supply chains. I look at land. I look at the people being pushed aside. That’s where the truth shows up. Right now, the push to build … Read more
Why containment cannot be the permanent plan for AGI The question we need to be asking isn’t “how do we build a cage strong enough to hold a superintelligence forever?” Any cage we can design, something smarter can break. Containment is a short-term strategy, useful for testing, useless as a permanent plan. The real question … Read more
Humans manage entities that are more powerful than us all the time – horses, oxen, elephants, rivers, nuclear reactions. We do it by being smarter. We design the harness, the bridle, the containment vessel. Managing something that is both more powerful and smarter inverts every trick we’ve ever used. The harness only works if you’re the one who understands … Read more
Mechanistic interpretability is one of the most important bets in AI right now. It might also be one of the most honest. By mechanistic interpretability, or MI, I mean the effort to reverse‑engineer what an AI model’s doing inside. I don’t mean just watching what it says. I mean trying to understand the internal computations … Read more
Here’s the big problem almost no one wants to talk about. When it comes to AI, we don’t really know what we’re building. Not the engineers. Not the CEOs. Not the governments funding it. We’re feeding a system on the full disorder of human civilization and hoping scale turns it into wisdom. That’s not engineering. … Read more