Part 1 — Descartes in Bed: The Moment the World Became a Graph It’s the winter of 1619. A young French soldier lies awake in bed, listening to the wind rattle the shutters of a cold Bavarian room. His name is René Descartes. Outside, Europe is tearing itself apart in the Thirty Years’ War — Catholics and Protestants fighting over truth, order, and God. Inside, Descartes has found something rarer than safety: solitude. He watches a fly crawl across the ceiling. In the half-li

Why the machines will never be truly intelligent in a humanly meaningful sense – no matter how clever they get. 1. The Cult of Computation There’s a new kind of priesthood rising from the glass towers of Silicon Valley. They wear hoodies instead of robes, speak in code rather than Latin, and promise a form of salvation: Artificial General Intelligence. Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Ray Kurzweil – these men are the prophets of a new faith. They believe that inte

1. The Spell of the Machine Few ideas have shaped the modern world more profoundly than the belief that everything is, at bottom, a machine. When Newton described the laws of motion, Descartes separated mind from matter, and Bacon declared that nature should be “hounded in her wanderings,” the West was gripped by a dazzling new confidence: The world can be measured, modelled, and mastered. That faith powered modern science and engineering — and the results were extraordinary.

Part I — What’s Water? There’s a well-known story from the American writer David Foster Wallace. Two young fish are swimming along when...

Part I — Sarah’s Room Sarah’s job title says “case worker,” but that hardly captures the skills she needs to exercise each day. She works...

The Hollow Promise of Numbers It begins, as these things so often do now, with a podium and a graph. A minister in a navy suit announces...

The Human Hunch You know the feeling. Someone says all the right things, but something in you tugs: Do they actually care—or are they...

A woman I know—let's call her Sarah—works in child protection. Her job, she told me, is not really about following procedures, though...

It was one of those crisp winter afternoons in a suburban primary school, the kind where sunlight slants through the windows at just the...

Modern business too often operates under a colossal misconception: that the world is complicated but ultimately controllable, and that...

Part I: The Glittering Hall of Reason and Dreams On a brisk evening in December 2024, the Grand Hall in Stockholm glittered with ceremony...

British education is fast losing its soul, if it hasn't already lost it. There is no animating vision of what schooling is for, or what...

There’s a familiar refrain nowadays: “Follow the science!”  In a world awash with claims of “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and...

Look at today’s tech headlines, and you’ll see a recurring theme: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Geoffrey Hinton all caution (or exult) that...

PART I: THE ILLUSION OF “INTELLIGENCE” IN THE AGE OF IQ TESTS In the early 20th century, French psychologist Alfred Binet devised a test...

In the mid-1960s, the hallways of MIT seemed to glow with promise. Artificial Intelligence, many believed, was just a few breakthroughs...

PART I: THE GREAT PROMISE—AND ITS SHADOW It was March 2016 in downtown Seoul when the world first heard the news: a computer program had...

The Hard Realities of Innovation Innovation is seductive. It promises growth, disruption, and an edge in a competitive market. Yet the...

Something in modern life feels profoundly off. Across the world, trust in institutions—governments, businesses, schools, and even...

Innovation promises breakthroughs, transformative ideas, and progress. Yet too often, our efforts to innovate fail—not because of a lack...