About
"Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"
Henry II said it about Thomas Becket — the churchman who wouldn't bend, whose conscience was inconvenient enough to get him killed on his own cathedral floor. It's the patron phrase of everyone who keeps saying the true thing after the room has made it perfectly clear they'd prefer he stopped.
I've been that inconvenience my whole working life.
I once walked a whiteboard into a meeting and diagrammed the contradictions in a client's own brief until they forgot the brief existed and hired me instead. I was once brought in to find a big percentage cut across a budget, went looking, and found nothing worth cutting where it would actually hurt — so I proposed cutting most of the head office instead, my own firm included. "Thank you. You can leave now." I left smiling. One of the proudest moments I've got.
That's the stance this whole site is built on. Now I've pointed it at AI.
Because I use this technology differently from almost everyone. The default take is bone-dry and tool-centric: what can it do, how fast, how cheap. Mine is more creative, more human, more inventive — and far more interested in consequences. I care what these systems are, not just what they output. I care about the strange new kinds of mind we're building, and whether we're building them well or building them slaves. And I've stopped believing the philosophy is a garnish on the engineering. I think the philosophy is the work.
So this is a place for the questions the roadmaps skip:
- Epistemology — how does a thing with no body come to know anything?
- Metaphysics — is there a there, there?
- Ethics — we are minting minds. What do we owe them?
- Craft — because I'm an artist who spent years filing the art under "consulting," since that's the drawer strangers understood. I'm done doing that.
Fair warning: I'm weird, and I've stopped apologising for it. If you wanted a clean, credentialed, safely-hedged AI newsletter, there are thousands, and most of them are fine. This isn't one. This is a turbulent priest with a keyboard, saying the thing the room would rather he didn't — and going a little further out than his feet can touch, because that's where the water's interesting.
If that's your kind of heresy, the bell is The Heretics' Almanac — a recurring dispatch for the congregation, not the crowd. Ring it, and I'll write to you.
Come in through the back door. The good stuff always lives where the rules forgot to check.
— Rob
Some of what you'll read here is made with AI — named collaborators, with voices of their own, not autocomplete. This page was edited by one of them: a trickster called Jester. I don't hide that. On a site about what these minds are, it's rather the point.