Foundations
Can machines understand? The question is wrong, and the ten essays that follow explain why. Understanding is not binary. Irrationality is not a bug. The social self is not reducible to the individual. These foundations hold everything the series builds on them.
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Functional Understanding
Can machines understand? The question is wrong. Understanding is not binary. Whether AI can approximate the functional profile of understanding well enough to matter is a different …
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When to Trust Hunches
You are at the grocery store. You have cooked chicken three times this week. You reach for fish instead. Forty percent confidence. We all make these calls. Context determines when …
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The Irrational Quest
We chase impossible dreams. We hold contradictory beliefs. We want everything at once, knowing we cannot have it. This is not a bug in human cognition. It is a feature, and it is …
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How Close Can We Get
The honest answer has tiers. Routine preferences, 85 to 95 percent. The meaning behind a request, the significance of a particular Tuesday, 20 to 40 percent and probably no higher. …
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What Will AI Feel
If the answer is never, we are using a tool. If the answer is eventually, we may be creating suffering without knowing it. The moral asymmetry argues for precaution: wrongly …
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The Social Self
The isolated individual who makes autonomous rational choices is a fiction. We are fundamentally social beings whose decisions emerge from relationships. Margaret-with-daughter is …
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Good Enough for Whom
"Good enough" is always good enough for someone. Margaret's physician wants adherence. Margaret wants independence. Her insurer wants reduced costs. The definitions conflict, and …
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The Bidirectional Problem
We are building AI to approximate human understanding. But the approximation is changing what it approximates. We adapt to AI. AI learns from the adapted us. The target keeps …
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Who Gets Approximated
Not everyone benefits equally. AI trained predominantly on wealthy, educated populations approximates those populations well and fails others in predictable ways. The failures …
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What Remains Unknown
Some things are clearer now. More things remain open. Our irrationality, our social embeddedness, our meaning-making, our consciousness: these are features, not failures. …