My latest post, 'The Cost of Knowing'. The one where I name the new failure mode: a critique that sounds rigorous, aimed at the wrong target.
Peter Evans-Greenwood
@peter.evans-greenwood.com
Thinking out loud about hybrid agency, crooked paths & coordination without stories. Essays → thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com
My latest post, 'Nobody Was Slow'. The one where I explain why a 20–30% productivity jump can sit inside twenty-three years of nothing.
Boards of Canada’s Inferno is their most controlled yet. They seem to be finally masters of their chosen tools and they’re working out what they want to say. The next album could be amazing.
My latest post, ‘Nobody Designed It’. The one where I find the closest historical parallel to my driver’s network isn’t a commons—it’s eleventh-century traders in the Mediterranean.
"AI...making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models...are so resource-hungry that tech companies...purchasing 70% of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage." The opposite of what we expect from new technologies. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project
theatlantic.com
My latest post, ‘Why the Terrain Looks Like This’, the one in which I argue Baldwin’s third unbundling hasn’t stalled — it’s still waiting for a vocabulary that doesn’t exist yet.
My latest post, ‘Why Productivity Waves Have a Shape’. The one where I suggest that the housing crisis and the AI wave have the same underlying cause—and it’s not the technologies.
The last few years have been a kind of natural experiment. Many people assumed intelligence was a scalar quantity—if you increased the amount of “intelligence” available, economic output & social capability would increase proportionally. That prediction has not held up well.
My latest post, 'We Called It Agency', the one where I introduce you to Catherine Helen Spence, who spent fifty years being corrected by the world and won, and ask why we've been calling something else by her name.
My latest post, 'What Institutions Actually Do'. The one where I show why Britain's superior electrical science didn't build the better grid. Capability wasn't the question. Liability was.
My new post 'The Squirrel and the Feeder'. The one where I explain why the squirrel is smarter than the venture capitalist. (It has no self-concept to protect.)
Inferno feels less like ‘another Boards of Canada album’ and more like Boards of Canada finally asking the questions that were always implicit in their work.
My latest post, 'At the Edge of the Thinkable'. The one where I follow Galileo borrowing a chain to think with, and what his error reveals about how concepts actually form.
Is it a year now that the vendors have all been declaring that “the era of AI experimentation is behind us”? It’s become boilerplate on all their announcements.
My latest post, 'Two Questions on LLMs'. The one where I name the reason LLM advice keeps contradicting itself, and the two questions that resolve it.
History is full of partially assembled futures: - airships, - nuclear power, - expert systems, - Concorde, - virtual reality (first wave), - metaverse infrastructure, - blockchain…
My latest post ‘What It Was Always For’. The one in which I explain why Edison made the current and Ford made the miles, and what that has to do with why Bruce Springsteen’s masters sold for $500 million and a venue in Blackpool charges £10 on the door.
LLMs are strange as latent space is higher dimensional, so everywhere is close to everywhere else. Training of all forms is output shaping, and if the shape you create likes goblins, then goblins will appear everywhere.
My latest post, 'Showing the Joints', the one where I argue that LLMs aren't primarily writing tools. They're reading tools—and that's the shift nobody is talking about.
My latest post, 'Where the Costs Are'. The one in which I argue that AI currently looks a lot more like the nail gun than the dynamo—and explain why that matters for where you look.
The nail gun transformed construction productivity. Nobody built a monopoly on nail guns.
My latest post: 'When Grammars Can Be Imported'. The one where I argue that Australia's twelve-thousand-mile handicap was the thing that built the capacity. Britain's proximity was the problem.
Afrika Bambaataa, hip-hop music pioneer, dies aged 68
Afrika Bambaataa, hip-hop music pioneer, dies aged 68
The Bronx born rapper's global hit Planet Rock is credited with shaping hip-hop in the 1980s.
bbc.co.uk
My latest Substack post, ‘The Relationship is the Skill’, the one where I show how the same AI output was a verification crisis for one person and a prospecting tool for another, and neither of them was wrong.
My latest Substack post ‘The Empty Chair’. The one where I argue the chair is ready, the preparation is sincere, and the guest won’t be in the room where the invitation was written.
The Physical AI playbook is looking a lot like the Metaverse one
The consciences debate continues in NOEMA, with Barton Friedland’s ‘What The AI Consciousness Question Conceals‘ attempting to take down Anil Seth's 'The Mythology of Conscious AI'.
My latest Substack post, ‘The Price Was Never the Point’. The one where I show why BMW’s heated seat subscription failed and Texas Instruments’ identical move forty years earlier became a business school classic. Same logic. Opposite outcomes. The difference is structural.
First Words argued the attention economy ended the subsidy, not the reader. Hollywood ran the same playbook—institutional identity replaced earned commons—and got the same result. Hail Mary is the market correcting. open.substack.com/pub/thepuzzl...
First Words
Venue used to carry the writer. That credit is gone. What remains is the writing — and the moment before the reader decides whether to stay.
open.substack.com