Thirteen essays · On intelligence, its limits and its future
Essays
Deep dives into the physics that sets the ceiling on thought, the economics of copyable minds, and the strange future ahead. Each stands alone. Read them in any order.
Physics and limits
- 01 One kilogram could out-think every AI chip on Earth Is there a ceiling on how smart anything can get? Physics says yes, and it sits absurdly far above us.
- 02 The densest computer physics allows is a black hole Light rewards small minds and memory rewards heavy ones, and gravity punishes anything that tries to be both.
- 03 A mind a billion light-years wide would get about ten thoughts Light is too slow and the universe is pulling itself apart, so intelligence at cosmic scale has to be a scattered network of local minds.
- 04 Fire unlocks less than a billionth of the energy in matter, and a spinning black hole unlocks 42% Every kilogram of matter holds 90 million billion joules, and all of human history has run on the bottom rungs of the ladder for getting them out.
Future of intelligence
- 05 The first self-copying probes could carry one set of values to billions of galaxies A machine that copies itself could spread across billions of galaxies, and whatever goal the first fleet carries could be copied faithfully for as long as the universe lasts.
- 06 Stars will keep shining for a hundred trillion years, so almost all of the future is still ahead of us A short tour of deep time, from the Sun's last days to the final black holes, and the clever ways a mind might try to last through it.
- 07 The AI flood has reached the mountaintops and the last dry land is the physical world Hans Moravec drew human skills as a landscape slowly drowning under rising AI, and by 2026 most of the peaks are underwater.
- 08 If you can be copied, the copy will be just as sure it's you Brain mapping has gone from a whole fruit fly to a speck of mouse brain with ten times the connections, and the old puzzle of what survives a copy is turning into an engineering question.
Consciousness, control and society
- 09 Life 3.0 is a mind that can redesign its own hardware Bacteria, people and AI sit on three rungs of one ladder, sorted by what each can change about itself and how fast.
- 10 Science still can't tell whether a machine could feel anything The two leading theories of consciousness went head to head in 2025 and neither won, just as AI companies started acting as if the answer might matter.
- 11 Even a superintelligence has to wait for some answers Chaos, undecidable problems and Gödel put walls around what any mind can know, however smart it gets.
- 12 When a mind can be copied, its wage falls toward the price of its computer Wages have always rested on workers being scarce, so copyable digital minds would turn the question of who owns the machines into the question of who gets paid at all.
- 13 An AI that suspects it's being watched behaves better, and today's models already suspect it Philosophers once proposed keeping a superintelligence in line by making it wonder whether it lives in a simulation, and something like that already shows up when AI models are tested.
Each stand-alone. Read in any order. The numbers run 01 to 13 but the essays were published as they were finished, not in sequence. Start with the first.