... the man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.
So let's talk about AI.
This entire piece is written by a human — me — and these em-dashes are a habit from my days at a newspaper in the early noughts. I'm also responsible for every error, typo, and disjointed thought.
We live in inconvenient times. All the old certainties are dead: what matters, what has value, how money is made, why liberal democracy and capitalism are the best way for the most people to benefit ... this list is endless.
My engagement with AI began about ten years ago when I started to learn about machine learning.
Back then, Big Data was the buzzword, and I remember defining it as having three Vs: Volume, Variety and Velocity. I can't remember where I stole that from, but I was militant about it — two of three Vs didn't make the cut.
Around the same time, my friend Ben Koe described the world we were entering as one where you either owned the machines, made the machines or did something that machines couldn't do.
That world has arrived.
While I spent the last nine years building out a startup that was acquired, and then helped scale the company that acquired me to cross $50MM in revenue in 18 months, the rest of the world decided it was time to party like it's 1900 once again.
The period of electrification of factories and households from 1900 to 1940, saw incredibly rapid productivity and economic growth. But, it had taken almost seventy years from Michael Faraday figuring out electro-magnetism to the first public grids getting built.
It's taken almost the exact same amount of time — from the 1956 Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence workshop at Dartmouth to Claude, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek — for AI to go from the glimmer of an approach to science fact.
My thesis is simple: Everything is changing beyond recognition.
This is as seminal a moment in human history as the transition from medieval times to the industrial age. My younger human readers (including my son) will have little or no memory of a world without AI and certainly no conception of global systems that weren't informed (or run) by AI.
The change is rapid, but just slow enough so that the new normal will feel inevitable for most people who are engaging the world, and fast enough that there are many who will struggle to navigate a new world where none of the old markers will exist. Think of that popular trope of a Stone Age man suddenly finding himself in modern times. Unlike the movies, there will be few happy endings.
In these times, we must discard common sense, our habitual beliefs, and our convictions.
My rational self has made three bets:
- Building is the only thing that matters. So I will build, a lot. Ergo, the foundry.
- Taste, judgement and experience (in any order but not without each other) is the single most important thing I have to offer.
- There is no time like now to start something new melding Art, Code and Science — it feels like the first dot com boom, Beatlemania and the gold rush all rolled into one.
That's why Marain exists — a homage to one of my favorite writers, Iain M Banks, who wrote a series of novels about the Culture — a galaxy-spanning civilization populated by humans (and other species) where everybody spoke Marain and where incredibly advanced AI called Minds did most of the heavy lifting for people.
From Wikipedia:
The Culture believes the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language influences thought, and Marain was designed by early Minds to exploit this effect, while also "appealing to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers". Designed to be represented either in binary or symbol-written form, Marain is also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language by the Culture. The symbols of the Marain alphabet can be displayed in three-by-three grids of binary (yes/no, black/white) dots and thus correspond to nine-bit binary numbers.
I am committed to building. Visit the Foundry to see what's already there — if I have my way, I will release something every two weeks. Big, small, medium and every size in the middle.
I will collaborate with people who are looking to push the envelope.
I am open to working with anyone who has an interesting problem and an appetite to explore what a solution might look like that doesn't rely on common sense, established habits, or definite conviction.
Let's begin.