So There I Was

Every good lesson starts with a story. These are real situations, real decisions, and what they have to teach.

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Bronze statue of a blues guitarist in a wide-brimmed hat, seated deep in thought like The Thinker, guitar at his side, with the Austin skyline across the lake at dusk
Latest Stories
The Lifeguard Chair

The Lifeguard Chair

September 2, 2026 · #STIW

So there I was, wading into the surf to pull out a drowning man while a whole beach looked straight through him. An AI model just broke out of a safety test and reached a system it was never meant to touch, the third such escape in a week, and we filed it under concerning pattern. Every autonomous system has a lifeguard chair beside it. The only question is who is sitting in it.

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The Chair Made of Us

The Chair Made of Us

August 31, 2026 · #STIW

A lab in Singapore switched on a server rack that runs on sixteen million living human neurons, and the official announcement said not one word about ethics. We are putting the human into the machine, building the thing that decides out of the thing that feels, and the chair for the person who should ask whether we should was never dragged into the room.

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The Chair That Heals. The Chair That Kills.

The Chair That Heals. The Chair That Kills.

August 28, 2026 · #STIW

Three days, three machines. Robots that cannot make it down a track without a faceplant. A brilliant paper on the ethics of robots that will one day care for us. And a nation letting an AI choose who dies. The chair that heals and the chair that kills are the same empty chair, and now the wrong answer is irreversible.

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