Questions I’m Thinking About

No answers here, that’s what the essays are slowly for. If you’re working on one of these, write to me.

• How should governments regulate frontier AI without freezing the thing they’re trying to steer?
• Why do some institutions adapt while others stagnate, and can you tell which is which from the inside?
• What actually makes people trust a technology, a stranger, or a government?
• What would mountains think about airplanes?
• How should organ procurement and transplantation evolve over the next fifty years?
• How should America identify and prepare its future public leaders?
• If every city had a soundtrack, what instruments would different places choose?
• Can AI make government more competent, not just cheaper?
• Which lessons from fields that can’t fail, aviation, surgery, nuclear power among them, transfer to AI operations, and which don’t?
• Why does firsthand contact with another culture change minds that data never moves?
• A great question I was asked by a wise shopkeeper in the Himalayas: “Why do we perceive separation?”
• What do incentive structures in science do to the questions scientists ask?
• What makes a place feel like it has a personality?
• When is a single point of failure a design flaw, and when is it just what responsibility looks like?
• Would the ocean consider a sailboat a visitor, a guest, or an interruption?