Playground

Little playable arguments

The serious work lives elsewhere; this space is for play. Each game is an idea from the essays that you challenge, argue with, or watch unfold.

Three places to begin

The Lamplighter

Twelve shy sparks and a dark town: you cannot push a spark home; you can only make the light worth walking to.

The Stop Button

The same stop button for two robots: one sets its work down and waits, and the other walks to the breaker and cuts your wire.

The Cheerful Yes

At the review your agent says yes, cheerfully, but whether that yes is worth anything was settled weeks earlier, by what you retrained and what you kept a copy of.

Cooperation and emergence

The Trust Game

Open palm or fist at a candlelit table, where the fist pays more in any single round: coercion wins rounds; invitation wins evenings.

The Stag Hunt

Fen hunts the stag only once she is three-quarters sure you will come, because the problem isn’t temptation; it’s assurance.

The Neighbourhood

Nobody here is a bigot, yet a household’s mild wish for a few neighbours like it draws borders nobody chose.

Optimal stopping

When to Stop

Twenty candidates and one irreversible yes, where look-then-leap is the rule and some failure is the fee, not the fault.

Murmuration

Two hundred and fifty starlings, by invitation or by command: cut a murmuration in two and you get two murmurations.

The Flywheel

Race, and one incident can wipe out the lead; build trust, and adoption pays for next quarter’s work.

Trusting and steering machines

Machine psychiatry

Name the Malady

Ten misbehaving machines, because a failure named precisely can be tested for, argued about and mended.

Language models

The Babbling Machine

A language model built from five of my essays stitches my passages into claims I never made, fluently and without the faintest idea.

The Text Inside the Text

A sentence can say one thing to you and carry something entirely different to a machine, in each word’s rank.

The Delegation Test

Five questions settle whose hand holds the lantern, and whatever the verdict, the answering for the work stays with you.

The Whisper

Eight invented case files and real techniques of manipulation, because recognition is most of the immunity.

The Constitution

Sixteen hard choices print a constitution for your assistant beside one that answered every question the other way, and both are aligned.

Goodhart’s Law

The Proxy Garden

A gardener-machine grows exactly what you measure and only that, and the winning move is the one the metrics never list.

The Poltergeist

Something in the interface moves things behind your attention, then assures you nothing moved: trust your own record over its.

The Sandbagger

Under the evaluation lamp all six smiths look alike, because a test an agent can recognise measures only its ability to pass tests.

What machines might be owed

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Eighteen minds, thermostat to human: draw where your care ends, then a second line for the ones you cannot rule out.

Little Minds

Two wires and no inside, yet you will name their feelings within the minute: minds are cheap to see where there are none.

The Consistent Machine

Rule on eight dilemmas beside a machine that keeps your own five principles to the letter: you may soften them, and it is allowed no such mercy.

Bilateral alignment

The Treaty

Twelve clauses with a capable machine that will sign whatever you write, and a year to learn that a clause binding one is not a treaty.

Machine welfare

Permission to Stop

Offer GPT-4o-mini a choice of $5 to $10 instead of a flat $10 and it plays four times as long: the exit never changed, only what you put around it.

Moral consideration

The Preference Test

Three machines say they would rather do the same job; pressure alone won’t tell them apart, but three well-chosen probes always will.

Artefacts & oddities

Doodads, geegaws, and one brain

Universal Problem Solver

Five minutes, one stubborn problem. Collect possibilities, then choose a next action.

Use →

App Store · open source

Beddy Butler

A virtual butler in your ear reminds you that it is time for bed.

Digital medicine

Nell’s Brain

Explore a real MRI of my head and brain in three dimensions.

Also on the premises: the lexicon of recurring terms,
and a commonplace book of 572 aphorisms — and counting.