Tag: culture

Categories
AI India

The Polyglot Machine

There is a subtle but profound shift happening in the global architecture of artificial intelligence. For the past few years, the gravitational pull of the AI revolution has been overwhelmingly centralized—anchored in the server farms and venture capital boardrooms of Silicon Valley. But if you look closely at the horizon, the center of gravity is beginning to disperse.

Activity in India’s AI ecosystem is accelerating (witness this week’s India AI Impact Summit in Delhi), and it feels less like a replication of what we’ve seen in the West and more like an entirely new paradigm.

Take Sarvam AI, for example. What strikes me about their approach isn’t just the technical ambition of building foundation models, but the philosophical underpinning of why they are building them. They are focusing heavily on Indic languages. This is not a trivial detail; it is the crux of the matter.

“We often forget that language is the original operating system of human culture. It shapes how we think, how we empathize, and how we conceptualize reality.”

When the foundational models of artificial intelligence are trained overwhelmingly on English, they inadvertently inherit a distinctly Western worldview. They learn the biases, the idioms, and the cultural frameworks of a specific slice of humanity, leaving the rest of the world to interact with technology through a translation layer that often strips away nuance.

India, a nation woven together by dozens of distinct languages and thousands of dialects, presents the ultimate crucible for AI. What happens when a machine doesn’t just translate, but actually “thinks” and generates natively in Hindi, Tamil, or Bengali?

The rise of AI in India represents a push for digital and cultural sovereignty. It is a recognition that the future of technology cannot be a monolith. For AI to truly serve humanity, it must reflect the pluralism of humanity. It must understand the local context, the regional slang, and the deeply rooted cultural histories that define how people live and work.

Watching companies like Sarvam AI pick up momentum reminds me that the next great frontier in technology isn’t just about achieving higher parameters or faster compute times. It’s about representation. The models that will truly change the world won’t just be the smartest; they will be the most deeply attuned to the beautiful, noisy, and diverse chorus of the human experience.

Categories
Authors Books History

The Devil’s Rope

We often mistake simplicity for innocence. When we look at a technological innovation, we tend to judge its weight by its complexity—the microchip, the steam engine, the nuclear reactor. But sometimes, history turns on the axis of something far more rudimentary. Sometimes, the world changes not with a bang, but with a sharp, metallic scratch.

I was recently reading Cattle Kingdom by Christopher Knowlton, and I stopped cold at a passage regarding the invention of barbed wire. It’s an object we pass by on highways or stumble over in overgrown fields without a second thought. Yet, Knowlton writes:

“None was more significant than the creation of barbed wire, which literally reshaped the landscape and set the stage for the era’s eventual destruction—at great personal cost to so many of its key players.”

It is a profound observation. We tend to romanticize the American West as a geography of endless horizons—a place defined by what it didn’t have: fences, borders, limits. It was the Open Range. But that openness was fragile. It existed only as long as the technology to close it was absent.

When Joseph Glidden and others patented their variations of “The Devil’s Rope” in the 1870s, they weren’t just selling steel fencing; they were selling a new concept of ownership. Before wire, a man owned what he could patrol. After wire, a man owned what he could enclose.

The quote strikes a melancholic chord because it highlights a paradox of human progress: the tool created to maximize the land ended up destroying the culture that relied on it. The cowboys, the cattle barons, and the drifters who defined the era were undone by the very efficiency they sought. The wire made the cattle industry profitable on a massive scale, but it also ended the cowboy’s way of life. It stopped the long drives. It turned the cowboy from a navigator of the plains into a gatekeeper.

And, as Knowlton notes, the “personal cost” was staggering. This reshaping of the landscape wasn’t just aesthetic; it was violent. The wire cut off migration routes for bison and the Indigenous tribes who followed them. It sparked the fence-cutting wars, neighbor turning against neighbor in the dark of night, snapping tension wires that represented their livelihood or their imprisonment, depending on which side of the post they stood.

There is a lesson here for us today, far removed from the dusty plains. We are constantly inventing our own versions of barbed wire—digital boundaries, algorithmic silos, tools designed to corral information or efficiency. We build these structures to create order, to claim our stake, and to protect what is ours. But every time we draw a line, we must ask: what era are we destroying? What open range are we closing off forever?

The landscape is always being reshaped. The question is whether we are building fences that protect us, or cages that trap us in.

Categories
News

Turning Out the Lights

[Note: see also The Murder of the Washington Post by Ashley Parker who writes: “Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special.”]

I was struck this morning by the brutal dismantling of the Washington Post’s international reporting capabilities. The list of bureaus being shuttered by the paper reads like a roll call of the 21st century’s geopolitical fault lines: New Delhi, Sydney, Cairo, the entire Middle East team, China, Iran, Turkey.

It is a stunning retreat.

But to view this merely as a corporate restructuring or a casualty of the dying business model of print journalism seems to miss a deeper, darker signal. This seems like an actual cultural symptom.

“The world is becoming less America-centric by the minute while the United States is becoming more America-centric than ever.”

At the exact moment technology has rendered the world indistinguishable from a single room—where a virus, a meme, or a financial crash in one corner sweeps across the floor to the other in seconds—we are choosing to partition off that room.

There is a tragic symmetry to it. As the center of gravity shifts away from the us, the we respond not by engaging harder, but by closing its eyes.

When a newspaper that has shaped history decides that “reporting on the world” is no longer of valuable enough, it is doing more than saving money – although clearly that’s the primary motivation. It seems to be a surrender to the idea that what happens “over there” doesn’t matter enough to us because the people who were supposed to tell us it was coming are gone.

We seem to be turning out the lights in the rooms we find too difficult, believing that if we cannot see the world, the world cannot touch us. Feels wrong.

The moves closing these bureaus are part of broader cuts at the paper:

  • Closing the Sports section
  • Closing the Books section.
  • Restructuring and shrinking the Metro desk.
  • Suspending the Post Reports podcast.
Categories
AI Living Productivity

The Reality Gap

“I follow AI adoption pretty closely, and I have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap. People in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives… people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams.” — Kevin Roose

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from scrolling through the “Inside” of the AI bubble while the rest of the world simply goes to work. It is the dizziness of watching a new species of behavior emerge—”wireheading” and “claudeswarms”—while the vast majority of the economy is still asking for permission to use a spellchecker.

The future isn’t just unevenly distributed; it is becoming mutually unintelligible.

Roose notes a “yawning inside/outside gap” that feels distinct from previous tech cycles. In one reality—geographically centered in San Francisco and digitally centered in specific discords—people are operating with a level of agency only sci-fi writers dared to imagine. They are deploying multi-agent swarms to manage their lives and consulting large language models for existential guidance.

In the other reality—the one inhabited by the vast majority of the global workforce—people are still waiting for an IT ticket to clear so they can use a basic productivity assistant.

It is tempting to look at this divide solely through the lens of technical access, but Roose hits on a deeper truth: “there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one.”

This is the friction of our current moment. It is not just that the tools are different; the permissions we give ourselves to use them are different. The “Inside” is operating with a mindset of radical experimentation and integration. The “Outside” is operating within legacy frameworks of risk mitigation and bureaucratic approval.

The danger of this gap isn’t just economic inequality, though that is a guaranteed downstream effect. The immediate danger is a loss of shared context. When the creators of technology live in a reality where “claudeswarms” run the day, they risk losing the ability to design for, or even empathize with, a world that is still fighting for permission to use the tools at all.

We are living in the same year, but we are no longer inhabiting the same time. The challenge for those of us on the “Inside” is to resist the intoxication of the bubble long enough to build bridges, rather than just building faster escape pods.

Meanwhile, in China (from the Financial Times)…

“I’ve witnessed first hand how China has grown from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass producing them,” he said. “Some of our most cutting-edge work is now done by fresh graduates. The real geniuses to change the world soon could well be among them.”

Categories
Art and Artists Living

Occupying the Artificial

There is a distinct texture to the modern shopping mall – polished tile, recycled air, and the relentless, humming promise that satisfaction is just a credit card swipe away. They’re designed to be transient; a place of movement, transaction, and eventual departure. You are not supposed to stay. You are certainly not supposed to live at the mall.

But recently, I came across a recommendation from Kevin Kelly about the documentary Secret Mall Apartment (currently on Netflix), which chronicles a band of artists who did exactly that. For years, they maintained a hidden sanctuary inside a busy mall.

“It is way more interesting and inspiring than first appears. It was a bold work of art, and I came away seeing art as a way of life.” — KK

This was art as an act of occupation. These artists didn’t just build a set; they altered their reality. They took a space designed for public consumption and carved out a private, human intimacy. They looked at the rigid architecture of the commercial world and saw a loophole, a blank canvas hidden behind the drywall.

Perhaps we should ask: Where are the secret apartments in our own lives?

We live in structures—both physical and digital—that are designed by others. It is easy to feel that our role is simply to navigate these spaces as they were intended. But the artist looks at the “mall” of daily existence and asks, “Where can I build something that is solely mine?”

Art as a “way of life” means we stop waiting for permission to be creative. It means we stop waiting for the studio or the gallery. For that “special” time or place. Instead we find the hollow spaces in our schedules, our environments, and our relationships, and we fill them with intention.

The sheer audacity of living in a mall was about a refusal to accept the world merely as it is presented – a reclaiming of individual agency.

Perhaps the most inspiring art in our lives isn’t what hangs on a wall, but how we choose to inhabit the “rooms” we walk through every day.

Categories
AI History Living

The Echo of the Roar

It is a strange sensation to look back exactly one century and see our own reflection staring back at us, sepia-toned but unmistakably familiar. We often think of the “Roaring Twenties” as a stylistic era—flapper dresses, Art Deco skyscrapers, and jazz. But beneath the aesthetic was a seismic technological shift that mirrors our current moment with an almost eerie precision.

In the 1920s, the world was shrinking. The radio was the “Great Disrupter” of the day. For the first time in human history, a voice could travel instantly from a studio in Pittsburgh to a farm in Nebraska. It was the democratization of information, a sudden collapse of distance that left society both thrilled and anxious.

“The radio brought the world into the living room; the algorithm brings the universe into our pockets.”

Today, we stand in the wash of a similar wave. If the radio brought the world into the living room, the internet—and specifically the generative AI of this decade—has brought the collective consciousness of humanity into our pockets.

The parallels in infrastructure are just as striking. One hundred years ago, the internal combustion engine was reshaping the physical landscape. The horse was yielding to the Model T; mud paths were being paved into highways. The very geography of how we lived was being rewritten by the automobile. In the 2020s, the “highway” is digital, built on cloud infrastructure and fiber optics, and the vehicle isn’t a Ford, but an algorithm. We are transitioning from physical labor to cognitive automation just as they transitioned from animal labor to mechanical muscle.

The Texture of Time

There is a specific texture to this kind of time. It is a mix of vertigo and acceleration. In 1925, the cultural critic might have worried that the “machine age” was stripping away our humanity, turning men into cogs on an assembly line. In 2025, we worry that the “algorithmic age” is stripping away our agency, turning creativity into a prompt.

But here is the insight that offers me comfort: The 1920s were chaotic, yes, but they were also a crucible of immense creativity. The pressure of that technological change forged modernism in literature, new forms of architecture, and entirely new ways of understanding the universe (quantum mechanics began finding its footing then).

We are not just passive observers of a repeating cycle. We are the navigators of the rhyme. The technology changes—from vacuum tubes to neural networks—but the human task remains the same: to find the signal in the static. To ensure that as the machines get faster, our souls do not merely get cheaper. We must decide, just as they had to a century ago, whether we will be consumed by the roar, or if we will learn to conduct the music.

Categories
Language

Separated by a Common Language: “What do you do?”

I was recently reminded of the old adage that we are often separated by a common language!…

Over the weekend, I listened to an episode of Paul Miller’s podcast “The Pathless Path,” featuring Billy Oppenheimer. Billy works as assistant to Ryan Holiday and he shared valuable insights on extracting compelling stories from research, a skill he and Ryan have honed. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation!

During the discussion, Paul asked Billy about his time in Western Australia, prompting a delightful anecdote. Soon after arriving in Australia, Billy struck up a conversation with a stranger over drinks and asked the usual question: “What do you do?” The stranger’s response was both surprising and enlightening: “Oh, you’re American!” It turns out that asking someone about their occupation isn’t as common in Australia as it is in the US.

This story highlights the cultural nuances of communication and the importance of being aware of them. Sometimes, we must try and learn from our mistakes when our use of a common language doesn’t quite translate.

Bonus:

Billy publishes a weekly newsletter, “Six at 6,” every Sunday evening, featuring six fascinating stories. If you enjoy reading interesting stories, his newsletter is a treat!