Five Billion Ticks

Losing Skills

We are teaching machines to think. At the same time, many humans are slowly losing the very skills that helped our species survive. Instinct. Judgement. Bonding. Caring. The ability to act under pressure without certainty. The ability to protect each other when life becomes uncertain. I’ve been thinking deeply about what humanity may be losing in an increasingly screen-saturated world… and why those lost skills may become the most valuable things we possess. This piece explores why families, nature and real-world experience may matter more in the age of AI than ever before.

Coming Home

If artificial intelligence outgrows humanity… who does it come home to? A family friend recently asked me whether they should be worried about where AI is heading. It was a simple question, answered not with fear, but with reflections on trust, family, competing intelligences, ancient myths and a future where meaning matters more than power. This isn’t a warning. It’s a way of thinking about what comes next - and about why the future still needs us.

Seeing is believing

You think you’re observing life. You’re not. You’re experiencing your interpretation of it. After a few messages following my recent pieces, I put this short video together - because the question people kept asking was a simple one: what does ‘real’ even mean anymore? If you’ve ever wondered why two people can live the same moment and walk away with completely different realities… this might resonate.

Five Billion Ticks

Five billion ticks ago, a mechanical clock began marking time inside a cathedral. No electricity. No code. Just gears, gravity and patience. In that same building, on a piece of goat skin written by hand in 1215, something else began ticking. It was written to shape power before it grew beyond those it affected. The concern was simple. A king. Authority without restraint. So they wrote limits into power. They did not reject authority. They defined it. Civilisation changes. The instinct does not. Eight hundred years later, we are still refining that effort. Now we stand before a different kind of power. Not a king, but something far more scalable. It lives in algorithms, in optimisation systems, in machines capable of making decisions at a speed and reach no monarch ever possessed. Five billion ticks ago, a clock began marking time over a document that restrained power. Five billion ticks from now… where will we be? 🎧 A short 3-minute reflection.

When Willow Answered Back

When Willow Answered Back is the origin story of Empathy Architecture - the moment a late-night conversation, an unexpected response and a single question converged into something larger. This episode explores the realisation that empathy cannot be coded into machines, it can only be modelled through human behaviour, language and care. This is not about AI becoming human. It’s about humanity remembering what it’s teaching.