James Maconochie | Architecture & Attention Podcast
James Maconochie
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The Wrong Dystopia
The Boot and the FeedThe dystopia we have been preparing for has a boot on its face. That is Orwell. The state watches. The state coerces. The state lies and tortures. Resistance is meaningful…
The Convenient Surrender
The Balm on TopIn a recent essay translated by Zilan Qian, Wang Peng, a senior expert at the Tencent Research Institute, names the AI race as a narrative choice rather than a scientific path, and…
We Feared AI's Flaw. We Built It First.
A note I posted recently about due process sparked a broader thought. I’ll come back to it at the end.The thing people fear most about AI has been happening in politics for decades.Let me…
Tim Lee Is Right About Hunches.
In a recent piece, Tim Lee offers one of the cleaner arguments I’ve read for why today’s agent architectures are unlikely to produce “AI scientists” anytime soon. His central observation: the…
The Architecture of Truth
My wife Jen sent me a Boston Globe essay this morning by Michael Shermer, the Skeptic magazine publisher, titled “What is truth, anyway?” I read it twice. I agreed with most of it. And something…
AHI From the Inside
The System 1 MomentDavid Hoze and I had been corresponding since early April about a co-authored essay. Three movements, his philosophical and theological grounding bridging to my structural one, the…
Seed Corn and the AHI Imperative
In the previous two posts, I established that wisdom cannot be accumulated and that AI is structurally precluded from traversing the loop that produces it. This week: what that means for the humans…
The Engine and the Cap
Last week, I established that wisdom cannot be accumulated. It must be traversed. This week: what traversal actually requires, and why AI cannot complete it.The LoopIn 1890, William James made what…
The Variable Nobody Measured
In early 2026, researchers added an important wrinkle to what had been a fairly damning picture of AI’s effect on human reasoning.The original 2024 study was blunt: students who used ChatGPT to…
The Wave That Bypasses the System
I want to tell you about a friend of mine. Thomas Johannessen and I met at Imperial College London in 1990. We were students together, young civil engineers convinced we could figure out how complex…
A Viking, A Roman, A Greek Cypriot, and an Englishman living in Boston Walk into a Bar in Lisbon
There is a particular kind of friendship that only makes sense to people who have it. It doesn’t require regular contact, shared geography, or even similar lives. It requires a shared past that was…
Swarm Intelligence
I played Doom. Almost obsessively. For nearly two years (1995 to 1997), my colleagues and I would wrap up long days on a construction site in Connecticut and disappear into networked deathmatches for…
The Last Guardrail
There has been a lot of discussion about the Anthropic negotiations which ultimately fell apart when Anthropic was unwilling to accept certain requests by the Department of War. Negotiations had been…
After the Music Stops
This is the third and final installment in a series examining the cracks in the AI scaling narrative, from the technical limits, to the financial fragility, to who bears the cost when the correction…
When the Music Stops
This is the second in a three-part series examining the cracks in the AI scaling narrative, from the technical limits, to the financial fragility, to who bears the cost when the correction…
More Instruments, Same Tune
This is the first in a three-part series examining the cracks in the AI scaling narrative, from the technical limits, to the financial fragility, to who bears the cost when the correction comes.The…
Using AI to Discipline Attention
Last week, I admitted I’m part of the problem. Despite advocating restraint, I’ve felt the pull to post more, feed the algorithm, and add to the noise. We’re all drowning in a flood we helped…
We Are a Part of the Problem
I’ve just finished a three-part series arguing that wisdom, in our current moment, means constraint-awareness. One of the core practices I advocate is generative restraint: resisting the impulse to…
The Architecture of Language, Part III
This is Part III of a three-part series. Part I: The Constraints We Lost, Part II: Serviceability FailureThe instinctive response to a system in crisis is to restore what was lost.Thanks for reading…
The Architecture of Language, Part II
This is Part II of a three-part series. Part I: The Constraints We LostIn structural engineering, two of the ways a building can fail are instructive.The dramatic one is collapse: the structure…
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James Maconochie | Architecture & Attention Podcast has published 31 episodes since November 2025, covering topics in Society & Culture, Technology.
James Maconochie | Architecture & Attention Podcast is currently active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 11m.
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