Author Archives: daveatrice

There’s something almost magical about telling an AI system “you are a world-class bartender with deep knowledge of most drinks and the impact of mixology decisions on drink flavor, texture, and presentation.” The transformation is immediate and profound – the AI’s responses shift not just in content but in tone, expertise, and even apparent confidence.Continue reading “The Multiple Minds of AI: When Personas Become Personalities”

John Smith’s morning routine had become remarkably consistent over the past decade. Wake up naturally between 6:40 and 7:00 AM without an alarm, check the financial markets on his neural interface display, review overnight developments in artificial intelligence research, then head to the kitchen where his wife Sarah would already be preparing coffee. “Morning, dear,”Continue reading “Embodied AI for Us, the Living”

In biology, endosymbiosis is the theory that all modern advanced life – humans, dogs, corn, basically everything except bacteria – evolved through partnerships formed 1.8 billion years ago between multiple different early cell species. This endosymbiosis was not an accident, because we know it happened at least twice independently: In every single human cell, thereContinue reading “Endosymbiosis Between Humans and Artificial Superintelligence: Three Possible Futures”

It’s now a foregone conclusion that AI can master to superhuman ability any game with fixed rules. From chess to Go, from poker to Starcraft, the pattern is clear: once the boundaries are defined, machines eventually surpass us. But what about games where the rules themselves are part of the play? This question led meContinue reading “Calvinball: Humanity’s Last Intellectual Bastion”

Richard Feynman famously stated “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Logically, the inverse statement (“What I create, I must understand”) is neither implied nor true. Six-year-old children start building weight-bearing structures with Legos without really understanding physics or mechanical engineering, and the greatest minds in AI research today still do not understand howContinue reading “Traditional Eastern Medicine May Soon Have Its AI Moment”

Are you among the first 10% of all humans who will ever live? That doesn’t seem particularly likely—after all, why would you happen to be born at the early extreme of human history? But that would also mean the number of humans to ever live likely won’t exceed 1 trillion, which hardly seems enough forContinue reading “Why Doomsday May Be Humanity’s Greatest Achievement”

We’re losing scientific data faster than our ancestors lost their stories around campfires. A few months ago, I received an email requesting raw NGS data for a paper I published seven or eight years ago. I didn’t have access to this data after leaving academia in 2021, so I directed the inquirer to Rice University.Continue reading “Scientific Amnesia: Our Data Disappears Faster Than Ancient Knowledge”

Education systems reflect the societies they serve. From the earliest human communities to our modern technological civilization, how we learn has evolved reflecting humanity’s then environment. Yet today, as artificial intelligence rapidly transforms our world, our educational approaches remain largely anchored in paradigms developed for a more stable and predictable era. AI has already begunContinue reading “Meta-Learning in the Age of AI”

Despite remarkable advances in healthcare over the past century, human longevity remains fundamentally limited by the individualized nature of both aging processes and disease vulnerabilities. Modern medicine has excelled at extending average lifespans by addressing common killers like infectious diseases and acute cardiovascular events, yet we’re confronting diminishing returns from these population-level approaches. The frontierContinue reading “Human Longevity Requires N=1 Therapeutics”

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has sparked intense debate about how to ensure these increasingly powerful systems remain aligned with human values and interests. The dominant paradigm in this discussion focuses almost exclusively on one-directional alignment: how to make AI systems conform to human values, priorities, and cognitive frameworks. This approach implicitly assumes thatContinue reading “Human-AI Coevolution”