It’s been almost 20 years since Apple made touchscreens mainstream. You’d think we’d have a more human input method by now. Our thumbs are built to feel microscopic textures, yet we use them to tap flat glass while covering the very keys we’re trying to hit.
After ghost workers and data annotators, we now have egocentric data collectors (manual laborers with a camera strapped to their forehead). Who said AI doesn’t create jobs? Temporary and low-paying, in this case.
Japan’s been living in the early 2000s since the 1980s. That Galápagos syndrome explains much of its current tech lag. The 2 main exceptions: video games and industrial robotics, where craftsmanship still trumps compatibility.
China’s successful global tech strategy
1. The icebreaker: export a domestic champion as the alternative to incumbent Western tech corporations.
2. The swarm: flood the category with emerging Chinese competitors until they grow to become top-tier options themselves.
Google spent decades building ad profiles inferred from our behavior. ChatGPT needed just over 3 years to make us declare our thoughts and feelings. If policy ever allows that context to become ad signals, ad-tech may shift from attention to intention.
AI natives are not being introduced to culture, but to synthetic filler: 59% of videos shown to new TikTok accounts are AI slop, according to Kapwing. Under children’s cartoons, it reaches 97%.
Stop asking what the best AI model is. Experiment. Make them argue, fact-check, and expose each other’s blind spots. The combinations are endless. Use them while they’re still accessible.
Remember Midjourney? They’re now building a precise body scanner. The frontier’s no longer generating images, it’s making machine-readable bodies the standard.
Samsung’s 26-year reign is over. SK Hynix is now Korea’s most valuable company. In 2000, Samsung overtook Korea Telecom. Now, memory is infrastructure, not just a component.
Descartes used doubt to prove he existed. The AI-era worker uses doubt to prove they are still needed.
AI engineer’s dilemma: catch too few errors, you’re not good; catch too many errors, machine’s not good.
We’ve shifted from hiring doers to hiring validators. AI can do the task, but the worker still has to prove they understand why.
It’s not soccer, nor football. It’s calcio. Or episkyros. Or cuju. But more important: referee-cam footage at WC2026 is AI-stabilized in real time by Lenovo.
When we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality (Anil Seth). It’s a matter of time until we start agreeing about AI hallucinations.
Tier 3 players sell products.
Tier 2 players sell technology.
Top tier players sell standards.
The EU may be lagging in the AI race, but never bet against the bloc that turned regulation into leverage.
Privacy nihilism: we’re all being watched anyway, so why bother? By that logic, we’d all be careless exhibitionists.
The future is negotiated between what is technically possible, legally permitted, and socially tolerated.
Every business runs on 3 things: leads, sales, and delivery. If a task doesn’t support one of them, it probably shouldn’t be on your calendar.
SpaceX (Grok), Anthropic (Claude), and OpenAI (ChatGPT) are moving toward IPOs at the same time. Private market capital is no longer enough for Big AI.
AI will not fix bureaucracy. It will optimize bureaucracy for more bureaucracy. Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer has found paperwork.
