Embedded AI - Intelligence at the Deep Edge

Send us Fan Mail A useful general-purpose robot has to do two things that fight each other. It has to think slowly enough to understand "put away the groceries," and it has to move fast enough to keep a grip on the milk carton without crushing it. The part that understands is large and slow. The part that moves has to be small and fast. You cannot run both on the same clock. This episode looks at the design now shipping on real robots: Vision-Language-Action models that simply run two clocks ...

Send us Fan Mail Recent research points to a “leveling effect” in knowledge work. Generative AI dramatically improves the performance of novices by acting as a cognitive scaffold, raising productivity and output quality. Yet for elite professionals, the same tools can subtly degrade performance. Automation bias, overcorrection, skill atrophy, and the jagged, uneven reliability of AI systems create a situation where partial collaboration produces weaker results than either human or machine alo...

Send us Fan Mail Is intelligence tied to biology, or can it emerge in any suitable physical medium? In this episode, we examine the Substrate Non discrimination Assumption and the broader question of whether intelligence is fundamentally substrate independent. We separate the engineering claim about capability from the ethical claim about moral status, clarifying what each would require to be proven and why neither has yet been settled. The episode concludes by asking a more practical questio...

Send us Fan Mail This episode looks at how artificial intelligence is eroding the shared stories that have long held civilization together, from money and nation-states to the idea of a lifelong job. As AI weakens the link between labor and survival, we explore why human cooperation cannot function without common beliefs, and why a new social contract is required to avoid fragmentation and instability. The discussion introduces the idea of a “new mythos” to replace industrial-age narratives o...

Send us Fan Mail This episode explores how the foundations of AI hardware are being rethought in response to the growing energy demands of large language models. As modern AI systems strain power budgets due to memory movement and dense computation on GPUs, researchers are turning to neuromorphic and photonic computing for more sustainable paths forward. The discussion covers spiking neural networks, which process information through sparse, event-driven signals that resemble biological brain...

Send us Fan Mail This episode examines the growing evidence that ChatGPT will soon include advertising, driven by leaked internal references and OpenAI’s financial ambition to generate $25 billion in ad-based revenue within four years. With more than 800 million weekly users, ChatGPT offers a scale and level of conversational closeness unmatched by any previous platform. The discussion explores why this shift is not just a business decision but a fundamental threat to user trust. Unlike tradi...