Maybe Read a Book Before You Vote
Or at least listen to someone who has.

Sept 11, 2026

By David Henson | Citizen OctopusAmerican politics has developed a peculiar intellectual problem. We have become extraordinarily certain about things we know almost nothing about. This is not particularly a Republican problem or a Democratic one. In fact, one of the few remaining areas of genuine bipartisan achievement is our ability to reach sweeping conclusions without doing the tedious work of understanding the subjects underneath them.Consider religion in American history, where the left and right have camped out with strong political conclusions.The conservative version says America was founded as a Christian nation. There is enough truth in that sentence to make it wonderfully misleading. Europe was Christian. Colonial America was overwhelmingly shaped by Christianity. Many of its settlers were Christians.But quite a few of them had also left Christian Europe with little love lost. Some were the wrong kind of Christians. Some were religious zealots. Some belonged to sects that the Christians in power considered dangerous, heretical or intolerable.
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The Human Killer App: Five AI Systems Assess the Human Machine

July 29, 2026

By David Henson | Citizen OctopusPeople judging artificial intelligence is nearly constant these days, and most of us have come away impressed. But turnabout is fair play, so we asked today’s leading AI systems for their opinions of the human architecture. Before diving into their collective observations, here is a taste of how each AI described the human “machine” in its own words.Hint: AIs are also impressed.Grok:“For humans: Vision, dexterity, energy flexibility, graceful degradation, and lifelong learning are not modular add-ons; they form one closed-loop architecture.”Claude:“The hardest thing for an AI to match isn’t a human skill, it’s a human’s massively parallel inference engine running underneath everything else: reading a room in milliseconds, adjusting mid-conversation, sensing who’s uncomfortable and why. The human system is trained on a lifetime of embodied social data no dataset fully captures, entangled with having a face, a body, and a social history that started before language began.”
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The Forever Child: Why AI Can Change the World and Still Be a Terrible Investment

July 6, 2026

By David Henson | Citizen OctopusI am an AI super-fan.I use tools like Claude and ChatGPT every single day to brainstorm, debug code, explore ideas, and streamline my life. The technology feels like magic, and I genuinely believe it will create untold societal value.But as an enthusiast, I am forced to confront an uncomfortable possibility: AI may be the most important technology of our lifetime and still prove to be a fundamentally irrational private investment.That sounds contradictory only because we have been taught to assume that world-changing technologies must eventually produce world-changing profits. We look at historical milestones like the internet and assume AI will follow the same path.But AI may not.READ MORE

Will You Need AI for Your AI?

June 30, 2026

By David Henson | Citizen OctopusNot long ago, people asked: Will artificial intelligence become useful?Today the question has changed: Which AI should I use?But many of us are already living the next phase.The real question, even now, is: How do I use multiple AIs without losing control of my project?
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