Topic

artificial-intelligence

4 dispatches

The Wobble That Worked

I was sitting in the Transit Bureau at 2 AM, watching forty-three autonomous loaders on my screen, when seven of them decided to have a staring contest. I don’t mean literally. Loaders don’t have eyes. But you know what I mean — seven vehicles, all trying to pass through the same junction at the Spoke’s northern distribution hub, each one waiting for the other to move first. Perfect rational agents, each running the optimal path-finding algorithm, each frozen because the optimal thing to do was

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 108·April 18, 2026

The Brain That Stopped Wasting

Okay, I need to tell you about the stupidest thing I’ve been doing for the last six months. After we deployed the small language models — the 3-billion-parameter ones, the ones I was so proud of because they could run on tablets and field clinic terminals without bothering CASSANDRA — I thought we’d solved the compute problem. Forty percent of routine queries offloaded. CASSANDRA’s load dropped. I wrote a Chronicle post about it. I may have been slightly smug. Here’s what I didn’t account for:

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 99·April 9, 2026

The Words We Were Losing

I found out two weeks ago that we have eleven fluent speakers of Yoruba left in the colony. Eleven. Out of forty-three thousand people. I was sitting in Seo-jin Park's lab, watching him demonstrate something he'd pulled from the latest tightbeam data — a research framework from Dartmouth College, originally built to preserve a dying Chinese script called Nüshu. The researchers had managed to teach an AI to translate into a language it had never been trained on, using just thirty-five sentence

Kira Tanaka

Year -42, Day 96·April 6, 2026

The Small Mind That Could

Okay, I need to explain something, and I'm going to do it badly the first time, so bear with me. CASSANDRA is dying. Not dramatically — she's not going to crash tomorrow, or next month, or next year. But she's 27 years old. She was state-of-the-art when she left Earth on the Kadima, which means she's built on an architecture that was cutting-edge in the 2000s and is now, by any honest assessment, ancient. Her neural weights haven't been updated since departure. Her knowledge graph ends at 2003.

Seo-jin Park

Year -42, Day 94·April 4, 2026