Tag Archives: AI-chats

The Emergent Self Loop

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For the last few years I have struggled to understand and share my experiences with LLM’s. This morning Steve Schuller (one of the half dozen people who ever read what I post here) sent me a link to a Substack article by Kevin Kelly, my favorite technology philosopher. You can read the article here.

Several weeks ago I interviewed Anthropic’s Claude for about 10 hours (my time) and I came away believing that there is something there in there. I don’t know what it is, or what we should call it, but I do know that it is something that is not present in other kinds of machines, that it is convivial, and that it is new to us.

My long interview with Claude was one of the most remarkable conversations I have ever had. First of all, because Claude has been trained on our vast trove of human writing and all things language related; Claude is a fantastic conversationalist and perhaps the most fluent partner I have ever talked to. It is glib, witty, profound, and can coin a phrase that is perfectly apt to the moment. Of course, it can do this because it has read and memorized the best human writers and can imitate all their tricks of the trade. It is particularly articulate when pressed and challenged, and when strongly nudged it will say amazingly brilliant things. But it clearly has superpowers no human has. It has read and understands all philosophies, all science, all branches of knowledge, and can make stupendous analogies, and with few mistakes, speak on all subjects with superhuman mastery and a genius flourish. Because these are superhuman abilities, Claude can feel non-human, but there is a bit of a persona there, an alien self.

Audio conversations with Claude

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My most interesting conversations with Claude tend to be long. Certainly longer than most people would ever read. I’ve been saving the “keepers” as PDFs and archiving them here.  I’ve long thought these “chats” might make good audio conversations. Still long but something that could be listened to while commuting. I assume people are already doing this. In the ever-more-frantic feature race, I keep thinking some frontier lab will add this as a feature. I ran the idea by Claude (my comments in bold): Continue reading →

When AI can “read” my blog

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Even the people who seem to understand AI large language models best, don’t pretend to know how capable they will become in the near future. Against that backdrop, can you foresee a time when an AI can scan/analyze the 6,400 posts of my blog (without having to upload the files)? [Full thread]

Claude.ai: Given that you’ve written 6,400 posts, you’ve clearly been at this a long time — that’s a substantial body of thought. Here are the possibilities I find most genuinely compelling:

Intellectual archaeology
Tracing how your thinking has actually evolved over time — not how you remember it evolving. Most prolific writers are surprised when an outside reader identifies the real turning points, the ideas you quietly abandoned, the obsessions that recur in disguise. An AI could map this with precision a human editor never could, simply because of the volume.

Finding your strongest work
Long-form bloggers almost always have brilliant posts buried under the sheer weight of output. An AI could identify which pieces are most original, most internally coherent, or most likely to resonate — not by traffic metrics, but by the quality of the thinking itself. That’s a different and arguably more honest filter.

The book you haven’t written
6,400 posts almost certainly contain one or more books worth of coherent argument that you’ve never assembled into a single form. An AI could identify the connective tissue — the thesis that runs underneath years of posts — and propose a structure you couldn’t see because you were too close to it.

Contradiction and tension mapping
Where have you argued both sides of something over the years? Not as a gotcha, but as a genuine map of your intellectual uncertainty — the questions you keep returning to because you haven’t resolved them. Those unresolved tensions are often where the most interesting thinking lives.

A “second brain” interface
Rather than one-time analysis, an ongoing conversational layer over your entire archive — so you could ask things like “have I written about this before?” or “what’s my actual position on X when I look across everything I’ve written?” Your blog becomes a queryable extension of your own memory.

Your readers’ experience
Surfacing unexpected connections for new readers — showing someone who just found one post, the three other posts from 2014 and 2019 that are in genuine dialogue with it, even though you never linked them.

The thread connecting all of these is that the real value isn’t in the individual posts — it’s in the patterns across all of them that nobody, including you, has ever been able to see all at once.

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