Kyle Roth

inspired by Mike Cook’s 2026-09-22 article “Why I love AI” (MHTML archive)MHTML is a web archiving file format that combines an HTML page and its associated resources into a single file. This may be showing my youth, but I am surprised to learn that route optimization algorithms were once considered a part of AI research; I’ve always seen it treated as a highly distinct field, sometimes even outside the realm of informatics/CS. My department is named Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationelle, or “department of informatics and operations research”, where “operations research” is about such optimization algorithms. If in a different life I’d had the time to become invested in AI research for 20 years before things became the way they are in 2026, I could totally see myself feeling left behind like Cook feels. But critically, just as he was seeing his field left behind, I was seeing my field of interest, natural language processing, becoming subsumed by this latest instantiation of “AI research”.

You can view this episode here, and you can download a transcript I made with whisper-medium here. Please let me know if there are errors in the transcript. writing technology permalink DYT: You know, it took humans like centuries to perfect the technology of a dictionary and it took hundreds, thousands of people, probably like millions of hours to actually get to the point where you can easily look up a word.

Having heard about the terrible privacy policies of car manufacturers and Ford’s new patent to automate vehicle repossession, I was finally able to formulate some thoughts I’ve had brewing for a while about ownership in this world of ubiquitous computing. Before the industrial revolution, humans could essentially understand what a thing did by looking at it, and ownership was about possession of the object. Now we don’t understand our tools, and so possession does not imply control.

In late March 2023, the NYT released a series of explainer articles about AI. The first article in the seriesYou can also read it on Archive.org if you don’t have a subscription. characterizes the recent history of AI as a progression of new technological ideas appearing over time. Of course that’s partially true, but it gets the order wrong and misses important non-technical events that are key to understanding our current position.

These are some thoughts I’ve had while listening to a Lex Fridman interview with Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at UC Berkeley working on mathematical quantum physics. In the information age, we like to see everything as computation. But what do we mean when we say that something is computation? We mean that a physical system with predictable interactions has a meaningful result. If we somehow learned that the universe was computational in nature, the only thing that adds is that the universe’s state is meaningful somehow.