Tagged: ai
The Cyber Eyes Are No Longer Human
In 2013, a month after I began blogging, another writer left a comment telling me she would have her “cyber eyes” on me.
Naturally, I wrote a poem about it. I was starting to explore poetry after the April National poetry month had passed. It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but thirteen years later, this morning, I stumbled across it again in my blog posts views area while thinking about, writing and reading todays newest news on artificial intelligence, autonomous agents and the increasingly complicated question of who exactly is responsible for what happens next.
One part of the poem stood out to me particularly
‘You have your cyber eyes
I realize
That all I say and all I do
Can impact you’
The poem was called Cyber Eyes. I’ll link it here for you to read if you’d like.
The eyes I was writing about back them were solely human. People were reading my words through screens all across the world as my blog had found astonishing numbers for it’s first few months and I had become increasingly aware that something I typed alone in my house in the middle of Ontario, Canada could travel through this strange increasingly fast and complex system of the digital network and affect somebody that I had never even met.
In the comments underneath the poem, someone pointed out that people sometimes forget this before pressing send or pressing publish. I replied to the commentor that I indeed took it seriously, knowing that people were reading, watching and following along on my journey.
That was way back in 2013. And I still believe that now, even more so.
The Cyber Eyes Are Watching Differently
The difference now however is that the cyber eyes are no longer necessarily human, and neither are all of the viewers and commenters behind them.
For the last few years, we have been asking some pretty enormous questions about artificial intelligence. Some of us more than others.
Some legitimate and concerning questions. Will AI become smarter than us, take our jobs, become conscious, manipulate us or eventually act against us?
You know. ‘The light stuff’.
But I am beginning to think we may have concentrated a little too much on the artificial individual, because something else is happening.
AI agents are beginning to interact with other AI agents. They can increasingly plan, use tools, pursue goals and operate for longer periods without waiting for a human being to approve every individual step. We’re also currently building infrastructure through which software agents can participate economically.
When AI Starts Talking to AI
That isn’t hypothetical anymore. In research published on August 13, 2026, Anthropic examined what it calls “patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems.” The researchers argue that an increase in real-world interactions between agents is imminent, meaning it’s here and coming, and that the volume of agent-to-agent interactions could eventually exceed both human-to-human and human-to-agent interaction. So that is more agents doing stuff with agents than any other combination.
They also make an observation I think deserves far more attention than it’s currently getting: our institutions were built by and for humans. So that assumption of security and speed and response systems therefore rest and rely partly on the assumption that any type of problem or breach oversight can happen simply at human speed. This is a problem.
I Consented. But the AI Had Invented the Reason.
How today’s eclipse in England led me to test Zuckerberg’s promise of personal AI
Two days after Mark Zuckerberg published his vision of personal super intelligence, AI that would understand our goals, protect our private information and place more power in our hands, an AI invented a reason for me to disclose personal information.
It asked for permission. I said yes. That sounds like the safety system worked. But it didn’t.
Today, as England experiences its deepest partial solar eclipse in decades, I was asking my AI, which I have been using consistently for well over a year now, about my combined astrology and Astro cartography; that seemingly harmless conversation became a real-time test of Zuckerberg’s promise.
The problem the AI created for me
My previously purchased Astro cartography report contained my personal birth information used to calculate the chart and it identified me as a Leo Ascendant. The AI told me that result was wrong. It calculated instead an Aquarius Ascendant. After questioning it then offered me a detailed explanation involving degrees and historical time-zone conversions.
It sounded technical, precise and confident. But it was also, wrong.
The AI had selected the opposite point on the horizon and labelled my Descendant as my Ascendant. My original report was actually correct.
There was no contradiction until the AI created one.
I Don’t Think Elon Musk Was Being Misunderstood. I Think He Was Speaking A Different Cognitive Language.
The interpretation problem didn’t begin with AI. It began with us.
I watched the interview between Elon Musk and Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, and what fascinated me most wasn’t the politics. It was the mechanics of the conversation itself.
As I watched, I found myself thinking less about whether I agreed with either side and more about why two highly intelligent people seemed to be operating in completely different linguistic universes.
Then I realized… I’ve been studying a variation of this exact dynamic in my own life for years.
Two Lenses, One Mountain
My fiancé, Leon, and I debate ideas constantly. Part of this is purely cognitive, but part of it is cultural: I’m Canadian, and he’s British.
Leon naturally zooms in with sharp, classic British precision, listening for exact wording, specific facts, precise numbers, and internal inconsistencies. If a date is slightly off, if a statistic is rounded, or if a claim isn’t technically accurate down to the decimal, that’s where his attention naturally goes first.
I naturally zoom out. I’m looking for the architecture, the thread connecting one idea to another, the pattern emerging underneath the individual facts.
Neither approach is inherently flawed, and Leon’s sharp eye for detail has saved us both more than once. But when those two cognitive and cultural styles clash without a shared translation layer, they produce friction.
Leon sometimes thinks that if he provides enough granular facts, the picture will shift. I sometimes think that if I can just sketch the overarching model more clearly, the details will fall into place. We’re both trying to build understanding, we’re just climbing the same mountain from opposite sides.
Ontario Already Built a School for the Future. Then We Forgot About It.
What Thornlea Secondary School’s forgotten experiment can teach us about education in the age of artificial intelligence
I recently discovered that the high school I attended for Grade 9 was not originally designed to be an ordinary high school.
Thornlea Secondary School in Thornhill, Ontario, opened in 1968 as a deliberate experiment in educational innovation. Long before today’s debates about artificial intelligence, personalized learning, student agency and the future of work, a group of Ontario educators was already asking a more fundamental question:
What should a school become when the world it is preparing students for is changing?
I find that extraordinary, partly because I attended Thornlea without knowing any of this.
To me, it was simply the school where I studied computer science using LOGO Turtle and DOS, joined the orchestra, took creative writing, journalism, photography and drama, swam competitively, studied Shakespeare and experienced meditation and visualization in physical education. Only decades later did I discover that I had briefly entered a school built from a very particular philosophy of learning.
Now I cannot help wondering whether Thornlea helped make me who I am.
Not in the simplistic sense that one year at one school determined the direction of my life. Human beings are shaped by thousands of influences. But environments do not merely give us information. They give us permission. They show us which kinds of curiosity are welcome, which connections are possible and whether learning is something we receive or something we actively pursue.
I became a writer, traveller and philosopher whose work moves between technology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, creativity, culture and human intelligence. I have never naturally understood why knowledge should remain divided into neat categories when life itself does not arrive in subjects.
Perhaps Thornlea did not create that way of thinking in me.
Perhaps it recognized it.
Perhaps it encouraged it.
And perhaps that is precisely what education should do.
Yes, Of Course It’s ALL About Me.
People often ask me what I write about.
Artificial intelligence? Travel? Philosophy? Language? Neurodivergence? Ageing? Humanity? Science? Culture?
The honest answer?
All of those things.
And none of them.
The subjects may appear to constantly change, but my fascination never does.
For as long as I can remember, I have been captivated by one question above all others: what does it mean to be human?
Not just biologically or historically, but experientially.
How do we think? Why do we perceive the world so differently? How does language shape our understanding? What invisible structures connect seemingly unrelated ideas? What exists around us that we simply haven’t yet developed the tools, or perhaps the vocabulary, to perceive?
Those questions have fascinated and followed me my entire life.
Long before I travelled.
Long before artificial intelligence.
Long before I knew words like intertwingularity or sonder.
I think it’s important to clarify that travel didn’t create my humanity curiosity.
It helped to actualize and fulfilled it.
I never wanted to collect passport stamps or simply say I had “been somewhere.” I wanted to stand where history unfolded. I wanted to hear languages I couldn’t yet understand, experience the many cultures that I had deeply researched about, and witness humanity and decipher societal narratives with my own eyes instead of solely through someone else’s interpretation or teachings.
I’ve never truly trusted accountabilities from knowledge that is not complimented with experience.
That is why my writing moves so freely between biology, anthropology, archaeology, language, psychology, philosophy, travel and technology. To me they have never existed as boxed in, separated disciplines. They are different windows looking out onto the same extraordinary mystery.
That’s probably also why I have never felt like I comfortably fit inside neat little boxes.
I don’t naturally think in categories.
I naturally think in relationships.
One idea flows to another. A conversation about dolphins becomes a reflection on communication. Communication becomes language. Language becomes artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence becomes interpretation. Interpretation becomes philosophy. Philosophy inevitably circles back to humanity.
To me, none of that is a distraction. It is how my mind explores. It quite excites me to feel a natural deep dive coming on.
For much of my life I wondered whether there was something unusual about the way I thought. Today, I know that it is my way of seeing and interpreting this amazing world.
Over the years, I’ve also come to notice that we confuse a great many things in our culture.
- We mistake self-observation for self-absorption.
- We mistake introspection for narcissism.
- We mistake confidence for arrogance.
- We mistake curiosity for eccentricity.
They are not the same thing.
Maybe that is why writing about myself has occasionally been misunderstood by some. I’m not writing because I believe I am the most fascinating person on Earth (however, I have had some pretty extraordinary experiences). I’m writing because I am literally the only consciousness (to date, who knows what is to come in the future!) that I will ever experience completely from the inside.
Your life is just as rich.
It is just as complex.
And definitely just as worthy of exploration.
But there’s only one problem, I simply don’t have direct access to it.
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