Bill Friend

Reframing Intelligence in the Age of Artificial Systems In June 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine told The Washington Post that the company’s language model, LaMDA, had come to life. “I recognize a person when I interact with one,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they have a brain made of flesh or a … Read more

Why the Country With the Best Model May Still Lose There is a comfortable story Americans tell about the race for artificial intelligence. In that story, the contest is a sprint, the finish line is the most powerful model, and the United States is winning. The story is not wrong, exactly. By most public measures, … Read more

Why Human Oversight Fails Without Calibrated Reviewers In the rush to deploy artificial intelligence in healthcare, criminal justice, and human resources, organizations have settled on a reassuring formula: pair every consequential algorithm with a human reviewer. The presence of that reviewer—the clinician, the judge, the hiring manager—has become a kind of moral and legal alibi, … Read more

A Strategic Declaration of Independence The UAE’s OPEC exit is not a commercial dispute but a strategic declaration of independence from the Saudi-led regional order, timed to exploit maximum geopolitical disruption. On April 28, 2026, with senior Gulf officials gathered in Riyadh for an emergency summit on the Iran war, the United Arab Emirates announced … Read more

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas argues that artificial intelligence is not just a technical innovation but a moral, social, and political force powerful enough to reshape labor, warfare, education, and human self-understanding. By linking AI to the industrial upheavals that prompted Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the new encyclical places the Church squarely inside one of … Read more

Cleverness, AI, and the Skill of Not Fooling Yourself I’ve been thinking about something recently. Grab a chair. One of my favorite rock songs is Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” In two and a half minutes, it retells Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the glimpse of the rabbit, the decision to follow, the slide into a world … Read more

Why Seeing Is No Longer Believing — and Why Skepticism Is Not Enough The Evolution of Trust For most of human history, trust was local, personal, and slow. You trusted the person whose face you knew, the merchant your family had dealt with for years, the elder whose judgment had been tested in public, or … Read more

In Part 1, we watched the market stop behaving like a leisure market. In Part 2, we read the steel — 40mm ice belts, heated sea chests, 6,000-mile ranges, and the Polar Ship Certificate, the only piece of paper that lets a 60-meter private vessel sit in second-year ice without breaching its insurance. In Part … Read more

In Part 1, we watched the market stop behaving like a leisure market. In Part 2, we read the steel — 40mm ice belts, heated sea chests, 6,000-mile ranges, and the Polar Ship Certificate that is the only piece of paper letting a 60-meter private vessel sit in second-year ice without breaching its insurance. We … Read more

Collective Character, Political Consequence, and the Burden of Responsibility I’ve had something on my mind lately. Pull up a chair. “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre wrote these words in 1811, not as a cynical dismissal but as a profound observation about human agency. Far from excusing tyranny or corruption, the … Read more

In Part 1, we mapped a market that had quietly stopped behaving like a leisure market. The volume curve flattened. The size curve climbed. Fraser’s order book filled with custom 60–80-meter projects, average buyer ages dropped a decade, and Dutch yards became the single most important node in the global supply chain. We ended with … Read more

Selective Justice, American Power, and the Erosion of the Rule of Law The issue is not whether Raúl Castro is innocent. It is not whether Nicolás Maduro deserves sympathy. It is not whether hostile foreign leaders should be shielded from accountability because they hold power, command armies, or wrap themselves in sovereignty. The issue is … Read more