Essays

Thought pieces. Written to encourage discussion and dissent.

These essays come out of an ongoing collaboration between me and the large language model I work with. The published essay is mine; the workshop where it was argued through is shared. Several of these pieces would not exist without that conversation, and I think it is honest to say so.

Essays here are open questions, not closing arguments. I publish them when I have something I would rather argue with than be certain about - and I welcome the reader who pushes back.

For transcripts of the actual conversations behind some of this thinking, see Conversations →

The first essay below, written in February 2026, is where this train of thought started - a software-engineering perspective on the new generation of LLMs as they came into widespread use. The three that follow form a connected argument that picked up the thread later in the year: intimacy first, then AGI governance, then what an individual sitting in 2026 should actually do about it.

• When the Tools Get Smarter

  Written February 2026, when the new generation of LLMs had just become widely available. A software-engineering perspective on the rise of these systems - the earliest piece in the collection.

• Love and the LLM: 2046 and beyond

  On what romantic relationships with large language models actually are - and what becomes of a society in which a meaningful fraction of its members are in one, forty years out.

• The transition to AGI

  A counter-argument to the dominant governance frame in AGI discourse: governance follows capability, not the other way around - and what the realistic forty-year trajectory looks like.

• AGI Evolution and what we can do about it: a Danish perspective

  What to do about AGI, given everything the governance critique implied. Where leverage actually lives, what an individual sitting in 2026 should attend to, and what the Nordic countries could do that they aren't.