Technology, Connected

AI data annotation, RLHF, and the hidden labor behind ChatGPT are the focus of this Thinking on Paper Book Club episode on Karen Hao’s Empire of AI . We examine how OpenAI’s race to scale relied on scraped data, content moderation, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and low-paid workers reviewing violent, sexual, and abusive material to make AI systems safer for everyday use. The conversa...

Quantum computers make mistakes — a lot of them. One in every thousand calculations can be wrong. In this Thinking on Paper Pocket Edition, Mark and Jeremy speak with Oliver Dial, CTO of IBM Quantum, about how researchers are turning unstable prototypes into practical machines. Oliver explains the difference between error mitigation and fault tolerance, how IBM’s new codes make quantum systems ten...

When it comes to Personal AI, Rob LoCascio knows best. Having spent three decades teaching machines to talk as the founder of LivePerson, he helped create the first commercial chatbots that shaped online conversation. Now, with Eternos AI, he’s working on the next phase of personal AI: teaching machines to remember us. Eternos builds personal AI models trained on your voice, memories, and values....

Seemingly conscious AI is a real threat. The AI Zombies are coming and you're not ready. A man takes his own life after months of talking to a chatbot. Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI warns that seemingly conscious ai is coming. In this Thinking on Paper Pocket Edition, Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson Think On Paper about Mustafa Suleyman’s essay “Seemingly Conscious AI” and what hap...

Kevin Kelly believes the next cultural shock won’t come from AI outsmarting us, but from it feeling something, or seeming to. He predicts that once we begin to code emotion into machines, people will start to bond with them the way they do with pets, partners, or even themselves. This isn’t science fiction. Emotional computation is already arriving: systems that respond with warmth, rejection, eve...

Artificial intelligence was supposed to accelerate the transition to clean energy. Instead, it’s being used to keep fossil fuels alive.  Inside Microsoft, two engineers began asking questions no one wanted to answer. Holly and Will Alpine had joined the company believing AI could help solve the climate crisis. What they found instead was code trained to keep oil flowing. Through internal documents...

OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the Empire of AI are the focus of this Thinking on Paper Book Club episode on Karen Hao’s Empire of AI . We examine OpenAI’s founding promise to build AGI for the benefit of humanity, the power struggle between nonprofit ideals and commercial reality, and how compute, capital, Microsoft, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Silicon Valley networks shaped the compan...

Andrew Hill, co-founder of Recall, believes the future of work won’t be built on pages or apps, but on swarms of AI agents. Essentially pieces of code that remember, reason, and make decisions on your behalf (and spend Bitcoin), agents will form the new interface layer: where identity, memory, and trust replace passwords, browsers, and brands. In this conversation, we trace how agentic systems evo...

Irreducible, a book that refuses to end where science usually stops. Federico Faggin proposes that consciousness is not a by product of matter but its foundation.  The universe, he suggests, is a network of seities (quantum entities made of consciousness, agency, and identity) each trying to know itself through experience. What looks like evolution or emergence may instead be intention unfolding i...

In Chapter 12 of Irreducible, Mark and Jeremy confront one of the book’s hardest ideas: that consciousness can’t be explained by equations or code. They trace how probability, prediction, and mathematics fall short of describing a universe that is always becoming. Meaning comes before symbols, and knowing comes before measurement. If the physical world is only an average of quantum states, then co...

Customer service is a tricky one. It's ripe for an AI takeover, but 20 million people worldwide work in the industry, so what are the trade-offs? 95% of the industry is salaries. There is a lot of collateral damage there. Millions of jobs will vanish and not everyone can be re-trained. And yet, as anyone who has experienced customer service in 2025 can testify: it's pretty lousy. Frustrati...

There is an energy crisis. There is an environmental crisis. And the two are about to collide. Mark and Jeremy speak with Martin Soltau, co-founder of Space Solar, about the race to build space-based solar power in orbit, a system that could beam clean electricity to Earth twenty-four hours a day. While fossil fuel giants use artificial intelligence to find new oil and gas, engineers are building...

In Machines of Loving Grace, Dario Amodei imagines a future where artificial intelligence works exactly as intended: curing disease, ending poverty, and giving humanity everything it ever wanted. Mark and Jeremy break down that vision: a “country of geniuses in a data center,” where AI drives biology, neuroscience, economics, and governance to their limits. They examine the optimism, the blind spo...

Federico Faggin says a seity is consciousness, identity, free will, and creativity fused into one indivisible whole. If quantum information is the fabric of reality, then seities are its living threads. Faggin writes: “A seity is a reality that goes beyond all categories and all definitions.” That is the point. You cannot break it into parts. You cannot simulate it with code. A seity generates mea...

Materialism says matter comes first and mind comes later. Federico Faggin says the opposite. In Chapter 9 of Irreducible, the physicist who built the first microprocessor proposes that consciousness is not an accident of biology but the foundation of reality itself. The universe, he writes, is not a machine, it is a living field of awareness trying to know itself. This is where he introduces the “...

In this week's show, Jeremy and Mark sit down with Ram Srinivasan, author of The Conscious Machine, to think on paper about consciousness, Advaita Vedanta, panpsychism and why Eastern philosophy changes how we design every AI system. It might be the most important podcast on AI you listen to today. Rethinking work in an exponential age Linear mindsets can’t keep pace with automation. We explor...

Compute has become the new oil. Whoever controls it, controls the future of intelligence. In this episode of Thinking on Paper, Jeremy and Mark sit down with Kony, CEO of GAIB, to unpack the real shift happening in artificial intelligence: power itself is being redistributed. GAIB is turning GPUs, the hardware behind every model, every chatbot, every act of machine cognition, into financial assets...

IBM has announced a $30 billion investment in quantum computing. Today we ask why. In this episode, Oliver Dial, CTO of IBM Quantum, speaks with Jeremy and Mark from the Think Lab in New York. This is the inside story of how IBM plans to make quantum useful and how quantum computing could reshape material science, chemistry, and the architecture of technology itself. It's all written in their...

Katia Moskvitch is a science journalist and physicist, she has written about neutron stars, quantum computers, and the human stories behind them. But this episode isn’t about data or discovery. It’s about curiosity. From BBC newsrooms to remote observatories in Nepal and Argentina, Katia has seen what curiosity costs and why it’s still worth paying for. She speaks about the scientists who never fo...

If consciousness isn’t produced by the brain but instead produces the brain, what does that make reality? In Chapter 8 of Irreducible, Federico Faggin stops describing consciousness and starts rebuilding the universe around it. He argues that awareness isn’t an accident of matter but the foundation of everything, that every particle carries meaning, not just information. Here he introduces a new m...

Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands, joins Thinking on Paper to discuss how Web3, gaming and decentralized identity could shift ownership of the internet back towards users. The current web is largely controlled by platforms that own the infrastructure, data and relationships between creators and audiences. Web3 proposes a different model in which users can hold digital assets, identities and commun...

Writer Brian Naughton joins Thinking on Paper to discuss The Echo Chamber, a 45,000-word novel generated by Anthropic’s AI model Claude. The experiment began with a simple question: if Claude were to write a book, what would it write about? Brian then allowed the model to develop the novel without rewriting its prose, directing the plot or editing the finished manuscript. In this episode, we discu...

Would you let your children have an AI boyfriend or girlfriend? We're reading Irreducible, by Federico Faggin. It's Chapter 7 and Mark and Jeremy think on paper about the hard problem of consciousness, qualia, ai awareness and the inner semantic space that creates your experience. There are 4 types of qualia: physical sensations and feelings, emotions, thoughts and spiritual feelings. From there t...

Is technology for good anything more than a marketing strategy? Technology shapes everything. From how you work and connect to how you make decisions. But is humanity using it to solve the right problems? And when millions of people rely on boring, repetitive jobs to survive, what happens when AI takes them away? On Victory in Europe Day, Khang Nguyen-Trieu joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper...

A podcast for people who refuse to let algorithms, headlines, or influencers do their thinking for them. What happens when technology moves faster than meaning? When AI writes code, raises your kids, and reshapes your job, but no one asks what it’s doing to your values? Thinking on Paper is a podcast for people who want to think clearly about the future. Created by curious minds, strategists, and...