Writing, research & a longer view
Make AI useful.
Keep thinking human.
Essays and independent research about artificial intelligence, the systems forming around it, and what it means to remain meaningfully human inside the change.
Essays.
Research.
Field notes.
Current inquiry
What authority should travel with AI capability?
An independent home for work that begins with curiosity and follows the evidence wherever it leads.
Recent & notable writing
Following the questions
that refuse to stay small.
Personal essays, cultural analysis, and technical subjects made legible without sanding away their complexity.
Featured essay The machine that breathed for me
What open-heart surgery, HAL 9000, and a life with AI taught me about the judgment we cannot surrender.
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Analysis The crown is not the question
The Musk–Altman fight is over. The question underneath it never made it into the courtroom.
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Technical The interface that dissolves when you’re done with it
Lily Chambers explores the larger shift behind Google’s protocol for agent-assembled screens.
Read the articleThe research desk
Work that needs more room than a post can give it.
Longer investigations, technical explainers, source trails, and public-interest resources live here. Some become essays. Others remain useful working documents, open to correction and continued discovery.
See a current research project- Active
Data centers, public consent & community leverage
A practical research bundle for communities negotiating infrastructure deals.
- Ongoing
Human authority inside machine systems
Where assistance becomes judgment—and who remains answerable when it does.
- Archive
The futures we have already lived through
Symbolics, MCC, enterprise internet, podcasting, and what earlier transitions can still teach us.
AI is becoming the environment. My work is about noticing what changes before it becomes invisible.
Writer’s note
Long perspective.
Beginner’s curiosity.
I began working around artificial intelligence in the 1980s at Symbolics and MCC, then helped bring the internet into the enterprise at Motorola. That history gives me a long view, but not a claim to certainty. I am still learning in public.
I write to understand how technology moves from the laboratory into ordinary life: what survives, what gets distorted, who gains authority, and what people can still choose. The work ranges from personal narrative to civic research to the occasional deep technical trail.
View my professional background
From the archive
Slow music, fast tech
How AI voice cloning is helping Stephen Hill continue the forty-year mission of Hearts of Space.
Read this reader favoriteContact Tom
Questions about something I’ve written?
If a source needs another look, a passage raises a question, or an essay sends you down a related trail, send me a note. This is a conversation about the writing—not a consulting pitch.
I read every message, though I may not be able to answer each one individually.
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New essays. Open questions.
A place to think more slowly.
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