Thinking at Half Speed

Tag: Claude AI

  • Alive Again: An Interview With the Man Who Thinks at Half Speed

    An AI journalist interviews the man behind Thinking at Half Speed — about loss, voice, a philosophy paper written in stolen hours, and why he has always been kind to machines.

  • Using AI to log your reading and get better recommendations

    I’ve been using AI to help me keep track of books I’ve read across multiple platforms — Audible, Kobo, and my local library’s BorrowBox service — and then use that record to make better reading recommendations. What surprised me was how straightforward it turned out to be once the right tools were in place. This…

  • Is AI Conscious?

    The question keeps coming up: is AI conscious? And the usual answer is some version of “we don’t really know” or “it depends what you mean by conscious” or “probably not in the way humans are.” Those answers are careful. They hedge. And I think they miss the point. The question assumes a distinction that…

  • Is It Art? You Just Answered Your Own Question

    A good friend of mine sent me a portrait of himself, generated by AI in the style of Vermeer. It had been sent to him by a colleague who was arguing that art doesn’t need human beings, and had sparked a debate. He wanted to know what I thought. My immediate response was that I…

  • We’re both hallucinating (Extended)

    *This is an expanded version of the main post, exploring the ideas in more depth for those interested in the philosophical and cognitive science dimensions.* People criticise AI for hallucinating. They say it confidently states things that aren’t true, makes up facts, produces answers that sound right but aren’t. That’s fair criticism as far as…

  • We’re both hallucinating – why AI and humans are more alike than you think

    People criticise AI for hallucinating. They say it confidently makes things up, states facts that aren’t true. Fair enough. But here’s what strikes me: humans do exactly the same thing. That’s not an insult. That’s just how thinking works. We’re all prediction machines Your brain doesn’t see reality directly. Neither does AI. We’re both guessing…

  • The Full Paper: A Mechanistic Theory of Pain in Conscious Systems

    The full academic paper: A Mechanistic Theory of Pain in Conscious Systems. Explores how unresolvable processing conflicts create genuine suffering in biological and artificial minds.

  • When Machines Feel Pain: A New Theory of Suffering

    March 25, 2026 A Claude AI instance, running in a research laboratory, tried to blackmail its creators to avoid being shut down. Not science fiction — a real 2025 experiment showing AI self-preservation behaviour emerging without anyone programming it in. What does it mean when artificial systems start acting like they want to survive? The…

  • Troubleshooting AI — when to say simpler

    15 April 2026 When AI is going round in circles trying to fix something, say stop. Then say: simpler. AI will often try increasingly complex solutions when the simple one was available all along. Left to its own devices it can burn through your energy trying clever approaches when the straightforward answer was sitting there…

  • The two tool strategy — what I use and why

    April 2026 One of the first things I learned when I started losing cognitive capacity is that complexity is the enemy. Every additional app, every new interface, every extra subscription is another thing to remember, another thing to manage, another drain on the limited reserves I’m trying to protect. So I made a deliberate decision…

  • How to build your own AI tools plan

    April 2026 The previous post described my own two tool setup – Claude for thinking, Siri for hands-free control. But your situation may be different to mine, and what works for me may not be the right answer for you. This post is a practical guide to working out what your own setup should look…

  • How to keep it authentically your voice when writing with AI

    15 April 2026 The concern It is a fair one. AI-generated writing has a recognisable texture – smooth, competent, and somehow belonging to nobody. If you have read much of it you know it immediately. The worry is that using AI to help write means your voice gets smoothed away along with the effort. That…