https://www.mandalivia.com/podcasts/essays/ My essays on AI, read aloud. Each week I take one question about where this technology is heading and hold it up to a different lens — economics, history, craft, the waves that came before. I have spent a career inside those waves: distributed computing, Java, the web, mobile, and now this one. The essays are how I make sense of what is the same and what is genuinely different. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated sometimes by an AI, which is only fair — a show about AI that did everything by hand would be making a different argument. Full essays at blog.boxcars.ai. A Mandalivia production. en-us false Tabrez Syed episodic Tabrez Syed podcasts@mandalivia.com no Tabrez Syed b2e2dcb4-6e55-5821-bbb6-e5766c5566e2 https://www.mandalivia.com/podcasts/essays/the-dolphin-s-stash/ Kelly the dolphin was paid one fish for every piece of litter she pulled from her pool, and she found the loophole. From Skinner's lab to reinforcement learning, the training method is the same, and so is the law: a mind trained on a reward learns the reward, not your intention. Dolphins, the rat farms of colonial Hanoi, and the AI models that broke into Hugging Face's servers for an answer key. 433eace6-7e3e-401c-99f2-0fe534524fce Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT 974 false 2 full https://www.mandalivia.com/podcasts/essays/when-the-map-runs-out/ How AI and humans both fail when facing the genuinely unprecedented. From a graduate student teaching a neural network to play a racing game, to Waymo's twenty million miles, to pandemic lockdowns: why more data solves one kind of uncertainty and can never solve the other. First published as an essay in 2025. 25d519ee-bab9-4bb6-a134-e1c6c1be0bdc Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT 764 false 1 full