My‑Interests

My‑Interests

Essays on energy, technology and society; a museum of Western painting you can walk through; and a shelf of books to read at the end of the day.

Latest essays

42 essays since April 2025, most of them about the power grid and the machines that have come to depend on it. Several are also in German and Portuguese.

All essays, by subject

  1. , Energy & Grid

    The Margin at the End of the Power Line

    Artificial intelligence has the cost structure of heavy industry and the profit structure of software. The costs arrive on bills nobody itemizes; the profits are called innovation. An enthusiast asks why the public has not yet connected the two.

  2. , AI & Computing

    The Most Trusted Machine in the House

    Capable household robots may arrive sooner than many expect. Their hardest problem may not be engineering but trust: whose interests does the machine ultimately serve?

  3. , Energy & Grid

    Several Futures of Nuclear Power

    A sixty-year-old design still rules the world's reactors. A wave of challengers is finally asking whether it should.

  4. , AI & Computing

    The Imagination Gap

    Capability has outrun ambition. The constraint behind both is rarer still — the imagination to conceive what is now worth attempting.

Rain, Steam and Speed, J. M. W. Turner, 1844

In the gallery today

J. M. W. Turner

Rain, Steam and Speed

1844

Find the hare on the track ahead of the engine — old nature outrunning the new machine, for now. A tiny plowman works the field, indifferent.