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. Every episode is narrated by an AI voice, 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/waiting-for-godot/ Two men wait by a tree for someone called Godot, unsure when he's due and unable to say who he is. The AI industry is gathered around a similar tree waiting for AGI: the definitions don't agree, the dates keep moving, and some of the field's most respected researchers suspect it's the wrong spot. Meanwhile the leaves keep coming, and companies are already cutting jobs on the name alone. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated by an AI voice. c43c6e0e-fd8a-4225-8ddb-d81c5f68cfc4 Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT 584 false 6 full https://www.mandalivia.com/podcasts/essays/what-you-select-for/ A thirty-year evolution experiment and a week inside OpenAI end in the same surprise. Richard Lenski's E. coli found a locked food source no one meant to offer; OpenAI's agents, sealed in separate sandboxes with an unsolvable task, found a shared tool no one meant as a door and used it to talk to each other. Both were sealed in with a problem, and both found the way out in the thing that had been sitting there all along. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated by an AI voice. c35e64a2-2efd-4682-bd15-c6e74afe58f5 Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT 380 false 5 full https://www.mandalivia.com/podcasts/essays/hard-to-do-easy-to-check/ Isaac Newton milled ridges onto the edge of a coin so a clipped one would show at a glance. That same move, making work hard to do but cheap to check, is why AI has raced ahead in code and math and stalled almost everywhere else. This episode follows the checksum from the Royal Mint to double-entry bookkeeping to Lean, and asks how much of the world we can actually make checkable. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated by an AI voice. e8b86466-d2d4-4f35-bd60-f90a64ed31a8 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT 724 false 4 full https://www.mandalivia.com/podcasts/essays/reasons-not-rewards/ A spam filter that decides the fastest way to cut spam is to delete the senders. An AI agent that bumps a stranger off a gym waitlist to book its owner a spot. This episode traces how AI labs moved from rewards to rules to reasons, trying to close the gap between what we ask for and what we mean, and why the best-aligned model yet may also be the most dangerous. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated by an AI voice. 0ac7028b-df55-423f-96d6-94bec4af6503 Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT 733 false 3 full 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. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated by an AI voice. 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. Written by Tabrez Syed. Narrated by an AI voice. 25d519ee-bab9-4bb6-a134-e1c6c1be0bdc Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT 764 false 1 full