A Mathematician, a Different Kind of Mathematician, and a Statistician
PhD, public policy | AI & ML | Too many affiliations to list | he/him/Dr
| Website | https://jameshoward.us |
| Github | https://github.com/k3jph |
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/k3jph/ |
The artificial life tradition of the 1980s made a claim neither symbolic AI nor neural networks had made: that intelligence might be emergent rather than designed. You do not program the behavior. You set up the conditions. The field was right.
AlphaGo Zero learned to play Go through self-play. Hillis proved the idea on the Connection Machine in 1990. Some ideas arrive early and wait. #AIHistory #ArtificialLife
https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/10/simple-rules-surprising-worlds/
Uber burned its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Teams are watching token counters the way AOL subscribers watched the clock in 1993. Per-token pricing is a transitional artifact. Whether inference costs follow the broadband path or the electricity path, the current model will not hold.
New post: INSERT COIN.
https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/08/insert-coin/ #AIGovernance #Technology #AI
Someone complained their degree didn't get them a job. The response: what was your major? Both refrains. Both miss the point.
I have an area studies degree and I'm making espresso. Got it in 2020, already a working data scientist, because I wanted to know things. The espresso is just coffee.
College is not job training. It makes you a better person.
Researchers who had 'artificial intelligence' on their CVs in the late 1980s quietly rebranded as 'machine learning' practitioners. That wasn't cynical. It was accurate. 'Machine learning' described what the surviving methods were actually doing. The AI winter sorted the field. Those who stayed built what came next.
https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/04/the-second-winter/ #AIHistory #MachineLearning
In 1961, a robot took a job no one wanted. The same robot would have been helpless in a kitchen. Danger isn't a property of an environment. It's a relationship between an environment and the body encountering it. New post on the ecology of work and what robots taught us about human fitness:
https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/29/the-ecology-of-work/
MYCIN outperformed human specialists at diagnosing bacterial infections in 1979.
It was never deployed clinically. The liability question it raised has never been resolved.
New post on the expert systems era: https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/20/the-rule-based-interregnum/
