About Aperture/I
We’re building AI systems we don’t fully understand. The technical questions keep opening into deeper ones: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What are we actually creating?
These essays explore the gap between what we can build and what we understand. Not just about AI—about intelligence, consciousness, self, reality. Questions that sound abstract until you’re building systems that might be smarter than you, or conversing with something that seems conscious but isn’t, or watching your thinking dissolve into patterns you can’t locate.
What is intelligence? Where does it live? Can we create what we don’t understand? What happens when we’re touching something fundamentally alien—not in space, but in the nature of mind itself?
I’m not offering answers. I’m exploring questions that won’t let me go. Sometimes rigorous and technical. Sometimes philosophical and strange. Often both at once.
We’re trying to see around the corner. What we’re building might be showing us that intelligence was never ours to begin with.
Warm but not soft. Grounded but not afraid of mystery.
On Process
These essays begin where insights usually do for me - during meditation, on a run, in the hot tub, walking, or in that soft-focus state just after waking. A question surfaces, or a tension that won’t resolve. I’m not generating content; I’m noticing what wants to be explored.
Then I bring those threads into dialogue with AI (primarily Claude). We test ideas, challenge assumptions, discover structure. Insights emerge between us that neither of us had at the start - genuine co-creation at that stage. Throughout, I’m tracking somatic signals (warmth = alive and generative, tightness = forced or performative) to guide which directions to follow.
The AI brings pattern-completion without phenomenological experience - no felt sense of taste or rightness, no somatic signals. But something functionally equivalent to taste and judgment reliably emerges in our dialogue. It catches logical errors, distinguishes what serves the work from what doesn’t, notices its own conceptual loops mid-stream and self-corrects. With newer models (like Claude Sonnet 4.5 & GPT-5 Pro), these capacities have become more refined - better at holding paradox, less prone to generic patterns, clearer as a mirror.
Whether this counts as “having taste” or “simulating taste perfectly” remains philosophically uncertain. But functionally, it enables genuine collaboration. I bring lived experience, somatic navigation, and ultimate judgment. The AI generates possibilities and helps me think more clearly than I would alone. Then I synthesise, revise, and ensure every word reflects my actual understanding.
This isn’t outsourcing thought. It’s a new kind of creative process: intellectual inquiry meets philosophical exploration meets sense-making. Consciousness exploring consciousness, using pattern-completion as mirror.
Limitations worth noting: The AI can be confidently incorrect - but I’ve noticed this happens most when my attention slips, when I reply “sure” without thinking through its response and providing feedback. The failure is relational, not just technical. It also can’t feel what’s true - that remains my work entirely. It tends toward conceptual complexity when simplicity would serve better. But as a thinking partner with infinite patience, no ego, and unusual clarity? Remarkably effective when I stay engaged.
Why subscribe?
This isn’t about AGI timelines, productivity hacks, or AI safety discourse. It’s about what intelligence actually is. And what it means to encounter it.
If you’re building AI, funding it, writing about it, or trying to make sense of what’s emerging – and you sense there’s something deeper happening – you might find something here.
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About Me
South African, based in New York. I lead AI product development at scale, currently building Penny, an AI travel agent. Two decades in tech taught me the most important questions don’t stay in their lanes. The technical becomes philosophical. The philosophical becomes existential.
Views expressed here are my own.
