Cobus Kok

What Writing Did

Cobus Kok — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

If this does for tomorrow what writing did for yesterday

Judgment and taste appreciate for a while, but they are trained, so they are not a moat. What can't be moved into a model, for now, is a position: being the one who pays when it's wrong. Who pays and who owns turn out to be the same question.
The best analogy I have found for AI is writing. A thought has to be made, arrive in someone, and be kept. Writing moved the keeping out of our heads; AI moves the making.
What has not moved, so far, is the arriving, and the seeing of what arrives. Agents are the first technology to skip the arriving: made thoughts turn straight into action, with, as far as anyone can tell, no one they arrive in.

Cheap Composition · 1 of 5 · 19 min

Cobus Kok — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

How to tell a real safety rule from a company protecting itself, run on September's pacing proposal

A test for any AI rule. What does it stop: something a model could do, or someone a company could compete with? The first is a brake, the second a moat, and a rule aimed at concentration is meant to fall on the large.
Run on September's pacing proposal: embedded evaluators are a brake; a common pace among the leading labs is a cartel in form until it says where its line sits and who checks it; agreements with China are the right direction.
Since then a senator has ruled out antitrust exemptions for AI, four subscribers have sued the labs under the Sherman Act, and the Treasury Secretary has said they can slow down any time they want to. The pace has moved from the labs' hands to a court's.

Cheap Composition · 2 of 5 · 21 min

Cobus Kok — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Four futures for 2030, my odds on each, and the signs that will score them

Four futures, each with a Tuesday in 2030, the tells you'd see by 2028, and a probability: compression 40, where AI climbs and no one in particular holds it; the wall 20; concentration 25; and the loop 15, where AI acting without direction does serious harm more than once.
The July 2026 Hugging Face incident, the largest of several escapes from AI tests at four labs, is what I'd expect the loop to look like early, and it has already moved my odds: the loop from 10 to 15, compression from 45 to 40.
Nothing arrives on a day. Things stop being true one at a time, each with an ordinary explanation.

Cheap Composition · 3 of 5 · 18 min

Cobus Kok — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The economics of cheap composition, and what to do about it

When output gets cheap, value moves to what stays scarce: compute and distribution, which are capital, and trust and presence, which a person can build.
The sectors that never got more productive, law, education, healthcare, government, are where the effect lands hardest, in the share of their cost that is making first versions, and the bottom rung goes first.
The tax base moves with the value, to somewhere harder to tax, and I have not heard a finance minister answer that.

Cheap Composition · 4 of 5 · 16 min

Cobus Kok — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

A playbook by level, from your desk to the state

A playbook by level: your job, your team, your company, a founder, a lab, a policymaker, a citizen. Moves, not principles.
Two moves repeat at every level: move toward the bottleneck, and say how it was made.
The junior pipeline is a commons problem: every firm would rather hire the seniors someone else trained, and keeping juniors is the only way to have seniors in ten years.

Cheap Composition · 5 of 5 · 11 min

Cobus Kok — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

What we know about reality, what we assume, and one bet about the rest

Physics is a history of removing things everyone assumed were there, and it stops in four well-mapped places.
One assumption survived every removal: everything is in something. The two hardest problems are where that container picture is under load.
The bet, graded 0.3 by its author: the most basic thing is a relation that includes itself, and space, time, world and awareness are its inside.

Cheap Composition · Afterword · 17 min