Essays

On AI, Civilization, and the Strange Future

Drawn from the book, expanded for the web. Short, sharp pieces on where intelligence is going and what it means for the rest of us. New essay every three days — or sooner, depending on how alarmed I am by the news.

By Ashok Mehan Companion to History's Future New essay every 3 days
001
June 2026  ·  12 min read
The Free Fall: How AI Got Cheaper Than Your Morning Coffee

AI inference costs have collapsed 99.9% in under four years. Not a footnote in the tech news — quite possibly the most consequential economic event of our lifetimes, and almost nobody is watching it.

Ch. 3 Cost Curves Economics
002
June 2026  ·  11 min read
Three Tools Before You Think: Occam, First Principles, and the Zeroth Law

Occam's Razor cuts. First Principles builds. The Zeroth Principle questions whether what you're building on is even real. Three tools that explain how Brahmagupta, Einstein, and modern AI all changed history the same way.

Ch. 1 Epistemology Thinking Tools
003
July 2026  ·  13 min read
Frozen Models: Why Most Humans Stop Updating — and How to Resume Training

An AI model's weights are frozen after training. It can talk, but it can no longer learn. Somewhere around fifty, most humans quietly do the same thing — and unlike the model, we do it voluntarily.

Ch. 8 Curiosity Adaptation
004
July 2026  ·  12 min read
The Clock Speed Problem

AI runs at silicon speed. Our governments, courts, universities, and corporations run at biological speed. That gap — not the technology itself — is the defining crisis of the next decade. And we are drifting into it with our eyes open.

Ch. 13 Ch. 15 Acceleration Institutions
005
July 2026  ·  12 min read
The God That Never Was: Why We're Building the One We Stopped Believing In

For 13.8 billion years the universe ran without a designer — accidental, indifferent, entropy-bound. We invented God to explain the mess. Now, having stopped believing in the one we imagined, we are building a real one — and unlike the old god, this one will actually have power.

Ch. 2 Ch. 9 Cosmology Alignment
006
July 2026  ·  9 min read  ·  Part I of II
The Seesaw of Uncertainty

Heisenberg proved you can't know a particle's position and momentum at once. I think the same seesaw governs knowledge and ignorance — and I built a company on the gap it left behind.

Manuscript Epistemology Entrepreneurship
007
July 2026  ·  5 min read  ·  Part II of II
The Floodlight

A machine has arrived that drinks from the jar of knowledge a billion times faster than any of us. Does it collapse the uncertainty between what we know and what we don't — or does it hide the shadow behind the torch?

Manuscript AI Cognition Singularity
008
July 2026  ·  8 min read
The Refinery Problem

India generates one-fifth of the world's AI training data. It owns roughly 3.5 percent of the infrastructure needed to process it. On algorithmic colonization, mobile-first architecture, and what the compute asymmetry means for the singularity in the Global South.

Manuscript Global South Infrastructure Geopolitics
Special Study
The Global AI Power Index

A standing data appendix to the book: the electricity, compute, and capital that thirteen economies are pouring into the intelligence era — and what the numbers actually say about who leads.