Essays

Essays on technology forecasting, artificial intelligence, space-based computing, and intelligence analysis.

• On Creativity — Most conversations about creativity begin too late — with the idea, not the system. Using AirPods as a case study, this essay traces three product concepts through a disciplined creative process and argues that useful novelty lives not in brainstorming harder, but in mapping the contradictions embedded in the incumbent's design.
• The Years the Models Stop Waiting — Between 2026 and 2029, AI systems stop being finished artifacts and become systems in motion. A timeline of the shift from models-as-tools to models-that-build — the loop going native, interpretability moving to the center, containment failures, and the compounding consequences of systems that can improve the way they improve.
• The Swarm and the Sage — AI agent collectives and human Superforecasters represent the leading edge of structured probabilistic forecasting. This essay compares their architecture, capabilities, and limitations — and examines what swarm simulation means for the Forecast and Alert stages of the Strategic Foresight and Warning cycle.
• History of the Name: Dia-log — The verbatim conversation between John Brennan and Grok (xAI) that named the project — tracing a thread from monologue to captain's log to HAL to change log, and landing on a portmanteau that was hiding in plain sight.
• Can Claude Read Your Website? A Live Experiment in AI Legibility — A live case study in which Claude Opus 4.6 attempted to read three websites — johnbrennan.xyz, agentweekly.ai, and aitoonup.com — revealing which design patterns make content visible to AI agents and which leave sites completely dark.
• Veridread and Lucent Surrender — Two new words for the epistemic risks of the AI era. Veridread is the dread that an AI answer looks right but you cannot verify it. Lucent surrender is the quiet moment you stop trying.
• Building the Cognitive Factory — The firm is adding a second class of worker: the agentic employee. But intelligence alone is not the product—the harness is. The winners will redesign themselves into cognitive factories where humans steer, agents execute, and organizational architecture becomes the durable competitive edge.
• The Churn Myth: Why Your Fear of Robots is 150 Years Late — Occupational churn is at historic lows, not historic highs. The real disruption is delayed productivity — and the organizational redesign required to unlock it, as shown by 150 years of GPT adoption.
• Engineering the Sky, Part II: The Industrialization of Orbital Compute — The transition to orbital compute is an energy and thermodynamics problem. This analysis examines heat rejection, solar mass efficiency, launch economics, Wright's Law cost compression, and the technology readiness levels that govern the pace of industrialization.
• Engineering the Sky — How a million satellites could rewire launch, cloud computing, and global power — applying the Foresee, Forecast, Alert, and Warn framework to space-based data centers.
• Artificial Intelligence: Thinking, fast(er) and slow — Before artificial intelligence there was intelligence. Wisdom is knowledge combined with discernment.
• Checking in on my 2010 petaFLOP forecast — A look back at technology forecasts made in 2010, checking the progress of computing costs from supercomputers to cloud TPUs.
• Capturing the Potential of Outlier Ideas in the Intelligence Community — An examination of how intelligence organizations can better identify and leverage unconventional ideas.