In March, I deleted Caped Corners, my old blog, and ported its readers to this publication, The Pingback, currently described as “A publication about how we know in the age of machines that know.”
This is its first essay, and I welcome you.
I first conceived The Pingback in March 2025. I felt malnourished both by the commentary around artificial intelligence and the instruments that attempted to integrate it.
For instance, it made no sense to me that an opinion that I had journaled or written some time ago could not be pinged back to me, perhaps as a notification, when some revelation in reality demanded that I recalibrate that belief. Or that I couldn’t spontaneously query and visualize the corpus of all the words I had written to map the ideas and questions I had raised about a particular topic.
Foundation models (the primitive behind what we call artificial intelligence today) have been capable of realizing epistemic infrastructure like this.
But no one was building or writing about these possibilities – hence, The Pingback.
The project has its academic roots in applied epistemology and the history of science and technology. Epistemology asks how we know what we know. Applied epistemology asks how to make practical the theories of knowledge and justification. You may consider Wikipedia, community forums, fact-checking, and community notes to be derivatives of applied epistemology. You can visit the homepage for more details.
Posts will be written by me, Joel. Guest posts will be labeled as such.
You can expect anecdotal pieces like the one you’ll read today, technical articles about instruments I build, commentary on related policy & technologies, and research.
I, Joel, am currently writing from the US, but will make an effort to keep the publication’s orientation global.
Originally published here.
A friend recently asked whether I truly believed that artificial intelligence would yield benefits to humanity. They also asked how I reconciled my belief that the technology might be catastrophic yet still be optimistic about it being built and deployed.
I have written a synopsis of my response below.
The concept of artificial intelligence being imminently catastrophic is not reconcilable across milieus I exist in. I was born, raised, and schooled in Nigeria. I graduated from high school in South Africa, in 2022, after two years of a military-like containment because of the pandemic. In the year that followed, I shuffled across my home town, Abuja, chasing stories of disenfranchisement and displacement and corruption.
I met many families whose children had never seen light outside the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp they resided: this camp was one of many across the country housing citizens expunged from their homes by terrorism in the North.
What led me to them, though, was the story of their disenfranchisement. Most of the camp-residents had experienced consecutive election campaigns, and participated in none. Why? The physical voter’s cards assigned to them had to be manually transferred between states, and to initiate this, they had to physically visit the government offices and file paperwork. A few able-bodied ones, they told me, made the full-day trek to-and-from the government secretariat. The rest remained, and likely still are, disenfranchised.
So while I and my African peers in the United States for college can afford to join our American counterparts to existentialize about projected AI dooms and its impact on creativity and aesthetics, the realities of our parallel, increasingly forgone milieu expose a stark irony. Public schools with hundreds of students manned by a couple of teachers. Sporadic power supply. Geopolitical tensions preventing us, including myself, from travelling or following dreams. Unstable internet access. Calls, meetings and interviews cut short by connection issues. Word-of-mouth methods for acquiring and conveying ideal farming practices. Disenfranchisement due to archaic data systems.
Each of these are issues for which solutions – and specifically technological ones – exist. These solutions are what I colloquially refer to as ‘solved art’ in the sense that they have been studied, documented, built, and now exist in the flywheel of technological innovation. In much of the global West, the practical availability of these systems is sufficiently ordinary that their underlying technological achievement recedes into the background. That power, water, and connectivity is broadly distributed and persistent is what enables one to transcend to matters of aesthetics, creativity, and a future where super-intelligent machines kill humanity.
Until artificial intelligence, much of this accumulated know-how remained locked behind specialized expertise, institutions, technical literature, and the capital. Others were tucked behind the annals of science and technology. The inventors rest in their graves - while most of the world remained unable to realize their breakthroughs.
So what does artificial intelligence look like from home?
It threatens to grant us access to the entire corpus of civilization’s knowledge. It threatens to reduce the man-power and capital needed to realize fundamental solutions to the problems in power, healthcare, and education that abound outside the West. It threatens to be an exponent that accelerates my milieu towards technological parity.
Artificial intelligence is, and will likely remain, one of the most transformational technologies we will live through.
“What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.”
– C. S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age”
Great words beautiful write up. Well done
Excellent write up.