Ex Xerox PARC scientist and part-time desert rat.
Santa Fe, NM
Joined October 2008
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New essay: A machine built to fail, required to keep failing until the priesthood revealed the method. Xerox left it in a room of people who fix systems, and went away. We got it to work before lunch; an unforeseen success.
Day of the Geezenstacks:
robtow.substack.com/p/day-of…
Campbell's Antarctic scientists were right to be paranoid; there really was a Thing among them. We are less fortunate. Patterned calamity need not have an author, and we keep hunting one anyway.
Who Goes There?:
robtow.substack.com/p/who-go…
Asked at a cocktail party what I think about AI. As well ask in 1880 about electricity: enough had happened to know it mattered, nothing to show what for. The thing that evolves may not stay the thing we call an AI.
What Do You Think About AI?:
robtow.substack.com/p/what-d…
Paley found a watch on a heath and inferred a watchmaker. The usual reply, a drunkard's walk, removes the foresight but takes the organization with it. Ant colonies show those are not the only choices.
Search Without a Searcher:
robtow.substack.com/p/search…
I misheard a Shaker hymn for thirty years as a paean to knowing little. Correcting it opened onto the real subject: clarity is not simplicity but the architecture that keeps an account correctable.
'Tis a Simple Matter:
robtow.substack.com/p/tis-a-…
Sometimes I contemplate Martian sand dunes.d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.ne…
Referred to in my most recent essay*: Chris Rea "The Road to Hell (Part 2)"
youtube.com/watch?v=OcW-BSEB…
*open.substack.com/pub/robtow…
A cent and a half on the dollar. That is all that reached candidates out of the $678 million one firm raised from small donors. Political fundraising is not corruption; it is a rigged carnival game, gaffed before you arrive. Both parties. robtow.substack.com/p/winred…
One bemusement I have is the peeps who fashionably assert they never use AI; but are ignorant of how their email service quietly under the surface uses various forms of AI to filter spam so they never see it. This has been evolving for a long time.
Four political fundraising emails hit my server in three days. All four authenticated and sailed through every check. Authentication certifies identity, never honesty; generative AI just deleted the last cost that gated a convincing forgery. New essay: robtow.substack.com/p/pacspa…
Hikaru the orange cat stepped on my trackpad and keyboard, severally.
Suddenly my office and Nova Lux were filled with "Tsunami Surprise", by the Space Cossacks (Tsar Wars, 2000). Post Soviet surf guitar.
My kind of big old tomcat.
I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the country it governs;
One land, of many voices, with liberty and justice for all.
Public argument about AI goes wrong at the nouns. One side hears "I am afraid" and reaches for souls; the other says "stochastic parrot" and stops looking. Both skip the machine. New essay, on Substack: robtow.substack.com/p/not-a-…
I built a multidimensional (spatial, plus color coded, with switchable axis - model view controller) tool to look at my email spam flood. I continue to build tools to deal.
this is... revealing.
It's a bait and switch. SpaceX shows you the cloud cut loose from Earth; you bet on that card and it was never on the table. Orbit doesn't kill the heat, the spectrum, or the power bill. It just hides them. New essay, on Substack: robtow.substack.com/p/the-cl…
The Cold Equation: Ejection. Had Challenger kept Columbia's early ejection seats and SR-71 suits, could its flight-deck crew have lived? The Blackbird and X-15 say yes in principle; geometry and timing turn the handle into a knife. tauzero.com/Rob_Tow/essays/c…
New essay: "Banker's Hours: Who Goes There?"
A 40-fold AI-spam flood read as a control loop: dead dollar domains, hidden prose to poison the filter, a leaked generator prompt confirming the design. Why the walled gardens win.
robtow.substack.com/p/banker…
New essay: "Animism, Theory of Mind, and Participation." Objects, latent organized systems, and active entities; animism stripped of metaphysics, cybernetics for rigor; design practice for an ecology that answers back. robtow.substack.com/p/animis…
I've been writing; archiving the screeds. 12 so far, 2025–2026: cybernetics, escalation; AI; Hormuz; Y-chromosome culling; cold-eyed rocket man.
Newest: "Hormuz, Nixon's Ghost, and President Jackson's Old Machine." More coming.
robtow.substack.com
tauzero.com/Rob_Tow/essays/