Volume III · Number 6 · September 2026
Independent and reader funded. No advertising, no sponsored posts, no affiliate links. editor@eyeforai.blog
Contents/Essays
The archive
Six long pieces, each arguing something specific. They are meant to be read whole rather than skimmed, and they are ordered by publication date rather than by importance.
Contents
Eye for AI · 4 September 2026
Every good test of machine ability eventually becomes a bad one. The interesting question is not whether that happens but how quickly, and what we are entitled to conclude in the interval.
Eye for AI · 21 August 2026
A demonstration proves that a system can succeed. A deployment requires that it rarely fail, in a specific way, for a specific person, on a Tuesday. These are almost unrelated problems.
Eye for AI · 7 August 2026
The clearest historical evidence on automation and employment is not about looms or robots. It is about clerical work, and what it shows is more unsettling than either side usually admits.
Eye for AI · 24 July 2026
A single phrase now covers four research programmes with different evidence bases, different timescales, and occasionally opposed prescriptions. The conflation is costing all four of them.
Eye for AI · 9 July 2026
Training costs make headlines. Inference costs decide what actually gets built, and they behave in ways that make the standard cost-collapse narrative less reassuring than it sounds.
Eye for AI · 18 June 2026
Some abilities appear to arrive suddenly as models grow. A careful line of criticism argues the suddenness is an artefact of how we score. Both sides are partly right, and the disagreement is more interesting than either.
Filed under
Standing section
How we measure machine ability, why the measurements decay, and what a serious evaluation would have to look like.
Standing section
What automation has historically done to occupations, who absorbed the cost, and why aggregate employment figures answer the wrong question.
Standing section
Regulation, procurement, compute thresholds and open weights — read as decisions with trade-offs rather than as a contest between good and bad actors.
One essay a fortnight, sent whole, with the notes attached to the same email.