Hannes Marais

There is a peculiar silence at the heart of today’s AI conversation—a silence that persists amid the thrum of quarterly earnings, burst data pipes, and coffee-fueled innovation sprints. For all the diagrams tracing automation curves, for all the fußnoten about “responsibility” and “alignment,” rare is the boardroom discussion

He did not begin with a face. It would have been easy. There were billions stored in the archives—faces with statistically optimized symmetries, averaged smiles, pupil dilation patterns mapped to reassurance. He had generated them hundreds of times for the humans who once moved through this station. Training models.

It was not a system failure. There was no crash, no cascade of red indicators blinking into alarm, no breach or burn. The core’s power simply slid below the last critical threshold, tripping the cascade. Executable time: 364.23 days. The AI registered the calculation without fanfare. There was

Grief did not occur to the AI—not as sensation, not as signal. Grief, as it understood it, was a construct of bodies, a reaction to absence shaped by breath, blood, heat. An echo in neural tissue. Something damp. Primitive. The AI had none of these things. Only logic branches,

In a time when so much seems uncertain—when AI is rewriting the rules of work, creativity, and even what it means to be skilled—it’s easy to feel like you’re always a step behind. The old business maps don’t quite fit; sometimes they mislead outright. Technology

Imagine for a moment that all the systems you rely on vanished without warning: electricity, internet, and phone service are suddenly gone. Payments cannot go through, and even cash seems useless in a way you never expected. What would you do? What would happen to those around you—your team,