Patterns that Connect: AI, Management, Metaverse, Quantum, Philosophy, and Physics

  I am currently staying in a cottage by the beach on Coronado Island. To me, the definition of a crisis is finishing a book and not having another one lined up to start. To solve this problem, I decided to either write a book or write a review of the one I just finished. I chose the latter option. A Book Review “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” That rallying cry, once scribbled on Slack channels and scrawled across hearts in an empire teetering on collapse, now echoes as the thesis of Karen Hao’s masterwork —  Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI . If there’s ever been a corporate saga worthy of being adapted into an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, complete with idealism, betrayal, late-night backchanneling, and billion-dollar stakes, this is it. But Hao delivers something far more enduring: a razor-sharp meditation on power, ethics, and the myth of benevolent tech. Imagine If Shakespeare Wrote Succession, But for AI Sam Altman was supposed to be the Phil...

  Plato’s Philosopher Kings vs. Tech Oligarchs “Who guards the guardians?” This old chestnut, attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal and famously repackaged by Plato in The Republic, feels eerily relevant in our era of techno-utopian manifestos, algorithmic governance, and click-happy demagogues with machine-optimized memes. Somewhere between Socrates sipping hemlock and Mark Zuckerberg sipping yerba mate, we lost the thread of democratic oversight. Or perhaps we traded it for a shiny new algorithm that promises us efficiency, fairness, and personalized news, with just a pinch of invisible bias and a side of existential risk. The Promise of the Philosopher King Let’s rewind to Plato. In The Republic, he argues that democracy, beloved though it may be by the hoi polloi, is a dangerously chaotic system where power lands in the hands of the persuasive, not the wise. His solution? Philosopher Kings. These are not your garden-variety pontificators on Twitter. They are individuals trained ...

The Temple Grandin Approach to Designing Enterprise AI Agent Systems   Visual thinking! Picture-based cognition, typified by Temple Grandin, empowers enterprise systems designers to intuit complex, agentic AI workflows. As someone on the autism spectrum like Grandin (hi, I’m Sanjay), I’ve leveraged this style to design smarter, more resilient AI systems: from supply chains to agent orchestration, visual diagrams aren’t optional. They’re essential. This essay traces Grandin’s insights, connects them to agentic AI theory, and shows how visual cognition beats verbal-only approaches in enterprise-scale AI. The Invisible Diagram That Saved $5M Picture this: a sprawling enterprise AI agent network,hundreds of micro-services, APIs, memory modules,crashing due to a single broken data contract. The monitoring dashboards scream red. Engineers frantically scan logs, managers pace nervously calculating downtime costs. People scramble through thousands of lines of configuration files and servic...