Placeholder — this is a seed, not the finished essay. The full version is in progress.
Choosing to work on bio-inspired, energy-efficient, locally-adaptive AI rather than scale-maximalist transformer infrastructure is itself a position about what kind of AI should exist. I’m not a neutral engineer. I’ve picked a side: against centralized, extractive, brute-force compute; for distributed, frugal, embodied systems that can learn on a chip in a field rather than in a hyperscaler.
This essay will lay out why I think that bet is not just ethically preferable but technically underrated, and where it breaks down.