Creative Differences

Gísli Rafn Ólafsson - The Crisis Leader

Back in 2013, my friend Gísli Rafn Ólafsson wrote an excellent book - The Crisis Leader - based on his experience as a technologist (I first met him at…

Sep 10 • 

Donald Farmer

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A walk with uncertainty

Come for a walk with me.

Sep 8 • 

Donald Farmer

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August 2025

Vessel

Rethinking a New York landmark

Aug 25 • 

Donald Farmer

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Undefining AI

In my last post, AI Fast and Slow, I explored how AI adoption moves along different timelines (corporate, systemic, and personal), each with its own…

Aug 16 • 

Donald Farmer

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AI fast and slow

I feel like I have been reading recently quite contradictory observations about the pace of AI development and adoption.

Aug 14 • 

Donald Farmer

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July 2025

Project Vend - the Consciousness Trap

I have written about Anthropic’s Project Vend as an example of how anthropocentric thinking obscures basic system design failures and re-presents them…

Jul 14 • 

Donald Farmer

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Project Vend - The Anthropomorphism Trap

In my previous post about Anthropic's Project Vend, I argued that the much-discussed failure of this experiment was primarily a system design issue…

Jul 7 • 

Donald Farmer

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Anthropic's Project Vend - a failure of system design rather than AI

Anthropic's Project Vend deployed Claude Sonnet 3.7 as an autonomous shop manager for one month, granting it control over inventory, pricing, customer…

Jul 6 • 

Donald Farmer

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Writing for others

Over recent years, especially in business and technical fields, the conditions under which we write and read have been changed by language models and…

Jul 4 • 

Donald Farmer

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June 2025

The limits of presence: my work in AI and emotional care

It has been weeks since I posted here.

Jun 25 • 

Donald Farmer

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April 2025

Spaces physical and digital

Our understanding of environment has changed in recent decades.

Apr 9 • 

Donald Farmer

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I just must write about this ...

In my last two newsletters I have written about how we reduce the quality of human intelligence when we compare it to artificial intelligence, and how…

Apr 3 • 

Donald Farmer

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