I’m Madkat Omega, a lead engineer and solutions architect working in applied robotics and artificial intelligence. These essays are my attempt to think clearly about the future we’re building: how it’s powered, who it works for, and what it does to the way we work, govern ourselves and tell our stories. I research difficult topics, build realistic arguments, and fact-check my work before it goes out. The decisions we make today shape the world future generations will inherit, and I’d like more people thinking about them.
There’s a lot here, so this page is a map. For more about me, see About.
If you’re new
Six places to start, one from each corner of the writing:
- Reclaiming Workplace Agency: how automating the mental assembly line could free us to rebuild trust, curiosity and meaningful work.
- How We Built Our Own Prison using AI: why “human-in-the-loop” is the most dangerous lie in modern engineering. A shorter read.
- Old Iron, New Code: retrofit autonomy and the family farm’s third path, which is applied robotics where it meets real work.
- The Windowless Room: what AI researchers once asked about minds, and where today’s chatbots keep breaking.
- Spycraft and Smart TVs: the real scandal in the OpenAI espionage case is that the television was already listening.
- Rehearsing the Death of God in a Digital Sandbox: how games and speculative fiction help a post-religious generation face an indifferent cosmos. A shorter read.
Read in order
These are series: stories meant to be read one after another.
The 1602 Machine
A five-act novel on the moral and legal architecture AI will need as it gains economic and social agency, with references to popular science fiction set against real-world cases.
Blueprint for Responsible AI Datacenters
A seven-part blueprint for datacenters that earn their place in a community: zero water impact, zero power impact, brownfield sites, economic reciprocity, civic design and local education.
Sovereign AI Assistant
Own your AI. Which laptops run models locally, how to build a private assistant for yourself, what a pod-scale setup looks like, and what you can build on top of it.
Singularity and Abundance
Looking at lessons from the past to prepare for a post-scarcity future.
Automation and Accountability
Two companion essays on who answers when AI automates high-stakes decisions, from stale assumptions in synthetic text to kinetic warfare.
Gen X and the 90s
Two Gen X essays on 90s music, unsupervised freedom, and the lost luxury of an unmonitored mind.
Browse by theme
Every story belongs to one or more themes.
- Artificial Intelligence 42How AI works, where it is headed, and what it can and can't be trusted to do.
- Work and Economy 26Jobs, money and markets in the age of automation, from UBI to the AI bubble.
- Politics and Society 20Governance, accountability and who decides, from AI policy to civic life.
- Infrastructure and Hardware 15The physical side of AI: datacenters, power, chips and the machines that run it.
- Build It Yourself 15Practical builds and business ideas: local AI, private assistants and one-person companies.
- Security and Privacy 4Surveillance, exploits, and keeping control of your own systems.
- Culture and Philosophy 18Games, music, myth and the big questions, with technology as the lens.
- Career and Well-being 5Working well: career advice, burnout and finding a sustainable pace.
Find anything
- Search covers the full text of every story.
- The archive lists everything by date, newest first.
- Tags are finer-grained topics.
Also on Medium
Every story here first appeared on Medium, and each one links back to its original. My Medium reading lists group the writing as three shelves:
- AI Architecture and Business: the physical, structural and enterprise realities of the AI boom.
- Surviving the AI Future: a practical and societal blueprint for the disruption of AI and automation, including the future of work and career survival.
- Philosophy in Media: the existential, ethical and metaphysical questions raised by AI and transhumanism, often through popular media.