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by Brian Roemmele
Multiplex is an experiment, an experiment that will be on going. An experiment in publishing as I am not a professional writer nor will it be likely any contributors would be professional writers. Much of the content for Multiplex will be direct results from first hand empirical research that I am personally working on or other researchers are working on. Multiplex will also follow the work of other great researchers that are inventing new technology or new uses for existing technology. The experimental nature of Multiplex means that content can be dense and sparse at times. What we won’t do is write just to fill in space. We will aim to have regular content for the member-only area. There will always be free content to be found on the site as well as the X feed.—Brian Roemmele
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In 1995, Neil Postman published a book with a Janus-faced title. The End of Education meant two things at once: that schooling as we knew it was coming to an end, and that schooling had lost its ends — its purposes, its reasons, its gods. He argued that a school without a transcendent narrative is not a school at all. It is a holding pen with a curriculum. Thirty-one years later, the holding pen has Wi-Fi, and every student carries in their pocket a machine that can do their homework, write their essays, and answer every question on the test — while understanding none of it. Postman did not live to see the smartphone classroom or the chatbot term paper. He died in 2003. But he described, with surgical precision, the spiritual machinery that would make those things not just possible but inevitable. He told us which gods we were worshipping, what they would do to our children, and what we would need to believe instead.Neil Postman did not write a book about school reform. He wrote a warning about what happens when a civilization forgets why it teaches its young. Thirty-one years later the warning is no longer theoretical. It is the room we are sitting in.Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
For over a decade a small group have planned to become the central authority to “protect you” from AI. It sounds like a bad movie script, but understand that when you read this, all of this is taking place. So let's break down the mechanics of the public script, because once you see the pattern, I swear you cannot unsee it. It's everywhere once you look not with conspiracy but with evidence. Step one. Name an unbounded apocalyptic catastrophe. Step two. Attach a very short, very terrifying countdown clock to it. Step three, demand centralized political permission to build or continue development in that sector. And step four, this is the kicker, when the catastrophe inevitably doesn't arrive on schedule, you don't apologize. You just move the clock and ask for more money. It feels exactly like a doomsday cult. You know, like the people who gather on a mountaintop all wearing Nike sneakers on a Tuesday because the leader said a spaceship is coming to destroy the Earth.And then Wednesday morning rolls around. The sun comes up, no spaceship. But they don't disband. They don't admit they were wrong. The leader just says, our unified prayers bought us a brief window of time. The spaceship is actually coming next month, but we need stricter rules and larger donations to ensure we survive. This mountaintop analogy perfectly captures the psychological trap here. When a group's identity, and frankly their financial structure, are tied to an impending apocalypse, a failed prediction doesn't result in them re-evaluating their core belief. It results in them doubling down on the urgency.And this isn't just an AI phenomenon, this lens examines the historical base rates of these exact types of apocalyptic predictions. The clocks that would not pay.And the methodology of how these historical predictions failed is identical to how the current AI doom predictions will fail. We look at the trail of failures that destroyed generations it starts with a massive cultural touchstone from 1968, Paul Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich, a biologist, predicted that the battle to feed all of humanity was already over. He said that in the 1970s and 80s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death regardless of any crash programs embarked upon at that time. And people just accepted this as fact. It was treated as a mathematical, scientific inevitability by the press and policymakers. We drive past the “No Nukes” anti enegery deception that sent the US on to a deeper connection to petrochemical energy. None of this is new, the new mask goes on the same corpse of dead end ideology.Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
Imagine a man who can win almost any war he is handed, and still cannot win the war inside his own name. Imagine a civilization so abundant it no longer needs soldiers of its own, so it borrows other people’s genius for violence and calls the arrangement morality. Imagine a chair that is not furniture. This is the cold thunder Iain M. Banks unleashes in Use of Weapons (https://amzn.to/4wmKNvq), the novel that asks the question The Player of Games only circled: after scarcity is solved, who gets used, and what does the using do to the user?In Part 7 I walked with Bora Horza Gobuchul through the Idiran war and showed the Culture from the outside, a machine civilization that looked to an old warrior like the end of meaning. In Part 33 I stood with Jernau Morat Gurgeh on Chiark Orbital and watched paradise curdle into boredom until a game became a weapon and a weapon became a soul. Now Banks turns the lens on the hidden hand itself. Special Circumstances. Contact’s shadow. The department that does not play Azad on a public board. It plays people.Picture the Abundance Interregnum not as a gentle dawn and not even as Gurgeh’s tournament. Picture it as a weapons locker whose door has just come unlocked. AI agents are no longer toys. Humanoid bodies are no longer demos. Local models in garages can already plan, persuade, fabricate, and coordinate. The question is no longer whether we will have power. The question is whether we will become the Culture’s Minds, or whether we will become Zakalwe: brilliant, useful, and secretly broken, running other people’s missions because we cannot face our own.Elon Musk has said the Culture books are a pretty good prediction of the future he is building. SpaceX drone ships carry Banks names. That future is not only Orbitals and matter printers. It is also Special Circumstances. It is the temptation to treat a person, or an agent, or a swarm, as a tool that happens to talk. Use of Weapons is the book that refuses to let that temptation stay pretty.Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
They Laughed At Me When I SaidThey laughed. That is the part I want you to remember first, because the laugh is the sound a dying consensus makes when it still thinks it owns the future.In 2012 I stood in front of a venture group and said that nanofabrication—true atom-by-atom assembly, not 3D printing, not sintering, not melting plastic into the shape of a wrench—would produce working discoveries before 2030, and that the path to a replicator was no longer science fiction. Their “expert” told the room my entire talk should be disqualified. There were no atomic-layer nanofabricators, he said. There never would be on any timeline a serious investor should care about. A hundred years, if ever.I have heard that same sentence about useful AI that would pass a Turing Test. I have heard it about the personal computer, about the internet in every home, about a robot that could walk into a room and do useful work. The expert is long gone. I am still here. And Oak Ridge National Laboratory just published the receipt.What Oak Ridge Actually DidOn September 3, 2026, ORNL announced what researchers at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences had already proven in ACS Nano: an artificial intelligence can now see individual molecules on a surface, decide how to move them, and build a working material atom by atom—then keep doing it for more than twenty-five hours without a human hand on the controls.They built the very first crude nanofabricator .Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
The Same Founder Sold Apple the Face — Then Sold Apple the Unspoken WordHow Aviad Maizels’ second Cupertino exit turns PrimeSense’s light-coding lineage into connectionless intent reading on iOS.Apple’s purchase of Q AI has been reported as just another AI shopping trip: whispered speech, noisy rooms, a $1.5–$1.6 billion price, Siri that finally works in a subway. That is the public layer. It is not the story. It's a story is a 13-year circle.In November 2013 Apple confirmed it had bought PrimeSense, the Tel Aviv company whose structured-light sensor had given Microsoft’s original Kinect its depth eye, for about $360 million. Four years later that same optical grammar — near-infrared light coding a face, a camera reading the distortion — shipped as the TrueDepth array behind Face ID. I wrote that arc as it was forming: PrimeSense was never a gaming leftover. It was the first tile in an Israeli sensing stack Apple was assembling for identity, emotion, and Voice First devices that would not need a password.I talked about this before anyone understood on Quora and my research was syndicated as [Apple’s RealFace Acquisition and What It Really Means.This is the continued story.. Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
The word singularity did not start out as a product launch or a podcast line or a date circled on a calendar or a book title often quoted a punchline. It started as someone admitting the map had failed. In mathematics, a singularity is where a function stops behaving. Division by zero. A pole. A place where slopes and limits will not hand you a finite answer. A mathematical singularity is a point where a function, curve, or surface stops being well-behaved: it may blow up to infinity, fail to be differentiable, or change topological type. The most familiar pictures come from three places.Physics uses the same word for the region, most famously the center of a black hole, where curvature and density push the usual equations past the point of being usable. You get close and time and space and mass stop being things a working physicist can treat with the tools that work everywhere else. The formulas do not taper politely…they blow up. That is why the metaphor stuck when people trained on those formulas started watching technology. If the rate of change is itself changing, there may be a stretch of history where yesterday’s models of how the future works just stop computing. In its first honest use the word was not a forecast of angels or demons. It was a warning about prediction running out of road.What follows is the long life of that warning. Who used it. What they meant. How the meaning split into several things that do not actually fit in the same bag. How the loudest voices of 2025 and 2026 wear the word like a badge. And why the badge may be the least helpful part of the story. The point is not to sneer. The point is to take the word serious enough to see what it can do and what it cannot. The first conversation that was not yet a doctrine The earliest technological use is not a manifesto. It is a remembered conversation, written down after one of the speakers was already gone..Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
In the mid-1990s, as the internet was still largely a specialist tool and genetic engineering remained more promise than practice, a small group of professional futurists set out to map the world three decades ahead with unusual accuracy. This was extracted from government work they did the defense department insights that were shared with them and the connections they formed in academia. Rather than offering vague speculation or single-point predictions, they gathered and stress-tested hundreds of forecasts across science, technology, and engineering, then distilled them into a disciplined set of high-probability assumptions. The result was one of the most ambitious exercises in applied foresight of its era.That foundational work crystallized in 1994 with Joseph F. Coates’s concise report, The Highly Probable Future: 83 Assumptions about the Year 2025. Drawing on Project 2025—a multi-year corporate and research collaboration—Coates laid out eighty-three carefully reasoned statements covering information technology, materials science, genetics, energy, demographics, environmental management, and social change. These assumptions were never meant to be destiny; they were intended as a shared intellectual platform on which organizations could test strategies and explore alternative futures. It was printed and was quickly forgotten.Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
The entire industry of text based “AI Detectors” is a pure grift machine built on arrogance, bad science, and the willfull stigmatizing of millions of real human writers. These tools do not work. They never worked. They will never work in any reliable way that matters. And the people selling them know it.I wrote a while ago about the use of Ai in any work of text in detail. I predicted some of these “AI Detector” companies would begin and it has. they are desperate for business through any means necessary.. Of course people are using AI, and calculators, and cars instead of walking and electric lights instead of candels. It is up to the author to disclose if they used such tools but these companies claim to solve a problem that does not exist in the way they pretend. The only questions that actually matter when you read something are simple: Is this passage worth reading? Is it thoughtful about the subject? Did I learn anything?An average human can answer those questions without some black box software that spits out a fake percentage and then ruins a student’s semester or a writer’s reputation. Detectors solve nothing. They create a new form of digital scarlet letter based on statistical noise.Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele
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Multiplex is an experiment, an experiment that will be on going. An experiment in publishing as I am not a professional writer nor will it be likely any contributors would be professional writers. Much of the content for Multiplex will be direct results from first hand empirical research that I am personally working on or other researchers are working on. Multiplex will also follow the work of other great researchers that are inventing new technology or new uses for existing technology. The experimental nature of Multiplex means that content can be dense and sparse at times. What we won’t do is write just to fill in space. We will aim to have regular content for the member-only area. There will always be free content to be found on the site as well as the X feed.—Brian Roemmele
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