About
Age of Robots is about intentionality and attention as the machines arrive.
Intentionality is the project. Attention is the discipline. The first is the choice to live deliberately when the easy way is on offer. The second is the practice of sitting with one person, one place, one moment, long enough to actually see it. Without intentionality, attention drifts. Without attention, intentionality is just talk. AoR is the work of holding both at once, and showing what it looks like.
The subject isn't AI itself. It's the people negotiating with it. Founders, artists, builders, teachers, parents, kids, skeptics, misfits. People still figuring out where they fit, and what they're willing to trade for the convenience on offer.
Some issues are long interviews. Some are essays. Some are stories about people who live near me. All of them are humans trying to figure it out.
Who's writing this
My name is Jason Erickson. I live in Kitsap County, Washington, with my wife and our kids. I write Age of Robots myself, slowly, on a schedule that doesn't optimize for speed. Pieces go out when they're ready, not when the algorithm thinks they should.
I'm pro-AI in how I use it and pro-intentionality in what I publish. The two are not in conflict. They just require choosing what to point the tools at.
My kids have a different shape than I had at their age. They were born into this. That fact is part of why I'm writing.
On YouTube
Age of Robots also lives at @official_age_of_robots on YouTube. The channel is not a marketing afterthought; it's a second medium for the same publication, run on the same rhythm. Some pieces work better on the page. Some work better with sound and movement. Some land best when the kids are doing the asking.
Cadence
Slow. A piece that takes three weeks to write and twenty minutes to read is the right ratio. The machines can produce faster. I am not competing on that axis.
On the network
Age of Robots also makes possible the Human Story Experiment, an editorial network of careful humans interviewing other humans across Kitsap County and beyond. If you read AoR for the argument, you might read HSE for the practice.