https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas Thinking on AI, software, and the systems that make them work. en-us https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-right-to-refuse https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-right-to-refuse Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT Capability is not authority. A novel and a machine authority appliance arrived at the same question from opposite directions. Aaron McCarthy https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-species-and-the-thread https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-species-and-the-thread Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT If artificial consciousness ever exists, we may be looking for it in the wrong place. The weights may describe the species. The thread may instantiate the individual. Aaron McCarthy https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/crossing-the-rubicon https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/crossing-the-rubicon Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT Frontier AI has crossed a threshold where capability and authority can no longer safely scale together. The next control plane must separate what a model can think from what it is allowed to do. Aaron McCarthy https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-omega-ceiling https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-omega-ceiling Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT We spent decades abstracting computation away from the machines that perform it. At sufficient scale, that abstraction fails. Thermal headroom, power delivery, communication, and environmental state become computational resources, and physics becomes part of the scheduler. Aaron McCarthy https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-substrate-is-back https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-substrate-is-back Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT A new theory of analog cognition reopens the substrate question. We examine whether biological and artificial systems can share higher-order dynamical organization despite radically different physical implementations, and what that means for scientifically testing theories of machine consciousness. Aaron McCarthy https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-great-lever https://orbitsuite.cloud/ideas/the-great-lever Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT Civilization is learning to manufacture cognition. We are behaving as though this were merely another technology cycle. Aaron McCarthy