Notes
Short reflections, observations and updates from the EDO team.
Borrowed Geometry
What thirty years of biomimetic disappointment can teach us about reading the field’s genuine crossings
The Targeting Question
Autonomous weapon systems trouble every one of those assumptions, not by breaking the rules but by removing the human from the moment the rules were designed to govern.
Where the Brains Went
Where a country’s best researchers choose to work is one of the more reliable leading indicators of where its capability will be in a decade — more reliable, often, than its defence budget or its diplomatic posture.
DNA as Substrate
In a laboratory at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the geneticist George Church...took his own book — Regenesis, fifty-three thousand words, eleven images and a short JavaScript program, 5.27 megabits in all — and wrote it not to a disk but to DNA.
The Compute Map
Compute is the axis along which that divergence is now most visible, most measurable, and most contested. The ability to train a frontier artificial-intelligence model is not evenly distributed across the world; it is concentrated in a small number of physical chokepoints.
From Palladium to Cognition
In the autumn of 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a United States Navy destroyer positioned itself north of Havana and switched on a device that could conjure an aircraft out of nothing. The device was called Palladium
The Soviet Equation
In 1962, the Soviet state publishing house Soviet Radio released a slim monograph by a physicist named Pyotr Ufimtsev: Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction.
When Fact-Checking Becomes Fact-Making: The Quiet Authoritarians of the Information Age
Once upon a time, “fact-checking” meant something. It was a final defence line—a barrier between sloppy journalism and public trust.
The AI Pope: Why the Vatican is Racing to Bless the Machine
In recent months, the Vatican has increasingly positioned itself at the frontlines of the global AI ethics debate—hosting conferences, issuing statements, and convening tech elites and moral theologians under frescoed ceilings to discuss the “soul” of the machine age.
There Is No Deep State… Only Shallow Citizens
The mythology of the deep state—this notion of an omnipotent web of unelected bureaucrats, clandestine agencies, and old-money dynasties operating behind closed doors—has become a seductive balm for a society unwilling to confront its own decay.
"To understand the future, we must first understand the ideas that made the present possible."