PITHY CYBORG

// TRANSMISSION ORIGIN STORY //

Hey! My name's Mike D. I'm a nerdy journalist and online educator from Greater Boston. I started writing Pithy Cyborg because I genuinely could not stop thinking about AI. Not in a casual way. In a stayed up until 3am reading about AI governance frameworks kind of way. The kind of obsession that makes you email yourself research notes at midnight and then feel only slightly embarrassed about it the next morning.

Thousands of subscribers later, I was still writing. Still sending. Still obsessing over AI policy debates, AI societal impact, the ethics of autonomous systems, and whether any of us really understand what we are building. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a reader said: have you thought about doing a voice narration?

I had not. I am a writer, not a voice person. My first recording sounded like someone narrating a technical manual inside a closet. But I kept going, because the words felt different spoken out loud. More urgent. More human. And the conversations happening inside AI, around alignment, around AI bias mitigation, around who gets to decide what these systems optimize for, felt too important to leave on a page.

So here we are. Turns out I feel like my articles are incomplete unless I do a voice narration now. I did not see that coming.