AI
The Counting Problem
In 2013 India's official records put malaria deaths at 440. The Lancet put them at 205,000. The strategic problem was an instrument problem the whole way down, and tha...
The Labor War That Didn't HappenDispatch
NFL referees ratified a seven-year CBA by a 116-4 vote the spring after the league automated first-down measurement. A decade of predictions about unions versus robots...
Nobody Uses ItDispatch
The failure mode of automation was never technical. It is that six weeks later the spreadsheet is still open on someone's second monitor, and nobody wants to be the on...
Sixteen Workflows, One Small ServerNote
I spent the summer automating my own operation before automating anyone else's. Sixteen workflows, a €8 box, a 0.9% failure rate — and one rule that turned out to matt...
Licensed vs. ExtractedDispatch
ESPN built the largest consented voice-cloning operation in media and nobody is angry. The AI content that draws fury is the extracted kind. The line was never AI vs. ...
The Catch-Up LayerDispatch
Rapid Recap, Catch Up to Live, AI vertical cropping — every AI feature that shipped in sports streaming compresses time. The recommendation layer everyone spent a deca...
The Observer Effect
Half a season into MLB's robot-umpire era, the machine's biggest effect on baseball has come from the calls it never made. Umpires shade toward the machine's zone, hit...
The Word 'AI' Is Doing a Lot of WorkDispatch
The World Cup that just ended was the most ambitious live production ever attempted — sixteen venues, 104 matches, roughly 9,000 hours, all of it processed in software...
The Machine Is Right and Nobody Believes It
The World Cup's offside machine took a goal off the board for a touch no replay can show, and FIFA says the call was correct. It probably was. That is the problem.
Leapfrogging vs. Stepwise Growth: Two Paradigms of Progress
From India's telecom revolution to Kenya's mobile money miracle, the most transformative progress often comes not from climbing the ladder rung by rung — but from skip...
What Isn’t Changing: The Enduring Power of Live Sports in an Age of Acceleration
In an era of compounding disruption from AI and shifting demographics, live sports endure as a uniquely resilient cultural and economic force.