Future Tense

City of Glass

A Z Mackay — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:25:52 GMT

At 3.20 in the morning in January 1992, a federal agent stood outside Danny Kyllo’s triplex in Florence, Oregon, with a thermal imager. The device showed no faces and no rooms. It showed heat, which was enough for the government to wonder whether high-intensity lamps were operating inside, an indicator of an indoor marijuana factory.

The intrusion looked…

Research Notes on Radio Sensing, Walls, and Privacy

A Z Mackay — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:51:25 GMT

What happens when the thing that treats a wall as porous is no longer a strange government gadget outside the house, but the normal radio layer of phones, routers, access points, cars, tags and base stations? Cameras are easy to recognise as privacy problems. Radio is harder because it arrives as linking, finding, unlocking, safety and care. The useful …

Break the Machine

A Z Mackay — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:10:54 GMT

In April, Gallup published a statistic that should have made AI executives feel less like winners on the adoption curve. Among Americans aged 14 to 29, the share saying AI made them feel excited fell from 36 per cent in 2025 to 22 per cent in 2026, while anger rose from 22 per cent to 31 per cent. Use did not collapse, and just over half still reported …

Research Notes: Break the Machine

A Z Mackay — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:05:06 GMT

In April, someone fired at least a dozen shots into the home of an Indianapolis city councillor and left a note on the doorstep reading ‘No Data Centers’. The obvious first question was whether anti-AI feeling is crossing from comment sections into the physical world. The second question turned out to matter more: if it is, what kind of story is that, a…

Conscience as Line Item

A Z Mackay — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:33:26 GMT

A supply-chain-risk designation sounds like something from a warehouse inspection report. Bad firmware in a router. A pallet of screws that does not meet spec. In March, the Pentagon applied that phrase to Anthropic’s Claude products. To a model Anthropic had spent years teaching to refuse.

The phrase did what bureaucratic language does best: it made a f…

Research Notes

A Z Mackay — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:29:15 GMT

The first phrase that felt too small for the fight was “supply chain risk.” That is warehouse language, vendor language, language you expect around bad firmware or an unreliable subcontractor. So why was it being used against a frontier AI company whose central public asset is trust? The question kept pulling in two directions at once. Could a governmen…

The Vacuum Bubble

A Z Mackay — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:09:05 GMT

Casimir Inc. did not announce a better battery. That would have been too ordinary, too trapped in the old humiliations of chemistry: degradation, replacement, charging cycles, mining, cost. Better batteries belong to the world as we already know it, where energy has to come from somewhere and the invoice always arrives.

On May 12, the Houston company ann…

Research Notes for The Vacuum Bubble

A Z Mackay — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:05:00 GMT

I began with a question that felt almost too neat. What happens when a company claims it can turn the quantum vacuum into a commercial power source, and the claim arrives dressed like normal climate-tech fundraising? Instead of a forum post or perpetual-motion sketch, the trail opened with a seed round, a product name, an NSF award, a patent trail, and a peer-reviewed theory paper orbiting the same announcement.

The Research Trail

The Living Pharmacy

A Z Mackay — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:51:56 GMT

Researchers gave bacteria a job, watched them do it, and watched them leave over time when dosing stopped. The job was happening inside a living gut. The exit was part of the therapeutic claim. In a Cell paper published in April 2026, scientists modified strains of Lactobacillus plantarum for hepatic encephalopathy, a condition where a failing liver tur…

Research Notes

A Z Mackay — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:39:38 GMT

What does it mean to take a medicine that is alive? Not metaphorically alive. Actually alive, metabolizing, responding, and sitting inside a microbial community that already has its own politics.

The better question arrived once the sources started pushing back. When medicine uses gut bacteria as programmable metabolic tools, how do we decide when a living system is controllable enough?

That question became useful because it forced every source to answer the same practical problem from a different angle, moving from molecular design to animal evidence, then into regulation, containment, clinical failure, and consent.

The useful sources were not the ones that made engineered microbes sound most futuristic, but the ones that kept changing the scale of the problem, from a strain doing chemistry in a mouse gut to an agency deciding what kind of evidence can make a living product feel bounded enough for people to accept.

The Research Trail

Three Doors to Forever

A Z Mackay — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:42:05 GMT

Longevity is the polite name for an old wish, more life, but not just more years at the frail end. The version now attracting money and attention is about extending healthy years. Less dementia. Less cancer. More time before the body becomes the main fact of a life.

There are good reasons to talk about it now. Aging biology has become less mystical. Scie…

Research Notes

A Z Mackay — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:14:10 GMT

Most public discussion drifts toward the glamorous scientific problem. Slower aging, cellular reprogramming, earlier diagnostics. Useful questions, but not the only ones. A better trail ran through enrollment criteria, employer benefits, trial participation, family offices, and the administrative machinery that decides whether a treatment counts as care or compensation.

The Research Trail

The Great Sand Heist

A Z Mackay — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:06:33 GMT

The Sahara is the wrong kind of sand. So is the Arabian Peninsula. The Gobi. The Atacama, and every other desert on earth. These places together represent a third of Earth’s land surface, blanketed in the material modern civilization needs most, and almost none of it is usable. Desert sand is round. Billions of years of wind erosion smooth each grain in…

Research Notes: The Great Sand Heist

A Z Mackay — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:22:25 GMT

The question that started this: why does a planet ringed with sandy beaches face a shortage of usable sand? Desert sand is useless (grains too rounded, won’t bond in concrete). The sand that matters, river sand and sea-floor sand, is the stuff being stripped from riverbeds in West Africa and dredged from the South China Sea at industrial scale. Once that framing clicked, the research opened up fast.

The Cancelled Destination

A Z Mackay — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:34:03 GMT

On the evening of April 10, a capsule named Integrity hit the Pacific. Four people climbed out onto the deck of the USS John P. Murtha: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen. They were the first people to travel beyond low Earth orbit in fifty-four years. They had covered roughly 695,000 miles, pushing the farthest-from-Earth record…

Research Notes: The Cancelled Destination

A Z Mackay — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:30:10 GMT

What science actually justifies a permanent lunar base, separate from Mars chatter, billionaire feuds, and flag-planting theatre? Four astronauts had just looped the Moon, closer to the far side than any crewed vehicle had ever travelled. A week before they launched, NASA had pivoted the entire programme toward building a permanent outpost. The sequencing felt off. Trail started there: follow the money, follow the physics, follow the governance, and see what’s actually load-bearing.

The research trail

First stop, the NASA Artemis II launch day blog and the splashdown-day news release. Crew (Wiseman, Glover, Koch, Hansen), closest far-side approach 4,067 miles, distance record set April 6.

The Safety Theatre of Agentic AI

A Z Mackay — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:32:38 GMT

In January, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Fujitsu presented FieldWorkArena at the AAAI conference in Singapore. A benchmark designed to measure whether AI agents are safe enough to field in live industrial settings. Factories. Warehouses. Places where the wrong answer doesn’t embarrass the product manager but puts someone in a sling.

FieldWorkArena …

Research Notes: The Safety Theatre of Agentic AI

A Z Mackay — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:25:02 GMT

Started with a simple irritant: every major AI lab is publishing safety research faster than ever, and AI agents are failing basic real-world tasks at rates that should be embarrassing. These two facts sat next to each other in my reading list for about two weeks before the question finally formed. The question was this: is “AI safety” the thing we think it is, or has the term been quietly colonised by something that sounds like safety but functions more like branding?

That question opened up a lot of territory. Here’s how the trail ran.

The Research Trail

The Aquifer and the Algorithm

A Z Mackay — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:49:49 GMT

Kelvin signs the water permit on a Tuesday. It’s a good permit. The engineering is sound, the flow rates are within spec, the aquifer recharge modelling says the draw is sustainable at the facility level. He’s a competent man doing competent work. He has a mortgage in suburban Virginia, and the permit crosses his desk alongside eleven others that week, …

Research Notes: The Aquifer and the Algorithm

A Z Mackay — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:43:22 GMT

I had an interesting call with a Future Tense subscriber last week. As a result of that call I started wondering how much water a single data centre actually uses. Not the industry total, not the national figure, just one building. The answer turned out to be the thread that revealed a measurement gap so wide you could lose an entire industry’s environm…