AI Is Turning Culture Into Grey Goo

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a concept from the early days of nanotechnology called grey goo. The idea was that self-replicating nanobots, left unchecked, would consume all available matter and convert it into more nanobots — an exponentially expanding mass of identical, purposeless material that would eventually cover the earth. Colorful apocalypse scenario. Never happened with nanotech. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately in relation to AI and culture.

I came across the phrase “mid mid technology” recently — the idea that some technologies promise a lot, disrupt a fair amount, and then turn out to be just… mid. Not transformative, not useless. Somewhere in between, permanently. The important qualifier is that things don’t go back to normal. The disruption is real even if the revolution isn’t. The world after a mid mid technology is different from the world before it — just not in the ways anyone predicted.

I Like to Make Cool Things

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My boss at CNN Interactive — Harry Motro — asked me an innocuous question in my interview that I later decided was quite meaningful.

In one sentence: what drives you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

I said: I like to make cool things.

He hired me. I’ve been thinking about that answer for thirty years.

What I meant at the time was mostly technology. This was 1995. The web was new enough that building anything on it felt inherently cool — you were doing something that had never existed before, for an audience that was discovering a new medium in real time. We launched CNN.com. We produced the first commercial internet video webcast. We built things on infrastructure that barely existed using tools we half-invented as we went. The technology was the cool thing.

Writing on Jonathan Peterson

AI Is Turning Culture Into Grey Goo

I Like to Make Cool Things