Cavafy’s Ithaka has often been read as a reflection on life. The destination is not the goal in itself, but the experiences we gain through the journey. What we encounter, endure and discover along the way becomes lived experience, and eventually shapes who we are. But reading those thirty-six marvelous lines again, I find myself wondering about something else. Why do we need Ithaka in the first place? Odysseus does not set out in search of an unknown destination. Ithaka is h

As discussions around Artificial General Intelligence become increasingly sophisticated, they continue to revolve around familiar questions. Can machines become as intelligent as humans? Can they reason? Can they create? Can they align with human values? I have gradually become interested in a different question. Can AGI remain objective? The choice of the word remain is deliberate. An intelligent system may initially appear objective because it begins with the same architect

Some time ago, during a conversation with my mentor about moral judgment and how our perception of a situation shapes it, he told me the parable of the long chopsticks. The story stayed with me. Recently, while thinking about whether artificial intelligence can truly make judgments, I returned to the story, not simply as a lesson about compassion, but as a thought experiment about agency. In hell, people sit before bowls of food with chopsticks too long to feed themselves. Ea

It was a winter night in the early 2000s, a few years after I had started my entrepreneurial journey. I was still at the office, preparing meeting materials, waiting for a friend to arrive so we could go for a drink at a nearby bar. He was also an entrepreneur, struggling with his venture. I told myself I wanted to listen because I cared. But if I am honest, there was another feeling beneath that. Listening to his difficulties made my own situation feel less desperate. His st

Today, I can ask questions that once would have required weeks of research, access to specialists, or years of accumulated experience. I can brainstorm, structure, and refine ideas in hours or days. Within minutes, I can explore competing perspectives, trace historical patterns, test assumptions, and examine possible consequences. The amount of knowledge and interpretation available to me has expanded dramatically. Yet I have noticed a subtle tension. More understanding does

There is something I realized after a presentation I recently gave about entering the Japanese market. Among all the practical points I shared, one observation stayed with me afterward. Your success in a meeting is not whether the counterpart fully understood your solution. It is whether they can leave the room and explain it to someone else inside their organization in two sentences. At first, this sounds like a simple communication problem. Make your message clear, simple,

There was a period in my life when everything seemed to accelerate. More decisions, more execution, more visible progress. The feedback was good, and the results were real. Somewhere inside all of that, I stopped asking whether the direction still made sense. Not because I forgot to, but because stopping felt more dangerous than continuing. There is a quiet belief shaping how many of us live today. That as long as we keep moving, we are safe. If we slow down, we lose ground.

The pattern did not reveal itself in failures. It revealed itself in successes. There is a moment where everything appears to be working. The system is efficient, the output is correct, the organization is scaling, the model is improving. Nothing is visibly broken. And yet, something essential has already begun to disappear. We tend to look for failure as a signal. A drop in performance. A visible mistake. A crisis that forces attention. But some of the most important failure

A few days ago, I attended a discussion on who owns the risks of AI. The question was framed around responsibility. Corporations, users, regulators. But the conversation quickly shifted to something else. Competition. Speed. Market pressure. The need to scale. The argument was that these forces push decisions toward growth over consequence. But that framing felt incomplete. Because these forces are not absolute. They reflect choices. Choices about what kind of success to purs

Something feels off when we talk about “Moral AI.” As if morality is something we can design. Define the rules. Train the model. Align the outputs. And once the outputs look right, we assume the system is. But that is not how morality works. A few years ago, I would have framed this differently. As a technical problem. How to encode values. How to align systems. How to reduce harm. Today it feels like the wrong question entirely. Not because alignment doesn’t matter. But beca

Sometimes music doesn’t relax me. It confronts me. There are moments when a song opens something unexpected. Not a memory exactly. More like a sudden awareness of distance traveled, and by what means. I am not self-made. A few days ago, I lost someone who shaped my life more than I understood at the time. What I am is the accumulation of people, sacrifices, and places. Greece. Cyprus. Japan. Choices made by others before I had the capacity to make my own. Conditions I was han

A few years ago, I was discussing with Gil , a good friend, his research on decision delegation to machines. At the time, the focus was on trading. Algorithms, robo-advisors, financial decisions. It felt technical. But something about it stayed with me. Not the trading part. Something else. We don’t just delegate to improve decisions. We delegate to make them easier to carry. Once you see it, it is difficult to unsee. In organizations, decisions rarely sit in one place. They

A question I am often asked is simple. “How is life in Japan?” My answer is also simple. Every country has its strengths and weaknesses. But what I value most in Japan is something more subtle. The obvious things just work. Cities are clean. People respect each other. There is a sense of safety in everyday life. Trains are on time. Services are reliable. Transactions happen without the need to worry about being taken advantage of. We tend to call these things “normal”. But th

Being both Greek and Japanese, I have often asked myself something. Are the similarities I see between Greece and Japan real? Or are they simply reflections of my own identity? For a long time, I was not sure. Was I unconsciously searching for patterns that helped explain who I am? Reading Le Japon Grec (The Greek Japan) by Michael Lucken changed that perspective. Lucken describes how, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some Japanese intellectuals began t

We usually think collapse comes from failure. Bad leadership. Bad strategy. Bad risk management. But some of the most dramatic collapses start with success. The firm is growing. Returns are strong. Risk models perform well. Markets are calm. Scaling looks smooth. Nothing appears broken. Research on scaling, such as the work of Geoffrey West, shows that large systems often become more efficient as they grow. The financial industry illustrates this pattern well. That is where t

After many years working with startups and new initiatives, I have come to a simple but uncomfortable conclusion. Most startups do not fail because they lack intelligence, talent, technology, or funding. They fail because they get stuck at very specific moments of knowing. In almost every struggling startup I have seen, the information was already there. Teams had done extensive market analysis. They understood trends, competitors, and timing. They could even describe what wo

We often define intelligence as problem-solving, learning, or optimization. But all of these assume something prior. What matters. What can be ignored. When to act. When not to. Where this leads. That selection is judgement. Judgement is costly. It carries consequence. This is why it cannot be fully outsourced. Without judgement, power is merely amplification. AI is extremely powerful at interpretation and optimization. But amplification alone is not intelligence. The risk is

In the mid-90s I started my career when the Internet was emerging. I worked on ASICs powering high-speed packet and optical networks. I evangelized xDSL in Japan, turning existing telephone lines into broadband infrastructure. I helped introduce Voice over IP when carrying telephone calls over packet networks was still considered radical. Those ideas were not obvious. They required convincing telecom equipment vendors and operators that embracing architectural change was esse

Lately, much of the discussion in the technology world seems to orbit around a single question: are we close to Artificial General Intelligence? Most answers focus on how well machines can think. Reasoning. Problem solving. Writing. Planning across domains. If a system can do many of these things, we call it intelligent. If it can do them broadly, we call it “general”. That framing misses something important. Human intelligence is not only about thinking. It is about remainin

A Structural Theory of Agency Constraints, Power, and Latent Instability Christos Makiyama January 2026 Version: AAF v1.0 (Canonical) Canonical Abstract Complex systems across human, organizational, and artificial domains often exhibit prolonged periods of apparent stability followed by rapid and irreversible failure. In many such cases, instability is detected only after observable degradation occurs, or explained retrospectively once collapse is unavoidable. The Asymmetri