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

When Japan Rediscovered Ancient Greece 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 c

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

I keep seeing this pattern, in startups and in large organizations. An organization starts with what looks like a strong idea or strategic direction. They have funding, brand, market presence, credibility, and resources. Execution is solid. Teams move fast. Products or initiatives reach the market. And then, often too late, something becomes clear. The why was wrong. Or a foundational assumption quietly stopped holding. Or the problem was never as fundamental as it first appe

I am a technology person. I love technology and the impact it has on humanity. It amplifies us and makes the world more manageable and predictable. Over the years, in many discussions with technology entrepreneurs, I noticed something. We talk a lot about technology and products, and much less about how value is actually created. To me, innovation is not the technology itself. Innovation is the entire mechanism of value creation. From defining the problem, to designing a solu

I have always enjoyed working with technology companies during their early stages. What draws me is not just the energy, but the ability to help shape the strategy (and purpose) of a new venture while it is still forming. Over the years, I have noticed a recurring pattern. As companies grow through success, processes and structure naturally follow. As incentives to sustain that success increase, expectations rise, and purpose is often the first thing to drift. As goals are pu

We live in an age of unprecedented wealth. Multi-trillion-dollar companies are already here, and trillion-dollar individuals no longer feel implausible. This is not a critique of wealth creation or consolidation. Money itself is not the problem. Money is a social agreement based on trust. It is not tangible. It is a tool. The real question is not how much wealth exists, or who holds it, but how money is positioned in our lives, our societies, and the systems we build around i

I’ve used the phrase “The future starts now” for years. It shaped my actions, my thinking, my attitude. I believed that what I do today shapes the outcomes of tomorrow. That is true. But I only understood the deeper meaning after a period that surprised me. After a season of momentum, I noticed something uncomfortable in myself. Confidence quietly became “rightness.” And “rightness” can easily drift into a need for attention, recognition, and control. Underneath that, there w

Early in the morning, while it was still dark, I went out for my first run of the new year. I’ve run this route many times. The path doesn’t change. The scenery always does. New houses appear. Old ones disappear. The path is familiar. Everything around it keeps changing. I didn’t expect it, but once I noticed it, it felt obvious. That quiet moment stayed with me. Long before castles, we built paths. We moved, traded, explored. Paths emerged naturally. And they endured. If you

This year, AI became impossible to ignore, shaping geopolitics, markets, and how we work. Whether it is a bubble or not matters less than one fact: AI is here to stay. And that is where the deeper question begins. AI will give us clarity. Unprecedented clarity. It will map the world outside us, and increasingly, the world within us. It will explain, predict, and optimize almost everything. But clarity is not direction. As answers multiply, a different gap will emerge: not how

With a little time to spare before heading to the airport, I took a walk through central Athens this morning and found myself at Syntagma, standing in front of the Parliament, a scene I’ve seen hundreds of times. Yet this time, it made me pause. It reminded me why democracy was born in Athens and why that same reason is deeply connected to how innovation is born as well. The answer lies in proximity within diversity. Greece’s geomorphological uniqueness fragmented the land in