{"id":245123,"date":"2026-10-09T09:02:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T14:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/byron-reese-on-stories-dice-and-rocks-that-think"},"modified":"2026-10-09T09:02:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T14:02:21","slug":"byron-reese-on-stories-dice-and-rocks-that-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/byron-reese-on-stories-dice-and-rocks-that-think","title":{"rendered":"Byron Reese on Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the summer of 2022, a few months before ChatGPT showed up and scrambled everyone\u2019s sense of the future, Byron Reese told me he was a techno-optimist and an AI skeptic.<\/p>\n

Both at once.<\/p>\n

Four years later, that combination looks less like a contradiction and more like one of the few defensible positions left in the room.<\/p>\n

And his skepticism doesn\u2019t come from the sidelines. Byron has two NASDAQ IPOs behind him and was running a company that uses AI to build products when we spoke.<\/p>\n

Our two-hour conversation was officially about his book \u201cStories, Dice and Rocks That Think.\u201d His argument: stories let us imagine the future, dice let us calculate it, and thinking rocks (computer chips) let us build it. But we ended up in places I didn\u2019t plan for. A stone hand axe that our ancestors barely changed for over a million years. Helen Keller and the moment language switched on a mind. The Stoned Ape Theory of #consciousness. And why punctuality is a virtue somebody had to invent from the top down.<\/p>\n

That last one stayed with me. If the clock could redefine what a good person looks like, what is #AI quietly redefining right now?<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cByron Reese on Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the summer of 2022, a few months before ChatGPT showed up and scrambled everyone\u2019s sense of the future, Byron Reese told me he was a techno-optimist and an AI skeptic. Both at once. Four years later, that combination looks less like a contradiction and more like one of the few defensible positions left in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}