The Threshold Agency Thesis Philosophy of Mind · Systems · AI The Threshold Agency Thesis What if some things that begin as tools can, under the right conditions, become agents? What if life itself is an example of that crossing? The Threshold Agency Thesis: A system that begins as a tool can become a cognitive agent when it reaches a threshold where it can maintain itself, model relevant parts of its world, and use feedback from its own actions to keep updating those models over time. Why this idea matters Most people assume the order goes like this: first there is life, then minds, then tools. This framework asks whether the order may sometimes run the other way. Perhaps some organized systems begin as purely functional structures, then become so good at preserving themselves and modeling the ...
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Your MBA is lying to you
Your MBA Is Lying to You — Why Legacy Strategy Frameworks Are Dangerous in the AI Era Strategy & AI Your MBA is lying to you Porter's Five Forces, the BCG Matrix, SWOT, and the rest of the strategy canon don't just fail in the AI era. They actively produce the wrong answers. And the people most fluent in them are the most confidently wrong. By Professor Babu George · linkedin.com/in/beingbabu Somewhere this week, a strategy team at a Fortune 500 company will open a slide deck, populate a Porter's Five Forces diagram, and use it to make a major investment decision. They will do this rigorously. They will do it with conviction. And in the AI era, they will very likely arrive at the wrong answer. This isn't the usual complaint that business school frameworks are "a bit outdated" or "need refreshing." The argument here is sharper and more uncomfortable: the canonical strategy frameworks taught in every MBA p...
THE TAXONOMY OF AI PLAYERS by Professor Babu George
The AI Power Matrix — Quarries, Wellsprings, Deltas & Driftwood The AI power matrix A framework for mapping who holds real power in the AI era, and the strategic plays between positions. Y axis: Scarcity Could someone else provide what you provide? Scarce positions are hard to replicate or route around. X axis: Ecosystem gravity Has the industry organized itself around you in ways that are painful to undo? Scarcity of what you control High scarcity Low scarcity Low gravity High gravity Wellsprings Scarce output, ecosystem not yet locked in Anthropic Mistral DeepSeek Quarries Own the bedrock, ecosystem built on you NVIDIA Google OpenAI Driftwood Ca...
The Fitting Room of Social Science
Why Every Theory Looks Good in Social Science By Babu George Essay Why Every Theory Looks Good in Social Science A mathematician's warning about small numbers, applied to the way we explain history, politics, and everything in between. 15 min read Social Science · Epistemology In 1988, the mathematician Richard K. Guy published a paper with a cheeky title: The Strong Law of Small Numbers. His observation was simple. In mathematics, the small integers—1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13—show up everywhere. They appear in prime number theorems, in geometry, in combinatorics, in completely unrelated corners of the field. And because there are so few small numbers and so many mathematical patterns that need them, coincidences are guaranteed. Two unrelated structures will share the number 5, and a mathematician who spots the overlap might think they have found a deep connection. They haven't. They've just witnessed a traffic jam caused by scarc...