Videos

Two Rivers

A song cycle in three acts about how AI was built, and the people who built it: thirty-three songs, each with its own video.

The structure is the argument. Two rivers rise from the same spring in the 1940s, fed by older tributaries that run in from further back. River One learns by being shown the answer: neural networks, Volume I. River Two learns by being told the score: reinforcement learning, Volume II. For half a century they run side by side, and in Volume III they meet. The joined river is how today's AI is made. An overture draws the map, and a finale carries it out to the sea.

On River One: a runaway teenager hiding in a library, writing to Bertrand Russell about the mistakes in his book, who ends up drawing the first artificial neuron at a doctor's kitchen table. Frank Rosenblatt, whose machine the Navy promised would walk, talk, see and write. Geoffrey Hinton keeping the idea alive through the long winter, two graphics cards overheating a student's bedroom, and a bidding war for three academics in a Lake Tahoe casino.

On River Two: Thorndike's cats escaping puzzle boxes, chickens living in William James's cellar, Claude Shannon's mechanical mouse learning a maze, and a single cell in a monkey's brain that fires for juice it didn't expect. Where they meet: Lee Sedol at the board for Move 37, the quant in Hangzhou who paid for DeepSeek himself, and one German professor, footnoting all of it. Watch and listen →