Start Here
Where to start in reading The Next Evolution Substack.
The writing here does one thing in several directions: it looks at a technology, a system, or a decision, and asks what it does to the person standing in front of it. Sometimes that person is a patient holding a prescription the screen won’t accept. Sometimes it is a board member approving a system nobody in the room can explain. The question underneath every piece is the same — we know we can, but should we?
If you only read three
Start with Twenty Watts, on what the human brain’s energy budget is teaching the people who design AI hardware. Then The Screen That Broke the Trust, on a digital prescription system that worked exactly as designed, for a patient it was not designed for. Then The material is everywhere. The factory is in Fujian. — on why the energy transition runs through a single country’s manufacturing capacity, and what that dependency costs. Between them, those three cover the territory: what is coming, who it lands on, and what nobody in the room is saying about it.
What is coming
These pieces look at an emerging technology and ask what becomes possible, what becomes harder, and who ends up better and worse off. The Error is the Point is about the moment quantum computing stopped being a question of whether. The Body as a Lab follows gene editing out of the journal and into the clinic, where the constraint is no longer the science. Three Days Earlier asks what an accurate forecast is worth to a community that has no way to act on it.
The person the system wasn’t built for
The longest-running thread in the writing. The Last Person in the Queue is about what happens to people when digital becomes the default and they cannot follow. Designing for the Person Who Isn’t Coping names the design assumption underneath that failure, and The Question That Changed the Design names the question — who is this hardest for? — that almost never gets asked while the answer could still change something.
Who carries the burden
Three pieces on digital crime, none of them about the criminals. Why the Victim Is Always Wrong is about fraud response systems built to protect the institution. The fraud was an event. This is a condition. follows what happens in the months after the money goes. It Cannot Automate Trust asks why the burden of defence has been handed to the people least equipped to carry it.
When every part works and the outcome is still wrong
Organisations fail in ways no individual caused. Every Department Did Its Job is about the gap nobody drew on the map. The voice that never reaches the room follows front-line knowledge as each management layer makes it more manageable and less true. The Company That Measured What Mattered is about the slide the board never sees.
Where to go from here
New pieces arrive roughly weekly — some forward-looking, some critical, some connecting sectors that don’t usually talk to each other. If one of them shows you something you hadn’t seen connected before, it has done its job. And if you’ve read something here that the map above doesn’t cover, the archive is open: the older material shows where this started, not where it is going.