The view behind Contuitus

I am a director working in defence and national security technology in Australia. My day is spent helping large organisations make sober decisions about complex systems, increasingly about artificial intelligence. This site is where I think in the open.

Contuitus is an old word for the steady, intuitive gaze that takes in the whole of a thing at once. This site applies that gaze to artificial intelligence: looking past the noise to the structure underneath, and writing it down plainly.

Background

My work sits where engineering meets governance. I have led delivery on systems that have to be both capable and accountable, in settings where the cost of being wrong is high and the tolerance for hand waving is low. That shapes how I read every new claim about AI.

Building journey

I build to understand. The projects on this site are small, honest tools, often running models locally so that sensitive data never leaves the machine. They are not products. They are experiments that keep me close to the material.

Philosophy

I try to write plainly, in the spirit of the APS Style Manual, because clear writing is a control. If I cannot explain a system in plain language, I do not yet understand it well enough to trust it. That is the whole point of this notebook.