About
About Jeff Adkins
Architect · Screenwriter · Patented inventor · Writing about AIMost people writing about artificial intelligence are approaching it from one direction. Either they understand the technology but cannot make you feel its weight — or they can make you feel its weight but don't understand the technology.
I have spent thirty years doing both.
As a technology consultant and chief architect, I have designed and built the systems that organizations run on. I have worked at the level where you are not just implementing technology — you are inventing it, patenting it, and watching it become industry practice. As a screenwriter, I have written four feature-length films, several of which have won awards and been produced. I have written short films. I have spent decades learning how to make complex ideas feel human, how to build narrative tension, how to find the story inside the structure.
aibabel is what happens when those two things collide — at the most consequential technological moment of my lifetime.
30 years as a technology consultant and chief architect. A patent on Complex Event Processing. The 4Ds framework — Detect, Derive, Decide and Do — adopted by major CEP companies and evangelists worldwide. Now working professionally toward AI.
Four feature-length screenplays, award-winning and produced. Multiple short films created. A career built on the belief that the most important ideas deserve the most careful telling — and that complexity is no excuse for obscurity.
The 4Ds — where architecture meets language
Years ago I wrote a framework for Complex Event Processing that has since been used by some of the largest technology companies in the world. The 4Ds — Detect, Derive, Decide and Do — described how intelligent systems process the world in real time. How they sense what is happening, reason about what it means, determine what to do, and act.
What I find extraordinary is that this framework — designed for event processing systems years ago — describes almost perfectly what a modern AI does. It detects patterns in data. It derives meaning. It decides on a response. It acts. The architecture of intelligence, it turns out, looks remarkably similar whether it is running in a data center or emerging from three billion years of evolution.
That kind of pattern recognition — seeing the same structure in different contexts — is what thirty years of architecture teaches you. And it is exactly what I want to bring to writing about AI.
Why both sides matter
I have been in technology long enough to have watched every generation of transformative technology arrive with promises and deliver something more complicated. The personal computer was going to liberate us. The internet was going to connect us. Social media was going to give everyone a voice.
All of those things happened. And so did things nobody promised.
AI is not different in that respect. It will do extraordinary things. It is already doing extraordinary things. And it will do things that nobody anticipated, that nobody wanted, that nobody knows how to undo. The history of technology is a history of gifts that arrive with prices attached — inseparable, simultaneous, inevitable.
Accelerating scientific discovery. Democratizing expertise. Solving problems that have defeated human intelligence working alone. Compressing centuries of progress into years. An extraordinary tool in the hands of anyone willing to think carefully about how to use it.
Power accumulating faster than wisdom. Decisions made at machine speed without human judgment. The concentration of capability into systems whose reasoning we cannot always audit, explain or reverse. The oldest human story, at the largest scale it has ever been told.
Where we begin — The New Babel
The first series on this blog starts with a question that came to me while reading Genesis 11. The Tower of Babel. A civilization unified in language and ambition, building toward the heavens, approaching a threshold where nothing would be impossible for them.
I started wondering whether we were living in a modern version of that story.
Not as theology. Not as warning. But as a lens — a remarkably precise ancient metaphor for what artificial intelligence is actually doing right now. Gathering every word, every language, every idea humanity has ever produced into one unified system. Unifying the languages that Babel scattered. Building a tower of knowledge so large it has outgrown the planet. And now, literally, lifting it into orbit.
The New Babel is where this blog begins. It is not where it ends.
"I have spent thirty years building systems and writing stories. AI is the first technology that has made me genuinely uncertain which is more important."
What aibabel is about
Beyond the Babel series, this blog is about all of it. The technology — explained by someone who has spent thirty years building it. The implications — explored by someone who has spent a career thinking about narrative and consequence. The history. The philosophy. The human questions that technology has always raised and never fully answered.
I will write about what AI can actually do and what it cannot. About where it is going and where it probably should not. About the decisions it is making that we used to make ourselves. About wisdom, and whether a machine can be said to have it. About what changes when machines can do almost everything we can do — and what, if anything, remains irreducibly ours.
I don't have all the answers. Thirty years in technology has made me appropriately suspicious of anyone who claims they do.
What I have is pattern recognition sharpened over three decades. A writer's instinct for what matters and how to say it. And a genuine conviction that these questions deserve more than a headline, more than a hot take, more than a press release dressed up as insight.
Come think about this with me.
Start with the first post Are We Living in a Modern Babel? →
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