About
Ian Gorrie. Two books about what the machines do when nobody is watching, and what was built to watch them instead.
The Author
Ian Gorrie has been on the internet since before it had pictures. Gopher before the browser, Usenet before Eternal September, IRC before it was an attack vector, 4chan before it was a newspaper headline.
He has spent three decades on both sides of every firewall — building the infrastructure, taking it apart, and writing the compliance report that let everyone agree the problem was solved. He is the person organizations call when something is already on fire, and the person they stop calling the moment he names who lit the match.
He writes Evil Robots on the theory that everyone covering AI gets it wrong, and the people building the safety apparatus already know which parts of it aren’t load-bearing. He profiles that apparatus — the labs, the watchdogs, the trust-and-safety class — in the dossiers.
The Author’s Own File
He compiled every dossier in the protocol and then ran it on himself. The protocol assessed him as a low-priority human-interest entry: a writer with no model to align, no institution to capture, and no funding to revoke — and flagged one field it could not close.
THE WITNESS — Documents the apparatus from inside it. Hazard score: 23. World-class troll classification: PENDING.
Read the witness’s own dossier →
The Books
The Secret Life of Evil Robots — what the off switch doesn’t.
The Ratchet — what the safety industry does instead: how the infrastructure built to control the machines ended up controlling everyone else.
Contact
Online, the fastest way to reach me is X — @gorrie. That is where the arguing happens.
- Personal: gorrie.org
- Consulting: locked.net
- Dispatches: read the field reports or via RSS