Blog

Essays, research briefs, and interactive pieces from TRI’s Human-Centered AI team.

Sowing heterogeneity

Before a road is built there is only a landscape of infinite decisions. It takes teams of experts to map, image, and graph each possible route. Even when feasible routes are…

Scott Carter, Linda Chang, Andrew Taber, Laura Libby

Towards “A New and Perhaps More Human Outlook” (video)

This is a talk I gave at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla on 3 September 2026, for the Ciclo de conferencias “El impacto contemporáneo de la antropología”. In it, I…

A blue point of view

A couple nights ago I made the unfortunate mistake of reading about The Blue Eyed Islanders puzzle (though I am fond of this less violent version). It kept me up all night.…

Requisite Variety: The How

We’ve explained the why of Requisite Variety. This post focuses on the how.

From white box to black box

How AI is like every other complex technology

AI systems are increasingly opaque. But opacity is not unusual in mature technology. Cars, phones, doors, computers, and infrastructure all become useful by hiding their…

Black Box, Then and Now

For a decade, the standard response to AI opacity has been to try to peer inside the black box. But frontier models are now opaque even to their builders, and explainability…

Welcome to Requisite Variety

Welcome to Requisite Variety, a space for essays, research notes, and experiments from TRI’s human-centered research community.

Kate Sieck, Scott Carter