About
About B.E.N.
B.E.N. is a pen name.
Behind it is a European living in the United States - an MIT graduate who works in Product at one of the world’s largest technology companies, where he helps deploy generative AI models to hundreds of millions of customers.
He writes under a pseudonym not out of fear, but out of principle. These essays are meant to stand on the strength of their arguments, not on the authority of a name or a title. The ideas should be judged on their merits, not on who holds them.
His day job puts him at the center of the AI revolution. He sees, firsthand, how these models are built, how they are deployed, and what they do to the people and organizations that adopt them. He also sees what the public conversation about AI misses - the structural forces, the institutional failures, the slow-moving crises that no one is talking about because everyone is busy arguing about the fast-moving ones.
These essays are his attempt to say what he cannot say from inside the machine.
About This Project
Shades of Singularity began as a private exercise - an attempt to organize a set of concerns that did not fit neatly into any existing framework. The AI conversation is dominated by two camps: those who see limitless promise and those who see existential risk. Both are right. Neither is sufficient.
What is missing is the institutional lens - the question of how societies, nations, and civilizations will absorb a technology that moves faster than any governance structure ever built. These essays apply that lens, drawing on the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, who understood that the design of institutions determines the fate of nations.
Hamilton built institutions - a central bank, a federal judiciary, a national debt - that shaped American life for centuries. We face a similar moment. The institutions we build (or fail to build) in the next decade will determine whether AI serves humanity or merely those who control it.
These essays do not pretend to have all the answers. They aim to ask better questions.