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Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu A Motto, A Mirror, and a Messy Truth The Blunt Poetry of Progress Some mottos whisper. Others chant. But this one kicks down the door with steel-toed boots and a clipboard in hand. “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” It’s not subtle. It doesn’t ask politely. It’s a phrase that feels like it was scrawled on a battlefield map, stapled to a corporate mission statement, and tattooed on the biceps of your loudest coworker, all before breakfast. But behind its bulldozer charm lies a curious depth. It’s part rallying cry, part ultimatum, part moral compass, if your compass was forged in a pressure cooker. So where did this phrase come from? Why does it resonate so widely across politics, business, startups, and even military doctrine? And this part’s important — when does it inspire clarity, and when does it bulldoze nuance? Let’s roll up our sleeves. We’re about to follow this phrase all the way down the rabbit hole. You can lead, follow, or… well, you know th...
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The Ethics of Creation

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Do We Have a Right to Make Minds? “You are the creator of your own reality,” say wellness influencers. That’s cute. Now imagine being the creator of someone else’s reality. Someone with a mind. Someone who didn’t ask to be created. This isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s not even speculative philosophy. It’s AI Tuesday. We are now in a world where the question is no longer can we build minds. It’s should we? And that question, urgent, uncomfortable, and utterly unresolved, sits at the intersection of Frankenstein, the Promethean myth, Buddhist compassion, and cloud compute. The Promethean Urge. Playing with Fire Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. That fire was symbolic of technology, knowledge, power. He was punished, of course. Eternally. In modern myth, we’ve updated the fire to mean AI. And we, the technologists, have become little Prometheuses. Promethei? Anyway. We are in the business of unlocking something elementa...
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What If Bias Isn't the Enemy?

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  Why the Future of AI Is About Management, Not Purity Copyright: Sanjay Basu Bias Can’t Be Deleted We keep talking about removing bias from AI. Here’s a radical idea:  Maybe that’s impossible, and maybe that’s okay. Yes, bias is real. Yes, it causes harm. And yes, we should take it seriously. But the idea that we can “eliminate” bias entirely, cleanly, surgically, once and for all, might be one of the biggest myths we’re still clinging to in tech. Why? Because bias isn’t an exception to human systems. It’s baked in. And if we keep pretending it’s something we can delete like a typo in a line of code, we’re not building trustworthy AI . We’re just building dangerous illusions. Let’s talk about what we can do instead. From Statistical Fairness to Societal Fractures Bias has always been part of the algorithmic conversation, but lately, it feels like it’s stepped into the spotlight. And for good reason. From automated resume filters that discard candidates with “ ethnic-sound...
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Ink-Stained Compulsions

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Why I Write Like My Brain Depends on It The Ghost That Whispers in Ink There’s a peculiar voice that lives inside my head. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t beg. But it’s always there. Whispering. Tapping at the inner glass. Not with urgency, but inevitability. Like an itch you don’t notice until it becomes a rash. Or a melody you hum without knowing the song. And the only thing that calms it? Writing. Not tweeting. Not texting. Not even note-taking. I mean full-bodied, belly-of-the-beast writing. Paragraphs that make me pause, punch the air, or quietly hate myself for a week. That kind of writing. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve. Back then it was scribbles in the margins of schoolbooks. Later, journals, stories, essays. Most of them are read by no one. Yet now, in my middle years, something shifted. I hit “publish.” Why now? Why not then? And more uncomfortably, am I simply another middle-aged knowledge worker falling headfirst into the quicksand of the a...
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On Being a Philosopher Who Engineers

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  Copyright: Sanjay Basu I live, most days, in a quiet but persistent cage. It’s not the kind with bars you can rattle or a lock you can break. It’s subtler, self-forged, and insidious. It sits between two irreconcilable identities. On one side, a philosopher who yearns to ask questions without the obligation of closure. On the other, an engineer, trained and professionally obligated to solve whatever problem dares cross my path. The philosopher in me wants to linger with the unanswerable. To stare at the vast, unlit questions. What is consciousness ? Why are we here? Is there a moral order beneath the chaos of existence? And let them remain raw and terrifying. But the engineer in me revolts. Questions, in that world, are not meant to hang in the air. They are triggers for action. A well-formed question is simply an engineering problem in disguise. And problems, as any engineer knows, exist to be solved. It makes for a restless life. This restlessness follows me everywhere. Into mo...
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