https://loom.thatvoid.com en Completed chapters only, narrated in the restored 1978 voice of James Burke. Episodes appear as they are woven and never change. That Void Press serial false Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:00:03 +0000 In which the author is declared dead by the machine he is writing about. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_00_Introduction-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000 0:03:31 1 full The gift that started it all: how the precise, sequential business of teaching stone-chipping may have given us language, how language gave us the world taken apart and described piece by piece — and why a machine that does nothing but arrange words can therefore do nearly everything. The thesis: AI is not a new story. It is the oldest story, reaching its punchline. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_01_Word_of_Mouth-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:01:00 +0000 0:39:38 2 full Lyon silk merchants and their labour troubles; Jacquard's punched cards; Babbage's dinner-party demonstrations and Ada Lovelace's footnote that outgrew its book; the American census crisis of 1890; Hollerith, tabulating machines, and how a company built to count people became IBM. Software, it turns out, began as fashion. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_02_Weaving_the_Thread-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:02:00 +0000 0:48:16 3 full Napoleon needs better artillery tables; Legendre and Gauss quarrel over who invented least squares; Quetelet dreams up the Average Man; Galton measures sweet peas and discovers regression. How the mathematics of error became the mathematics of prediction — and why "machine learning" is, at bottom, the artillery problem: where will the shell land next? — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_03_On_Average-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:03:00 +0000 0:45:21 4 full Galvani makes a dead frog kick and starts a craze; Cajal draws the neuron and wins a Nobel; McCulloch and Pitts turn brain cells into logic; Rosenblatt's Perceptron makes the front page of the New York Times in 1958, promising machines that will "walk, talk, see and write." Two long winters, one stubborn handful of believers, and the thaw that changed everything. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_04_Nervous_Energy-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:04:00 +0000 0:44:12 5 full A fake chess-playing Turk fools Napoleon and inspires Babbage; Turing asks whether a machine could imitate your aunt; computers conquer draughts, then chess, then Go; and meanwhile, unnoticed, the video-game industry spends thirty years and billions of dollars perfecting a chip for drawing explosions — which turns out, by pure pinball accident, to be exactly the machine you need to grow a mind in. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_05_Fun_and_Games-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:05:00 +0000 0:48:47 6 full Optical telegraphs on French hilltops; Morse and his code; the operators who could recognize each other by their "fist"; Bell Labs and Claude Shannon, who discovered that information is measurable, that English is about fifty percent redundant, and that predicting the next letter is the same thing as understanding. The scandalous secret at the heart of the talking machine: it is a guessing game, played brilliantly. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_06_Getting_the_Message-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:06:00 +0000 0:48:02 7 full The Rosetta Stone and the decipherment race; Cold War Washington funds machine translation to read Russian journals; the Georgetown demonstration overpromises; the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, or possibly the vodka is good but the meat is rotten; statistical translation at IBM; and a 2017 paper with the cheekiest title in computer science — "Attention Is All You Need" — that taught the machine what to pay attention to. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_07_Lost_in_Translation-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:07:00 +0000 0:51:24 8 full Diderot smuggles the Encyclopédie past the censors; Carnegie builds two and a half thousand libraries; Wells dreams of a World Brain; Berners-Lee gives the web away for nothing; Wikipedia proves strangers can be trusted, mostly. Then the machine arrives and eats the entire library in an afternoon — and the librarians sue. Who owns what everybody wrote? — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_08_Common_Knowledge-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:08:00 +0000 0:42:47 9 full Guilds and their secrets; Jacquard's weavers throw their sabots into the works; the word "computer" used to mean a woman with a pencil; what happened to the lamplighters, the switchboard girls, the typing pool. Now the tool comes for the toolmakers — the coders, the lawyers, the illustrators. The axemaker's bargain, renegotiated: this time the axe falls on the axemakers. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_09_The_New_Apprentice-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:09:00 +0000 0:43:19 10 full Print gives us both the scientific journal and the pamphlet war; photography is doctored within a decade of its invention; radio panics America with Martians. Now the machine confabulates — remember my obituary — and can wear anyone's face and speak in anyone's voice, including, as it happens, mine. What survives of truth when evidence itself can be woven to order? (The answer, history suggests, is: more than you'd think, but only if we do what we did last time.) — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_10_True_Enough-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:10:00 +0000 0:43:06 11 full The tool that language built has learned language, and the loop is closed. Why prediction always fails and what repeats anyway: the scarcity-collapse pattern, run once through print in detail. Expertise as the last manuscript; the professions meet their printing press; Bloom's two-sigma problem and the tutor every child can now afford; the Luddites, who were right; Thamus, who was also right; and why insisting on disagreement is about to become the most valuable habit a human being can have. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_11_Full_Circle-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:11:00 +0000 0:38:27 12 full The Emperor's aluminium cutlery, and why scarcity is a date, not a fact. Every institution as a scarcity-management device; Malthus and Crookes, impeccably right until the recipe changed; bread from air. Feynman's plenty of room at the bottom, the design bottleneck the talking machine just broke, and the nanofabricator's arrival schedule. Recorded music as the rehearsal; what happens to money, work, identity and the state when the wanting and the having close on each other; the feudal and hijack failure modes; the dividend; and the last scarce thing on Earth. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_12_Something_for_Nothing-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:12:00 +0000 0:39:05 13 full On living, permanently off-balance, in the most interesting times there have ever been. — read in the cloned 1978 voice of James Burke. loom-KL_13_Afterword-burke Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:13:00 +0000 0:05:30 14 full