Paul Manzano

Essays, mostly opinions on AI from the operating side.

The Legacy Residents
The Busiest Ghost Town on Earth
Notes from a legacy resident
Payment Required
How the city rebuilds for its new majority
The Attention Standard
The city’s currency was human minutes. The mint has closed.
Show Your Papers
The city cannot tell its residents apart
The Invisible City
What happens to a place built to be seen, when the residents stop looking
Commerce Without Witnesses
The first markets in history where neither party is a person
The Slowest Resident
In a city at machine speed, being human becomes a performance problem
The Deciding
The last essay in the series, on what was never activity
Field Notes
The Quarter the Clicks Disappeared
What AI answers did to one small company’s search traffic, with the actual numbers
Should You Charge the Robots?
The block, charge, or welcome decision
The Oldest Legacy System
What the machine readers actually change on a shop floor
Ten Thousand Pages by Friday
What machine reading changes in deadline document work
A Year Before the Bell
The blueprint experiments we ran before ChatGPT existed
The Census
The Legacy Resident Census2026 · baseline
An annual count of humans and machines in the digital city

Through Akston Industries I own and operate legacy industrial companies spanning manufacturing, distribution, and infrastructure services. Rearden Labs, our AI arm, turns what we learn running them into a portfolio of AI companies. I also invest, long and short, in the public companies building what these essays describe, so I have positions on both sides of every claim here.