Welcome to episode 1 of The Thinking Machine: my new series that compares real and artificial intelligence 🧠👾 You don’t see reality. You see your brain’s prediction of it. Right now, your brain is generating a constant stream of guesses about what’s about to happen. The next word in this sentence. The temperature of the air on your skin. The weight of your phone in your hand. It compares those guesses to what your senses actually report, and most of the time, the prediction is close enough that you don’t notice the process is happening at all. Your experience of “reality” is mostly just successful predictions. When a prediction is wrong, something more interesting happens. The mismatch is called prediction error, and it’s how you learn. Your brain updates the model so the next guess is better. Trip on a step that was shorter than expected, and your motor system quietly recalibrates. Hear a word you didn’t expect, and your language model updates. This loop — predict, comp...