The Sign Precedes the Signified

We are at an inflection point that most of our existing frameworks were not built to handle.

Artificial intelligence is developing faster than our philosophical, ethical, and cultural understanding of what that development means. The technical literature moves quickly and speaks mostly to those already inside it. The popular discourse moves just as quickly but often sacrifices rigor for accessibility. Somewhere between those two registers, the most important questions are going largely unasked.

Prior Signals exists in that gap.

We are a community of writers, thinkers, researchers, and practitioners who believe that the questions raised by artificial intelligence are not exclusively technical ones. They are questions about what it means to build systems that increasingly resemble minds. About the values we embed in technology, intentionally and otherwise. About power, accountability, and who gets to make decisions that will shape how billions of people live. About the kinds of futures we are foreclosing and the kinds we are making possible, often without fully realizing we are doing either.

These questions deserve the same rigor we bring to engineering problems. They also deserve the kind of writing that makes that rigor legible to anyone willing to think carefully, regardless of their technical background.

We publish essays, analysis, and criticism that move between disciplines without apology. Philosophy, cognitive science, economics, politics, ethics, history, law: the development of artificial intelligence touches all of it, and understanding it seriously requires drawing on all of it.

What connects everything we publish is a commitment to following the argument wherever it leads, and to doing so with honesty about what we know, what we don't, and what may be genuinely unknowable.

We don't have a position on whether artificial intelligence will save us or destroy us. We are skeptical of anyone who claims that kind of certainty in either direction. What we do believe is that the decisions being made right now, in laboratories, boardrooms, legislatures, and server farms, will have consequences that extend far beyond the people making them. Those decisions deserve serious, sustained, honest scrutiny from people who are willing to sit with difficulty and complexity rather than resolve it prematurely.

That is what we are here to do.