Tharin Pillay 
Tharin wants to know what AI is becoming and how that's changing us.
Lawyer by training, writer by compulsion, he's previously worked in academia, civil society, and consulting. As a reporter, he's written over 140 articles for TIME Magazine. Past fixations include drug policy, anti-corruption, and other people. He's making it up as he goes.
Selected work
Reported essays
- AI Doesn't Feel. So Why Does It Have Something Like Emotions? — Jun 2026
- Are We Losing Our Minds to AI? — May 2026
- Why AI Systems Can't Help Developing Personalities — Mar 2026
- 'We May Have a Crisis on Our Hands': The Unregulated Rise of Emotionally Intelligent AI — Feb 2026
- Why Experts Can't Agree on Whether AI Has a Mind — Jan 2026
- Why the World's Best AI Systems Are Still So Bad at Pokémon — Jan 2026
- Inside Fei-Fei Li's Plan to Build AI-Powered Virtual Worlds — Dec 2025
- Inside the AI Village Where Top Chatbots Collaborate—and Compete — Nov 2025
- 'The Dead Have Never Been This Talkative': The Rise of AI Resurrection — Jun 2025
- AI Models Are Getting Smarter. New Tests Are Racing to Catch Up — Dec 2024
- New Tests Reveal AI's Capacity for Deception — Dec 2024
Profiles
- Dwarkesh Patel — 2026
- Jaan Tallinn — 2026
- Stuart Russell — 2025
- Pliny the Liberator — 2025
- Ryoji Ikeda — 2025
- Edwin Chen — 2025
- Jakub Pachocki — 2025
- David Holz — 2025
- Peter Singer — 2025
- Tyler Cowen — 2025
- Anima Anandkumar — 2025
- Demis Hassabis — 2024
- Andrej Karpathy — 2024
Personal writing
- Climbing Mountains We Cannot Name — Apr 2026
- Getting Personal with Claude — Jan 2026
- Density, Destiny, Manhattan to the West of Me — Oct 2025
- Platforms Rule Everything Around Me — Jan 2025
- My Brilliant Lonesome Runaway Year — Jan 2025
- I can still write — Sep 2023
Other
- Rethinking the Right to Freedom of Thought: On Drug Policy, Neurotechnology, and the Case for Cognitive Liberty — The International Journal of Human Rights, Aug 2024
- South Africa Must Find Its Own Intelligent Voice in Global AI Debates — News24, Dec 2023
- Competition Policies and Media Sustainability: A South African Case Study — IGF Dynamic Coalition on the Sustainability of Journalism, Aug 2023
- Metaphors Matter: Dissecting the Language We Use to Discuss Corruption — Daily Maverick, Jul 2022
