It looks like AI is not only not improving business and political leadership; it’s actually making it worse. Man of the Year: Person to Fear? I’m sure you took notice of Sam Altman. the CEO of OpenAI, who has just been fired. As it turns out, he was one of Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year for 2023 that called him “perhaps the most powerful pers...
Democracy is rapidly a disappearing form of government. We will be lucky if we can just sustain soft autocracies. X Marks the Spot… Until recently social media was nothing. Now it’s the thing. So much so that the Supreme Court is getting on the act by accepting a case (would you believe), namely when can when public officials block people on their ...
We should harness SBF to catalyze global finance for the purposes of social good, instead of merely putting him in jail. Green Eggs and Ham I guess numerous assorted lawyers, traders and financial guys are watching the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). You know the wunderkind multibillionaire who minted it all on his ownsome and is now on trial f...
We need to imagine the very worst that could happen as a result of the Ukraine war if are to have ever have the remotest chance of preventing it. A Nice Little War The opinion of those who follow these things is that at this particular time in history, this is the nearest we have come to nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis. Here’s a stupid q...
We clearly can’t trust humans to run the world. Now we’ve gotta try the AIs. Nothing Beats Free! Did you catch up with the troubling book “How Democracies Die” by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt? Hmm the august provenance is already going to be a turnoff for the people who need it most. Anyway, you get the idea. Clearly a key ...
Gravity is not a constant. What icon falls next? Weighty Matters Whadya know? New cutting-edge research seems to show conclusively that gravity doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. To wit, it is stronger at lower-than-average accelerations. Wow! That changes everything! For the skinny see this account. I can’t imagine a deeper revolution in physics,...
Barbie’s is the ultimate search to avoid shallowness and meaninglessness. She fails. Miserably. Superficiality is It “Barbie” the movie is turning out to be a big hit. How could that be for something that is all about superficiality and modern gender consumerism? I actually watched it twice so I could figure out what I am missing. And what’s with t...
The deluge of new anti-obesity drugs will massively reduce obesity. Will that mean those who take the drugs will be able to eat what they like? How will that affect public health? More is Merrier Yep, so obesity drugs are now the in thing. And its great news it seems. They work very quickly and in the vast majority of cases don’t have bad side effe...
If there’s going to be a Singularity for us humans, won’t there be many for all the animals on this planet? Whales Gonna Have Fun There’s always signals out there that are telling us things we hadn’t thought about. One such is the sudden spate of articles about orcas (you know, killer whales) which are ramming boats off the coast of Spain and Portu...
The received wisdom is that we are headed for the Singularity – where the intelligence of machines exceeds that of humans. But the betting is that we are headed for the Modularity – we will know and understand a lot more about many more things but understand even less about how to control our overall environment. Nothing Like a Good Old-Fashioned C...
AI will cause the world to overload on debt purportedly designed to be “safe” by our AI masters.In the process it will reinvent economics and finance from the ground up at least partly based on the new kids on the block of behavioral economics and finance.These will provide new and disturbing ways to manipulate the unsafe borrowing behaviors of con...
Post Summary: Men holding the power is the fundamental structural impediment to ending global war and poverty and extending good health to all. The Second(ary) Sex Which astronauts will be the first to go to Mars, men or women? Seems like women win this race.(“Study finds female astronauts more efficient, suggesting future space missions with all-f...
The JWT, no matter how technologically sophisticated and amazing it is, is showing only a tiny fraction of what it could. Shouldn’t it show us GPS-like maps and graphic pictures of travel directions? Here is my vision of the new super-duper images from, the (AI?) enhanced super-telescope. Dazzle Without the Frazzle! The JWT (James Webb Telescope) i...
Is the Singularity about to hit humanity, unexpectedly? The AI Virus? I don’t have to tell you that le nouveau AI is all over the place. All the big techs are now in it or rapidly getting in but that isn’t the half of the story. The big news is that thousands of companies and organizations are now getting in. They come from all over including our g...
It’s going to be a wild ride which probably won’t end well. A Nice Little Recession We’re seeing a number of signs which predict a US and probably a world recession. The bank runs are part of the story. The collapse of crypto currencies is another. Add to that the layoffs, of which I rate Disney’s as the most important and the most symbolic. We can...
Choose your poison. We can avoid the damage caused by climate change simply by nuking ourselves. Do You Want Your Carbon by Air, Or Radiation? I’m sure you noticed recently that the UN Environment Program issued a statement that there is ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’, i.e. we can’t achieve the goal of limiting the average rise in global t...
Is ChatGPT independently evolving its own kind of intelligence? A Brain Made of Stone? What would you think if someone told you that animals can make stone tools? No doubt it’s rubbish you would say. What if the animal was an ape, but not human? Even more so. But check it out here (“Sophisticated stone tools may predate humans, study suggests”). Wh...
Has the James Webb Telescope (JWT) just revealed a totally new universe which we can now physically see? Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall? The JWT was always going to be interesting because it can see so much that we’ve never seen. One of the things we wanted to see was the edges of our universe. Current theory says that limit happens to be around 13.5 ...
The big, big problem. No cure so far for Alzheimer’s, none in sight. We need to try something really new. How about ChatGPT? Physician Cure Thyself I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that AI, and in particular the product-du-jour is ChatGPT from OpenAI. It has already achieved some outstanding feats, such as being able to write fluent, convincing an...
Banning successful movements like TikTok is the way to lose global leadership, not to regain it. Banning Success the New Autocracy? I guess you have noticed the swelling chorus to ban TikTok, the Chinese uber-social network. The motivation for the ban is the security threat from China represented by TikTok. It has de facto hacking rights over of mi...
