A recent essay from the MIT Press reminded me of the sad decline of Blockbuster, which I saw begin as SVP of the company (I was unceremoniously fired along with much of the old guard before the true destruction began). Anybody old enough to remember knows that visiting a Blockbuster store to rent a new […]
Recent movie interpretations have seen the central theme of Homer’s Odyssey as the conflict between the desire to return home, both physically and emotionally, and the lingering effects of war that impede it. That’s not what the story is about, at least not fully. The confusion starts with the translation of first line of the […]
Pope Leo XIV has issued an encyclical letter on how we should think about AI, and what we should do about it. The 42,000-word document, entitled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, can be summarized in just a few words: Remember to be nice to one another. Sure, […]
Physicist Carlo Rovelli claims that our experience of consciousness – of a “self” that is aware of itself along with the world around us — is not something separate from the natural world. Unfortunately, the headline writers at Noēma, which published his essay, entitled his piece “There’s No Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Of course there […]
Utah is likely to approve construction of a massive “hyperscale” data center to help facilitate the processing of data for AI applications. It’s an awful idea. I say that not because there’s anything wrong about the benefits its investors promise: More energy, water desalinization, and tax dollars for Utah to use for other purposes. It’s […]
Polymarket lets people bet on the likelihood of news events, thereby yielding some sort of predictive consensus on the future or, as its hosts declare, “the wisdom of the crowd.” It is nothing of the sort. To call it legalized gambling would be giving it too much credit; it’s a sham, at best, and more […]
Is consciousness not an outcome of material existence but the initial enabler for it? That’s the premise of a really cool paper I just read: space-time is an emergent phenomenon from some deeper underlying order. The author is a serious scientist who suggests actual equations that could be used to describe it. Of course, they’re […]
Thanks to spotty service by the USPS, I have started to migrate our snail mail services to digital-only. I’m doing so belatedly, perhaps, but certainly with a little bit of anger and a lot of sadness. We don’t like in some far-flung rural area; rather, we’re smack dab in the middle of downtown Chicago, so […]
Mozilla has announced that it’s forming a “rebel alliance” of AI startups to combat Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other backers of deathstar AI. It’s a cool idea that’s misguided and will ultimately fail. What’s cool about it is that Mozilla is standing up for, well, everyone who doesn’t stand to make a killing automating everyone […]
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum just screams for counter-programming. The get-together, colloquially called “Davos” because it happens in a quaint little town in Switzerland, is billed as a place where “the foremost leaders from government, business, and civil society” can “confront shared challenges and drive innovations driving the future.” Considering all of […]