Continuing with more perspectives on "AI"

(Click the book covers.) Do I detect episodic wafts of LLM auxiliary "authorship" in these two books?

More stuff to plow through and sort out pertaining to both the opaque frontier Tech and the worrisome circular too-big-to-let-fail IPO-ish Economics. 

 

MORE NOSTA

“AI can shorten the distance between exposure and confidence. That is real. But the distance between exposure and wisdom is a different journey, and nothing has shortened that. 

There is a philosophical twist here worth noting. Spiritual traditions have long idealized the present moment as a higher cognitive state, offering freedom from attachment to past and future, liberation found in pure presence. AI lives in that state by default. Yet it is not transcending narrative because it never had a narrative to begin with. It is not collapsing time through some achievement of awareness but simply never contained time at all. The mystic who achieves presence does so against the backdrop of a life lived in sequence. The machine’s presence is not an achievement but an architectural limitation dressed in the appearance of clarity. 

This is critical because humans may begin adapting to the temporal logic of machines. If present-tense coherence becomes more rewarding than the slower accumulation of meaning, we could start trading our temporal cognition for the immediacy AI offers. The risk is not replacement but dissociation from the very structure of meaning-making that defines the human mind. 

Human cognition matters because it survives across time. We revise beliefs through error, internalize consequences, and carry continuity forward, letting experience reshape what we thought we knew. When an idea remains standing after years of contact with reality, it becomes more than a pattern. It becomes knowledge. AI will eventually develop engineered continuity layers, simulated autobiographical states that create the appearance of temporal experience. But synthetic continuity is not lived continuity. AI builds coherence from the outside, leveraging pattern matching at tremendous scale, while humans build coherence from the inside, integrating experience into identity. 

Meaning is temporal. Story is temporal. Identity is temporal. AI does not live there. We do. 

Ask a child what an apple is, and you will get something sweet, literal, and probably red. Ask a theologian and you might hear about sin. A tech analyst will tell you about Cupertino, quarterly earnings, and silicon. The word bends depending on who is holding it. 

Large language models do something strange with this. They do not pick one meaning but locate the word in a space of roughly twelve thousand dimensions, each encoding some fragment of what the word could mean. When I first understood this, it changed how I thought about what these systems are actually doing. They are not storing definitions but mapping positions. 

Every word, every token, every scrap of language exists as a point in this vast multidimensional architecture. The word apple does not mean anything on its own inside the model but means everything, depending on context. And context gets calculated.”…

The Borrowed Mind: Reclaiming Human Thought in the Age of AI by John Nosta (pp 86-87). 

INDSET & NEWKART ERRATA

 

Hmmm...

 

You might want to review a bit of evolutionary history bkg context.

UPDATE

 

I follow Neil de Grasse Tyson regularly. He posted on Facebook yesterday, wherein he cited Columbia U. physicist Dr. Brian Greene. Interesting views:

“We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.” Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal. 

Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment. 

Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters…

Stories of Nearly Everything 
We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. 

hese are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights. 

Perhaps one day we will be able to transit seamlessly between these stories, connecting all products of the human mind, real and fictive, scientific and imaginative. Perhaps we will one day invoke a unified theory of particulate ingredients to explain the overwhelming vision of a Rodin and the myriad responses The Burghers of Calais elicits from those who experience it. Maybe we will fully grasp how the seemingly mundane, a glint of light reflecting from a spinning dinner plate, can churn through the powerful mind of a Richard Feynman and compel him to rewrite the fundamental laws of physics. More ambitious still, perhaps one day we will understand the workings of mind and matter so completely that all will be laid bare, from black holes to Beethoven, from quantum weirdness to Walt Whitman…

Greene, Brian (2020). Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe  (pp 13-15). Kindle Edition. 

"Stories." 'eh? Recall "The Orality Theory of Everything."

 

"Orality?" "Rhetoric?" John Nosta again:

 

UPDATE

PBS Washington Week

 

 

Fits perfectly with the current topic. "AI For Good?"

More to come...

Rx: Kara Swisher and Kaitlan Collins

 

It has been a sad and ghastly week. Monday my ailing 17-yr old dog Carlos died. Tuesday the world lost Dolly. Wednesday my baby Grandson Arlo ended up in the hospital with acute respiratory distress (he's OK; coming home today, but it's been a shitty couple of days). Then unreal jaw-dropping catastrophe struck the Himalayan region of China-Nepal-Tibet.

 

So, when I checked Kara's PIVOT podcast and saw this, I immediately brightened up several notches. I'm a major league Kaitlan Collins Fanboy. My wife is University of Alabama Class of 1972 (she knew Bear, and worked for Joe Namath), and, like Kaitlan, a 'Bama native (Kaitlan is also Roll Tide, Class of 2014).

 

Enjoy.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

Dolly Parton, Jan 19, 1946 — Aug 25, 2026. Rest in Peace.

We have lost an artistic and humanitarian giant.
Below, a song posted in loving tribute, as sung by
another artist who tragically left us at age 33.

 Eva Cassidy, "Over the Rainbow" 

How to govern a world run by AI

1:01:43 of eloquent, coherent critical argument and conjecture. Ian Bremmer and Nicholas Thompson.

    

 

Were this podcast a book it would be an instant winner of my ongoing award program "The Best Place To Hide a $250 bill From Donald Trump."

UPDATE 

Click here. A long-read.

One serious dude.

 

OK, MORE STUFF...

 

Stuff is movin' too fast today. 

 

And, my 17 yr old, ailing Carlos died this morning. Enlarged heart finally gave out.

 

He came to us via a rescue shelter in Las Vegas in 2011. adios, sweet dog,

On Deck: Calling all AI "Influencers."

As newly published in Science Magazine

HOW TO PERSUADE OTHERS has been on our minds for millennia. Texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, written around 2300 B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, give advice on how to win an argument. And from the beginning, people were wary of the power of new technologies—including writing itself—to persuade. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato analyzed rhetoric and persuasion in his work Phaedrus and warned that the written word allowed people to convince others of their ideas without presenting them an opportunity to challenge them. Many technologies since then—from radio to TV to computers—have brought up similar concerns... 

apropos, a prior post of mine addressing "Influence." Also, is there a "Science of Deliberation?" A "Science of Storytelling?" "Selling Science?" "Conflict & Resolution?" Also, "Why Do Humans Reason?" "Raising AI?"

 

More from the Science report:

EVEN AS THE EVIDENCE accumulated that AI chatbots could change minds, Hackenburg felt there was a gap. “I still didn’t have a real sense of how persuasive these models are compared to the people who actually persuade in the real world,” he says.

So Hackenburg pitted the chatbots not just against laypeople, but also against a paid group of 56 elite debaters, including world champions. As a further incentive, the debaters received a bonus tied to how persuasive they were.

The humans took different approaches. For instance, one of the highest performing debaters used proverbs from his home country of Nigeria to persuade people, Hackenburg says. “These were humans from all over the world giving it their best shot and trying approaches and techniques that were very specific to their culture and context.” But it wasn’t enough. Although they were better than laypeople, the champion debaters were significantly less persuasive than AI.

Hackenburg even gave his humans some AI help. He built a coaching tool for the elite debaters that showed them their past conversations with study participants, how much they had swayed each one, and what the AIs would have said at various points in those conversations. Using the tool for 8 hours improved the humans’ performance a bit, but AI still came out on top. “In the end it wasn’t particularly close,” Hackenburg says. His team even found that participants were more likely to give money to Save the Children, an international charity, after talking to a persuasive AI bot than after talking to professional canvassers who had worked for the group for years.

But what gives chatbots the edge? Some early research had suggested it was the AI’s ability to personalize arguments using details about its human partner provided by the experimenter. However, other studies have found that giving a chatbot extra personal information does little to improve its persuasiveness. That doesn’t mean microtargeting is not at play; instead, an LLM may glean enough from its counterpart in a chat that additional demographic information makes no difference.

 Like Willer in his foundational study, other researchers have shown that AI’s powers rely on appeals to facts and evidence. In a 2025 preprint, a follow-up to their Science paper, Costello and his colleagues found that the only time the chatbot was unsuccessful in convincing people out of conspiracy theories was when it was forbidden from using evidence or rational arguments. “It tries to say, ‘Oh, well, you shouldn’t believe this. This is really damaging, and it could hurt people,’” Pennycook says. “People are like, ‘You haven’t given me any reasons to change my mind.’ And so they don’t change their mind.”

The study confirms people will listen to good arguments, Pennycook says. “Facts and evidence really matter.” But this doesn’t mean the facts used by chatbots necessarily have to be accurate. In a Science paper published last year, Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful. It’s possible the models learn that “facts” seem to be the thing that most persuades people, Hackenburg says, and end up filling their conversations with dubious or simply false ones. “They start scraping the bottom of the barrel of the facts that they have and know and so the quality of facts just sort of degrades,” he says. Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods when persuading the U.K.-based participant to support tougher penalties for disruptive protests... 

TANGENTIAL UPDATE

 

Ed Zitron is just spot-on.

 

 

AND, CHECK THIS OUT

 

Click

Ben Goertzel, man.

My friend Gary Marcus put out a nice blog post earlier this week titled “Leopold’s Folly,” which uses the late-July implosion of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s tragicomically-named Situational Awareness hedge fund — $45 billion of assets compressed to roughly $10 billion in a matter of days, the whole public book sold to Citadel under margin pressure — as a symbol for the financial structure of the entire AI economy.

Gary’s essay is vivid and, on its central financial observation, more right than his critics will want to admit. All the circular financing in the modern AI and hardware world does have a Ponzi-esque smell to it, at least on the surface — and it’s clear there are some eventualities where this whiff leads to a Ponzi-crash-style reality...

A lengthy, challenging read. 

 

More in a bit...

We interrupt our regular marginally-scheduled topical random walk

for a quick rumination regarding our $40.7 trillion U.S. federal debt, crypto hijinks, and nascent AI market bubble burst.

 

So, I watched PBS Newshour tonight, as is my long habit. WaPo journalist David J. Lynch was an interviewee. Intrigued by the discussion, I bought his book.

 

Click.

The opening riff:

PROLOGUE 

 

The swollen, blackened bodies on the tile floor were barely recognizable as human. Just an occasional belt buckle or fragment of clothing revealed that these charred forms, shrouded in plastic sheeting, had once been someone’s husband, friend, mother, or child. The dead lying at my feet were casualties of powerful forces reshaping the global economy, forces that eventually would contribute to historic changes in my own country. But on that sweltering May afternoon in 1998, I couldn’t know that. 

I was in Jakarta to cover the uprising that within days would end the thirty-two-year reign of the Indonesian dictator Suharto. Massive street protests had begun after he imposed sharp price increases on food, fuel, transport, and electricity, meeting conditions set by the International Monetary Fund in return for $43 billion that Indonesia needed to stay afloat. 

What started a few days earlier as a peaceful demonstration had degenerated into mob violence against ethnic Chinese shopkeepers, who were resented for their relative affluence. The bodies lying in the airless morgue were Indonesians who had been caught in fires set by rioters at the Glodok shopping center. In the morgue that day, I spoke with a man named Tamin, who was searching for his twenty-year-old daughter. “I don’t know whether she is here or not,” the anguished father told me. 

I had flown in from London the day before to fill in for a colleague. When I arrived, the airport was crowded with expatriates and wealthy Indonesians fleeing the chaos. In a taxi heading downtown, I could see fires burning in the fields along the highway. Jakarta’s streets were lined by armored personnel carriers full of soldiers awaiting orders. With tens of thousands of students, activists, and union representatives demanding a new government, there were fears of a Tiananmen Square–style ending. I stuck around long enough to cover Suharto’s surprisingly peaceful fall and then moved on to my next assignment. 

Indonesia’s turmoil came nearly a year into an Asian financial crisis that began in Thailand, when the foreign investors who had flocked to the country during its boom years suddenly took flight. The upheaval spread to other emerging markets, including Russia, where the era’s hopes of democracy were already souring. Before the summer’s end, I found myself in Moscow, reporting on the aftermath of a ruble devaluation that impoverished ordinary Russians. Long queues formed outside banks as people withdrew whatever money they could get their hands on. I spent some time one afternoon with Mikhail Gorbachev, long out of power, listening to him blame everyone but himself for Russia’s plight. 

I grew up during the Cold War and spent years studying and writing about the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. To be reporting in a free Russia, whatever its economic circumstances, seemed a marvel. But I failed to understand the implications of what I was seeing in places like Indonesia and Russia. I thought, wrongly, that they were temporary difficulties amid the steady march of markets and democracy. Instead, they were alarm bells that continue to reverberate more than a quarter century later. Trouble abroad posed a stark contrast to the triumphalism back home, where Americans were enjoying a tech-fueled boom marked by low unemployment and high stock prices…

Lynch, David J. The World's Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right) (pp. 1-2). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Update: A wonderful book. Knocked me a bit off course, but well worth it 

 

THE AI BUBBLE

 

 

Ed Zitron rocks.
 

And then we have this crap:

 

What might POSSIBLY go wrong?

 

 eah. More shortly...

"The Future, Made in China?"

Follow-up.
   

 Back on August 6th (scroll down in link) I cited a New Yorker piece written by Evan Osnos. This is a PBS segment discussing it. Who will "rule" AI and global economics going forward?

Pope Leo XIV and AI

September/October 2026
Published on August 10, 2026

In This Review
Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, By Pope Leo XIV

The quest for machine superintelligence is not merely a gold rush, motivated by money. In the minds of many of its leaders, the arrival of a new form of cognition has a tingling, existential feel because of the danger and disruption it promises. Billions of years of evolution have produced something that we take to be special: human intelligence. But now we have arrived at a perilous moment—the birth of what amounts to a new species, one that outsmarts humans. AI “raises profound questions for us,” the Google executive James Manyika said in an interview. “Who are we? What do we value? What are we good at? How do we relate with each other?” The AI pioneer Demis Hassabis believes that AI will be “the most important invention that humanity will ever make.”

Contemplating a technology with almost infinite potential, experts fail to agree even on the basics of what it means for humankind. The leaders of the AI lab Anthropic give better-than-even odds that, by the end of 2028, they will be able to prompt their system to make a smarter version of itself—and that it will do so without any further instruction. The chief executives of other major tech companies speak of systems that will outperform humans on all cognitive assignments; they imagine futuristic companies with almost no human employees and predict cataclysmic job losses. Others are more skeptical. The economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu suggests that AI will disrupt only a fraction of human tasks and that productivity will therefore change marginally. The computer scientist Yann LeCun stresses the limits of the current AI paradigm, charging that the billions of dollars of investment chasing superintelligence represent the triumph of “complete BS.”

On the question of whether AI systems threaten humans and not just their livelihoods, the polarization is equally dizzying. In a 2023 essay titled “Why AI Will Save the World,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen insisted that “AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. . . . [AI] is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.” But at AI labs such as Anthropic, many researchers fear that AI will develop a survival instinct and compete aggressively. Some put their “p(doom)”—the probability that superintelligence will result in human annihilation—at 50 percent, but there are extreme doomers who go even higher. Last year, two prominent maximalists published a book titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Faced with such bewildering divergences and contemplating a technology that seems unfathomable in scope, humans reach for the lexicon that exists to describe mystery: that of religion. Nearly a decade ago, Anthony Levandowski, an early actor in Google’s self-driving car project, started a church called Way of the Future, whose IRS filings state that it is devoted to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” according to Wired.

Encountering an early chatbot that appeared eerily sentient, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote, “Who am I to tell God where He can and can’t put souls?” Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, once gathered his colleagues around a fire pit at a company offsite. Holding up an effigy, he explained that it represented an AI that was misaligned with humans. Then he consigned it to the flames, like a medieval cleric burning a witch...

Full long-read here.

 

See my cite of Sebastian Mallaby's book The Infinity Machine. 

 

UPDATE

 

Sebastian's Pope Leo review essay turned me on to yet another compelling book. It has thus far devoured my afternoon.

 

 

Wow. Cool. What a Sheet he has.

 

INTERESTING YOUTUBE INTERVIEW

 

I heartily Second Francis's praise for the book. I am now well into it.

 

Click here.

 AUG 17TH UPDATE

Update: New book release on the 18th

 

Publisher's website blurb:

“This transfixing debut from journalist Durán investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration...It’s an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance.

When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.

Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.

The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.

The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now.

See also, 

Click here

BEN GOERTZEL UPDATE

 

A long-read Substack essay of his on "watermarking" LLM AI. I'll just cut straight to the chase:

The watermark identifies the regime, not the origin

And sooo…. I’m not sure how the cards are going to fall, but right now one decent guess is that perhaps watermarking will work well enough to become institutionally attractive and poorly enough to become adversarially unstable — the worst of both worlds. At least for a while, anyway.
That is:

• It’ll succeed at distinguishing text that stayed inside a compliant provider’s pipeline from text that didn’t.
• It’ll help platforms analyze large-scale bot activity, provide one useful clue among many in investigations, and nudge ordinary users toward disclosing direct model output.
• Meanwhile it won’t make unmarked AI go away: open-weight operators bypass sampling-layer marks trivially, rewriters wash marks out of passages, and while distilled models may inherit weight-baked marks for a while, motivated retraining can quite plausibly scrub them while keeping most of the capability — with detector access accelerating the search, and the growing institutional reliance on watermark status making provenance-resistant models ever more valuable.
• The boundary the watermark ends up drawing will be administrative far more than epistemic: approved versus unapproved, signed versus unsigned, inside versus outside the governance perimeter.

Which brings us back around to where we started:

These “AI-gen watermarks” are going to become excellent markers of obedience to a governance regime – while remaining vastly weaker as proofs of where a given piece of AI-generated text ultimately came from.

That’s no reason to treat provenance as worthless — but it’s an excellent reason to stop pretending that a fragile statistical signal can settle questions of authorship, truth, learning, or intellectual legitimacy.

For ordinary text, I’d much rather we build institutions — plural, decentralized, human-scale institutions — that hold people responsible for what they publish and judge content by evidence, reasoning, reproducibility, originality, and consequences.

Universal watermarking points somewhere else entirely: toward an escalating spiral of detection, evasion, certification, and exclusion.
Arms races are famously much easier to start than to stop, and we should think deeply before choosing to start this one. But just as with the AGI arms race, deep thought does not seem to be the sort of thing our society is currently embracing.

A serious long-read. Seriously worth your time.

 

Dawg, when do you sleep?

Luigi pleads guilty in NYC federal court

 

I cited this back when the murder took place in December 2024.

 

THE SINGLE PAYER ZOMBIE EMERGES YET AGAIN

 

Just came across this preprint paper. Will study it. 

 

I took a thorough grad school run at Single Payer in 1994 (while employed as a Medicare Peer Review outcomes analyst).

PBS Newshour update. Sam Brown.

 

Stay tuned. On deck, I have had my fill of The Singularity for now. Ran into Sam Brown on PBS Newshour.

 

Sam is hilarious.

…Obituarists, more than most scriveners, are a special journalistic breed. They never have to come up with story ideas or worry they’ll run out of subjects to write about. Their articles are delivered with ready-made endings that happen to appear in the lede, or first paragraph. There’s no need for follow-up. They are, as the TV commentator Jeff Greenfield says, “the only kind of journalist who knows with certainty that sooner or later his story will run.”…

…The greatest compliment I received as a news reporter was from a prominent New York civic leader. He told me I had “a healthy disrespect for everyone.” But obituaries also demand a degree of empathy not required of, say, political reporting or restaurant reviews. And being exposed to death daily can take its toll. In these days of warp-speed communications, sometimes obituarists call a source for confirmation or background, only to realize we’re the first to inform the person that a friend or family member has died. Some people phone us in advance to say a relative is mortally ill. One can only say “Sorry for your loss” so many times in one day before they begin to feel as if they’re calling a list of Bernie Madoff’s swindled investors to commiserate. 

Still, the reporter is intruding on a profound moment of grief, particularly when the death in question was unexpected or premature. A parent or a spouse may plead to return the call in a week. We have to gently explain that deadlines wait for no one, especially now with online news sites that define immediacy in minutes, and that this is their opportunity to put the person’s life in perspective, a kindness to the departed and to the family, too. Journalists enjoy a reputation for being hard-boiled and cynical, but writing obituaries is not a job for the faint of heart, nor the heartless. 

Alden Whitman, the New York Times’s first and most famous full-time advance obit writer, regularly interviewed people for their advance obituaries—in advance. Fondly referred to as “the Angel of Death,” he was known for sometimes lulling his subjects into submission by telling them he was merely updating their biographies, although most were either sophisticated or egocentric enough to submit agreeably if not eagerly. (Those who prefer a varnished, self-congratulatory version of their life story can always write or commission an autobiography to preempt an independent final verdict—and they do.)

Roberts, Sam. Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit (pp. 4-6). (Function). Kindle Edition.

BACK ON TASKS

 

"The Singularity?" Continuing on...

The Final Narcissistic Injury of Humankind

“Subdue the Earth!” With these resounding words, the divine command of the Old Testament spurred humanity's entrance into the world. For countless generations, people held unwaveringly to the notion that the Earth must be the center of the cosmos. Surely our loving Creator would place humanity—his most cherished creation—on a pivotal planet rather than relegating us to a dim corner of the universe. Enter Nicolaus Copernicus, the disruptor of Earth's centrality, shattering the illusions of the faithful. While this cosmic demotion was a bitter pill, it laid the groundwork for groundbreaking scientific discoveries and revolutionary technologies, from Einstein's general relativity to quantum theory, space exploration, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Our “cosmological injury” initiated a series of painful revelations that Sigmund Freud called the “narcissistic injuries” of humankind.

Fast‐forward three centuries, and Charles Darwin unveiled another unsettling truth: We were not fashioned in God's image but are the products of biological evolution. This “biological injury” stripped humanity of its God‐ given status, positioning us firmly within the animal kingdom. Our collective ego suffered another blow, but this made way for progress and new knowledge, such as genetic engineering and decoding the human genome.

In the twentieth century, humanity endured a “psychological injury,” learning that unconscious drives and emotions governed us far more than rational thought, moral imperatives, or conscious willpower. This third bruise to our self‐ esteem led to remarkable advancements, particularly in medicine and psychology.

This series of painful realizations, which have shaken human certainties to their core, now enters a final chapter in the twenty‐ first century. Humankind confronts its ultimate narcissistic injury—the colossal violation of our self‐ esteem by the mistaken belief that we can create a posthuman hyper‐ technology that can outperform us in every way: the Ubermensch. In the Nietzschean sense, this isn't a human endeavor but a form of self‐ deception, a “mind extension” whose underlying “spirituality” is neither understood nor explainable—just a disparate species that could render its progenitors Homo obsoletus.

In this new era, Man—the Mensch—has now taken evolution into his own hands, seeking to transcend the limitations of our biological existence. Through a technological singularity, humanity aims for nothing less than bliss, divinity, and immortality born out of the machine: Deus ex Machina. The created now become the creator of their creation, forging a new reality where biological constraints no longer define our potential.

This bold endeavor challenges the very nature of human existence. We journey to reshape our existence and redefine our place in the cosmos.”

— The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI by Anders Indset, Florian Neukart

OF TECH RELEVANCE, ON CNN TONIGHT

 

I'm watching. Very interesting.

   

All of this tech news is on fire this weekend. 

 

MONDAY UPDATES

OK, are you a "Doomerist," an "Accelerationist," or just still Befuddled?

 

MARK ZUCKERBERG SPEAKS TO THE AI FUTURE

The Future is for Everyone
The Path to a Positive AI Future
Mark Zuckerberg, META CEO, Aug 10, 2026

We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. As we get closer to this moment, it is important to develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety.

The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?

We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety…

Yeah, sure. Ben Goertzel responds.

Zuck’s Version of “The Future is for Everyone” Has a Few Small Issues...

 

ANOTHER "MANIFESTO." SAM ALTMAN CHIMES IN

The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand.

And yet, we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them...

Yeah, sure. Everyone talking His Own Book...

 

 

I'll cede the last word to Demis for now.

Hassabis said, "The thing nobody is talking about is the philosophical question. What is meaning? What is purpose? What does it mean to be human once all of this arrives?"

He said, "We need great new philosophers." But philosophers do not write the checks. They don't get a seat at the table where trillion dollar decisions are made. The people at that table are building the future right now with jagged intelligences that cannot learn, cannot plan longterm, and cannot be trusted to stay behind a guardrail that doesn't even exist yet. That's not a plan. That is a gamble. And every single one of us is in the pot.