Some random Rip Currents from Jacob Ward

Jacob Ward

"Other Currents"

1. Meta logged its employees’ keystrokes, then announced their layoffs. The Model Capability Initiative — Meta’s new tool for capturing employee keystrokes and mouse clicks, framed as AI training data — was announced this week with no opt-out option. Two days later, 8,000 layoffs. The sequence is the story: document what the workers do, then eliminate them.

2. Palantir published a manifesto. Anthropic went to court. Two companies drew opposite lines in the same week. Palantir’s 22-point public document calls AI weapons inevitable, some cultures “dysfunctional and regressive,” and pluralism a failure. Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins noted the obvious: these aren’t abstract ideas floating in space — they’re the stated ideology of a company that sells targeting software to militaries and immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, Anthropic has been in federal court since March fighting a Pentagon designation that labeled it a national security supply-chain risk — because it refused to remove safeguards against autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. One company announced what it believes. The other is paying lawyers to defend it.

3. The Joint Chiefs said autonomous weapons are coming. Nobody asked whether they work. Yesterday the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs called autonomous weapons a “key and essential part of everything we do.” Anthropic’s actual position — that frontier AI is not reliable enough to kill people without a human in the loop — has not been rebutted. It has been bypassed.

4. 96,000 tech layoffs this year, all attributed to AI. Nobody has to prove it. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, Salesforce, Block — every announcement uses the same language: efficiency, AI investment, right-sizing. No company is required to document whether AI replaced a single role. The NLRB has no jurisdiction over the framing. Nobody does.

5. Amazon’s Ring can now identify your neighbors by face. Familiar Faces rolls out facial recognition to Ring doorbells — identifying family, friends, delivery drivers — processed in Amazon’s cloud, opt-out by default. EFF and Senator Markey are pushing back. Three states have already blocked it. “Optional and disabled by default” is how every ambient surveillance feature starts.

6. OpenAI lost three senior executives in a single day and is projecting $14 billion in losses. The CPO, the head of Sora, and the enterprise CTO all departed the same Friday. Multiple cited the DOD contract and the cultural shift from research to commercial operations. The company generating $25 billion in annual revenue is simultaneously losing the people who built the products and spending $14 billion more than it earns.

7. Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue. The gap matters because of what each company agreed to. Anthropic hit $30 billion in annualized revenue this month, passing OpenAI’s $25 billion. Enterprise customers — not consumers — drove it. Worth noting alongside item 2: Anthropic is the company currently in court over autonomous weapons restrictions. OpenAI signed a DOD contract that removed equivalent restrictions weeks after Anthropic was blacklisted.

8. S&P 500 boards are disclosing AI risk while knowing almost nothing about AI. 83% of S&P 500 companies now list AI as a material risk in disclosures — up from 12% in 2023. Board directors with AI expertise: 2.7%. The people with the legal authority to set limits have mostly opted not to understand the thing they’re supposed to be limiting. This is the governance gap that makes every other story in this section possible.

 I added my own random @BobbyGvegas Current:

Another random “current" from a subscriber: The other day, I posted a story to my Facebook page, and was shortly thereafter notified by Facebook that, unless I opted out, henceforth all of my story postings would be given an AI generated “headline." Supposedly to help gain better visibility for my stories. Read “content monetizing assistance." I replied in testy ALL CAPS. (Use your imagination.) Something along the lines of  NO.MUTHA.ZUCKING.WAY…

RIP CURRENT UPDATE

Jacob is definitely worth a paid subscription.

PanDigicon update

Jacob Ward is killin' it of late.

    

From his Substack.

"A federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco accuses Perplexity AI of embedding tracking software that transmitted users’ private conversations to Meta and Google — even when users had specifically enabled the app’s Incognito mode, which explicitly promised not to track data. The complaint, Doe v. Perplexity AI Inc. (3:26-cv-02803), names all three companies as defendants and alleges violations of California privacy law.

 
The actions alleged are both ugly and, unfortunately, very common. According to the complaint, trackers download onto a user’s device the moment they log in, giving Meta and Google full access to everything typed into Perplexity’s search interface — before the query even reaches Perplexity’s own servers. This allegedly includes not only email addresses, Facebook IDs, IP addresses, and device information, which Meta and Google can theoretically pair with names and home addresses to specifically identify them. It also, according to the suit, includes the text of the exchanges between the users and the AI. The Incognito mode that Perplexity described as creating “anonymous threads” that “expire after 24 hours” offered, according to the suit, no actual protection at all.

 
It is industry practice to embed analytics code like what’s described in the suit to improve performance and offer a tailored experience. But the idea that the code could also be delivering the content of the conversations is new, and a clear violation of what people would reasonably expect..."

The "PanDigicon?" Bentham's "panopticon" for our time. Man, my privacy gumshoe stuff in now so dated. Started my privacy ranting in grad school 30 years ago. 4th Amendment scruples today? How quaint.

 

I still try to stay abreast. See expanded riff here as well.

 

  
Jacob Ward is hugely worth your time. Subscribe to his stack.

 

This just came to my attention. Too much goin' on right now. More in a bit... 

"NSFW?" We're gonna need a new acronym.

How about "TSFAIU?"

    

Totally Suitable For the AI Unemployed.™

 

CBS is going all Sinclair / Fox Lite. CNN isn't far behind. MSNOW? ABC? Wouldn't surprise me. Print media? I've been a WaPo subscriber for decades. Not any more, in the wake of Bezos' gauche craven suckups to Trump. Still hanging with the NY Times for now, and my subscribed periodicals: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Wired, Science (AAAS), and Scientific American.

 

A new independent entrepreurial public affairs news market is emerging. Mostly podcast-ish, and that gawdawful chaotic Substack platform (ugh).

 

Watch / listen intently to the above Kara Swisher-Scott Galloway Pivot episode. Wickedly funny (incl NSFW) and deadly serious & analytically cogent. Potential #1 for our nascent TSFAIU demographic. Think abut it. (Pull it up in native YouTube, and read the voluminous comments that people have left. Lots of thoughtful, topically astute viewers. By no means a FanBoy/Girl love fest.)

 

Other potential contenders? Jacob Ward? Laurie Segall? Numerous others.

 

Think about it. 

 

More shortly... 

The launch of Laurie Segall's "Mostly Human" podcast

 

A whlie back I cited the work of CNN / 60 Minutes alum Laurie Segall. She has just launched her "Mostly Human" podcast effort.

 

First up: "Parenting at the Speed of AI." 

 

The guest is Dr. Becky Kennedy, clinical psychologist. 

 

Useful to re-visit my prior topically relevant cite of Dr. Jonathan Haidt here. 

 

As a doting grandfather / great-grandfather, I have keen familial interest here, especially in light of paradigm-shifting recent Big Tech social media rulings in the courts.

 

 

ERRATUM

From my book stash. I cited it in 2021. A fine read.

Play breeds better thinkers

In a digital, global world where information is projected to double every 12 hours (1), the memorization of facts will become less of a commodity than the ability to think, find patterns, and generate new ideas from old parts (2, 3). Thus, a cradle-to-career approach to educating children must be mindful of how children learn to learn, not just what they learn (4). Combining insight, scientific acumen, and exquisite narrative, The Intellectual Lives of Children allows readers to peer into the minds of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers as they explore and learn in everyday moments, emphasizing what constitutes real learning.

Children are bursting with playful curiosity. By age 3, they ask questions about everything they see—Why does a tree have leaves? Why does the Sun come up each day?—and by age 5, they pose even deeper questions, about God and morals. These questions not only provide fodder for knowledge, they help children discover the causal relationships among things—all with adult mentors by their side… 

TOTALLY ABSURD OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

    

Opened my email this morning. Always love a good laugh.

   

 

OK neuro-nitwits, I left Las Vegas in 2013 to return to the SF Bay Area. Then moved to BMore 7 years ago. Don't quit your Thailand day jobs (btw, note that I pulled it up in Photoshop and quickly smudged the lower-right Q-Code).
 

More shortly...

SOTU 2026, Jacob Ward‘s thoughts

In the grand tradition of presidential addresses, I stand here — well, no, I’m sitting, actually —to tell you exactly how things are going. Unlike those addresses, I do not tell you things are going great. I borrowed the format — the gallery anecdote, the foreign policy chest-beating, the optimistic entrepreneurship section, the infrastructure close — and used it to describe the world as I’m seeing it right now. Consider this your State of the Union from someone with no speechwriters, no approval rating to protect, and nothing to sell you except the truth as best I can see it.

Tonight’s address covers a seemingly random mishmash, but I promise I pull it all together: a soccer riot in India that is actually about all of us, a race with China that may be less about values than about who profits from the panic, a Pentagon deadline handed to the one AI CEO who tried to hold an ethical line, a concentration of power that makes “the market” sound quaint, the loneliness that comes with a billion-dollar company of one, and a set of courtroom reckonings that are a preview of where AI is headed next. The State of the Union is anxious. I remain hopeful. God bless America.

Very well stated. A lot to reflect upon.

Also of note below,

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is threatening to blacklist Anthropic from working with the U.S. military over the artificial intelligence company's refusal to loosen its safety standards.

The threat came on Tuesday during a meeting between Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, according to two people with direct knowledge of the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly...

DARIO AMODEI

The Adolescence of Technology 

Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

January 2026

There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.

 

In my essay Machines of Loving Grace, I tried to lay out the dream of a civilization that had made it through to adulthood, where the risks had been addressed and powerful AI was applied with skill and compassion to raise the quality of life for everyone. I suggested that AI could contribute to enormous advances in biology, neuroscience, economic development, global peace, and work and meaning. I felt it was important to give people something inspiring to fight for, a task at which both AI accelerationists and AI safety advocates seemed—oddly—to have failed. But in this current essay, I want to confront the rite of passage itself: to map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them. I believe deeply in our ability to prevail, in humanity’s spirit and its nobility, but we must face the situation squarely and without illusions...

And, check this out.

One Blood Clot Away II: René Girard, Curtis Yarvin, and the Billionaires Plan

How Peter Thiel Turned a Philosophy and a Manifesto Into a Vice President

"EVERY oil empire thinks that THIS time js going to be different"

Jacob Ward's Rip Current

    

Jacob Ward is consistently worth your time.

One of the historical conflicts Jacob cites.

 

 I think I was 10 at the time.

 

2026 INCOHERENCE AT THE U.S. STATE DEPT

 

"Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, asserted on Monday that Greenland rightfully belonged to the United States and that the Trump administration could seize the semiautonomous Danish territory if it wanted.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper, the CNN host, after being asked repeatedly whether he would rule out using military force.

The remarks were part of a vocal push by Mr. Miller, long a powerful behind-the-scenes player in Trump administration policy, to justify American imperialism and a vision for a new world order in which the United States could freely overthrow national governments and take foreign territory and resources so long as it was in the national interest.

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”"

That is not the U.S. I have been a part of for 80 years.

January 6th, 2021 

Jacob Ward on our rapidly expanding post-truth era

 

I followed Jacob Ward's excellent work back when he worked for NBC. Cited him here back in December 2018. I now follow him via Substack, specifically URL'd at TheRipCurrent.com.

 

This is an intriguing segment.

 

A few relevant prior riffs of mine. Search on "965."

 

UPDATE

 

Check out Jacob's Ethics Statement page. Read all 0f it, including the lengthy "A Note on Trust." Sold me, bro'.

 

Jacob's book. 

Click here

Another book jumps the rope line. Just started reading.

 

I've been gumshoeing "Artificial Intelligence" related stuff for a decade or so. 

I don't much care for Substack (notwithstanding my passive account there), a weak authoring platform with a chaotic viewer interface. Nonetheless, based on what I've viewed and read today, I will be upgrading yo a paying RipCurrent subscriber.

 

UPDATE

 

Trump just signed an E.O. re-scheduling marijuana. Jacob discusses the implications.

 

My 1998 grad thesis comprised an exhaustive examination of incoherent suspicionless workplace drug testing policies. Much of the policy idiocy remains in place, legalization initiatives notwithstanding.

 

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

My Yooper sister always sends me Christmas tree ornaments. This one is priceless.

 

Love ya, Carole.
 

More shortly...