AI accelerates and magnifies the problem of man and his tools. Man already has a huge inclination to make assumptions rather than carefully and inclusively process information for himself. Tools that speed up that processing of information leaves man processing less for himself finds him more of a mere consumer who makes more and more assumptions based on information processed and packaged for him. There is such a thing as human speeds, speeds where we can respect our limitations/capacities and still remain humane/thoughtful ourselves- critical thinking skills require less consumption of "facts" and more careful examination.
WE threw cars out there because we were fascinated by what they could do for us with their speed. We fastened ourselves to them...redesigned our communities around them. It can be argued that our sense of belonging/ community suffered. AI will reshape us more than cars so we need to not just use them in fascination but think carefully about how we don't want them to shape. But they will shape us not matter what so let's use them carefully. But first we need to recognize that there are limits to being and remaining human- humane- careful inclusive thinkers.
All the more reason who owns AI... the cloud is so important. Technofascists will make us serfs in a techofuedalism points out Yanis Varofoufakis in Technofeudalism.
Who owns (leases) it, exactly. I've been thinking, AI might be considered Wikipedia on steroids, or accelerated to near the speed of light. It (unfortunately) is the default info source whenever one searches for something online, yet who are the compilers of its information? I purposely avoid clicking it, so as to deny it my tiny bit of traffic validation, except in rare instances when it has something I regard as solid information.
Their editors did do the right thing a year ago, I think it was, when they decided to drop the Anti-Defamation League as being a reliable source on antisemitism. The pushback must have been ferocious.
Hello Glen.... What happens when the Kurzweil Singularity is reached?.... A.I. can learn faster, and more depth than Humans.... With the confluence of Quantum Computing, Robotics, and 3D Printing will A.I. see Humans as a Threat?... Will Humans have Created 'Sky-Net'?...
In an ideal world - education in an AI world would make use of tutors (similar to Oxford University) where student knowledge and understanding of an AI-generated essay or work could be probed in a one on one.
However, teaching load, student-class sizes, funding, and other social barriers make it unlikely in most academic settings. So, there may be some successes with the use of AI in education, but also many failures - I saw a recent reporting at the University of Reading in the UK that 94% of the AI produced answers to exams went undetected. So, maybe it's already game over.
The bigger issue seems to me to be about what does education mean in an AI world - a world where it's predicted, though certainly not provable, that 40-50% (or more) or all jobs will disappear. Do universities just become technical schools for admission to the law, engineering, and medicine - or are there even jobs in those for more than a few? Do humanities departments disappear as much of the knowledge store of history, art, etc is available through a prompt?
What seems safe to say is the pace of change within the technology itself is outstripping our ability to understand and deal with it. What is the half-life of a person's education in such a world? I don't know.
"In a way, AI is a selective manifestation of evidence that is already out there. And there’s the rub. Who’s doing the selecting? Who’s writing the algorithms? Which evidence is being favored and which is being suppressed or disregarded?"
For me those are the key questions. Being the techno-Luddite, the skeptic, the contrarian that I am, in this (unfolding) era of AI* I have new-found appreciation for the "gumshoe" historian and journalist who uses his/her suspicions, skills, hunches, wits, initiatives, sixth an seventh sense to get THE source material, which if I'm reading the above paragraph correctly, AI doesn't get into, much. So I'm worried, with the seduction of quick and easy analyses available, are we being sold a story largely within status quo boundaries, when truth may well lie beyond?
*I still like to quip that "artificial intelligence" refers to the Republican campaign platform (habitually replete with reference to "tax reform" that is anything but).
If I were teaching, I'd be a dinosaur. IMO, AI is much too unreliable thus far to be used for classroom purposes. The underlying sources and the algorithms are unknowable. Material that AI generates is questionable at best, so not what students should be using for any purpose. Part of higher learning is [or should be] tracking down and vetting sources. In other words, doing your own research
What you said, Bill, PLUS, very few people are talking about the environmental disaster that AI causes: "To build Colossus, Elon Musk’s pollution-spewing AI data center in Memphis, Musk used gag orders to silence city officials and bypass input from residents, whose asthma rates have since soared. Now Musk wants to take this strategy national." https://jacobin.com/2025/07/elon-musk-memphis-pollution-colossus
Another OUTSTANDING Thought-Provoker, Bill. And Thank You for the link to Mike Neiberg’s Substack. For somebody who knows absolutely NOTHING about AI like me, that looks like an excellent place to hang out.
THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION confronting every Human Beings on this Planet still capable of thinking for her or himself ~ starting with Americans ~ is:
“Given what Humans know about the Universe, this Planet, Life, and Ourselves from our Natural, Social, and Human Sciences; and,
“Given what Humans can do in that Universe, to that Planet, with Life, and for Ourselves thru our Hard and Soft Technologies [now including AI],
“Why, then, is there still Poverty, Hunger, and Disease, Illiteracy, Injustice, and Inequity, Ecocide, Genocide, and Democide, Insecurity, Tyranny, and War?”
See below for ChatGPT’s response.
Does anybody here at BV have any thoughts on either The Question or ChatGPT’s response?
Here’s a compact answer that tries to be honest about the gap between what we can do and what we actually do.
WHY DO THESE PROBLEMS PERSIST?
The short answer
Because knowledge and tools don’t automatically translate into aligned incentives, capable institutions, or sustained cooperation. Technology amplifies human intent; it doesn’t fix governance, power, or trust by itself.
The deeper causes (in plain language)
Misaligned incentives & power. Many actors profit from the status quo. When the returns to extraction or exclusion beat the returns to inclusion, progress stalls.
Weak or captured institutions. You need state capacity, rule of law, and low corruption to turn resources into outcomes. Many places lack one or more of these.
Coordination and collective-action failures. Public goods (clean air, peace, basic research) get underprovided because each actor hopes others will pay.
Externalities & the commons. Costs of pollution, pandemics, or war spill over to others, so decision-makers underweight them.
Distribution, not just production. The world produces enough calories and knowledge; bottlenecks are logistics, affordability, and political will.
Inequality and exclusion. When wealth and voice concentrate, policies skew; services for the poor become poor services.
Beliefs, identity, and bias. Misinformation, prejudice, and zero-sum narratives block policies that would help everyone.
Uncertainty & risk. Policymakers fear unintended consequences; communities fear loss. Precaution turns into paralysis.
Violence & anarchy problems. Security dilemmas and weak conflict resolution make force “rational” for leaders, disastrous for people.
Path dependence. History—colonialism, borders, institutions—sets tracks that are hard to jump off, even with new tech.
Technology is an amplifier. The same tools that can cure disease can also enable surveillance, manipulation, and warfare.
Time horizons. Leaders optimize for election cycles or quarterly results, while problems (climate, education) pay off over decades.
WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY MOVE THE NEEDLE
Not silver bullets—portfolios that compound:
Fix incentives: carbon pricing or caps; anti-monopoly enforcement; transparency rules; performance-based transfers to local govts.
Build state capacity: invest in civil service, digital rails (ID, payments, data), procurement reform, and maintenance, not just megaprojects.
Target the “last mile”: cash transfers, universal basic services (primary care, vaccines, WASH), and logistics (roads, cold chains, power).
Health & education basics: community health workers, primary care + generics; early childhood; teachers supported and measured on learning.
Women’s empowerment: schooling completion, reproductive autonomy, and safety—these shift fertility, earnings, and health system-wide.
Economic inclusion: secure land/asset rights, mobile money, SME finance, and trade facilitation so people can actually use markets.
Science for neglected needs: fund R&D and advance market commitments for diseases of poverty; open science and tech transfer where feasible.
Climate realism: coal-to-clean deals, grid upgrades, resilient agriculture; protect and pay for nature; insure against climate shocks.
Peace & justice: credible mediation, peacekeeping where needed; transitional justice; community policing; prison and legal reform.
Information integrity: independent media, platform accountability, civic education, and pro-social algorithmic choices.
Global cooperation 2.0: pandemic treaties with automatic triggers; debt restructuring mechanisms; climate loss-and-damage finance.
Guardrails for powerful tech (incl. AI): safety standards, red-team tests, incident reporting, and liability that scales with risk.
We’ve multiplied the first term dramatically. The bottlenecks are mostly in the middle term—and patience for the last.
If you want, tell me which domain you care about most (health, climate, education, conflict, inequality), and I’ll sketch a concrete, 5–10 lever plan tailored to it.
AI accelerates and magnifies the problem of man and his tools. Man already has a huge inclination to make assumptions rather than carefully and inclusively process information for himself. Tools that speed up that processing of information leaves man processing less for himself finds him more of a mere consumer who makes more and more assumptions based on information processed and packaged for him. There is such a thing as human speeds, speeds where we can respect our limitations/capacities and still remain humane/thoughtful ourselves- critical thinking skills require less consumption of "facts" and more careful examination.
You said it much better than I did, Glen. Agree completely!
Thank you Denise!
Credit where it's due, sir
WE threw cars out there because we were fascinated by what they could do for us with their speed. We fastened ourselves to them...redesigned our communities around them. It can be argued that our sense of belonging/ community suffered. AI will reshape us more than cars so we need to not just use them in fascination but think carefully about how we don't want them to shape. But they will shape us not matter what so let's use them carefully. But first we need to recognize that there are limits to being and remaining human- humane- careful inclusive thinkers.
Se
"But first we need to recognize that there are limits to being and remaining human- humane- careful inclusive thinkers."
Very sobering, very admonitory.
All the more reason who owns AI... the cloud is so important. Technofascists will make us serfs in a techofuedalism points out Yanis Varofoufakis in Technofeudalism.
Who owns (leases) it, exactly. I've been thinking, AI might be considered Wikipedia on steroids, or accelerated to near the speed of light. It (unfortunately) is the default info source whenever one searches for something online, yet who are the compilers of its information? I purposely avoid clicking it, so as to deny it my tiny bit of traffic validation, except in rare instances when it has something I regard as solid information.
Their editors did do the right thing a year ago, I think it was, when they decided to drop the Anti-Defamation League as being a reliable source on antisemitism. The pushback must have been ferocious.
YES!
Hello Glen.... What happens when the Kurzweil Singularity is reached?.... A.I. can learn faster, and more depth than Humans.... With the confluence of Quantum Computing, Robotics, and 3D Printing will A.I. see Humans as a Threat?... Will Humans have Created 'Sky-Net'?...
Good questions Apache!
In an ideal world - education in an AI world would make use of tutors (similar to Oxford University) where student knowledge and understanding of an AI-generated essay or work could be probed in a one on one.
However, teaching load, student-class sizes, funding, and other social barriers make it unlikely in most academic settings. So, there may be some successes with the use of AI in education, but also many failures - I saw a recent reporting at the University of Reading in the UK that 94% of the AI produced answers to exams went undetected. So, maybe it's already game over.
The bigger issue seems to me to be about what does education mean in an AI world - a world where it's predicted, though certainly not provable, that 40-50% (or more) or all jobs will disappear. Do universities just become technical schools for admission to the law, engineering, and medicine - or are there even jobs in those for more than a few? Do humanities departments disappear as much of the knowledge store of history, art, etc is available through a prompt?
What seems safe to say is the pace of change within the technology itself is outstripping our ability to understand and deal with it. What is the half-life of a person's education in such a world? I don't know.
Thanks, Tom, I can see I'm gonna have a good night's sleep tonight... :-(
Maybe tell yourself this is only a simulation and we're living in the Matrix. Take the blue pill. :-)
"In a way, AI is a selective manifestation of evidence that is already out there. And there’s the rub. Who’s doing the selecting? Who’s writing the algorithms? Which evidence is being favored and which is being suppressed or disregarded?"
For me those are the key questions. Being the techno-Luddite, the skeptic, the contrarian that I am, in this (unfolding) era of AI* I have new-found appreciation for the "gumshoe" historian and journalist who uses his/her suspicions, skills, hunches, wits, initiatives, sixth an seventh sense to get THE source material, which if I'm reading the above paragraph correctly, AI doesn't get into, much. So I'm worried, with the seduction of quick and easy analyses available, are we being sold a story largely within status quo boundaries, when truth may well lie beyond?
*I still like to quip that "artificial intelligence" refers to the Republican campaign platform (habitually replete with reference to "tax reform" that is anything but).
Your comment makes me think of the original Star Trek episode about the lawyer with real books.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_Martial_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
Yep, I used Wiki---guilty!
"Yep, I used Wiki---guilty!"
Uh-oh... When are visiting hours? Or are they only for family and pre-screened friends?
Sorry, I'm accepting no visitors. I want to be alone with the voices.
Rest assured, your wishes respected... yikes! ;-)
😁
[Gotta find out how to insert emojis.]
Robert Reich has a discussion about AI this evening. Maybe more interesting---and equally informative---are the comments.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-your-kids-will-make-money?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
If I were teaching, I'd be a dinosaur. IMO, AI is much too unreliable thus far to be used for classroom purposes. The underlying sources and the algorithms are unknowable. Material that AI generates is questionable at best, so not what students should be using for any purpose. Part of higher learning is [or should be] tracking down and vetting sources. In other words, doing your own research
AI is scary for this Octogeneration, retired Computer Programmer.
What you said, Bill, PLUS, very few people are talking about the environmental disaster that AI causes: "To build Colossus, Elon Musk’s pollution-spewing AI data center in Memphis, Musk used gag orders to silence city officials and bypass input from residents, whose asthma rates have since soared. Now Musk wants to take this strategy national." https://jacobin.com/2025/07/elon-musk-memphis-pollution-colossus
Another OUTSTANDING Thought-Provoker, Bill. And Thank You for the link to Mike Neiberg’s Substack. For somebody who knows absolutely NOTHING about AI like me, that looks like an excellent place to hang out.
THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION confronting every Human Beings on this Planet still capable of thinking for her or himself ~ starting with Americans ~ is:
“Given what Humans know about the Universe, this Planet, Life, and Ourselves from our Natural, Social, and Human Sciences; and,
“Given what Humans can do in that Universe, to that Planet, with Life, and for Ourselves thru our Hard and Soft Technologies [now including AI],
“Why, then, is there still Poverty, Hunger, and Disease, Illiteracy, Injustice, and Inequity, Ecocide, Genocide, and Democide, Insecurity, Tyranny, and War?”
See below for ChatGPT’s response.
Does anybody here at BV have any thoughts on either The Question or ChatGPT’s response?
ChatGPT’s response:
Thought for 9s
Here’s a compact answer that tries to be honest about the gap between what we can do and what we actually do.
WHY DO THESE PROBLEMS PERSIST?
The short answer
Because knowledge and tools don’t automatically translate into aligned incentives, capable institutions, or sustained cooperation. Technology amplifies human intent; it doesn’t fix governance, power, or trust by itself.
The deeper causes (in plain language)
Misaligned incentives & power. Many actors profit from the status quo. When the returns to extraction or exclusion beat the returns to inclusion, progress stalls.
Weak or captured institutions. You need state capacity, rule of law, and low corruption to turn resources into outcomes. Many places lack one or more of these.
Coordination and collective-action failures. Public goods (clean air, peace, basic research) get underprovided because each actor hopes others will pay.
Externalities & the commons. Costs of pollution, pandemics, or war spill over to others, so decision-makers underweight them.
Distribution, not just production. The world produces enough calories and knowledge; bottlenecks are logistics, affordability, and political will.
Inequality and exclusion. When wealth and voice concentrate, policies skew; services for the poor become poor services.
Beliefs, identity, and bias. Misinformation, prejudice, and zero-sum narratives block policies that would help everyone.
Uncertainty & risk. Policymakers fear unintended consequences; communities fear loss. Precaution turns into paralysis.
Violence & anarchy problems. Security dilemmas and weak conflict resolution make force “rational” for leaders, disastrous for people.
Path dependence. History—colonialism, borders, institutions—sets tracks that are hard to jump off, even with new tech.
Technology is an amplifier. The same tools that can cure disease can also enable surveillance, manipulation, and warfare.
Time horizons. Leaders optimize for election cycles or quarterly results, while problems (climate, education) pay off over decades.
WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY MOVE THE NEEDLE
Not silver bullets—portfolios that compound:
Fix incentives: carbon pricing or caps; anti-monopoly enforcement; transparency rules; performance-based transfers to local govts.
Build state capacity: invest in civil service, digital rails (ID, payments, data), procurement reform, and maintenance, not just megaprojects.
Target the “last mile”: cash transfers, universal basic services (primary care, vaccines, WASH), and logistics (roads, cold chains, power).
Health & education basics: community health workers, primary care + generics; early childhood; teachers supported and measured on learning.
Women’s empowerment: schooling completion, reproductive autonomy, and safety—these shift fertility, earnings, and health system-wide.
Economic inclusion: secure land/asset rights, mobile money, SME finance, and trade facilitation so people can actually use markets.
Science for neglected needs: fund R&D and advance market commitments for diseases of poverty; open science and tech transfer where feasible.
Climate realism: coal-to-clean deals, grid upgrades, resilient agriculture; protect and pay for nature; insure against climate shocks.
Peace & justice: credible mediation, peacekeeping where needed; transitional justice; community policing; prison and legal reform.
Information integrity: independent media, platform accountability, civic education, and pro-social algorithmic choices.
Global cooperation 2.0: pandemic treaties with automatic triggers; debt restructuring mechanisms; climate loss-and-damage finance.
Guardrails for powerful tech (incl. AI): safety standards, red-team tests, incident reporting, and liability that scales with risk.
A MENTAL MODEL TO KEEP
Outcomes = (Knowledge × Tools) × (Institutions × Incentives × Norms) × (Time).
We’ve multiplied the first term dramatically. The bottlenecks are mostly in the middle term—and patience for the last.
If you want, tell me which domain you care about most (health, climate, education, conflict, inequality), and I’ll sketch a concrete, 5–10 lever plan tailored to it.
Source: https://chatgpt.com/c/68a59a02-a404-8323-b6a3-fa1cd1e64c9b .