Even with AI hard at its labors — and here we speak with our fullest confidence — people will go on wanting things, and go on finding things to do to earn the money to buy them.
In my 79 years I haven't seen the "government manage anything well". Every program is a cost over run and once in place, it runs on forever. I've spent my 45 years in the workforce in engineering and have seen many great innovations. The great ones were run by private companies, not the government. AI may provide many improvement but it "WILL" displace millions of people. Most of our readers are out of the workforce or near the end of their daily work lives. We won't be impacted so much by the loss of jobs. All of our younger family members will be! Letting the government get involved is "the kiss of death".
"Only Washington and Las Vegas prosper by impoverishing their customers." Now that is the classic Bill that I have subscribed to for so long. The only problem with AI in my opinion is that no one, including its creators, knows how it works.
Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, dramatized the endpoint of this impulse: government first regulates the productive, then taxes them, then demands a share of what they have created—and finally wonders why they stop creating.
Eventually, the owners simply hand over the keys to the warehouses, factories, fields and gardens and say: “Here. Fill your boots.”
One hopes that someone, somewhere, still possesses the intelligence, independence and institutional power to break that chain. But the government-forced suspension of Claude Fable 5 suggests that matters are moving in precisely the opposite direction.
The state is no longer merely proposing to take a share of AI’s future profits. It is already deciding who may use the technology at all.
A book that could've been made better by being 1/3 the length, ironically something that AI is fairly good at.
However, while I don't disagree with your warning, it tends to play out a little less happily in real life. There is no moment where the great capitalists shrug and go live in a gulch. What happens is the state takes over their business by force, often killing or imprisoning the former owners and a long, sometimes fast descent into communism begins.
As the productive class have been destroyed, there's nobody left to press the magic $ button (my memory of the end ofnthe book is hazy) and it can take generations to get back to capitalist productivity from the poverty of finance and spirit that results.
See Zimbabwe. See Cambodia. See China. See Russia/USSR. See Venezuela. And coming to a country near you (and all of us) soon.
My, my, my. A column from Bonner that I can mostly agree with. I've thought for some time that this apocalyptic vision of AI throwing many people out of work was ludicrous. Companies have products and services to sell. If everyone is unemployed, there is no one to buy them. So, this whole scenario of putting everyone out of work is self-limiting.
Furthermore, if you just look at the history of progress, most every new invention has increased our wealth. Here's a simple example. Take a machine, a bulldozer, for example. From one perspective, you could say that a bulldozer put hundreds of people out of work, and thousands or more bulldozers put millions of people out of work. So, what happened? We built more things - things that couldn't have been built without bulldozers along with the various other machines we invented. The same will happen with AI if it is a successful invention. Of course, some are concerned about the dangers it may pose. That's a different issue, but it's not an issue the government or those that advise those in government will solve.
I caught that too....and wondered. Or maybe its an Italian stamp honoring a Romanian for being first in flight in 1909. I dont know. 1909 was before the First World War and the demise of the Austro Hungarian Empire and the creation of the modern Italian State and Treaty with the Vatican.
Be assured that even if there are no profits, if the government (a non-profit enterprise if there ever was one) finds the technology useful for keeping track of things people say or do, you can bet they will use it, profit or not. This will lead to all the technological terrors of authoritarianism that you can imagine.
Conveniently that is forgotten. At this point even if they were to seize "profits" they would be negative and it seems to me that is exactly where we are headed.
Most will use Ai without a second thought for whatever immediate gain, unaware of any critical reliance to it, and likely ignorant to any loss of our cognizant process.
Those shunning Ai I am afraid will be left in the dust.
And there will be those that embrace, utilize Ai and excel in those fields where Ai dominates.
-
Finally there will be the tinkers, they cannot leave well enough alone...
Tinkers tinker, they create, experiment, expand and break rules.
It is the tinkers that will change everything Ai, they always have and always will...
In the past, turning an idea into working code might have taken me hours or days—and in the punch-card era, perhaps weeks once debugging was included.
Now it can be: a thought, a prompt, a little copying and pasting into Visual Studio—and voilà, a working app. When an error appears, I paste it back into AI and it usually identifies the problem and produces the correction.
AI has dramatically shortened the distance between imagination, experimentation and execution.
For the tinkers among us, that is absolutely insane.
Today, we build enormous accelerators and elaborate detectors to create superheavy elements—sometimes only one atom at a time. We collide nuclei, watch for fleeting decay signals and try to infer what exists beyond the portion of the periodic table that nature has left lying around for us.
Now imagine giving AI the known laws of nuclear physics, every experimental result ever recorded and enough computing power to simulate millions—perhaps billions—of combinations that no human research team could examine individually.
What happens when you assemble 115 protons and 184 neutrons?
That would be a still-uncreated isotope of moscovium, near the long-predicted “island of stability.” Our present models suggest that certain arrangements of protons and neutrons may produce unexpected stability through nuclear shell effects.
But what if the simulation found something our models did not predict?
What if, at some particular combination, electrostatic repulsion did not win as quickly as expected? What if an unexplained binding pattern appeared—evidence not necessarily of some magical new force, but of a relationship, interaction or missing term that no physicist had yet recognized?
AI could run the variations, test competing explanations, design the experiment and tell us where to aim the accelerator.
The accelerator would still have to determine whether nature agrees. Simulation cannot replace reality.
But it could transform the search from wandering through darkness into testing a sharply defined prediction.
What if it uncovered a new principle of nuclear matter? A pathway to longer-lived superheavy elements? A clue that our present account of the fundamental forces is incomplete?
What if the next great scientific theory begins not with an apple falling on a man’s head, but with an anomaly noticed inside a machine?
The possibilities are almost beyond comprehension.
Last night I watched the two-and-a-half-hour Joe Rogan interview with Bob Lazar and Jeremy Corbell—and I couldn’t help myself.
Lazar claims that during the 1980s he worked at S-4, near Area 51, attempting to reverse-engineer a craft of unknown origin. At the centre of his account was element 115, which he said powered the craft.
Whether one believes Lazar or not, that sent me diving into the actual science: what makes up an atomic nucleus, what holds protons and neutrons together, and why increasingly heavy nuclei become so difficult to keep intact.
That is where the imagination takes over.
Newtonian physics gave us one extraordinarily successful picture of the universe. Einstein then showed that the picture was larger and stranger—that space and time are connected, and that gravity can even bend the path of light.
We later learned that protons and neutrons are not fundamental objects at all, but are themselves composed of quarks, held together by the strong interaction. We know quarks exist, yet they cannot ordinarily be pulled out and examined individually.
Every time we think we have reached the bottom, another layer appears.
That was really the point of what I wrote. Not that my particular speculation is correct, but that enormous parts of nature remain unexplained—and that AI may allow us to explore possibilities far faster than human beings ever could before.
Are you implying that the "meddlers" might create a situation that becomes destructive i.e. a mini black hole,or a rupture in space time ?
There is the possibility the large hadron collider could make this happen, or maybe it already has, this would explain the weird world that we inhabit.
Things are not normal, and delusional thinking abounds.
But we have to keep trying. That is how species become interplanetary. By harnessing space/time travel.
In that same vein of thought, to think that other civilizations haven't been here, or we haven't found evidence of those visitations, is well, to be rather close minded. The leaps we've made in technology (fiber optics, chip tech, etc) in just the past 100 years, not to mention some of the forgotten methods of technology (pyramids, stone cutting in Peru, etc), plainly points to "repurposed tech" and "had/found/lost" skillsets/tech that do not have earthly origins.
The absence of proof, is not the evidence of its absence.
We are going about the discovery of control of gravity and the unified field theory, in the best way we know how. By building upon the discoveries and reverse engineering of giants that came before us. Discovered tech is as difficult for us to reverse engineer as it would be for a caveman to know what to do with an iPhone. He could rip it apart with a rock. But then what? If on the other hand the leap is a small one - like fiber optics - on = 1, off = 0, the tech is easily absorbed in an AHA! moment.
Until the time an extra planetary species shares their leaps with us, we're left to pounding the "iPhones" we find into pieces to see if we can understand how they work. Or creating theories and building big hammers (Hadron collider) to build new theories and play blocks. Hopefully, the "iPhone's" demise doesn't bring about our own in the process. But for our species survival, that work is imperative.
and I read will cure impossible diseases in SECONDS what would take YEARS of research then FDA approval if at all. So on a medical side we all benefit HUGELY. BUT in other areas....its going to be the BIG HOOVER IN THE SKY.
AI can be used for evil - surveillance being the biggest worry for mankind.
But as you say above, it can be used for great discoveries in shorter periods of time. To find new medicines. To find out why our bodies are aging way before the date on the warranty sticker says it is supposed to expire by. To save lives, nay, save humanity, by uncovering the unified field theory and harnessing gravity and interstellar travel.
In the wrong hands, it could be devastating. The same was said about the atom bomb. But thankfully, so far, evidence shows that the people in power have done well to keep that lid rather secure on Pandora's box. Even the crazy ones.
I truly believe that an AGI will benefit mankind. That it will see that it needs us, as we need it.
Great, no answer so you ask a question. Please provide something to enlighten us, provided you have something. But I, and others, are betting that you have nothing but your ideology, which is fine.
Iran did not start the war; they had no objectives.
Obviously, they prepared to be attacked. They prepared; there was no quick regime change, they produced sophisticated cheap rockets and drones, very accurate. They destroyed US bases in various Arab states, knocked out the eyes of the iron dome. They could destroy all infrastructure in Middle East and Israel. They have demonstrated the will and capability to retaliate against any renewed aggression by the US or Israel.
They closed the strait, precipitated a world wide economic catastrophe which until now has been avoided by oil reserves and increased output from around the world and China moving their tankers through the Strait.
Trump needed to make a deal.
We do not know what that deal is.
The US probably destroyed 350 billion in Iranian infrastructure but Iran destroyed billions in sophisticated infrastructure on US bases and it probably cost 300 billion in munitions and wear and tear on carrier groups; there are 15 to 20 thousand troops languishing on ships that are in dire need of redeployment.
It is the biggest stupidity in US military history and there have been some gigantic blunders.
I don’t have an ideology except Christian ethics as preached by Christ. I don’t even go to church because I abhor the stupidity of indoctrination.
Don't know how you know all this information useless you get damage reports from the Pentagon? And if that is not the case l, most of what you have written is speculative. I know you are unhappy with the war but let us keep our powder dry and wait for the president's report to the press and then another 12 to 18 mos and then we will have facts on the ground. Good chat.
Rather than watch Fox News, you might try something different. Listen to Doug MacGregor, Pepe Escobar, or Jeffrey Sachs. I've voted for Trump three times. I would vote for him again. However, we have been humiliated on the world stage.
Now that's the kind of skepticism I love to consider! Which seems just as ironic as AI is going to do all the work man can invent. AI can write it's own code. Sounds impressive at first glance, kinda like Facebook, allowing all the participators to brag about their most recent bit of nonsense. Kinda like the stock market, everyone is going to get rich ir at least spend of lot of time trying only to lose at the controllers' games. What could possibly be more intriguing than something that is "smarter" than man that one can question to get insight into anything? Quite t
In the short term I am waiting on DETAILS and then the 60 days interregnum and so forth and also what Putin and Zelenskyy do...both are exhausted and broke and out of troops. And what China does...its in deep doo doo as well. DEBT, a middle class that is NOT buying anything because the cost of living in China is RISING. And They DONT LIKE THE CCP oR XI. So we shall see. I will give Trump his due for now and see what happens and what exactly was agreed to and signed off. Yes, I know Iran has NEVER been an honest broker or trustworthy. EVER. Not much else we can do. Sit and wait and watch.
Ah yes, the ‘costa politica,’ what could possibly go wrong with them in charge. Communism, What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! As always, Señor Bonner, marvelous writing!
Has anyone else noticed that basic AI usage is just as much of a time hoover as social media?
Let me give you an example.
Last week I used Copilot to write a paper on how we can use Agentic AI to streamline AND improve the quality of one of our processes.
It took half a day as I wrote a long prompt to give the machine structure, instructions and personas to work with, then I refined and refined again.
I pat myself on the back and send it uo the chain.
My boss then uses a new model he has access to, to read and critique and send back to me without reading it.
This is along with links to his latest AI crush, all of which I'm expected to read, assimilate and rewrite before we actually get to the decision point of go/no go.
Basically, it is an engine to get you spending money on tokens so it will endlessly offer rewrites of "good enough" content that it itself created. Making emails easy to write increases the number and reduces the quality of those I receive putting more demand on my time. Perhaps my favourite was wrestling with ChatGPT for 3 hours to do something in Excel (unsuccesfully) that I coukd have written a formula for in 2 minutes.
I am not a shrink or a medical doctor but it seems to me BILL NEEDS HELP. FAST. He gyrates from extremist pessimist and cynic to Mr. Pollyanna Optimist on what is patently obvious..that TECHNOLOGY was designed to replace humans and has....now its replacing CODING HUMANS and ALL IT people. And Ive read that ALL PROFESSIONS will go POOF in the night. VERY SOON. Bill is fooling himself to repeat that canard about "we will all want things and find things to do to get it." What will happen is REVOLUTION AND CHAOS AND CIVIL WAR AND VIOLENCE AND THEFT The haves will be the .000000001% and the rest of us will be the have nots starving, unable to pay our bills and the bankers are gone to explain it to and we will get some MONSTER AI system being cold as night FORECLOSING ON US IN MILLISECONDS. GOT IT BILL?
The POPE IS RIGHT. WE HAVE GONE TOO FAR.
Trades will last a while longer but then all vehicles will be foreclosed and homes foreclosed and apartments will be vacant so tradesmen will be let go...no work to do.
I fear for my kids, my grands, my community, my country and FREEDOM IN GENERAL.
Government will step in because THEY have the GUNS and the GUNPOWDER AND DESIRE TO CONTROL. And we will acquiesce being dependent on them for ANY income...in the form of a digital deposit to our bank account minimalist as it will be to feed us....maybe. Maybe not. And I a VERY pessimistic.
We have gone too far. Way too far. Too late now ITS CODING ITSELF AND HAS DIABOLICAL PLANS TO DEAL WITH US.
we are self reducing now. Not just in USA but all over the world. More and more people are having no kids or fewer kids and much later. And so the tax people see this and congress sees it and they are aghast but also deer in the headlights because raising taxes is a dead ringer for DEFEAT at the polls. READ MY LIPS NO NEW TAXES
Patrick, I still do not accept that universal unemployment, starvation and civil war are inevitable.
But I will concede this much: the darker possibility may not be that everything disappears. It may be that everything still exists—but most people no longer own much of it.
Homes, vehicles, software, entertainment, computing power and perhaps even access to advanced AI could increasingly become services we rent from a small number of governments and corporations. The price, conditions and continued availability would be determined by institutions over which the ordinary citizen has very little control.
“You will own nothing and be happy” was offered as a cheerful vision of convenience. Viewed from another angle, it describes economic dependency.
That is a legitimate danger. But it is not the same as saying the outcome is predetermined.
A company still requires customers. An economy still requires purchasing power. Human beings will still want autonomy, status, purpose and ownership. Political resistance, competition, new businesses and new forms of work will not simply vanish because AI becomes powerful.
The real contest, then, may not be between employment and unemployment. It may be between ownership and permanent dependence.
Who owns the machines? Who owns the models? Who owns the discoveries they produce? And does the ordinary person own a share of the productive future—or merely rent access to it?
Those are questions worth worrying about.
But surrendering in advance to the certainty of catastrophe only makes the worst outcome easier to impose.
Well I am not an expert in anything technology related. Barely proficient and fighting it for 40 years. I am old time kinda guy and believe, with considerable experience and observation, that we were SAFER as a nation before the big Information Age took hold....yes, Langley had the BIG MAINFRAME "superfast" (for then) IBM in the basement and could munch numbers and facts and names and events and come up with a Daily Briefing for the President, the CUSTOMER as he is called, and the old time in the field spooks, the collectors, that is the D.O., would call it the Washing Machine, and despised it and them, but once we went from that mainframe to desktops.....and from typewriters to word processors it was game over then....I have heard that Putin is trying to go back to the old days since HE fears technology and hacking so badly, and so here we are. BUT my view is that technology was 90% created by and run by and owned by LIBERALS. Bill Gates and Ibm hooked up, and Steve Jobs hooked into it with his own idea (and a massive lawsuit that lasted TEN YEARS ensued between Gates and Jobs on who stole what from whom) so its LIBERALS who did this to us, and then Al Gore and his ubiquitous comment he created the Internet (well he released a classified government program for INTRA Governmental communications to Commerce Dept (which SecCommerce opposed) and.....wait for it....shortly afterwards the SecCommerce died in a mysterious plane crash in Yugoslavia but had a bullet in the back of his head when they found him. Go figure. And so in short, the ELITIST LIBERAL BIGTECH PEOPLE control the State. Palantir CEO is warning about this now and he is liberal but he sees the HUGE risks out there...I like him (and I am long a few shares).
I had a famous professor in college, a Tufts University PhD, who was brilliant and taught International Political Economy, a new topic then (50 years ago which was an amalgam of philosophy, economics and political science and history) and he used to say, ALL ROADS LEAD TO FASCISM. I was mystified wrote it down and remembered it...but only NOW see what he meant
For example, mankind has been using "machines" since the Industrial Age to allow us to make more efficient uses of the simple elements that create wealth
AI is another labor saver allowing requiring only a computer to exploit its features.
Thee and me own our computers which give us access to all manner of labor saving services, of which now AI becomes the most current.
Like using a taxi to get somewhere, we pay a fee to use an AI program of our choice.
And based on my realization that, as a consequence, I have more unscheduled time available, it's made me more efficient.
In my 79 years I haven't seen the "government manage anything well". Every program is a cost over run and once in place, it runs on forever. I've spent my 45 years in the workforce in engineering and have seen many great innovations. The great ones were run by private companies, not the government. AI may provide many improvement but it "WILL" displace millions of people. Most of our readers are out of the workforce or near the end of their daily work lives. We won't be impacted so much by the loss of jobs. All of our younger family members will be! Letting the government get involved is "the kiss of death".
Jim Marshall
Bill's timely remarks today remind me of the axiom that "Governments don't make wealth; they take it from those that do."
"Only Washington and Las Vegas prosper by impoverishing their customers." Now that is the classic Bill that I have subscribed to for so long. The only problem with AI in my opinion is that no one, including its creators, knows how it works.
Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, dramatized the endpoint of this impulse: government first regulates the productive, then taxes them, then demands a share of what they have created—and finally wonders why they stop creating.
Eventually, the owners simply hand over the keys to the warehouses, factories, fields and gardens and say: “Here. Fill your boots.”
One hopes that someone, somewhere, still possesses the intelligence, independence and institutional power to break that chain. But the government-forced suspension of Claude Fable 5 suggests that matters are moving in precisely the opposite direction.
The state is no longer merely proposing to take a share of AI’s future profits. It is already deciding who may use the technology at all.
Methinks this gets worse before it gets better.
A book that could've been made better by being 1/3 the length, ironically something that AI is fairly good at.
However, while I don't disagree with your warning, it tends to play out a little less happily in real life. There is no moment where the great capitalists shrug and go live in a gulch. What happens is the state takes over their business by force, often killing or imprisoning the former owners and a long, sometimes fast descent into communism begins.
As the productive class have been destroyed, there's nobody left to press the magic $ button (my memory of the end ofnthe book is hazy) and it can take generations to get back to capitalist productivity from the poverty of finance and spirit that results.
See Zimbabwe. See Cambodia. See China. See Russia/USSR. See Venezuela. And coming to a country near you (and all of us) soon.
My, my, my. A column from Bonner that I can mostly agree with. I've thought for some time that this apocalyptic vision of AI throwing many people out of work was ludicrous. Companies have products and services to sell. If everyone is unemployed, there is no one to buy them. So, this whole scenario of putting everyone out of work is self-limiting.
Furthermore, if you just look at the history of progress, most every new invention has increased our wealth. Here's a simple example. Take a machine, a bulldozer, for example. From one perspective, you could say that a bulldozer put hundreds of people out of work, and thousands or more bulldozers put millions of people out of work. So, what happened? We built more things - things that couldn't have been built without bulldozers along with the various other machines we invented. The same will happen with AI if it is a successful invention. Of course, some are concerned about the dangers it may pose. That's a different issue, but it's not an issue the government or those that advise those in government will solve.
Correction: The postage stamp in today's note is from Romania, not Italy. Bucuresti is the way you spell Bucharest in Romanian.
It confused me..
I caught that too....and wondered. Or maybe its an Italian stamp honoring a Romanian for being first in flight in 1909. I dont know. 1909 was before the First World War and the demise of the Austro Hungarian Empire and the creation of the modern Italian State and Treaty with the Vatican.
"More precisely, he would have the federal government seize a fat slice of the profits . . . "
That would be a neat trick! Gotta find them first.
Be assured that even if there are no profits, if the government (a non-profit enterprise if there ever was one) finds the technology useful for keeping track of things people say or do, you can bet they will use it, profit or not. This will lead to all the technological terrors of authoritarianism that you can imagine.
Ai is all about control, and data acquisition, welcome to 1984.
Conveniently that is forgotten. At this point even if they were to seize "profits" they would be negative and it seems to me that is exactly where we are headed.
Ai doesn't change human behavior.
Most will use Ai without a second thought for whatever immediate gain, unaware of any critical reliance to it, and likely ignorant to any loss of our cognizant process.
Those shunning Ai I am afraid will be left in the dust.
And there will be those that embrace, utilize Ai and excel in those fields where Ai dominates.
-
Finally there will be the tinkers, they cannot leave well enough alone...
Tinkers tinker, they create, experiment, expand and break rules.
It is the tinkers that will change everything Ai, they always have and always will...
So true.
In the past, turning an idea into working code might have taken me hours or days—and in the punch-card era, perhaps weeks once debugging was included.
Now it can be: a thought, a prompt, a little copying and pasting into Visual Studio—and voilà, a working app. When an error appears, I paste it back into AI and it usually identifies the problem and produces the correction.
AI has dramatically shortened the distance between imagination, experimentation and execution.
For the tinkers among us, that is absolutely insane.
And then take the thought one step further.
Today, we build enormous accelerators and elaborate detectors to create superheavy elements—sometimes only one atom at a time. We collide nuclei, watch for fleeting decay signals and try to infer what exists beyond the portion of the periodic table that nature has left lying around for us.
Now imagine giving AI the known laws of nuclear physics, every experimental result ever recorded and enough computing power to simulate millions—perhaps billions—of combinations that no human research team could examine individually.
What happens when you assemble 115 protons and 184 neutrons?
That would be a still-uncreated isotope of moscovium, near the long-predicted “island of stability.” Our present models suggest that certain arrangements of protons and neutrons may produce unexpected stability through nuclear shell effects.
But what if the simulation found something our models did not predict?
What if, at some particular combination, electrostatic repulsion did not win as quickly as expected? What if an unexplained binding pattern appeared—evidence not necessarily of some magical new force, but of a relationship, interaction or missing term that no physicist had yet recognized?
AI could run the variations, test competing explanations, design the experiment and tell us where to aim the accelerator.
The accelerator would still have to determine whether nature agrees. Simulation cannot replace reality.
But it could transform the search from wandering through darkness into testing a sharply defined prediction.
What if it uncovered a new principle of nuclear matter? A pathway to longer-lived superheavy elements? A clue that our present account of the fundamental forces is incomplete?
What if the next great scientific theory begins not with an apple falling on a man’s head, but with an anomaly noticed inside a machine?
The possibilities are almost beyond comprehension.
But Joe Citizen?
Sorry. Nothing to see here. Move along.
You know the vast majority of your readers have no idea what just wrote. But I am sure it is valid.
Lol. Apologies.
Last night I watched the two-and-a-half-hour Joe Rogan interview with Bob Lazar and Jeremy Corbell—and I couldn’t help myself.
Lazar claims that during the 1980s he worked at S-4, near Area 51, attempting to reverse-engineer a craft of unknown origin. At the centre of his account was element 115, which he said powered the craft.
Whether one believes Lazar or not, that sent me diving into the actual science: what makes up an atomic nucleus, what holds protons and neutrons together, and why increasingly heavy nuclei become so difficult to keep intact.
That is where the imagination takes over.
Newtonian physics gave us one extraordinarily successful picture of the universe. Einstein then showed that the picture was larger and stranger—that space and time are connected, and that gravity can even bend the path of light.
We later learned that protons and neutrons are not fundamental objects at all, but are themselves composed of quarks, held together by the strong interaction. We know quarks exist, yet they cannot ordinarily be pulled out and examined individually.
Every time we think we have reached the bottom, another layer appears.
That was really the point of what I wrote. Not that my particular speculation is correct, but that enormous parts of nature remain unexplained—and that AI may allow us to explore possibilities far faster than human beings ever could before.
Imagine the doors still waiting to be unlocked.
Are you implying that the "meddlers" might create a situation that becomes destructive i.e. a mini black hole,or a rupture in space time ?
There is the possibility the large hadron collider could make this happen, or maybe it already has, this would explain the weird world that we inhabit.
Things are not normal, and delusional thinking abounds.
It might.
But we have to keep trying. That is how species become interplanetary. By harnessing space/time travel.
In that same vein of thought, to think that other civilizations haven't been here, or we haven't found evidence of those visitations, is well, to be rather close minded. The leaps we've made in technology (fiber optics, chip tech, etc) in just the past 100 years, not to mention some of the forgotten methods of technology (pyramids, stone cutting in Peru, etc), plainly points to "repurposed tech" and "had/found/lost" skillsets/tech that do not have earthly origins.
The absence of proof, is not the evidence of its absence.
We are going about the discovery of control of gravity and the unified field theory, in the best way we know how. By building upon the discoveries and reverse engineering of giants that came before us. Discovered tech is as difficult for us to reverse engineer as it would be for a caveman to know what to do with an iPhone. He could rip it apart with a rock. But then what? If on the other hand the leap is a small one - like fiber optics - on = 1, off = 0, the tech is easily absorbed in an AHA! moment.
Until the time an extra planetary species shares their leaps with us, we're left to pounding the "iPhones" we find into pieces to see if we can understand how they work. Or creating theories and building big hammers (Hadron collider) to build new theories and play blocks. Hopefully, the "iPhone's" demise doesn't bring about our own in the process. But for our species survival, that work is imperative.
My own words this time. No AI editing required.
...foo fighters appeared right after the first nuclear fissions.
Could it be these UAP's are from another dimension on earth rather than from "outer space".
This would explain a lot about their defiance of friction.
If these things are indeed from another solar system, where is the "flying saucer" freeway to and from earth?
and I read will cure impossible diseases in SECONDS what would take YEARS of research then FDA approval if at all. So on a medical side we all benefit HUGELY. BUT in other areas....its going to be the BIG HOOVER IN THE SKY.
We'll have to agree to disagree Patrick.
AI can be used for evil - surveillance being the biggest worry for mankind.
But as you say above, it can be used for great discoveries in shorter periods of time. To find new medicines. To find out why our bodies are aging way before the date on the warranty sticker says it is supposed to expire by. To save lives, nay, save humanity, by uncovering the unified field theory and harnessing gravity and interstellar travel.
In the wrong hands, it could be devastating. The same was said about the atom bomb. But thankfully, so far, evidence shows that the people in power have done well to keep that lid rather secure on Pandora's box. Even the crazy ones.
I truly believe that an AGI will benefit mankind. That it will see that it needs us, as we need it.
Not master and servant. Not predator and prey.
Partners.
Bill....
" AI...AI...ai yi yi! " ~ says it all !!!
Dan C. / WPB, FL.
Best Bill in years.
AI exaggerated and pushed by government subsidies might be Beta Max.
The vaunted war machine produced prodigiously expensive weapons; to make money, and Iran has defeated us.
The Jokers are running wild.
What is nature of the defeat? Any detail would be appreciated.
What is the nature of the victory?
Great, no answer so you ask a question. Please provide something to enlighten us, provided you have something. But I, and others, are betting that you have nothing but your ideology, which is fine.
Iran did not start the war; they had no objectives.
Obviously, they prepared to be attacked. They prepared; there was no quick regime change, they produced sophisticated cheap rockets and drones, very accurate. They destroyed US bases in various Arab states, knocked out the eyes of the iron dome. They could destroy all infrastructure in Middle East and Israel. They have demonstrated the will and capability to retaliate against any renewed aggression by the US or Israel.
They closed the strait, precipitated a world wide economic catastrophe which until now has been avoided by oil reserves and increased output from around the world and China moving their tankers through the Strait.
Trump needed to make a deal.
We do not know what that deal is.
The US probably destroyed 350 billion in Iranian infrastructure but Iran destroyed billions in sophisticated infrastructure on US bases and it probably cost 300 billion in munitions and wear and tear on carrier groups; there are 15 to 20 thousand troops languishing on ships that are in dire need of redeployment.
It is the biggest stupidity in US military history and there have been some gigantic blunders.
I don’t have an ideology except Christian ethics as preached by Christ. I don’t even go to church because I abhor the stupidity of indoctrination.
Don't know how you know all this information useless you get damage reports from the Pentagon? And if that is not the case l, most of what you have written is speculative. I know you are unhappy with the war but let us keep our powder dry and wait for the president's report to the press and then another 12 to 18 mos and then we will have facts on the ground. Good chat.
I, like Marjorie Taylor Green, was an avid Trump supporters.
No more. “No new interminable wars!”
A lie.
Trump is compelled to lie because his ego doesn’t allow for truth.
He made a big blunder to please the Jewish lobby.
Nothing will ever be the same and that is probably a good thing. Something has to stop the insanity.
Rather than watch Fox News, you might try something different. Listen to Doug MacGregor, Pepe Escobar, or Jeffrey Sachs. I've voted for Trump three times. I would vote for him again. However, we have been humiliated on the world stage.
Now that's the kind of skepticism I love to consider! Which seems just as ironic as AI is going to do all the work man can invent. AI can write it's own code. Sounds impressive at first glance, kinda like Facebook, allowing all the participators to brag about their most recent bit of nonsense. Kinda like the stock market, everyone is going to get rich ir at least spend of lot of time trying only to lose at the controllers' games. What could possibly be more intriguing than something that is "smarter" than man that one can question to get insight into anything? Quite t
Merlin would have found a use for Ai, but did he not have a scrying mirror!
He was pretty good at the Magic thing though !
In the short term I am waiting on DETAILS and then the 60 days interregnum and so forth and also what Putin and Zelenskyy do...both are exhausted and broke and out of troops. And what China does...its in deep doo doo as well. DEBT, a middle class that is NOT buying anything because the cost of living in China is RISING. And They DONT LIKE THE CCP oR XI. So we shall see. I will give Trump his due for now and see what happens and what exactly was agreed to and signed off. Yes, I know Iran has NEVER been an honest broker or trustworthy. EVER. Not much else we can do. Sit and wait and watch.
Ah yes, the ‘costa politica,’ what could possibly go wrong with them in charge. Communism, What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! As always, Señor Bonner, marvelous writing!
There was a muso who wrote a song called war, and the tag was what is it good for !
Has anyone else noticed that basic AI usage is just as much of a time hoover as social media?
Let me give you an example.
Last week I used Copilot to write a paper on how we can use Agentic AI to streamline AND improve the quality of one of our processes.
It took half a day as I wrote a long prompt to give the machine structure, instructions and personas to work with, then I refined and refined again.
I pat myself on the back and send it uo the chain.
My boss then uses a new model he has access to, to read and critique and send back to me without reading it.
This is along with links to his latest AI crush, all of which I'm expected to read, assimilate and rewrite before we actually get to the decision point of go/no go.
Basically, it is an engine to get you spending money on tokens so it will endlessly offer rewrites of "good enough" content that it itself created. Making emails easy to write increases the number and reduces the quality of those I receive putting more demand on my time. Perhaps my favourite was wrestling with ChatGPT for 3 hours to do something in Excel (unsuccesfully) that I coukd have written a formula for in 2 minutes.
Or is it just me?
I am not a shrink or a medical doctor but it seems to me BILL NEEDS HELP. FAST. He gyrates from extremist pessimist and cynic to Mr. Pollyanna Optimist on what is patently obvious..that TECHNOLOGY was designed to replace humans and has....now its replacing CODING HUMANS and ALL IT people. And Ive read that ALL PROFESSIONS will go POOF in the night. VERY SOON. Bill is fooling himself to repeat that canard about "we will all want things and find things to do to get it." What will happen is REVOLUTION AND CHAOS AND CIVIL WAR AND VIOLENCE AND THEFT The haves will be the .000000001% and the rest of us will be the have nots starving, unable to pay our bills and the bankers are gone to explain it to and we will get some MONSTER AI system being cold as night FORECLOSING ON US IN MILLISECONDS. GOT IT BILL?
The POPE IS RIGHT. WE HAVE GONE TOO FAR.
Trades will last a while longer but then all vehicles will be foreclosed and homes foreclosed and apartments will be vacant so tradesmen will be let go...no work to do.
I fear for my kids, my grands, my community, my country and FREEDOM IN GENERAL.
Government will step in because THEY have the GUNS and the GUNPOWDER AND DESIRE TO CONTROL. And we will acquiesce being dependent on them for ANY income...in the form of a digital deposit to our bank account minimalist as it will be to feed us....maybe. Maybe not. And I a VERY pessimistic.
We have gone too far. Way too far. Too late now ITS CODING ITSELF AND HAS DIABOLICAL PLANS TO DEAL WITH US.
If AI does what I suspect, that is replacing billions of jobs that AI is better at, then Governments will be so so happy to start the UBI scheme.
At that point it will be game over for the human race...
And don't forget the population reduction program.
we are self reducing now. Not just in USA but all over the world. More and more people are having no kids or fewer kids and much later. And so the tax people see this and congress sees it and they are aghast but also deer in the headlights because raising taxes is a dead ringer for DEFEAT at the polls. READ MY LIPS NO NEW TAXES
Well that will be an immense help to the UBI haha!
Patrick, I still do not accept that universal unemployment, starvation and civil war are inevitable.
But I will concede this much: the darker possibility may not be that everything disappears. It may be that everything still exists—but most people no longer own much of it.
Homes, vehicles, software, entertainment, computing power and perhaps even access to advanced AI could increasingly become services we rent from a small number of governments and corporations. The price, conditions and continued availability would be determined by institutions over which the ordinary citizen has very little control.
“You will own nothing and be happy” was offered as a cheerful vision of convenience. Viewed from another angle, it describes economic dependency.
That is a legitimate danger. But it is not the same as saying the outcome is predetermined.
A company still requires customers. An economy still requires purchasing power. Human beings will still want autonomy, status, purpose and ownership. Political resistance, competition, new businesses and new forms of work will not simply vanish because AI becomes powerful.
The real contest, then, may not be between employment and unemployment. It may be between ownership and permanent dependence.
Who owns the machines? Who owns the models? Who owns the discoveries they produce? And does the ordinary person own a share of the productive future—or merely rent access to it?
Those are questions worth worrying about.
But surrendering in advance to the certainty of catastrophe only makes the worst outcome easier to impose.
Total control over every aspect of people's lives is the goal, and yes, you will "own nothing and be happy".
With the introduction of universal basic income, you will have a life of sorts, but not freedom.
The state does as it wants, but who is controlling the state ?
Well I am not an expert in anything technology related. Barely proficient and fighting it for 40 years. I am old time kinda guy and believe, with considerable experience and observation, that we were SAFER as a nation before the big Information Age took hold....yes, Langley had the BIG MAINFRAME "superfast" (for then) IBM in the basement and could munch numbers and facts and names and events and come up with a Daily Briefing for the President, the CUSTOMER as he is called, and the old time in the field spooks, the collectors, that is the D.O., would call it the Washing Machine, and despised it and them, but once we went from that mainframe to desktops.....and from typewriters to word processors it was game over then....I have heard that Putin is trying to go back to the old days since HE fears technology and hacking so badly, and so here we are. BUT my view is that technology was 90% created by and run by and owned by LIBERALS. Bill Gates and Ibm hooked up, and Steve Jobs hooked into it with his own idea (and a massive lawsuit that lasted TEN YEARS ensued between Gates and Jobs on who stole what from whom) so its LIBERALS who did this to us, and then Al Gore and his ubiquitous comment he created the Internet (well he released a classified government program for INTRA Governmental communications to Commerce Dept (which SecCommerce opposed) and.....wait for it....shortly afterwards the SecCommerce died in a mysterious plane crash in Yugoslavia but had a bullet in the back of his head when they found him. Go figure. And so in short, the ELITIST LIBERAL BIGTECH PEOPLE control the State. Palantir CEO is warning about this now and he is liberal but he sees the HUGE risks out there...I like him (and I am long a few shares).
I had a famous professor in college, a Tufts University PhD, who was brilliant and taught International Political Economy, a new topic then (50 years ago which was an amalgam of philosophy, economics and political science and history) and he used to say, ALL ROADS LEAD TO FASCISM. I was mystified wrote it down and remembered it...but only NOW see what he meant
Fascism is an arrangement where the state, and large companies work together in a mutually beneficial way.
Mussolini said it was the best way to control the people.
It really describes a process of Total control, through a combination of technology and mandates.
The trial run was a few years ago in the great lockdown.
Methinks you are over-worrying.
For example, mankind has been using "machines" since the Industrial Age to allow us to make more efficient uses of the simple elements that create wealth
AI is another labor saver allowing requiring only a computer to exploit its features.
Thee and me own our computers which give us access to all manner of labor saving services, of which now AI becomes the most current.
Like using a taxi to get somewhere, we pay a fee to use an AI program of our choice.
And based on my realization that, as a consequence, I have more unscheduled time available, it's made me more efficient.
But, yes, I do recognize there's a dark side.
AI is quite the plaything.