Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • Whetherday

    On big changes in nowheres becoming somewheres

    Audacy, by far the most stressed-out owner of too many radio stations, is killing off another big old signal: KXNT/840 in Las Vegas. I dug into that, and wrote about it on Trunkline, my neglected blog about infrastructure that will soon get a big facelift.

    C****heck them out

    Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent.

    Exit signals

    Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other offenses, wastes the many talents of Sasha Baron Cohen) when a bat flew across the screen. This indoors, far away from any open door or window. We went to bed with all lights off and our largest doors and windows open to allow the bat to leave. We'll see how that goes.

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  • Fur eye day

    Why we need Searls Glasses (first described 16 years ago)

    Wetherspoons bans Meta Glasses in pubs amid privacy concerns

    Book now

    The next three IIWs:

    • November 3 – 5, 2026 IIWXLIII #43 Fall 2026
    • April 27 – 29, 2027 IIWXLIV #44 Spring 2027
    • October 19 – 21, 2027 IIWXLV #45 Fall 2027
    • Early bird ends in 15 days

    How are they going?

    Fighting subscription tricks and traps

    Combating hidden junk fees

    Both were issued in January by Mayor Mamdani's office in NYC.

    Events at the ends of the Internet of Stuff

    Two Amazon packages were delivered here and next door today by a Prime Guy in a U-Haul truck.

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  • The Internet of Stuff

    Routers for the Internet of Stuff

    We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis.)

    In The Rise of the Stupid Network, which he wrote in 1997, David Isenberg explained that the Internet’s design was stupid and smart at the ends: you, me, and the websites and services of the world. This would prove to create what David Weinberger and I six years later called the World of Ends.

    Of course, Internet routing isn’t stupid. It’s just smart about routing—and as little else as possible.

    The same is now true for shipping. Some of its movements are easy to see when an Amazon truck arrives, when we find ourselves on a highway with more trucks than cars, or when we see containers being hauled on railroads or stacked onto cargo ships. But how goods flow through this whole system isn’t much clearer than how what I’m writing on this laptop appears on your screen.

    Surfacing those mechanisms is important because your smarts are far less involved in The Internet of Stuff today than in the Internet of Bits. And getting involved will give you far more agency in the marketplace than you have ever had before.

    Imagine being in charge of your privacy, your identity, the prices you’re charged, the services you’re offered, your terms of engagement—all of it—for the benefit of both you and the services you engage.

    Of course, there will be a fight. Both business and government are infected with the belief that surveillance is the best way to know people and what they’re about. This has given us an online economy far too informed by surveillance, and it’s getting worse in the offline world. Your phone apps spy on you. Your car and TV spy on you. Yet you can do far more with the information that spyware collects (where you go, who you meet with, what you’ve watched and when) than the spies can—for their good as well as yours. You and the companies you engage with can enjoy trusting, useful intelligence that flows both ways. Among much else that I’ve been writing about here for the last twenty years.

    So that’s what I want to explore. Stay tuned for more.

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  • Throbsday

    A whiteboard on which notes were made about AI writing and related issues at IIW 41 in October 2025. Not the best art, but at least not generated by an AI.

    On AI wronging and writing

    I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It’s not just the excess of one-line paragraphs, the contrasty “not that, but this” argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It’s a tone that sounds like the average of a million well-put hunks of text published by competent writers of opinion columns and advertising copy. In other words, a lot like my own writing.

    AI writing is AutoTune for the human kind.

    Also (again like my own writing), AI writing is good, but not good enough. Unless you’re Shakespeare, Vonnegut, or McPhee, writing can always be better. If you use AI to write, be sure to re-write it. Seriously.

    Like most people who research and write for a living today, I make heavy use of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I am also a paying customer for two of them. While I may not like all their writing, I like their help with—

    • Research on anything
    • Any health issue that takes longer to explain than the five minutes my doctors give me once a year
    • Tech support

    For example, ChatGPT last week helped me get two laptops to connect with two difficult peripherals (a printer and a batch photo scanner) at my sister’s house, and to expose the inadequacies of the software tools involved (such as Epson’s crap scanning tools, and a sneaky feature in Apple’s Image Capture that pretends a saved (and presumably uncompressed) TIFF scan was not a wrapper on a compressed JPEG one. (The file sizes were small and identical.)

    And now it’s helping me write my next book. More on that later.

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  • Whetherday

    poop

    Digressions & shit, or vice versa

    Willy Staley in the NYTimes:

    To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is consistently delivering Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake”), with pointed ends, indicative of healthy rectal function, he told me. “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”
    “I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

    In his book Hopeless but Optimistic, Douglas Wissing shared this interesting fact: members of rural Afghani tribes living on rocky terrain go to hillsides to squat, and wipe their butts by rotating smooth rocks through their cracks. If I had the book with me, I’d share the text. Lacking that, however, I have found corroborating sources:

    1. National Geographic, in What did people do before toilet paper? says Archaeologists … have uncovered samples of pessoi, a humbler, ancient Greek and Roman toilet paper equivalent. Consisting of small oval or circular pebbles or pieces of broken ceramic, pessoi have been uncovered in the ruins of ancient Roman and Greek latrines. They’re even immortalized on a 2,700-year-old drinking cup that shows a man squatting and making use of his stone. Pessoi even rate a mention in the Talmud.
    2. TheBMJ in Toilet hygiene in the classical era:

    During the Greco-Roman period, a sponge fixed to a stick (tersorium) was used to clean the buttocks after defecation; the sponge was then replaced in a bucket filled with salt water or vinegar water.3 Another technique was to use oval or circular fragments of ceramic known as “pessoi” (meaning pebbles),4 a term also used to denote an ancient board game. Aristophanes referred to the use of pessoi for sanitary purposes in Peace (5th century BC):

    “Arms dealer (displaying a cuirass): And what, alack, shall I do with this rounded cuirass, a beautiful fit, worth ten minas?

    Trygaeus: Well, that one will not make a loss for you, anyway. Give me that at cost price. It will be very convenient to crap in . . .

    Arms dealer: Stop this impudent mockery of my goods!

    Trygaeus (placing the cuirass on the ground like a chamber pot, and squatting on it): Like this, if you put three stones beside it. Is it not clever?”5

    On the UNICEF site I also found How toilets are saving lives and money in Afghanistan. The subhead reads, “Thousands of child deaths in Afghanistan could be avoided each year by using toilets and washing hands.” Excerpt:

    Using a combination of shock, shame, pride and disgust, families are encouraged through peer pressure to build a latrine and commit to using it. The process usually lasts three to six months until an entire community has given up defecating in the open, contributing to a healthier environment for everyone.

    That was in 2017.  The Taliban took over in 2021.  Think they kept that shit up? If you have an answer, it might help to know that the village was Chaw, in the Ghazni region. You can zoom into it here.

    Check them out

    Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent.

    Exit signals

    Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we’ve ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other offenses*, wastes the many talents of Sasha Baron Cohen) when a bat flew across the screen. This was indoors, far away from any open door or window. So we went to bed with all lights off and our largest doors and windows open to allow the bat to leave. Today we’ll sit away from our largest doors (sliding glass walls, essentially) with our lights off, to watch, if we can, to see if a bat leaves.

    Still a thing

    A Map of the Manifold Environment is Phil Windley‘s latest post covering what’s going on with picos, which I expect (or at least hope) will become the way we will populate and organize the Internet of Stuff, a piece I haven’t written yet, but is implied in The George Carlin Model of AI, The True Internet of Things, and much stuff Phil (the alpha here) and I have written over too many years to have gone by without picos taking off. Yet.

    What if we’re the ones already quarantined—by them?

    Springer: Protecting earth from extraterrestrial contamination: The case for a lunar biocontainment facility. Via 404.

    Overheard:

    “I’m moving as vast as I can.”

    *The movie should have been able to flip the script on male domination while being actually funny, which it is not.

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  • Chooseday

    I think this notice I just got at Autonocion.com means the privacy signals my browser sends are being respected at that site—and have been in the past. That’s good, I guess, because there is no way I can easily audit website obedience to my personal privacy choices. The larger problem is that if one’s privacy is entirely in the hands of “Privacy Centers” such as this one, we don’t have any. But we do have a fix. Read on.

    Working to kill off cookie notices

    The IEEE’s cookie notice says, “This website utilizes technologies such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as for analytics, personalization, and targeted advertising. Privacy Policy.”

    Its privacy policy, at that last link, says it collects eighteen kinds of personal information, and says one of the purposes for collecting it is—

    To serve personalized advertising to you. We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements, and we may use any of the non-personally-identifiable attributes we have collected to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. When you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement, there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and that your attributes meet the criteria the advertiser selected.

    Yet a PageXray of IEEE.org shows no adtech tracking, and hardly any tracking at all.

    I bring this up because I led work on MyTerms (IEEE 7012-2025 – IEEE Standard for Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Terms 7012), and we now have a new group in IEEE’s Industry Connections program working to deploy and establish MyTerms worldwide. The group title is Individual Defined Privacy Terms Roadmap.

    If you want to make cookie notices go away, start or support work toward making MyTerms happen, and help us make that work cooperative by joining that group.

    Sign up here.

    And what do you think?

    Andy Kessler of The Wall Street Journal asks: Does AI Have a Fiduciary Duty? and suggests “The answer may lie in the common law.” His concluding paragraph:

    I’m no fan of trial lawyers but, like it or not, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta and perhaps every Chinese open-weight AI model may already be covered by common-law fiduciary responsibility. We’re a few court cases away from finding out. They need to start acting that way or their trillion-dollar valuations may become a target much larger than the tobacco companies in the 1990s.

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  • A Lesson in AI Economics

    I am a heavy Photoshop user, and recently upgraded to Photoshop 2026 at Adobe’s robotic insistence. But, when I went to do a “generative fill” on an old photo (in the outlined area above), I was met with this:

    Fuzzed by that, I hit the View my balance button and got this:

    This shows I’m almost out of something I didn’t know I had. So I hit the Buy now button to get to the bottom line. This appeared:

    I’m not going to subscribe to any of those. But I do want to understand what’s going on.

    I assume that credits are for tokens, but don’t know what a generative fill will cost in tokens, or credits, or whatever. I assume bigger ones will cost more, but how, and how much?

    I do get that intelligence is a commodity and for sale. What I need is a sense of how this commodity (in tokens, credits, or whatever) is metered, and how I can easily see it.

    One clear thing to me, at least emotionally, is that Adobe is enshittifying Photoshop here, because it is starting to charge for something that had been free.

    Look, I get why they’re doing it. But I also believe there have to be better ways to create this new AI economy.

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  • Ownday

    Shot Monday in San Francisco at Howard and 2nd by Mary Hodder

    Elemental differences

    Look up graphite, graphite company, or graphite the company, and you’ll mostly get geological and industrial answers. (Unless, of course, your search history suggests the company signing the billboard above.)

    The easy way to find out, of course, is to ask your friendly AI. It will tell you the company behind the billboard above is Graphite.com, formerly (and still) Graphite.dev. They are an AI code review platform. Your AI will also tell you that kind of billboard is called a “wallscape.” Didn’t know that until I asked.

    The billboard copy is a play on Marshall McLuhan‘s most-quoted one-liner, The medium is the message. What McLuhan meant was that the character of the medium matters more than the content it carries. He also doesn’t confine the meaning of “media” to the communicative kind. He means all forms of tech. For example, he said that trains made farms as much as they made cities. Eric McLuhan, Marshall’s son and collaborator, writes, “People don’t want to know the cause of anything. They do not want to know why radio caused Hitler and Gandhi alike. They do not want to know that print caused anything whatever.”

    So: What does AI cause? The glib answer found in many news stories is “job loss.” Graphite is saying it gives you a new job.

    The McLuhans might say that’s small beer. Because every new technology doesn’t just cause widely different outcomes (such as radio did for Hitler and Gandhi). It creates new environments, new ecosystems.  Old jobs will be lost and new jobs found, but in service of many radically changed and new forms of work, play, and everything else.

    I think the main question is whether AI, or the environment created by AI, will enlarge or shrink human agency. Of course, it will do both. But I’m betting on more of the latter. So is Graphite, I suppose.

    Thinkings out loud

    Overheard: “In tech, every bit of progress makes something easy obsolete.”

    Did AI make me believe this?

    Charley Johnson: AI Can Change Your Mind Without You Noticing

    Why just brands?

    WordPress VIP: Future of the Web 2026: Chapter 1: The brand that feels human in the AI era earns the decade ahead.

    A way for your stuff

    Phil Windley: Using Home Assistant with Manifold.

    Further evidence that advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely

    Joe Mandese in MediaPost: Why Malvertising’s New Vector May Leave A Sour Taste In Your Mouth. Excerpt: “Advertising — or more explicitly, ‘malvertising’ — has long been a vector for distributing malicious software, but a new, insidious exploit utilizes an innovative model for distributing it. Instead of utilizing a single malvertisement to install malicious code on a user’s device — usually by redirecting the user to a landing page that automatically download pre-compiled malicious code — SourTrade does it in clandestine installments, treating the user’s browser as a passive file receiver that functions as an active local compiler or assembler launching the code when it is completed. You can read more about it in this post by the team at cybersecurity firm Confiant…” Which is here.

    I also learned the term “wallscape” from the same AI that told me who Graphite was.

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  • Rollday

    Well, two of us know

    Magritte apple with AI carved in it

    With Apple Is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It, Limited Edition Jonathan does a better job of saying what I’ve been saying about where Personal AI is going, most recently here.

    Mutterings

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  • Local radio lives in Burlington and Graham

    WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands in a field on Burlington’s north side:

    Amazingly, WBAG is still using the same tower, manufactured by the Wincharger company, which continues to do what it did before and after its broadcast tower phase: make windmills. Here’s one of their ads from back when AM radio ruled the airwaves, and the company answered growing demand:

    As it happens, I document broadcast towers and antennas (which on AM are the same), for two reasons. One is that I love broadcast engineering. The other is that I know many or most of these old towers will disappear in the next decade or two. For both reasons, I shot WBAG’s tower in 2015 and again a few days ago. It looked rusty as hell the first time, and it looks even more rusty now. Kind of like me.

    But the station itself is quite the opposite. Live jocks host shows and spin records, there are nine local talk shows, and they have an abundance of local advertisers. While sitting here, I’ve heard ads for Franks Jewelry, Bulington Alamance Associate of Realtors, Little Donny Walker’s Car Wash, Sam’s Factory Outlet, Suretop Roofing, Always Best Care Senior Services, and Fisher Wealth Management (which also has its own talk show on the station). This things are rare in local radio today. Most stations have long since been bought out by giants (now bankrupt or headed there), and run canned content from elsewhere.

    WBAG’s main format is oldies, with a focus on Carolina Beach Music. I grooved on this genre as a student at Guilford College from ’65 to ’69. Being of a geeky bent, I listened a lot to FM radio, which was still struggling then. My fave tunings were to jazz and blues from WAAA-FM on 107.5 from Winston Salem, and top 40 from WBAG-FM on 93.9. Both of those FM licenses were bought out when FM got hot. (WBAG’s 93.9 license now belongs to WNCB in Cary.) And while WAAA went through many call letter and facility changes (it’s now WTOB, the abandoned callsign of a former top 40 station in town), WBAG has remained itself continuously, eventually adding a small FM signal on 105.9 that covers Burlington, Graham, and Alamance County well enough. Here are its day/night AM and FM coverage areas:

    Via Radio-Locator.com

    Unlike most radio stations, WBAG doesn’t stream online. Instead, it lives in the natural world, where we still have distance, and the inverse square law applies, meaning the signals only go so far. That’s a charm of local radio.

    Good to know we still have an exemplar of it.

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  • Earth to Southwest (and every other service company): make your surveys about your service, not just personnel facing customers

    Here is what I wanted (and got) from Southwest: a clean window on a comfortable plane that i could find, board, and fly in easily. Most of that is not about flight attendants.

    Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight:

    And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking:

    I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one doesn’t have a way to report that the Southwest app sent me to a gate far out in one concourse—

    Screenshot

    —when it had been moved to another concourse:

    I can say that one difference between United’s app and Southwest’s is that I have not yet had the same experience with United’s.

    But both have the same long surveys for making me report on flight attendants.

    Do better, teams.

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  • No body day

    Let’s have her sing a country song about life in the uncanny valley

    Goldie Boone is a “digital country artist” who looks too good to be real. So I’m sure she’s not. Convince me otherwise.

    Nothing personal. Yet.

    Mozilla’s The State of Open Source AI is required reading. It makes a great case for open source (and open weight models). This is essential in the current political, economic, and development battles between those and the big closed US-based companies and models. We will see the earlier open source battles (geeks vs. IBM, then Microsoft, et. al.) play out again, only faster.

    I also love what he says about the browser as an agent. Good stuff.

    But the word personal doesn’t appear. Local appears twice. User appears seven times, all inside the section titled The agentic harness is another user agent. Again, great stuff in that section.

    Still, it’s like we’re arguing about democracy in feudal Europe or Japan.

    We need personal AI. Full stop. Or start.

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  • Cryday

    The price is right.

    Haven’t figured out lighting yet, but I like the idea

    After struggling for days to make my new Epson FF-680W photo scanner, which does a much poorer job of scanning photos than my iPhone 16, I’m ready for one of these.

    Welcome to New York

    AeroXplorer: LaGuardia Tower Alerts Pilots to Possible Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat Near Airport. Excerpt: “Controllers told inbound flights to stay alert for individuals on the ground who may have been carrying a rocket launcher.” Easy to do while landing a plane on a runway approaching the cockpit at 200 mph.

    Earth to Spectrum Internet::::

    On your Outage Information and Troubleshooting page, just @#$%^ tell us where your @#$%^ outages are. Don’t require an account holder’s zip code and phone number first. When you’re just a friend trying to help the account holder over the phone (still working over the cell system), that information isn’t always available. Or necessary. Out is out. You’re a @#$%^ utility. Your outage is public information—or ought to be. Thank you for your service. When it’s back.

    In case you’re optimistic about AI today

    AI Secret : OpenAI Bags a Fields Medalist. Plus: GPUs Stop Waiting, Kimi Exposed the Valley’s Mess.

    To ponder:

    OpenAI put the fire alarm on payroll, borrowed its medal for the pitch deck, and called the whole thing responsible AI…
    BigMac did not create cheaper intelligence. It found the GPU waste inflating its price, and gave token economics a reason to fall by multiples…
    Kimi did not reveal a Chinese threat. It revealed Silicon Valley has no shared answer for AI except that somebody else should pay more for it…
    Gemini’s 950 million users do not prove Google built the best AI. They prove the best AI loses when it asks people to go somewhere else…
    We’ve helped promote over 500 Tech Brands. Will yours be the next?

    Unrelated (except by pessimism): Sketching the new dysto-utopian world with massive presence of artificial intelligence. A four-class society (a long read), by Branko Milanovic.

    On the other head

    Hear in LA: Ben, the Man who Saved the Cinerama Dome

    Think small

    @BrianRoemmele: WOW! The $8 AI Machine!

    Who needs a top-five wing and has picks to spare?

    Now that LeBron is headed to the 76ers, watch Jaylen Brown get traded again before the season starts.

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  • Thurbsday

    It didn’t happen in 2010, but it will in 2016.

    It’s still a bubble

    In May of 2018, I posted GDPR will pop the adtech bubble. It didn’t. The bubble is now bigger than ever. My mistake was assuming that there was a policy answer to a morally awful business that paid well. In retrospect, it’s a  humbling reminder of how long one can be wrong about something—and that maintaining a wrong doesn’t make it right. That’s why we were already working on MyTerms (IEEE 7012) at the time. It’s done now, and ready to rock what’s overdue to pop.

    And this subscription cancellation was made by a human being

    Hanaa’ Tameez in NiemanLab: “This price was set by an algorithm”: News subscribers are surprised by a new line in their renewal emails—Outlets like Wired, NJ.com, and The Wall Street Journal are setting renewal prices just for you — and being forced to disclose it.

    A One of One

    In tech journalism’s golden age, when mags were thick and slick and hot, and covered world-changing work like a swarm of noisy bees, the most readable, annoying, hated, and loved writer of them all was John C. Dvorak, who died three days ago at just 80.

    In Quaker meetings, the rule is not to speak until you can improve on the silence. In tech journalism, the rule is not to speak until you can improve on the cacophony of good things others are saying and writing, while not knowing if what you’re writing works or not, but you can’t stop doing it anyway. I learned a lot about all that from John. Hats off.

    Here’s his newsletter’s announcement.

    What they said

    Peter Kaminsky: How Well Do Frontier LLMs Write in Languages Other Than English? What Native-Speaker Critics Say. Pete’s AI fu is second to none. You’ll read why. And how.

    He the People

    My Modern Met: Colorado Mayor Mike Coffman Spends Every Friday Night Sleeping in a Homeless Shelter. Excerpt:

    Coffman has described his overnight stays as a form of quality control, allowing him to evaluate whether Aurora’s incentive-based model is helping residents move toward stable housing. He plans to continue sleeping at the shelter every Friday until the program reaches its full potential. His goal is to create a model that other cities can follow.

    Here’s not looking at you, kid

    Noah Shachtman in Wired: For Taylor Swift, Madison Square Garden’s Controversial Cameras Briefly Went Dark—MSG’s sprawling surveillance system can monitor guests down to the second. Its owners made an exception for the pop star’s rehearsal dinner. Background, also by Noah: The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine.

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  • Verilies

    Via Gemini.

    Talked out

    Jason Lewis: It’s Over—Talk Radio (as well as traditional media) has run its course.

    A newer beginning

    Nitin Badjatia has been laying out more and more reasons—and ways—that enterprises will adapt to customers, rather than the reverse. More at ProjectVRM.

  • Twistday

    As of 4 PM today

    Uh oh

    Tornado watch for all five New York City boroughs. How the radar & lightning map looks now.

    And here are planes not landing at Newark (EWR):

    And the last center that holds

    Mediapost: Sports Is The Last True Mass Medium.

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  • Intelliday

    How about mintelligence?

    We need different words for human and machine intelligence.

    The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can’t measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you’d get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends to measure intelligence, but it doesn’t. (I speak as a former schoolkid whose known IQ scores had an 80-point range—and was at different times rewarded for being smart and punished for being dumb. Fact: I was both all along. So are we all.)

    The machine kind is a quantity. You can measure it in various ways, but economically the AI commodities for sale are called tokens. Kieth Teare visits this fact at length and depth in Intelligence: Who Owns it? Excerpt:

    We should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.

    Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.
    Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.

    Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.

    Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.

    If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?

    He concludes,

    My view is this:

    The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.

    But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.

    As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.

    The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.

    The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.

    An important read, even if you disagree with some of it. My main issue is differentiating between the human and machine forms of intelligence. We’ve always had a word for the former. We need a new word for the latter.

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  • InOrOutDay

    From today’s New York Times

    This is the first morning since I arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday that stepping outside in the morning didn’t feel like walking into an oven. It was 76° F (24.4° C), which isn’t bad. I also couldn’t see far up the road, because the air was full of smoke, and it was hard to breathe. See the above.

    My question is whether we should even get in the car to go somewhere. Wired has advice.

    For the other coast, here’s what’s not happening yet—but will—underground. Lots of maps there, and a viewer.

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  • Heatday

    Heading into downtown Baltimore through heat and smoke.

    To your health

    It’s 96° here in Baltimore, where the air quality sucks thanks to fires in Canada and Minnesota. But write on I shall.

    And your money

    Ed Zitron’s long read on the coming AI crash is worth your time.

    Seriously

    In paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms, Don Marti gives us a useful frame and strategy for saving civilization.

  • Oneday

    That’s all I have to prep for a month on the road. Tomorrow is Baltimore. After that, North Carolina. After that, California. Back in Bloomington in mid-August. Right now it’s hot in all my places:

    All within 5° of each other.

    Ground down

    Says here that Rogers Sports & Media has closed six of its radio stations. One of those, CKWX /1130 in Vancouver, I enjoyed listening to in Hawaii. One was an FM, too.

    Mesa Mike’s List of Deleted AM Radio Station Facilities is huge, but limited to stations that are now defunct. Many more are still licensed but silent (e.g. 560 AM in San Francisco), operating from highly diminished facilities (e.g. WDNC/620 in Durham, WMEX/1510 in Boston), or slowly shrinking away (WSCR/670 and WBBM/780 in Chicago, WCCO/830 in Minneapolis).

    , ,