AI
-
Thursday
And having any readers is better than having none. So far (2:30 pm), this blog post has had three visitors. (Update at 11pm: eleven visitors.) And I’m not even sure those visitors have read any of this. Meanwhile, Online Sports Betting is For Losers is now up to 3,252 visits, second all-time behind Death is Continue reading
-
Tuesday
We’re covered. Zoom in to satellitemap.space. The vast majority of low Earth orbit satellites (all the white dots above) are Starlink’s. Play around with the tabs. This, more than raw power, is what gives authoritarians their authority. Dana Blankenhorn has a good post on Authority. With respect to my own thoughts on the topic, there’s what’s said in Continue reading
-
Tuesday
Whatever, it's complicated. The Narrow Path Needs a Floorplan: What Happens When You Feed Tristan Harris’s Vision Into the Meta-layer. The path is between the DYSTOPIA of centralized control and the CHAOS of "unchecked decentralized" whatever. The path is called COORDINATION, and involves "global clarity & coordinated action," which is about "co-governance—a path where humanity chooses structure, Continue reading
-
An Inadequate AI Solution
Let’s take the example of printers, which tend to suck. Here is one example of suckage at work, and the instructive hell it put me through: The Canon MG3600 is my wife’s. It sits by her desk and does a good-enough job. The Epson WF-3520 is mine. It sits by my desk and leaks black ink. Continue reading
-
A Conversation with ChatGPT About Personal AI
What follows is a conversation I’m having with ChatGPT about personal AI. I guarantee it’s unlike any conversation about AI you’ll find anywhere else. If we want truly personal AI—the kind that is yours and not just a corporate service, this starts to point the way. Me: I am thinking about what personal data could—or Continue reading
-
What Makes an AI personal?
The unintended risks of handing over our lives to Personal AI is the headline of the opening segment of Jamie Smith‘s newsletter today. In it he shares a post by Liz Gerber about an autonomous choice made by the AI in her self-parking car: Last night, my car automatically parked in the grocery store parking Continue reading
-
AI Achieves Sentience, Commits Suicide
I think up Onion headlines all the time: American Dream Ends When Nation Wakes Up. CAPTCHASTAN Capitol Lacks Bicycles, Motorcycles, Buses, Crosswalks. Local Pothole Has No Bottom Earthquake Denies Acting For God New Trump Fragrance Line Based On Fake Blood, Sweat. Then this morning, on one of SiriusXM’s ESPN channels, I heard Trump pitching his Continue reading
-
The Real Intention Economy
As a noun phrase, “The intention economy” first appeared in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006. A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen. Six years after that, I wrote this book, Continue reading
-
Personal Agentic AI
“Agentic” is hot: As an adjective, it is typically used as a modifier for AI. Hence this coincidence: Not surprisingly, Gartner puts Agentic AI first among its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025: Here is one Gartner explanation, among many: Theme No. 1: AI imperatives and risks drive organizations to protect themselves Trend 1: Agentic Continue reading
-
On Intelligence
Now that AI is a huge thing, it’s worth visiting what intelligence is, and how we mismeasure it—for example, by trying to measure it at all. I’ve been on this case for a while now, mostly by answering questions ab0ut IQ on Quora. My answer with the most upvotes is this one, to the question Continue reading
-
ChatGPT app for Mac
So I went to the ChatGPT website to ask a question and got hit with a popover promo for the new Mac app version. So I got it. Here is the dialog that followed my first question (which is boring, so we’ll skip it), copied over from the ChatGPT website, where I went after this Continue reading
-
Does personal AI require Big Compute?
I don’t think it does. Not for everything. We already have personal AI for autocomplete. Do we need Big Compute for a personal AI to tell us which pieces within our Amazon orders are in which line items in our Visa statements? (Different items in a shipment often appear inside different charges on a card.) Continue reading
-
Jayson Tatić and the Boston Celtićs
Nobody’s talking about this, so I will: Jayson Tatum is playing a decoy. More to the point, he is playing Jokić, Dončić, or a bit of both. Not all the time (such as when he’s doing one of those step-back threes with lots of time on the clock, but enough). So let’s call him Jayson Continue reading
-
A Fun AI Fail
Here is me, trying to get ChatGPT (version 4o, which I pay for) to give me an illustration to use in my previous post here, titled The People’s AI. But don’t go there yet (if you haven’t already). What I ended up using is a punchline at the end of the dialog that starts here— Continue reading
-
Blog + Newsletter
Newsletters are all the rage now. In recognition of that, I blogged here two years ago about the idea of writing a solo newsletter. Since then I’ve been co-producing this one with Katherine Druckman at Reality 2.o. It’s a Substack one, so I know how that game works on the production as well as the Continue reading
-
Personal vs. Personalized AI
Personal AI is personal. It isn’t personalized. Context: There is a war going on. Humanity and nature are on one side, and Big Tech is on the other. The two sides are not opposed. They are orthogonal. The human side is horizontal, and the Big Tech side is vertical.* The human side is personal, social, Continue reading
-
Talking Artificial Intelligence with the Real Don Norman
Artificial is AI’s frst name. And Intelligence is a quality, not a quantity. You can’t measure it with a dipstick, a ruler, or an IQ test. If you could, you’d get the same result every time.* But being artificial doesn’t mean AI isn’t dangerous, fun or both. It is, and will be, what we make Continue reading
-
Feed Time
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning. One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for some reason maintains its DALL-E Continue reading
-
Looking for DALL-E 3 Help
I just returned to DALL-E 3 after using its Microsoft version (currently called Copilot | Designer) for a while. But I can’t get in. See how it says “Try in ChatGPT↗︎?” When I do that, it goes to https://chat.openai.com/. After I log in there, it offers no clue about where DALL-E 3 is. So I Continue reading
-
The New News Business
Eigth in the News Commons series. Back when I was on the board of my regional Red Cross chapter (this one), I learned four lessons about fund raising: People are glad to pay value for value. People are most willing to pay when they perceive and appreciate the value they get from a product or Continue reading