Personal AI
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Toward a Human Future for AI
I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, titled Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures, which just came out. Here is the full… Continue reading
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Remembranes
And I thought the voice was a knockoff of Leo Laporte Washington Post: He spent decades perfecting his voice. Now he says Google stole it: NPR’s David Greene says he was “completely freaked out” when he heard an AI voice that sounded just like his own, and he’s suing over it. It's still vendor sports.… Continue reading
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Where Are We?
While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded. For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast… Continue reading
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Warm Takes
We still await truly personal AI. Google just launched Personal Intelligence. “Get highly personal help with everything from vacation ideas to project plans, and more. Gemini connects the dots across your Google apps—like Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube—and your chat history preferences to provide suggestions tailored to your world.” That should be called personalized, because… Continue reading
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Dept. of Contentions
His story A thousand years ago, when I was in college, there was a traveling museum of some kind, I forget what. All I remember was a pair of very large bronze hands, from a plaster cast. The hands were thick and plainly those of man whose work was heavy manual labor. Then I looked… Continue reading
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How to Civilize Digital Life
The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.” Those six words… Continue reading
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Saturdaze
Exceedingly common, turns out I was excited to see and shoot a butterfly (above) that a search (remember that?) tells me is a Common Buckeye. The News in Hues Poynter says Nexstar hopes to get its bid to buy Tegna (politically speaking) red-lit. It’s one more way the Redstream eats the Mainstream. Heavy Earth is two… Continue reading
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Linklings
Hiss After AM Cuts, Tesla Dropping FM Radio From Entry Level Models. I want one Companion Intelligence looks very close to what I've been calling for here. What's the opposite? Darius Van Arman has a lot to say about market concentration. (For reasons I can't grok, the long headline is uncopyable.) Continue reading
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My Three Hooks
For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish. Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency,… Continue reading
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The Hotel Model of AI
What I like best about Keith Teare‘s latest essay, Who Owns The Front Door to AI? If it isn’t you, its game over, is that it sounds like he’s setting up the case for personal AI. But he’s not. He’s describing how our AI-assisted lives will get sucked through better interfaces deep into one or more… Continue reading
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Questions
What does the Internet make of us? was hard to find until I found it. Now it’s easy to find. What did Google learn, and how did it learn it? The law professors to whom I made The Case for MyTerms two weeks ago seemed to buy it. What, if anything, will happen next? When I read The… Continue reading
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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
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Real Agency
I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that… Continue reading
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The People’s AI
People need their own AIs. Personally and collectively. We won’t get them from Anthropic, Apple, Google, OpenAI, Meta, or Microsoft. Not even from Apple. All those companies will want to provide AIaaS: AI as a Service, rather than AI that’s yours alone. Or ours, collectively. The People’s AI can only come from people. Since it… Continue reading