When it Comes to AI, Clear-Eyed Pragmatism Beats Slaphappy Optimism After my return from vacation, I had a lot on my plate these last few days. The preceding sentence is my way of apologizing for not providing a post earlier this week. Still, I’ll attempt to make amends, offering this post today and another tomorrow (on Nvidia GTC . . . for
Annihilation or Utopia? AI Likely to Land Somewhere Between the Two Extremes A couple recent articles got my attention, and I thought I’d offer thoughts with which you might enthusiastically agree or vehemently disagree. Either reaction is acceptable. The only unacceptable reaction would be apathy and indifference. We’re here to think critically, not to sleepwalk. The topic of AI is
Forget the Asteroid in 2032 — Worry About the Here and Now I am not among the people concerned about an asteroid, charmingly named 2024 YR4, that is reportedly hurtling through space on a collision course for Earth. Astronomers and physicists estimate that the space rock, which measures from 130 to 300 feet (a wide variance), has about a 1.5% probability
A Case For a Bursting AI Bubble Let’s be honest. We all have our enthusiasms, and some of them, by their very nature, are partly or wholly irrational. Nobody can be objectively rational and logically detached all the time. Some of us can’t manage it only some of the time. Humans aren’t wired that
And Now for A Very Different Take on the DeepSeek Cause Célèbre A media storm raged in the wake of news that China’s DeepSeek open-source AI models were capable of equaling or surpassing the performance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is decidedly not open source. In the past few days, arguably too much has been written and said about the emergence
The TikTok Mouse and the Elephant in The Room We’ve reached a point, here in the fast-moving eddies of the digital era, where snapshots of a given point in the space-time continuum are nearly impossible to capture. Time doesn’t present itself as an orderly sequence of discrete blips, like the ellipses that follow a stray thought, but
Quantum Mania: Amid the Present Puffery, A Seemingly Bright Future You could say that it’s the best of times, the worst of times, and practically the non-existent times for quantum computing. The sentence I’ve just typed is paradoxical, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The information-technology industry seems to be forming a consensus that quantum computing
The Danger Zone: When Societies Struggle to Adapt to Technological Change I’ve thought a lot lately about how previous generations, during prior periods of major technological change, dealt with being caught between the tectonic plates of past, present, and future. Most of us assume, I believe, that tomorrow will be much like today. For the most part, that’s true.