What will publishing look like in the Age of AI? Let’s examine that. TikTok “gets you” fast. At least that’s what I’m told. I don’t use it. It’s not doing magic or reading your mind. It’s curating based on your actions. But curation always has a goal. TikTok’s goal is to capture your attention. It…
Summary: If AI becomes a superintelligent pattern seeker, it may infer values or organizing narratives from the data it has absorbed – that no human has considered. If humans ever create AI superintelligence, what would happen? Most people who’ve given the question any serious thought say nothing good, with a very small chance of something…
With the pope quoting Gandalf in an encyclical about AI, the obvious question is “How is AI like the one ring?” There are some trivial comparisons. It makes the user invisible. It requires a lot of energy to make it. It uses a mysterious technology. Its creators pour some of themselves into it. The bigger…
Summary: AI companies increasingly claim they can build “moral AI” by training systems on human values, but human morality is rooted in value-laden perception of the world and lived emotional experience, not just patterns of language or rules. Because AI lacks the embodied experience that gives moral concepts their meaning, its “morality” will always require…
Summary: This article is based on a talk I gave at the Niche Media Conference in Orlando. You can read it, or you can skip to the video at the bottom of the page. This is not a happy article. This is not positive, rah-rah stuff. This is reality. And it’s scary. If you’re willing…
Del Spooner (Will Smith) lived a life of guilt and regret because an unfeeling robot chose to save him rather than a child. “Any human would know better!” Are we making the mistake that Asimov predicted? Science fiction is full of dystopian futures with “thinking machines.” Is there a good future? Can we imagine the…
Summary: AI is not a mind that thinks like a human, but it’s also far more than a simple autocomplete engine predicting the next word. Its outputs come from layers of statistical processes, pattern recognition, and structured systems that make the results surprisingly sophisticated — even though the underlying mechanism is still just math. Social…
Thirty years ago a mediocre article quietly died on an editor’s desk. Today it goes straight to Substack. The internet was built on this strategy: spend 20 percent of your effort to get something to 80 percent (“good enough”) and hit publish. Sometimes it gets lost in the noise, but occasionally a piece catches fire….
Bo Sacks recently highlighted a problem we’re going to have to face in the near future: AI feeding on itself. If AI is trained on content from the internet then as AI displaces human authors, AI will be training on AI-created content. It’s not quite Ouroboros – the mythical snake eating its own tail –…
I’m frustrated. If you weren’t already aware of the AI-powered calamity in our near future, Matt Shumer gave it a good intro in “Something Big is Coming.” We’ve been warned, but we’re not taking the warning seriously. AI is already causing mass layoffs, and reports estimate anywhere from 10 to 50% of jobs could be…
This is a quick summary of how to use and not use AI in a small law firm. You may find it applicable to your business as well. Executive Summary Warning: Before you post anything to an AI system ask yourself if you would say it out loud in a room full of strangers. Opportunity:…
Are you unintentionally sharing your own or your client’s confidential information with AI? Some AI features are on by default. Just today I was looking at a Google doc and noticed the summary on the side. In order to make that summary, Gemini had to read that document. You should check that, and you might…
Once upon a time, clever businessmen learned how to make a hamburger, soda, and fries for $6 — by optimizing every step of the process. Families came from everywhere to buy these burgers. It was a happy place. Then Alan Mink had an idea. “What if I replace all the workers with robots? That would…
Merrian-Webster has coined “slop” as the word of the year. They define slop as … “Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Fair enough. Bad AI content comes in many varieties. On the content side we speak of the “tsunamic of bullshit.” On the image side,…
Every major technological revolution in American history displaced workers, but none threatened to eliminate entire categories of cognitive and manual labor at the same time. That’s what artificial intelligence threatens to do, and that’s why it’s different than previous tech revolutions. The loom displaced jobs in the textile industry, but it created wealth that made…