I enjoy my e-bike, but I know 2024 was just one point in time, and that change is coming. In the car-bike debate, that’s not always recognized. Advocates treat cars and bikes as a binary choice. But in the electric age we are now entering they aren’t, and they won’t be. How you get around […]
Debates about cities revolve around three prepositions, which have developed into two propositions. The prepositions are to, through, and around. These describe the three aims of transport. We are going to a place, through a place, or around a place. Before the 20th century, we went in and went out, and going around was unusual. […]
In two years, America went from being the leading economic power in the world to the dominant one, all thanks to AI. AI, the training of databases to deliver freeform answers to freeform questions, in a variety of formats, launched a boom in demand for computing resources. This created an infrastructure shortage that may take […]
The computer revolution, unlike previous eras in technology, didn’t change our physical world. When people during World War II imagined the world of 50 years previous (and Hollywood films of the time show you that many did), it was the physical changes that stood out. The entire infrastructure of American life was designed in their […]
Almost as soon as last month’s political disaster was clear, I identified the cause. I also wrote about what must be done next. (Image courtesy of Google’s Gemini.) A cloud, by itself, is not competitive in an AI world. You can’t just have data on your supporters and polls of the public. A party must data […]
Gary Marcus and other deep thinkers are suddenly shocked that “Artificial Intelligence” lies. They’re even said to be “scheming.” This should surprise no one. But let’s see if it can be explained in words of one syllable that geniuses might understand. First, computers aren’t human. They lack the context to tell truth from fiction. Their responses […]
After 46 years I have finally retired from daily news reporting. It’s been a great run. But when my last daily outlet, InvestorPlace, closed in September, I realized I don’t need it anymore. I can do what I want. The problem is that writers retire to pine boxes. Writing is all I ever wanted to […]
A hallmark of today’s AI Bubble is that proprietary solutions are leaving open source in the dust. The arc of OpenAI, from an open source foundation to a profit-hungry business, is often used to illustrate the point. The investment required to build AI models, and the potential profits, have kept open source out of the game. […]
Billions of dollars are being invested today in Nvidia data centers and software, aiming at something called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is the “Holy Grail” of ChatGPT, of Grok, of Gemini and Claude. The claim is that AGI can replace people, reasoning better on any problem than you and I do. The goal is […]
Historically, we Americans have a habit of seeing adversaries as larger than they are, their weaknesses as strengths we should emulate. This was true for Iraq in the 1990s, for Japan in the 1980s, and for the Soviet Union through the Cold War. There were Americans who wanted to copy Nazi Germany in the 1930s, […]
