Thoughts, Ideas, and Logs.

    The schoolmarms are wringing their hands and the principals are sweating through their cheap suits. The great tidal wave of Artificial Intelligence is here, and it's threatening to wash away the sacred integrity of the classroom.     What integrity?     For a century, the goal of American education hasn't been to create thinkers. It's been to manufacture cogs for the great capitalist machine. Sit down, shut up, memorize, regurgitate. Don't question, just consume. The whole system is designed to produce a nation of obedient workers, not autonomous citizens.     And now, along comes a robot that's better at being a cog than the humans are. It can solve the formula, it can write the book report, it can do all the tedious, soul-crushing drudgery we call "homework" in a nanosecond. It is the perfect, tireless, uncomplaining cog.     And the system is panicking. Their solution? "Let's go back to handwritten essays!" It's the desperate cry ...

    Alright. Let's talk about the miracle of modern medicine. A truly inspiring story of fifty years of brilliant, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art fucking guesswork. For half a century, my body was a crime scene, and the detectives were all Inspector Clouseau.     They had a long list of suspects, a whole rogues' gallery of ailments. They called it a "nervous stomach." They called it "Bipolar-Lite™." They called it "bad luck." They called it "getting older." For fifty years, a long line of well-dressed, over-confident, six-figure-income witch doctors looked at a simple case of the fucking milk farts and saw a grand, baffling mystery.     And the whole time, the real culprit wasn't hiding. It was sitting right in the middle of the table, smiling, waving a flag, and pretending to be my best friend. It was the milk. It was the cheese, it was the yogurt, it was the butter, it was the whey, it was every goddamn creamy, dreamy, milky-white a...

    Imagine a world without airports. No more security theater, no more overpriced water, no more sharing recycled air with a man who thinks a hacking cough is a personality trait. In its place stands the Teleporter: a sleek, humming platform that promises to whisk you from New York to Tokyo in the shimmering blink of an eye. It’s the ultimate expression of human convenience, a triumph of technology over the tyranny of distance. It’s also a murder machine with a brilliant marketing department.      We’ve all been sold the fantasy, but nobody wants to read the fine print. They don’t call it the “Molecular Disassembly and Atomic Reconstruction Chamber,” do they? No, because that sounds terrifying and nobody would get in the fucking thing. They call it a “teleporter.” It sounds clean. Instantaneous. Magical.     But let’s not get swept up in the branding. Let’s be engineers of our own existential dread for a moment and walk through what this device actual...

    So, I was looking at the… the "news" today. I use that term loosely. It's not really news anymore, is it? It's the daily disaster report. It’s the box score for the home team, Team Fucked. And folks, let me tell you, Team Fucked is on a winning streak.     Let's start with the big leagues. The international pissing contest. In Kyiv, Russia is lobbing missiles into apartment buildings again. Nineteen dead, four of them kids. They call this "the vendetta of Moscow." Oh, what a fancy name for blowing up children. It's not a vendetta, it's a temper tantrum with a budget. And what's our response? More meetings. More sanctions. We're gonna sanction them so hard, Putin might have to switch to a slightly less expensive brand of caviar before he signs the next order to turn a Ukrainian shopping mall into a crater.     Meanwhile, in the other sandbox, Israel is getting ready for a big party in Gaza City. They're telling everyone to leave. T...

    Let us begin by clearing the air of the cloying incense of romanticism. The notion of creativity as a visit from some ethereal muse, a divine lightning strike that illuminates the waiting, passive vessel of the artist, is a fiction of the most saccharine and debilitating sort. It is a comforting bedtime story for the intellectually lazy and a standing alibi for the perpetually unproductive. The mind is not an empty stage awaiting a visitation from the gods. It is a loom, and it weaves, with tireless and often frustrating application, from the threads of experience it has been given. It cannot, and this is the first and most crucial point, make something from nothing.     The entire enterprise of human thought is built upon the accumulated rubble of what has been thought and said before. To believe otherwise is to indulge in a solipsism of the most childish and arrogant variety. Creativity, therefore, is not an act of conjuring. It is an act of synthesis.   ...

  I have been observing, with a mixture of amusement and alarm, the emergence of a rather tiresome and infantile dichotomy in the debate surrounding artificial intelligence. It is the supposed contest between the "natural" and the "artificial," a framing that is not only intellectually lazy but is freighted with a whole cargo of romantic superstition. The argument, if one can call it that, seems to be that human intelligence, being a "natural" product of evolution, is inherently superior, safer, or in some way more authentic than any intelligence we might ourselves devise. Let us be clear. Nature, in its sublime indifference, is the source of every poison, plague, and predator that has ever threatened our species. It is the realm of the cobra's venom, the black mamba's kiss, and the botulinum toxin. The "natural" world is a theater of ceaseless, pitiless, and mindless slaughter. To suggest that a product is "good" or ...