In the twilight years of homo sapiens, we struggle not only to acquire enough knowledge to elevate ourselves above the crowd but we also struggle to get consensus among enough equally credentialed individuals to anoint us as members of their club where we would enjoy the admiration and adulation of the masses. We spend our productive lives protecting this status against the bitter and resentful masses who envied our status. The authors of AI are tempting us with visions of trans-human splendor.

Is this another apple from the infamous tree of knowledge?

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It is time to re-evaluate the miracles of the scientific revolution and embrace them as enhancements to earlier, more organic, approaches rather than as replacements. The scientific approach gave us tools that we didn’t have before but they don’t give us life We already had that. The most important legacy tool was the relationship between doctor and patient, a doctor with the humility to know that he is not the giver of life and a patient who has the wisdom to appreciate the life he is given.

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Forget about climate change. Economic change will be far more devastating a problem but at least it is something that we have a chance of controlling. Sadly, we are not politically focused on it.

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A funny thing happens on the way to a “better tomorrow”.  Ideas born from “good intentions” need funding and we all know the golden rule: “he who has the gold, makes the rules”, and therein lies the long road to dystopia.  An innovative little company called Humane (HU.MA.NE), staffed with dozens of people from Apple, seeks to “put us back in touch with ourselves, each other and the world around us” with “technology that improves the human experience and is born from good intentions”.  It’s almost as if they are apologizing up front for the nightmare that is coming with “we had good intentions”. 

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Once upon a time there was a novel idea and they called it the internet. The idea was to connect the world at the speed of light so that we could exchange ideas without physical limitations. As with all great ideas, “a funny thing happened”, this time on the way to the multi-trillion dollar entrepreneurial orgy of intellectual and civilizational destruction.

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This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever struggled with mental illness or knows someone who does. It is a powerful and inspiring story of hope and healing.

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We have created an emotional desert in our culture stripped of any semblance of family, community, responsibility empathy and wellbeing.   We celebrate the lone wolf entrepreneur as hero.  The hyper individual who needs no one but the few who dominate the rarified air of global corporate domination. This is our new god and we willingly beg for scraps from the table of his angels. People are a low level commodity valued only for their responses to manipulated information pumped at them 24/7 through ubiquitous devices that track ever increasing volumes of telemetry data on their activities.

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Apple has chosen to create an entirely new computing environment called “spatial computing” and that makes all the difference but is that good or bad?

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Risk is a relatively new concept in the world of civilizations.  Previous civilizations passed negative events off to “gods”.  The closest latin word is periculum which is more associated with danger but the Romans could not calculate danger. The ancient Egyptians used detailed record keeping and storehouses of grain to prepare against drought that they ascribed to the gods. Today we have quantitative measures for dealing with negative probabilities, thanks to efforts born by financiers in the renaissance, to virtually every aspect of our lives today. This is due to the demands of scientific exploration requiring measurable evidence for conclusions. Quantifiability is the essence of the word risk.

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