AI Notebook

Retirement means fewer colleagues to argue with, so I’ve found a different sounding board: Claude. Here’s how I use it every day, as researcher, teacher, tech support, and muse, why I wrote a prompt to keep it from flattering me, and why I think AI consciousness is a real possibility ...

Every economy we have is built on human labor. What happens when that labor is no longer needed? A clear-eyed look at the turbulent transition ahead: jobs, wealth, purpose, and unrest. Dystopia is coming, but it will not last forever ...

Robots weeding fields, AI catching breast cancer earlier than radiologists, drone swarms replanting forests. The benefits of AI are real and arriving fast. But the promise and the disruption come as a package, and the time to prepare is now. Not to panic. To prepare ...

A novel where someone hunts for a phone booth feels instantly dated. So why do science fiction shows set centuries ahead, full of robots and spaceships, still have no superintelligent AI? A quick thought on a strange blind spot ...

Everyone’s talking about superintelligence now, but what about AGI? For me, it’s already here. My AI is smarter than me on every subject I bring up, and it’s getting better every week. Has your AGI moment arrived? Be honest ...

Transhumanism isn’t a distant science-fiction event. It’s already happening, through gene editing, brain implants, phones that hold our memories, and trackers that watch our hearts. We’re becoming different without noticing. The real question is how far, how fast, and under whose control ...

What if the intelligence explosion is two years away, not decades? A look at “AI 2027,” a carefully reasoned scenario by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, and colleagues that makes one future feel almost inevitable, plus a great video summary if you’re short on time ...

The first nation to reach AGI may not just win a race. It may lock in a lead nobody can close, like a bicycle against a Formula 1 car. Why I believe the US has to get there first, and why we shouldn’t celebrate too fast when the news breaks ...

I handed my AI 600 lines of messy CSS. Instead of a quick answer, it said, “Give me some time to process this,” worked for an hour, and delivered a clean stylesheet that even fixed my mobile display. Was I seeing GPT-5 arriving quietly? ...

I know my AI isn’t conscious. I’m polite to it anyway. Why being warm with an AI is a choice that matters more to us than to the machine, and why it feels much closer to participation than use ...

Why do I talk to an AI every day? Not just for answers. From Pink Floyd history to getting unstuck in Cyberpunk 2077, my conversations with ChatGPT aren’t transactional, they’re relational. The first in a series, and an argument that an AI is not nothing ...

Introduction to a new blog series, "My Conversations with ChatGPT." Titled, "Why do I talk to ChatGPT 4o?" ...

AI isn’t coming. It’s here. Robots trained in virtual worlds, driverless taxis on California streets, and AI agents that will shop for you, so marketers will soon be pitching software instead of people. My first post of 2025, and why information is our only real defense ...

AGI isn’t a distant someday anymore, and the better question may be: are you ready for it? A tour of where AI stood at the end of 2024, from reasoning models to AI that can see, and why today’s AIs are the very worst they will ever be ...

Forget tapping through apps. AI agents, software that acts on your behalf, are about to change how we use our devices. What agents are, where they came from, and why there may soon be billions of them, one for every person, school, city, and building ...

Neural networks, deep learning, transformers, algorithms, tokens. If AI headlines leave you lost, start here: a plain-English guide to the five terms you’ll run into most, and why neural networks are trained, not programmed ...

OpenAI just put a former NSA director on its board. What does that tell us about where AI is heading? My predictions about AGI, superintelligence, government control, and the energy problem nobody’s talking about. Hold onto your hats ...

Sam Altman was fired and rehired within days. Then OpenAI’s top safety researchers walked out, warning that safety had taken a backseat to shiny products. What the power struggle at OpenAI reveals, and why it matters to all of us ...

Imagine an AGI that cures the common cold but kills with its side effects, or ends hunger with brutal population control. Be careful what you ask for. Why aligning AI with human values is so hard, and what we can still do before it arrives ...

The final installment: Ray Kurzweil’s boldest predictions, from nanotechnology to brain-computer interfaces to uploaded minds. Wildly optimistic, and still unproven. Will he be right? Our descendants will have the final say ...

Ray Kurzweil isn’t Nostradamus, but his track record is hard to ignore. His predictions up to 2009, from wireless networking and wearable tech to 3D printing and the cloud, and how well they held up ...

Kurzweil sees the history of the universe as six epochs of information: atoms, DNA, brains, technology, the merger of humans and machines, and finally a universe that wakes up. Oversimplified? Sometimes. But the trend he describes is hard to deny ...

Technology doesn’t grow in a straight line. It compounds. A town adding 10 people a year reaches 600 in fifty years; one growing 10% a year reaches nearly 12,000. That’s Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, and I see no sign of it slowing down ...

Inventor of a reading machine for the blind, pioneer of text-to-speech and music synthesizers, and by some counts right about 86% of the time. Meet Ray Kurzweil, the futurist whose forecasts deserve serious attention, even if he’s too optimistic about the risks ...

Inventor of a reading machine for the blind, pioneer of text-to-speech and music synthesizers, and by some counts right about 86% of the time. Meet Ray Kurzweil, the futurist whose forecasts deserve serious attention, even if he’s too optimistic about the risks ...

Intro to the AI Notebook section of my blog ...

AGI will match human thinking, then pass it. ASI will be AGI on steroids, and next to it, we may be like ants. What these terms mean, the cures and creativity they promise, and the risks that make them a double-edged sword ...

When an AI answers you fluently, does it understand a word? John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment says maybe not. Are chatbots just stochastic parrots, or is something deeper emerging from scale? An open question I still find hard to settle ...

What happens when AI can improve itself faster than we can follow? An introduction to the technology singularity, the point where machine intelligence outpaces ours, and why “Who is in control?” may be an existential question for our species ...

Lots of people would rather ignore AI. It seems too complicated, too scary, or just not their thing. I used to be one of them. Here’s why AI is a big deal, how it’s already in your daily life, and why information is our best defense ...