Gongol.com Archives: October 2025
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October 1, 2025
One of the great sources of wisdom in life is to find two pieces of seemingly equally good advice that are in some sort of conflict with one another. Through this process, the mature mind learns the virtue of appreciating tension -- that life is rarely so much about stark matters of black and white blending into some mushy gray, but rather much more often about seeing that it takes red, green, and blue together to produce white light. ■ A good example: Calvin Coolidge recommended that "If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine of them will run into a ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them." ■ An apparently opposing piece of advice comes from Benjamin Franklin, who said in his 1749 Poor Richard's Almanack, "What can be done, with Care perform to Day, Dangers unthought-of will attend Delay". ■ Yet it only appears at first glance that these two aphorisms are in conflict. In fact, they are merely in tension: Coolidge's advice appears to suggests doing nothing and obeying inertia, while Franklin's advice seems to suggest a frenetic pace of activity. The tension that binds them is the recognition that time is fleeting -- it is the non-renewable resource that constrains us all. ■ Coolidge's wisdom holds that we shouldn't waste it on frivolous concerns, while Franklin's insight is that time almost always causes compounding effects, whether for good or ill. Both are right. ■ In the opening days of a Federal government shutdown, we ought to carefully ask which problems are worth solving and which are not. As a society, we seem to have assumed that far more than nine out of ten problems can simply be ignored, while also ignoring the perils of Franklin's "dangers unthought-of" making big problems even bigger.
October 2, 2025
James Cridland has built a reputation for anticipating changes to come in radio and related industries, a skill he puts to work in a weekly podcast called the "Podnews Weekly Review". In a recent episode, Cridland interviewed Jeanine Wright of Inception Point AI, a company that uses artificial intelligence to synthesize AI personalities who then "host" recordings that the company feeds into podcasting directories and applications. ■ The company's central selling point is "infinitely" scalable content -- which is to say that because they generate everything using computers rather than people, they can produce a virtually unlimited volume of new content. Cridland's skepticism of the approach is impossible for him to mask in the course of the interview, but even without provocation, Wright unintentionally reveals a distressing ethical hollowness to the business model. ■ Wright volunteered, "[B]ecause our time to production is dramatically less and our costs of production are less, it means that we can surf trends much better than traditional podcasting organizations. So a week ago when Charlie Kirk was shot, we had content about Charlie Kirk up, we had a living biography, we had a content, and a new show about his assassination up within an hour. So when people typed Charlie Kirk into Apple and Spotify, we were three of the top five shows". ■ Not a word about accuracy, tastefulness, tone, or service to the public. Just, in other words, "Someone famous died violently and unexpectedly and we used computers to flood the zone with material allowing us to profit from it faster than anyone else." This is a dreadful turn of events. ■ Sensationalism and yellow journalism have been around for well over a century. But when humans do it, someone at least bears responsibility for making choices along the way. Someone's name -- a reporter or an editor -- stands to be diminished for those times when tastelessness crosses into ghoulishness. But Wright's model expressly rejects even the duty to put a human in the decision process: "I'm releasing 3,000 episodes a week, and I have eight people on my team. There's no way we're listening to the overwhelming majority of our content before it's released." ■ Much like rabbits, once introduced into the wild, computer-synthesized content has a way of propagating uncontrollably. It goes into the datasets that train new artificial intelligence models, and the high-volume production ensures that, like a garden weed, it has the sheer relentlessness to choke out everything else. Even death becomes merely a monetizable opportunity.
October 3, 2025
Taylor Swift has conclusively proven that, no matter what happens to terrestrial radio broadcasting, the legacy of pop music remains true to its name. Whether objectively newsworthy or not, her newly released album has been the subject of at least 100 articles in news publications just on its first day. Whatever else the album may or may not be, it is certainly popular. ■ The album has been streamed millions of times, reviewed exhaustively, and been made the subject of scores of podcasts. It is not enough for us to have entertainment, we seem compelled to entertain ourselves by rehashing the entertainment itself seemingly nearly as much as we consume it in the first place. ■ Entertainment can lead to lots of good sensations: Happiness, joy, pleasure, even satisfaction. But one thing that pure entertainment isn't equipped to provide is a sense of fulfillment. Consumption (like listening to music, watching a movie about an album, or looking at photos of a singer) lights up the brain in different ways than original, organic creation. ■ With every passing day, it becomes easier and easier to consume entertainment non-stop anywhere and anytime. Facebook users are even being invited to virtually snap their fingers and produce endless streams of AI-generated video slop. ■ Against these headwinds, we have to be sure that the real creative pursuits get their due share of our time. Without them, something goes missing -- not just at the social level, but for the individual, too. Doing is more rewarding than viewing.
October 4, 2025
Hybrid warfare is here to stay
A significant aspect to the Cold War that often gets overlooked is that it was shaped largely by standoffs. The Berlin Wall was the most tangible example, but much of that era was characterized by posturing from behind each side's own lines. ■ The current security environment has turned that old model on its head. We have entered a period of provocative "gray zone" or "hybrid" conflict. The first sign that tactics are outpacing our responses is that so few people would readily recognize those terms. ■ Muscular hand-to-hand combat still occupies enough space in the imagination that the Secretary of Defense very publicly railed against "fat troops" and "fat generals" during an extraordinary assembly of top officers this week. But what's actually happening right now to some of America's treaty allies is that drones are invading the skies, Russian warships are crossing lines and provoking defensive vessels, and hospitals and water systems are coming under cyberattack. ■ Problems like hostile drones in military airspace aren't "fat troops" problems. They are complicated, technology-forward problems. Nobody's going to arm-wrestle a drone out of the skies. Tactical creativity and strategic imagination are both in extremely high demand, because we don't really have "muscle memory" for gray-zone conflict. Yet it's here, and the longer it takes to realize that a sort of dull, persistently low-grade scale of trouble is likely to be here to stay, the farther we're going to fall behind in staging an effective defense.
October 5, 2025
After about six weeks of a complete shutdown, Jaguar Land Rover is restarting production at three manufacturing plants in the UK. They were shut down by a cyberattack in August and have been frozen ever since, not only putting the company's direct employees on ice, but also freezing the enormous supply chains that feed modern automotive manufacturing. What's really bad for Jaguar Land Rover might be catastrophic for some of its captive suppliers. ■ It seems likely that we passed a milestone sometime between ten and twenty years ago without knowing it: The peak of modern production efficiency. Someone will undoubtedly try to fix that date with some precision in a real academic paper, but it's somewhere in that range: Late enough that the gains from Internet-enhanced commerce were largely realized, but cyber threats had not undermined those benefits. Similarly, as far advanced in the gains from trade and specialization as we could reach, but before the reckless dismantling of the pro-trade order (the failure to get the US into the Trans-Pacific Partnership seems to be a real bookend to that era). ■ Whether it happened before or after the 2007-2009 financial panic is difficult to say. The pre-crisis era had greater overall confidence; the post-crisis era had the energy of people trying to make up for lost ground. Regardless, it should be clear to us now that conditions will henceforth be harder than they were then: Antipathy to trade is going to hurt us (semi-permanently, at least), and the overhead costs of dealing with criminal elements among us in cyberspace will permanently shave off some of the peak gains we could have obtained from technological efficiencies. ■ Regrettably, we're left to adjust to a more brittle state of affairs. Supply chains can't be just-in-time anymore, whether because of abrupt changes to tariffs or because of ransomware. Perhaps even worse, the insidious incursion of AI-generated junk content is contaminating the Internet and distorting search results, making the path out even harder to navigate. It turns out that Joni Mitchell may have been a prophet of our times: You really don't know what you've got until it's gone.
October 6, 2025
Incredibly self-defeating choices
Vaccination rates for the basics -- like the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine -- have sunk below the threshold for herd immunity in a huge number of counties across the United States. USA Today mapped and expanded upon data collected by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, and found that the vaccination rates are below 95% in three-quarters of counties. ■ This is a terrible self-sabotage, on a scale that would look like sabotage if it were being imposed by outside forces rather than being chosen from within. Some things only work if they have widespread consent and commitment, and vaccination for highly contagious diseases like measles is one of those things. ■ Vaccination combines self-interest (who wants to suffer from a nasty and preventable disease?) with community interest, since some people simply cannot be vaccinated, either due to age or existing immunocompromise. Unfortunately, what is rationally accounted-for in public health overlooks a sinister intervening factor: The greed, irrationality, and civic indifference of the cottage industry that has grown up around campaigning against vaccines. ■ Where is the pride in showing respect and concern for one's neighbors? And why do some outlets and institutions persist in amplifying the voices of people who plainly don't understand the purpose or protections of vaccines? ■ It's one thing to be wary of any new medication. Benjamin Franklin lamented that he was a skeptic of an early approach to smallpox inoculation, because his hesitancy led to the death of his four-year-old son. Franklin openly admitted, "I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation". ■ He would undoubtedly beg modern-day Americans to protect themselves and their children with the proven tools easily and readily available to stop dangerous contagious diseases, and he would undoubtedly endorse a vaccine with a track record half a century long (like MMR, which was introduced in 1971). ■ Modern medicine figured out how to halt diseases that used to kill thousands of Americans a year. We have a solution, and even better than a cure, it's preventative. It is much better never to have gotten a disease in the first place than to have been cured of it. ■ It's one thing to be lost, confused, or apprehensive about dealing with new and novel problems, but it's downright daft to surrender to old threats when we know plainly how to stop them.
October 7, 2025
Conrad Hackett of the Pew Research Center poses an exceptionally reasonable question: "How much influence do public intellectuals have in the present influencer era?". Naturally, the question hinges on several definitions, not the least of which is "Who qualifies as a public intellectual?". ■ There certainly was a time when at least a few of them were easy to identify: Carl Sagan, Milton Friedman, and Vaclav Havel all left deep impressions on society in their times. Today, consistent with Hackett's question, it's harder to know which impressions are really being left. ■ We live in a time crowded with intellectuals but short on those who are really devoted to learning how to move the public. The surplus of intellectuals is generally a blessing; the smart people of prior generations would almost certainly be downright green with envy over the depth and breadth of knowledge available today across an astonishing range of disciplines. The student graduating with an associate's degree in chemistry emerges with more real factual knowledge than any of the alchemists of old, and the same is true across practically every discipline. ■ It is the reluctance or inability to translate that knowledge (from almost any domain) for public consumption that becomes an incapacitating problem. It's one thing to opine among friends, colleagues, or those who are already interested in a subject area, but reaching outside -- in order to persuade those who aren't already interested -- is a very different challenge. ■ Public outreach is a skill calling for both strategy and tactics. One must have a grand vision as well as a firm grasp of particular techniques. More importantly, a real public intellectual must possess the patience to see a long fight all the way through. ■ That patience is key; one of the defining aspects to "influencer" culture is that one can have a meteoric rise one day and be "cancelled" the next. The effective public intellectual doesn't chase momentary virality, but stays within the current of public attention using the tactics at hand (to remain relevant to the public) while strategically advancing a greater cause.
Getting their hands on a small maker of tiny chips
When the subject of your interest is not aware of your existence
"Start calling your parents by their first names"
A joke from The Onion, to be certain, but it's really not bad advice
Bob Ross paintings are being sold to raise funds for public broadcasters
October 10, 2025
Heeding Warren Buffett's advice to "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful", the time seems quite right for an extra-sober assessment of work from a contrarian perspective. So much money is being spent on data centers to run artificial intelligence that it's tilting the balance of GDP growth. Without the feverish spending on computers, the economy would basically not have grown at all. ■ And what is all this spending being done to produce? In essence, the appearance of knowledge. This isn't to denigrate an entire class of machines or their human technicians, but the evidence has been piled up pretty high to show that in many cases, at least with generative artificial intelligence based upon large language models, what we're getting as outputs is mainly good at looking like intelligence, far more than actually exhibiting the thing itself. ■ The temptation to copy the outputs and pass them off as original thoughts has already ensnared many a user. The answers these tools generate are often plausibly correct, and even when they aren't, they at least tend to be written in such a way that they seem convincing (at least to the reader who doesn't know any better). ■ This isn't the first time that copying work has been a high-grade temptation. Nearly 125 years ago, Booker T. Washington lectured his students at the Tuskegee Institute, "We carry a similar kind of deception into our school work when, in the essays which we read and the orations which we deliver, we simply rehearse matter a great deal of which has been copied from some one else. Go into almost any church where there is one of the doctors of divinity to whom I have referred, and you will hear sermons copied out of books and pamphlets. The essays, the orations, the sermons that are not the productions of the people who pretend to write them, all come from this false foundation." ■ The easier it becomes to at least appear as though one possesses a great deal of knowledge, the more important it becomes to emphasize the strengthening of character: Taking ownership of what one actually knows, giving appropriate credit when answers have come from others, showing modesty instead of bluffing overconfidence. The appearance of access to "intelligence" is going to tempt a lot of people into really ill-advised behavior.
October 11, 2025
There is a familiar old metaphor about the duality of human nature: An angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each whispering into our ears in a battle to influence our decisions. It's a metaphor so familiar that it even appears in seemingly countless cartoons. ■ To an extent, it's helpful to see a depiction of that duality so that we can appreciate that all of us struggle with a battle between good and evil. But what if there's something missing from that metaphor? What if there's a third character and rather than it being a struggle simply between two, it's a three-body problem instead? ■ What if we were to depict the same angel and devil battling it out, but with a character for self-interest who tips the balance between the two of them? ■ For some people, the angel will overwhelm almost all bad thoughts. For others, the devil. But for most of us, most decisions end up depending upon not just the balance between our good and bad natures, but also where the preponderance of self-interest lies. ■ Society really is about making sure we align self-interest with the interests of the community as a whole, so that the good angel wins more often than not -- and particularly in the times when it counts most. If evil seems to be winning more often than it should, then, of course, we should have concerns about the viability of the devil in too many lives. ■ But we should also have a more immediate concern with where the preponderance of self-interest lies in tipping the balance. That's more controllable among people of goodwill and decency. Structuring self-interest so that it provides a framework of rewards and punishments that serve to tilt the balance in favor of the angels is not only an extremely important job, but also highly dispositive about where we end up in the long run.
October 12, 2025
A project by the Pew Research Center found that link rot has killed two of every five pages that were on the Internet in 2013. Whether the pages have been taken down entirely, moved, or simply neglected to death, the point is that they are there no more -- at an appalling rate of disappearance, considering the centrality of the Internet to our daily lives now. ■ The loss of information to the sands of time has been a problem throughout human times. Historians are forever trying to piece together fragments of artifacts in order to reconstruct lost knowledge of the past (consider the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the excitement over the "reading" of scrolls once damaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius). ■ Some information has always been allowed to fade away; we know what ancient people thought was important because they did things like chiseling it in stone. But we have made the largely unconscious decision to store most of our contemporary information online, often unconsciously assuming that digitality equals permanence, even without any reason to believe that. It wouldn't be so potentially dangerous an assumption if we were still fanatical about creating permanent records. ■ Unfortunately, we are not. A great example: The Statistical Abstract of the United States, which was published from 1878 until 2011 to provide a comprehensive look at Census data. But the publication was terminated, presumably because of the assumption that "all the information is online now". ■ What we've failed to do amid all this flattening of information (and information access) is to distinguish what content really needs to be permanent from that which can be forgotten without regret. There is no special HTML code for "Preserve this content at any cost", even though there is content utterly deserving of such a flag. And now, with artificially-generated content "killing the Web" right before our eyes, the consequences of failing to draw the proper distinctions are arriving even faster than anticipated.
October 14, 2025
Education is all too often treated as an object -- a thing to be possessed, much like a football on a field. Someone holds on to it and moves it in their preferred direction for a while, then someone else takes it in another direction. The contest over the object sooner or later overwhelms the meaning and purpose of education itself. ■ Great forces, from unions to parent groups and from mega-donors to the Federal government, battle over who may deliver it, set the rules about it, or decide how much it will cost. The debates get pretty fierce. ■ Indigenous Peoples' Day serves up a healthy reminder that the intrinsic value of something like education shouldn't be measured by those battling to control it like some abstract battlefield, but instead by just how hard people will work to get it when they have been denied. ■ The ongoing struggle to correct generational lapses in access to education remains an expensive indignity to overcome. Some 22,000 students are now enrolled in 34 different tribal colleges and universities. That's a lot of individuals, but bachelor's degree attainment among American Indians is still half that of the national average. ■ The first tribal college is only 57 years old, which offers some sense about how relatively young the process of correcting past errors still remains. They aren't the only option, but when it comes to optimizing access and opportunity for people who have been overlooked or left out for generations, colleges close to enrolled tribal members are an important solution. Not everyone needs a degree, of course, but if communities are chronically left out of the degree pipeline, it's bound to be economically costly for them. ■ Seen this way, education doesn't look much like a football to fight over. It looks more like a valuable good that becomes even more valuable the further it is spread, whether through scholarships or other support.
Lee Enterprises is ceasing the Monday print editions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Omaha World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal Star, and the Quad City Times. Other papers outside the Midwest are also being affected.
Photos from the Des Moines Register archives
Downtown buildings galore, almost all gone today
October 16, 2025
Ever since the computing world broke free of text-based interfaces like DOS and Telnet, almost every graphical platform has used some kind of icon to signal that a page, program, or multimedia file is loading. Spinning circles and blinking dots serve notice that "Something is coming, and we're working on it, but it's not ready yet". ■ It's hard to imagine just how much better television news programming (especially the cable news networks) would be if TV news also came with a "loading" screen. Something to say, "We're working on it, but there's nothing reliably intelligent for us to say quite yet." ■ CNN ran a segment this week featuring a report on betting markets and their predictions about the outcome of the 2026 Congressional vote. It's hard to think of a better example of nonsense masquerading as news, serving no other purpose but to fill space and proffer the illusion of information. ■ With 8 billion people on the planet, there's enough newsworthy material to go around and fill 24 hours a day with news coverage. But the supply of potential news content isn't distributed evenly with the distribution of journalists. ■ Even more consequentially, much of what is objectively "news" fails an important test for media success: It's not obvious to the target audience what's in it for them. India, for instance, is home to one out of every eight people on the planet, but it's rarely obvious to the news viewer in Boise or Little Rock why that news from way over there is of any consequence to them at home. ■ But it shouldn't be of any less interest than what shows up in online prediction markets about an election more than 12 months away, and that's where the spinning icon that says "Loading..." should come in. There are plenty of times when nothing would be better than something, if that "something" is no more fact-based than an astrology report. News is undoubtedly coming -- it always is -- but when it's not ready yet, we'd be better off knowing that it's OK to look somewhere else for a while.
October 17, 2025
Human beings are members of an elite class of animals, known as the persistence predators. We've made our way to the top of the food chain not by having the biggest teeth, the sharpest claws, or the most sensitive noses. We've done it by having the ability to keep going when chasing prey and not giving up. ■ The ability to outlast what we chase is so deeply embedded in our physical nature that it undoubtedly has an effect on our psychological makeup. Our ability to pursue long-term goals is something that is so necessary to our physical survival that it must influence how we think, as well. We can't be the product of nearly two million years of evolution without our brains having adapted -- at least somewhat -- to staying occupied and mission-oriented. ■ It's hard to escape the conclusion, then, that people who lack the ability to persist after a goal have either had it beaten out of them or have chosen to abandon it based on social influences. Those who give up too easily are denying something about their very nature as humans. ■ What causes people to give up prematurely rather than to embrace the long war? There are too many things that need to be done that take persistence, but ultimately end up in enormous reward: It simply doesn't make sense to deny this one thing that nature has given us that we have evolved to be the very best at doing in the whole animal kingdom. ■ Biology makes persistence our superpower: It's what got us to the top of the food chain. And it lodged something special in our brains that we have to be smart enough not to abandon in our social affairs with other humans. Some worthy goals take a long time and volumes of persistence. Giving up isn't in our nature.
October 18, 2025
A seat at the table for a board member with no body
It's never really clear in the moment at what precise moment a craze has hit its peak, but someone usually says something so spectacularly over-the-top as to offer a pretty good marker. For a gratuitous example: The CEO of Logitech declaring, on stage, that she would welcome an artificial-intelligence bot as a member of her company's board of directors. ■ The problem isn't that a board can't use a reliable source of memory. Boards have secretaries and take minutes. They produce reports and reach decisions. A computer that works like a super-stenographer isn't necessarily a bad idea, assuming that board members actually make use of the institutional memory available to them. ■ Nor is the problem that an AI agent can't be properly trained to align with the people it serves. It can be done, though it requires very deliberate choices about which values and which stakeholders matter -- and in what measure. In theory, an AI agent could help to shed light on blind spots. ■ The really big problem is that it's foolhardy to commit to high-technology solutions when very few corporate boards are any more capable of critical thought or independent analysis than a collection of potted houseplants. Warren Buffett even noted in his most recent letter to shareholders, "I have also been a director of large public companies at which 'mistake' or 'wrong' were forbidden words at board meetings or analyst calls." ■ Decisions must still be made by people, and there is nearly overwhelming risk that technology treated as a cure-all will only serve to make human board members even more docile and compliant than before. Imagine the likelihood that any individual board member will want to speak up and challenge the computer "seated" at the table by the CEO: Who will dare to argue with the mystical oracle machine? ■ It's plain old folly to focus on adding supposedly high-tech tools to human systems without doubling or tripling the effort devoted to improving the skills and qualities of the human beings at the table. That's why the current moment seems a lot like the peak of a fad.
October 19, 2025
Yesterday's aircraft of tomorrow, today
Boeing has announced a special program under its Boeing Business Jets division: A "turnkey" service to convert 747s into VIP long-haul private jets. Most of the airlines that used to fly the 747 don't anymore, having modernized to newer aircraft that promise better fuel efficiency per passenger-mile flown. The raw laws of market forces decide much of what flies and what doesn't, no matter how sentimental some slices of the public might be over the waning of the 747. ■ The reason people on the ground care about the plane is the same reason it might just survive an unlikely revival as an oversized business jet: The 747 is big and distinctive. The bulbous upper deck and four engines make it simple enough for even a kindergartener to recognize, so the types of people who have huge budgets and a demand for private travel might well be able to satisfy the act of very conspicuous consumption by getting a 747. ■ The number of individual playboys looking to light their money on fire may be rather small, but there's a fair chance that the offer might entice a few professional sports teams. Others with smaller travel demands are probably more likely to stick with smaller, faster planes closer-suited to their wants. ■ It is, however, a tribute to the value created by good design that Boeing would even bother to market a plane that is nearly 60 years old as a modern business jet. Almost any other 60-year-old design you might encounter for sale anywhere is probably being advertised strictly for its retro characteristics. Having a 747, though, puts the prospective buyer in the same customer class as the President of the United States. Unlikely as it may seem on the merits alone, there may yet be a few private buyers hoping to join that club.
October 20, 2025
Orchestrating institutional revival
A perfect storm, resulting from the "silver tsunami" of Baby Boomers withdrawing from work and other active pursuits, the widespread lockdowns and shutdowns of 2020, and the digital world's ever-expanding way of crowding out experiences in the face-to-face world, has assaulted the health of countless social institutions. Religious attendance in many denominations has taken a hit. Civic and service groups are struggling to hold the line. Businesses once owned by proprietors or small groups of partners are being traded around like baseball cards. ■ What may be needed more than ever is a whole movement to train and mobilize people to orchestrate institutional revival. Notwithstanding the fad for putting the title of "founder" on college applications, what we really need are people who can lead processes of renewal and revitalization inside existing worthwhile organizations. ■ That tends to be a less glamorous task than "founding" something new. The tech sector's obsession with "disruption" doesn't help matters, either, particularly when that sector is in the midst of a fairly evident bubble that is crowding out both capital and human investment in other areas. ■ Age is no guarantee of perfection, either for humans or their institutions. But the groups we form do tend to take shape around corrections encountered along the way; just as the Constitution is better now after 27 amendments than it was in 1787, so too do most institutions end up improved by reforms that accrue over time. (Most, not all: There's no redeeming some awful organizations, but they're usually broken from the start.) ■ The decay and collapse of good institutions ought to be a concern of us all. Nobody can be a member of every group, nor should anyone want to be. But the need for people to be able to work together for useful purposes is good for all. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it all the way back in 1835, "There are no countries in which associations are more needed, to prevent the despotism of faction or the arbitrary power of a prince, than those which are democratically constituted." Orchestrating the revivals needed by so many institutions right now will take both talents and skills, but there's precious little time to waste.
October 21, 2025
When actor Suzanne Somers died in October 2023, the artificial-intelligence boom had not really begun in earnest. ChatGPT was still quite new, and Google had not yet released Gemini. But her husband, Alan Hamel, says they had already discussed creating a digital twin for Somers after her Earthly life was over. ■ Hamel seems to want the Somers chatbot to become just as famous as the real person, and possibly even harder-working. "Suzanne AI", as he called it to People Magazine, is supposed to be rolled out soon to her website, where Hamel says fans "can come and just hang out with her". ■ It has been fairly obvious that we were going to land here someday: "Talking" to the dead has been an enduring pastime (see: Ouija boards), and the idea of talking to a computer is at least as old as "Star Trek". There are ways this can be done well, and ways it can be done harmfully. ■ A program could be trained on an individual's written and recorded output and subsequently queried, just like one might enter a question into a search engine. For people with lots of writing or recordings to their credit, the resulting database could be quite useful. ■ If the machine furnishes a response that clearly puts the answer at arm's length, then that's probably a net good. Put another way, if the answer could be voiced by any radio or television news anchor, then it's probably just fine. We could call such a tool a "personality engine", in the sense that it acts like a search engine for an individual's personality. ■ But if a user insists on hearing an answer to their prompt in a synthesized version of a loved one's voice, or yet further in a virtual video form (not unlike Max Headroom), then there are really grave risks of fundamentally confusing the wiring of human memory in ways that can't be repaired. Memory is already fragile at best and easily corrupted at worst, and introducing convincing synthetic remakes of deceased people creates a wildly fraught ethical trap -- especially when AI hallucinations are already a known hazard. ■ Once human memory has been corrupted, there's really no clear way of repairing it. We already live with unreliable eyewitness accounts and the Mandela effect. It can only turn much worse if "Suzanne AI" becomes one of a cast of thousands or even millions, filling our present with synthetic revivals of the past.
October 24, 2025
Five dozen countries are expected to sign the U.N. Cybercrime Convention this weekend in, of all places, Vietnam. The UN says it includes "human rights safeguards". The Cybersecurity Tech Accord, whose signatories form a real who's who among tech companies, has protested that the safeguards aren't good enough. Many of those tech companies have undermined their own public goodwill through the reckless embrace of artificial intelligence models that put the public interest far too low on the priority list. ■ But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which may be characterized as more of an honest broker, wwarned plainly that "By permitting broad international cooperation in surveillance for any crime deemed 'serious' under national laws -- defined as offenses punishable by at least four years of imprisonment -- and without adequate robust safeguards, the draft convention risks being exploited by governments to suppress dissent and target marginalized communities." ■ The situation highlights two important points that exist in an uneasy tension with one another. There is a reasonably clear need for international coordination to check the sinister deployment of digital tools to exploit others. The Internet makes many problems into global problems, and responding appropriately takes constructive cooperation across national borders. ■ But at the same time, the United Nations is profoundly ill-structured to respond to the nuances of managing cybercrime within the context of real security for human rights. If the definition of "crime" is left solely to individual countries, then little protection remains for those individuals who might try to exercise resistance to an oppressive government. If simple dissent can be labeled illegal, then what good is the law except as just another tool of oppression?
October 25, 2025
The US government has been in a battle with the independent agency running the Voice of America, announcing summary layoffs of effectively the whole staff in August, then being told in September that it cannot just fire everyone. The campaign to Save VOA argues that without the broadcaster's efforts to report the news fairly and independently, people living in countries without freedom of the press are being deprived and cut off. ■ International broadcasting has always been a tool of public diplomacy, which is merely another way of saying that countries try to achieve some objectives by persuading people living in other countries. The VOA charter openly says, "VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions." ■ The Canadian province of Ontario just engaged in some public diplomacy of its own, with a television ad using Ronald Reagan's words to attack tariffs and trade barriers. The words came straight from a routine weekly radio address by Reagan in 1987, making the ad wildly compelling. ■ Americans should be alert to the fact that, whether or not our government participates in the world marketplace of public diplomacy, we're still in it. Others will try to influence us, even if we have unilaterally surrendered on trying to influence others. ■ Some, like Russia, will do it through sinister propaganda. Others will engage like Ontario has -- even if the consequences aren't always predictable. But the bottom line is that it's going to happen, and withdrawal from the global information sphere is exceptionally self-defeating.
October 26, 2025
Hurricane Melissa, having already undergone extremely rapid intensification, is rearing up to pummel Jamaica with an unfathomable 20" of rain across nearly the entire island, with some portions of the island potentially in line to get 40" of rain. ■ That's a rate virtually no infrastructure is (or even can be) built to withstand, and Jamaica simply isn't equipped with first-rate infrastructure. It's a country that remains stuck on a low-growth trajectory, and without a sustained period of strong economic growth and subsequent investment (and reinvestment) in the public infrastructure, events like this are going to cause far more death and devastation than they otherwise might. ■ It's important to remain forever skeptical of government power, but never to grow irrevocably cynical about what good government is uniquely equipped to do. The United States is providing Hurricane Hunter surveillance of the storm, something that NOAA is uniquely equipped to do, both in terms of the physical equipment required and the skilled technical teams able and willing to commit the effort. The Hurricane Hunter team is literally one of a kind. ■ And yet those American Hurricane Hunters aren't being paid right now due to the Federal government shutdown. Imagine flying into a hurricane in order to save the lives of others, knowing only that you have a reasonable expectation (but no guarantee) that you'll receive back pay for the job. That's its own kind of failure -- the machinery of government hasn't failed, but the administration of law over that machinery has. Planes are in the air, but paychecks aren't being printed. ■ The idea that government can solve every problem is a mirage. But it's also a mistake to think that it cannot be used, carefully and in limited fashion, to enhance the quality of life -- to promote the general welfare, in the words of the Constitution. Modesty and self-control are needed anytime a government is established among people; cynicism and a burn-it-all-down ethos are not.
October 28, 2025
Jaw-dropping footage from the Hurricane Hunters
(Video) The views they're capturing from the eye of Hurricane Melissa are bewildering in their scale
Des Moines introduced an odor-monitoring system to detect odor-producing chemicals, and it's no surprise that complaints have fallen. Measurement creates opportunities for feedback loops.
Doesn't seem like that should be a controversial request, much less require a court order
October 29, 2025
The nerds will have to save us
Anyone looking for a most incredible Internet rabbit hole ought to visit the Facebook page titled, "SS United States: An Operational Guide to America's Flagship". It's an endlessly detailed discussion page full of photographs, content, and even debate about the SS United States, which at one time was the fastest passenger ship in the world. ■ The curators of the page and its followers (numbered in the thousands) don't hesitate to discuss the ship's history in long, detailed threads. The Facebook page is an adjunct to a 216-page book on the ship, but it acts much more like a forum than a pure marketing tool. The people populating it are nerds -- a term of endearment for those who take an enhanced level of interest in subject-matter knowledge for recreational reasons. Every civilization has nerds and every civilization needs them, desperately, even in the best of times. ■ A serious social worry we should reasonably have right now is that the proliferation of junk books, articles, and online content written by unaccountable and unreliable artificial intelligence programs are going to fundamentally and irreversibly pollute the world's reliable base of historical knowledge. Writing a well-documented, carefully-researched history of a subject like the SS United States is time-consuming and costly (if in no other terms but the opportunity cost of doing something else). ■ It would be cheap and easy to artificially generate a completely fabricated history of the same subject -- complete with convincing photograph-like images -- and sell it as a competitor to the authentic, human-written original. Once a market for a real thing is revealed, the market for imposters, copycats, reverse-engineered imitations, and opportunistic rip-offs is rarely far behind. And the cheaper the knock-off, the greater the potential for profit-making. The world of books is already plagued by them, and large language models are making the problem exponentially worse. ■ That's a completely upside-down incentive structure for society's interests, if reliable knowledge means anything to a civilization at all. It may become much harder to sort good information from bad in the very near future, and it's going to be up to the nerds of the world to save us. It's going to be an extraordinarily heavy lift.
Anthony Bourdain's perfect hamburger
It's an engineering question as much as a flavor one
October 30, 2025
In a bid to improve its position to generate cash from advertising, Google has announced "new tools designed to make any YouTube content a premier experience on TV". That's an energetic way of saying that they will artificially increase the resolution on videos that were uploaded at any resolution less than 1080p HD. ■ In theory, it could be harmless -- though the reliance upon artificial intelligence to deliberately alter old content is a bit unnerving. And, to its credit, Google says it will ensure that a "clear option to opt-out" remains for content creators, and that viewers can disable the feature within a few clicks. ■ But there are still problems. One is that Google is notorious for policy changes on short notice, and with little or no reason. The "Google Graveyard" is full and growing even more crowded by the day. Who is to say they won't change policy again in a few years? Authorship ought to mean something, even if it means that something in standard definition. ■ The other matter is that it reflects a willingness to play fast and loose with the truth. Turnerization drew no small number of critics, and for good reason -- "Casablanca" is perfect in its original black and white. Most YouTube videos are far from historically notable, but taking liberties with basic knowledge is a hazardous undertaking. Restorations gone awry offer a fairly cautionary tale about what can happen when someone other than the author decides to "touch up".
Sue Danielson worked for decades as the core member of the WHO Radio news department. She's a first-class reporter and a great person.
October 31, 2025
Iowa's mothballed nuclear power plant is coming back online under an agreement between NextEra Energy (current majority owner of the plant) and Google. It's an ambitious deal, under which Google is getting a 25-year deal to buy the electricity. It gives some scale of Google's current outlook to see that they're willing to agree now to start geting power no sooner than three years from now. It's no small matter to make a deal that won't even begin to produce outputs until the next President is in office. ■ It's something else still to consider that the arrangement lasts for 25 years into the future. On one hand, it's refreshing to imagine that Google is strategically planning a quarter-century or more in advance. ■ On the other hand, it's amusing to imagine that Google executives are willing to make plans that far into the future. Google's first and most modest public product (its search engine) is barely 25 years old itself. ■ It's quite a lot to say that a company is willing to do something with such a long time horizon -- especially when it's obviously being done to fill a spike in energy demand tied to a computing trend that has only had a short-term time in the spotlight. It might be wondered: How often is a similar time horizon used in families? Is the 30-year mortgage the only time anyone agrees to stick with an investment for a quarter of a century or more?