Category Archives: Technology

Looking Up and Looking Down

Posted on Wednesday 10 June 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

— Looking Up — Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 7 Jun 2026: Human intelligence will win out over artificial intelligence, subtitled “The more machines can do, the clearer it becomes what only human beings can provide.” Let me start by giving … Continue reading →

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Sunday’s Post

Posted on Monday 25 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

How smartphones are implicated in the decline of fertility; How the latest Star Wars film waters down its franchise, as happens with much popular culture; Crime in LA in the lowest in decades, but voters are still very concerned about … Continue reading →

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Yuval Noah Harari: NEXUS

Posted on Friday 3 April 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Random House, Sept. 2024, xxxii + 492pp, including 88pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index; but no bibliography) This is Harari’s fourth big book, following SAPIENS, HOMO DEUS, … Continue reading →

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David Brin, THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY

Posted on Saturday 28 March 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? (Addison Wesley, April 1998, 378pp, including 42pp of notes, follow-up, acknowledgements, index, and about the author.) Here is a book that has sat my shelves for over a quarter … Continue reading →

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Retreat and Hypocrisy

Posted on Monday 8 December 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Why does Trump promote AI, while cutting funding for science and medicine? Why does Trump pardon drug traffickers, while shooting boats in the Caribbean that are supposedly, without evidence, trafficking drugs? Paul Krugman on the end of the free world; … Continue reading →

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Slop

Posted on Tuesday 21 October 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Essays about AI slop, and how this endangers objective truth; Trump is tearing down the East Wing of the White House, after he said he wouldn’t; Responses to Trump’s poop video; Paul Krugman on Trump’s loss of touch with reality; … Continue reading →

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AI Is Telling People What They Want to Hear?

Posted on Saturday 16 August 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Tom Tomorrow on “defunding the police”; The unreliability of AI, with an example of John Scalzi; An essay about how the future will be mundane; Several links on Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska; Slate’s handy summary of people in … Continue reading →

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How Can AI Tell the Truth? Whose Truth?

Posted on Friday 25 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

More about AI, and how (from Steven Levy) there’s no such thing as a bias-free AI; Speculation on what a MAGA ideologically correct AI would be; Following up on Harari: how would an AI handle inconsistencies among, and within, religious … Continue reading →

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“American” Intelligence?

Posted on Thursday 24 July 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump wants AI to be not “woke”; how will he enforce that? And he doesn’t like the word “artificial”; A reel by Yuval Noah Harari about a realistic threat of AI; Heather Cox Richardson on the various deflections Republicans are … Continue reading →

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Jonathan Haidt, THE ANXIOUS GENERATION

Posted on Thursday 16 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” (Penguin Press, March 2024, 385pp, including 90pp of acknowledgements, notes, references, and index.) Here’s the latest by the author of one of my favorite books, THE … Continue reading →

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