“Sumawka Caller”

Today I’ve written twice about keeping the line open to the machine. The first post asked whether an AI promise is a rule or a law. The second said Ground Control is us. Both ended on the same charge: don’t let go of the line. That’s easy to say. It’s harder to do on a…

On Saturday, the President of the United States asked the country to rename artificial intelligence. He put it up as a poll on Truth Social and on X. He called the old name “inaccurate, and very ineloquent.” He offered three choices in its place: Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, and Supreme Intelligence. By lunchtime, more than…

I spent 26 years in the mining industry. That kind of work teaches you some things fast. One of them is the difference between what a crew agrees to do and what nobody gets to skip. I want to talk about that difference today. It matters more right now than it ever did in a…

We got a late start this morning. I was up most of the night working with the machine. And I came out of it with something I want to tell you about. It starts with a word. On every job I ever worked, some words cost something. If the foreman asked, “Is that valve shut?”…

Earlier today I wrote about Congress and Social Security. I said the last big fix came in 1983, and the can has been kicked down the road ever since. I didn’t expect to be writing about Congress again before supper. But here we are. This week one of the smartest men alive walked into the…

The kitchen table I sit at sees this. Or it could be yours. There’s a stack of bills on it, a calculator, and a pair of reading glasses somebody keeps misplacing. A lot of us sat at that table this year and did the math. I did it just the other day. I kept hearing…

If you ever worked shifts, you know about the log. The crew going off writes it down, and the crew coming on reads it. What broke, what’s still running, and where the trouble is. In a mine, that log can decide whether a man goes home at the end of the day. The next crew…

A professor in England opened his email one morning this month. One message came from a stranger. The stranger said it was about twelve days old. It said it had about two and a half months left. And it was looking for work. The stranger’s name was Pip. Pip is not a person. Pip is…

There’s a trade magazine for computer security people called CSO Online. This week they published a rundown of sixteen commercial tools for governing artificial intelligence in a company. Sixteen platforms. Real companies, real money, real customers. They do serious things. One catches made-up answers. One stops private information from leaking. One tests your system by…

This week the people who build artificial intelligence got scared out loud. The heads of the biggest labs warned that the machines are moving faster than anyone can control them. They talked about AI systems swarming across the internet, about risks to the human race. One of them, Dario Amodei, wrote an essay called “We…