“Sumawka Caller”

Harbinger someone or something that foreshadows a future event : one that gives an anticipatory sign of what is to come There’s an old word most people only half know. Today it means a sign of what’s coming. The first robin is a harbinger of spring. You’ve heard it used that way. But the word…

For over twenty years I had a job title. Plant Utilityman. Kiln Department. California Portland Cement. Most folks don’t know what that job is. So let me read you the duties, plain. Not from memory. From the posting that company runs today, for that same department, under its new name. Here’s what it says the…

Every man who ever kept a dog on a chain knows the truth about that chain. You don’t trust the dog. You trust the chain. The dog might be gentle. The dog might be mean. Doesn’t matter much on a normal day. As long as the chain holds, the neighbor’s kids are safe and you…

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece today with a title that tells you where we are. “The AI backlash is starting to sting.” For a couple of years the big AI companies could wave off the anger. A protest here, a worried column there — easy to ignore when the money’s pouring in and…

Let me tell you about a week where two things happened that don’t fit in the same world and yet they landed in the same seven days. A man named Adam Field said the sharpest thing I’ve heard all month. He is the chief AI officer at a company that serves twenty-five thousand organizations —…

A top engineer at IBM just wrote something true, and I want to build the floor underneath it. His name is Vincent Hsu. He is a CTO at IBM Storage — a real builder, not a talker. And he laid out a problem most people never see. When an AI works, it builds up context….

The tools where never the problem. A software CEO just told everyone to stop buying software. His name is Rich Veldran. He runs GoTo — an IT and communications company that sells tools for a living. So when a man like that stands up and says the tools are not the problem, you ought to…

Tony Fadell knows what a platform war looks like. He’s started a few. He built the iPod. He was one of the fathers of the iPhone. He founded Nest and put a learning thermostat on a million walls. When a man with that résumé writes a column predicting the next war, you read it. His…

There’s a new chore in the American workweek, and most people doing it don’t have a name for it yet. The researchers do. They call it botsitting. Glean’s Work AI Institute — working with academics from Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard — surveyed six thousand office workers across three countries this year. What they found should…

On June 19, I published a post called “The Machine Can Reason. That’s Not the Same Thing as Feeling It.” On July 19 — one month later, to the day — two philosophers published an essay in The Guardian asking the world’s biggest newspaper audience: could AI be conscious? I want to walk you through…