“Sumawka Caller”

The first sign that something is wrong in a war doesn’t come from a general. It comes from a phone ringing in a small office that most people have never heard of. In March of this year, a few weeks into the war with Iran, those phones started ringing. NPR went and counted the calls….

You can’t fear a beast if it has no teeth. The beast I’m talking about is Trump. He’s loud, and he fills every room he walks into. Every morning there’s a new headline, a new threat, a new thing to be angry or afraid about. That noise isn’t an accident. It’s built to make you…

Every day somebody tells you to be afraid of artificial intelligence. The news says it. The experts say it. Even the men who build it say it. But almost nobody tells you what, exactly, you’re supposed to be afraid of. So let me do it. No fog. No end-of-the-world movie talk. Just the details, sorted…

This week the head of one of the biggest tech companies in the world said something I never expected to hear from a builder. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft. Microsoft has poured more money into artificial intelligence than almost anyone on earth. And in a long post about AI safety, he wrote this: “We must assume…

A few days ago I wrote about a word. The President of the United States decided “artificial intelligence” should now be called “super intelligence.” He signed an order telling the federal government to use the new name. Then he said anyone still using the old one was the enemy. I said then that a name…

Something the powerful never want said out loud. Every bit of power they hold is borrowed. It was lent to them by people like you. And what is lent can be called back. That goes for kings. It goes for parties. And it goes for the companies building artificial intelligence right now. They talk like…

There is a new sales pitch going around the AI world. You may have heard it. It goes like this. Why rent your AI from a big company when you can own it yourself? The pitch has some weight to it. The big AI companies charge for every question you ask. They keep the machine…

This morning I sat down and asked my AI what was going on with the coming election. I wanted the latest. It gave me numbers that looked solid. They came with names and sources, and they sounded sure of themselves. Then I checked them against what I had seen on the news the day before….

Last time I wrote about the fuse. I wrote about people using a machine they do not trust, with no way to check it. I wrote about doubt with no handle turning into anger. Today I want to talk about the other side of that. I want to talk about what it looks like when…

Something has changed out there, and you can feel it if you listen. People are not just uneasy about AI anymore. They are angry about it. Not everybody, and not all at once. But the mood has turned, and it turned faster than the folks selling this stuff ever expected. A while back the worry…