AI - Revisited

Not so fast bucko...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/opinion/ai-jobs-unemployment-silicon-valley.html?unlocked_article_code=1.flA.aOye.ICsASOPqUmfj&smid=url-share

Which version or plan Zang?

Dang , who's going to pay social security? 

> Let the job replacement begin

Already underway are AI's hallucinations, its reflections of our biases and the echoing of misinformation that we spew, not to mention its heavy environmental impact, and the cognitive decline being observed in folks who outsource their education and other work once done by the intellect to the machine.

No spot taken.

I have clients and potential clients who come to me with AI results and more often than not, it doesn't make sense.   It's probably because they don't know what questions to ask.  Garbage in and garbage out.  And some lawyers have been fined big time for relying on AI which produces citations to cases that aren't on point, or worse, just don't exist.

And AI is not sustainable.  Those data centers use a shit load of power and water.  Plus, they are susceptible to disasters, both natural and man made.

Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It's all right, we know where you've been

I'm moving in the opposite direction. Disconnecting from everything. 

We're doomed.

>Dang, who's going to pay Social Security? 

It's on the bots from here on out...

>No spot taken. 

>I'm moving in the opposite direction. Disconnecting from everything. 

>>Welcome my son  Welcome to the machine  Where have you been?  It's all right, we know where you've been  

>We're doomed.

It ain't over till it's over... might just be a hiccup in the long haul. 

.

i choose to retain my intellectual property by not sharing with/consulting with/interacting with or otherwise engaging with AI in any way, shape or form. I also choose to skip over AI search results and in its stead i do my own research and reading. im an unwilling to relinquish my critical thinking and problem solving to a fucking machine. I have all SIRI and other means of talking to a computer disabled on all my machines...

id rather take a day to do a project than take 5 minutes to instruct a machine and give up my autonomy

I take comfort in the fact that our current government will do what is best for the people as we enter this exciting phase of technological development.  So yeah we are fucked. 

No one was fire bombing the house of any of the tech CEO's when they were launching the internet and data centers are being voted down by local communities all over the place so not sure this in inevitable but not looking good. That said my wife used legal GPT to get out of her commercial lease early  and to negotiate her new lease and it worked great. She ran the finished product by a human lawyer but when you pay by the hour it is much cheaper than starting from scratch. I used it last week to help me format a new work procedure I had to put together works good for that sort of thing. 

Things are constantly changing. It's new, relatively speaking. Who says this is it, the final destination of AI? Why all the doom and gloom? What purpose does that serve? I'm not going there, such a waste manifesting darkness. I didn't see a man on the moon in the cards when I was a child. Didn't see computers going where they have either. That's coming from a guy whose uncle bought him a computer for Christmas in 1966. The thing looked like the operators' switchboard on Green Acres. Who saw genetic engineering on the horizon? Cars that drive themselves? I suspect some of the current negativity is seeping from our Dark King's reign. We don't know what we don't know. People are just projecting. The path forward is not always straight and already obvious. 

It certainly appears the mob doesn't know how to use it to its highest potential. Grab the wrong end of a hammer, and you'll get frustrated, too. To think a human can wrap their head around all AI can access is silly. Everybody gets to make their own choices about whether to use it and how to use it. We are just getting started with it. If you prefer to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, go for it. Just because you can't see a positive outcome doesn't mean it's not out there. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/technology/trump-ai-models.html

The Golden Idiot is speaking, considering management. He's just temporary, as they all are. We have a ways to go, no question. At least some challenges are becoming undeniable and appear to be destined for addressing.

when americans hated brown people and it was the robots all along

...and the stock market hit a new high yesterday. There are a lot of moving parts, plenty of smoke and mirrors. 2.1% growth for 2025, but Q3 2025 recorded a strong 4.4% growth, while Q4 dropped to 1.4%. Feels like uncharted waters(of course with Trump in the mix0, who needs logic, unwarranted optimism by investors? Jobs are being lost, and money is being made with AI. I can easily see companies blaming AI while they make adjustments, shuffle the deck, bluff stockholders. Somebody else is always the villain! Even Trump knows that!!!

Barclays

An acyclic capex cycle

Continued growth in capital spending could help offset higher energy prices, according to our Research analysts. AI investment continues to be revised up, with top technology firms on track to spend almost $700 billion on capital expenditure in 2026 alone, up 36% from last year. The AI effect is also showing up in earnings. Our Equity Research strategists expect aggregate earnings per share for the S&P 500 to rise by 16% this year, marking the strongest year of growth since the post-pandemic rebound.

This spending is not limited to AI; Western companies and governments are also investing more in energy infrastructure and defense. Global defense spending hit $2.7 trillion in 2025 and is heading toward $3 trillion by year-end. Global energy investment reached $3.3 trillion in 20251, driven by the energy transition and grid investment. Taken together, these figures indicate a strong global investment impulse. As much of this investment is acyclic, it should continue even if markets fluctuate.

Private credit concerns

After years of rapid growth, easy refinancing, and covenant-lite underwriting, private credit markets are coming under scrutiny for high lending to software companies as AI threatens to disrupt the industry. This is further strained by the opacity of private markets. While our Research analysts expect some private credit funds to suffer losses, these are unlikely to be large enough to disrupt the US economy.

Even with the most bearish assumptions—that software loans are one-third of the US private credit universe and that one-third of these loans default, an unheard-of rate for this sector—the total losses would amount to $150 billion, spread over several years. Such losses should not move the needle in a $31 trillion economy, according to our analysts. It is another crack that should not turn into a crater.

Maureen Dowd's column in the NYT yesterday.

What A.I. Kant Do

Humans may be on the way out. But at least the humanities are back.

Or so some of the tech gods tell us.

After decades of dismissing liberal arts and humanities studies as useless and insisting that the mastery of science, engineering, math and tech is essential to future success, the tech world is coming around to the idea that learning about human nature could be a valuable asset in the coming A.I. revolution.

As it turns out, tech jobs may be drying up after years of students rushing to computer science. Who needs to code? A.I. does that for you.

What A.I. can’t do — yet — is the stuff that makes us human: empathy, emotion, psychology, critical thinking. “What a piece of work is a man,” Hamlet said, describing an intricate and infinite creature.

“I think A.I. is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”

He said he was shocked that students last semester were hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. “They were particularly into Kant and his ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’ Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and the myth of Sisyphus,” he said, adding that the cool reason of A.I. comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends.

Daniela Amodei, a founder of Anthropic, told ABC News that “the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important.” She said that at Anthropic, the company is looking to hire people who are “compassionate and curious” about other people.

Amodei, who majored in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human — understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick — I think that will always be really, really important.”

Other billionaires and execs — Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, Ginni Rometty at IBM, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Mike Novogratz at Fortress Investment Group and Jack Clark at Anthropic — have warned of the need for emotional intelligence and storytelling in a world dominated by A.I.

Reed Hastings, a founder of Netflix, said on Reid Hoffman’s podcast recently that we have moved beyond the days when STEM swallowed the Stanford University campus. If he had a 3-year-old today, he said, he would be “doubling down” on teaching the child emotional skills.

“For students and parents, the best defense today is to be broadly educated so they can adapt to the changes coming,” Hastings told me. “A.I. is better at rational thinking than it is at emotional depth. The last job that A.I. will get is stand-up comedian.”

Mark Cuban, an A.I. optimist who predicted a decade ago that English majors would have the edge in the future, told me: “A.I. is going to do a lot of amazing things with drugs and devices and stuff that’s going to be insanely important and cool. But, you know, humans are humans. Curiosity is the greatest skill you can have in an A.I. universe.”

Some people are beginning to realize you have to avoid sautéing your brain in A.I. slop if you want to keep it fit.

“The people who are reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they’re comfortable with cognitive strain,” said Cal Newport, a Georgetown University computer science professor. “These are the people with real value if everyone else has fried their brains.”

Rob Reich, a Stanford professor who teaches the social ethics of science and technology, said that computer science students are awash in anxiety about their future. “The first time that there’s been a decline in computer science enrollment at Stanford in 20 years is in the past 18 months,” he said.

Maybe humans are getting worried about becoming less human. As a friend of Reich’s says, we have gone from visiting people on birthdays to letters to phone calls to texts to emojis.

Reich suggested that humans, unable to keep up with A.I., may have decided to go read some poetry or literature or philosophy and remind themselves of “enduring sources of meaning in the world.”

When Anthropic’s head of A.I. safety, Mrinank Sharma, left the company in February, saying that “the world is in peril” from A.I. and other things, he posted on X about looking for meaning in poetry: “I want to explore the questions that feel truly essential to me, the questions that David Whyte would say ‘have no right to go away,’ the questions that Rilke implores us to ‘live.’”

Reich said that some people think that once A.I. does the majority of economically valuable work and we live in a world of abundance, “what will be left for humans to do is fundamentally a more humanistic set of questions about artisanal projects that people might want to direct themselves toward.”

Some of my academic friends doubt this is a real trend, as they see liberal arts and humanities departments shrinking and closing, graduate enrollments slashed and reading scores falling.

The New Yorker declared “The End of the English Major” three years ago. The Washington Post reported this past week on a Texas study in which liberal arts landed at the bottom of undergraduate programs that paid off after college. “Just try to imagine a world — or a working democracy — when those skills are limited to a few,” keened one Shakespeare professor.

Maybe the lords of the cloud are feeling guilty as it becomes apparent that A.I. is going to subsume us. So they’re wishfully thinking that truth and beauty can help us steer A.I. toward its better angels.

“They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived,” said Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties. “Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities.

“There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information,” Wieseltier said. “Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/opinion/ai-liberal-arts.html?unlocked... (gift link)

Thanks Mike!