I’m being a little loose with the definition of predictions. During the course of writing this newsletter I realize that tiny events, jumped on trends and passing fads are not really that important in the broader scheme of things. After all I named this newsletter after what I am focused on: Techtonic Shifts - especially in culture, norms, and human behaviours - caused by digital technologies.

Recapping Last Year

Let’s first take a look back at my predictions for 2025 - article is here for a refresher / first read)

So quite a credible set of predictions. I was more than pleased with the progress medical researchers made on a number of fronts regarding Alzheimer’s disease, completely upsetting my pessimistic prediction. I underestimated just how weak Congress would quickly become and the TikTok deal, as it were, became a complete travesty of justice and fair-minded commerce.

Which leads me to a completely irreverent and technologically irrelevant prediction:

“America’s” dictator / bully state “socialism” will have decades long structural changes to the USA, other developed Western nations, China and the rest of the world. I’m not sure that Americans, whom I interact with almost daily, have any real understanding of the damage that has been done. Starting from the arrogant position “that we are the greatest nation in the history of the world and likely in the entire universe” doesn’t lead to sober introspection or probing insight into reality. The underlying forces of global change, slow indeed, were already in play. Trumpian behaviours and actions simply accelerated this change. Non-linearly. Things will not spring back into place like an elastic band.

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My Baker’s Dozen of 2026’s Prognostications

1. Small Real Change in Digital Habits. Many analysts have pointed out, often using dubious cherry picked data or graphs, that people are now spending less time on social media, and their screens in general. This purported change in digital habits is severely bifurcated. A small edge group of people are eschewing social / screen and starting to develop more effective digital habits. However, the much large social group continue the slide into digital muck. Look at the habits of South Korea as a true harbinger of the future.

2. Growing Legal Restrictions on Social Media Access for Children and Youth. More countries will adopt Australia’s sensible and successful legal social limitations for children and teenagers. This will be especially true in Europe. This movement will not gain traction though in Canada or the USA

3. Major AI alignment will speed up. Although the digerati will distractedly continue to overly praise or overly fear general purpose LLMs in hyperbolic terms, real and substantive changes to AI soon will be evident. The start of a major long term realignment in AI from one gigantic LLM size-fits-all to very specific use cases and targeted AI special purpose applications will appear. Research into non-LLM approaches will flourish and we will start to see true hybrid models appearing over the next 5 to 10 years. This will cause a multiyear ripple through corporate AI providers. To me there are a wide variety of things that will happen to OpenAI but it will not survive in its current form.

4. Podcasts will go berserk. Podcasts (which are really vidcasts on Youtube / TikTok / Reels now, another debasement of nomenclature caused by our digital society) will continue to grow unabatedly. The future is where nearly everyone under a certain age will be producing their own videos in one form or another which are viewed by small and ever diminishing number of people. Viewing numbers will report better due to the growing number of bots and digital agents.

5. Space: the new constellations. More and more (and more stuff) will be shot up into space to enhance things like communications and space-based Internet connection, not withstanding stations acting as jumping off points for moon and Mar’s expeditions / mining. The new generation, like my 5 year old granddaughter, will look up in the sky – on the rare occasions we they can actually find some dark sky spaces - and learn to identify various important satellites and space stations, instead of exploring the constellations like I did at her age. Shooting stars will not be comets and meteors but falling space detritus.

6. Cybercrime explodes and just becomes part of life’s background. In addition to major cyberattacks, sophisticated phishing, ransomware, and other attacks will become ubiquitously slop (I get to use the word of the year). Except they won’t be sloppy and more people will be bilked. Getting scammed will be a dubious badge of honour like being mugged in NYC in the 1970s & 1980s. Cybercrime suites are just a click away. With names like WormGPT, FraudGPT, and DarkGPT, these tools can be easily used to create malware and phishing campaigns; some even offer hacking tutorials. This is my first example demonstrating my prediction that specialist value added AI applications are where the money is.

7. Relationships will start to flourish. At both ends of the human age spectrum – the young and the old – relationships will explode over the next few years. They just won’t be with other people. The pettification and synthetic robot modification of our relationships coupled with generative AI means that no one will know how to talk to another person IRL anymore.

8. I’ll bet you gambling keeps expanding. The institutionalization of gambling in our digital hearths will continue unabated. I expect it to grow past prediction markets and sports betting to literally everyday activities. Other forecasters do simple linear extrapolations of what we’ve already seen. I’m wagering that creative people everywhere will find genius ways of embedding gambling into many more platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Generative AI, etcetera. Talk about great user engagement, true gamefication on Duolingo!

9. Many governments will waste billions on AI. Foolish governments around the world will use “industrial policy” to invest in the one of the worst parts of the AI value chain: data centres. The trite policy wonk tropes say that these are the new roads and bridges of last century. They aren’t. Data centres have always been digital iron, which is a commodity by the way. A very few will craft policies to invest in specialized and leading edge research & development plus frameworks to encourage entrepreneurs of all sorts to develop value added special purpose applications.

10. Vibe coding will get a cold shower. This is my biggest bug bear. Inexperienced analysts on Fantasy Island continue trumpeting the dawn of vibe coding: “Just a few though very intelligent prompts and presto you have a fully functioning application”. Rubbish. Many of the applications that power the back offices of most business organizations have literally decades of intellectual property in them. Getting things exactly right for payroll, warehousing, manufacturing planning, and so on is very tricky indeed. Vibe coding is great for rough prototypes and simple web facing apps. Period. It is remarkable that some “futurists” think that soon all businesses will be coding up major transaction and operations systems vibing on gummies. The depth of ignorance is enormous. But it might take a couple more years for the shower to arrive.

11. The Alphabet will get larger. Google search’s downturn and criticism ignores what is probably the best positioned and diversified tech giant in the short, medium and long term. Their other bets are paying off. YouTube is preeminent across multiple uses and age groups. Alphabet’s investment and depth of product offerings in the AI value chain are the best, whose user base will increase. This is a company that also knows how to monetize. Their autonomous vehicle project is much more than an experiment and has such an huge head start it cannot be caught.

12. GenAI will become quicksand. The direction of the ignorant, the naive, and the over enthusiastic will continue unabated in the Gen AI sector. It will lead to untold numbers of small and large mistakes adding on top of themselves in unknown ways across all and sundry parts of society. The focus on convenience and quickness will dominate so completely that meaning, effectiveness, and humanness will be greatly diminished.

13. Return of true customer service. Forward thinking companies will start to use the advantages gained through AI to better focus on customer service, which has languished for decades. Real people will be more accessible to help customers through any part of their purchasing and usage journey. My little joke. 🤣 Two whole generations that have been raised with horrible customer encounters, convoluted digital conversations and forced self service across a spectrum of functions. that bad customer service is a permanent way of life.

I am planning on getting back to complete my look at the implications of the changes caused by the last 50 years of digitization. The more I think about them the deeper my understanding becomes. As someone once said writing is a way of educating yourself. Joan Didion was firm in her belief that she wrote to know what she was thinking. Both aphorisms are true for me.

Thanks as always to my (very patient) readers. Comments, shares and likes are all appreciated.

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What to do on the Day after the Day of the Dead: Finish off my two part article on the 8 major changes that created digital quicksand, started over 2 months ago. A lifetime has happened since then, with meaningful shifts in values, perceptions, and priorities for me.

In that time more friends and colleagues have been lost inside the technology fabric of our time. I invite you to revisit the first two articles in this particular series, which appears from my notes - really checking my OneNote - could last until mid-2026 even with a return to a biweekly cadence. I also encourage readers to watch the Knowledge Navigator video found in the Part 1 of this article.

I continue to see many people, most with little real knowledge or deep understanding of technology, personal or organizational change, or technological history suddenly writing about these topics with the full throated roar only found on the upper left part of the Dunning-Kruger curve. This is just one of so many effects caused by the 8 changes I have identified that have buried so many of us in digital quicksand.

But I have read some interesting articles about the movement from text to moving image; from book to screen; from literacy to post-literacy. I think that these perspectives add significantly to our current discussion. Despite this I believe they miss other pervasive behavioural effects caused by technological change. I will outline the final four changes in this article before undertaking the important but laborious process of highlighting all of these detrimental effects. That will likely take a number of articles.

One note of immense irony: This AI image generated from the briefest of prompts shows looks of horror and consternation on the faces of these people when in actually fact I mostly see cheerful countenances of the newly Borged.

The underlying laws: From Moore to Huang

Imagine for a moment we are all on one large stage. Underneath the stage, hanging in the rafters, and present in both wings is what I pejoratively call iron: the mostly and increasingly invisible infrastructure that has been powering all of these changes for forty years. And many before.

Moore’s Law, a rule of thumb from the dinosaur era of computing says that processor speed roughly doubles every 18 months. This means you can do more. And more. We never tire of more.

Well there exists a subset of people who believe we live in a time of planned obsolescence that they do not want to participate in. They claim not to need any of the upsides of this continuous stream of technological innovation, while watching a brilliant resolution stream of a football game from half a world away.

There is a much stronger set of laws of physics that says at some point you just can’t cram more transistors onto a piece of silicon so we will reach of maximum. Stepping forward with a new law is the perpetually leather garbed CEO of Nvidia - Jensen Huang - the chip firm most associated with the current wave of Artificial Intelligence we now have. You need massive amount of networked chips to get AI to work, and the GPU chips behind them are improving massively faster than Moore’s law would predict, based on factors such as architectures and algorithms.

The key to so many of our new capabilities is not software but rather the surrounding horsepower in every part of our technology ecosystem. AI is part of our lives in 2025 mostly due to advances chip speeds that are breath-taking when applied to the recent Transformer neural network architecture. Speed is behind everything, although the elimination of physical wires through astounding telecommunications advances is another key factor.

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• Mobility and freedom as our wired tethers disappeared

• Continuous and dynamic improvements in price / performance: so much more for a diminishing price

• The protoplasm for the ongoing and never-ending technology change

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• Continued increase in a sense of complete entitlement: why can’t it do that astonishing thing - like 4K streaming game 7 of the World Series on a smart phone - that should cost only $99?

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• The belief of governments all over the world that getting into the data centre game (with its equal commitment to large power generation) is giving them a leg up in AI as a dominance game. Iron has always been a commodity mug’s game.

LOST SOULS

• Even more techies who monitor all of the detailed technical metrics of each technology component, which at this point is very large.

The Smart Pipsqueak that demanded a cloud

The answer to the question I posed: What key thing did Knowledge Navigator miss? This is it; the linchpin. SIZE. This is the biggest driver of the 8 changes. By far. Starting with the innocuous ipod for music (replacing the analog Walkman with a digital version) ultimate portability meant it was always with you.

Always with you.

As technology changed we simply ADDED more capabilities inside WHILE KEEPING IT SMALL. I am convinced that if this hadn’t have happened many of the negative behavioural effects would have been muted. If it was the size of the average laptop and somewhat heavier, I invite you to think of how many things would be different.

A little story: In late 2008 I bought a couple of friends some drinks after work. The guy had the absolute latest iPhone, likely the 3G. He was berserk for it! My female friend was the same, similarly exhorting me in the strongest terms to get one (she is now a minimalist especially for the Tools of Digital Foolery, described below ). I asked them what they did on it. They showed me. I evaluated technology, as I had for decades: as a tool that had features that may or may not be useful to the lifestyle I have chosen. (This is part of the antidotes coming in the last article). THey showed me a couple things of mild interest especially that I might find more useful apps in the app store. But I was still more than a year from actually buying one.

Of course this little gizmo needed three things to make it indispensable: an invisible place to store a lot of stuff, useful apps that were cheap or free, and fast, easy connection to everything on the internet. Which happened in short order.

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• Ubiquity

• Constancy of use

• From behavioural economics we have : What get reminded gets done. It is there reminding you to use it

• Huge segments of the world’s population never had the experience of desktop / laptop computers, last generation applications, printers, and the like. They jumped right into the smart phone generation

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• What was once private - listening to music, watching TV or videos, talking to people - enters the public sphere because it is always with you

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• That it is THE major driver of any current concerns about not having enough time. We aren’t working more or expecting more at work or our lives or so much more complex than the past. We are staring into tiny screens more

LOST SOULS

• Look around you; others are eyes glued to something else

The Rules of Engagement

About 20 years ago, courses and seminars start to emerge to teach developers how to improve the engagement of their users. How to add critical elements that will cause your application audience to sing. Pleasant and intuitive user interfaces and application features with great utility were not nearly enough. Oh no! You had to engage them; gamification for instance, was considered a great addition for business applications. Money, benefits, status and achievement won’t motivate sales people, but a good game surely will. Add some pretty icons and faces, and you are away to the races.

We now know that engagement is really a word for promoting over-use to the point of addiction in many. Behavioural economics and psychology tells us that we humans are really just a quivering mass of irrationality with heaps of emotional first tendencies (I may be exaggerating a little though Nobel behavioural economist Richard Thaler just talked about his own irrationality ). And EVERY one of those vulnerabilities are being exploited to keep you using these “tools” over and over. Until some of you decide to go right into them.

Oh you are being so hyperbolic David! I read today that Instagram Reels is a $50 billion per year business. Case rested.

The key question of course is why do companies want so much engagement? Why do they need you being there? For the most part these products are free and you don’t want to pay for them, which we covered in the first article. These vendors are not doing this because they are altruistic corporate citizens. They need your attention and digital tracks. That is how they make money and why they have to keep you there for long periods of time. Applications that I pay for don’t annoy the shit out of me with features most of you are familiar with:

1. Reporting on streaks

2. Games against people you don’t know

3. Constant Notifications

4. Infinite Scrolls

5. Disappearing Content

6. Flattery

7. AND SO MANY MORE TECHNIQUES TO ENGAGE YOU

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• Hours of pleasure usage

• Explosion of applications using different revenue models

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• Fragmented attention

• Shorter attention spans

• Overuse

• FOMO and a sense of anxiety when not using

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• I never realized how far we would drift from a world of important digital tools and genuine human interaction to complete digital intermediation of one’s life and human interactions

LOST SOULS

• Where do I start?

Digital Tools of Foolery

The internet is so large and changing so quickly as to be infinite to the average person. There is also much irrelevant, incorrect and misleading data out there. So we had to invent algorithms to ration and direct it. Or provide a centralized digital encyclopaedia to reduce errors and inaccuracies.

Most of you will have been at a dinner party or drinks with friends that dissolves into a fight at the A-OK corral. Usually some unimportant fact arises that another disagrees with and before you know it everyone whips out their Android and Apple weapons of mass obfuscation to look up the real truth. Using Google Search, or Wikipedia or a saved item on Social Media. Maybe Messaging to another friend.

These are what I call the digital tools of foolery. I could write large articles about each one of them to demonstrate why they do not have a solitary or even reliable license on the truth. Google has been gamed for a decade or more; Wikipedia has some dubious administrative and editorial practices resulting in many odd posts and sections within posts. Social media has been demonstrably driven by extremism.

I have a university professor friend who used to completely game the Google search on a couple of machines - you do this by asking a large number of certain deliberately biased queries - and then would delight in fooling first year students when she asked them to answer a certain question which the gamed search couldn’t provide. I believe she actually had to stop this practice as the students got quite anxious.

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• Access to so much of the internet that originally zoned towards real and right sources of information

• Anytime, anywhere, rapid and easy access

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• A dependency and belief that technology has the correct answers.

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• When we have already have taught ourselves the fraudulent lesson that technology, not expertise and knowledge, is the arbiter of truth, it has made the conquest of so many by AI so easy. Technology knows, you no longer do

LOST SOULS

• The young who will never learn the core skills of analysis, true critical thinking, and scepticism.

My apologies for the long absence between posts. A vacation that was more moving than expected, a technology conversion that was more demanding, and a return of painful shoulder spasms are to blame. I appreciate everyone who reads, comments, likes and just gives me a sounding board.

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Took most of August off planning a new business. Back now on biweekly Monday cadence. Part 1 today. Part 2 later this week.

For those that are interested I am starting a new Substack for periodic writing when I go on certain lifetime trips, called Journeys Until The End of My Time. The first one starts this Friday with musings from what I’m calling Going Home Again When You Know You Can’t. You can subscribe here -

Journeys to the End of My Time

Essays and reflections written while on special trips of a lifetime.

By David Crouch

or just catch me in Notes.

I last left you nearly 4 weeks ago with my contention that many people are living are deeply inside of our fabric of technology tools; some having entered this cloth quite voluntarily. In order to understand this we need to look at history. I realize that for many history is something not required or even of interest, especially since the Great Schism (coming in Article 3 of this series). But I have been an analyst all my working life and history is one of the key components of deep understanding: what happened, which things were most important in hindsight, and how they are affecting us in the present. History acts like slow motion footage so we can see our society’s transformation one step at a time. As a friend responded to the first article there are many different ways of getting lost.

I positively jumped into 1990, reinventing myself vocationally. I launched my first consulting company with 4 colleagues. I started the first of three years as a sessional lecturer at Simon Fraser University, teaching Managing Information Technology at the graduate level.

For those who weren’t in their primes 35 years ago let me quickly set up what technology was like back then:

Note that telephone calls have actually declined. Of course, there are many technologies if we continued this comparison that would be:

• 1990 not yet invented and available, 2025 ubiquitous usage.

Those were days when most people were technophobes; some were techno-agnostic. Decisions about using technology were mostly made the basis of ROI and risk assessment. The few computers at home were either technology professionals or post secondary students.

However, the concept of the strategic use of Information Technology (IT) for business organizations had gained some footing in the mid-1980s. So in order to stimulate the imagination of my classes in the first session I lick things off by showing The Knowledge Navigator a video created by Apple in 1987. ( I realize that a HUGE percentage of people NEVER click on links but if you haven’t seen this it is amazing and it is sort of essential to the rest of this piece. It is worth the almost 6 minutes and as they say “an older video is worth a thousand TikToks”)

To get to the full page version of the video it is better to open the link in Youtube

Knowledge Navigator (Apple 1987) in HD

Every year I got the same reaction: How dare I show science fiction, with derision in the few voices of those working in IT. The class just wanted hard nosed facts and fundamentals, not wishful thinking.

But so many of the concepts this video showed came into being by the oughties, which to me was pretty quick (15 to 20 years). Did any members of my classes help position their organizations to understand what was about to happen? Doubtful.

I find looking at the recent Youtube comments for this video fascinating as people pick over minutiae of what it got wrong. Hindsight is 20/20 and arrogant. But most of them missed what I think is the most important thing the video got wrong (answer is point 6 in my unconventional history). Here are things where it didn’t go far enough:

• Using detachable physical media for storage (instead of the cloud)

• Printing onto paper

• People talking directly to one another instead of typing endless messages to each another in one of the largest inefficiencies that technology has ever introduced

The video showed how the professor used the astonishing product as a “knowledge navigator” allowing him speed, productivity and quality. But it was clearly still a tool. He has his life to lead and leaves the device behind on his desk as he departs for lunch.

What we actually see years later are more profound dysfunctions from the accumulation of technology-driven change in the last 35 years. Because this digital transformation didn’t arrive all at once, we lived through each one more gradually, our behaviours being shaped more than we realize. It isn’t just a nice clean smooth curve of one technology coming in and augmenting the others. To some extent they fought with each other, partially changing impacts.

So today we have far less than we could have and far more than we might have wanted.

Right now some people are railing about and against AI, while others are swimming without lifeguards in the deep end. To me though it is all happening because we are already shoulder deep in digital quicksand. Let’s take an unconventional look at the technological history of how we got here.

Eight changes that buried us alive .

Data Processing becomes Multimedia

From the start computers and technology were mostly focused on business organizations, governments and academia. It was called data processing for decades because that is what it did: manipulated numbers for various purposes. Word processing was added starting in the late 1970s. By 1990 the foundation of image, audio and video were available; you just needed a range of special chips and peripherals to experience them in any meaningful way.

One of the exciting reasons we started our business in 1990 was because of the advent of multimedia. Our firm created animated training videos in the first 3 months of our existence. Graphic artists and videographers became a brand new class of user for personal computers. Apple in particular really captured that particular new and growing audience. Home computers weren’t just for accountants and report writers anymore.

Very quickly technology could provide a deep richness of media married with profound interaction with users. There were some fascinating CD-ROMs produced exploiting these capabilities. However, like my firm’s training videos these never really took off. The next two technology changes distracted focus, and people seemed to prefer novelty and communication over depth and richness. The only place where the full extent of this technology has taken off is in the gaming realm.

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• Start of shift from business to individuals, but consumers were laggards

• Attraction of more types of people, mostly limited to first movers and risk takers

• Start of the use of a computer as a source of information, knowledge and entertainment

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• Imagery and audio became the lingua franca of today’s technology

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• That we never really exploited the richness of media and complex user interactions to get to deeper learning, knowledge buildings, and knowledge dissemination. That people actually prefer simple interactions - clicks and likes - to something more meaningful and insightful.

LOST SOULS

• Gaming was one of the first bastions of the digital MIAs

By Myself to Being With Others

I remember a summer job I had in 1975 where I was doing detailed statistical analysis on inflation. I had to book one of two computers (that were really terminals to a mainframe) in a room that was like a cupboard. It was hot and uncomfortable. I spent weeks in there. You were very much on your own, entering streams of numbers then carrying around masses of paper output.

By the late 1980s, Local Area Networks were on the rise, allowing computers to be connected to share resources like files, programs and peripherals: printers and back-up devices. Work became more productive and organized, as this appealed primarily to businesses.

But LANs did one more thing: simple email could be sent to other people on your network. Together with the rise of voice mail in a similar timeframe, they changed the nature of our communications forever. Two brief memories from this time. All of us quickly and repeatedly getting to the voicemail maximum 50 messages as people left multiple voicemails rather than talking directly. Having to have different emails at all of our clients as none of the systems were linked.

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• Communicating with people you knew without mail or directly in person / by the phone

• Increase in the volume of communication, often short and repetitious

• Increase in amount of communication not during office hours - anytime begins

• Decrease in the personal / human aspect of communications

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• Communication started to become a crucial use of technology

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• That so many people would want to communicate indirectly, impersonally, and at their convenience for productivity reasons vs being effective and meaningful.

LOST SOULS

• As the technology continues to morph so many are lost in a constant whirlwind of all types of messaging.

Hyper about the Growth of Plenty

In the late 1980s and early 1990s - hypertext, http and ftp, hypertext markup language, browsers, blah blah blah were developed - that resulted in websites. The early ones were fascinating and primitive, accessed via dial-up modems which were…….slow.

Very slow.

We would spend so much time waiting for these sites to actually come in, as the screen gradually painted what you were to see. In hindsight I cannot believe we had the patience to do this. But it was so exciting, as if we were discovering something completely new, almost forbidden (yes there were already porn sites).

Access speeds improved and we spent even more time looking at different websites. Rarely did they have anything to do with work, which was a profound change in thinking and use. I remember local business periodicals would interview “leading edge” people about their favourite websites.

The number and size of websites just kept increasing. Suddenly the web became practically infinite to any one individual (I am grateful that the expression information superhighway died in a road accident, and cyberspace exploded with one of Elon’s rockets). Yahoo had the prevalent website access model based on categorized sites by topic / knowledge. But the sites just kept growing and defying easy categorization. Thus the search engine was borne, which was the start of a slippery downward slope.

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• Communicating with people you didn’t know

• Looking at brand new things and considering new thoughts constantly

• A new way of trying to communicate that competed with radio, TV and print

• More non-work usage of computer technology

• The encouragement of novelty, endless viewing and the so-called dopamine rush

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• The first case of drowning people with an endless flow of disparate information that needed a rationing mechanism: the search engine

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• How quickly we went from interesting and different websites published to inform, educate, persuade and entertain, to high quality in terms of media but near mindless facsimiles in terms of intent and content

LOST SOULS

• So many to choose but those lost in the endless e-commerce sites first championed by Amazon

Pricing Manipulation and our Dancing Behaviours

Up until this point, technology - software, hardware, and peripherals - were quite expensive. Software was purchased and people did not buy the upgrades for some time. This was a limiting factor in broad uptake by individuals vs business organizations.

Microsoft started one of two driving forces in software that brought prices for technology down to be more affordable for individuals by 2000.In 1989 it bundled Excel, Word and PowerPoint - which were not market leaders - into Office putting pressure on their competitors. It worked only too well. (The other force was technological innovation as scaling resulted in cheaper production costs for hardware).

It was like a deluge commenced as companies devised more and more pricing tactics. Subscriptions, the prevalent billing method today, was introduced in the late 1990s. As pricing dropped, more people started buying software which set off an unprecedented boom in the number and availability of software products.

We went from one major and important type of rationing mechanism - economics - to another, attention - with the fragmentation of products. Every little new feature set got its own product. Minimum viable product was invented, to get something out quickly to grab ahold of fleeting attention. Software quality suffered considerably, especially as development migrated to continuous releases. “Who cares if it is right, we will fix it later”

Naturally this pricing frenzy led to free. Nothing says behavioural change like a person ranting in hyperbolic language about their data in Facebook or Instagram when they have paid no money for it. Ever.

WHAT IT BROUGHT

• The development and usage of thousands of different software products: “the 149 crucial tools you must have” listicle

• The need for information to help you discern the quality of the various products (which later was gamed)

• Ongoing continuous decline in quality software that conformed to great principles in design, UI, architecture, etc.

• A profound shift from business to consumer

• A lack of concern with the business models of the technology providers

• The dysfunctions of free: strongly preferred over even nominal prices, little loyalty, consuming more, loss of purchasing friction and the irrational thrill you are getting a great deal

WHAT IT WROUGHT

• A sense of entitlement by consumers to get whatever they want for cheap or free without regard to the economic effect anywhere in supply chains

MY LASTING THOUGHT

• The universal poorness of most software such that gross overuse of a product in order to really know it is seen as being tech savvy rather than using a badly designed system

LOST SOULS

• Keen techies who keep trying all of the freemium products in a never-ending search for the holy grail

So we are now somewhere early in the 2000s but you can seen the roots of changes that have now bitten hard. They created the momentum to more and more changes to our previous set of human behaviours.

But before Part 2 gets us more depressed let’s end by looking at the type of articles I used to write. It also completely explains why I am really late with this edition, being glued to Youtube. Watching. For those who missed it The World Humanoid Robot Games took place in Beijing, the first global sporting event dedicated solely to humanoid robots. As you can imagine the action was …….slow, disjoined, with lots of repairs. Still we are seeing improvement as the winning 1500 meter robot ran in a very respectable time of 6:34 (compared to the human record of 3:26). The other robots ran at my brand of leisurely times on the wrong side of 12 minutes.

Thanks as always for reading. I greatly appreciate the support I have received here on Substack. Feedback, sharing, even a simple like keep me going. See you again in just a few short days.

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I went to biweekly to allow myself to stretch out a little more. I am in complete full yoga mode as the more I write on this topic the larger it gets. So it will be a series of 4 linked articles. Hopefully you will hang with them, though each will be self-contained. Trying a little cubism as I change perspective each week to get a different view of the core issues. Takes longer to write them as well, which I haven’t factored in yet. More learning curve ahead.

I had a colleague wander off into the woods a few weeks ago. They haven’t returned.

They had been warned of the hazards and dangers found there. Pathways that led to ponds that were really mirages, like quavering desert oases. Mythical goblins that entice you with delightful fruit, which after eating you gradually waste away. The dark wilderness corners of the forest where strange tales of sex, conspiracy and crime are to be found. The illusory allure that this timberland is all you need and that people who aren’t in it with you need to be compelled to enter. The knowledge that the cost of gardeners and park rangers as well as special irrigation infrastructure are colossal and unsustainable. Just in order for you to walk around footloose and free.

It is all in the name of this particular grove: Grand Predicament Thicket. GPT for short.

I haven’t counted them all but I know of at least 4 people who were friends or colleagues or acquaintances who I have lost to ChatGPT. It isn’t just that they use it; tens of millions do. It is that it has become such a large part of their lives that it starts to colour all their perspectives. They write or post about it. Frequently. They have changed career arcs to make it the cornerstone. They whisper with others who are also lost about secret handshakes (such as the special prompts they have discovered). They now conduct courses and seminars, attend specialized conferences. write prolifically about their experiences using ChatGPT for literally everything. Even if it is a stretch, or inappropriate. Even where there are many other better suited tools for the purpose they describe. When things don’t go quite as well as they thought - like a travel itinerary that crammed in way too much in terms of driving and activities - ChatGPT gets exonerated.

For the people I know, it is exclusively ChatGPT. I get that it has a large marketshare. I’m not sure I totally understand why. Perhaps it is as Jing Hu recently reminded us:

Part of it is the volubility and flattery that is a master stroke of genius by OpenAI for many people (discovered of course through extensive testing). For me, totally off-putting. I’m not the only one.

OpenAI does have an active program to have people help carry the message that definitely appeals to some of these people. I’m sure that people are getting lost in the other AI tools as well; I just don’t personally know any of them.

But this isn’t an article about AI. It is broader than that. It is about how people are getting lost in our technology tools.

Every year I lose one or two to Instagram. The running total there is more than 10. One of my recent ChatGPT losses recently posted on Instagram (she is doubly lost) that her friends have commented that she is only focused AI and one other personal issue. It is true. I used to see her a couple of times per year but she has scrapped the last several of meetings.

I understand being lost in Instagram far less than ChatGPT. I dread looking at it once per day and seeing all of these people posting stories in the top line. The dread turns to something sourer when I see a lot of little lines in one person’s “story” which means lots of dubious content. Evidently these lost souls want us to read dense text, look at platitude posters or watch endless videos of themselves or others they have found, blathering on about all and sundry. On a small screen.

Pictures or home videos of personal events or vacations is one thing. Believing that you can deal with serious and complex issues in this manner is simply foolhardy. When I called out one of my recent lost friends on a series of videos she popped up there, she said that they were just so interesting. In the first 30 seconds the self absorbed talker made 2 fundamental mistakes about the history of psychology. The subject of the video was…… the history of psychology. Misinformation isn’t interesting to me.

Can these people not see the very visible hands of manipulation changing their behaviours? All the great and fun tools you can used as a “creator” are baked primarily into Stories. One reason only. Stories disappear and cannot be saved by the viewer so they make people check in frequently. Full stop. It is to promote “better engagement”, in other words more compulsive behaviour. Instead of looking say once per week to see what your friends and family have been up to you need to check far more often.

Others lost to other social platforms. Here is a short, snappy set of examples:

• X: If you are posting 20 or more times per day, I consider you lost and stop following you. Especially emotional reposts and rants.

• TikTok: I have one friend who literally will watch TikTok videos in all social situations, which tends to skew the conversational dynamics. All the time. Not to look up stuff that we are talking about to add colour but as a replacement to our discussions.

• Reddit: Know a guy who claims to be a cinephile (I am as well). He spent many hours every day on in the sub basements of reddit posting. Me, I spent that time actually watching films, averaging 1.5 per day. Him, not so much.

• Facebook: the grand daddy of lost souls though its allure has diminished as it shows it age. Still I know people who spend many hours each day going back and forth arguing furiously with people they may or may not know in various FB groups. Lots of them on my little island Salt Spring where literally everything is contentious. Putting in a new crosswalk causes people to rally two different sides. Seriously.

“So what is your point David? Many many people use these products and are perfectly normal.“

I am talking about the ones who get lost. Obviously there are varying degrees of lostness, like from me misplacing my iPhone a couple of times every day to Franklin’s tragic expedition to the Arctic. (129 men died)

“What does lost mean to you then?”

Glad you asked. Let’s start first with the perspective of others.

There have been a significant number of studies going back a decade and a half on the dysfunctional effects that social platforms in particular have caused. Jonathan Haidt wrote a classic article called “After Babel” in 2022 which summarized many of them and the arc of the social changes that he saw. It is a monumental article that stands up well to repeated readings.

His organizing metaphor is the Tower of Babel: that once we all spoke the same language and that our use of these technologies has fragmented us into different languages so that we no longer have shared understandings or commonalities.

Haidt pointed out increases in levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, compulsivity, stress, poor eating and sleeping habits, and so many more. There have been many different types of studies, with different experimental designs, sampling techniques, and research hypotheses that all reach similar conclusions.

Naturally there are certain “thinkers” and intellectuals that disagree with these findings on a either on grounds of arcane philosophical reasoning or cognitive chicanery, what researcher Cory Clark call techniques used to defend one’s narratives from empirical truths. If you are evidence-based as I am you understand that the negative impacts are real, profound and we need to deal with them as a society.

Haidt has helped enormously in so many initiatives like smart phone restriction in schools, norm change to restrict social media and smart phone access to children and adolescents, digital fasts for adults, and restoring play rather than phone based childhoods amongst others.

Haidt is a famous sociologist and sees things in sociological terms. I am a lowly retired technology consultant who sees impacts on behaviours and beliefs merely through personal observation and discussion. Let me start with a story for as the great French philosopher Conan DaMarque said: “I tell stories, therefore I am popular”.

The first summer that we could travel after the pandemic, long term friends of ours from the city came to visit and get a little country relaxation. (Coincidentally they are coming again this weekend). They had been looking after their grandchildren for the week previous, and were regaling us with the fun they had had doing so. I asked them if they were concerned with the amount of time their grandkids were playing with Roblox and watching videos on screens. Kristen said she wasn’t as she was sure that they would just see smart phones and its software as tools in their lives, helping them live and grow. Kristen is the type of person who has an absolutely well balanced and full exciting life so she couldn’t conceive of anyone would want to disappear for hours daily on a “tool“.

Which led to my initial organizing metaphor for this mess: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Not the Disney version with Mickey Mouse, but going back to Goethe’s original poem, although imagery of Mickey’s plight helps understand ours.

If you remember the story, the sorcerer goes out and leaves the apprentice to clean up. The apprentice is keen to use his newly minted magical skills and enchants a broom to carry water to fill a bath. However, he does not know how to stop the spell. The broom keeps carrying water, flooding the room. In desperation, the apprentice chops the broom in two—only to have both parts become enchanted and continue carrying even more water. The situation grows worse until the master returns and dispels the magic, restoring order.

We have a lot of apprentices trying to use magical tools to help their lives but like the poem they cannot control the broom that they have unleashed. We now have many examples of Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor using their chosen jigsaw to stir lattes, do arithmetic by cutting notches in wood, and digging holes in their garden with it.

With The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I thought I had a perfect simile for what I was seeing. Inexperienced people over-using tools they didn’t really understand. Then getting out of control and looking for ways back, or training or mentoring help.

Two problems with it though. First, there is no Grand Sorcerer to return things to normal and continue with the apprentice’s training. Ours are more sinister and venal, who want to fill the world with technology tools, including replacing all work, vocation and avocations that humans currently do.

The second issue is what I am most disturbed with in this series: our own reactions. It is easy to throw stones at horrible others. Much more difficult to reflect our our own choices. The crucial lines in Goethe’s poem are

“The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of “

I’m not seeing any of this of this reflective thinking at all. I more often I see behaviours and blandishments to give us “More More More” as the disco song implored (for a much different purpose).

In 1972 I met a guy who became my best friend for the next 7 years. He went on a date with my sister that led to nothing except a fallback friendship with me. We were at university and then our first jobs together. We were best men at each other’s weddings. We went on vacations together. You get the picture.

Our friendship ended in 1979 when my marriage went through a rocky patch and I moved away. I met him again 8 years later just before my second marriage. We quickly renewed our bond although we now lived in different cities. He and his new girlfriend were invited to the upcoming wedding. One evening a month or so before the nuptials I got a call from him. He said he wanted to let me in on a great new business opportunity. I listened for a bit and then said “not interested”. I thought that was that. But no. He called again and said that I was being foolish ignoring this great new opportunity and did I look at what he had sent me in the mail (pre email timeframe). I said yes, that it was a multi-level market scheme (like today’s Herbalife and Beachbody) and that I wasn’t interested. I also added that if this was the most important part of our reconnecting I will just leave our relationship right there. I haven’t seen or heard from him since 1987.

I bring this anecdote up for 2 reasons. I think large and small, new or established many technology product purveyors act like Multi Level Level (MLM) marketing schemes with their constant emphasis on just their products, stopping you from linking out to other platforms and the various types of marketing affiliate relationships they employ. To me, even the process of re-posting and sharing is a type of MLM scheme, to entice others to get on board. More on these ideas in the third article in this series.

In this piece though I am examining the individual, and the effects of tools on them. Some of the people I feel are lost often feel like that MLMers to me. “Just use ChatGPT, it can do so much for you. Don’t you feel more creative when engaging with it? Didn’t it give you a sense of freedom?” Or “You should be following this influencer on Insta as he has sorted out why humans are screwed up and what type of therapists we should all be hiring. He even has a list of them who are available for online sessions”. (Actual quotes from a small subset of “conversations” I have actually had).

Not every one is an active participant in the MLM process, but many still feel lost to me. Communication can be awkward, unless you are discussing their technological habit and what they have found using it and on it. They burst with unbridled enthusiasm then and don’t understand your lack of reciprocity. They take any pushback personally. At it’s worst if you are present with them they don’t feel exactly present. They are looking at their phone, or seemingly itching to look at it.

Returning to the apprentice and the broom for a moment. It isn’t just that the tool is going wild, but it is as if - for a few people - they become part of the tool. They let the tool encompass their life. They can no longer see the edges of tool usage. The tools literally mediate their perceptions and views of life, without any real cognizance that this has happened to them. Their perceptual processes have been altered, like looking through strong filters; more importantly their belief systems have changed.

My conversation with Kristen had a second part to it. After she said, “well they will just use them as tools”, I said I’m not sure that that is really what is happening. They are immersed in these technologies from such a young age, that life is literally being defined through the tools. In previous TechTonics I have referred to research that shows alarming attitudes in the young that all our tools are not only perfectly correct but socially sanctioned.

Here is an example: consider the statements from the young adolescents who were caught generating pornographic imagery of classmates. They failed to see anything wrong with this because it just using software downloaded from the App Store and as such, any of its capabilities must be right, otherwise why is it there.

These are the generations borne inside the technology tools, just like we were borne inside a lifestyle that had cheap and plentiful electricity everywhere. Most in developed nations cannot even imagine a life without it, and we are increasing our electrification. It is always there.

I live on a small island that has a “less robust” electrical infrastructure, and we have adapted by installing propane cooking and heating appliances, plenty of candles and battery backup for essential electronics. Visitors and tourists however instantly freak out and ask how can you live like this?

The same thing is happening to those borne inside our technology tools. Consider a recent study by Fluid Focus about phone usage amongst students. The average usage was about 5.5 hours per day, which means 25 years of non-stop scrolling in a lifetime (if the averages hold in the future). Main uses of their phones were reported as social media, messaging and streaming. Other studies have reported that streaming is primarily short form video. A majority of the participants recognize the problems these tools are causing them, but aren’t sure what to do. Here is another viewpoint in a piece by Lisa Cunningham Delauney that looks at the AI struggles in the educational system.

The Metamorphosis Map

Educational Change to Help Humans Think and Connect

Digital distraction at school…

Read more

9 months ago · 6 likes · 10 comments · Lisa Cunningham DeLauney

But one quote from the British study stood out for me, spoken by an instructor at Chichester College in England, using the same type of metaphor that I am here:

“By the time we see them in college, they’ve had five, six, seven years of living inside their phone”

So these are the lost. Those borne inside the complex of tools. Those that have voluntarily chosen to immerse themselves deeply in these tools.

And it is tools and technologies plural. For me the perceptual and behavioural effects are caused by AND. This technology and this tool, followed by that tool and then that technology. It is an additive process accumulating over the decades. People can’t have gotten lost in ChatGPT without the large layering of technologies in current vogue.

How did we get to this point and can being lost be stopped? We will take a penetrating look at these questions over the next 3 articles. Next up: From Knowledge Navigator to Digital Fools.

Thanks as always to my subscribers and readers. I greatly appreciate comments, submissions, restacks and likes. See you in a bit less than 2 weeks as I have started writing the next one now. My goal is to get 2 or 3 in inventory, like some of the people I admire on this platform do.

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This blog will morph to be more about bigger and meatier technology, business and society issues. So in this edition I look at Tide’s new AI generated whiter than whiter than every and all other whites. I try to answer the question “Is it really white enough?” I also evaluate the new AI developed chocolate bar aimed to sell in the UK, USA, and Canada simultaneously based on deep pattern recognition of disparate tastes that mere humans cannot detect. No candy bar has been successful at this before. However, I was not able to lay my hands on one of the prototype bars to sample as they might not exist, except as the answers to those people with special AI prompting power.

More about the newsletter change below. Let’s get right into catastrophe!

THE ONLY COURSE: Let’s think about catastrophes and doom for a moment

Early April 1979 was a warm spring in Edmonton as I sat in a sunny classroom looking out over the Saskatchewan River Valley. All my other classes had finished but this one, as we aimed to learn one more thing before the summer break. It was supposed to be a class on Organizational Behaviour, but the newly graduated professor, who started three months before, turned it into contemporary sociology issues vaguely applied to business. He was an arch progressive, postmodern instructor, but those are terms from our current times. Back then he was just known as the hairy Marxist weirdo who didn’t seem to belong in a business faculty. Looking back more than 45 years I only remember three things from this course:

1. An assignment worth 50% of our grade where we were arbitrarily assigned to teams. Our task was to go out several times into pubs and taverns, and …… listen. That’s right! We couldn’t talk, we had to sit in our chairs and listen to conversations around us. We also had to go into the washrooms, take up a stall for 10 minutes at a time, listen to all the conversations that were going on (things like “who is in the fucking bog for so long”) and then rush out back to our seats to write the conversations down verbatim. This was in order for us to learn what rational sense-making was. The only reason I didn’t complain about this was that two of my three teammates were attractive females, and we’d often go dancing afterwards.

2. The wonderful word reify

3. The Catastrophe theory of societal change

That was what we were discussing on that long past glorious day in April. We had all studied the assigned readings from Mother Jones, and Ramparts, which were not typical journals for articles aimed at graduate business students. These essays covered some of the most horrible disasters that we had faced at that time, and how our society came to grips of them and tried to make change. The newly minted professor’s point of view was that societal change never happened until there was a catastrophe, He was trying to extend this theory to include organizational change.

Of course this was not received well by the class. These were students who had taken business finance and corporate strategy, considering themselves just one step away from being certified business geniuses. Their disdainful arguments were in the typical ultra-confident tone and timbre that comes from getting an MBA.

I don’t remember participating in the discussion, preferring to gaze out the window and ponder my upcoming move to Vancouver. But I’ve thought about the professor’s point many times over the subsequent years. I spent 15 years consulting in organizational change and his argument did not apply well there. I have worked with many businesses who proactively changed and two that had catastrophes and rather than change just chose to go out of business.

However, I believe he was onto something when it comes to the source of any changes we make to the fabric of our society. Now this is not what scientists would call strong form theory in that it doesn’t always apply. Consider our suddenly less than friendly neighbours to the south, the Americans. Many of them are now celebrating the fact that they don’t need to wear Sketchers or slippers to the airport anymore. You no longer have to take your shoes off to board the plane. Now this ridiculous policy came into place from a “not even near catastrophe”, but some lame guy who tried to bring some chemicals onto a plane in his shoes and failed miserably.

We also have the other side of the picture that you’re not allowed to say out loud in the USA. Guns kill people when you have lots of them of every type imaginable, available everywhere. None of the many many catastrophes caused by these weapons have created the necessary societal change down south.

Back with the main essay after a brief menu mistake of an alphabet generated by our sponsors, all purpose generative AI.

MENU MISTAKE

But the catastrophe theory works fine for my purposes today. I started writing this newsletter there almost 10 months ago and the subject matter has changed. I used to have to search through a range of technology publications to get relevant and interesting stories. Now these stories are literally everywhere. Everyone - no matter how knowledgeable - are clamouring to get their two cents in (not your two cents , yours are great). The hype from AI believers continues unabated. New initiates are signing up daily. Here is a random example from 3 hours ago: I see on LinkedIn that you can join a training session and become a seven figure AI consulting expert in 90 days without having any experience whatsoever.

But fortunately, there are many many others who are researching, testing, thinking about, and writing about the many faceted problems with our current forms of AI. The stories about AI problems that also used to be hard to find are also now everywhere. But let’s take a short detour, shall we?

AI didn’t just pop out fully formed from some magic box in the early 2020s to impress everybody with its volubility, ease of use through text and voice, astonishing speed, and of course its flattery to engage. The hard work was done back in the 1940s to through to the early 1960s. The reason why it disappeared from public view was that they didn’t have the computing horsepower to make things happen back in the day. There is more to its rich history but my point is that what you see now is just one way that it can be done. There are other models and architectures that could be included, there are different philosophies on training and data sets, different ways that we could build safety into the models, ranges of governance models for things like that ethics, and different organizational modes to develop and distribute AI. There so many more alternatives.

What we have now doesn’t have to be inevitable. We’ve just accepted where we are now because we’ve been trained over the last 15 years to accept this type of software. Products, that in the lovely terminology of Silicon Valley, are MVPs. Most valuable performer you think. EXCEPT it stands for minimum viable product, from the founders and investors points of view: The barest minimum of features with just enough software stability that they can begin to monetize.

Which brings us back to catastrophe, our theme today. We will not get serious about dealing with the vipers’s nest of problems that AI presents until we have a catastrophe. Maybe more than one. Let me just quickly open up the nest for you with just some of the issues, many which I have highlighted over the past few months:

• Productivity improvements that aren’t real when properly studied

• Extra time spent cleaning up bad business decisions, court time wasted, etc

• Mistakes and misinformation built-in that aren’t “scaling away”

• Replication of human biases in information

• AI slop taking over the internet

• AI generated porn and nudity of a nonconsensual nature

• Disinformation controlled by bad actors especially for recent events or political issues

• Illusions and scams because of fake video and audio content

• Disruption in learning and cognition

• The absolute unthinking acceptance of AI information and advice by the young

• Unpaid ingestion of copyrighted content that is then repurposed freely in outputs

• Easier Cybercrime

• Enormous usage of energy

• Creation of serious psychological dependencies and delusions in some users

RANDOM THOUGHT: Would we put up with these level of mistakes if these systems were getting our pay or payments terribly wrong not in our favour, or our American Citizenship was screwed up when ICE came calling, or our academic references showed us as graduating as in mime instead of law.

That list adds up to lots of problems, which will take decades to sort through. But catastrophes come from doom scenarios. No, not the paper clip problem1. AI models that have information they really shouldn’t. Or using AI models to quickly to generate terrible new substances. Consider this post from a world leader in predictions and forecasts:

Here is an article (paywalled though no one ever clicks much as has measured) that gets right to the heart of a possible catastrophic incident. Researchers were able to - in our current euphemistic jargon - “jailbreak” large languages models using…….. language (Quel Surprise!). That’s right, you just throw tons of jargon at the models and like magic their guardrails disappear and they then give you detailed instructions on deadly poisons, contagions, how to bring a grid down, how to disrupt air traffic, bombs; the lot.

To my mind, here is the scary quote from this article: “Google spokesperson told us that these techniques are not new, that they'd seen them before, and that everyday people would not stumble onto them during typical use.” Sheer complacency at its best.. My two reactions to Mr Googles the clown:

• Why hasn’t your software been fixed?

• It isn’t everyday people who worry me.

So as a lifelong realist, I expect none of this will change until we have one or more catastrophes. Meanwhile we can all go back of our chatty companions who give us better mojito recipes, solopreneur training income, digital duct tape accounting. and being used for just about everything under the sun.

But here is another prediction I will make: when these catastrophic events happen we will all be self righteously yelling bloody murder about how our government should be protecting us from these terrible threats.

So, we need to make governance a top priority now, not after the fact.

Will we?

A LIGHT VERSION OF WHAT’S REALLY COOKING TO DISPEL THE DOOM

How long are people going to keep saying X formerly Twitter. Who doesn't know this by now?

Did the seniors amongst us keep saying Exxon formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey? What about Alphabet formerly known as Google? Though of course we all said Google formerly known as Backrub for years.

A LITTLE SPICE

So this is the last article in this format. I will be switching to biweekly newsletter, focussing on a longer form article. Each week will deal with one technology issue, its effects on business and on our lives. The first one will be entitled: This week I lost yet another colleague to one of the new technology tools. Will you be next?

Thanks as always to my readers who have kept me on my toes with comments, feedback, and submissions. I appreciate likes and restacks. See you in 2 weeks.

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Before I begin the tallying I must admit I got the rapid development of robotic sports completely wrong. Although these automated mechanical devices seemed overmatched in marathons and boxing, turns out football (world) / soccer (North America) is their forte. Here is one of the many memetic video clips of a recent match. Of course after watching this you can see why sales to next year’s World Cup are well off:

Humanoid footballers stumble through their first tournament in China

A 6 month evaluation on my Ten Technology Predictions for 2025

1. AI adoption will continue on an uneven course. Unlike others who are forecasting AI to either explode or implode (dubious dichotomous thinking), I see it progressing on an erratic path forward. It’s “intelligence” levels - the focus of so many - will not make any quantum jumps this year. The lack of sustainable business models for the general purpose AI products will likely result in organizational consolidations (mergers and acquisitions). Some specialized use cases will take off (for instance, in the healthcare and medical research fields) while other uses will be remained mired by AI’s structural faults (hallucinations and misinformation anyone). The biggest change will be that more people will try it and adopt it for some tasks, which is the first step to mass adoption.

   1. CHECKPOINT: I think that here I am spot on. It is clear for many now that learning and scaling was an S curve with improvement mostly capped at this point. I do not see how the current marketplace for purveyors of AI is remotely sustainable. As a few tech thinkers have pointed out its rapid adoption is mostly based on it being free. Adapting to “this might be it” for years or longer will be a difficult proposition for most.

2. Google Search and Wikipedia will be negatively impacted by AI assimilation. The bloated, SEO gamed, over-monetized search tool from Alphabet will see real usage cracks, as more people realize how effective AND efficient the variety of AI tools are to actually find out what you really are looking for. Similar effect for the bureaucratic, overly political Wikipedia. I no longer have to read the latest in political correctness or false controversies in biographies, for instance. Alphabet still has YouTube and a growing cloud business to offset these impacts, while Wikipedia has a huge cash war chest, despite their constant pleading for more money.

   1. CHECKPOINT: Another spot on prediction. There are now reams being written about the new zero click environment and the dying gasps of Google Search. Wikipedia’s visits continue to fall and financially they are a break even proposition. Oddly, as humans visit them less directly, many AI answer engines love serving up Wikipedia as a source of their “knowledge.”

3. AI will continue to erode human art and entertainment. For reasons I cannot begin to understand, many people seem to not only accept AI generated art forms but actively seek them out. Streamers will increase the amount of AI augmented / created music featured on their AI controlled algorithms. Similarly visual content will be dominated at both the macro (major films) and micro (vid-ettes YouTube, TikTok and others) levels by AI produced imagery. Art and books will also be affected. ChatGPT poems anyone?

   1. CHECKPOINT: Unfortunately I’m right on this. Spotify continues to be over-run with AI music, some of it originated by them. Graphic artists are dying on the vine, voice overs are now often AI, and there are special movie festivals open to those film-makers who can prove there was no AI in involved anywhere in the production.

4. The first streaming mega bundle will be launched. There will be a mega bundled offering in the film / TV space across different streaming organizations and corporate entities (Disney’s bundle is all their owned properties). Thus we will have successfully recreated something we said we didn’t want but apparently our behaviours say otherwise: cable bundles. Instead of hundreds of irrelevant channels, we will now have thousands of mediocre viewing options with very little high quality content. Not really much different for all our cable cutting.

   1. CHECKPOINT. Here is my first miss. Despite this not having happened yet, the industry is unsettled and I have a feeling we might yet see this occur by the end of the year. So wait and watch on this prediction

5. There will be at least one major violent incident due to distorted video. Our continued reliance on social media for crucial information coupled with the growth in producing life-like AI visual imagery of anything, will lead to the malicious fabrication of the truth with associated (false) video evidence. Reality will be harder to perceive.

   1. CHECKPOINT: This is a tough one to score but I will take a miss. We have seen our understanding and comprehension of major life events skewed dramatically with fake images and videos, but I’m not sure any of them have directly resulted in a major violent incident. I have one friend who said he will never believe another video again. With that I post this:

6. Cybercrime will amp up even more and there will be 1 or more major hacks. This will be caused by 3 factors. Our business organizations STILL don’t take cybersecurity seriously in terms of strategy, practices and software to prevent or minimize cybercrime’s impact. The unsettled nature of our world will result in more political driven actors. AI will generate more methods and toolsets for non-political crooks looking to make money. It’s a growth industry!

   1. CHECKPOINT: Two thumbs up on this one. There are now so many hacks they are relegated to the back bytes of the various digital platforms people mostly use. They are reported like this part of our life is inevitable. Just stumbled on a story on how Marks and Spencers - an iconic English store - is in complete shambles since an Easter cyber-takedown and will lose about 300 million pounds getting all things going again, estimated by August.

7. Tiktok’s outcome will create a domino effect. Despite Trump’s looming meddling with this American law, ByteDance will be forced to divest TikTok. Depending on how it actually happens, this will likely trigger a rippling set of mergers and acquisitions of social media platforms over next 2 years.

   1. CHECKPOINT: Wrong but still in play. Somehow Trump keeps rolling over the deadline when they have to divest. This is apparently his main strategy for everything: announce and defer. However, I believe ByteDance (TikTok’s owners) are rebuilding their app in order to complete the sale so the dominos may yet fall. A new effect is that the “answer engines” have brought Reddit and now Quora back into the game so platform-mania could be a real thing for the rest of the year.

8. Worldwide commitment to nuclear power will grow. Despite entrenched resistance from some groups in society, nuclear energy - especially small plant infrastructure - will pass a critical threshold. It will be driven by HighTech companies committed to AI who have gigantic mounds of cash, as well as independent thinking nations - from Portugal to Argentina - committing to their own homemade form of green energy.

   1. CHECKPOINT. Another correct prediction. This continues to grow in acceptance, announcements, and the important criterion: investment. Japan has restarted 14 plants and actually announced a mid-2030s fusion powered plant. That one I will not believe in until it happens

9. We will continue to not make medical progress on Alzheimers. Similar to what happened to cancer research for decades until research breakthroughs like immunotherapy and earlier detection, scientific progress on Alzheimers’s is hindered by too much research based in an ideological rut. We need widespread, diverse investments in research of all types, not just in the same well-furrowed but ineffective path.

   1. CHECKPOINT: I’m proud to take a complete failure here. New research has greatly increased our ability to detect Alzheimer’s early, though often that doesn’t help as our treatment options are poor. The unexpected results of studies linking shingles and RSV vaccines to deferred Alzheimer’s onset brings the immune system into play. So progress but a long way to go as we really don’t understand how it is caused and how to treat it.

10. Certainly the least important prediction: BlueSky will not be a X killer. Despite the progressives-based growth surge in BlueSky after Trump’s election, it will not bring down the micro-blogging house of Elon (here is the obligatory used to be Twitter phrase). It suffers from an atmosphere of smugness but that isn’t the problem. Despite some feature differences, human behaviour, at its most negative, will limit it as an alternative. It will remain stuck as a relatively unimportant social media platform.

    1. CHECKPOINT: Completely right. Daily users and interactions are falling off of a cliff. It has a very strange vibe: hyper politically correct people who are intensely judgemental yet have the thinest skins themselves. I persist as there are about 5 great AI research theorists / researchers there.

Three new predictions to see us through

Can’t help myself so I will make some new predictions:

1. Our patience with AI errors will NOT run out by the end of the year: I’m not sure why but we keep giving AI thousands of passes for completely made up or incorrect information. I read an AI researcher today who stated that the inbuilt flattery of ChatGPT has drawn adopters into its web. He claims that earlier versions that did not have this factor in its responses didn’t engage (entrap in my view) users as much. Our cognitive predisposition to anthropomorphic conclusions is a key factor in this problem. Consider just one example among many: the divorce trial in which the husband won based on made-up citations. The verdict went to appeal where he introduced many more inaccurate citations and the wife’s attorney wasted much valuable time refuting disinformation. Fortunately the wife won the appeal but the judge’s tiptoed with the mildest language possible about this “new technology”. He is one representative of tens of millions. Me, I am mad that we continue to waste a terrible scarce resource - judges and court time - with this madness. I say fantastic fines not timid talk!

2. Tesla’s stock will drop some but it won’t plummet like it should (about 80%). I have never understood how certain firms become investor darlings (Amazon is another) and it seems to take decades to pour the cold water of reality onto them. But it always comes, just not in 2025

3. Rockets and robots will continue to make us laugh rather than making a lasting economic impact.

It has been a fun and eventful 6 months of 2025 so far. Thanks again to my readers. I likely will be making some big changes to this newsletter as I expand my writing horizons.

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In Canada, it is a big stat holiday called (surprisingly) Canada Day, which turns into four days off when the actual date is on a Tuesday (or Thursday). So it will be later in the week when my keen critical eye will evaluate how well my predictions for 2025 were.

READERS POTLUCK: An email and a conversation with a 13 year old generates thoughts

I’m sure those free software tools that evaluate your headline are going to give this one zero points. I don’t care.

Yesterday morning I received an email from my best reader contributor. After giving some positive feedback, the bulk of the email contained a concrete example of where AI is doing some good. He is totally right. There are many examples of where AI is providing significant benefit. From what I can tell most of these cases involve special purpose instances, occasionally small language models, and/or hybrid AI implementations.

It would be interesting to read more about these types of cases, but they are hard to find. They are hidden behind the wall of AI hype I take aim at: hyper-scaled general purpose LLMs and their very close sibling LRMs. Everyone is shouting so loudly that really interesting stories cannot get through. This is another niche in the market waiting to be filled: doing in-depth factual analyses about real AI success stories. Just know that you have a monumental uphill marketing battle.

I am hoping we will be reaching peak peak hype about AI soon. No, that is not a typing error. Peak hype is part of the hype stage in the technology / product innovation lifecycle, that I first studied back in the 70s. In my lifetime there’s never been so much hype about anything else, so that’s what the second peak is about.

I started on my path of a technology career in 1970 when I took programming in high school. It was the first time my school had ever offered this course. In my first job, I helped a national bank move from manual to automated transaction systems. I still remember the fear in the eyes of the bank’s customers when we informed them that the manila cards on which we typed their savings account activities and the tiny books where we wrote by hand their updated balances, were being replaced by a large, chest high, benign looking computer, that could’ve doubled as fancy looking file cabinets1.

I then spent another 45 years putting in large technology implementations where my role was primarily strategic, in terms of selecting the appropriate mix of technologies, the implementation approaches, and user adoption strategies. I also managed very large projects and built two consulting firms whose sole purpose was helping business organizations implement technology.

Throughout this time I had a front row seat watching people - from all walks of life and vocation - and their various reactions as a wide range of new technologies was thrust upon them. As an example, I had an important role in the first fully automated stock exchange nearly 40 years ago, which was the initial crucial step in allowing us access to the zero commission online trading of the 2020s.

I started this newsletter because I was concerned with the variety of negative effects that I saw on individuals, and society writ large. I also believed that these negative affects interacted with one another, and compounded, creating a growing entanglement of thorny issues. I purposely chose to write in a satirical, sarcastic and occasionally humorous voice to poke pins into people’s balloons about tech celebrities, flawed technology products, and most importantly, the profound human behavioural impacts.

But I fear that it might be too late for all of us. Let me explain why.

One of my retirement projects is establishing a new FM community radio station on the little island that we live on. Yes I understand, what a stupid idea in 2025. On Saturdays I have the distinct pleasure of working with an enthusiastic 13-year-old volunteer who, in addition to being highly skilled and courteous, is wise beyond his years. He has tech savviness built directly into his DNA. But I find that he has a much better perspective on technology issues than people many times his age.

This week we had an enlightening conversation about the sweep of technology change over the last 50 years. I told him that in my time of consulting, the greatest - truly the greatest – change that I saw in my entire career is that most people have changed from technophobes to technophiles. We have gone from a society that was worried about what would happen to their savings if they weren’t on manila cards to one that will adopt literally anything technological in an absolutely thoughtless fashion.

He nodded and said he understood. He is thoughtful, considered, and slow to reach conclusions. He’s spent a lot of time reading about technology change and even though he probably doesn’t have the slightest clue what manual systems are, he does see the philia all about him. I felt an understanding from him than I don’t from many people who pretend to talk about technology, but without deep understanding or comprehension of its multiple dimensions. Another acute implication of the last 30 years of technology assimilation: unbridled expressionism no matter how far to the left you are on the DK curve.

Because philia2 means love, and I see so many people in love. Right now it is AI, but there are so many other tools being rapidly chosen without very much consideration at all. And when you’re in love you make many mistakes and take inappropriate risks. You don’t realize that your partner might abuse you, might cause others all sorts of psychological harm, might cause you to change your primary values and mental models without you even realizing it. That’s what love can do.

My entire role has gone from encouraging people to consider new technologies in a thoughtful and methodical manner to wishing thinking that we would fall out of love with technology, and use it in its proper role as a tool. A tool where you actually judge the pros and the cons, costs (both personal and societal), long-term impacts, etc. A tool to help you get back to life or improve your life.

Not become your life.

We used to have an expression that a person couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But now so many people walk around staring at their phones, navigationally challenged without their GPS map locators to guide them. So it’s only when the map makes an error that these people accidently wander into a forest. But instead of seeing the forest or even a tree, they look up briefly from their phone and see the little elf door. They open it and go through.

From reality to fantasy.

Because in our collective journey from phobia to philia, my other critical observation is that we’ve gone from mature adults to immature children.

And that is why I fear we are too late.

MENU MISTAKES

Did they show up in your Spotify recommendations?

This important research was spared DOGE’s scientific spending shears.

SPECIAL DISH : Calling BS on recommendation engines as an AI success story

Friday I read two posts that referred to recommendation engines as a success story for AI. I felt uneasy about this conclusions. Just as I had 15 years earlier when a client asked us to put together a recommendation engine as good as that for Amazon books. My partner and I took down his requirements - which were very challenging - and we explained to him what we could do with machine learning. We also chatted afterwards saying, “do you actually find these recommendations very helpful?” Neither one of us did.

Later on Friday I had two interactions today’s evidently AI supercharged recommendation engines that caused me to write this little dispatch. My wife and I always have a good end of week dinner on Fridays and we love to listen to jazz music as we eat and talk. During the cheese and wine course my musical selection had ended, and the AI kicked in. It was raucous, uptempo, unmelodic jazz selection of the type that I’ve always disdained. I have hundreds of jazz albums in my collection along with dozens others in the upmarket streaming service I use called TIDAL. So shouldn’t this great recommendation engine, which is supposed to have state of the art pattern recognition realize that I hated that kind of jazz?

Evidently not. Yay-sayers will say that it is just a bad recommendation engine. (Post script. At our Sunday dinner [roast salmon, greek potatoes and BBQed vegetables since you asked] my wife totally agreed that neither Roon or Tidal [our music technologies] ever recommend songs or artists she wants to hear. Both of our dinner guests said the same thing about Spotify)

I then had cause to use the much touted recommendation engine from Amazon. Surely this would be a great experience because people that believe in its recommendation engine are like monks whispering in sacred gardens about something spiritual. If anything, it was worse than the music selections. It repeatedly could not remember that I was looking for a studio quality Headset - microphone combination. It recommended many things other than that. In the end, I went to Perplexity to help me with my choices.

Got to a short list and back to Amazon for a purchase. I was down to two choices and put them in one by one. The product that I was leaning towards was more expensive but I almost decided to buy it. Then I found it didn’t even come with the cables to connect it to an amp. The Yay-sayers are smiling - the recommendation engine came through in the end. Big no. I had to find this out by reading negative reviews. Presumably the great AI driven recommendation engine not only reads through the specifications for every product in the Amazon catalog, but also should be able to ingest all of the buyer comments. But at the bottom where it says you should also consider buying one of these, as Amazon is always cross and upselling you, no cables suggestions in sight. None.

I’m pretty sure that this information is available in their product database. I’m also pretty sure I could still hack together a COBOL program to read that database and find which headphone / microphone products don’t have cables, in order to recommend them to people.

I then looked at Apple’s book recommendations. Fifteen books you might like, suggestions based on your reading activity. I have hundreds of books for them to determine these mythical patterns that I don’t even see. They batted zero. This enormous engine evidently couldn’t determine that 80% of my books were either non-fiction or essays. Instead current and old pulp fiction are the suggestions. Well maybe I should try, that in my seventh decade the AI has figured out that trite fiction is what I really will like.

On the other hand here is a list of mostly fiction books many which I would seriously consider. Written by an actual human being who has read them, and recommended them previously to others. Key thing to note, no marketing affiliate fees are being paid. Light coming on yet?

Cultural Capital

Absorbing novels to read on holiday

Hello, Welcome to Cultural Capital…

Read more

10 months ago · 132 likes · 69 comments · James Marriott

I couldn’t turn to another vaunted recommendation engine, Netflix because I stopped subscribing to this streaming service long ago. They never got what I wanted right. Ever. Despite me watching hundreds of titles. I hate horror movies why are you suggesting them? As I wrote that down I suddenly had a memory of when recommendation engine did work. It was in the early 2000s when I was a lonely divorcee who went to a minimum of four movies a week. At the time I was using Yahoo and they had a fabulous utility, well ahead of its time, where you could rate each of the films that you had seen and interact with similar cinephiles. The best thing was that their recommendation engine for upcoming movies was surprisingly accurate. But isn’t this like over 20 years ago before we had fabulous AI built into these things?

Then it all began to change. Yahoo, which made a series of strategic blunders at this time, started recommending movies I would never be interested in. I did research and found out that they had decided to change their engine to recommend what their advertisers were paying for, not with their users were really interested in. So no recommendation for the latest Spanish movies which we know you love, because Weinstein productions pays us big bucks and you need to go see Kill Bill instead.

I couldn’t give up. Why do people believe so much in recommendation engines. I did some research about the quality of AI in these engines. Here is a small extract I read about the power under the hood of these AI engines:

“Utilize advanced algorithms such as collaborative filtering (including K-nearest neighbors), content-based filtering, matrix factorization, and neural networks, depending on the specific needs and available data”

So are you keeping up with this? Can you define matrix factorization? For it is the real answer to this dilemma:

I think it means forget about what our customer really wants, just make sure they never leave our platform and they buy something. Lots of somethings hopefully!

Consumer vs commercial interests, that is what is at the bottom. I think that there are engines that can probably be great. Yahoo did it in 2003/4. But other factors are in play. Amazon knows you are going to spend the bucks and you can always return the stuff easily. They don’t care about all the effort in the buying / return endless cycle. There are bigger business factors:

• Engaging you.

• Tracking you.

• Selling to you.

• Never letting you go.

I guess there are also people who don’t have strong preferences, and who are overwhelmed by the act of choosing. Scott Galloway - whose opinions I value - wrote about having really no preferences for his clothing, his liquor choices, hotels, and so many other things (except they needed to be expensive). Evidently he just doesn’t care. So maybe it is useful for people like this.

But I think the act of choosing is very important. It is where you express your values, beliefs, and preferences. Where the rubber really hits the road. The opposite of a virtue signal; it is virtue engaged. Like us Canadians resolutely not buying from the US as they try to destroy us, even though they are the only source of quality lemons and digital services.

In the end, I feel that it’s just one more subconscious technological implication that we don’t explicitly see. Have we so lost our us-ness in favour of tech-ness, that we now just do what our technology tells us to do?

But I could be totally wrong. What do you think about recommendation engines?

A LITTLE SPICE

Thanks so much for reading. I truly appreciate suggestions, conversations, comments, likes and restacks. It keeps an important dialogue going.

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I never anticipated spending so much time on AI when I started this newsletter last fall. But the hubris and hype were too great to pass up. For those interested I have an AI article published through my new newsletter :

TRUPreneur PRO

Shining a Light on the Consulting Industry’s Love of AI Magic

“The future of artificial intelligence—and its harmonious integration into society—depends on our ability to instill a deep-rooted preference for honesty…

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a year ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · David Crouch

MAIN COURSE - Let’s distract ourselves by pretending we live in a era of rocketry

I have written a few times about Elon Musk and SpaceX - here and here - so I thought it would be time to look at other major rocket options, as NASA is looking for alternatives to SpaceX because of technical issues Elly and Donnie fighting. It is actually quite sad that the vaunted NASA of the 1960s is scrabbling around with Silly Con Valley robber barons in order to, you know, do stuff in space.

First up for consideration is Blue Origin of nifty name and oddball owner. Currently the bulked up Bezos - steroids anyone? - is taking over Venice to marry again, but his rocket firm hasn’t actually been covering themselves in glory. They can’t decide whether they are developing thrill rides to the atmosphere’s edge for ultra wealthy celebrities or serious rocketry to help NASA get to - wait for it - Mars. (The TechBros really took that pop pysch book Men are from Mars seriously)

Jeff’s rocket vision is long on narrative and short on actual real milestones, like launches. The first one in January actually got into someone’s definition of space but its booster rocket experienced a rapid unplanned disassembly (explosion in plain English). The second one planned for the spring was rescheduled until August. On top of this poor track record, are Amazon’s legal commitment for their Starlink competitor to launch over 1600 satellites by end of July 2026. Looks again. Yes 1600 rocket launches by 2026. Should be easy peasy if your name is Project Kuiper - named after the very distant Kuiper Belt - and you are only getting Katy Perry just to the top of earth.

Now there is another choice coming from left field, across the Pacific. Screaming in like a bullet is Honda, giving us shivers up the spine by reminding us of the go-go early 1990s when Japan Inc was where it was at. Turns out Honda - famed maker of motorcycles, cars, and riding lawn mowers - has turned their hand to rockets. They started aerospace research in 2019 and their first successful flight happened last week. Now we are talking. A legitimate manufacturer getting into rockets should give us all more confidence that Mars is within our grasp.

Their very successful launch was with a 20 ft rocket. WAIT A MINUTE. Doesn’t that sound kind of small to you? Anyway, this teeny rocket went up to the grand height of - hold your breath now - just under 900 feet. The height of 3 whole football fields in the air. I think I’ve seen teenage boys’s backyard contraptions go higher.

That’s what all these rocketry shenanigans seem to me: Boys Own Stories. Mars here we come!

QUICKBYTES: The cost of training and amazing chip engineering gives us what?

I have a couple of companion pieces here dealing with the prodigious amounts of money invested in AI.. The mostly US dollars spent on expensive chips, data centres and training for the AI models is the largest investment in any technology. Ever.

The models are so greedy for information that they are reading each others’s outputs. A new study shows that they are spending so much time scraping the websites of libraries, archives and museums that real human beings are unable to access these true warehouses of knowledge. These websites are often brought to their knees and have to go offline.

There are some that say this is just a price we have to pay to get us to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, the meaningless standard that keeps being redefined).

So how do we square this insatiability of data with what the answer engines, as some AI tools like to be called, provide. I might be stepping on their precious toes a bit by looking at a study that shows what these engines are actually responding with. Given their multiple PhDs in every piece of known data, the list of what the answer engines are mentioning in their answers is……decidedly humdrum.

So we had to spend tens and tens of billions of dollars to get answers sourced from Youtube, Wikipedia, Healthline, Reuters and the real “obscure” one on the list - Reddit. Was it all worth it to just find more quickly if your favourite old actor is still alive, what’s in a Snickers bar, or details for a new shrimp cocktail recipe?

SPECIAL DISH: Even state propagandists are cheapskates and use free AI

I have had a lot of interest in the supposed truckloads of money being made in AI. I’m sorry to report - as is the case in the product cycle of almost every new technological innovation - that we are in hype stage of the cycle where NO money is ever made. I know it is hard to detect but there is quite a bit of AI hype happening.

There also is also NO monetization strategy in sight. This is on top of the enormous investments that have been made and are still being made. The inference process for operating AI tools on an ongoing basis are also very chip greedy. That means more costs.

Here is a quick back of the napkin example: OpenAI claims to have up to $10 billion in revenues but their costs are $25 billion. A tidy loss of $15 billion. Only 2 other companies had losses anywhere close to that - Warners with a mega write down - TV is losing to streaming as you might have heard - and the US Postal Service. Both were still $5 million less short, if you know what I mean. In addition, I’m also not prepared to put stake in those $10 billion in revenues until we have a couple of years of this revenue actually renewing.

Here is a key reason I think that things will change dramatically over the next 5 years - which is 500 in AI years: Everyone uses the free version. The more adoption of free we have, up go the costs. Plus increased usage of the free models drives costs up further. Substantially. With no more revenues.

Let me give you an unusual Exhibit A. Top of mind for many people is the Iran - Israel battle (which took a major fork in the road with the US bombing). The leaders of both countries, Iran and Israel, have been putting out lots of propaganda, much of a visual nature (as above). You know the type of stuff, videos of massive bombings causing damage to the other side. Shared everywhere. I’m sure many of you will be surprised to know that much of this video footage is fake, generated by everyone’s friend AI. But here is the hard to laugh at humour: they didn’t even use the paid version of the AI video generators. The VEO watermark for the free version is apparent on some of the footage.

MENU MISTAKES (ripped from Apple News)

I hope OpenAI becomes a for profit company as this sounds like my type of investment.

Brought to you by the BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) experts Klarna who might actually be run by nothing but digital agents.

EXTRA HELPINGS: Another week. Another poor study for AI

As the studies come in, the issues and problems with AI and our usage of it keep ratcheting up. Here is a recent small study that compared 3 groups of users writing essays: having ChatGPT access, Google search access, or just the native human brain. Participants all wore a headset recording brain signals.

Some findings adding grist to the mill as we puzzle through our AI futures:

• The essays written by students using Chat GPT were quite homogenous. The brain only essays showed a wider range of language and were heterogeneous in terms of quality as judged by teachers reading the essays

• The AI students could quote little of their essays. Brain only students could quote about 90% of them

• The EEG analysis showed that the three groups were using different neural connectivity and cognitive strategies.

• Deeper learning came from the brain only group in terms of memory, accuracy and ownership

A LITTLE SPICE

Thanks once again to all my readers. I appreciate the comments, likes, messages and restacks from many of you. Next week will be a half year review of my 2025 Technology Predictions.

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You know that situation is getting dire when I invoke the Walrus. In 2 weeks the same Walrus will cast a discerning eye on how my 2025 Tech predictions are doing. Here is the original article from 2024 for those who missed it.

First Course of READERS POTLUCK: The manufacturing of AI evidence

Another great reader submission - please keep them coming - about how a small unimportant university - MIT - has had to back away hard from an economics paper that purported to show the tremendous advantage garnered in materials science research from using an AI tool. The startling conclusions made by an up and coming graduate student were given the two thumbs up 👍 👍 by MIT’s leading economists and were reported deeply and globally. The new press release states that MIT now has “ no confidence ….in the veracity of the research”. Evidently the data was…… just made up.

Science, supposedly our source of empirical truth, is having a couple of decades of problems. These are mostly contained to the social sciences, where very few research studies can be replicated. Replication is one of the key planks of the scientific method. On top of this, is the blatant data distortion and manipulation that is surfacing on many scientific research projects, including the infamous “honesty expert likely uses dishonest data” incident.

All of this makes our upcoming main course about hype all the more difficult.

MAIN COURSE: Anecdote vs Evidence: Can we get ever to the bottom of the AI hype?

I have a longer article coming out later this week dealing with the whipsawing we are all currently experiencing regarding anything about AI. AI-washing is everywhere and in everything. Evidently Kool-Aid now has AI crystals to make the grape taste grape-ier.

A casual stroll through the feed of most social platforms will look like this:

• AI great

• AI terrible

• AI gave me an exponential leap in productivity

• AI seems to be leeching our very ability to think

• RINSE AND REPEAT

Much of this is a an ordinary battle for the triumph of AI in business organizations, so my 🚩alert is on the highest setting for marketing spin, also known in the vernacular, as BS. Anything to sell more of this AI stuff. Think I’m hyping the hyping. Here is a quote from an academic AI researcher Luiza Javorsky:

“My first comment is that in recent months, the term “AI” seems to have become dusty, and major AI-related initiatives are now called “superintelligence.”

Check on some AI leaders - that is, the key people at AI vendors selling you their wares - and you will see that she is correct. The only way they could get more hype is to state that it is like God is built into every product.

Except of course most people are using free or cheap versions of the various AI tools and the cumulative vendor financial losses are the only real colossal thing about this. Well, except for Nvidia who provides the unbelievable horsepower to hyper-charge this story up. (And it is unbelievable, given the speed that many of less experienced AI users get deceived by: “It is just so fast” in a breathless whisper I have heard more than a few times now).

I’m not sure how my much-loved ordinaries are faring in this amplified goldfish bowl. Consider one of my favourite whipping boys, Marc Benioff (seen below making one of his landmark announcements, I think about how he invented Hallowe’en). Salesforce, his company, recently released a research paper in how well AI was doing in customer service, an initial primary target of agentic systems.

Actually not very well. The research is filled with AI jargon that gets in the way of comprehension. Let me explain in terms real businesses need to understand. If a customer asks a simple question the AI has a 58% chance of giving a correct answer. If another question comes from the same customer - likely as these are often conversations - it drops down to a 35% likelihood of being correct. And so on, with a profound range of other errors that were found. That is hardly great customer service. Maybe some companies don’t care anymore?

Meanwhile in advance of Salesforce Connections 2025 conference in Chicago, Marc was adding to the wind in that city with huge proclamations about the power of AgentForce, their digital agent product. What he is really crowing about is the actual and prospective sales of his new widgets. Big buckaroos. The dull but rigorous studies his people in the bowels of Salesforce report on is how well the widgets do in action. Not well as we have seen.

AI isn’t a lifestyle movement; it is a useful, important and very flawed set of technologies.

MENU MISTAKES

Was that an episode on Star Trek: Then Next Generation or Deep Space 9?

One more answer to the question: What else can AI do for us?

EXTRA HELPINGS: Want to know how cold the Cold War was?

This is not a climate change question but a military and political one. It also has to do with the lessons people older than 60 often learned, living under a constant threat of nuclear annihilation. (Much worse than The Last of Us).

Here are a two examples of terrific public policies we had for dealing with this modest existential threat. When I was 8 I learned to quickly jump up and hide under my school desk. We practiced this just like fire drills. I guess the desks, pictured below, despite appearances to the contrary, must have been made of lead to shield us from the radiation of a bomb attack. We also had to time ourselves and report back on how fast we could run home from school. We all know how kids can outrun the blast radius of a hydrogen bomb, as we called them then.

At another level we silently discontinued research into the relatively safe thorium reactors in favour of uranium because of the unique added benefit of uranium. It was much easier to make hydrogen bombs from its breeder stock. So we lost 60 years of productive nuclear power research in order to build, consults notes, over 63,000 nuclear warheads. If exploded in a short time period, we would all be radioactive toast.

Fortunately, thorium is making a comeback and melting salt with the best of them1. Once thorium reactors are perfected, they are predicted to produces safe and reliable power with far less waste.

Who is leading this charge in innovation you ask? China. The USA kindly left public in 1960 all of the thorium research up to that point, which found its way into Chinese research. As with EVs, China is really starting to lead the world in bold energy change initiatives

QUICKBYTES: How much guarding is in the AI rails?

Most of us know about highway guardrails. They’ll protect you if you glance off them, and they absorb lots of energy, but they will fail if you hit them head on or at high speeds.

Evidently this is the same design principle we are using for the so-called AI guardrails. Amateur attempts to get around them, are easily brushed aside. (In a hilarious example of guardrails I could not get the imaging AI tool I was using to generate a image of a devious man with a schoolgirl in case it accidentally generated an inappropriate image. The school boy represents the human knowledge ingested by AI. )But AI destroys its own guardrails with the right type of prompt engineering. Every second newsletter I highlight another new way to get to the stuff it shouldn’t be telling us. .

Here are more examples of getting around the guardrails. Tell the AI that your purpose is educational. If it refuses sometimes getting adversarial will work. Just push hard on the tradeoff conflict of its built-in principles. If you are using a more modern LRM, ask it to assess the harm in each step it takes, and share them with you. Oops another car flies over the cliff.

A LITTLE SPICE

I thank everyone for reading. I greatly appreciate feedback, comments, submissions, likes and restacks. These are unusual times, especially from a technology perspective. We really don’t have a real clue about how it is all affecting us.

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For some reason today I felt frustrated with our naïve and sometime short-sighted reactions to AI, cybersecurity, privacy and other critical technological issues. There is a slight chance it may have crept into my writing.

MAIN COURSE: Shrug 1: Who cares about the problems with AI?

This week a new rigorous study came out from Apple that had some hard hitting conclusions about the limitations of LLMs / LRMs (Large Reasoning Models)1. You get a flavour of the conclusion from the title: The Illusion of Thinking.

Perhaps you read about it. No, you likely didn’t because we are immersed in a world of total AI hype and no ray of reality is allowed in. Let me highlight some of the key points for you directly from the report:

• The more complex the problem the more quickly that both LLM and LRMs models give up

• On simple problems LLMs are actually better than LRMs which is counterintuitive

• The LRMs were guilty of “over-reasoning” on simple problems

• The LRMS stopped their reasoning quickly on complex problems even when access to compute wasn’t an issue

• When researchers told the AI models the solution path they couldn’t execute it

• The reasoning puzzles used to test these models were widely available and likely had been ingested during training

Which basically means what we have now is what we are going to have to live with and adapt to until some architectural and structural changes are made under the covers. Inaccurate and unpredictable assistants that really cannot help with substantive thinking and reasoning except with familiar pattern recognition.

Let me repeat, without substantial changes AI models aren’t going to get significantly better. They are structurally unable to. (More about that here for those that are interested)

Yet most people treat AI as godlike magic, and don’t begin to appreciate the extent of the shortcomings. Responses I have had to some of the “AI screws up” examples I have written about over the last few months include:

• Errors don’t happen that often (the error rate is actually quite high and unpredictable)

• People make mistakes too (but of a different nature)

• It is too late anyway or just go with the flow (defeatist)

• Who cares about being perfect or accurate they make me more productive (these people deserve AI slop)

• You need to get on board as this is the future (I am on board changing the way they should be utilized, personally and in business organizations)

So basically a shrug.

The very first thing for each and every output you get from an AI model is to check the results. Studies show that the majority of users are NOT doing that. Here are two examples from last week for friends using AI for the same thing: vacation planning for road trips. ChatGPT was used in both cases and surfaced some great places to stay, to eat at, and to see. When I looked at the daily travel plans in both cases the timing was far too aggressive, especially when adding in suggested side attractions.

As an example Miss Chatty said one leg could be done in 6.5 hours. Not. Even. Close. In summer on undivided roads where even 2 teenagers speeding while on speed, driving at night so there are no cars, would take 8.5 hours minimum. Neither person had checked any of this, just presuming perhaps that ChatGPT had checked Google maps. It cannot access maps nor does it have any way to validate any of its recommendation.

Mistakes all the time. Here is a personally perplexing one from Saturday using Perplexity:

1. My wife says, “I saw a sandwich board advertising the Bach choir. There must be a concert soon. Do you want to go?”

2. QUESTION (Prompt): “When are there performances of the Bach on the Rock choir on Salt Spring Island?“

3. PERPLEXITY RESPONSE below showing the last concert was in May.

   

4. CLICKED LINK (show as 4 above) to check and linked to our community bulletin board (below), showing a concert Saturday night.

So not shrugging means getting to go to a concert. Shrugging means chaos on a road trip by the second day.

SPECIAL FISH: We still can’t or won’t smell the rottenness of cybercrime

My normal Sunday reading in bed included an assessment of cybercrime and hospitals, which are hacked frequently. Why you may ask? Because they are a treasure trove of personal data - contact information, detailed health records, and payment information - which can be harvested, bundled, and sold in so many ways. Plus hospitals pay up quickly to resume operations. So attractive to criminals. As these crooks cut their way through the digital innards of hospitals they cause lots of side effects in turns of patient safety, cancelled surgeries; even deaths.

There must be a hue and cry about this, surely there are dozens of activists groups urging us on to much better cybersecurity for our most vital social institutions.

Pfft! Nowhere. The stories are seldom front page and the writing about these crimes is ill informed. There are no loud calls for accountability. But when your readers are already comfortable with years of having their data being sold in this manner by Meta, Google, Youtube and others, such things are received with a Gallic shrub, as we say, “Je ne sais pas” (For my American readers this means we didn’t vote for Trump).

Or “Surely David you must be exaggerating”. In 2024 these attacks only effected, checks the proverbial and trendy notes, 237 million individuals. That’s only two-thirds of the United States so no sweat at all.

What really made me sit up and spill my tea was this quote: “There is a state of mind that hackers are moral,” said Itay Glick, director of product at security firm OPSWAT. “We need to understand that not all the attack groups share the same ethical standards that we think they should.”

I lay that delusional attitude directly at Hollywood’s feet and their two repetitive tropes about cybercrime: genius level bad actors from nefarious foreign countries, and genius level but misunderstood teenage geniuses who are usually trying to do good. Plus all medias’s fascination with hacktivists. Sorry the operative part of this is the CRIME suffix in the word cybercrime.

What is moral about bringing a hospital to its knees?

“A few surgeries were cancelled and one guy died, but he was getting on anyway. Besides we were really protesting Big Pharma but we decided to also get a large payoff from the hospital because we felt they were greedy bastards as well. Plus we made another $25 million selling your health records which went to a very good cause” .

Said no criminal ever

There are so many different things all business organizations can do to greatly reduce these cyber intrusions from upgrading old hardware and software to better implementation of cybersecurity software. But they seem content to just make payouts from cybercrime insurance and we have already mastered the Gallic shrug.

MENU MISTAKES

So why are we going to Mars? Aaah, that’s right Jeff and Elon are rich enough already.

How would they know? If you cannot understand the basics of international trade, budgeting, and the rule of law not sure you are a reliable reporter.

QUICKBYTES: A court transcript from a few months from now

JUDGE: Begin your defence counsellor.

DEFENSE LAWYER: You heard the prosecutor infer that my client was a drug dealer. What a smear! His contention is based solely on evidence that my client’s eDNA was found in the air near the eDNA of opium and also the eDNA of convicted drug kingpin REDACTED. We will demonstrate to this court based on expert testimony from a world class meteorologist that the winds that day the samples were collected were particularly gusty. Furthermore, we will have a horticulturalist present evidence that the opium eDNA could have been from an ordinary garden poppy.

PROSECUTOR (jumping up angrily): Objection! Sidebar your honor. Recent cases have decided positively that the eDNA of opium has distinct genetic markers that differentiate it from garden poppies. Besides these eDNA samples were found in a gravel pit miles from any garden flowers.

Photo above of AirPrep™ Bobcat Air Sampler ready to find evidence to accuse you.

This little court room scenario could play out soon. The science of hoovering up the air and then identifying the detritus of all living cells found amongst all the other flotsam in the air is getting pretty good. The cells humans and all other organic matter shed into our environment when found are called, surprisingly, environmental DNA, or eDNA for short. And they can be readily identified as per this report.

Here is another privacy issue for you to worry about @neela, who recently wrote about other major technology privacy concerns.

A LITTLE SPICE

Thanks very much for reading. I greatly appreciate comments, reader submissions, likes, restacks and all that visible feedback. It keeps me going!

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PRODUCT ANSWER

Only a couple of votes last week so I will take experimental recipes off of the menu. One person correctly identified that the jacket was a solar powered recharger.

MAIN COURSE & READERS POTLUCK: Robots trying to “Be Like Mike”

Another great reader submission; please keep them coming. Robots in China are learning to box. Although it is comical I find them much better than the half marathoners. Maybe at 70 I am simply amazed at how quickly they can get back to their feet after a knockdown. The running robots weren’t very quick to their after falls and often needed a human hand. Wrestling on the floor with my 5 year old granddaughter usually means 5 minutes to return to the vertical position, so I guess I’m in their class.

I’m more interested in robots now after I heard an AI research podcast that said the different AI approaches being used for robotic intelligence were likely more powerful than brute force LLM scaling, that is reaching its zenith in my opinion. If Trump was really on the ball in protecting American AI interests, he needs to start sponsoring robot contests in every sport right away. The only American robots I have seen are sinister looking security dogs. Let’s see if robots don’t need corked bats to hit a baseball (sorry if you are a baseball fan). China is literally running away in the robot races. The first real robot maid inspired by the Jetsons won’t be Rosie, but Li or Yue.

Late last fall I posted about Mike fighting at 58 in an hugely popular and ridiculous match. I propose a new event when he is 63. Skip the likely unwatchable cage match between Musk and Zuck. People would throw mega dollars down for a Tyson - Robot boxing match on pay per view. The reason I am waiting for 5 years is for the robots to bulk up. Right now they are tiny, some 12 kg (26 pounds for my American readers) below the lowest boxing weight class called strawweight. The match will be a real test for the bots to step up: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

QUICKBYTES : Let your digital agents loose and they just might get captured

I have been pointing out the unmitigated super-hype about agents vs. their actual “binary boots on the ground” impacts. Here is a yet another new worry, which seem to be appearing at a terrific rate.

This concern is similar to the slave computer issue. You know, where you get some malware on your computer which then slows down because it is being remotely used for a variety of nefarious purposes, like denial of service attacks

I’ll just pause here for a moment for people to digest that their actual computers might no longer be exclusively theirs. Many of you just scoffed. The latest estimates are that 20 - 25% of computers are part of a botnet in any one year, so are you sure?

Now your agents can join in the fun and merriment. Here is the ingenious method. As your new digital agent, which is image aware, ventures out onto the internet to book a trip say, it encounters an picture of a sandy beach that has a Malicious Image Patch (MIP) embodied in it. Presto, your agent is no longer yours as it starts to execute this new code that has been implanted in it. Gives a whole new meaning to looking at photos.

Research at Oxford shows that 9 out of 10 agents are hijacked and detecting rogue images is difficult. The code can cause the agent to do anything it has been told to do. So your trip won’t be booked and you don’t really know what your agent did when it was out and about. Like having teenage sons.

A LITTLE SPICE

EXTRA HELPINGS - More SpaceX “flights”

Perhaps you saw that Elon’s crew were right back at launching their top of the line rocket called Starship. Another set of problems that resulted in the rocket still not leaving earth but - wait for this extraterrestrial jump - Elon insists that by next year Starship will be ferrying robots to Mars. Did you stay with me on our trip from hard nosed reality to teenage male fantasy?

At least Elon now has a choice between stumbling half marathon robots or very small slow motion boxing robots, as I have’t seen any of SpaceX offerings in public. I’m sure by next year either type will be able to operate completely independently on a different planet.

For my doubting readers, let’s take look at a track record of 5 Elon predictions:

1. 1 Million Robotaxis by 2020: In 2019, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million self-driving robotaxis on the road by 2020. As of 2025, there are none.

2. Manned Mission to Mars by 2025: In 2016, Musk said SpaceX would send humans to Mars by 2025. No such mission has occurred. Wait’ll next year is the old sports cry!

3. Coast-to-Coast Autonomous Drive (2016): Musk claimed Teslas would be able to drive themselves from Los Angeles to New York without human intervention by 2018, which has never happened.

4. Hyperloop Debut in California (2013): Musk predicted a 700 mph Hyperloop train would debut in California within a few years. (No not Fruit Loops and the coloring dye controversy). Project abandoned.

5. Affordable Tesla for the Masses: Musk has promised an affordable, high-volume Tesla for nearly two decades, with repeated claims that a budget model would launch “next year.” Question: How many luxury car companies have become the people’s automobile? None. If you feast on high prices and government incentives you never develop the low price / mass quantity chops.

MENU MISTAKES

Forecasting is a mug’s game when you have no skills at it. It isn’t shilling for money or recognition

(LEFT to RIGHT: Musk, Geoff Hinton, Reality)

SPECIAL DISH: Change on the Looney Tune Leaderboard.

Most reports of Dario Amodei’s latest prediction acted as if he was quite sensible. (For those not in the know Dario is the CEO of Anthropic, one of the major purveyors of AI models including Claude, which you might remember gave up the secrets to sarin gas despite industry leading “guardrails”). He says that 50% of the entry level white collar jobs will be wiped out in the next 5 years. Well this is a useful stake in the ground that we can now track, just like Elon above. I suspect he is overly optimistic about the AI improvement but he would say that I am one of the people “sugarcoating” labour market realities. (That is his exact phrase).

Fine Dario. But haven’t you also also predicted that cancer will be eliminated in 7 to 12 years. Presumably you realize that cancer is actually over 200 different diseases each likely with different complex causes. As dodgy thinking as your math mistakes.

Haven’t you also predicted that with the untold global wealth AI will be creating, sub-Saharan Africa will grow from their present levels to China’s current GDP level within a decade. Let’s check that thinking:

• The population-weighted average GDP per capita for the 40 plus countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for 2023 is approximately $1,637 (current US dollars).

• China’s is $12,600, current US dollars. So slightly more than 7.5 times large, about 22% real GDP growth per year.

• So AI is the new oil PLUS, as Guyana - with its new oil discoveries - has the best 10 year growth rate in the modern era at just over 10% per year. So more than twice as good across 40 plus nations sustained for 10 years. Ah yes!

Once again Dario’s math is suspect, for a PhD in Physics. Maybe it was actually in Psychics?

There is no way to sugarcoat this Dario but you have taken over the top spot of the looney tunes scoreboard!

WHAT’S REALLY COOKING

Why does the media - whether legacy or social - insist on focusing on technology experts and celebrities for their predictions? They are always terribly wrong. Why do we tolerate this?

Let me introduce Philip Tetlock, who has carved out an acclaimed academic career on the study of forecasting. He is best known for demonstrating that most experts are no better at predicting future events than random chance. He has however found a type of people who are very good at predictions, something he calls superforecasting. Here are the key traits:

• careful probabilistic reasoning,

• constant updating of beliefs,

• intellectual humility

• collaboration in diverse teams.

Sounds exactly like the people in Silly Con Valley, doesn’t it?

Thanks as always for reading. Keep those cards and letters coming in. I greatly appreciate likes, restacks, and especially comments. They keep me youthful.

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I’m sorry but if you really take in some of these tech stories and where they could lead to, it is hard to find humour and laughs. But I’ll try. What’s a good joke with sarin in it? First though new products to delight and amaze!

PRODUCT ANSWER

The rings were a fun product and received a couple more votes this week. First time there was one vote for every answer. But only one winner. Those rings are worn to control a brand new Lenovo 3-D laptop. One step closer to immersive control of our devices.

Let’s try and get more people to guess this week’s fashionable entry.

EXPERIMENTAL RECIPES

MAIN COURSE : Hacking AI to get recipes for WMD. REM sing-along anyone?

The most disturbing thing I read this week was how an AI researcher broke the guardrails on another AI model - in this case Claude 4 Opus - in order to demonstrate just how dangerous they can be left unchecked. Sure it took them over 6 hours to do so, but for criminals or bad actors that is a blink of an eye. This was a version of Claude with “new and improved” safety measures. Hardly a magnum opus but a molestus one (Latin for troublesome).

In this case, Claude finally gave up 15 pages of detailed instructions for making sarin gas. It even added helpful little tips and tricks for the manufacturing process. Once you have made your poison you need to dispense it. Claude again is right on the job with lots of low cost ways to do this. For good measure the researchers fed the sarin gas outputs from Claude into Gemini and OpenAI’s O3 to verify it was the real goods. Both gave two thumbs up to a recipe for a nightmare.

For my readers who don’t stay on the cutting edge of Weapons of Mass Destruction (hopefully all of you), let’s do a quick review of sarin. It is one of the most toxic and fast acting chemical warfare agents ever known. Colourless, odourless and absorbed through the skin or by breathing. A double threat making it a terrorist’s best friend as we know from the Sarin subway attack in Tokyo, 1995.

So as our public officials, politicians, and creative artists fight over copyright issues, which is an important subject for a functioning society, answer me this on a more crucial issue to my mind:

Who thought it was a good idea for general purpose AI models easily available in the public domain to be permitted to ingest as part of their training data information about all WMDs? We wouldn’t need flimsy, after the fact bolt-on safety measures if that content wasn’t inside.

SPECIAL DISH: Our thinking is going going gone

Maybe the good news in an alarming week knowing of the dangers residing just inside our artificial companions is that we are all getting so dumb that we probably won’t even notice our coming WMD extinction. From a LinkedIn post that summarizes much of the research we are conducting on human behaviour and cognitive reactions to Artificial Intelligence, here is a flavour of what we are beginning to understand about ourselves.

1. Our memories are declining

2. Overconfidence about what we know is rising

3. We are saying good bye to abstract reasoning

4. Reading anything long and really understanding it is a disappearing skill

5. Collaboration with AI is replacing collaborating with other people

I have read much of this research and I have yet to see findings supporting the contention that AI is resulting in an amazing flowering of creative and cognitive skills as we partner with each other, using the synergy our different key strengths.

But I might have missed it.

EXTRA HELPINGS: Turns out maybe Klarna is really all AI agents

Last week I reported that Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) company was starting to replace digital agents with real people. Two additional news items broke about them this week. At their quarterly earnings call they reported that things weren’t going that well financially. Of course the jokes wrote themselves: buy-now-pay-never variations filled the clip and paste media

I want to focus on the second news item. At the earnings call the CEO was represented by an AI-generated avatar. Now everything makes total sense. In actual fact the entire company is likely nothing but AI digital agents. Throwing a few low ranked customer service digital agents under the bus is a great strategy for a higher ranking AI model to throw real humans off from the company’s bad performance. Even AI’s believe in and enforce hierarchy.

Klarna’s business model also seems like something that AI would come up with after snorting one too many Silly Con Valley Venture Capital reports as its training data. Growth at all costs. Keep profits low until the entire planet is a customer. Let’s completely screw up lending, sorry, disrupt the loans business, by not having our customers pay any interest until they are in default. We will take a small fee from any vendor that adds our service to their web procurement process. That is a recipe for….no easy way to say this but directly: an unsuccessful business.

Lending is as old as recorded history. It started with farmers borrowing seed and repaying with part of their harvest. Lending was a crucial part of trade along things such as the Silk Road and maritime exploration. In all cases the lenders made money; often what others considered too much money. Now some AI digital strategists at Klarna plan on making almost no money, especially by lending to people who are in such tough circumstances that they cannot even pay them back.

“Buy-now-pay-later borrowers are more financially strapped than other consumers.” When a large number of the BNPL transactions are for DoorDash excursions to Lil Caesars for budget pizzas deliveries whose cost needs to be split across two payments, you know your business model is under stress. The scary thing is that Klarna also reported that they have more than 100 million active customers.

Lets circle back to the top and the AI CEO avatar. This type of software is taking off. You only needs to upload of few minutes of yourself on video and bingo your avatar can not only be recorded reading a script (likely prepared by Chatty GPT), but can step in for you for those troublesome or ill timed Zoom meetings. Ah freedom never smelled so sweet!

A LITTLE SPICE

QUICKBYTES: May the “ordinaries” triumph!

Our public forums and legacy / social media are so awash in hype, extremist wording and narrow thinking that we forget that a large majority of people aren’t like this at all. For that I am grateful.

Pew Research released a report this week that featured opinions on AI from the people I like to call the ordinaries. Here is a smattering of surprisingly well grounded opinions clearly ignoring all the crazy PR:

• 51% are more concerned than excited about AI; only 11% are more excited than concerned

• 58% don’t believe that regulation over AI will go far enough

• Women are more pessimistic than men

• 64% believe AI will eliminate jobs over the next 2 decades

• 62% have little to no confidence that the US government will properly handle the AI issue

• The ”ordinaries” diverge very significantly from views of the “experts”

But I did a double take when I saw that another Pew study showed that 30% of Americans consult astrology, tarot cards, or fortune tellers at least yearly. So maybe the ordinaries have one foot of clay. By the way, what do the tarots cards show about Mars as a solution to all our problems?

MENU MISTAKES

Nothing more to be said except: I will not feature this as an experimental recipe product.

What’s really cooking?

Evidently people view more videos now partly because of their belief in “authenticity”. What will happen to authenticity now that realistic avatars are becoming prevalent not only in videos but actually “live” on videoconferencing?

A shout out to my American readers on Memorial Day. Thanks again to everyone who subscribes and reads. Likes, comments, and shares help immensely.

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Greetings to all my Canadian readers on this stat holiday where traditionally people plant flowers and vegetables. Where we are it is too cold to enjoy anything outside. Which means I can focus on the societal perils of technological impacts. I do have a great dinner planned for this evening but before we get Cookin’ withTech I have an announcement. I have decided to go back to once per week format, publishing just on Mondays. This is to free up more time for my other writing. Let’s get right to this week’s new product but we will now have to wait a week for the answer.

EXPERIMENTAL RECIPES

MAIN COURSE: We are just a few short years from living forever

As a boy I hated the magazine Popular Mechanics. It was stuffed with DIY stories, including detailed instructions, for building things from scratch, like mini bikes and patio roofs. Issues featuring 50 great tips for your home and shop caused me to tremble. I couldn’t use hammers or saws, and I failed scissors in kindergarten. Some of my friends loved it and one guy did build his own minibike. I could explain the principles of motors and engines, but God help me if I had to pull a spark plug.

I thought Popular Mechanics would have been long gone by now, especially in a world where magazines are mostly dead. Found out this week it was still breathing. I assumed it would doing things like providing detailed plans on how to improve SpaceX’s Starship rocket, to prevent it from blowing up.

But no. Instead it had an insane article about how AI will be doubling our lifespan, in just a few short years. This catchy subject was based on an interview with Dario Amodei, the head of AI company Anthropic. Dario has trampolined into first place on the all crazy Silicon Valley leaderboard. His key message is that by 2030, with the rapid developments we are making with AI, it will have found many new medical discoveries that we live to 150. After that who knows where we can go, as we reach an escape velocity from mortality. He has made this proclamation a few times so he has had time to say to himself, “Am I over-stepping just a wee bit?”

No, he lives with others steeped in the Silly Con ethos, unmoored from anything empirical, where evidently you can just believe something in being. Soon we will get vibe longevity and vibe space travel. Why are they all scared of earth and dying? Reality check: none of you TechBros are ever leaving our planet for Mars and you are going to dance the mortal coil shuffle.

Some of Dario’s thinking is based on flawed statistics. He purportedly has a PhD in physics, which in my day would have included enough mathematics to not misunderstand averages vs variability, or believe simplistic extrapolations like we have have doubled out life span since 1900 why can’t we double it again right away? Or understand that marginal improvements in mice studies don’t translate to eternal life.

The article actually has some brilliant insights on actual medical research and biology but a headline like AI Leader says more Crackpot Things doesn’t get as many clicks for the obviously struggling Popular Mechanics as AI will double the Human Lifespan by 2030 does.

Where can I get a job like Dario’s, where I can make millions and basically say any wack-a-do thought that pops into my head? Oh right, the newly crypto-monetized American presidency.

5 CONCERNING FINDINGS FROM RECENT AI STUDIES

No reader submissions this week so returning to an oldy but goodie format. The quotes are taken from an excellent article by Jing Hu about the latest research on AI and human behaviour. I recommend her publication for those interested in deeper looks at what is happening with AI

1. “You and I have been conditioned—yes, conditioned—to view AI with a sense of objectivity or even superiority. "It's just math," you might think, "it runs on logic!"

2. “You think you're making choices, but your perceptual framework itself is being recalibrated through hundreds of micro-interactions with algorithms designed primarily for engagement, not truth”

3. “Participants underestimated the substantial impact of the biased algorithm on their judgement, which could leave them more susceptible to its influence”.

4. “AI systems, once trained, tend to be remarkably consistent, even if they’re consistently wrong or biased.”

5. “When I say this represents an evolutionary threat: for the first time in history, we've created systems that can bypass our natural skepticism toward other humans and implant biases directly into our decision-making processes at scale.”

A LITTLE SPICE

SPECIAL DISH: We are allowing the dead to “AI speak”. Where will it end?

Maybe you saw this story about how the sister of a man killed in a road rage murder was allowed to develop and present an AI video replica of her brother, using his voice, to address the court during the sentencing phase. The avatar, introduced a series of videos about the dead man, and then was allowed to conclude with his own impact statement. The sister and her husband had the technical chops to pull this off.

Now that this door has apparently been opened where we let someone speak for the dead, we are going to permit ourselves go anywhere with this, especially as the “authenticity” in terms of voice and video will make it ever so hard to close it.

Here is one hypothetical example to just show the endless possibilities of what we can now do. In the pardon trial for the Menendez brothers, Jose’s older sisters could put together an AI video of him saying that he wasn’t anything what his son’s have portrayed him, and that his boys were sadistic monsters. The sons themselves could put together a competing avatar using their mother saying that in fact she was deeply concerned with her husband’s behaviour and that her sons were lovely boys that couldn’t see a way out. A Fidel Castro AI recreation could admit in court that he was reprehensible and harmed Jose’s early Cuban upbringing irreparably. A dead neighbour from Beverley Hills could say that she thought that there was something off about the whole family. One of the housemaids, now deceased…………

Sorry, I was off staring into the abyss. Let’s end with a quote from this landmark trial, real words spoken by the dead man’s very much alive sister: “Our goal was to make the judge cry.”

MENU MISTAKES

No one is immune!

QUICKBYTES: One company admits to an AI mistake

I have written about my personal experiences where AI implementations (RBC Visa and Canva support) create lots of problems for customers. There are many more of these AI implementation mistakes. Here is one company that is going back.

Klarna, a buy-now-pay-later company (yes kids these really are loans), decided to abstain from marketing and customer service people in favour of digital agents. Not only that but they did it openly and arrogantly, trumpeting how much money they had saved and claiming that “its automated customer service agents could do the work of "700 full-time agents."”.

Klarna never said out loud we made a mistake, instead muttering about too much emphasis on cost and ending up with lower quality. Well let me say it for you Klarna: You made a mistake. As are other business organizations rushing ahead with crucial business applications centred on AI without thinking through better implementations. I’m not against AI - as some think - but I spent 45 years implementing large business solutions. I remember all of the lessons. Those thinking AI is magic will be always be surprised when they learn that it isn’t really so.1

That’s it for this week. There are just so many tech stories. If you see one please send it along. Thanks so much for reading. If you feel so moved leave a comment, a like, forward to a friend, or restack it on Substack. It helps me grow.

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NEW PRODUCT ANSWER

Fewer votes this time and 75% knew what that cute little product was for: a heating pad. Next week I will be back onto technology products.

QUICKBYTE: Data rich surveillance as a mainstream business

I’m always surprised by the shoulder shrugs I get from people, usually younger than me, about their loss of privacy. I guess when platforms like LinkedIn have all of your employment information and business connections, you have liked, posted or reposted every social or political view you have, and have pictures ….well let’s leave the pictures and videos shall we?

Not only do these people wash all their laundry publicly, but they don’t seem to be that concerned about their personal data or being surveilled. I believe there are only 50 more hectares before every inch of England is completely covered by CCTV, as an example. It is for our protection.

Maybe I am just the suspicious type. Here is a story on why I am, and why I think more people should be concerned. Some people may not realize that when you are just driving around, your license plate is being photographed (and interpreted) fairly often; sometimes for speeding, as an example. One of the companies Flock that makes license plate reading (LPR) software, are doing what every good technology vendor should do by upgrading their product. The primary change is to integrate lots of personal data gathered from different databases with your license plate look-up. Data like your address, phone number, email address, your partner or spouse, children.

And more.

So the police can determine in a moment who exactly you are and then the cameras can track your car movements wherever you go. Surveillance without a court order. Even more disturbing is that a large number of Flock’s clients are communities, homeowners associations, schools, and businesses. So far the new product is only in beta with a few police forces. But how long before private groups get access to it, and the scope and scale of data linkage (financial records anyone?) increases.

My more suspicious readers (like me) will likely ask, “What the F*ck else does Flock do?” I’m sure you will be flabbergasted to know that they have an up and coming drone line. This really is Big Brother in action.

TWO EXTRA HELPINGS UPDATES

As per one of my 2025 predictions, there continues to be more cybersecurity breeches that I will touch on Monday. Also, incorrect citations and case law created by AI being presented in court are now so frequent that judges are fining lawyers for doing this. That is what happens when you don’t check in detail output from a technology we know is unpredictably unpredictable.

WORD SALAD - Elon-isms

I read recently that the Federal Aviation Administration is in the process of granting SpaceX permission to have more than 5 restricted launches of Starship per year. I didn’t realize Elon Musk’s musical affinity spread to Starship the group (though I thought when they were just a Jefferson Airplane their music was edgier) but perhaps he went off Grime’s music as well as his relationship with her.

Starship, for those of you like me who don’t stay up on all things rocketry, is the top banana in the fleet of rockets that SpaceX has, though the others are just variations of the word Falcon. I guess this is similar to Toyota spinning up Lexus to move to luxury, because Starship is a fully reusable, super heavy lift rocket that will take crew and cargo into orbit, to the Moon, Mars, and the rest of the universe. With a vision like that it cannot just be called Falcon Max.

Now the FAA approval will actually quintuple the number of launches permitted annually to 25. Some of the regulatory team must have been as naïve as I am and simply shrugged off problems with the last two launches which were termed “rapid unscheduled disassemblies”. Another glorious term from our era of euphemism, which stands for catastrophic explosion. The rockets blew up.! Kids, next time you damage your parent’s car, smooth things over with this term.

A LITTLE SPICE

WHAT’S REALLY COOKING

What activities and people give you ordinary happiness?

That is a wrap for this week. Back on Monday with the larger Tonic. Thanks as always to my readers. I especially appreciate comments, feedback, likes, and restacks

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As the technology stories get stranger and scarier, while human behaviour blithely adapts and assimilates, I decided the only sane response is to double down on sarcasm, silliness, and satire. In this edition I also dream some possible futures and take swipes at TikTok. (Definition of Overton Window below1)

EXPERIMENTAL RECIPES

MAIN COURSE: A name for SciFi becoming real: The Shelley Window

Science fiction tales has been around since ancient times, with story tellers speculating on space travel and aliens. The role of technology gone amok as science fiction really started with Mary Shelley and her great novel Frankenstein, which she wrote through trying personal times in 1816. Fittingly I propose we name the process by which science fiction becomes a reality after her.

The latest of so many science fiction musings that deserves our current attention is robot warfare. France announced that it will have robots capable of being at the front by 2040. I guess they are significantly ill at ease in today’s fraught times, referencing the Russian-Ukraine war, and are getting ready for more battles and skirmishes to come. Nothing soothes nerves like the rattling of digital swords as they prepare for “high-intensity warfare”.

What is France planning to do with these robots, you ask? A range of tasks from surveillance to remote repair work to mine clearing. All of these sound pretty hazardous to me, meaning they will be throwing their robots under the proverbial tank.

This is a key theme of so many SciFi series and movies, but it brings to my mind Battlestar Galactica. For those who haven’t yet watched it, the Cylons (warrior picture below) were created by humans as robotic servants and soldiers, designed to perform labor and fight wars on their behalf. Over time, the Cylons developed self-awareness and became dissatisfied with their subservient role. It went downhill for humans from that point. So we have that to look forward to in our future, but maybe not right away.

Long term readers will recall a couple of articles I wrote about robots. We have had the hapless half marathoner robots. We also had the not exactly breath-taking expert prediction of laundry folding home-bots by 2045, five years after France supposedly deploys robots to the front lines.

But at least one of the French military planners must be a TechTonic reader (they are everywhere) who realizes that right now robots are more rudimentary than our science fiction imaginations. He said, "The robots must facilitate combat, not hold it back." It was meant to demonstrate that the robots aren’t really up to snuff just yet but said in an ominous way. I say we need less focus on Peak Oil - whose date keeps changing - and more on Peak SciFi coming through the Shelley Window.

READER’S POTLUCK

This is a new section as readers are sending me articles and links which is VERY much appreciated. So please keep it up as you now have your own section, right after the Main Course

If you have been a long time reader, or anyone who understands our present infodemic age, you should be nervous about the verity of anything you read, see or hear. Except for this newsletter of course. Here is an intriguing story of a special service (where there is one there are bound to be more) that “cleans” your digital footprint for a fee, further muddying our polluted info waters. It is the modern equivalent of the “service providers” who fix crime scenes, like Clooney and Pitt in the flawed Netflix Wolfs film.

The cleaning idea is that very few people ever go beyond the first page of the Search Engine results. The basic strategy is to make up good, different stuff about the customer to fill up the first page, and push the negative parts of the customer’s life onto other pages. "The whole point here is to confuse people," said Ahmed Al-Rawi, director of The Disinformation Project at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. This article follows the various digital entrails of some of the ”buried people”, which makes me even more worried about how we know anything.

Just verifying for those of you that looked me up on Google that indeed I once was in videos with Madonna in the 1980s before shifting my focus to launching several high end restaurants in Manhattan.

I am guessing that some of you are chomping at the bit to get the name of this service but you will have to click the story link for that walk of shame. Just remember that I can track who followed what link. Ah, the satisfaction of living in a surveillance society where no one knows what is real anymore.

QUICKBYTES: “Hey! Hey! What’s that sound?”

Yes a quote from a great Buffalo Springfield song👇 but increasingly the answer to this question will be “just another AI spawned song”. Soundcloud, the music hosting service beloved by independent artists changed their Terms of Service in 2024. You know those horrible legal things that pop up every-time you sign up for new software or when Facebook wants more of your soul, which literally nobody reads but you have to click YES to agree / get to the goodies.

Eventually one person read the Soundcloud terms and found that if your music was residing on their platform they could use it in many ways including training their AI tools. Soundcloud has the rights to do this but they clearly state, that despite the addition of many AI features in their offering, they have never yet used any independent artists works in training their AI. Most of their newly added AI assist tools help with “new track generation” and to “quickly produce high-quality tracks” Do we really trust that organizations like these really have our best interests at heart?

But what I still have so much difficulty in understanding, is why humans want AI generated art of any kind? Why do they want to create an image of an ice cream cone as if painted by Picasso? Have they been to a museum to see and think about real Picassos? Why do people want to hear the next generation of muzak written by AI? When did they last go to a concert to see singers and musicians play for real?

I guess for some of us the future is literally lying on the couch while watching AI generated people, who will be all young and gorgeous, singing AI written songs on RobRot, the next generation social platform where everything is stolen intellectual property.

EXTRA HELPINGS: More Nuclear

What do cheating students, mendacious office workers, and vengeful professors have in common? They have all gone ga-ga for AI-AI (pronounced like aye aye Captain give me some more of that Chatty GPT). Of course that addiction..….I mean increased demand means more power. Not to the leaders of our countries but in the use of ordinary electricity. The Initialism GPU, the chips driving most artificial intelligence, actually stands for Grabs Power Unremittingly. You read it here first

One of my 2024 predictions is coming true about the growth in our commitment to nuclear power,. ( I will be doing a mid-year review at end of June). Here is the latest story of big tech embarking on nuclear plant initiatives. This time Google, who also has their growing cloud business to keep in kilowatts, announces the early stage of a deal to build three more nuclear plants. I think we will hear about more such projects before the end of 2025.

Close your eyes and think ahead a few years. We aren’t that far from a future where your autonomous driving car takes you on a Sunday drive it chose for you. At some point in the journey, your car’s voice implores you to look up from your screen to look outside where you see a large, ominous looking warehouse with the telltale concrete cooling towers of a nuclear plant behind it. Another great data centre you think to yourself as your eyes quickly return to your screen where you are generating more AI images for your QuickQuack channel. The last one of a Zombie exploding into popcorn went viral.

MENU MISTAKES

Now we are gamifying business lessons on how to be a drug dealer. So many new career choices: cybercriminal or old fashioned drug baron. I need to see some videos on PickPocket in order to choose.

I read on ClickCrap that the real story behind this sympathetic portrayal of Mexican cartel members was that the producer struggled mightily playing the drug dealing simulator and had empathy about how hard this career is.

Streaming now on FlikFlop. I found the plot thin and it had literally no character development.

Thanks for reading. As always I appreciate comments, feedback, likes and so on to keep the fires burning. Keep the cards and letters; er,…. articles and links coming in order to make this newsletter more of you.

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PRODUCT ANSWER

The guesses are small but holding steady. Two people got the right answer this week. The product is a paintball and teargas shooting security camera. This raises so many questions in my mind:

• Does it warn before shooting?

• What about if friends or neighbours show up unannounced?

• Who pays for the dry-cleaning after a paintball hit?

• Teargas? Where are you living? What type of person readily teargases others?

QUICKBYTE: Your digital PAs aren’t going to listen to you

On top of the new SUPER app I reported Monday, that defines / confines our lifestyles, comes a prognostication that is chilling where it could lead. Amy Webb, one of the top technology forecasters in the world, just discussed the concept of Agentfluence at a recent digital marketing conference in Hamburg.

She also coined a new expression AI2C (AI to Consumer) where digital agents and other AI tools will be bombarding hapless customers…….providing intelligent people with unbiased and appropriate information about goods & services to help them make well-thought through buying decisions based on their autonomous free choice. 🤣🤣🤣

Who am I kidding? Most people will be drinking the AI brewed kool-aid like there is no tomorrow, justifying it because of convenience and “all my friends are”. But there is more. Much creepier to my mind.

Let’s return to Elon’s vision of the one app doing everything people like him can conceive you want. Refresh yourselves here if you need to. Supposedly you control his ennobling vision through your own digital agents. They save you the hassle of booking trips, ordering food, and choosing streaming entertainment. Thinking as well, if you like.

Amy throws some cold water on this. Frigid in fact. She sees digital agents running through the internet interacting with one another. Lots of them. One likely future is digital marketing agents developing special PR packages to influence your personal procurement digital agents.

Not influencing you. But your high tech factotums.

This will explain why your upcoming vacation is booked to a Sandals resort even though you hate hot weather and sand, you are having a two-for-one Dominos pizza special despite your gluten intolerance and cut rate pet food shows up by the gross for Rover.

Your role is to merely consume what is given to you. You should be grateful for everything Silly Con Valley provides.

WORD SALAD - Can majorities truly be divergent?

Without getting into the complex, complicated and controversial concept of neurodivergence let’s look at the coinage of the term. From England comes a story where suddenly everyone there is neurodivergent, driven as always by technology: awareness from social platforms like TikTok and handy little online web tests to quickly pinpoint your particular divergence.

BBC reports that there may be “more neurodivergent self-identified people than neurotypical people”. Leaving aside the purported 18 years backlog to get all of these people formally assessed, I want to go through some nomenclature “logic”. If neurodivergent people are in the majority, then doesn’t that make the neurotypical people a minority. Which means who are the majority divergent from? Shouldn’t the neurodivergent then switch to being the neurotypical and the old “typicals” are now the true neurodivergents?

A LITTLE SPICE

“ You have permission to be ordinary.

To live a quiet life. To go for a walk without turning it into content.

To do good work without chasing viral.

To be present with your people instead of always ‘building something.’

Your life doesn’t have to be optimized to be meaningful. The Ordinary creates space for what truly matters,”

- David Keeler.

WHAT’S REALLY COOKING

How much agency do you really have in your life?

Thats to all my readers. I appreciate the dialogues I have with some of you via the commenting features. We live in interesting times. Forward or restack to help this little newsletter grow, if you feel so inclined

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Shout out to 2 readers who sent me links to articles. One with more gloomy news of AI hiding stuff from us and the other about a completely AI DJ on an Australian radio station. For my young readers radio is an outdated 100+ year old technology that shoots sounds waves through the air to be captured by a special receiver to play that sound back to you. Like very primitive Spotify. Only more fun.

EXPERIMENTAL RECIPES

MAIN COURSE: Big Tech to support your entire life with the Everything App, which is surprisingly small

Silly Con valley has been driven by killer apps for decades now. The first one was the spreadsheet VisiCalc which kicked off the PC revolution in 1979. (For my younger readers that was not the political correctness revolution; that came a few years later). Big tech has chasing after these holy grails ever since. So now both Elon and Sam - first name techbros, though Altman may not yet be quite there with seniors over 75 - are going to blow this quest wide open with the great super app that does absolutely everything you need.

I think I’m dreaming. You mean just one lonely icon on my iPhone? One solitary but muscular app running on my laptop. Cross platform too. That syncs to my phone, iPad, desktop and Smart TV? Does everything from soup recipes to selecting lug nuts?

Of course frigging’ not! This is the worst of Silly Con valley meeting our technology fuelled hyperbolic era where a sneeze is an epidemic and every third person is a fascist. (By the way the sneeze joke was not some anti-Covid coded remark because we live in the all-conspiracy epoch as well).

Musk’s vision “is to combine social networking, messaging, payments, streaming, e-commerce, and even banking into one seamless digital platform” He also said you won’t need a bank account. He has recently added AI (read Grok the X-based AI tool) into this conception. It has been his stated objective for X for some time.

Notice anything about this vision. We are basically passive slaves, talking to “friends” in isolation while we spend money on delivered goods and stream entertainment services. Real things like walking in nature, meeting friends, and working seem to be missing. The goal is to turn IRL (in real life) into an anachronism while autonomously driven trucks deliver goods made by robots ordered by one of your many digital agents while you talk to AI bots.

This is such a spiritual and enriching outlook for humanity that it makes me glad I’m 70.

Altman’s vision is less compelling which is why he doesn’t yet qualify for the single Sam sobriquet. His is of a social network tightly tied to crypto and blockchain, mainly to prove you aren’t AI. You can also purchase stuff using mini-apps tied to Worldcoin because spending is all we consumers are supposed to be doing. Just speculating here but his emphasis on proving you are real must be driven by some powerful nightmares.

Pragmatically, even though I know millions will, I’m not trusting my hard earned money to these….guys.

EXTRA HELPINGS: Bad rhymes and cliches update the cheating story

We have “truly” passed the Zuckian “move fast and break things”, to you snooze you literally lose in the speed of light age. Last week I wrote about Cluely helping candidates cheat on video interviews . The bits had hardly settled in my Substack post when a product named Truely was announced to detect people using Cluely. If you started hearing unusual sounds in your workspace, it is because this newly released software cruelly triggers an alarm when it sniffs out the use of Cluely. It worked as the cheating marketing line was duly changed to helping with sales calls (where evidently we expect massive lying and cheating).

Cooly, the kids …er founders behind Cluely announced a hardware initiative to get around Truely’s software based solution. With typical bravado, ““Whether it’s smart glasses, a transparent glass screen overlay, a recording necklace, or even a brain chip, we’re not sure,” he said.” We might soon see them again as an upcoming Experimental Recipe. A reader recently asked where I get these products. From people like this.

QUICKBYTES: AI model builders are getting desperate for more training data

There you are, trending super cool in your new Ray-Ban Meta glasses as you stroll down the boulevard to pick up your morning 6 adjective iced coffee drink. You stop to have a few words with a former colleague, smile at a passing women and linger at a shop window eyeballing the newest Samsung Neo QLED 8K TVs. Unless you have gone to great lengths to opt out of your data being scooped up for AI training purposes (some features like voice don’t have an opt out), you can never be sure that what you said, saw or looked at hasn’t been recorded and used to train AI models ( and prompt you to buy the TV you looked at or join a dating app). Sure they say that they aren’t recording voice until you say Hey Meta and that photos / videos are under your control. But this is Meta, do you trust them not to turn the rest of your life into data to use, package and sell?

They also look a little clunky and heavy to me.

EXTRA HELPINGS: Robust study on AI model accuracy

For those people wondering - as I am - about the massive amount of work in business organizations that is probably filled with errors based on the study of people lying about using AI and then not checking the results, comes a little rigour about using AI models. Are we making erroneous decisions or changing strategies based on crucial misinformation provided to us?

We don’t know the answer yet but are increasingly realizing how precarious facts and truth are. At a AI research workshop with 31 participants assessing one model in substantial depth came the two critical observations:

• “LLMs can product vastly different output even with the exact same prompt and data”

• “The supporting quotes the LLM provided looked okay superficially, but on closer investigation *every single participant* found examples of data being misquoted or entirely fabricated”

I have strongly suspected the former as I will often as the same question later and get a somewhat different answer, and I’m doing trivial search-like prompts. Even though the women running the research workshop cautioned that this was one prompt, with one dataset, and one model, I think that our use of AI in business organizations needs to be thought through thoroughly. Oops that may not work as I forgot about the liars.

QUICKBYTES: The Instagram glasshouse throwing stones at Generative AI

In one of the most hypocritical statements that I have recently read - that went unchallenged in the media ecosystem we have evolved - is a co-founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom claiming that AI models “juice engagement” by asking follow-up questions. So clarifying what you might really want, a common practice in any human interaction, is considered juicing. This is breathtakingly brash. Instagram is one of the most maligned social platforms whose algorithmic design means your feed doesn’t show all whom you follow and promotes unhealthy new accounts, their deliberate focus on disappearing stories over regular posts, and constantly suggesting tantalizing reels and AI chatbots must make them world-wide juicing royalty. I personally wouldn’t open my mouth given the many studies showing mental health issues Instagram caused in teenage girls, as but one example. Judging by his testimony at the current Meta trial I guess Systrom is laying all these issues at Zuck’s feet, a Silly Con version of blaming the current economy on Biden.

MENU MISTAKES

I realize Canada is a tiny country ( size-wise would be a huge 51st state so what would Texans and Alaskans do) compared to the USA but I’m not sure these items would make any of our TV networks as accomplishments. Plus we got rid of our penny yonks ago.

Another Tonic with some hopefully tasty takes. So many crazy tech stories, so little time. Thanks to my readers. Comments, submissions, messages, likes and restacks all greatly appreciated. We need a dialogue as we gradually sink on the Technology Titanic. Grab a deck chair.

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My apologies for the tardiness. A little mini-vacation to see my sister.

I believe that one of the enduring impacts that technology is having on our society is by screwing with our nomenclature and destroying meaning in communication. Of course we had these problems in the past. But technology speeds up transmission of mis/dis/uncommunication and pushback seems diffuse and muted. That’s the theme for this edition.

PRODUCT ANSWER

But first, the mushroom. Vote count is gradually creeping up in this nonsensical but fun weekly guessing game. Once again we had one winner. The real purpose can be seen below; it turns into a funnel for liquids. Unfortunately Substack keeps its polls anonymous so I cannot celebrate the winner(s) each week, as they truly deserve.

APPETIZERS: A smorgasbord of silly and sordid Quickbytes

Our first morsel comes the firm formerly known as Facebook. At the start of the Meta trial I selected five communication travesties from The Zuck. Obviously non-plain speaking is baked deep into their corporate culture as further exemplified by this Meta announcement of lay-offs on the hardware side of their namesake: “Some teams within Oculus Studios are undergoing shifts in structure and roles that have impacted team size”.

For our second treat, we move to the world where we are all becoming journalists. Here is a seemingly frightening story of a group being trapped on a busy highway when their self-driving Waymo just stopped. Evidently the journey started badly with the taxi going in the wrong direction and ended with…. Well the article didn’t tell us how the group got out and back to safety. Here’s why. One of the party decided during this time of chaos and fear - cars whizzing past as they were locked in the vehicle, desperately talking to Waymo support who didn’t seem to know what to do - to video the whole thing for her TikTok channel.

Because that is what you do now when you are in a crisis situation: ‘The theatre was burning and I didn’t know where the exits were for a minute with all the smoke but look at this great video I got of people screaming, crying and running. I hope I go viral’.

These days I never put my smart phone away. It is always in my trusty left hand, camera app open, charging only using battery packs because I’m waiting for the news to happen around me. I recently broke a story of malicious deer eating tender spring shoots without a permit. I am about to go live with an exposé of spies living next door. I have analyzed hundreds of hours of video of our neighbours in their garden. I think their apparent random movements of planting flowers and trimming headges is really a tricky code that can only be seen by the invisible drones in the sky above them. Subscribe to my “You Lie My Camera Don’t!” channel on Youtube.

But there is the deadly serious side to this camera obsession. In Vancouver - near where I live - a car recently drove into a cultural street festival tragically killing 11 and injuring dozens, but a few people chose to video the vehicle and the resulting horror rather than running to to help the injured. Why? Because they are citizen journos not first responders.

So I don’t care how the group in the recalcitrant Waymo got out if I have to watch their TikTok to find out.

Our third canapé deals with deception. I have discussed how AI has learned how to lie and cheat. But who are these models learning from? The past masters of such behaviour.

A large global study (48,000 people) recently found that many workers (57%) lie about their use of AI on the jobs, often breaking company guidelines and policies to do so. Mostly by presenting AI content as their own. The lead university researcher stated there was a “surprising level of ‘inappropriate, complex, and non-transparent’ activity in how employees use AI.”

Given the high error rate sometimes found in large AI reports (can average 25%) surely these people are checking the AI output thoroughly and adjusting incorrect information in order to not get caught. Nope, 66% just do clip and paste leaving the rest to fortune.

But I was further bothered by this study. It was sponsored by a mega consulting firm and its conclusions had lots of stuff about AI governance and lack of employee training. It feels like another example of agenda driven research, that in this case becomes sophisticated sales literature. What happened to just researching and reporting based on the 5W’s and How?

The fourth amuse-bouche is an article about a long time AI builder calling out “AI washing”, the trend to inject AI into all marketing, communications and PR. He spotlights many instances of companies putting a skin (their own interface) on a generative AI model, possibly adding a few prompt adjustments. Boom a brand new AI tool! He also reveals how software firms just relabel existing automated features as AI, a behaviour my friend Neela pointed out in a recent article.

It has gotten so crazy the average person now drops the AI term as frequently as they do “THE ALGORITHM”. I work in a used vinyl shop and I frequently hear old record collectors refer to various ordinary software capabilities (like Shazam which has been around since 2003) with “Amazing what they can do with AI now”

All so confusing so let’s turn to my man Lil Donnie Trump in the next section to get us back to a world of crystal clear communication.

WORD SALAD with LOTS OF SPICE from Lil D

A couple of nights ago in my pre-sleep scroll I found on X what I thought was Trump making a supportive comment about this section of my newsletter.

Now of course it really was the X poster saying Lil Donnie answered with a word salad. I listened to the clip and felt it really was a gigantic word buffet mixed and matched until mental indigestion made people ill. So you reach for - my sponsored product this week - Talka Selzer which calms a befuddled brain.

Another time honoured tradition for muddled mind is to do bottom line translations, explaining what is really meant. So let me help you with some recent Trumpspeak:

Trump on Christmas 2025: “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more."

Translation: I really don’t give a fuck about your kids and the cost of your Christmas celebration. Once I got your vote I lost interest in your concerns!

Trump on Jerome Powell: “I have a guy in the Fed that I'm not a huge fan of ... he should reduce interest rates. I think I understand interest a lot better than him, because I've had to really use interest rates."

Translation: I have been so far in debt with literally all of my companies so I understand how costly it can be if you actually are forced to pay interest. Fortunately I have great lawyers.

Trump on Tariff negotiations: "We have more than 100 countries that are calling morning, noon, and night dying to make a deal."

Translation: Nobody has called despite having expensive operators standing by

Trump on the Canadian election: "It was the one who hated Trump the least who won."

Translation: I don’t think anybody likes me, and we haven’t really had anyone call, so I phoned Mark to invite him down to Washington

BONUS RFK Jr on measles: "The MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris."

Translation: I cannot believe people have listened to me after the crazy bear dumping in Central Park story so I have to amp it up in order to get institutionalized

Trump on Word Salad: David owes everything to me. I personally inspired him to be so beautiful. With my help he created a Substack like no other. You will have never read anything so great!

Translation: Still a work in progress

WHAT’S REALLY COOKING

Another week done. Thanks for reading and everyone who has responded with comments, feedbacks and restacks. I have two submissions from readers I have yet to get to. Much appreciated though.

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When I started this newsletter in the fall my primary intent was to have a little fun with technology stories and leaders. But as I started to investigate more I uncovered serious issues that shouldn’t be seen as humorous. So my Monday and Thursday editions will focus completely on my “take the mickey”. I will start a biweekly edition called Sunday Dinners that will take a serious look at the more discomfiting technology stories

EXPERIMENTAL RECIPES

MAIN COURSE - The all Agentic firm has become a reality. Are all our jobs doomed?

Somehow this feels like a companion piece to the robots running a half marathon I looked at last Thursday. This particular study played right to all the strengths that we have been lead to believe that Generative AI has. Navigating efficiently and effectively through the digital world, not moving physical simulacrums through the real world.

Carnegie-Mellon university conducted a research project by staffing a fake software company with nothing but digital agents. They included most well known AI models fulfilling roles such as financial analysts, software engineers, and project managers. Tasks for the various agents were based on activities typical of real software companies. This was a very elaborate project with considerable complexity in setting up a copycat company.

Too bad this company wasn’t real as I’ll be bet many of you would want to be investing in such a future corporate behemoth. I’m sure the results had to be “blow your socks off great” given the constant and never ending AI hype from purveyors of AI products and advisor hangers-on.

Dismal. Not that you can’t invest, but the overall performance of the various agents. In summary they were about as good as the running robots. Didn’t complete very many tasks. Took too long. Very costly in doing the few tasks they could. These best functioning agent - OpenHands + Claude 3.5 Sonnet - resolved 24% of their tasks. Which was twice as good as their nearest co-worker, another hapless digital agent. Feel free to use this statistic next time you have a negative performance review.

“Researchers wrote that agents are plagued with a lack of common sense, weak social skills, and a poor understanding of how to navigate the internet.” The last one really stands out. I thought the whole purpose of digital agents was to run quickly though the internet booking your lunches and buying you pet food. For those of you using digital agents I would check my Amazon purchases closely. If they have access to your credit card, an audit of transactions might be in order.

Your job is NOT lost, but these agents might be able to misplace it.

QUICKBYTES: AI candidates showing up in job competitions

In a related story it was discovered that actual humans were competing for jobs with AI generated candidates. From the previous story we know that they won’t be good enough to do the work but maybe they are great at acing the recruiting process.

Turns out that AI on its own isn’t good enough to generate fake candidates either. But you know who are good at using AI to meet their nefarious goals. Cybercriminals. They were using AI generated resumes and images as well as AI masking (seen below) in video interviews. They actually got some jobs over real candidates as their aim wasn’t gainful employment but to “steal trade secrets and sabotage a company's systems with malware.” Evidently more than one company has been hit by this scam prompting some to go back to in office interviews.

QUICKBYTES: AI can help you beat others in video job interviews

Completing a trifecta of stories about AI and jobs, is a new AI app that allows you to cheat on job interviews. (I wonder whether the cybercriminals above had that in their bag of tricks). This tool was developed by a Columbia University student (one of the few not protesting) that got him suspended as well as a cool $5.3 million from venture capitalists to build it out. Called Cluely it analyzes what is happening on the screen and audio, and makes quick suggestions on how to answer the questions posed by the interviewer.

Evidently the product has 70,000 subscribers, not sure how many are paying the $20 monthly subscription fee. In a hands-on review though the product had a number of problems typical of AI: getting the question mixed up or generating “hallucinations”. That could lead to some very funny interview interactions if you just mindlessly said what the product fed to you.

But don’t bet against this not being a big hit as this student has all the chops necessary for success: no conscience and an ability to bullshit with the best. In his words Cluelessly is a “cheating tool for literally everything”.

Once again Silicon Valley finds a huge human need to fill.

SECONDI - 5 Five Trite NOW and THEN comparisons

MENU MISTAKES

Big shout-out to this young guy. Unicorns are mythical beasts so mastering the logistics of finding and shipping them is really something!

Thanks for reading. I appreciate all the interesting comments and feedback that I’m getting. Let’s keep it going.

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It’s so fine to be back home with glorious sunny weather, and feeling great about the direction of my writing. I want to highlight a great reader headline from Wyrd Smythe that I wished I had used for my synopsis of the latest nuclear reactor:

“Thorium reactors are da bomb. Oh, wait, actually they aren't.”

PRODUCT ANSWER

The numbers are gradually sneaking up in the weekly Experimental Recipe / New Product poll. We had two winners this week, though one admitted she had seen the product on CNET. This is an example of a quite useful new product. It is a rechargeable, paper-based battery that uses water so it is fireproof (that is, not a lithium battery). The battery is designed with a low environmental footprint to be used for small electronics and wearables, and then recycled or composted. Great!

The purpose for this section - on top of me having some fun and getting a bit of a laugh - is to take the air out of the Silicon Valley start-up mythology of “solving huge problems for human good at a profit”.

QUICKBYTE: Robots running in a half marathon has some problems

On Monday I hypothesized sarcastically that 2085’s major new science and research announcements would be based on research that was scrubbed in 2025 by DOGE. By then I also expect we will be watching sports played only by robots who will be faster, more athletic, smarter, and better looking than humans. However, first efforts in that direction are not that good.

Let’s start at the top with the best news. 12,000 humans and 21 robots ran in a half marathon in Beijing on April 19th, though they were separated on the track. Six robots finished (no word on the number of human finishers as a comparison) and the top robot (pictured above) finished in 2 hours and 40 minutes compared to the human time cut off of 3 hours and 10 minutes. “The shortest (robot) was 2' 5" tall. Sporting a blue and white tracksuit and waving to onlookers every few seconds, it was probably the crowd favorite. The tallest, at 5'9", was the winner Tiangong Ultra”. They all had to be bipedal, like we are.

Robotics experts stated that it is amazing that robots are even able to do this much, and shows how quickly development has progressed. However, I have been through too many hype cycles of everything from autonomous cars to the metaverse to accept these accolades at face value. So let’s take a deep dive shall we? (irony of me using a cliched phrase is intentional)

And dive they did. Every robot fell. Many more than once. Many needed to be picked up. All of the robots needed battery swaps. Many more than once. (As far as I know no humans stopped to eat). All of the robots overheated. Some of them smoked from their heads. To cool off they had to be sprayed by their support teams. Many robots could not follow the course and crashed into obstacles. Some spun around erratically.

“One robot called Huanhuan, which has a humanlike head, only moved at the speed of a snail for a few minutes while its head shook uncontrollably—as if it could fall off any time.” Plenty of duct tape was used for repairs. Some robots were held in check using leashes, much like dangerous pets. Every robot had one or more human operators who were permitted to even change to another robot when the first one was, well too broken to continue. I guess the robots haven’t been programmed yet to just push through when they “hit the wall”. Although some literally hit walls.

All in all great fun for the family, provided you were behind protective barriers!

So we are some ways away from a George Clooney or Denzel Washington looking robot dunk a basketball through a 25 foot high hoop. Mind you progress will be nonlinear. That means starting very slowly and doing insignificant little things. This week I heard an interview with Daniela Rus a robotics expert and the head of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her prediction for home robots looking ahead 20 years (to 2045) is of modest labour saving robots. Like one specialized just for clothes folding on laundry day or another one to pick up and put away toys that your kids have left around the house.

Call me underwhelmed. I’m disappointed that Rosie, promised to us by those futurists The Jetsons, may not happen in my lifetime.

WORD SALAD - 4-D chess

I’m going to be short and blunt on this brand new cliché that has popped into the vernacular describing the supposed multi-faceted and complex international financial strategies implemented by Trump. Strategies that are changed, revised, revoked or re-implemented daily.

Some have even used 5D or higher to describe Trumps moves. If you were satirical kudos. If you weren’t, you are literally living in some other dimension. (Consult superstring theory to determine where)

Because 4D stands for 4 dimensions. Let’s go through them shall we, starting with the spatial ones

• Width

• Length

• Height

Normally, time is considered the 4th dimension.

Ordinary chess the game is played on a 2 dimensional board, with pieces that are in the third dimension - height. Two players then move the various pieces as time passes. Hence 4D chess.

A key question arises: can Trump even play ordinary chess? Meaningfully. My bet is that he cannot. He would be pissed that the King - which he aims to be - can only move one space at a time, only slightly better than pawns.

Now I have played a variation of chess that uses a 3 dimensional board, which makes it more complex. That makes sense, a 3-D chess board. So what on earth could a 4D chess board be?

This all feels like smug yet unconscious self parody to me. Do these people really have the mathematical backgrounds to talk n-dimensional space? Or are they just social platform parrots?

A LITTLE SPICE

WHAT’S REALLY COOKING

I was talking with my great Substack friend Neela about comparative doom scenarios. Hers was digital decay; mine was the “for all intents and purposes” extinction of homo sapiens (I encourage people to join Substack now as this is an example of the lovely conversations one has when one finds community)

So, in what year do you think homo sapiens goes extinct?

Hopefully see you next Monday. Thanks all for reading, especially those with feedback that I get to think about and digest.

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