When I was a child in the 1950s, in the heart of the manufacturing era, a President could create a business policy around a few key men. Engine Charlie ran GM and, later, the Defense Department. In that post he succeeded Electric Charlie, who had run GE. In the oil era, the Bush family was […]
Sam Altman (the Gary Kildall of AI) specializes in mischaracterizing Generative AI technology, promising to create “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) Real Soon Now. AGI is supposed to replace humanity with cloud servers and make creative people obsolete. This goes down great in Silicon Valley salons and the Trump White House. It’s also bullshit. AI, like […]
What I find most frustrating among liberals today is the belief that Donald Trump is an aberration, that he represents some disease in the American body politic, that “we’re not like that.” He’s not an aberration. Americans are just like that. We always have been. I’ll go further and say all people are like that. […]
Nvidia and other AI Infrastructure stocks are falling on news that China’s DeepSeek has a Large Language Model (LLM) that can be trained at 2% of the cost of other models. (Illustration from ChatGPT.) I expect the bust to spread quickly. Microsoft, Google and Meta are all vulnerable given their huge investments in AI infrastructure. […]
We have been living in the Era of Technology for 16 years. Tech dominates our economy and our politics, much as oil did in the generation before it, and manufacturing before that. As I wrote recently, tech has switched sides, moving from being given power in 2008 to seizing it in 2024. It’s time to […]
If Intel’s failure taught tech anything, it should be that you don’t get big change from big companies. A proper industrial policy will focus on startups. You set a goal, and you expect a lot of failures. You pull the subsidies as the recipients grow. Instead, America focuses on big, slow moving companies, which is […]
American democracy operates by the Golden Rule. He who has the money makes the rules. Every so often my old Rice University history degree kicks in. It forces me to remind myself of that fact. I have written about history here, off and on, since 2006. Being a mere B.A., I’ve gotten things wrong. I […]
There are dark times ahead. The ignorance of the American people, our willingness to throw progress on the fire in the name of capitalistic excess and religious bigotry, will cost our nation dearly. Our grandchildren will be unable to tell the world that America is, as Lincoln said, the hope of the world. We will […]
Big Tech companies switched political sides in 2024 because they’re scared. They’re deeply involved in the Great Game of AI and don’t want anyone to tell them what they can or can’t do. (Illustration from Canva.) The Great Game has existed in tech since before I became a reporter. From operating systems to GUIs, from […]
My wife fell into programming. She was offered some training after applying for a job as an accountant. (Illustration from Canva.) This was in 1981. Over the years she learned Assembler, Cobol, some C++ and Java as well. She found her calling in organizing and writing as computing moved from mainframes to the cloud. She […]
