Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
It's like the old bodybuilders Franz and Hans on SNL:

"We're going to PUMP
and dump!"
  

    
If the human race lasts a million years, grifters and scammers will
still discuss this time as a golden age.
  

    
I always arrive very late at this annual affair, this one is even
tail-endier but here goes.

Still very busy with exactly the same as I was doing in 1990:
promoting renewable energy and getting in gear for climate change. 
The only difference is that both were in the future then and both
are here full scale today.  

Headline of the day at dallasfed.org: "Utility-scale solar shines in
Texas despite tariffs, federal policy changes"

We don't have to worry about whether we'll have all the power we
need for a reliable, clean and affordable grid.  Technology,
economics and practicality have won out, even and especially in the
world capital of natural gas.  My friend Bill McKibben finally woke
up to that and wrote "Here Comes the Sun" last year -- worth a look.
  

    
The emblematic moment for me last year was on the #22 muni bus
during a San Francisco visit the weekend before Christmas.  We were
coming out of the power outage zone and got stuck at 16th and
Guerrero behind an inert Waymo.  Its vast AI brain was unable to
determine what to do without traffic signals.

The bus operator contacted Muni dispatch which contacted the Waymo
control center and after 20 minutes they were able to unbrick the
million dollar traffic plug.

This happened all over the City.  An ordinary power outage caused by
a fire at the 8th and Mission substation (not the first, 1996, or
the second on the same day in 2003, the third) became citywide
gridlock, an unanticipated spillover of the seamless digital world
of the future.

I think the City should rerun the day with a digital twin of the
traffic system and charge Waymo for the difference.

Instead for their reward Waymo is now granted the right to put
immigrants out of work driving passengers from SFO throughout the
peninsula.
    
  

    
The WELL was part of and grew up alongside the same Silicon Valley
subculture whewre the main branch has now become a feeble
rent-seeking grasp to monetize a massive and completely boring idea,
because they have absolutely nothing new to offer.

In 2023 I asked ChatGPT to write a sequel to "Sitting on the Dock of
the Bay."  The original was written mere steps from the WELL's
original home on Gate 5 Road.  Any 6th grader could do better than
the sequel.

LLM technology is just grep with pre and post processing.  It's not
intelligent and never will be.  

All the same there are real benefits and real dangers.  One of the
few tech execs who I pay any attention to is Meredith Whittaker with
the Signal Foundation.  She's hard core corporate (built up a big
division at Google, worked with the NYU AI people) and not at all
adverse to working with the world of three letter agencies and
worse.  

But she has it right: what is at stake is human freedom.  That will
be determined by us, not by AI or AGI or AXYZ.
  

    
AI is just someone else's software and data centers are just someone
else's hardware.  

I am old fashioned and forward looking enough to think that the
"personal" in personal computing was the real revolution.  AI
doesn't have to run all in the cloud and be controlled by those who
control that.  

It can run on our own devices and under our own control.  I remain a
firm believer in hlr's insight on all these things as "tools for
thought."