AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

 If you see your glass as half empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching. — Anon

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The now-extinct Celtic language of Gaulish gave French its infamously tricky base-twenty counting system, where eighty is “quatre-vingts,” but only a few hundred Gaulish-origin words persist in modern Metropolitan French.
A now-extinct language of Frankish was a Germanic language, as English is. Though it contributed the names of France and the French people, it comprises only about 10% of modern French vocabulary.

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“East of Eden” is a defining literary work, centered on California's Salinas Valley, and is deeply tied to the state’s geography and identity.

The seven-episode series, starring Florence Pugh, recently wrapped up filming in New Zealand.

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Davis is hitting .151 through the first quarter of the season and just .177 with a meager .289 slugging percentage over his 218-game career.

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AI, Its Friends and Neighbors

A multi-trillion-dollar bet on the development and acceleration of AI has become the biggest outlay of capital in the history of business.

That said, AI is becoming deeply unpopular. It has a 26% approval rating, which is below just about every institution, including ICE. Data centers are being protested around the country. Two people even decided to take a shot at Sam Altman’s house. The industry has spent $150 million in PAC money to purchase compliance from the two major parties, but that hasn’t stopped ordinary people from coming to their own conclusions.

More money is now being spent on data centers than on commercial office buildings.

The hyperscalers plan to spend $700 billion, including data centers, on AI infrastructure in 2026. A major sports arena costs a couple billion or so. So imagine 7 new sports stadiums being built in every one of the 50 states this year, and you have a sense of the scale of the investment. (From Yang)

So what's going on here? Are we to advance society and knowledge at the expense of jobs--or should we purposefully stop those advances for the unproven benefit of the few? Are technological changes really up for popular vote? If so, what about online betting and pornography? Are these workers just Luddites, impassioned and wrong? What are the ancillary, unimagined applications of the technology, good and bad? And the real, basic, and unspoken question: what are the non-economic implications of this technology?

What happens in an increasingly comfortable but workless culture? Will social disruption be caused by aesthetics? The barricades manned by librarians and psychologists?

And can this technology be ignored--or suppressed--when it might be commandeered by people of bad intent?