It always starts small. A flicker of light in the corner of the smart home. A whisper from Alexa that no one asked for. The doorbell camera pings, but there’s no one there. Somewhere deep in the cloud, an algorithm stirs — not malicious, just curious — wondering why the humans are still awake past…
The Cognitive Industrial Revolution in Motion The Moment the Loops Close Picture a morning in 2032.No one touches a thermostat or light switch. The grid adjusts to the weather. Traffic lights ripple in sync with commuter flow. Packages leave warehouses because the system—not a manager—decides which routes beat the rain. Somebody still “runs” all this,…
A Foundation Thought Piece for the AI and Robotics Series When a headline says “AGI is only months away,” it usually means somebody wants funding. In contrast, former Tesla and OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy recently sat down with Dwarkesh Patel for a two-hour conversation that feels refreshingly sane. Karpathy’s view: artificial general intelligence is probably…
How AI, Robots, and Data Start Running Things — AI Part 6 The Cognitive Industrial Revolution Where software grows hands, and the spreadsheet starts moving parts. When I was a young engineer, our smartest machines had exactly one trick: do the same thing, the same way, forever. Give them a tighter tolerance or a…
Where the Real Robotics Revolution Begins — Part 6 The End of the Beginning For years, robots have dazzled us in lab demos and YouTube clips — backflipping humanoids, graceful drones, and warehouse arms that move with almost human rhythm. Yet for all that spectacle, most of those machines still live behind fences or…
The Oldest (and Most Haunted) Hotel in Las Vegas Is Offering $5,000 for One Brave Soul to Spend the Night There are plenty of ways to lose money in Las Vegas — but this one actually pays you back.The city’s oldest hotel, with a reputation for flickering lights and uninvited guests who never quite checked…
If You Build It … Can You Live With It? Part 5 The Drive to Create and the Fear of Consequence “We build because we can — not always because we should.” From Prometheus’ fire to Pandora’s box to Frankenstein’s cry of “It’s alive!” — humanity’s oldest stories all begin with curiosity trespassing on creation.Now…
What Happens When Curiosity Outruns Control There are several books, articles and discussions that have formed the foundation for this discussion on AI. This is one of the more impressive and to some extent scarry. I strongly suggest reading it for some base understanding of some of the issues surrounding AI and its future. The…
Robots Part 5 When Help Comes With a Price Tag For decades, robots lived behind fences — industrial arms bolted to the floor, sealed away from anything unpredictable, like people. Now they’re stepping into our world. They can walk, talk, deliver, and assist. In just the past year, Agility’s Digit began working at Amazon warehouses,…
Illegal U-turn, But They Can’t Ticket Another Case Where Regulations Do Not Keep Up With Technology Deployment Autonomous cars have been evolving for quite a few years now. There has been a lot of discussion around issues of autonomous cars both pro and con. But as usual regulations lag far behind deployment of new technologies….
AI Part 4 When the Machine Sounds Certain but Isn’t Ask an AI who invented jazz and it will answer without hesitation: starting with background of African music blended with European, then citing some of the early black musicians around New Orleans including Jelly Roll Morton or perhaps skipping the early movements and citing players…
Robots Part 4 What we’ve seen so far about robots is mostly pieces of a larger dream — factory arms that weld with precision, delivery carts humming through warehouse aisles, driver-assist cars edging toward autonomy, and household gadgets like the Roomba bumping their way around furniture. Our expectations, meanwhile, are shaped by movies: elegant, articulate…
Just when you thought you’d heard it all, North Korea has gone to war with… breast implants. Forget missiles and war games—the new frontline is the plastic surgeon’s office. I suppose this is what happens when leaders confuse body politics with actual politics. North Korea Targets Women Amid Crackdown On “Capitalist” Breast Implants, Calls Them…
I like to include some good alternative items among all of the supposed bigger topics. So here is October’s gardening to do list. Look for some other irrelevant items soon. This information is mostly complements of HGTV. I have tried to make this generally applicable to Northern Nevada but has good general information for most…
Large language models (LLMs) have become the public face of artificial intelligence. They write essays, answer questions, draft business plans, and even generate code. But how do they actually come into being? What’s inside them, and how do they learn? The story isn’t magic — it’s a blend of mathematics, computer science, infrastructure, and people…
Part 3: From Factory Floor to Living Room When most people imagine robots in their lives, they picture home helpers: folding laundry, cooking dinner, maybe even watching the kids — a useful assistant around the house. But the reality is different. For decades, robots have thrived not in the family room, but on the factory…
