The question is whether our institutional systems can evolve fast enough to manage large-scale infrastructure development in a world where technological change is accelerating much faster than regulatory adaptation.
The more automation handles normal operations, the fewer humans remain who deeply understand the underlying process when something unusual occurs.
A few days ago I bought something at a counter that required almost no human interaction. Someone handed me the item, turned around a payment screen, and suddenly I was facing three large buttons suggesting tips of 20%, 25%, and 30%. At that moment I had a strange thought: when did this become normal? Back when I was younger, a good restaurant tip was often around 10%. Sometime later 15% became more common. By the 1990s and early 2000s, expectations gradually moved higher, eventually settling closer to 20% for normal service in many restaurants. That shift happened slowly enough that most of us barely noticed it. Then COVID arrived and many social behaviors shifted almost overnight. Consumers understandably became more sympathetic toward service workers, contactless…
Memorial Day is arriving in just a few days, so I reached back to my Your Smart Kitchen newsletter to get some useful and interesting recipes that I hope will give you some hints for something a bit different but still fit into the holiday activities. I start with a variation of a burger the should elicit some comments. And there are a couple taco options, a easy vegetable and some dessert suggestions, Have a terrific holiday weekend. Look forward to more articles in topics that I hope are interesting and useful. Terry Burgers with Blue Cheese Mayo and Sherry Vidalia Onions Yield: 4 servings Ingredients Preparation Grilled-Chicken Tacos Makes 12 Tacos Ingredients Preparation Beef Tacos: Tacos de Carne Asada Total Time: 36 minServes…
May kicks garden season into high gear — nothing is really off-limits this month. Get out and dig into gardening before the summer heat arrives. Here are a dozen suggestions you can start on if you haven’t already. Plant Warm-Season Veggies By month’s end, warm-season vegetables should be in the ground in all but the northern-most regions. This includes pepper, tomato, eggplant, squash, corn and cucumbers. Okra, black-eyed peas and melons are also on this list. Plant beans, too, growing several varieties so you have beans for fresh eating and drying. Direct sow seeds into the garden, or tuck in transplants. Once soil is warm, seeds quickly catch up with transplants. Look for Healthy Roots Healthy plant roots are white and fill the soil volume…
Most people imagine artificial intelligence as something floating invisibly across the internet — distributed everywhere, available anytime, almost magical in its reach. But the reality is far more physical. AI increasingly depends on a relatively small number of extraordinarily large and extraordinarily expensive computing centers. Vast buildings filled with specialized processors, cooling systems, backup power systems, networking equipment, and enough electricity consumption to rival small cities. Behind every chatbot, image generator, recommendation engine, autonomous system, or AI “agent” quietly coordinating schedules, purchases, logistics, or data analysis is infrastructure that is surprisingly concentrated. That concentration may become one of the defining technology risks of the next decade. Not because the systems are evil. Not because machines suddenly become self-aware. But because modern society rarely handles concentration…
Most robot demonstrations, especially humanoid robots, are carefully staged. The floor is clean. The lighting is controlled. The sensors are calibrated. The battery is fully charged. The software has been updated. The Wi-Fi works. Someone nearby knows how to reboot the system if things suddenly become “unexpected.” Then the robot walks across the stage carrying a box, folding a towel, or waving at the audience, and everyone focuses on the machine itself. But the robot is often the easy part. What matters is everything around it. That may be one of the biggest misunderstandings in the public discussion about robotics. We tend to imagine the machine as an independent mechanical worker — something like Rosie from The Jetsons — operating largely on its own intelligence…
Most financial problems do not arrive with sirens and explosions. They arrive quietly. Usually in spreadsheets. A raise here. Better benefits there. A pension adjustment. A staffing increase because the city is growing. Another negotiated contract because inflation went up or hiring became difficult. None of it necessarily looks unreasonable at the time. Then eventually someone publishes the numbers all in one place. A recent compensation breakdown involving City of Reno employees caught my attention for exactly that reason. Not because a few people are highly paid — large organizations always have some executives and specialists making substantial salaries — but because of how large the overall compensation structure has become over time. According to reporting by This Is Reno Investigations, more than 100 city…
We’ve become accustomed to systems that simply work. Electricity, communications, cloud services—most of the time they are there when we need them. When they fail, even briefly, the disruption is noticeable, but usually manageable. Backup systems exist. Workarounds exist. People know what to do. Artificial intelligence is starting to become part of that same layer of assumed availability. Not in an obvious way, and not all at once. But gradually, across writing, research, customer support, coding, and planning, it is being woven into the way work gets done. In many cases, it is not replacing entire roles. It is shaping how tasks are performed and how decisions are made. That distinction matters. Because we are not just depending on infrastructure anymore. We are beginning to…
AI has made it remarkably easy to begin things. You can start an article in seconds, sketch out a business idea, draft a plan, or build something that looks structured and complete with very little effort. It feels productive. It feels like progress. In many ways, it is. But it also changes where the difficulty sits. Starting is no longer the hard part. For most of us, that used to be the barrier. Ideas stayed in our heads because getting them into any usable form required time and effort. You had to think them through before you wrote them down. You had to decide whether they were worth pursuing before they became anything at all. Now that sequence has been reversed. A passing thought becomes…
Mother’s Day has a way of getting complicated. Somewhere along the line, what should be a relaxed morning turns into a project. Big meals, multiple dishes, timing everything just right—trying to make it “special” by making it bigger. I’m not sure that’s the right direction. After enough years of doing this—on both sides of the equation—I’ve come to think that the best Mother’s Day isn’t the most elaborate one. It’s the one that feels the easiest and most comfortable. Start With a Different Goal If there’s one thing to keep in mind, it’s this: The goal isn’t to impress anyone. It’s to create a morning that feels like a break. That usually means: What Actually Works Over time, we’ve drifted toward a very simple approach….
I came across an article recently suggesting that AI can make the lives we didn’t live feel more real. It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure it’s a helpful one. Like most people, I have a few decisions in my past that I wouldn’t mind revisiting. Probably more than a few, if I’m being honest. Some were personal. Ending a relationship before I really understood what I was walking away from. Others were professional—moments in meetings where a few words said in frustration had consequences I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. I’ve developed something of a reputation among friends and colleagues as a “master of the career-limiting comment,” which, while not something to aspire to, hasn’t seemed to prevent a reasonably good outcome over…
Spring showed up early this year—or at least it looked like it did. February was warm. Sunny days with temperatures getting into the 80s. Things started to wake up. It felt like we might be in for an early season. A few brave plants even made an appearance, and it was tempting to get ahead of things. Then March and April reminded us where we live—even if we never did get much snow. Cold mornings, late frosts, and just enough uncertainty to make you regret getting a head start with seeds in the ground and a few vegetables in pots. After more than 20 years here, I should know better than to plant anything serious too early. In northern Nevada, that’s not unusual. Spring doesn’t…
If you watch much television these days, you’ve probably noticed the steady stream of ads for extended auto warranties. They tend to follow a familiar pattern. A confident spokesperson—sometimes a recognizable name like Danica Patrick—talks about the rising cost of repairs. Engines fail, transmissions go out, electronics stop working, and when they do, the bill can run into the thousands. The message is clear: protect yourself now, before something goes wrong. It’s a compelling argument. But like most advertising, it leaves out part of the story. Most of these plans cost somewhere in the range of $800 to $1,200 per year, depending on the vehicle and level of coverage. Over time, that adds up quickly. Three years might cost $2,500 to $3,500, and five years…
And Still a Long Way From Leaving A few days ago, I wrote about how much of the technology imagined in Star Trek has, in one form or another, found its way into the real world. Not everything—and not always in the way it was portrayed—but enough to make the comparison feel less like science fiction and more like a long-range preview of where we might be headed. That kind of progress is easy to underestimate while it’s happening. But there’s another side to that story—one that’s less talked about. Some technologies don’t arrive on schedule. Some remain stubbornly out of reach, even when the underlying physics suggests they might be possible. I was reminded of that while reading a recent piece by Ethan Siegel,…
If AI follows the same pattern, what do we do differently? In the last article, I ended with a question. If major changes tend to unfold gradually—and if we usually don’t recognize their full impact until they reach us—then what does that mean for artificial intelligence? More specifically: If AI is following a familiar pattern, is there anything we can do differently this time? We’ve Been Here Before History suggests a consistent response. We don’t ignore change because we’re unaware of it. In most cases, the signs are visible. New technologies emerge, early adopters experiment, and initial use cases begin to take shape. What we tend to do instead is wait. We wait until the change becomes relevant to us personally. Until it affects our…
We’ve seen the pattern before—just not always in time Large changes rarely feel important while they are happening. Not because we don’t see them, but because, at least at first, they tend to happen to someone else. A farmer loses his land. A small operator sells off equipment that no longer makes sense. A business across town closes. A new way of doing things appears, and it works—but not in a way that seems immediately relevant. All of these are real changes. They’re just not our changes. However, the question is are we not experiencing a big change in progress? As long as changes from AI stay in controlled spaces and remain that way, it’s easy to assume that whatever is happening is limited, temporary,…
When fuel costs rise, people adjust differently—and systems follow In a recent post, I explored what might happen if gas prices reached $10 per gallon—a scenario that feels extreme, but not entirely impossible under the right conditions. The most interesting part of that article wasn’t the analysis. It was the reaction. Or maybe more accurately, the shape of the reaction. There were responses. Quite a few, actually. Some thoughtful, some dismissive, some practical, some a bit off to the side. But after reading through them, one thing stood out: It was hard to tell what people actually think—and there certainly was no consensus on what would happen or even what should happen. What Was Said The comments fell into a few general categories. Some people…
Revisiting Star Trek and the Future That Quietly Arrived I recently finished reading Treknology by Ethan Siegel. The book is about ten years old now, which makes it interesting for a different reason than originally intended. It’s no longer just about the progress that had been made a decade ago. It’s about what has happened since—and how much of it has quietly worked its way into everyday life. A Familiar Future I’ve been a Star Trek fan since it first came out—not a fanatic, never went to conventions or collected memorabilia, but the concept always resonated. When it first aired, I was working on the Saturn V program. We were building real rockets, pushing toward the moon, and Star Trek showed something beyond that—a longer…
On AI, Security, and the Problems We Didn’t Look For A recent article that showed up in my email feed caught my attention. It said the latest release of Claud Mythos has capabilities that are too dangerous to mke broadly available until our most important software is in a much stronger state. AI systems—specifically tools like Claude—are being used to analyze existing code and uncover security vulnerabilities at a scale that wasn’t practical before. That, by itself, is interesting. But there’s a second layer that may be more important. In simple terms, once the barn door is open, it tends to stay open. Once that capability is shown to exist by Claude, it doesn’t stay contained. Other developers will build similar tools. Other organizations will…
Four years ago, I turned my roof into a power plant. At the time, it felt like a small step—practical, maybe even a little ahead of the curve. My electric bill dropped to almost nothing, replaced mostly by a fixed service fee. Not a quick return on investment but will pay off in time. For a while, it seemed like a simple equation. Generate your own power. Buy less from the utility. Everybody wins. But systems don’t usually work that way for long. The Shift Utilities are beginning to adjust. Not dramatically. Not loudly. But steadily. Rates are changing. Fee structures are evolving. Fixed charges are creeping upward. Net metering rules are being revisited. In Nevada, this has been less visible—utilities never paid for excess…
You Don’t Replace 300 Million Cars Overnight We have two cars—a 2019 SUV and a 2016 sedan—and we have no plans to replace either one anytime soon. Years ago, I made a simple vow: never buy a car that costs more than my first house. That house cost $38,000 in 1971. At the time, that seemed like a reasonable line to draw. It’s getting harder to keep. New cars are now pushing $50,000. Even used cars are commonly in the $25,000 to $40,000 range. And that doesn’t include electric vehicles, which often come with additional costs—like installing a charging system at home. At this stage of life, I may not need another car at all. I drive less than 5,000 miles a year. My car…
(And Why That Matters) For years, we’ve been told that robots were coming for our homes. They would cook, clean, fold laundry, walk the dog, and maybe even offer the occasional piece of advice—something between a helpful assistant and a mechanical companion. That didn’t happen. At least not in the way we imagined. Instead, robots showed up somewhere else entirely. Not in our kitchens. Not in our living rooms. But in warehouses, factories, hospitals, and supply chains—the quiet infrastructure of modern life. And that turns out to be far more important than the original expectation. Walk into a modern warehouse today, and you won’t see science fiction. You’ll see something more interesting. Shelves moving across the floor on their own.Robots gliding through aisles, carrying products…
Gardening Tips We have had Spring all through March and now it is looking like we may be the last remnants of Winter for the start of April. So many of the garden tasks normally targeted for April may have already been completed. Successful gardening amounts to paying attention and following through with what needs to be done at any one time. Regardless, here are some of the tasks for your garden which should be considered for April. Beware of insects and other pests in your garden. Keep an eye on your garden for aphids, spider mites, etc., and take action when necessary to eliminate the pests If you don’t have enough garden space, you can always create more by growing crops in pots! For example,…
Note: I usually cover men’s health topics but this seems interesting and important. We spend a lot of time talking about what might happen.This is a story about something that actually did. We spend a lot of time talking about what might happen. AI might change everything.Robots might take jobs.New technologies might reshape industries. This is a story about something that actually did. According to a study published in The Lancet Public Health, Australia is on track to become the first country to effectively eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem—potentially as early as 2028. Not reduce it. Not manage it. Eliminate it—at least to the point where it becomes rare enough that it’s no longer considered a major public health issue. That threshold…
Where Automation Meets the Real World A few weeks ago, I had a plumbing issue. Nothing dramatic. Just one of those problems that starts small and then slowly reveals itself to be something else entirely. At first glance, it looked straightforward. A leak. Maybe a fitting. Possibly a simple replacement. That lasted about five minutes. What the plumber actually found was a piping system that had been installed throughout our neighborhood when the homes were originally built. In our case, we had made only minor changes over the years—a split pipe at the water heater and a failed bathtub drain. Otherwise, the system had been left alone. Which sounds fine… until you realize what it means. We are essentially sitting on a potential time bomb….
What People Expect vs What Actually Works A Slight Upgrade Without Starting a Family Debate Easter dinner is one of those meals where expectations matter. Not in a loud, demanding way. No one sends out a formal menu in advance. There are no official requirements. But everyone shows up with a quiet assumption about what will be on the table. And if it’s not there, people notice. They may not say anything. But they notice. Easter is not the time to experiment with something completely new or surprising. This is not the moment to introduce a bold reinterpretation of the holiday meal or a dish that requires explanation before it can be eaten. Easter dinner works best when it feels familiar. But that doesn’t mean…
We used to expect systems to be reliable. Now we expect them to recover.
The People Who Question — And Those Who Don’t You ask AI a question, and it gives you a fast, confident answer — clear, well written, and often persuasive. At that point, you have a choice. You can accept the answer and move on, or pause long enough to question it. Most of the time, that choice passes almost unnoticed. But it may be one of the more important decisions we make in how we use these tools. The First Divide There is a growing conversation about an “AI divide,” usually framed in terms of access — who has the tools and who doesn’t. But it is not always clear how broadly that conversation is grounded. Much of it seems to take place among technically…
March Madness, Smartphones, and the New Business of Sports I live in Nevada, so I am not opposed to gambling (even though I don’t gamble). It has been part of the state’s economy for decades. But I do worry about what it is doing to sports and some of the institutions and activities surrounding them. NIL has already changed college athletics, and not necessarily for the better. Sports betting companies are now major sponsors of professional leagues and broadcasts. Increasingly it feels as if the conversation around sports has shifted. It is less about who wins or loses and more about who scores what and when. Every March the country turns its attention to college basketball. Brackets appear in offices. Games run all afternoon. Upsets…
