Items regarding technology hardware, software, services and related.
I went to an outdoor event where fireworks were supposed to be the closing attraction. But we didn’t get traditional fireworks with the booms and bangs and the smell of gunpowder in the air. The show started normally enough. Families on blankets. Folding chairs. Someone’s portable speaker playing music slightly too loud. Instead of fireworks,…
For the last two years, the entire world has been staring at AI as if it were a comet blazing across the sky — fast, bright, unpredictable, maybe dangerous, definitely worth talking about. Meanwhile, another technology has been quietly stretching, strengthening, and stepping out of the shadows. Quantum. A word that used to trigger flashbacks…
A Gentle Walk Through a Wild Idea Every so often I stumble onto a scientific idea that’s equal parts fascinating, imaginative, and just a little bit unhinged. The latest one came from an Exploring ChatGPT piece titled “The Custodian Theory,” which suggests something bold: that the universe might require ongoing verification by intelligent systems in…
I read a lot. Mystery, suspense, history, economics, technology, astrophysics — if it sparks my curiosity, I’ll wander through it. Lately, the rabbit hole I keep falling into is AI. Not the “write me a recipe” kind or the “draft my email” helper. The deeper, stranger side. The side that behaves, in some ways, like…
Senior’s Guide to Caring About Cosmic Nonsense** I read a lot. And I read about a lot of different things. Most of my time is spent with mystery and suspense, but every so often I take a break from fictional detectives and wander into real topics—economics and finance, technology (AI and robotics have been my…
PART III When Influence Becomes Identity, and Identity Becomes Power If Part I was about what AI gives us, and Part II about what we gradually surrender, Part III is about the moment we may never be able to reverse—the point where the tools we built stop feeling like tools. Not because they rebel.Not because…
Part II The Drift Toward Dependence and the Emerging Risks of AI If Part I was the story of what AI gives us, Part II is the story of what we slowly give up. Changes rarely arrive all at once. Technology doesn’t steal our abilities in broad daylight. Instead, it erodes them in quiet, unremarkable…
The Promise of AI: More Capability, More Opportunity, and a Second Chance for Everyone Alan Turing once asked whether a machine could think.The question of our time is different: Can a machine be good? Before we wrestle with that, we need to look squarely at what AI is already doing—and why, for millions of people,…
By Yogiwan (Terry Retter) Bitcoin started as a hacker’s dream and a banker’s nightmare. Fifteen years later, it’s rewriting the rules of money itself—faster, borderless, and occasionally lawless. When I first read about Bitcoin and blockchain It sounded like a hacker’s dream and a banker’s nightmare — a clever piece of math that could move…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Artificial intelligence (AI) –Part 2 Every new technology sparks the same fear: that the machine will take over. When calculators arrived in classrooms, some worried students would never learn math again. When spreadsheets hit the office, people thought accountants were finished. When search engines matured, teachers fretted that research would be reduced to typing a…
Part 2: Learning to Learn — Dexterity, Data, and the Objective Question Think about a baby tying shoelaces. At first it’s fumbled, uneven, and sometimes impossible. But after enough tries, the skill “clicks.” What’s remarkable is not just the act of tying shoes — it’s the ability to generalize that learning. The same hand–eye coordination…
Artificial Intelligence — Part 1 Artificial Intelligence. The phrase conjures up images of machines plotting in secret, or maybe a Hollywood scene where the glowing computer screen suddenly talks back. But behind the hype, the breakthroughs, and the sometimes breathless headlines, AI is not sorcery. It’s not “alive.” It’s not a new species waiting to…
What We Thought vs. What We Got (revisited) The Robot in Your Imagination vs. the One in Your Kitchen Part 1 Say the word “robot” and the pictures in our heads arrive by decade. For some of us, it’s Rosie from The Jetsons—a wise‑cracking housekeeper with a full calendar and a faster comeback. A little…
A few Sundays ago, I was watching a tech segment on one of the national morning shows. The guest was explaining, with great confidence that we are facing the greatest change in how we live, that AI was going to change all our lives—our work, our homes, and perhaps even our sense of purpose. I…
Support Systems, Ethics, & the Road to Real Help Let’s say your robot vacuum bumps into a chair, backs up, spins, and navigates around it. Smooth, right? Maybe. But who taught it how to handle that chair? And what if the chair has a new leg design tomorrow? Will it still figure it out—or will…
But Can They Make You a Sandwich? The Real Limits of Domestic Robots Today Let’s start with a confession: we’ve all been impressed by videos of robots backflipping, breakdancing, or hauling crates like over-caffeinated warehouse workers. The humanoid revolution, it seems, is not just coming — it’s here! Or is it? Despite the PR sizzle…
What We Thought vs What We Got Part 1 The Robot in Your Imagination vs. the One in Your Kitchen Say the word “robot” and depending on your age you may get various images that come to mind. For us older folks it could be something that walks, talks, waves its arms, and maybe even…
Are we finally going to catch up to The Jetsons from 50 or 60 years ago? “Rosie the Robot,” which first aired on September 23, 1962, featured a robot maid who did housework and served as a personal assistant. Fast forward 61 years, and we are inching closer to this futuristic vision with emerging products from Figure…
Or Have We Forgotten Our Place Among the Stars? I came across this article at Big Think a newsletter that provides counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories from an array of industry, education and research leaders. There is a lot of overlap with my article on interstellar travel and related concepts. This article explores the question of…
President Trump’s mentioning Star Gate for his AI research project kicked up quite a bit of conversation on interstellar travel along with aliens and other esoteric topics way beyond the AI objectives. It seems the fascination over Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), now often referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), is intriguing. And the speculation…
