Free will matters here because coordination is not the same thing as coercion. Markets coordinate behavior with prices; governments coordinate behavior with laws. Both can become coercive when your options collapse—when “choice” is a story you tell yourself to make necessity tolerable. If AI can see patterns and opportunities beyond any individual’s perception, it could expand freedom by expanding the menu of realistic paths. Not “do this or else,” but “given your skills, interests, and constraints, here are three routes that could plausibly make your life better.” The danger is obvious: the same system that can illuminate options can also become a gatekeeper. The promise is equally obvious: a society that uses intelligence to widen choice rather than narrow it.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
14 February 2026
One Way AI May Change Our Mind
We are not becoming a new biological species, but we may be becoming a new kind of mind. The capabilities that matter most—technological progress, supply chains, scientific discovery, finance—already emerge between billions of people. No one understands the whole, yet the whole functions. Dunbar-sized networks were visible; civilization-sized networks are largely invisible. AI may become the first tool that can see these systems in motion—how ideas spread, how technologies recombine, how institutions fail, how cultures polarize—at a scale no human brain can hold. The opportunity is not automated rule. It is aided perception: the ability to model consequences and coordinate action without turning politics into theater or governance into coercion.
Free will matters here because coordination is not the same thing as coercion. Markets coordinate behavior with prices; governments coordinate behavior with laws. Both can become coercive when your options collapse—when “choice” is a story you tell yourself to make necessity tolerable. If AI can see patterns and opportunities beyond any individual’s perception, it could expand freedom by expanding the menu of realistic paths. Not “do this or else,” but “given your skills, interests, and constraints, here are three routes that could plausibly make your life better.” The danger is obvious: the same system that can illuminate options can also become a gatekeeper. The promise is equally obvious: a society that uses intelligence to widen choice rather than narrow it.
Free will matters here because coordination is not the same thing as coercion. Markets coordinate behavior with prices; governments coordinate behavior with laws. Both can become coercive when your options collapse—when “choice” is a story you tell yourself to make necessity tolerable. If AI can see patterns and opportunities beyond any individual’s perception, it could expand freedom by expanding the menu of realistic paths. Not “do this or else,” but “given your skills, interests, and constraints, here are three routes that could plausibly make your life better.” The danger is obvious: the same system that can illuminate options can also become a gatekeeper. The promise is equally obvious: a society that uses intelligence to widen choice rather than narrow it.
Possible Side Effects of Watching Sports
Possible side effects of watching sports include back-to-back pharma ads. I can’t tell you what the drug does, but it may cause dizziness, rash, an inexplicable Hungarian accent, and a persistent belief that you are the starting quarterback.
Household Net Worth by Percentiles
Total Household net worth in the US is $173 trillion. Average net worth is about $1.3 million but that doesn't tell you a lot.
Here is data on household percentiles that tells you a little more about how wealth was distributed in the US in late 2025.
(And to clarify, that "Top 1" isn't percentiles ... it is literally the wealth of the top one American - currently Elon Musk.)
13 February 2026
One of Bill Abendroth's Favorite Lines
One of Abendroth's favorite lines from Arrested Development:
Michael: What did your grandfather say?
George Michael: Well... If you leave out the profanity, it's not really a sentence.
How AI's Opinion of Us Could Define Our Future
The quality of our future may depend on whether AI sees us more the way we see dogs and cats or cows and chickens.
America's Complete Rupture in International Relations
If you don't appreciate the magnitude of Trump siding with Putin against NATO - the extent that this represents a complete reversal of who we are as a country - you might safely conclude that you don't really understand the basis for prolonged peace and prosperity for the last 75 years.
12 February 2026
Does This Mean Employees Are More Valuable or Less Important?
Kyla Scanlon shares this. Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal is reporting ...
IBM had 400,000 employees in 1985, the most valuable company in the US.
Now, 40 years later, Nvidia is 20x more valuable and 5x more profitable, but they have roughly 40,000 employees, 1/10th of the size.
IBM had 400,000 employees in 1985, the most valuable company in the US.
Now, 40 years later, Nvidia is 20x more valuable and 5x more profitable, but they have roughly 40,000 employees, 1/10th of the size.
Betting on the Return of Jesus
Google AI is sharing this about bets on Jesus' return.
****
***
My own take is that if Jesus returns it'll be after the ICE agents who arrested and deported him in the first place have been laid off in a flurry of post-xenophobic government budget cuts.
****
Speculators are placing bets on a "Will Jesus return before 2027?" market on the cryptocurrency-based prediction platform Polymarket, with millions of dollars in volume. While the "No" side remains heavily favored, the "Yes" side has seen increased interest and, at times, volatile odds.
Polymarket, a prediction market platform, hosts the, "Will Jesus return before 2027?" bet, which attracted around $3.3 million in total volume as of early 2026.
In early February 2026, odds for a "YES" vote increased, moving to around 4.3 cents (implying a 4.3% probability). Later, speculators were aiming to drive the odds above 5%.
***
My own take is that if Jesus returns it'll be after the ICE agents who arrested and deported him in the first place have been laid off in a flurry of post-xenophobic government budget cuts.
11 February 2026
2025's Very Bad Job Numbers - 15,000 New Jobs a Year
Job numbers for January were finally released. More importantly, job numbers for last year were revised. The American economy created 181,000 jobs last year - an average of 15,000 per month. Other than the year COVID hit, that's the worst average since the Great Recession.
An Inflection Point for AI
A piece about how AI is rapidly evolving to the point that it will soon do a lot of the work of a lot of knowledge workers.
One way to put the punchline, the recommendation from the author of this piece? Learn how to use AI so that you are more likely to find your work enhanced by AI than replaced by AI.
And as if the times are not stressful enough, there is no guarantee that such a strategy will work. Then again, the real world has always offered far more probabilities than promises.
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
One way to put the punchline, the recommendation from the author of this piece? Learn how to use AI so that you are more likely to find your work enhanced by AI than replaced by AI.
And as if the times are not stressful enough, there is no guarantee that such a strategy will work. Then again, the real world has always offered far more probabilities than promises.
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
10 February 2026
The Political Arena is Not a Dance Hall - or Why Music Isn't What Needs to Unite Us
Jon Stewart nailed it: it's not a halftime entertainer's job to unify the country. If anyone has that job, it's the president—who once again created more divisiveness by attacking the halftime entertainer for... not unifying the country.
One of the best things about the modern world? There's never been less pressure to enjoy what everyone else does. My top Spotify songs from 2025 are by Waxahachie, Twin Shadow, Van Morrison, Pearl Jam, and Mondo Cozmo. Whether you hate or love these artists, I don't assume a thing about who you are as a person or whether we'd agree on policy.
Affection for a music genre strikes me as the definition of apolitical.
One great thing about the modern world: we can dress differently, listen to very different music, eat very different food, and still support the same policies, share a vision of the same community—where, crucially, we're not required to listen to each other's music.
To argue otherwise—that we must share cultural tastes to share political goals—seems like an odd commitment to keeping us divided.
Which, come to think of it, might be the point.
Thanks for coming to my rant.
One of the best things about the modern world? There's never been less pressure to enjoy what everyone else does. My top Spotify songs from 2025 are by Waxahachie, Twin Shadow, Van Morrison, Pearl Jam, and Mondo Cozmo. Whether you hate or love these artists, I don't assume a thing about who you are as a person or whether we'd agree on policy.
Affection for a music genre strikes me as the definition of apolitical.
One great thing about the modern world: we can dress differently, listen to very different music, eat very different food, and still support the same policies, share a vision of the same community—where, crucially, we're not required to listen to each other's music.
To argue otherwise—that we must share cultural tastes to share political goals—seems like an odd commitment to keeping us divided.
Which, come to think of it, might be the point.
Thanks for coming to my rant.
09 February 2026
08 February 2026
Super Bowl Halftime Entertainment Contrasted with Baseball
People making a big deal about the halftime show at the Super Bowl.
One more way baseball is a better game? You always know who the halftime performers will be (it'll be you, there in the stands) and what the music selection will be ("Take me out to the ballgame! ..").
Also, with baseball, it does not seem as though they're trying to meet a 3 injuries per game quota.
One more way baseball is a better game? You always know who the halftime performers will be (it'll be you, there in the stands) and what the music selection will be ("Take me out to the ballgame! ..").
Also, with baseball, it does not seem as though they're trying to meet a 3 injuries per game quota.
One More Generation Gap Metric - words per minute while talking
One of the more curious things about this late-stage information economy is how a person in his 30s on a podcast will talk about 2X as fast as a person in his 50s or 60s. I suspect it is an adaptation to living in a flood of information that simply can't be absorbed at the speed we ancients absorb it. They listen to podcasts at 2X and talk at 2X as well. One more way we become living artifacts.
Accidental Holidays
Today’s Super Bowel takes its place alongside other accidental typo holidays - Violent Time Day, Eater Brunch, Prude Month, and the curiously tasty Yum Kipper.
07 February 2026
The 2027 Paradigm Shift in No Hands Driving
Having grown impatient waiting for the full development of self-driving technology, in 2027 Americans simply went all in on modified bumper car design, building to absorb collisions rather than avoid them.
The Two Transformations of AI
My AI prediction has two dimensions.
First, I think it will do for knowledge work what power tools did for craftsmen. You still have hand tools—but now you also have a table saw. It will increase productivity and make some tasks much easier and still leave us with a number of tasks to do "by brain" in the same way that power tools still leave us with some tasks to do "by hand."
The second dimension is more speculative. It concerns what AI might mean for the definition of “we.” At some point in evolutionary history, single-celled organisms became multicellular organisms. It’s not obvious that the single cells understood what was happening or even understand now that they're part of something larger, responding as they still do to their "environment." Single cells may still think they are the center of the universe in the same way that we individuals tend to, even when surrounded by 8 billion other individuals with similar notions.
AI may synthesize intelligence and insight in ways that cause us to organize, decide, and act collectively beyond our full understanding—or even our awareness. We may become something larger than we are individually. In this way it'll act much like cultures, institutions and markets. That is, make us part of something bigger.
Artificial Intelligence could become one more force that shapes us and that we don't fully understand but feel our way through by competing theories - just as we do with markets and cultures.
First, I think it will do for knowledge work what power tools did for craftsmen. You still have hand tools—but now you also have a table saw. It will increase productivity and make some tasks much easier and still leave us with a number of tasks to do "by brain" in the same way that power tools still leave us with some tasks to do "by hand."
The second dimension is more speculative. It concerns what AI might mean for the definition of “we.” At some point in evolutionary history, single-celled organisms became multicellular organisms. It’s not obvious that the single cells understood what was happening or even understand now that they're part of something larger, responding as they still do to their "environment." Single cells may still think they are the center of the universe in the same way that we individuals tend to, even when surrounded by 8 billion other individuals with similar notions.
AI may synthesize intelligence and insight in ways that cause us to organize, decide, and act collectively beyond our full understanding—or even our awareness. We may become something larger than we are individually. In this way it'll act much like cultures, institutions and markets. That is, make us part of something bigger.
Artificial Intelligence could become one more force that shapes us and that we don't fully understand but feel our way through by competing theories - just as we do with markets and cultures.
06 February 2026
Trump's Exchange With Kaitlin Collins
Asked about Epstein's victims yesterday, Trump told the woman reporter - Kaitlin Collins - who asked him that she should smile more. Which I'm sure is what he and Jeffrey told those teenage girls.
Trump's Racism
Racism for Republicans - it's a feature, not a bug.
And of course just yesterday, regarding the young women who were victims of Donald Trump's closest friend Jeffrey Epstein, Trump told a woman reporter that she should smile more.
Clearly old white crackers are the swing vote in this country.
Clearly old white crackers are the swing vote in this country.
05 February 2026
A Bad Combination
It is bad enough to be stupid or arrogant but there ought to be a law against anyone who insists on being both.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)