The Rise and Fall of Civilizations

The most dangerous internal contradiction any civilization can have isn't inequality or political conflict per se — it's the loss of the capacity to imagine and attempt its own transformation.

There is a crucial tension between learning how to live life as past generations have and learning to imagine life as only future generations can live it.

Tired, Wired

Tired: telephone.

Wired: teleporter.

Stock Market Performance Compared

Hmmm.

Jensen Huang's Token Economy and Possible Consequences

Jensen Huang - founder and CEO of Nvidia - has been speaking passionately about the token economy. He sees AI as fundamental to the future economy. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world, in history. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I think Nvidia's value is going to rise dramatically over the next 5 years. One way to think of the token economy is this.

From Request to Token to Output

A user types a prompt. That text is broken into tokens — roughly, fragments of words — and fed into a model. The model, which is essentially a vast map of statistical relationships built from training data, predicts the next most likely token, then the next, then the next, until it produces a complete response. Nvidia's GPUs are the engines that make this prediction process fast enough to be useful at scale. This is what Huang means by the token economy — every inference (every AI response to every request) is a stream of tokens, and the world is generating an almost incomprehensible number of them.

The Broader Economic Flow

Perceived demand: A customer wants something — a product, an answer, a service, a piece of code, a diagnosis.
AI as coordinator: Rather than a human routing that request through an organization, AI interprets it, matches it to available resources, capacity, inventory, or knowledge, and either fulfills it directly or orchestrates the humans and systems that will.
Production or retrieval: AI either generates the output itself (a document, an image, an analysis) or directs physical or human systems to produce it.
Delivery and feedback: The customer receives and responds; AI captures that signal and refines future responses.

Where precisely does AI fit?
Everywhere in that chain except the underlying human desire that starts it and the physical reality that ends it. The want is still human. The product — a meal, a drug, a manufactured part — still has to exist in the world. But everything in between — interpretation, routing, coordination, generation, quality checking, personalization — is increasingly where AI lives.
Huang's insight is that this middle layer, which used to be mostly human labor and organizational overhead, is becoming a token stream. And Nvidia sells the engines that run it.

The human layer: Perceived desire on one end, satisfied (or disappointed) desire on the other. This is where meaning lives. A person wants something; a person receives something; a person feels the gap or the fulfillment. Irreducibly human.

The coordination layer: Everything in between. Interpretation, routing, production, delivery, feedback. This is the token economy — the vast, accelerating machinery of turning want into have. AI doesn't create desire and doesn't feel satisfaction. It lives entirely in this middle space, and it is transforming that space almost beyond recognition.

This framing implicitly raises a key question about AI's limits: it can compress and optimize the coordination layer almost without bound, but it cannot manufacture desire at one end or genuine satisfaction at the other. Those remain stubbornly, essentially human.

Which may be why the most enduring economic question in an AI-saturated world isn't about efficiency — it's about what people will actually want when the cost of coordination approaches zero.

So where does desire - the catalyst for all this - originate?

Advertising and marketing have always been in the business of manufacturing or shaping desire — making you want something you didn't know you wanted, or want it more urgently than you otherwise would have. AI doesn't invent that dynamic, but it could perfect it in ways that are qualitatively different from a Super Bowl ad or even targeted Facebook posts.

The concerning version: AI that knows you well enough — from your behavior, your language, your rhythms — to identify latent desires before you've consciously formed them, nudge them into felt wants, coordinate production to meet them, deliver them, and close the loop. All without meaningful human involvement at any stage.

At that point the two bookends to this process — perceived desire and realized desire — are no longer quite as "irreducibly human" one might suspect. They're still experienced by humans, but they may be increasingly manufactured and managed by AI.

Which raises a question that is less economic than philosophical: if the desire was seeded, the product generated, and the satisfaction engineered — what exactly was the human contributing? The experiencing of it, perhaps. Consciousness as the last remaining irreducibly human input.

That's not entirely new — culture and commerce have always shaped desire. But the scale, precision, and speed AI brings to that shaping is new enough that it might be a difference in kind rather than just degree.

One troubling possibility in this? We're no longer steering this vehicle, this economy ... we're just riding in the Ferris Wheel of desire and desire fulfillment. This has the potential to move us from life as a Jungian search for meaning into a life of Skinner's stimulus and response.

Jung's project was essentially about the human as meaning-maker — the psyche reaching toward individuation, toward a self that is authored rather than merely conditioned. The Ferris Wheel image captures something that feels like movement and experience, even pleasure, but has no destination and no agency. You didn't choose the arc. You're just on it.

Skinner's world, by contrast, has no self to author anything. Just organisms responding to stimuli, reinforced or extinguished by their environment. Desire and satisfaction as a loop, not a journey. Which is precisely what a perfectly optimized AI economy might produce — and, notably, would look like flourishing from the outside. People getting what they want, efficiently, continuously. The metrics would be excellent.

Fed Chair Powell Talks to A Startling First in our Nation's History of Job Growth

"Effectively, there is a zero job creation equilibrium in the private sector — which we've never had in our nation's history." — Jerome Powell, today's press conference.

For the first time in 250 years, the number of jobs we need to create to keep up with growth in the labor force is zero. None.

This reflects two converging trends. First, the birthrate and retirement rate have been drawing closer together over the last two decades, shrinking the growth in the number of new workers. Second, between deportations and the slowdown in immigration, the labor force is no longer growing the way it has for 250 years.

Tesla Over-priced, Nvidia Under-priced

Price / Earnings Ratios:
Nvidia 37
Tesla 370

ONE of the initiatives within Nvidia is the application of AI to self-driving cars, and in terms of market potential for Nvidia that is likely much closer to 2% than 20% of their future revenues. And - in my opinion - promises to be more transformative as a technology and how broadly it can be applied. (Tesla is unlikely to license their self-driving technology to other automakers but Nvidia definitely will, could even become the standard across brands ... and of course that would be just one of their many, many products and services.)

Obsessed About Time Travel

He realized, lying on his deathbed, that he had wasted his whole life in the lab chasing a time travel machine. It made him wish he could go back — live his life again, only this time spend less of it obsessing about time travel and more of it traipsing through forests, walking beaches, gazing at art, enjoying friends...

If only he had a —

Believing Impossible Things

"There's no use trying," Alice said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Relationships are Like Tennis

Relationships are like tennis. They start with love - love and then people start making mistakes and keeping score.

Time Travel First, Direction Next

Idea for a time travel movie in which the main character wastes all his naturally gifted going forward time trying to devise a means to go backwards in time.

I only wish I had come up with the idea earlier.

Instead of a Fortune Cookie Slip ...

“This is wildly inappropriate! Whose idea of a joke was this?”
He shouted across the restaurant, holding up the offending fortune cookie slip.
“What’s wrong?” the waiter asked, rushing over with genuine concern.
“Who prints this kind of thing on a fortune cookie?”
The waiter snatched the slip, read it, and promptly blushed.
“Oh no. I’m terribly sorry, sir. You’ve received one of our… Freudian slips by mistake.”
"How does this happen?"
"Well, the typical explanation is that it expresses something you scarcely admit to yourself. It may reveal deeper ..."
"I didn't ask for after-dinner therapy!"
"Does this mean that you won't be giving me a tip, sir?"
Diner looks aghast. "You do know this isn't helping."
Waiter reads the Freudian slip again, blushes and says, "Quite right, sir. I can see how my question just made things worse."

The Republican Party's Notions of What Government Can Do

One of many things that baffles me about the Republican Party (and this has been true since at least the time of George W. - possibly Reagan) is that they think it is beyond the scope of government to lift a child out of poverty but that a military strike will transform a foreign autocracy into a modern democracy.

Names for Money

Light economic history.

Dollar is slang for a Federal Reserve Note.
A buck is slang for a dollar.
Moola is slang for a buck.
Filthy lucre is the point at which slang tips into cursing.

A Multi-Faith T-Shirt

It seems possible that a "w/ Jesus in my heart & Buddha in my belly, all I do is sing Allah-la-la-la" t-shirt has global market potential. It is also possible that it would simply be a product that would sell poorly everywhere and not just in one region.

Francis Fukuyama on the War Against Iran

Francis Fukuyama, regarding the Trump administration's war against Iran.

"The Trump administration is behaving as if it were born yesterday, innocent of the accumulated understanding of regional politics, and the sources of earlier American policy failures. Indeed, it has expressed contempt for experts coming out of the administration and has excluded them. ... Instead it has relied on a sycophantic circle of loyalists, none of whom are likely to give the president reliable or realistic assessments about how to move forward. Consequently, the administration is making it up from day to day. ... The world has become a most dangerous place because the world has come under the power of a 10 year old boy."

Stock Market Performance Under Recent Presidents

 Well, at least the MAGA boys can console themselves by the fact that their boy is doing better than Carter or Bush 2.
So far.

Self Publishing in Multiple Locations

The good news is that he finally got his self-help book published.

The bad news is that it was picked up by a fortune cookie company.

His "book" was released in serial form — installments distributed across different restaurants, on different days, in different cities, in no particular order. Fittingly, it was a book on the power of networking, and recipients were encouraged to find each other and piece together what they'd learned. Of course, since those instructions were also released in random installments, it took quite some time before anyone knew this.

He took some comfort in the fact that his latest book had, technically, sold millions of copies. The five-star reviews were cryptic but numerous and often included references to bok choy, noodles and dim sum.

On Mongrels and America

"Since races do not exist - though racism, damnably, does - mongrelism is our common lot. It may be a bitter one, as in the case of Merle Oberon, not altogether benign in such an instance as Queen Victoria, or fecund, as in that of Pushkin, but whether we want to accept it or not, we are all mongrels."

— Angus Calder

Merle Oberon (1911–1979) was a glamorous Hollywood and British film star of the 1930s and 1940s, born in Bombay to a mixed South Asian and European family. In the racial climate of early Hollywood, this background would likely have ended her career before it began.

So her studio invented a different woman entirely. Born in Tasmania, they said. European parents. Clean, simple, acceptable.

She spent decades performing two roles: the characters onscreen, and the invented self she wore everywhere else. Even close colleagues had no idea. The concealment was total, and it held.

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is widely considered the founder of modern Russian literature — the writer who gave the Russian language its modern form, who shaped what Russians understood themselves to be. His great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African child, likely from what is now Cameroon or Eritrea, brought to Europe as a slave, then adopted and educated at the court of Peter the Great, eventually becoming a military engineer and general. That ancestry runs directly into Pushkin, into the poems and stories that Russia called its own.

The nation's purest cultural touchstone. Mixed all the way down.

This is what Calder is pointing at: the things a culture holds up as essentially, irreducibly itself — its founding literature, its iconic faces — are rarely what they appear to be. Purity is almost always a retrospective fiction. The real thing, the living creative thing, tends to be a collision. Part this, part that, and then whatever strange third thing emerges from the two meeting.

Rock and roll is the American version of this story. It came from the collision of country and blues — the whitest and the blackest streams in American music running together until something neither tradition could have produced on its own came out the other side. Still restless. Still unfinished. Still, somehow, arresting.

That's America, really. Not pure. Never pure. Just the ongoing collision — of people, genes, languages, sounds, habits and tics from everywhere — producing something that keeps mutating and hasn't settled yet.

Calder called it our common lot. It might also be our best quality.

Odd Thoughts on a Sunday

"Figure out who you are and then do it on purpose."
- Dolly Parton

*****
The first priority on your to do list should be doing what no one else can, doing the tasks that uniquely define you - and are uniquely defined by you.

*****

Conspiracy theories are just screenplays that writers couldn't get turned into a movie. They're fiction, but they're not particularly good fiction.

*****

"My job is to, quite simply, create the conditions whereby you [the employee] can do your life's work."
- Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVDIA, now the world's most valuable company

****

Possible futures:
In the future, AI will present all clothing ads to you as you in that clothing. Previously, there was confusion between how good the clothes look on beautiful, handsome models and how good they look on you. Once that confusion is behind us, clothing sales will plummet. One might think this is incentive enough not to run such ads but it'll increase the online population as people choose to stay virtual rather than step outside to be seen as their less than ideal selves.