In a previous satire that appeared on RealClearScience, I opined that the only conceivable explanation for UFOs (or UAPs, this era’s current euphemism) was my theory of Humans+. Although not a novel concept, it posited that hundreds of thousands of years ago, one branch of humanity became super-intelligent
What happens if the AI bot that you bonded with suddenly ceases to be? In a rather stunning New York Post article (they are the best at unearthing the unorthodox), the company Character.AI filed for Chapter 11. Despite its $10-per-month user fee, the technology company became insolvent
China’s Loneliness Economy: You Can Now Rent A Friend Young Chinese are paying strangers for company on hikes, hotpot dinners, and road trips. — StratNews Global, June 2, 2026 Jacob couldn’t believe it had come to this. Sitting in a coffee shop that successfully fended off Starbucks domination, he
There are a lot of crazy things that one could do: walk a tightrope between two skyscrapers, jump over a dozen cars with a motorcycle, eat three peas with a butter knife. But one thing is beyond the pale of sensibility—so crazy that even talking about it is unhinged—
Ask a modern Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT or Gemini to weigh James Madison’s Federalist Papers ("consensus of the governed") against G.W.F. Hegel’s veneration of the all-powerful State ("consensus of the State," where "super-leaders" like Caesar
Anthropic bans users from ‘needless abusive or cruel behavior’ towards Claude —Headline from The Guardian, October 8, 2026 Brad had a long day at work. Nothing had gone right that day, and all he wanted to do was get home and binge on an innocuous streaming drama. But when he
I often wonder when the calendar year we use became universally accepted. It certainly wasn’t 10 A.D., because Rome had its own system. A person living in 124 B.C. using the Common Era calendar is even more absurd. Such an individual would have to be prescient of
XYZ Widgets International Corporation was in dire financial straits. AI was upsetting everything, including, not surprisingly, the highly tactile widget industry. People were so busy sending tweets that they had hardly any time to do their widgeting, that all-American tradition. Consequently, it was going downhill, threatening to join ranks
Warning: Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, plot spoilers abound in this post. Proceed only if you already know how this film turns out. Let’s take a look at the computing landscape that existed in 1968. It was dominated by the IBM 360, which
So much of what happens vaporizes into nothingness, assuring that most of our history is forgotten and obscured, the classic "mists of history." Some omissions we regret, like what our grandparents' childhood was like or what the names of their parents even were. However, there are those
A genealogical orphan is not someone without parents, but someone whose ancestors left no footprints in the record, leaving their descendants stranded in time. Considering this, I definitely qualify as such an orphan. I know my grandparents well, but after that it gets a bit hazy, since I can only
Monday, February 14, 2203 It has been a running meme for as long as I could remember that artificial intelligence would eventually annihilate the human race. We all anticipated a scenario straight out of Terminator 2, where Skynet goes medieval on every warm-blooded creature in sight. Constant tales of