Gordon's Notes

It's hard to imagine how very simple much of our technology environment was in the 1980s. Much of what we interacted with was still unde...

These days my social media experience is largely Mastodon. There's something to be said about a social network that's so irreparably...

TLDR: The "technological singularity" was an important and useful term with a clear meaning. Then it became the "Rapture of t...

A Scientific American contributor found ChatGPT (probably 3) scored 155 on a standard IQ test : Estimated on the basis of five subtests, the...

Scott Aaronson, who works on AI safety for OpenAI, wrote a critique of AI Pause that was not up to his usual standards. Here's what I w...

The ad-funded internet is collapsing. It's been ailing for years but, as seems to the rule, the last bit is happening quite quickly. I&#...

 Not a bad response. ”Describe what happens when ChatGPT is enhanced with natural language processing and domain-specific knowledge modules....

TL;DR: It's not that ChatGPT is miraculous, it's that cognitive science research suggests human cognition is also not miraculous. &q...

The 70s were pretty weird, but I was too young to notice. (Not coincidentally, the Toffler/Farrell Future Shock book was written then.) By ...

 My Great-Aunt was born in the 19th century. She spent most of her life working in data processing. She, and thousands like her, did read, d...

Viktor Frankl formed some of his opinions of human nature by surviving several concentration camps. After his release, in a few days, he wr...

I haven’t written recently about why Crisis 2016, sometimes called Crisis-T , happened. For that matter, why Brexit. My last takes were in 2...

I believe this is true — though I’d be more confident if one of my favorite economists thought this was plausible (emphases mine): If The ...

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never repla...

The Economist has an excellent overview of the risks of the attention economy  (11/4/17). The Gamergate connection is particularly good. Th...

In the 90s the world kind of made sense. Since then, not so much. I don’t know if teens truly are experiencing an anxiety epidemic, but any ...

Once upon a time tens of thousands of New Yorkers moved paper from one file cabinet to another. Once upon a time there were jobs for strong ...

I’ve been using “crisis-T” as a tag for our times. I used to think it was a bit melodramatic; that maybe T would somehow veer to the fantas...

It’s a human thing. Something insane happens and we try to figure out “why now?”. We did a lot of that in the fall of 2001. Today I looked b...

In the real world HRC is President and the GOP is beginning a painful reform process that will lead to a far better conservative party and a...