If you were an American Christian living in, say, Iraq, would you wish your neighbors a Happy Ramadan? I would do that if I lived there - to extend courtesy to my neighbors and to honor the country I live in.
Do you feel that special Christmas holiday feeling? "All of life starts going … soft-focus, with glimmering lanterns and crackling fireplaces . . ." It makes you want to order a peppermint latte (photo).
Cynics or atheists enjoy it too, but they have to deny that the power which inspires the good feelings comes from the ancient meaning of our Christian holiday. Check out this post from 2016.
What would be the mood of a holiday inspired by ancient Nordic folklore? By ancient Aztec traditions? "What kind of “winter villages” would modern Aztecs have organized?"
This author says, "The fact is that the good cheer, conviviality and family reunions we feel compelled to organize at this time of year really do flow from a long list of powerful truths that our ancestors only learned about because of a single Jew’s birth in Bethlehem."
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Careful guardrails will be essential since decision making and execution of decisions is what agentic AI will do, and there will be consequences. Programmers will have to imagine possible bad consequences in order to protect priorities like privacy, cost, human safety.
Examples of what agentic AI could do in a couple of applications:
"AI is not just about building smarter machines, but about building them responsibly, ensuring they serve humanity’s best interests." Absolutely.
from Logicgate
You're familiar with the large language models (LLM's) like ChatGPT. They generate pictures and they generate text (by scanning the internet for likely word sequences) according to the command of a human user.
But artificial intelligence has gone way beyond that level to what is called "agentic AI" software systems. They are "proactive entities designed to tackle specific tasks with a remarkable degree of independence." They are programmed to make decisions and take action on them according to a human programmer's goal.
That independence is empowered to reach decisions by following this procedure (image):
from Logicgate
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(cont'd from yesterday's post)
How about putting data centers where solar power is free 24 hours/day and weather doesn't interrupt, thus solving the energy problem? How about putting them where cooling is also free 24 hours/day, thus solving the cooling problem?
Yes, there is such a place, a place to put data centers where no community will object or delay, where solar energy and coldness abound. The plan is to put them far, far away--in space.
Always considering the big picture, Elon thinks about how to help human civilization survive the dangers he foresees. When asked last month whether AI in space is possible, he answers that it is inevitable:
Follow up to this post
Artificial intelligence developers want new data centers asap. But local opposition is slowing everything down.
Energy is a big issue. Additional nuclear power plants of any type would help fill the energy gap, but it takes time to build up new ones. Anyway, our power grid is not as robust as it should be, so how will it handle huge new amounts of power? And since the needed increase of energy will probably come initially from fossil fuels, pollution could be a problem.
Massive amounts of cooling technology will also be required for data centers because so much heat will be generated. Will it come from local water sources like rivers or springs? Communities often don't like that idea.
Will local governments be receptive to enormous energy needs, possible local electricity rate hikes, possible pollution, and the draining of water resources if they allow a data center to be built?
So far, communities are delaying or blocking permits for the proposed building of data centers.
“Opposition is cross-partisan and geographically mixed,” the researchers wrote. “Blue and red states alike are tightening rules or rethinking incentives; legislators in places like Virginia, Minnesota, and South Dakota are scrutinizing subsidies, grid impacts, and local authority, often cutting across traditional party lines.”
from NBC
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Founder of Dell Technologies, Michael Dell, is all in on this idea. An investor all his life, he and his wife seem inspired: they are giving $6.25 billion out of their own charitable fund to give kids --not babies, but 10 and under--their own investment account seeded with $250.
Spending the money will be totally up to the child when he or she has access to it; no requirement dictates what it must be spent on. Meanwhile, "They'll learn about dividends, re-investment, and long-term thinking--not by studying financial theory, but by seeing their money steadily increase."
It could change families for generations.
It's never been done in America before. A law was passed last summer to give every eligible new-born child a new investment account seeded with a thousand dollars by the federal government (Invest America).
Children are eligible who are U.S. citizens, have a Social Security number, and are born from January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2028.
More contributions to the account can be made by almost anyone, up to $5000 per year. The money can be invested in ETF's (exchange-traded funds) and mutual funds.
It's for the child's future. No withdrawals by anyone can be made. At age 18, the child/beneficiary will convert the account to an IRA, subject to IRA rules for withdrawal. He or she can use it for anything, not just for education.
No eligible American child will reach young adulthood penniless under this program. As Michael Dell put it, "Everyone starts with something." Neither parents nor anyone else can get their hands on the money. The child can watch the account grow and learn how to invest.
This could be a wonderful thing.
from Schwab
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Some kids are on screens at school six hours per day. It hasn't resulted in better learning scores, but rather in worse scores.
"Thanks largely to the pandemic, an estimated 88% of school districts now issue laptops or tablets to students. While these devices make it easier for teachers to collect assignments and generate reports, they have been shown to significantly undermine student learning."
What can parents do in light of the unexpectedly poor results coming from ed tech in the classroom? This author has suggestions:
Reading a real paper book is more fun than reading it on your phone or laptop, whether a novel or nonfiction. But did you know that it also creates a more effective learning experience?
Turns out that memory (located in the brain's hippocampus) is linked to a physical location, like knowing where in that book you learned something. Scrolling doesn't give a physical location to a new fact, so it's missing one learning aid.
We now have decades of data on student learning associated with increasing use of education technology in classrooms. Disturbingly, it shows that kids learn less: "The more schools digitize, the worse students perform."
It was assumed that ed tech would help. But no, what disappointing results we have after all the effort and money that American school districts have spent digitizing.
from "We Gave Students Laptops and Took Away Their Brains"
(cont'd tomorrow)
Last spring Harvard and a number of other universities got a letter from the current U.S. administration informing them that they were in danger of losing the millions or even billions of dollars they are used to receiving from the federal government.
Some at Brown say that the agreement was a "savvy bit of dealmaking, giving away little of substance." The founder (graduate 2021) of a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapter at Brown agrees:
"Frankly, Brown got off easy.” During his time on College Hill, he says, “I saw exactly how hostile the campus was to ideological diversity. . . Forcing Brown to accept biological reality and merit-based admissions is a nice start, but the DEI bureaucracies, activist professors, and overall ideological capture is left untouched. Brown receives its money with barely a slap on the wrist.”
Brown's alumni magazine admits that "Compared to the agreement Columbia University had signed a week earlier pledging $221 million in fines to the federal government, Brown made far fewer concessions."
Additional note: "Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn't worth the cost . . a dramatic decline over the last decade." Sadly, I concur. We've discovered that universities and colleges in general are not doing what we Americans thought they were doing, and we can't keep giving them our tax money.
Earth now supports more than double its population--at a higher standard of living--compared to what it did back in the 1970's, when the overpopulation panic started.
After decades of alarmist warnings that the world can't support any more of us, actual evidence--cited in the last three posts--is piling up in favor of the opposite view. We earthlings are better off with more people, and in more danger long term from falling birth rates.
But the global trend today is a birth rate so low that some countries will never be able to recover from it.
To exactly replace their population total, a country needs an average birth rate per woman of 2.1. Only one region of the world still has births above that rate. Check out birth rates for over 200 countries here. A few examples: Italy 1.26, Germany 1.46, USA 1.84, Paraguay 1.88, Congo 5.49, Japan 1.4. Generally, the poorest countries have the most births. Europe, long term, may be in trouble (image).
from Stream
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Re-post from 2013
Thomas Malthus in 1798 predicted that humans would multiply on the earth until the earth could no longer sustain them. Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1970 published The Population Bomb which predicted, on the basis of Malthus, a future of massive global starvations. What did happen was the opposite of that (yesterday's post).
What did they miss, since this does happen among animals? The vole population (a sort of mouse) can multiply to the point of outpacing their food supply.
But people are "More Than Voles," as Eric Metaxas put it. Created by their own Creator to create, humans can create their own niche to support themselves. Homo sapiens are not utterly dependent on the natural environment like animals but rather can create wealth.
According to the materialist (there is no supernatural) worldview, humans are just animals. According to the Christian worldview, humans bear the likeness of their Creator.
God gave humans "the intelligence to complete the work of creation . . for their own good and that of their neighbors."
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
In yesterday's video you saw that mainline media, elites, the president at that time, were all persuaded that a population crisis had erupted because about 3.5 billion humans lived on this planet. You saw Ehrlich unapologetically maintaining his panicky tone years later.
Today our global population has more than doubled at 8+ billion. Did that result in more suffering in terms of life expectancy, food supply, child mortality, air quality, etc?
No. As it turned out, life on Earth is actually better by these metrics despite huge population growth.
Many people have the impression that we urgently need to reduce the number of people making their home on this planet. They may argue that it would be best for human beings now living and for those on Earth in the future. Or, they may argue that nature deserves to have Earth to itself with no human population.
Why would declining numbers be better for people? Mostly because they believe that our human population is unsustainably using the planet's resources; that is, consuming too much with the result that there won't be enough for future generations.
Some call it "overshoot." In other words, they foresee coming deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil erosion yielding insufficient food, pollution and reduction of fresh water--all coming because our global population uses natural resources at a faster rate than Earth can keep generating.
A very short summary of this view that there are too many human beings was made by David Attenborough, saying that humans have "overrun the planet."
Author of The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, persuaded much of America that we had to quit producing so many people:
from The Stream
What else is Tesla working on? A year ago, the "robovan" was revealed. It will transport up to 20 people, has a futuristic look, and of course it's an autonomous vehicle.
It will serve a function similar to our current bus system . . but it's still just a prototype so far. The rider cost per mile may potentially be 5-20 cents. Sounds good, but it's far from ready to go.
