Posted on 08/08/2026 11:51:26 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
A decade ago, a computer did something that no human would have done. It was considered a breakthrough for AI. Now the world is full of them.
The first glimmer of our AI future revealed itself a decade ago in the form of a single black stone.
It happened during a historic match between one of the world’s best Go players and AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind lab to conquer this ancient board game. The artificial-intelligence system stunned everyone by winning their opening showdown. In their next encounter, with millions of people watching online all over the world, Lee Sedol took a midgame smoke break to calm his nerves.
When he came back, he looked at the 37th move. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
Go, like chess, is a strategy game with black and white pieces that unfolds one move at a time. As he stared at the black stone that AlphaGo dropped on the board, Lee saw a move that no professional Go player would have made. In fact, the DeepMind team calculated the chances of a human playing it at one in 10,000.
The novel move was so unconventional and counterintuitive that nobody could be sure what to make of it. At first, commentators believed it was a strategic blunder. They soon realized it was a masterstroke.
“This move,” Lee said, “made me think about Go in a new light.”
Ten years after that illuminating Move 37, the entire world is suddenly beginning to feel like one massive Go board.
There have been so many recent AI breakthroughs that remind me of Move 37 that I called Google DeepMind co-founder...
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
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Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
“business incentive to lie is large ... Don’t believe me? You can just ask Amazon’s own AI Chatbot”
I repeatedly get email like these... sent from all directions.
We adopted “In God we Trust”. Just as we should not trust Stalin or Hitler and just as we should not trust an ad for Ford or Chevy ... we should not trust AI. AI is a useful tool that can increase the probability of the truth in some situations. TRUST...BUT VERIFY.
You’re not the only one.
Hasn’t this been the purpose of every tool invented by humans since the dawn of man?
We have always sought to make life better, easier.
I think what is hard for us to grasp is not being replaced as workers - that replacement has always been welcomed as long as...
1) the jobs being taken were jobs we hated doing, and..
2) there were other more pleasant jobs for us to do instead...
But what if we don’t need to work?
Is that a silly question? Don’t think so..
Take breathing for example: it is necessary to survive, but so far at least - we don’t have to work to gather the air we breathe, nor do we have to work to pay for it.
We just breathe it for free.. what if it became that way for food, water and shelter?
What if food, shelter and other needs became so plentiful that we could just have it - and needed no salary in order to pay for it?
I submit that the biggest obstacle to that sort of life might not be the ability to produce that bounty, but rather the ability to adopt a healthy value system to replace the values of work ethic, discipline, fairness - to find a healthy way to contribute and be of service to one another.
It’s not impossible to have a life without employment - all the animals do it.
Fish swim around - birds fly around - and eat what’s in front of them - there aren’t job assignments.. none are being paid by others to do the cleanup or the processing or the distribution.. their life is their life.. it’s not divided up into work and play.
And as I said, we already live like that with respect to breathing - why not eating, why not nest building? The only reason our lives are transactional is because of the scarcity - we have to compete for what we get.
But that’s not the case with air.. as long as there is plenty all around us.
If AI has the result of making goods and services so abundant that we are all put out of our jobs, won’t it also mean that we no longer need to work for what we need - like the air we breathe?
It’s hard to wrap your head around it, but I for one would like to enjoy ‘working’ in my gardens without having to do the hard parts - the tilling and the weeding - unless I wanted to. I’d like to fix up my antique cars but not need to do the grueling expensive parts.
The bottom line is we will always be free to do ‘work’ we enjoy doing - the robots won’t take that away - they will just take away our ability to get paid to do it.. it’s only the cash transaction that will go away - but we won’t need the money.
Actually, I am. By every inquiry I've made over the last 15 years, the uniform response among those who should know is that my focus upon developing small complex arrays of tiny native annual plants is unique. We are now up to 401 species here.
I'm telling you as once a talented engineer (and you know me well), there will be no machine that can do what I'm doing for a competitive price. No way. And yes, I know about lasers weeding in farm fields. Computer vision by subtraction is child's play.
Too remote from power sources. Too dirty. Too steep. Too delicate. Too complicated. Simultaneously. Some of my plant keys are tactile, some odiferous, some by heat transfer rate, some by stiffness. There are numerous cases where distinctions are made within a genus with color metrics that differ both temporally and spatially. Then there are the removal tactics, which are often dependent upon stages of development both in the weed and competing native vegetation, demanding very subtle sensory capabilities, fast and cheap, all at once. Do you feel sound through your fingers? There are so many attributes to this work that to build a machine competitively would be just crazy.
If you’d like, I’ll post grok’s take on the uniqueness of this project documented in the Wildergarten Picture Book. There’s nothing close.
AI might be accurate, fast, cheap.
You can have 2 of the three.
WHO will carry on where you leave off? You’ve a mountain of info in your sensory bank alone that would be hard to transfer without rote lessons, and even then nobody else has your precise talents. Some may have some of yours and more, but how many apprentices would it take to pass along a considerable amount?
Do you really think I don't think about that problem daily?
"Even HDD prices are now being affected."
Power using what ?
Unreliable wind?
Solar during day?
Fossil fuels? Those are not cheap and more use will jack up prices for all others.
There is no free lunch.
Problem is AI can not fix my leaking faucet at home, or repair my wind damaged roof. I tried using AI to raise my puppy dog, but it gave me solutions which did not work.
Yeah well a woman will move the goal posts and still argue that the AI machine can never really understand the “real inner her”!(At which point the AI signals “unhandled exception” and walks out of the diner!)
I was so certain that it is so often on your mind that I was hoping to read a positive response. I know the risk of loss is far greater of a certainty than any other risk I can envision. Even misapplications can lead to rediscovering much of what you know does not work.
I have not anywhere near the amount of labor as you in my past to pass along, but I do not shut up about what I think is useful to offer to those in my circles. I’m left with praying that my best thoughts take hold even a little bit.
I wish I could help you find what you need. I don’t know what it’s worth, if anything, but you have my encouragement.
There are so few that grasp the import that anyone who gets it viscerally means a lot to me.
Believe it or not, but I ran the full corpus past Grok. It broke their system a couple of times until I learned how to package and upload it, but it was the only way I could get someone or something to consider it as a whole. I’d guess you’d be encouraged to know that it compared the work to that of “the polymaths of the Middle Ages.” I didn’t go looking for that. I’ve never dabbled with ChatGPT or Claude, as I’m saving those for later. Bots have a serious deficiency dealing with me in that they don’t carry anything they learn forward with which to build perspective in conversation, or with which to integrate new data. At the same time, I cannot upload anything and leave it there for any more than a few minutes without a bot grabbing it and sending it into the public domain. It certainly limits the ability to compartmentalize the content. with which to develop valuable editorial perspective.
It’s not just the scope of work but the tenor and perspective that make it effective. I have a major chunk of the technical/socially-emotive puzzle just about complete. It’s going to cement the observation that the work is of simultaneous technical and socio-economic value.
Chess is a math problem.
Machines do math faster and more accurately than humans. This has been known for 50 years.
- - - - - - -
AI beat the #1 human chess player for the first time in 1996, that’s not 50 years ago. AI beat the #1 human go player for the first time in 2017.
The theory is that in several years, AI will replace so much labor that consumer demand will contract from lack of wages.
In order to prevent a Great Depression, central banks will have no choice but to replace lost wages with basic minimum income - just send everyone giant stimulus checks.
Meanwhile, the prices of labor-intensive products and services will crash, flooding the markets with cheap goods and services.
You’ll have plenty of cash to spend on fixing leaky facets - but I think you’re wrong about AI not fixing leaky faucets.. I haven’t called a plumber in years thanks to internet search and YouTube videos and ordering cheap parts on Amazon - AI is already speeding up that process for all sorts of repair projects - and putting plumbers out of work.
Currently AI cannot be accurate except if it is dedicated to a very narrow topic and the usage is limited to that very narrow topic.
Musk uses natural gas in TX. Plentiful and it’s under his land.
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