Dolly Parton died this week. There were not many like her. Not at that level. She was in many ways the universal American. Beloved by every community and a representative of someone we know in our own personal lives. People with ordinary decency. A person who stayed humble even on the world stage. She will be remembered not only because she was talented, but that she was a good person while the whole world watched.
She showed us the best of what a good human, a good American, is.
I was there when the desktop computer showed up in ordinary houses.
I was there when you would hear of a friend that got Coleco or Intellivision or Atari, some kind of home gaming system. It didn’t feel like it happened all at once, but in a span of about four years, people had at least one of those systems in their homes. Portable phones wouldn’t arrive for another ten years or so but the way people played, worked, the jargon in their language; it had all been rearranged. There was no agreement to it. It simply happened.
The time we are in now has that very same feel.
Which is why it is naive to think artificial intelligence can be ignored, or waited out, or sniffed at until it goes away.
It is not going away.
Everything it lays a hand on will change into something else. Work. Social life. What you do with a free hour. Medicine. Healthcare. Education. Not one of those is going to look the way it looks now, and the transformation is already underway in most of them. Merck and Moderna just reported a successful Phase 3 trial of a cancer therapy built for one individual patient.
No one develops something that individualized by hand.
What really concerns me is that this is the precise moment we stopped doing public policy.
We have hollowed out the agencies, run off the career people, and filled too many public offices with men and women whose private interests outweigh the public good.
It is so bad that the companies themselves cannot find steady ground. They publish frameworks asking to be regulated, then quietly lobby against regulation when it shows up. OpenAI put out a blueprint calling for public wealth funds, robot taxes, and a four-day week. Anthropic's Dario Amodei told his fellow billionaires they should accept a good version of higher taxes now or get a bad version designed by a mob later. Bill Gates, who spent a decade as this technology's most reliable optimist, now says he is deafened by the silence about its risks, and that nobody has a plan for bringing people into this era.
Meanwhile we are behind, and our adversaries know exactly how far.
China has done both things at once. Its labs have been lifting capability straight out of American models and using them to train their own models on the cheap. And did you see the running robots this week?
But the stealing is the less impressive half. They have also hyper-invested at home: a $138 billion national fund aimed at robotics, Alibaba putting $53 billion into AI over three years, one company alone building more than five thousand humanoid robots in a single year. And while this administration is in the hands of personal whims, China added 540 gigawatts of new power capacity in one year. You cannot run this technology without electricity and they seemed to have understood that better than us.
The approach here has been to build the enormous data center first and explain it to the neighbors later, if at all, with the social and environmental costs left as somebody else's problem.
The backlash was predictable.
There were protests across forty-two states this summer, roughly $286 billion in projects blocked or delayed, and sixty-nine jurisdictions with outright bans. Wholesale power on the eastern grid jumped seventy-six percent in a year. Only fourteen percent of Americans want one of these near where they live, and the fight has gone bipartisan, which almost nothing does anymore.
That’s what bad public policy creates.
There is only one way forward if AI is to serve the public good. Legislation that supports daily life in the way the desktop computer did, but this time with real protections built around jobs, compensation, and the environment before we have little control.
Until that happens, don’t play dumb. Learn the tools.
I have put out this newsletter now for nearly three years, and I have built processes using the power of AI to surface new material, edit my writing, create images, and keep the schedule straight.
I ask it to help assess my essays, remind me of other pieces I’ve written, and of course do the usual checking of grammar and spelling. Probably the resource I used the most as a kid was the thesaurus, a book to help pick more “sparkly” words (as one of our favorite elementary teachers used to say). AI gives you sparkly words and tells you why they’re a better choice. If anything, AI has helped me be more efficient, less mundane, at the effort to become a better writer.
Despite my use of AI, every judgment here is mine and what I decide. The argument, opinions, mistakes, the dumb ideas and the occasional good ones. It’s like having a jury to help me deliberate.
What has surprised me most over the past three years is how curious it has kept me. It spurs me on. That is what actually improved my writing. I’m doing more thinking on the craft. It has let me build small apps around reading and public service, a process that would have required coding knowledge until recently. Whether the apps or my writing is any good, I don’t know. But it sparked my creative gene the same way I remember first seeing a computer.
Learn it now while it is cheap and available. It won’t stay that way without public involvement. Nearly all of the AI builders have free tiers, whether Claude, OpenAI, Meta, Gemini, Mistral, or Perplexity. Open one, start a dialogue, and use it for a week on something you actually care about.
In the meantime, the corporate world is chasing AI that will someday be ubiquitous and autonomous. There will be an assistant with you all day, closer to a butler than a search box, listening and observing, helping with your thinking and your calendar and your friendships and your learning, remembering more of your life than you can hold yourself, seeing more about you than you have ever surfaced.
There will also be humanoid robots, robotic cats and dogs, and almost anything else you can imagine that can hold an AI chip. They will be able to speak with both humans and animals and act in a way that seems alive.
That should sound a little frightening, especially with no policy in place to shepherd a change this size. Something with the potential to benefit or harm life, liberty, and Earth.
The reality is that AI will have to become genuinely universal for all to use and have some say. We can’t afford for it to be confined to corporations, trillionaires, and rogue nations. That’s when it would really be dangerous.
The public needs a seat at the table immediately, but the public needs to really understand why.
What I Read This Week
Things worth your time
A short film on justice. Under two minutes, and it does more honest thinking about justice than you’ll get in an hour of news.
Twenty-five thousand pounds went up off a runway in Plattsburgh on electricity alone. The plane stayed up twenty-seven minutes, and cost five dollars to fly. Keep an eye on this one. The future of flight may be shorter hops, cheaper, and closer to home.
This was a beautiful piece, though tremendously sad. Can both be correct? We don’t deal with death well, but as a minister once told me decades ago, it’s how we deal with life that is the most important. Because our culture has been entrenched in transactions, we tend to gloss over the ultimate transaction, when someone good has passed. I like this because it is a reminder that almost all of us will never make the newspaper or the headlines, but it is really our work, our time, and our decisions that matter the most. Life is a precious and mysterious gift and if you can spend it bringing joy or good to others, that’s the model to follow. That’s the ultimate. I’m going to be starting a podcast sometime this year, and I’m going to try and bring more focus and interest to the ordinary, working class type of citizen. That is where I think we will find the connections and solidarity that we have been missing. Stay tuned. In the meantime, cherish these remembrances from some fine people.
Two Main Stories
The week, at length
Reed Hastings Sees the Curve Again
Reed Hastings built Netflix by watching where an industry was headed while Blockbuster kept charging late fees. So when he talks about AI and schools, it is worth listening. He is right that AI can be the patient, individual tutor no overworked teacher ever has time to be. He is right, too, that the teacher's real work was never the multiplication tables. It was the guidance, the structure, the slow labor of raising citizens instead of sheep. But Hastings glides past the hard part in a few seconds, so here it is plainly. First, we need a Human First policy as AI rises, or the disruption runs us over. Second, add up the true cost of lax gun laws, the metal detectors and armed guards and lockdown drills we have stitched into childhood, and ask how many teachers that money could put back in the room. Spend on people instead of fear. That is the connective thinking this country keeps refusing to do.
The Walkman was the first thing I ever owned that felt like the future. Then came a Sony CD player in the car. For a kid then, Sony was Japan, and Japan represented a cool, techy future.
Now CEO Hiroki Totoki says the quiet part out loud. Sony was forced to make a transformation, so Sony moved more from products to entertainment. PlayStation is the crown jewel, Crunchyroll owns anime, and the image sensor business quietly booked 122 billion yen of operating income in a single quarter. Still, I miss the coolness of great new products. Sony built the object everyone wanted back then before Apple ever did. At least for competition’s sake, I would like to see them try it again.
Porcupine Predicts
Three calls, the next two years
Politics
Elon Musk spends the next two years learning that a movement built on resentment of foreigners does not carve out an exception for rich ones. The H-1B brawl over the 2024 holidays, when he defended the visa and drew a revolt from the movement's own nativist wing, was a rehearsal. He was born in South Africa and held an H-1B himself. Calls to revoke his status will grow.
Tech and Energy
The International Energy Agency projects renewables meeting close to half the growth in data center electricity demand, rising twenty-two percent a year, with small modular reactors arriving behind them. Meanwhile this administration is restarting shuttered coal plants. Within two years, if new leadership takes the initiative, new tech will deliver faster and cheaper while the coal revival becomes costly. A real new green deal finally comes to fruition.
Business
Business has gotten there before the law has, but now cometh the reaper. The Associated Press laid out the template: a crypto firm under federal investigation, eleven million dollars to Trump-aligned committees, the case quietly dropped, then a billion-dollar venture with the President's own media company. Investigations will open, and it will lead to real federal adoption of law governing alternative forms of currency. If it catches members of the regime, that will be the bonus.
Alarming
When the smoke alarm battery is getting weak
and starts chirping to let you know it's time to
change it, and you cannot get on a ladder because
you are too old, disabled, alone, or drunk, you learn
to tune out the noise until someone comes over, or
you are sober enough to get on a ladder. But that may
be awhile since most of us are drinking more to tune out
other noise, like politicians in office. As we change our
bandwidth from AM radio to FM, we aren't receptive to
the frequency of lies and double talk anymore.
But I will get help with the chirping battery to protect
my investment, not that I care whether this place burns
down, but the insurance people would inspect the battery
before they paid up, as they should. I just wish people
would inspect who they vote for, before paying up with
our liberty and livelihoods, while the ones in office burn
down our House. We the people, are the Underwriters--
so why are so many unwilling to protect their House and
change the damn battery?
Deborah Parker
Before you go
Part of living in the first world is the ability to go about our lives in blissful ignorance of suffering around the corner or in another part of the world. We may not be able to address all of it individually, except through occasional donations and overused “thoughts and prayers”. But each of us can do one thing: avoid ADDING to suffering.
Live a life like that and you’ve done something well.
Always strive to be a good human.