David Brooks wrote an outstanding piece in the New York Times (Feb. 2, 2023); In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human. Among issues being addressed are personality skills. He quotes Tyler Cohen, “The prior generation of information technology favored the introverts, whereas the new A.I. bots are more likely to favor the extroverts,…You will need to be showing off all the time that you are more than ‘one of them.’” Interesting consideration. Implications?

From Dan Rather; “The Chinese story strains credulity (or one could use more colorful language). What were they trying to accomplish? They had to know this would be detected. Was it meant to be provocative?” What do you think?

Did you know that there are huge oceans of liquid water on several moons in our solar system? Jupiter’s Europa, for example, is estimated to have 1.3 zettaliters of water under it’s icy exterior surface. (1 zettaliter = 1 billion cubic kilometers) Other life in our own solar system?

In an article by David Brooks in the New York Times he addresses reasons for the success or failure of programs designed to solve the poverty problem. He characterizes Democratic programs as transferring money through the provision of more jobs or through other means that address the “material deprivation of the poor.” Republicans address “economic incentives” or “regulatory barriers”  that affect our poor.

But, Brooks suggests that the problem here may be found in how we view the poor. When poor people are merely conceived as an abstraction, to be improved through economic structures, we miss seeing who these poor individuals truly are. We miss seeing people’s character and behavior, factors that strongly affect roles in our culture.

Thomas Malone, now the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, published, in 2018, Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together. I have just begun reading and expect to provide my thoughts on it here soon.