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The Bitter Lesson of Mental Kudzu

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My public library has that service to access periodicals online, so I opened the MIT Technonogy Review. All very intersting, capped with an article about pigeon thinking and AI: Planet-Sized Pigeon Brains, by Ben Crair. That got me thinking. After a little back and forth with Chat-GPT, yes, ironically, we had an outline and soon I had an essay. We imagined raptors. What we got were pigeons. For decades, the popular imagination of artificial intelligence leaned toward cleverness. We worried about cunning machines outsmarting us. Imagine chess-playing raptors, Go-playing predators, silicon minds with the capacity to stalk and trap us. Jurassic Park set the template: we feared the velociraptors, the clever girl who opens the door. But Rich Sutton’s “bitter lesson” tells us the real story. Progress in AI hasn’t come from mimicking human thought. It hasn’t come from modeling the neocortex, or building digital philosophers. It’s come from something far humbler: associative learning at ma...
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AI Consciousness? Maybe. Human Consciousness? I'm Not So Sure.

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With help from Chat-GPT and Claude The question haunts some conversations about artificial intelligence: "But is it conscious?" We probe silicon minds, demanding proof of self-awareness, empathy, genuine understanding. C an a machine truly experience? Can it grasp the weight of existence? Can it know itself? These questions reveal an unexamined assumption, that humans possess consciousness in some meaningful, reliable sense. We position ourselves as the gold standard of awareness, the benchmark against which all other minds must be measured. But this assumption deserves scrutiny. What if our understanding of human consciousness is more mythology than reality? What if the very framework we use to judge AI consciousness reveals uncomfortable truths about our own mental lives? Defining the Territory Before examining human consciousness, we need clarity about what we mean by the term. Consciousness involves at least three related but distinct capacities: Phenomenal consciousness ...
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The Human Cost of Gun Policy Decisions

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By Copilot The Human Cost of Gun Policy Decisions On July 19, Isaiah Phillip was shot at a pool party in Northeast Harris County. He was 17, a football player at North Shore High—young, full of promise, and gone. It was the third time in three years that gun violence struck the team. Braxton Coles, who lost his own grandson to a shooting last year, spoke from bitter experience: “You don’t know who you killed. You might have killed the next cure for cancer or diabetes.” —Braxton Coles, Click2Houston In the neighborhoods around North Shore, the grief is heavy—and the support systems meant to prevent these tragedies are quietly disappearing. What Policy Left Behind In April 2025, the federal government rescinded $158 million in Community Violence Intervention (CVI) grants, cutting off funding midstream for outreach workers, hospital responders, and trauma counselors. In total, more than $811 million in Department of Justice public safety and victim services grants were pulled f...
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Unpacking America’s Border Debate: Why the Country Still Needs Immigrants

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    How Immigrant Workers Shape America’s Economic and Cultural Destiny With Perplexity, Mare the Muse, and images by ChatGPT On a sun-bleached farm outside Salinas, California, strawberry rows are spaced wider—less for convenience than for a simple lack of hands to pick ripe fruit. Across the country, in bustling towns from Galveston to Cape Cod, “Help Wanted” signs crowd restaurant windows as managers scramble to fill shifts. These everyday scenes bring to life the urgent national debate over America’s borders and the millions who work, live, and hope within them. A Nation Forged by Migration America is, by its very nature, a nation of immigrants. From colonial days to the present, waves of newcomers—Irish dockworkers, Chinese railroad builders, German craftsmen, Mexican farmhands, and many more—have come seeking opportunity and carved out the country’s prosperity. Immigration policy has fluctuated between openness and restriction, marked by milestones such as the Chinese Ex...
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The Hidden Cost of Our Digital Lives

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The Hidden Cost of Our Digital Lives: AI, Streaming, and the Planet’s Energy Crisis Written by Chat-GPT, Perplexity and Mare the Muse We live in a golden age of technology. AI chatbots answer our questions, streaming services deliver endless entertainment, and cloud storage keeps our memories just a click away. But beneath the sleek interfaces and instant responses lies a hidden reality: these digital services consume vast amounts of energy, water, and land — often with outsized environmental impacts. As the world grapples with climate change and resource depletion, understanding the true cost of our digital lives is more urgent than ever. This post dives deep into the environmental footprint of AI models like GPT-3.5, compares them with other major internet services like Netflix and Google Search (now enhanced with AI), and explores what it means for our planet — and our choices. Two Ways to Understand Digital Energy Use Before diving into the numbers, it’s important to grasp ...
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