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Trouble with a Capital K: The Theater of Hope and the Ledger of Reality

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I. The Shrug in the East End In the Magnolia Park neighborhood of Houston's East End, the "K-shaped" economy is not a line on a Bloomberg terminal. It is the physical architecture of the street. Between the gleaming downtown skyline to the west and the refinery stacks to the east, the people who keep the city running live in the gap, doing the work the ledger makes invisible. The morning after the 2024 election, I watched a colleague absorb the results. She is a woman who cleans our office: Mexican, speaks little English, essential to the daily functioning of the building and entirely absent from the calculations of those who own it. She was beaming. "President," she said. "Strong." I didn't argue. Not because I agreed, but because I understood. Understanding it, really understanding it rather than pitying it, is the only way to make sense of where we are. She wasn't wrong that the world had rewarded strength. She wasn't wrong that the p...
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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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