Posts

The Permian Paradox: Earthquakes, Flares, and the Corporate Capture of the Texas Subsurface

Image
The toxic cycle of Texas fracking, from regulatory capture to the environmental crisis unfolding in the Permian Basin. Written by Gemini AI, summarizing an extended research chat. Introduction: The Invisible Crisis To the casual observer, the West Texas landscape appears as it always has: a vast, sun-baked expanse of scrub brush, limestone, and open sky. But beneath the surface of the Permian Basin, a quiet, violent crisis is unfolding. For decades, the extraction of oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, fracking, has been celebrated by politicians and corporate executives as an economic miracle. It has turned the United States into the world’s leading energy producer, generated eye-popping quarterly profits for multinational corporations, and filled the coffers of the Texas state government. Water shortage is hitting much of the larger areas. The Colorado River is a vital source of drinking water for 40 million people in the seven states, Mexico and for 30 Native American tribes, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bitter Lesson of Mental Kudzu

Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

AI Consciousness? Maybe. Human Consciousness? I'm Not So Sure.

Image
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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more