I am always on the lookout for silver linings in life. What I mean by a silver lining is: Don’t naively ignore the dark cloud, look at it honestly and carefully, take it seriously, yet still focus on the sliver of sunshine around it. …

In my last post, I outlined a realistic but alarming scenario that describes how society could get reorganized due to the impact of AI. But I also promised to talk about ways to avoid this dark scenario. I am going to talk about that in this post. I will first…

We all know that the world is going to change radically over the next few years and decades due to advances in AI. AI is extending the scope and scale of technology and automation into pretty much every sphere of life. It is even accelerating the rate of change. Needless…

There is a popular misconception that everyone has one big mid-life crisis in their life, and it happens soon after they turn 40. It is supposed to begin as you wake up with a serious hangover after a night of drunken debauchery on your 40th birthday. And it is supposed…

It is a tradition, at least among sci-fi writers, of writing a trilogy, and then adding a fourth book to it. I believe Asimov was the first one to do that, but I could be mistaken there. …

This is the third and final post in my “Sentient AI” series, inspired by Google engineer Blake Lemoine’s claim that an AI has become sentient in his estimation. In my first post in the series, I gave an overview of the claim made by Lemoine, and provided a primer for…

In my last post, I provided a plain language primer for making sense of the recent developments in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In that post, I covered the recent pronouncement by Google engineer Blake Lemoine that a chatbot called LaMDA has become “sentient” in his estimation. I also went over…

Last week, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, caused quite a stir by claiming that an AI chatbot he’s been testing internally at Google has become sentient. His story, including the transcript of his conversation with the chatbot, instantly became big news. The conversation is definitely intriguing and thought provoking…

Last week I wrote about First Principles Thinking —what it is, and more importantly, what are the pros and cons of using it. While First Principles Thinking is a powerful and even necessary way of thinking and making decisions, it is not sufficient for operating in a complex, dynamic, and…