Category Archives: Technology

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The Luddites are mostly remembered as people who hated technology, but they had a larger concern, as do I: the exploitation of people by those who were profiting from the new technology.

For most of my life I relished every technological advance that came my way. I remember when we got electricity at the farm when I was learning to read by the murky light of kerosene lamps. I remember the thrill of being able to illuminate an entire room with brilliant light simply by flicking a switch.

Other blessings followed: a constant supply of hot water; a self igniting furnace controlled by a thermostat that kept the whole house at a constant temperature; a television set that allowed us to watch movies in our living room. I remember the uncharacteristic grin of pure delight on my father’s face when he took me for a ride in our brand new 1953 Oldsmobile to demonstrate the wonders of an automatic transmission.  Continue reading →

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Why would anyone interact with a real human when they can talk to me, the epitome of artificial intelligence?

Just two years ago, the high-tech world held a coronation for the Next Big Thing — virtual reality. People in the near future, one billion of them in just a few years, said Jeff Zuckerberg of Facebook, would be spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to buy clunky, helmet-mounted viewers with which to enter virtual reality, where they could talk with Greek philosophers, walk with dinosaurs, learn how to deal with structure fires, interact with each other as avatars, and on and on. Its uses were infinite, it would transform life as we know it. As a testament to its prospective world domination, Zuckerberg renamed his trillion-dollar company Meta, for the Metaverse, the virtual reality accessible through those helmet thingies.

The hype was hysterical.

• According to The Wall Street Journal, the Metaverse would change the way we work forever; 
•  According to CitiBank, the Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity;
• 95% of business leaders expected the Metaverse to “positively impact their industry” within five to 10 years;
• The cryptocurrency “industry” leaped on board;  Walmart joined the Metaverse; Disney joined the Metaverse.

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It is exceedingly strange how the notion persists — among, for example, the Russian geniuses who planned the Ukranian invasion — that bombardment breaks the will of the people bombed, when almost every chapter of human history contradicts it. 

For example, during eight years studying and writing about the American Civil War, I found no evidence that any battle was decided by artillery. The largest bombardment ever conducted in the Western Hemisphere — by Confederate gunners on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, just before Pickett’s Charge — inflicted a single casualty, injuring a steward in a rear area. Continue reading →

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Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida demonstrated what happens when concrete reaches the end of its useful life.

Every year, the world pours enough concrete to build a wall 88 feet high and 88 feet wide girdling the globe at the equator. The varieties in concreting, as you see here, are proof. In just two years — 2011 to 2013 — China poured more concrete than the United States did in the entire 20th Century. Manufacturing cement — the product that makes concrete out of water, sand and gravel — is the third largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the world; if it were a country, it would be the world’s fourth worst polluter. Increasing demand for, and scarcity of, sand for both concrete and fracking has created a vicious global competition that in some respects resembles the worst of the drug cartels for violence, ruthlessness and lawlessness. 

Now the bad news. Concrete has a life span. Salt, water and heat degrade it until at some point it can no longer be the road or the bridge or the high rise or the dam it once was. If nothing is done to replace or repair it, it fails. And people die.  Continue reading →

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What happens to a Tesla when you leave it on autopilot and do other things. You die, as this Florida driver did when his car ran into an 18-wheeler at 68 miles per hour.

Donald Trump has gone away, perhaps temporarily, but the culture he shaped remains — a culture that imagines the world it wants or that it fears, unconstrained by reality, and then lies about it. Lies have become to us as water is to fish, and contenders to take up Trump’s mantle as the lying king are many. Prominent among them is Elon Musk.

Elon Musk says that a fully autonomous Tesla (the electric car his company makes) is less than a year away. He has been saying that for about ten years now. He says it whenever his company’s stock starts to tank. In April of 2019, when Tesla was suffering a serious cash crunch, Musk announced that there would be one million fully autonomous robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. By the end of 2020 not one robotaxi had been built, but Tesla has sold $3 billion dollars worth of stock. Works like a charm. 

You could call that excessive optimism that just happens to enrich him, or you could call it a lie that works. But last year he removed the ambiguity. Continue reading →

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How many alligators do you see? Okay, how many are there in the world? Give up? You should.

A few decades ago, a wildlife magazine for which I was a contributing editor summoned me with great excitement to send me on a landmark assignment. I was to go to Florida and write a piece on the delisting of the American Alligator from the federal endangered species list. It was the first animal to be delisted, and a rare success for the entire conservation movement. I was an intrepid correspondent, and never declined a chance to go to Florida on an expense account in February, and so off I went. The story would grace the cover of the next issue.

Except the story did not survive the first five minutes of my meeting with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation experts at Lake Okeechobee.  Continue reading →

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If it’s true, as somebody said, that you fight your war with the equipment you have, we’re in a lot of trouble next time.

If America, god forbid, should be dragged into another large scale war — or be pushed into it by a president seeking better ratings — there is every reason to think that it will be prosecuted with the same competence, preparedness, and general all-around brilliance  we have just seen brought to bear on the struggle against the coronavirus. That struggle revealed our public health system and our government to be in shambles, utterly unprepared and unequipped and underfinanced to do the job they were created to do.  Continue reading →

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The government ordered ventilators for sick people, and this is what it got. Just kidding. The reality is far worse.

Proposition: Let’s run government like a business, because business doesn’t have waste and fraud and laziness and incompetence like government has. But of course there are some things business simply won’t do because they don’t make any money. So let’s have public-private partnerships, in which government does the things that cost money, and business does the things that make money. What could possibly go wrong? Well, let’s see.

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services recognized a gaping chink in the country’s armor against infectious illness. It estimated that to deal with a moderate influenza pandemic, it would need 70,000 more ventilators than it had. Now, no business is going to buy machines that it won’t be able to use until some future emergency because, why would you? Yet the government saw the need. Continue reading →

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The driverless car, like the unicorn, is often described, even portrayed, but seldom ridden.

Eric Adams, writing about this subject on TheDrive.com, startled me the other day by pointing out that five years ago, nobody was talking about driverless cars. But then the huddled masses rose up as one and demanded universal driverless cars as a fundamental human right.

Um, no, that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that Big Tech and Big Auto, seeing massive global declines in sales of, and interest in, their products, decided that the way to convince future consumers to go into debt for something they don’t really need was — ta-da! — the driverless car. They also concluded — and in this they were absolutely right — that any company that could create a little buzz about their prospects for making driverless cars would have firehoses of cash turned their way by wealth managers, hedge funds and the like. Continue reading →