The Plutocrat Feedback Loop

It feels like billionaires become more arrogant, more entitled, wealthier and more politically influential by the minute.  Something is horribly out of balance.  But it isn’t hard to see why.  It is quite simply the plutocrat feedback loop.

A feedback loop is a system where there are circular, reinforcing (or in the case of negative feedback, braking) effects.  Feedback loops are common in almost any system, whether mechanical, electrical, economic or societal.

When a business is successful its founders benefit from its success through profits but even more so from their ownership.  Industries in the past often required years or even decades of growth and capital expenditures to provide their owners with massive wealth.  Factories took time to build and markets were limited by transportation costs and the reach of marketing efforts. 

The modern world of finance and technology often provide a small group of entrepreneurs and investors with almost unimaginable wealth in just a few years.  The network effect quickly establishes a quasi-monopoly to the first few entrants to a modern market because who wants to try a different social media platform when all your friends and family and business associates are on the first one?  Who wants to use a new office app if everyone you interact with uses MS Office?  Who wants to use a new money transfer app if everyone you know uses Venmo?

When owners and investors quickly get fabulously wealthy, they are able to invest in start-ups either individually or through venture capital companies.  This creates a community of wealth and networking that attracts new opportunities and generates new success stories producing more wealth.  

This is a feedback mechanism – wealth producing more wealth.  It is a key part of capitalism, but the modern world has seen this feedback loop become incredibly fast because finance and tech companies require little buildout and relatively few human resources as well.  The time from concept to billion-dollar acquisition or IPO has shrunk dramatically.

A second feedback loop for plutocrats is the ‘I am a master of the universe’ effect.  It is only natural for someone to gain confidence after building a successful company.  But the hyper-celebrity nature of today’s entrepreneurs can easily exaggerate that sense of accomplishment and produce a growing sense of superiority.  Wealth also creates a legion of sycophants who are only too eager to confirm that superiority to be able to share a bit in the reflected glory and the crumbs that are leftover from the plutocrat banquet.

As new investments produce more wealth and one’s social circle becomes an echo chamber of other big ego plutocrats, a God complex is easily developed:  I am uniquely gifted!  I need to share my wisdom and genius with the world!  My ideas and philosophy are far superior to those of the morons and peons who drag this world down!

The most dangerous feedback loop is the political one.  Great wealth plays heavily into American politics.  It buys elections, it buys influence, it buys policy, it buys positions.  And all of that influence serves to create political, economic and social policy that reinforces the wealth, the industries, and the stature of the plutocrats.  A wealth tax?  No way!  Higher income taxes?  Not in my lifetime!  Some regulation of the crypto scam?  Are you kidding?  A more measured pace for AI and data centers?  Of course not – we’ll lose to the Chinese!  A serious analysis of big tech monopolies?  That’s socialism!  A closer look at the harm inflicted by social media algorithms?  That’s limiting free speech!

These feedback loops are powerful and they are growing and accelerating.  The world we inhabit now, with grotesquely unfair distributions of wealth and income, with climate change already inflicting great damage, with autocrats multiplying and unilateralism becoming the norm, is to a great extent a product of these feedback loops.  While we still have democracies (however weak they have become) in place we must do something to diminish their growth and impact.  

It is abundantly clear that plutocrats are the wrong people to trust with the future of the earth and human civilization.  But we must act now or they will prevail.

Some Perspective on American High-tech Exceptionalism

I love my country.  It is my home and where I have spent almost all of my life.  I love the incredibly diverse landscape, I love the people (or at least most of them . . .), I love the culture, I love the energy and the friendliness that generally prevails across our land.  

But I don’t love my country because it is better than other countries.  I don’t subscribe to that notion.  America, like every other nation on earth, has its beauty, its wonder and its admirable traits.  But also like every other nation, it has some very unfortunate habits and faults.

Our over-the-top patriotism and boastful claim to a unique ‘exceptionalism’ is one of these.  In the disastrous age of Trump, this unchecked boosterism has attained epic heights and any criticism or more nuanced appraisal of our history and our accomplishments is seen as anti-American, ‘woke’ and treasonous.

At the risk of being similarly branded, I want to take a more nuanced look at our domination of the age of computer and information technology.  There is no doubt that US companies dominate the high-tech world.  But is this domination purely American?  And is it tied to our uniquely exceptional country and its uniquely exceptional people?

There was this little thing called World War II that occurred just before the middle of the twentieth century.  And guess what?  The USA was the only industrial nation that came out of the war without catastrophic damage. In fact, having expanded dramatically as the ‘arsenal of democracy’, it was actually stronger than when the war started.

The invention and rapid development of the transistor and silicon technology launched the computer age.  It is no surprise that a country that had emerged stronger from both world wars would be in a position to make these innovations.  The creation of technology hubs in Massachusetts and California benefited from the readily available investment capital of the wealthiest nation in the world and research from the best endowed universities.

There is a ‘network effect’ when something achieves a certain level of achievement and begins to attract similar things.  History is replete with examples – Athens during the Golden Age of Greece, Florence  during the Renaissance, Manchester and Liverpool during the early industrial revolution, and Germany’s universities during the rise of scientific discovery there in the late 1800’s.  The rise of Silicon Valley, Route 128 in Boston and other tech hubs was the natural outcome of a confluence of factors that created this network effect.

As the computer hardware revolution spawned the software and information age, which required less capital expense and investment, the key innovations became a bit more international.  Software languages were invented by engineers from many different countries – Peter Naur (Danish) and Niklaus Wirth (Swiss) invented many of the early languages (ALGOL, PL360, Pascal, Modula) that paved the way beyond the limitations of FORTRAN and COBOL.  Other international players introduced concepts of object-oriented programming.

Soon thereafter, computer software and network hardware enabled the invention of the Internet. The underlying networking protocols (TCP/IP) were developed at DARPA, a US defense department organization, by Americans Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf.  But the higher-level protocols and concepts that enabled the World Wide Web (HTTP and the browser) were created by British engineer Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.  

The years following the advent of the Internet saw furious advances in software and networking.  Many different languages were invented.  European software developers contributed heavily to these advances.  C++, Python and PHP were all invented by Europeans, and Java by a Canadian.  The most prevalent operating system in the world, Linux, was invented by a Finnish computer scientist, Linus Torvalds.

As we hurtle into the AI era (perhaps our last era?), it is interesting to note that many of the key breakthrough concepts and techniques that created the world of neural networks, chatbots, and LLMs were developed at the University of Toronto by a group of computer scientists including Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun,  Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever.  Hinton formed a company, DNNResearch, in Toronto, which was acquired by Google to supercharge its AI subsidiary, Google Brain.

Intelligence and creativity are human attributes that defy national boundaries.  Even entrepreneurship is a universal and somewhat primal urge.  But investment capital, networking opportunities, talent pools and other seductive aspects of technology hubs have a strong magnetic pull and attract would-be innovators from across the world.

Yes, America is the envy of the world for its prowess in technology.  But how it got there and how it sustains that prestige is not a simple question of American exceptionalism.  It is a combination of timing, available investment capital, the network effect and momentum. America is a wonderful place, but the wide world is just as wonderful and as the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of those creative and energetic men and women from across the world who propel us forward.

Fate, Destiny, Providence and God’s Plan

In my continuing quest to understand the nature and conflicts of metaphysics and religion, I am intrigued by the question of what we mean when we toss around the terms fate and destiny, and what religious people mean when they speak of providence and of God’s plan.

Both fate and destiny describe some form of predetermined future.  However, dictionaries say that fate implies a blind, unchangeable outcome driven by outside forces (fate comes from the Latin Fatum, which means ‘that which has been spoken’), while destiny suggests a purposeful goal shaped at least in part by personal choices and efforts.

In Greek mythology, the ‘fates’ were three sister goddesses who ‘personify the inescapable destiny and lifespan of every mortal and God’. Clotho, the Spinner, spun the thread of life at birth; Lachesis, the measurer, measured the length of the thread, deciding how long that person lives; and Atropos, the inevitable, cut the thread with her shears, marking the exact moment of death.

We speak of accepting one’s fate, and the term fatalistic implies a passive acceptance of what is often a difficult outcome.  People from every era and every culture have bemoaned the often cruel and arbitrary nature of fate.

Fate implies a lack of free will.  If your fate is predetermined, then in theory what you do cannot affect or change it.  Yet even people that accepted the concept of fate continued to act as if they had free will, probably because it is against human nature to cease acting on one’s behalf.  Perhaps they were willing to accept the somewhat dispiriting notion that everything we do is predictable in advance and simply hope for the best.

In the midst of the enlightenment, when the laws of physics and mathematics were being discovered, it was tempting to imagine that the universe was completely deterministic and that everything could in theory be predicted.  This seemed to lend some credibility to the concepts of fate or destiny.  But as science progressed into the twentieth century, the role that chance, noise, probability and randomness/stochasticity play completely changed our perspective and introduced a new level of uncertainty in both the physical and the human world.   

The concept of a predetermined outcome, or fate, is no longer embraced by most rational people unless they believe in a religious version, which is known as providence or more simply, God’s plan.

The monotheistic religions appear to have a spectrum of beliefs about the nature of free will and predetermination.  Many religions believe in predestination, which is similar to fate in that it posits that the entire path of our lives is known by God.  The issue of free will is debated endlessly, and different groups at different times have come up with ways to reconcile predestination and free will.  But contradictions and logical absurdities abound in these attempts to fit ancient concepts of fate and providence into a world where science, logic and reason predominate.

Some theorize that God is outside of time and history and is able to know and observe everything about our lives without denying us free will.  But many of the same people speak of God’s plan as if one’s life has been planned or is at least in the process of being planned as one lives.  How this can coexist with free will is never completely explained.

Most religious people believe that God intercedes in our lives in enacting his plan, but the question of how a merciful and loving God that is acting on our behalf allows horrible things to happen is only vaguely addressed.  The typical answer is that evil occurs because God is not a puppet master and that he allows us free will and that humankind’s sin causes bad things to happen. 

But this is a woefully inadequate and illogical answer.  If God can and does intercede yet allows evil to occur then that begs the question on what basis God intercedes?  Why cure one cancer and not another?  Why save one life in a plane crash and not the rest? The usual response is that God’s ways are mysterious, a profoundly unsatisfying explanation.

Whether fate or providence, the idea of a predetermined path of life is both pain and solace to many.  If one’s life is burdensome and full of failure, then the idea of fate may bring some measure of comfort, as one can rationalize the misfortune as inevitable and avoid responsibility. Similarly, if a great tragedy occurs, some may find relief in believing that God’s plan will bring some good out of it eventually. 

Accepting the fact that events in our lives or in the world may be purely random is difficult and distressing.  But what remains is indeed true free will.  How we react to events can have impact on our own lives and the lives of others.  We do have agency, however feeble it may seem, and we must do what we can to have positive effect.  It is the most needed characteristic of humanity.

Confidence

Confidence is a trait that is highly regarded.  Merriam Webster defines it as follows: a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances.  We are told that confidence is essential to success in life, indeed even to happiness.  A lack of confidence is seen as a failing, a weakness, and likely to lead to misfortune or at best, mediocrity.

But as I regard my own life, I am struck by how variable and ephemeral confidence is.  It comes and goes with surprising fickleness.  One can be supremely confident in the moment, imbued with almost limitless trust in oneself, then find soon thereafter that confidence has fled, leaving one hesitant and uncertain about a course of action.

I have experienced this in many aspects of my life, but perhaps most acutely in sports.  In my soccer career I was fortunate to have a good level of success, both in high school and college.  There were games where I felt like a superman, where almost every touch I made on the ball was clever and skillful, and goals came with surprising ease.  But a week later I could seem hapless, unable to generate much creativity or presence on the pitch.

What was clear was that confidence bred more confidence in a delightful acceleration, and that the loss of confidence became a downward spiral with similar dynamics.  It was easy to ride the upward march of confidence and quite difficult to stem its fall.

There were similar alternating flights of confidence and insecurity in my professional life. Sometimes I felt like a master of the universe, completely in control of a situation, meeting, project or task.  Other times I faced a crisis of confidence, feeling inadequate or enervated. 

Confidence can be cultivated and nurtured through effort – by practice, acquisition of skills, and other methods of creating a basis for it.  If we are industrious and work in good faith to increase our competencies, then a deserved increase in confidence will likely occur.  Confidence does not appear out of nowhere and a small measure of pride in having built it is not entirely unmerited, but we should be acutely aware that confidence also requires some measure of good fortune, opportunity or well-suited circumstances. 

Sometimes a loss of confidence is clearly a consequence of events outside of our control.  And similarly, a lucky confluence of good fortune may make our self-confidence soar and produce that euphoric sense that we are invincible.

There is a line in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar that I find helpful in understanding the impact that some what random, external events can have on our confidence:  

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

It is a mark of immature vanity to believe that all of our confidence and accomplishments have been self-created and that we deserve sole credit.  We should all indulge in a bit of imposter syndrome now and then to keep our egos in check.  And we should always remind ourselves as we gaze upon those whose confidence has departed and whose fortunes have plummeted that ‘there but for the grace of God/fate go I’.

The Age of Multi-Impotency

When I was young, the cold war was underway and the threat of nuclear war hung over our heads like the sword of Damocles.  In elementary school at a naval base in Hawaii, we practiced walking to bomb shelters during the Cuban Missile Crisis and performing the absurdly useless ‘duck and cover’ maneuver.  At the time, I don’t recall being frightened or overly concerned.  I was a child.

As I got older, in the late 60’s and 70’s, the thought of nuclear war became less abstract to me and I began to seriously ponder the consequences and the probability of it occurring.  The potential consequences were, of course, catastrophic beyond comprehension.  

But as frightening as a nuclear holocaust seemed, the actual likelihood seemed very low (only later to discover that we came scarily close several times!).  And of course there was little or nothing I could do about it.  I felt impotent, but it didn’t really bother me that much.

What a difference a few decades make!  The world today offers up multiple nuclear holocaust types of scenarios, each with its own unique feeling of impotence.  There is global warming, artificial intelligence, growing authoritarianism and unilateralism, the new ultra-plutocracy, the loss of biodiversity, the proliferation of plastic pollution, and worst of all, the MAGA cult and its megalomaniacal leaders.

And while the probability of nuclear holocaust was perceived as rather low during the cold war, the twenty first century plagues are already inflicting massive damage on our world and clearly accelerating the march toward cataclysmic events.  

To feel impotent to impact an unlikely, though chilling, single scenario like nuclear war is one thing.  To regard so many encroaching perils and feel impotent to have any real impact on any one of them is almost insupportable.  The age of multi-impotency is upon us, and humanity hangs in the balance.

Missing the Point on Morality

A large motivational force behind the MAGA movement is the hysteria over the decline of so-called Christian values and morality.  Well intentioned people see the changes in sexual mores, the ubiquity of Internet pornography, the increase in single parent and non-traditional families, the acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage, abortions and drug use as signs of a catastrophic decay of societal morality.

They attribute this ‘decay’ to the decline in Christian affiliation and church attendance, and more generally, to left wing or liberal ideologies.  The historical association of communism with atheism is conflated with any left-leaning political inclination.  The fact that many mainline Christian denominations have embraced more liberal policies in the past is dismissed as corruption or naïveté.

The so-called ills that frighten the MAGA cult are complex societal or personal topics.  Sexuality, and all of its associated issues (sexual preference, pre-marital sex, abortion, pornography) have challenged societies for millennia.  There is no single set of moral codes that can resolve them.  

And if we are honest with ourselves, then we must confess that these primarily affect the individual, whether for good or for bad, and it is therefore up to each individual to decide what path to take as long as it does not directly harm others.

There are indeed moral failings in our society, but they have nothing to do with sexuality or substance addiction.  

It is a moral failing that we have so much wealth in our society yet there is no universal medical coverage.  

It is a moral failing that much of the world still languishes in desperate poverty and falls prey to famine and disease when other parts of the world have an embarrassment of riches.  

It is a moral failing that we spend so much of our resources on weapons.  

It is a moral failing that we continue to pollute the air and water, accelerate global warming with no effort to reduce it, and produce ever more plastic and other long-term contaminants.

It is a moral failing that we are more interested in throttling or preventing the immigration of desperate world citizens than in helping to solve the problems that cause this migration.

The fact that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism have much more to say about these moral failings than the ones the MAGA world decries is apparently lost on these hyper religious doomsayers.  If there is to be a true ‘turning point’, then it would be the loving unification of the religious faithful with their humanist brethren to address the real moral failings and work toward a more moral world together.

Lindsey Graham – The Poster Child of Unprincipled Politics

The dead will have their eulogies.  People will search for the good in them and pretend it was their essence. But let’s not kid ourselves.  Lindsey Graham was an unprincipled political animal, only in it for himself.  The list of Trump sycophants who jettisoned all scruples to feast at the MAGA trough is long, but Graham rightfully holds an exalted status in this list of self-serving opportunists.  

Graham’s flip-flopping on Trump and the MAGA world was not an outlier in his career.  He completely changed his position on multiple issues – gun control, abortion, immigration, climate change, election denial, etc.  Early on, he famously promised to serve no more than 12 years as an elected official, then died in his 31st year.  After using tortured logic to rationalize the refusal of a republican led congress to accept Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2016, he chaired the Judiciary Committee that cynically turned that logic on its head to drive through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.  

In foreign affairs, Graham was a saber rattler and chest beater extraordinaire, a cheerleader for every huge foreign intervention mistake that the USA has made in the last 30 years.  His jingoism was particularly focused on the Middle East and his unequivocal support of every Israeli military operation and oppression of Palestinians is part of why we have Netanyahu and his Nazi-like settler movement in charge of Israel today.

Yes, Graham would occasionally cross the aisle to work with Democrats.  And from time to time he did demonstrate a bit of true conviction.  But if we are to learn from the mistakes of the Trump era, then we must recognize that the crass opportunism that has kept Trump in power must be exposed and denounced in no uncertain terms.  Lindsey Graham, along with JD Vance and Marco Rubio, is a perfect example.  Whether he was a purely cynical operator, or somehow drank some of the MAGA kool aid and fell under Trump’s spell, his mercurial turnabout is a cautionary tale about how the lust for power can take away all conscience and integrity.

Meta Pervert Glasses – The Technology That Only A Creep Can Love

Mark Zuckerberg is a toxic, tough guy wannabe who clearly nurses deep neuroses from childhood.  So it is no surprise that his company Meta has launched the most invasive, cringy technology that one can imagine – eyeglasses that allow people to spy on and video everyone around them.  If there is a better example of technology run amok I cannot imagine it.

Facebook, later Meta, became a juggernaut by fouling the waters of social media and amplifying the insecurities of vulnerable tweens and adolescents with their addictive algorithms.  After a pathetic, failed fever dream of creating the metaverse, Zuckerberg pivoted to the final frontier of privacy - glasses that assault both the users and every unwitting person they encounter with unneeded and despised technology.

We have smart phones and watches and oura rings.  We have ipads and air pods and headphones, and a few of us still use computers.  How much of our bodies and our lives can we smother in technology before we have finally had enough?

Zuckerberg’s pervert glasses seem to be hitting a brick wall lately.  People talk about being ridiculed and shamed for wearing them.  There are huge privacy issues when people have the means to record voice and video without consent of people around them.  Who could have possibly thought this was a good idea?  Zuckerberg, of course.  

If there is any justice in this universe, then meta glasses will die a quick death and be a huge failure for Meta and its broligarchic founder, Zuckerberg.  If not, then they will be one more nail in the coffin of humanity’s chance to lead a life unfettered by constant technological irritations. 

Is the So-Called Radical Left Really Radical?

Recent election wins by more left-leaning candidates have sent shock waves through both republican and democratic power structures.  The republicans are delighted, as this offers them the time-tested ‘socialism’ bogeyman to use as a scare tactic in the midterms.  The democrats are anxious that the new, more strident wing of their party might alienate independents or middle-of-the-roaders.

But what are the actual issues and policies that motivate these ‘radical left’ candidates, and are they really radical at all given the current state of our economy and country?  The first alarm bells go off with the use of the label ‘democratic socialist’ by New York City’s mayor Mamdani and many others.  This term strikes terror into the hearts of those Americans who have been conditioned to associate the word socialist with Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and other failed authoritarian states.  

Socialism is primarily an economic concept that postulates full ownership of industry by the state.  It has long been abandoned by serious politicians.  But the term ‘democratic socialist’ implies a democratic political system that uses government effectively to smooth the rough edges of capitalism and ensure a more egalitarian and benevolent society.

It is true that many of the new left are strongly advocating more aggressive redistribution of wealth and income in our society.  But given the gilded age levels of wealth disparity, the growing national debt and the heavy economic burdens that lower-middle working-class families bear, can there really be any doubt that a fresh look at taxation is needed?  With AI delivering an even more absurd bounty to the ultra-wealthy and billionaires using their wealth to gain ever greater control of politics, who can argue that we are not in desperate need of new ideas?

Another issue that has animated the new left is the unconditional support of Israel.  The USA is an extreme outlier in the world in this regard.  The militaristic and extreme right wing Netanyahu regime, with its genocidal war on Gaza, its winking nod to extremist settlers taking over the West Bank, and its use of assassinations and disproportionate attacks, is fast turning Israel into a pariah.  

Even many US and Israeli Jews have recognized the foolhardiness of our unequivocal support and the need for the US to exert massive pressure on Israel to change its ways and truly work toward Middle East peace.  This is no longer radical, but simply sensible. Calling every attempt to discipline Israel antisemitism is disingenuous and dishonest.  And sincere criticism of the influence of the Jewish/Israeli lobby in our politics is needed and should not be conflated with older anti-Jewish tropes.

The passion of the new left to deal with these two major issues may be unsettling to some, and they may at times advocate dramatic measures that are not realistic.  But this is the way that the pendulum swings.  If there is no passion and no conflict, then there is little chance for change.  The status quo is no longer workable.  And it is far better for this change to come through democratic, legislative processes than through depression, revolution or war.

Beware the Fast-Approaching Human Doodle!

Do you have a golden doodle?  Or a labradoodle, or a bernedoodle, or an aussiedoodle, or a yorkiepoo, or a schnoodle (I could go on but I won’t).  It seems like every other dog I see these days is some form of poodle hybrid.  They are apparently universally acclaimed as intelligent, gentle and, most importantly, non-shedding.  Who can blame someone for wanting one?

Someday soon most of the dogs in the world may be some form of doodle.  Not surprising, is it?  It is a very human trait to want the best of everything.  If nature stands in the way, then we’ve generally found a way around it!

Recently a new form of gene editing called base editing was announced by scientists at Columbia University.  Base editing can apparently meticulously swap out individual letters in an embryo’s genome with less potential for errors than previous CRISPR technologies.  

There is naturally a mixed reaction to this news.  The prospect of eliminating inherited diseases in embryos has many scientists and physicians very excited.  To overcome the scourge of diseases like sickle cell anemia or Huntington’s disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy would be a miraculous achievement.

But, of course, the editing of embryonic genomes also brings to mind the Pandora’s box of designer babies.  Does anyone think that Elon Musk, David Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and all the other tech and finance bros would hesitate one nanosecond to use this technology to create the new Übermensch?  

But it’s not just the gazillionaires who will play this game.  Every parent wants the best for their children as they develop and grow.  Why not start even before they are born?  Who wants a short kid – no one - so let’s fix that!  Who wants a boy who will go bald in his twenties?  Edit that out!  Athletic ability?  Put lots of those genes in!  Intelligence?  The sky’s the limit!  

So, what will the human doodle of the future look like?  Tall, blond, blue-eyed, non-balding, super-intelligent, a super athlete, and disease-free no doubt.  And perhaps there will be a bunch of variations based on race and ethnicity.  

The designer baby world will make today’s inequalities look positively benign by comparison.  The cost of designing will completely separate the haves from the have-nots.  We may find ourselves in a brave new world of über and unter menschen – a Nazi fever dream without any necessary gassing or unpleasantness. 

Yes, beware the coming of the human doodle.  Artificial Intelligence will seem like a fun time compared to that nightmare.  

When Is There Too Much Tech? – Part 3 – AI Agents and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The AI revolution marches on.  The chatbots are somewhat old news now, though they are everywhere and inundating the world with content that is very difficult to distinguish from human endeavor.  The big new AI blitz is ‘agents’ and one of their primary uses – ‘vibe coding’.

AI agents are software programs that performs tasks autonomously on behalf of a user.  They utilize neural networks and machine learning like chatbots, but they are set up to act independently from the user once a set of instructions or goals are provided.  The classic use case is for an AI agent to act like a human travel agent, booking flights, rental cars, hotels and other travel details without user intervention.

When I envision a world of AI agents I am reminded of the sorcerer’s apprentice, that Disney Fantasia animation that portrayed a magic spell run amok and out of control.  I wonder if AI agents will have a similar effect on human activity.

The use of AI agents in the workplace is being aggressively marketed and the corporate world seems eager to incorporate them, whether out of FOMO or true belief. Companies hope to see significant increases in productivity when these agents are deployed.  

For the economics to work out the huge expenditures that AI companies are making in data centers, development and LLM training must be offset by ever-increasing revenues from companies paying for these agents.  And in turn, these companies must see increasing productivity which either reduces expenses (less employees) or increases revenues for the same number of employees.

I have little doubt that AI agents will have significant impact in the corporate world.  Whether they will cause the feared tsunami of layoffs and unemployment is difficult to predict.  In a perfect scenario, the cost of goods would decrease and there would be full employment with a shorter workweek.  But getting to that perfect world will be painful at best, and perhaps impossible.

We are seeing a test case for this in the coding world.  Vibe coding is eliminating the need for low level programmers and increasing the output of higher-level architects and designers.  Computer science majors, having been exhorted for decades to ‘learn to code’ are leaving college facing a scorched earth landscape of job options.  The industry may evolve to establish new job types and accommodate future grads, but first indications are not encouraging.

In our personal lives, the prospect of using an AI agent may seem tantalizing, like having your own administrative assistant.  It can pay bills, set up doctor appointments, schedule lunches or coffee with friends, plan a trip, organize your computer, manage your investments and perform a multitude of other tasks.

But when you hand over so many of your tasks to an AI agent, do you lose agency in your own life?  Do you become ever less aware of the details and mechanics of living?  It may save you time, but what will you do with that time?  Isn’t part of being human attending to the mundane details of life?  Isn’t there a certain satisfaction and Zen-like quality to performing those tasks?  

AI will seem irresistible to many, if not for its utility, then at least for its cachet and the feeling that one is technology savvy.  But its creeping invasion into our lives must be carefully monitored and measured to calculate its true value and measure what we lose in the process.  Beware that you do not end up like the sorcerer’s apprentice, outsourcing your tasks and being overwhelmed with runaway technology.

Payback is Hell

The 90’s were a great time, right?  The cold war was over, the Soviet Union humbled and dismantled.  The technology revolution brought ever more powerful computers and the shiny new Internet, with all of its potential for bringing knowledge to the entire world and leveling the playing field.  Global trade was growing and large numbers of people were moving out of poverty into a semblance of middle-class lives.  The United States was the world’s policeman, protecting free trade, settling squabbles and projecting power in a benevolent, quasi-altruistic manner (ha!).  The western developed countries were at the peak of their power and wealth.

It would have been the perfect time for the west to attempt to compensate for the damage that hundreds of years of colonialism and imperialism had wrought on the developing world.  

It would have been the perfect time to recognize the looming hydrocarbon crisis and begin to work towards alternative energy models.  

It would have been the perfect time for reaching out to former adversaries (Russia and China for example) and making a sincere effort to integrate them more fully into the global community.  

It would have been the perfect time to encourage a worldwide effort to address the drug trade and the growing rate of addiction in the west, which was, after all, the driving force for the trade.

It would have been the perfect time to promote education and entrepreneurship in developing countries rather than steal the best and brightest to further consolidate our dominance.

Yes, all of those things are super complicated and hard to achieve, but it would have been a perfect time and a very good idea to make our best effort while we were flying high. 

But that time is over.  Now the west is in free fall, with rising debt, government paralysis, rampant populism and authoritarianism, a supremely self-absorbed class of plutocrats, global warming looming, immigration crises and the USA led by an insane narcissist and megalomaniac.  

The formerly second tier nations – China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Russia and others – are rightfully claiming their share of the world’s bounty.  The African and Latin American nations with long histories of corruption, squandered economic opportunities and political turmoil (much of it initiated and exacerbated by the west) also yearn for their share, but see their young abandon hope in desperate efforts to immigrate or cleverly fuel the west’s out-of-control drug habit.

All is not lost yet, but the west is rapidly learning that payback is hell.  Now is the time for the world to come together.  The Trumpian unilateralism is a dead end that will lead rapidly to our demise as a species.  AI will only accelerate that demise unless we band together to share its power and potential.  Who will lead us forward?  Who will reject the current zero-sum mentality and argue persuasively for cooperation?  The world is waiting.

Two Hundred Bonjours a Day – My Spiritual Journey on the Camino

I have a very unfortunate injury to my left foot, presumably from playing soccer.  There is no cartilage between two midfoot bones. Walking at all is slightly painful, but becomes ever more so as the distance increases on a given day.  This is a profoundly discouraging injury to a person who expected to run, hike and play soccer into his 70’s and even 80’s.  But such is life.

When Karen decided to walk the French portion of the Camino pilgrimage from Le Puy to Estaing with her German friend Gudrun, I thought I would fly over with her and drive around while she was walking, practicing my French.  But as we got closer to the trip, the idea of joining them for part of each day’s walk and chatting with the predominantly French pilgrims seemed like a better idea and more likely to produce genuine French conversations.

So I rented a car and drove ahead of the walkers, walking a few miles back to meet them each time as I leapfrogged their progress.  They walked from 10-14 miles each day and I would do between 5 and 8.

Walking backwards on the Chemin de Saint Jacques, as it is known in France, was rather odd.  Since almost all of the walkers are moving forward, I passed large numbers of them (sometimes several times in a day!), cheerfully greeting them with a ‘Bonjour’ and maybe a ‘Bon Chemin’.  Some of them stopped me to ask why I was going the wrong way and this allowed me to engage in a conversation about my unique approach, my injury and anything else that might come up.  It was great practice for my French.

In the evenings we stayed at ‘Gîtes’, the very low-cost but convivial lodges for pilgrims.  We stayed in private rooms with bathrooms (spoiled Americans!) but many chose to sleep dormitory style and share bathrooms.  Breakfast and dinner were communal, offering great opportunities to make camino friends and share life stories.

Most of the pilgrims were older, between 50 and 80.  These baby boomer French were less likely to be confident in English and were super supportive of my efforts to improve my French.  The shared goal of walking (even though I was a ‘faux’ pilgrim or Pelegrin, as I joked to all who learned my story) and our shared humanity was a wonderful elixir that seemed to imbue everyone with an optimistic spirit and a sincerely friendly demeanor.

I never tired of saying ‘Bonjour’, and the people I met repeatedly over the course of our ten-day pilgrimage were equally buoyant in their greetings and our shared moments laughing and conversing.  It is clear that human beings really want to get along and enjoy one another’s company when we are on equal footing and sharing a goal.  But sadly, it all seems to break down when the real world gets in the way.  

My very odd and somewhat fraudulent Chemin de Saint Jacques, with its 200 Bonjours a day was a reminder to try harder to see our common humanity in every person I meet.  The bitter pills of our current political climate have poisoned me in that regard, but the antidote is out there if I will only remember to reach for it.

When Is There Too Much Tech? – Part 2 – Save Us From the Chatbots!

As the AI juggernaut wraps its tentacles around us, the question is not so much whether it will bring wondrous new automation, applications and gadgets - that is a given - but more about what we will give up or cede in allowing technology to create, manage and control more of our lives.  And most importantly, the question is whether what we lose is a reasonable trade for what we gain and whether it is simply another step in our evolution as a species, not to be feared, or a slow descent into a more passive and meaningless existence.

Consider this:  When you receive any significant message from someone, whether personal or business, there is now no way to know whether it was generated by an LLM or written personally by the sender.  The sincere note of thanks, the profession of friendship or love, the sharing of thoughts or opinions – are they the expression of the writer’s thoughts or feelings or simply a chatbot’s response to an instruction?  We simply cannot know, and it seems likely that as time goes on it will almost always be the chatbot.  That, to me, is already a profound loss.

The use of chatbots to create something written, whether an essay, a letter, a poem or a song, denies the ‘creator’ the effort, the thinking, the research, the creative struggle that would otherwise have been necessary to craft what the chatbot produces.  And yes, of course, that doesn’t mean that a chatbot can’t be used to ‘augment’ or aid someone’s creative work rather than fully compose it, but imagine the temptation to rely heavily on AI and the high probability that most will succumb to that temptation.

What future student will learn to write effectively, much less beautifully?  It takes hours and hours to learn how to write well.  Think of the hundreds or thousands of pieces of writing one struggles to create throughout high school and college, not to mention the personal missives one sends via mail, email or notes.   Who will take the time and the trouble to do this now?  Only a very few.  Is this an unnecessary skill in the AI ‘best of all possible worlds’ of the future?  Perhaps, but I believe losing this skill is a heavy price to pay.

And if one no longer writes, then we will no longer have to struggle to analyze and deeply understand a topic and organize our thoughts to be able to express them articulately.  Yes, we will have the deep analysis and summary that a chatbot will give us, but it will have been cheaply obtained and we will have been robbed of the critical thinking that is such an important part of any creative or learning process.

In the end, if we rely on chatbots that have been trained on what humans take years to develop, are we not cheating ourselves of that process of development?  Aren't we taking a huge shortcut that will certainly limit our own capabilities by pretending that when chatbots obey our commands they represent us?

Chatbots can create other things – graphics, photos, videos, films, and music for example.  And in the near future it is very possible that their brethren, robots with AI/LLM capabilities, may be able to do almost anything humans do now and more.  Will this empower humans to be creative in new, exciting ways?  Perhaps, but it could also commoditize creativity and result in an avalanche of shiny things that have little substance behind them.   We already see this.

Providing tools for humans to be more creative is one thing, but mimicking human creativity through a massive training process and then independently creating things with input from a human has the potential to make human creativity superfluous and overwhelm the world with cheap and gaudy thrills.

We can hope that people will seek out true human creativity, and I can envision an underground of noble creative spirits carrying the torch of humanity like the oral book reciters of Fahrenheit 451.  Perhaps after a few years the LLMs will be rejected like foreign tissue from the body of humanity and we will learn once again to express ourselves without the addictive aid of a seductive but treacherous interloper.

When is There Too Much Tech? – Part I

I recently completed a five-course series on neural networks and deep learning where I built smaller versions of the AI that is on self-driving vehicles, chatbots/LLMs and other platforms.  While waiting for my million-dollar job offers from OpenAI, Anthropic and others, I have a few thoughts on technology.

BTW, that introduction is intended as a subtle reminder that I am not exactly ignorant when it comes to technology and science.  I am fascinated by these topics and I find it compelling to understand as much as possible about them, but I also find myself less and less interested in using ‘tech’ – the ever-growing intrusion of apps and devices that overwhelm all of us and consume so much of our time and resources.

We have become accustomed to the steady onslaught of tech into our lives since the arrival of the personal computer and the Internet.  And we readily acknowledge the level of addiction that has accompanied it.  Who doesn’t feel anxiety if they leave the house forgetting their smart phone?  How often does one see couples or entire families ignoring one another and mesmerized by their phones at a restaurant?  How long can one resist the insistent urge to check emails, texts, Instagram, Facebook, or either tech offerings?

The number of devices that deliver this technology is growing fast – computers, tablets/iPads, smart phones, watches, ear or headphones, eyeglasses, doorbells, thermostats, home security devices.  It isn’t hard to imagine a time in the near future where we may choose to have a device implanted in our body.

There is no doubt that these advances have brought compelling changes to both our work lives and our leisure time.  Google maps make navigation much easier and less prone to error; ride-sharing and room-sharing apps make travel and vacations easier to plan and execute; Amazon makes every possible purchase simple to find and available in a day or two; music, videos and films can be streamed at any time; social media delights us with an endless stream of clever thoughts, photos and videos, and informs us of every event in the lives of friends, acquaintances and celebrities.

Tech is portrayed as making life easier, saving us time, making us more productive and providing entertainment.  But we also embrace it as a status symbol, an indication of how clever we are and, perhaps most tellingly, as a necessary investment to avoid being left behind – the dreaded FOMO. 

There is a herd instinct in tech usage that is cultivated by the massive marketing efforts of major tech companies and amplified by social media. Even traditional news media hop on the bandwagon with endless ‘gee whiz’ reporting in their efforts to remain relevant. 

And now the age of AI is upon us.  We stand in awe of the chatbots and their uncanny ability to respond humanlike to our queries and serve up endless delights with only the tiniest effort on our parts. We quickly abandon the more rigorous web searches for information, relying on the AI summaries.  We begin to allow AI agents to attend us.  They will manage our work and home life and make us more efficient, more productive, healthier and happier.

But will they really do this?  And at what cost?  At what point does technology become more of a burden than a blessing?  What do we lose in the bargain?  Is there a healthy balance, or is technology ultimately a black hole that will suck us in and transform us into soulless creatures with no agency in our lives? 

These are the questions I want to study in the next part of this essay.  I am no tech luddite now, but I see warning signs on the horizon and I think they bear careful analysis.

The Mystery of Life and Death

As a person who is fascinated by both the beauty and the mechanism of the world around us, I have vacillated between the passivity of simply accepting and trying to enjoy my life and the universe I inhabit, and the struggle of questioning and investigating the first principles and the mystery of that existence.

What is a human being?  We grow ever more sophisticated in our understanding of the body, our genetic code, our physical existence, our maladies, our aging.  It is true that our understanding of the brain lags somewhat.  Scientists have begun to link our thoughts, emotions and consciousness to various parts of that mysterious organ, but the question remains:   Is there more to us than biology?  Is there a soul, a spirit that is immortal?  Is there something that will remain after the heart stops beating and the brain function has ceased?

The question of whether I am more than simply some energy configured in human form is one I have grappled with frequently in my life.  There were times when I was almost willing to fully embrace Christian theology.  And I still am sympathetic to the fervent desire of so many to be adherents to a specific faith and find comfort in their tenets.

But even in my most ardent religious moments a nagging doubt was present.  The exclusive nature of most religions was the first crack in the wall for me.  How could God consider any sincere search for truth to be sacrilege?  And once that small crack emerges, the entire structure of religious certainty becomes very shaky.

As my skepticism about organized religion grew, I found myself jettisoning all specific theologies and veering toward agnosticism.  Some part of me wants to believe that there is an eternal soul or spirit that will endure beyond this mortal coil.  Given how little we understand even today the true nature of the matter and energy that we embody, I see no reason not to wish for some sort of lasting consciousness and existence once my physical body has died.

And isn’t religion ultimately very focused on death and our fear of it?  Religion uses the mirrored prospects of either a hellish or heavenly afterlife to justify its existence and to control behavior.  It promises a reunion with lost loved ones, a rejuvenation of a worn and aged body, a continuation of life without toil, pain or grief.  No wonder it has had such success!

Some great thinkers and scientists seem content to believe that their deaths will be the end for them, and it is hard to refute this type of thinking from a scientific point of view.  Let’s face it, the religious texts are pretty terse on their descriptions of the life hereafter (many mansions in my Father’s house?) and any serious pondering of the possible details of heaven, hell or other post-Earth modalities becomes absurd pretty quickly.

But I find no solace in the idea that my ‘energy’ will simply dissipate and become part of something new in the universe.  I don’t want to cease to exist. I’m neither a fan of growing old nor of disappearing, and the offered platitudes of being remembered by family and friends are only slightly reassuring.

As I draw ever nearer to the end of my physical being, the mystery of life and death becomes much less an abstraction and more a topic to seriously ponder.  But I have no illusions that I will find any answers before my demise.  Perhaps I will hedge my bets and do a deathbed conversion to every possible religion.  But more likely I will simply hope for the best, as I have done in so many aspects of my life, and accept whatever comes.

Space Dreams

Yesterday, the NASA expedition Artemis II successfully launched, initiating a new era in US lunar exploration by humans rather than unmanned missions.  What are we to make of this new phase?  

I was 15 years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.  It was super exciting watching it on TV.  Two years later I was in Florida at Cape Canaveral with my father to watch the liftoff of the Apollo 16 mission.  My father was intimately involved in space missions as a director of the National Reconnaissance Organization, a top-secret group that built spy satellites starting in the 60’s.

I had two experiences with the subsequent Space Shuttle program.  The first was when my wife’s uncle, Karl Henize, an astronomy professor astronaut, flew as the mission specialist on Challenger in 1985, at that time the oldest person to go into space. The second was watching in horror from the roof of my company in Melbourne, Florida, as the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch in 1986.

The history of human exploration is a fascinating one - the challenges and risks, the technology, the courage.  To the extent it embodies a quest for knowledge and experience, it is a wonderful and admirable human quality.  But, of course, it has also been strongly associated with some of the worst human traits – greed, violence and conquest.

This new phase of lunar exploration and potential colonization comes over 50 years after the first visits to the moon.  The motivation seems to be primarily competition and fear of losing ground to other nations.  In recent years China, Russia and India have all announced their lunar projects.  These include establishing lunar bases (China has termed it an International Lunar Research Station) at the South Pole to take advantage of water sources and extended sunlight.  China and Russia will potentially partner to install a nuclear power plant.

There is real potential for conflict as nations jockey for position on the moon.  Can competing nations conduct their operations without resorting to violence?  If history is any judge, then the answer is no.  Every past exploration saw nations battling endlessly to gain advantage.  The only exception has been the exploration of the Antarctica, which is presumably because to date there has been little material advantage in that exploration.

But aside from the potential future conflicts between increasingly antagonistic nations, there is the nagging question of whether we earth inhabitants can justify reaching for the stars when we have so many problems to solve on our own planet.  The resources and riches required to conduct space missions are prodigious.  Can we in good conscience dedicate that wealth to our space dreams when disease and poverty hover over billions of earthlings and climate change and pollution threaten the lives of everyone?

Alas, that question will never be seriously pondered, because space conquest, like war, AI and the re-invigorated arms race, is inevitable.  Fear and hubris, in equal measure, are the inertial drivers that no force of good will or love seems to be able to counteract.  

I admire the ingenuity and curiosity that enable us to explore our universe, and I will be fascinated by the various stages of accomplishment and the new discoveries that occur, regardless of which nation succeeds.  If we could only abandon warfare and the wasteful arms race and work together in these endeavors, I would be doubly proud of their successes.  But I cannot unreservedly praise our space quest when it must ultimately divert attention and resources away from much more urgent human needs on this earth.

The Importance of Fully Comprehending

The mechanics of mathematics and arithmetic came easily to me.  I was one of three kids who were put into algebra in 8th grade at my middle school and I took calculus my senior year in high school with about twenty other kids. Yes, I know that isn’t even close to being remarkable today, but at the time it was pretty advanced!

But I was also a bit on the lazy side as far as schoolwork goes, and though I quickly learned the mechanics of solving problems and achieved good scores, I never bothered to fully comprehend the theory and deeper meaning of the mathematical concepts.  Once I arrived in college I struggled initially to keep up with the math, physics and engineering courses because of this superficial level of competency in mathematics. 

Over time I began to see the folly of my approach to learning.  I had thought I was clever when I could utilize something quickly without much effort, but I was missing the heart of the matter.  It took me a few years, but I finally realized both the necessity and the joy of fully comprehending subjects, of digging deep to master the theory, not just the basic functional pieces.

This very human tendency to acquire knowledge at a superficial level and assume one has sufficient mastery of a topic is at the heart of some of the discord we have in our society and world at large.  The Internet and AI have exacerbated this phenomenon.  People look at a YouTube or Instagram video, or read the AI-generated summary of a topic or event and assume they have ‘researched’ it sufficiently to form a strong opinion.  

Truly understanding the complex questions our society and world face requires a significant investment of time and energy.  Few have the discipline or even the desire to make that investment.  Gaining a decent comprehension of history, economics, psychology, sociology, science and politics requires both energetic inquiry and critical thinking.  

Critical thinking is the skill necessary to investigate and weigh the pros and cons of different points of view or theories in order to make a judgment about a topic.  Some subjects are not easy to fully comprehend, but once the effort is made the meaning is very clear.  Mathematics and much of the physical sciences lie in this domain.  Some scientific work has political implications and may be disputed or have varying theories (climate change, epidemiology, cosmology, vaccines, etc.) but careful analysis and resisting the tendency toward confirmation bias can help illuminate the most likely truth.

Other topics outside of math and hard science are more prone to misunderstanding or oversimplification. In interpretating history and politics one is often seduced by superficial readings and the mythology of one’s childhood or prevailing social conventions.  A healthy skepticism and determination to read more deeply will help render a more nuanced and accurate portrayal.

If more people in our society would strive to fully comprehend the critical issues of our times and avoid making superficial judgments, perhaps the partisanship and rancor would diminish somewhat.  I am not optimistic that the current trends in social media and AI will do anything to improve matters, but I would be happy to be proven wrong!

The Meaning and Purpose of Life

At various times in my life, I have put some effort into contemplating the big questions: What is the meaning of life?  Is there a purpose to our lives? And like everyone else who ponders this question (and is completely honest), I came away with a handful of platitudes and not much conviction.

There is meaning in the love I have for my family and friends and the times we’ve shared.  There is meaning in the work I have done.  There is meaning in the sports I have played and the hobbies I have pursued and the subjects I have studied.  There is meaning in the efforts I have made to become a better person – more generous, less judgmental, more at peace with myself and the world (still much to be done in those realms!).  There is meaning in my search for meaning.

 

As for purpose, I really struggle to come up with much at all.  A religious person would say that our purpose is to glorify God and to worship God with all of our being.  And they might add that they are also to love their neighbor as themselves.  However, amidst the disharmony of our current world, I would be surprised if most of the religious people would not find themselves choking on those words and reddening in the sheer hypocrisy of their claim.

 

I would be happy for there to be a loving higher spirit and world that is somehow tied into our lives, but I find the concept of a God whose main motivation for creating us is to be worshiped quite absurd.

 

At times I have thought rather guiltily that my purpose should be to help others and make the world a better place.  I have intermittently acted on this thought, but on balance my purpose has been much more oriented toward my own happiness, experiences and interests.  I don’t know whether this is a major character flaw or simply the way that life tends to lead us.  If there is reincarnation and I end up as an insect in the next life, then I will know the answer.

 

Luck has played a big role in my life.  I was lucky to be born in the middle class of the richest nation in a loving family with wonderful parents.  I was lucky to have gifts and talents that outweighed the challenges of health that have sometimes plagued me. I was lucky to find a partner and a host of friends that have enriched my life.  I know that not everyone is so lucky.

 

I am in the last quarter or fifth or sixth or even tenth of my life, depending on how my luck holds out.  I am not at all ready to check into the dirt hotel, as a friend likes to say.  Still, I am quite grateful for the life I have had and would not have cause to complain if my life did not extend much longer.  But this is by no means a fatalistic acquiescence in the face of health challenges.  I plan to fight like hell to live as long as I can and have as much time with my wife, children, grandchildren and friends as possible.

 

So, meaning and purpose, not totally clear, and not likely to get much clearer in the future.  Time flies and memories fade, but each new day brings new opportunities for joy, laughter and love.  And those are meaning and purpose enough.

Prediction Markets, Lotteries and the Sickness of Gambling

Polls are out and prediction markets are in.   The fact that over 90% of polling calls and texts are ignored, along with recent epic fails by polls (the first Trump victory, BREXIT), have taken much of the luster from the polling world.  Instead, new platforms that allow people to gamble on predictions are apparently becoming the gold standard for indicating likely outcomes of almost anything.

The argument is that when people put money behind something it is more meaningful and more likely to be true.  I’m not sure that I buy that, but the hype is so strong that prediction gambling has quickly become a multi-billion-dollar business.

 

I have almost no interest in gambling, so it mystifies me that so many people love it.  I have always equated gambling with an unseemly human interest in get-rich schemes and wanting something for nothing.

 

I understand that gambling has elements of a competitive game and that we are all programmed to enjoy challenging ourselves in various ways against other players or against a system.  The classic weekly poker game that so many people seem to enjoy is fairly benign, as it usually involves small sums of money and a lot of social interaction and drinking.

 

However, gambling online, at casinos, horse tracks and the like or purchasing lottery tickets or day-trading on the stock exchange is often a sickness, an addiction.  Granted, there are many who enjoy this type of activity and have the means to do it without serious ramifications.  They may even profit from it.

 

But the vast majority of gamblers are people who lose and may even lose big and whose gambling is a heavy or even catastrophic burden for themselves and their families.  A report by the federally initiated National Gambling Impact Study Commission (sadly, only as recent as 1999) indicated that the top 10% of lottery spenders account for 2/3 of the sales and are heavily weighted toward high school dropouts and people of color.  Even more damning is the fact that the popular lottery-funded scholarships such as Georgia’s HOPE scholarship are much more likely to be won by white middle- and upper-class students than the children of low-income families who actually account for the majority of the ticket purchases.

 

I am no expert in the psychology of gambling, but it is reasonable to assume that poor people are more susceptible to the lure of gambling because of the tantalizing prospect of solving their myriad money problems in one lucky pick.

 

The huge recent increase in sports gambling and more generally, prediction gambling, is troubling.  There is a slippery slope between betting on something to occur and acting to make sure that it does occur.  The dangers of both insider knowledge and insider influence are not difficult to imagine. 

 

These new gambling paradigms and the endless opportunism they reflect are one more sad reminder of how human beings are moving ever more rapidly away from promoting the good and the salutary in the economy.  The get-rich-quick mania and its mirror image, the desperate hope for instant relief, are signs of a sick society.    I hope and pray that the sobering events in the world today will prompt new ambitions for the greater good.