Going sideways

Mark Harris for Vox

MAD worked. Two super powers understanding that Mutually Assured Destruction was assured if Russia and the US decided to launch missiles to end the world but that was then, when two powers had the tech and the sensibility to hold off, a policy that almost ceased to work in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nightmare only prevented by statecraft performed at the highest level by Kennedy and Khrushchev. 

Now enter AI, the wildcard of wild cards added to the mix.

Cuba - An aerial view showing the medium range ballistic missile field launch site number two 

at Sagua la Grande. October 17, 1962

Too fast, too dangerous, a wicked problem for the ages

The Americans were closing in, the situation was getting more dangerous by the minute —
and President Xi Jinping was waiting for my recommendation.

Note: This IS FICTION!

The standoff began in May, when the US announced a package of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Taiwan that would significantly upgrade the island’s ability to repel a Chinese invasion. We ordered massive military exercises in the region as a show of force. The US soon responded by sending the USS Abraham Lincoln to lead its own exercises with a joint contingent of Australian and Japanese forces.

If we showed weakness, Taiwan might be lost to China forever. If we were too aggressive, it could lead to World War III. But with so many ships and aircraft menacing the region, all with unclear intentions, the situation was getting too complex for commanders to process, and the risk of a deadly miscalculation was rising. Already, there had been a tense near-miss when a Chinese maritime militia fired on an American helicopter — thankfully, without casualties.

Key takeaways

Recent events in Ukraine and Iran show that the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield has very quickly gone from a speculative scenario to a current reality. This has led to fears that AI could increase the risk of nuclear escalation, either by acting in a way that its designers don’t intent, or simply moving too fast for human commanders to keep up. Ironically, it turns out be the best way to decrease the risks of how AI will perform in war may be to train humans in how to interact with it.

Perhaps it was time to let the machines take over.

The rise of battlefield AI

Now we’re seeing AI programs handle real-world combat situations on a daily basis. Maven Smart System, the Palantir-supplied system that integrates data from satellites, drones, and numerous other sensors, has been used by the US to pass along dozens of potential Russian targets per day to Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians themselves have developed a system nicknamed “Uber for artillery” to coordinate fire across the frontline. During the war in Gaza, the Israeli military system employed an AI-enabled system known as “Lavender” to identify Hamas targets, though some reports suggest it may have had an error rate of around 10 percent.

The bombing of the Minab school, for example, has been compared in some coverage to the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. That incident, which occurred at a time when US-Chinese relations were comparatively friendly and China’s military was much smaller, sparked a diplomatic crisis. Today, something similar might spark a war — and, in an increasingly automated battlefield, one that could turn from a conventional conflict into a nuclear exchange faster than human military leaders can keep up.

Pattern recognition isn't good enough. It's like Minority Report and precogs. Without nuance and meaning, AI and it's connect to war can go sideways in a nano second.

Everybody runs

The exchange

In life, many things don't go as planned. :)

Questions, questions :)

Audit Zero

Philip Fong /AFP via Getty Images

Audit Zero, a priceless quote given to me by a dear friend says it all because ... look closely, there's an essential item missing from the Toto pix, the finest manufacturer of smart toilets in the world, especially if the power goes off. :)

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Dumb & Dumber/rev II

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock

Dumb & Dumber applies as the smart phone is making people stupider but we already know that. From basic math to reading, analytical skills are going away in real time as we speak. Not comprehending cursive or understanding the notion of an analog clock also relates and we haven't even discussed fractions as that is old school, are they not? 1/2+1/2= ???

As rampant AI use accelerates a crisis in education, University of California professors are pleading with leadership to reinstate college-entrance exams, The Wall Street Journal reports, claiming that incoming students barely have a middle-school level understanding of math and other subjects.

Their request, made in a letter last week, will be a controversial one. Entrance exams like the SAT and ACT have long been criticized for exacerbating racial inequality. Taking them isn’t free, and nor is participating in rigorous preparation courses, with wealthier and usually white children thirteen times likelier to get a high score on either test than kids from low-income families, one study led by Harvard researchers found.

Nonetheless, UC math and science professors find the situation on the ground to be untenable, with the letter claiming that nearly a third of students taking their first semester calculus course at UC Berkeley are now displaying “severe preparation deficits.”

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the faculty wrote, as quoted by the WSJ.  “UC has finite resources and can help only so many students.” 

Dumbanddumber

One thing that’s undeniable: the education landscape is drastically different to what it looked like just a few years ago. AI chatbots and other AI tools have ushered in rampant cheating. Where its use is considered within ethical academic bounds, many educators are skeptical that AI facilitates actual learning, with numerous studies linking heavy AI use to impaired critical thinking skills and memory loss. One found that students who used ChatGPT to help write essays had lower brain activity in areas corresponding to creativity compared to students who only used a traditional Google search or didn’t look up information at all.

All the while, grade inflation has skyrocketed across the country since the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT and other AI tools, with recent research showing that the share of A grades in courses more vulnerable to AI cheating — typically in the humanities and engineering — surged by about 30 percent since 2023.

But is the answer to these deeply-rooted issues reinstating mandatory testing? It’s debatable, and you could argue that it’d be the equivalent of slapping on a band-aid to treat a disease. It’s clear that the education system is failing young students, and unless serious conversations are had about myriad systemic issues, plus the incursion of AI — which is fueled by institutions happy to take Big Tech money — the situation isn’t going to improve.

What time is it? Many cities and towns traditionally have public clocks in a prominent location,
such as a town square or city center. This one is on display at the center
of the town of Robbins, North Carolina

The real gorilla ...

An undisturbed permafrost landscape adjacent to the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau.
Credit: Xiling Gu

The real gorilla of global warming is warming up for the big show, CO2 coming out of the permafrost. The Russians warned us, the Chinese warned us and now, the rest of the world is warning us as the amount of carbon sequestered in ice is now issuing forth in force as the ice trapped in the tundra begins to melt. BRT has posted blurbs about permafrost for years and now it seems, the tipping point may be arriving at last. 

A new study in Nature Communications finds a critical climate tipping point in Tibetan permafrost ecosystems. Warming of 2–4 degrees Celsius triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of carbon release that could significantly accelerate climate change, according to the work.

Permafrost covers roughly 15% of the Northern Hemisphere's land surface. It is ground that remains frozen for at least two years. For millennia, organic matter has been trapped in frozen ground, kept out of the atmosphere as a vast carbon reserve.

As global temperatures rise, however, that carbon bank is increasingly springing leaks. Warming thaws the frozen ground, allowing microbes to break down the stored organic matter and release it back into the atmosphere as CO2, a feedback loop that could significantly amplify climate change. But at what warming level does this process cross a point of no return, where carbon losses permanently outpace carbon gains?

Phys.org spoke with Professor Jinzhi Ding of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-author of the study, to understand what drove the research and what the findings mean for our understanding of climate feedback.

"Old-carbon decomposition was essentially a 'black box' because we lacked the tools and long-term observations to track it," she told Phys.org. "That unanswered question motivated us to finally open that black box."

Schematic diagram of the permafrost carbon-climate tipping point triggered by warming-induced decomposition of old carbon. Credit: Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72122-3

Ground zero

The Tibetan Plateau is home to the world's largest alpine permafrost carbon reservoir, with roughly 47 billion tons of carbon present in the top 10 meters of soil alone. The plateau is warming at approximately 2.5 times the global average rate, making it a testing ground for understanding the effects of rising temperatures on permafrost ecosystems worldwide.

The problem centers on a delicate balance between two competing processes. Plants initially thrive with a slight increase in temperature resulting in them pulling more CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. But it simultaneously accelerates microbial decomposition in the soil, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere. The critical unknown was which process ultimately wins and at what temperature the balance breaks irreversibly.

What made this particularly difficult to answer was the role of ancient carbon locked deep in permafrost soils. Once thawed, carbon frozen for hundreds to thousands of years enters the atmosphere as entirely "new" emissions—not simply recycled modern plant carbon, but a net addition that existing climate models have struggled to account for.

Panoramic view of the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau. Credit: Juan Li

In your shorts ... Soma applies

Spark is Google’s new agentic answer for everything. | Image: Google

In your shorts applies as Spark will take over your digital existence painlessly. Plan a trip, Spark has you covered. Need to get the best price on a pair of shoes along with the nearest place to get said shoes, Spark's got you covered as Spark is the ultimate aggregator, complete with intense AI, yours for $99/month/Ultra but the price will drop as membership increases.

Like Soma, the drug of choice in Brave New World, Spark's painless unless the power goes off or, in the case of Soma, the drug is no longer available because the ability to do stuff becomes compromised while the suppliers of both entities hoover ever more personal data while being in your shorts 24/7.

BraveNewWorld FirstEdition

I had a very different experience using Spark, Google’s new always-on AI agent. Spark is a hugely ambitious thing: Google intends it to be the interface through which you can use external apps, and over time even operate your computer. (“OpenClaw with better internet access” is a not-wrong way to describe it.) Spark is currently rolling out to Google’s $99 / month AI Ultra plan, but Google allowed me to try it early. I tested some simple action-oriented stuff, like having Spark go through my Gmail inbox and suggest a bunch of things I should unsubscribe from and having it comb my Google Docs for old tasks I still haven’t finished. In both cases, it did a fine job, even creating me a nicely organized document with a bunch of links to quickly unsubscribe from various marketing emails.

Then I gave Spark a simple trip-planning job. “I’m going to be in Hershey PA with my wife, two kids, and dog the weekend of July 18th. Can you make a plan for the whole weekend, including places to stay, eat, things to do, and everything else?” I left out a few salient details, like the concert tickets I have for that Saturday night, but figured I’d start with the six most obvious things to do in Hershey and go from there.

The hook ...

The whole Spark itinerary was filled with details like this. It included my wife’s name, and took into consideration the fact that she doesn’t like to eat onions or scallions. It included the Thomas Rhett and Niall Horan concert on Saturday night, presumably based on the Ticketmaster confirmation in my email, and noted that parking is included in the tickets we bought. When I got to the part where it mentioned getting a babysitter that night, I remembered to note that my parents are coming along for just that purpose, so I added a note to the conversation.

On the other hand, I can’t shake the deeply creepy feeling I get from the whole thing. What Spark did feels sort of magical, and very invasive. It’s weird that Spark is so casually telling me the names and ages of my children, reminding me that it knows where I live, and finding information I know for a fact I’ve never volunteered to Google. Intellectually, I know that Google knows an incredible amount about me — add up my emails, my calendar, my photos, and my search history, and you’ve pretty much got me pegged. But seeing Spark treat all that data not as something to be protected, but as something to be mined, just feels bad.

Soma applies ...

This is the trade we’re all being asked to make right now. There is a direct correlation between how much of yourself you’re willing to share with an AI system and how useful that system can be. Google is in such a strong position precisely because it already has all that information, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest are desperately trying to figure out how to accumulate it. The AI tools we’re being promised are the ones that know us intimately, that can take action on our behalf, that can make decisions without even needing us around. None of that works unless we open ourselves up completely to the machine. So that’s what we’re being asked, even compelled, to do.

Resistance is futile - The Borg, or is it?

Yours truly has been a geek for 50 years on the user side. From DOS and Unix to Mac OS and the net, the litany of apps and how to use them applies but this is different. This is abdication and with it comes the atrophy of skill. I use Gemini every day. Extremely helpful when used with precision and consistency and I know Google knows a lot about me but Spark, in my shorts, 24/7? Nah. More convenient, without question, quantumly dangerous & addictive, you bet. I have Ultra and like it but at a distance. 

BRT did a piece titled Hotel California. The society died as there was no purpose, think about it. I have.

In 1968, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health created a perfect world — unlimited food, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what would happen. What happened was extinction.

Factoid ... Microsoft's doing the same exact thing but at least they're being up front about it.

An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to agentic platform,” the documentation.

Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. It is not particularly notable that Microsoft is developing new AI tools—the company has reoriented almost everything it does to focus on AI, and every major AI company has tried to figure out how to bring AI agents into their products after OpenClaw went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw allows users to create AI agents that can act on behalf of the person using it; it can send emails, edit calendars, publish blog posts, and more. What is notable is that the explicit goal of the people developing the product is to addict its users. Microsoft officially announced Scout Tuesday as an “always-on personal agent” that runs on OpenClaw and is integrated into Microsoft 365. 

The Fog

Shutterstock / Futurism

Fog fascinates me. Mysterious, wet, something untoward and ... quiet. The notion of something living in it makes total sense as water vapor is nourishing and bacteria thrives on it. 

There’s something living in the fog. Repeat: there’s something living in the fog.

It may sound like a twisted update to the classic John Carpenter film — or a log line for the new Apple TV horror series “Widow’s Bay” — but these low-hanging clouds are indeed rife with living bacteria, according to new research.

The findings, published in a study in the journal Environmental Microbiology, showed that fog is teeming with so much life that the researchers liken it to a vast aquatic ecosystem unto itself.

“We found that millions of bacteria inhabit… fog droplets,” coauthor Ferran Garcia-Pichel at Arizona State University, told USA Today. 

Edwards

“When you take all of the droplets together, the concentration of bacteria is the same as in the ocean,” he added in a statement about the work.

The presence of bacteria in airborne water droplets isn’t a new revelation in itself. But the work helps elucidate what it is that bacteria do while suspended in fog and other clouds — something that wasn’t clear before — and the impact this has on the broader environment.

“There’s very limited knowledge about what kinds of bacteria are present in fogs, which are like clouds at the ground level,” lead author Thi Thuong Cao, a researcher at ASU, said in the statement.

To peer into this gloomy microscopic realm, the researchers meticulously collected air samples before, during, and after fog events. Since wind can blow fog banks away and confound attempts to get consistent samples, the researchers focused on a specific type called radiation fog that forms on calmer days when the ground cools and chills the air above it, allowing water droplets to condense close to the surface.

Off in the distance

Some thrived more than others. The population of one bacteria called Methylobacteria, known for devouring simple carbon compounds including pollutants like formaldehyde, increased after fog events. A closer look showed that the bacteria were actively growing and multiplying.

“We observed them under the microscope to see that yes, the bacteria are getting bigger and they’re dividing, so there is growth,” Cao said. “We also found that they’re using the formaldehyde as food to support their growth.”

Edwards II

The ultimate ...

The touch pad built on the side of the 2013 Google Glass can communicate with the
user's phone via Bluetooth

This was the first, the entry edition to the ultimate ... device to entice one to surrender to the algorithm 24/7.

In 2026, there are many options. The question to ask is ... what AI provider gives you the skinny.?
Meta, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. The "choice" is up to you, right???

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Lest we forget ...

A bionic contact lens is a proposed device that could provide a virtual display that could have a variety of uses from assisting the visually impaired to video gaming, as claimed by the manufacturers and developers.[1] The device will have the form of a conventional contact lens with added bionics technology in the form of a head-up display,[2] with functional electronic circuits and infrared lights to create a virtual display[3] allowing the viewer to see a computer-generated display superimposed on the world outside.[4]

Combine this with AI, ear buds and of course, the contacts and said tech becomes powered by the body and surrender becomes complete 24/7. 

Sin ...

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

Your's truly loves the word Sin as it invokes god and what he did to Job. The classic Yiddish joke applies..
God, why are you torturing me????, Because you piss me off.

For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.

The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.

Detail of printing error on E13 of EUROPE a PROPHECY William Blake

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

The latter two figures in particular have struck a chord with me because they acknowledge that the crisis posed by technological modernity is primarily an anthropological one. “‘What is man?’ is the question of our time,” Trueman writes in his new book, The Desecration of Man. Pope Leo, in his encyclical, similarly frames life today as defined by the “paradox of material progress and anthropological regression.” Leo writes that people have more and more yet live less and less like human beings, a tension that AI is likely to exacerbate.

In The Devil's Advocate, John Milton's favorite sin was Vanity. 

Works for me. :)