The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (Part 2, Chapter 8)

Previously: The Unlimited Horizon, part 1.

Is there really that much more progress to be made in the future? How many problems are left to solve? How much better could life really get?

After all, we are pretty comfortable today. We have electricity, clean running water, heating and air conditioning, plenty of food, comfortable clothes and beds, cars and planes to get around, entertainment on tap. What more could we ask for? Maybe life could be 10% better, but 10x? We seem to be doing just fine.

Most of the amenities we consider necessary for comfortable living, however, were invented relatively recently; the average American didn’t have this standard of living until the mid-20th century. The average person living in 1800 did not have electricity or plumbing; indeed the vast majority of people in that era lived in what we would now consider extreme poverty. But to them, it didn’t feel like extreme poverty: it felt normal. They had enough food in the larder, enough water in the well, and enough firewood to last the winter; they had a roof over their heads and their children were not clothed in rags. They, too, felt they were doing just fine.

Our sense of “enough” is not absolute, but relative: relative to our expectations and to the standard of living we grew up with. And just as the person who felt they had “enough” in 1800 was extremely poor by the standards of the present, we are all poor by the standards of the future, if exponential growth continues.

Future students will recoil in horror when they realize that we died from cancer and heart disease and car crashes, that we toiled on farms and in factories, that we wasted time commuting and shopping, that most people still cleaned their own homes by hand, that we watched our thermostats carefully and ran our laundry at night to save on electricity, that a foreign vacation was a luxury we could only indulge in once a year, that we sometimes lost our homes to hurricanes and forest fires.

Putting it positively: we are fabulously rich by the standards of 1800, and so we, or our descendants, can all be fabulously rich in the future by the standards of today.

But no such vision is part of mainstream culture. The most optimistic goals you will hear from most people are things like: stop climate change, prevent pandemics, relieve poverty. These are all the negation of negatives, and modest ones at that—as if the best we can do in the future is to raise the floor and avoid disaster. There is no bold, ambitious vision of a future in which we also raise the ceiling, a future full of positive developments.

It can be hard to make such a vision compelling. Goals that are obviously wonderful, such as curing all disease, seem like science fiction impossibilities. Those that are more clearly achievable, such as supersonic flight, feel like mere conveniences. But science fiction can come true—indeed, it already has, many times over. We live in the sci-fi future imagined long ago, from the heavier-than-air flying machines of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the hand-held communicator of Star Trek. Nor should we dismiss “mere” conveniences. Conveniences compound. What seem like trivial improvements add up, over time, to transformations. Refrigerators, electric stoves, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and dishwashers were conveniences, but together they transformed domestic life, and helped to transform the role of women in society. The incremental improvement of agriculture, over centuries, eliminated famine.

So let’s envision a bold, ambitious future—a future we want to live in, and are inspired to build. This will be speculative: not a blueprint drawn up with surveyor’s tools, but a canvas painted in broad strokes. Building on a theme from Chapter 2, our vision will be one of mastery over all aspects of nature:

by Jason Crawford, Roots of Progress |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Part 2, Chapter 8. (yikes). You can see I've come late to this. Essays on the philosophy of human progress. Well worth exploring (jump in anywhere). Introduction and chapter headings (with links) found here: Announcing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (RoP).]

Yuko Murakoshi
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Cao Yang

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Peter Doig, Milky Way, 1990
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Institutions

Institutions and a Lesson for Our Time from the Late Middle Ages. No institution of politics or society is immune to criticism. I have met no one who would really believe this, even if notional liberals and notional conservatives both have their protected favorites. But the spirit of the time is leading directly to the destruction of institutions that are essential for our cultural, social, political, intellectual, and individual health and survival. This is a two-way street, by the way. Both wings of the same bird of prey do it throughout the Neoliberal Dispensation in the Global North and a few other places.

I am currently reading The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance by Bernd Roeck (transl. Patrick Baker, 2025). At 949 pages and 49 chapters, I’ll complete the task in a month at 1-2 chapters per evening. I hope. We are still only just past Magna Carta (1215) in Chapter 12: “Vertical Power, Horizontal Power.” Both axes of power are essential in any society larger than a small group of hunter gatherers. Here is Professor Bernd on institutions:

Institutions – that dry term, which we have already encountered in the discussion of universities and in other contexts, denotes something very big and important. Institutions are what first allow the state to become perpetual; without them, it dies. If advisers appear as the mind and memory of the body politic, and the military its muscles, it is law and institutions that provide a skeleton for the state. They alone are capable of establishing justice over the long term. Only they can set limits to power and arbitrary will. They preserve knowledge of how to achieve success, as well as reminders of mistakes to be avoided in the future. No one knew this better than Cicero, who emphasized the Roman Republic’s special ability to gather experience and make decisions based on it. Before the advent of modernity, no section of the globe created institutions as robust and effective as those that developed in medieval Latin Europe. Moreover, these institutions were highly inclusive. The guaranteed protection under the law and the right to private property, provided education, and were relatively pluralistic (i.e., horizontally structured).

Indeed, Rome owed its success to its institutions. They then provided the states consolidating during the Middle Ages with models of compelling rationality.

This is not the place to quibble about details. But those who want to destroy our political, cultural, social, and educational institutions rather than improve them or refocus them along lines upon which reasonable people will agree? These unreasonable people are not to be respected:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought (Russell Vought, OMB Director) said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Well, it is working and the lack of imagination and humanity here is striking. These “bureaucrats” are the scientists who make sure our food is safe and that the chemical plant on the waterfront is not dumping its waste into the tidal creek. They are the scientists who hunt down the causes of emerging diseases. They are the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center who have gotten so very good at predicting the paths of cyclones. They are the men and women who sign up Vought’s parents for Social Security and Medicare. They are the people of the IRS who sent me a substantial tax refund because I overpaid, something pleasant I did not ask for nor expect. They are also the professors who teach engineers how to build bridges that will bear the load and teach medical students the basics of health and disease. And yes, they are the professors who teach us there is No Politics But Class Politics. The key here is that all of this is debatable by reasonable men and women of good will.

To paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the institutions funded by our taxes are the cost of civilization. Perhaps we will remember this ancient wisdom before it is too late? Probably not. The urge to burn it all down, instead of rewiring the building and replacing the roof, is strong.

by KLG, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Marcin Wasilewski Trio

Sudovian Dance

Writing Workshops Are F**king Useless

I am a writer and professor, with an MFA in creative writing, and I detest the writing workshop. The writing workshop is widely considered to be the best means (at least in America) of forging an existence for writers, young and old, of harvesting the best of their work and sustaining their practice. As both a writer and a professor, and furthermore as a reader, this is something I find simultaneously ridiculous, infuriating, and depressing. In a field, perhaps the only field, quite literally named in the spirit of “creativity,” how is it possible that one mode of instruction, taught most notably at a small school in Iowa, has entirely won the day when it comes to the education of artists? How has the market been so cornered? How have the options become so limited? How have professors become so convinced that this method—in a field, it needs be mentioned, constantly being asked whether it’s something that can even really be taught; and this by writers, readers, professors, deans, parents and everybody else—that this method of instruction is simply the way? Especially when we’ve got mountains—almost all of literature produced ever—of evidence to the contrary? (...)

I think that workshops represent a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what ought to be encouraged in the experience and expression of any young artist. They all seem tethered to history with very selective gaps that ignore the solitary plight of so many artists we now recognize as geniuses; they simply ignore what has made literature so vital and so powerful across time, and in my estimation they do so at their peril. Programs are still enjoying the novelty of their existence today—as I said, the numbers of applicants seem just fine, on the uptick even—but unwillingness to adapt and improve will almost certainly begin to strangle off this pink cloud, and reading accounts of bad experiences only hammers this home with vengeance.

Bearing this reality in mind, what are some feasible adjustments that might be made to the workshop model if this kind of discipline is not to become more of an homogenous soup than it already is, dense with justifiable complaint and dissatisfaction? If we can accept that there is a fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the model of sitting a beginning artist in a room of their peers and having their nascent works critiqued in a rote, occasionally praiseful, occasionally scornful, always misguided effort to uphold an arbitrary connection to a school in Iowa, then it would behoove us to look at that misunderstanding to find any clarities. How have writers, before the existence of any writing workshop ever, done what they did? How did Herman Melville write? How did Virginia Woolf? And here it’s important to not simply throw out the whole enterprise, because 1) I like my job, and 2) We exist in a culture already entirely hostile to this pursuit, and academic disciplines make adjustments constantly, so it doesn’t pull any rug of legitimacy out from under us to say we’re adapting, implementing new models, exploring other paths than the one that’s grown stale, and repetitive, and actively harmful in countless circumstances.

What do I do? I am presently adapting. What I’ve tended to do is preface my class with a note that workshopping is technically a requirement where I teach these courses, and thus I will give them demonstrations of the workshop experience, and I will work with them to comment on things in a useful manner in one another’s work, but that the whole of the class will not be tethered to this model. Instead, we do these things, but then I’ll introduce this notion of the literary/arts “salon,” an open environment, wherein we’re all struggling, all trying to figure shit out, and whether we might wish to share something one day, or talk about something we’ve read recently, or simply complain about how impossible it seems to be to get published, these are all treated as the real, useful stuff of writing, because, once they leave school, they are. I did this in a course where everyone tried, over the semester, to write a novella. I wrote one with everybody, based on a set of three possible prompts each week. Everybody attempted 1,000 words per week. Some days we all simply came to class and wrote. Some days we talked about novels we’d all been reading per the class list. Some days we’d circle up and share from our work, but never was it the case that one person found their work being the focus of critique for any prolonged period. This has nothing to do with discomfort. The simple fact is that art is not made by committees. Even in the cases of film, where arguably a group, i.e. a committee, is wielding influence over the whole, there are inevitably voices exerting more influence on the entire process, if not one single voice, and we as audiences are better off for this. This is an undeniable truth when it comes to writing. Writers are people, and thus they can occasionally benefit from social interaction as regards their work. Some of them might thrive on it, and might be highly receptive to critique, and might be able to implement those critiques in ways that endlessly benefit the work. This concoction of human being has yet to cross my path, but I’m sure they exist. For the rest of us, perhaps simply fostering a community where we feel comfortable pursuing our interest is the thing. Perhaps that’s plenty.

by Republic of Letters |  Read more:

Image: Unterberg Poetry Center (404)

[ed. Writing workshops - a niche topic for sure. What I found most interesting is the promotion of 'salons', or something like them ever since reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast back in college and missing old philosophical/brainstorming sessions (in contrast to rote lecture/test classes). Basically, a more interactive, open-ended, ideas-based approach to learning, with lots of applications beyond basic schooling and education, especially in business. See also: The Salons Project.]

***

Salons were an important place for the exchange of ideas. The word salon first appeared in France in 1664 (from the Italian salone, the large reception hall of Italian mansions; salone is actually the augmentative form of sala, room). Literary gatherings before this were often referred to by using the name of the room in which they occurred, like cabinet, réduit, ruelle, and alcôve. Before the end of the 17th century, these gatherings were frequently held in the bedroom (treated as a more private form of drawing room): a lady, reclining on her bed, would receive close friends who would sit on chairs or stools drawn around. (...)

Breaking down the salons into historical periods is complicated due to the various historiographical debates that surround them. Most studies stretch from the early 16th century up until around the end of the 18th century. Goodman is typical in ending her study at the French Revolution where, she writes: 'the literary public sphere was transformed into the political public'. Steven Kale is relatively alone in his recent attempts to extend the period of the salon up until Revolution of 1848:

A whole world of social arrangements and attitude supported the existence of French salons: an idle aristocracy, an ambitious middle class, an active intellectual life, the social density of a major urban center, sociable traditions, and a certain aristocratic feminism. This world did not disappear in 1789.

In the 1920s, Gertrude Stein's Saturday evening salons (described in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and depicted fictionally in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris) gained notoriety for including Pablo Picasso and other twentieth-century luminaries like Alice B. Toklas.

Roadside Attractions

Man walking his dinosaur, Murdo, South Dakota. June 2018

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Tom Gauld - Mooncop
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Universal Music Group is Going After Rick Beato

Just when you thought major labels couldn't get more stupid...

I lost faith in the music industry decades ago, and I’ll never get it back. You will have an easier time convincing me that Elvis still lives in Graceland or Santa Claus delivers gifts from an Amazon truck.

I’ve heard too many horror stories and I’ve seen too much firsthand. I eventually came up with my “Idiot Nephew Theory” to explain why major record labels seem so much more stupid than other businesses.

Here’s how I’ve described it:

THE IDIOT NEPHEW THEORY: Whenever a record label makes a strategic decision, it picks the option that the boss’s idiot nephew thinks is best.

And what do idiot nephews decide? That’s easy—they always do whatever the company lawyer recommends.

But just when I think I’ve seen it all, some new kind of stupid comes my way via the music biz.

And that’s the case right now. Universal Music Group has gone to war with Rick Beato.

If UMG were wise, they would thank Mr. Beato, who works tirelessly to grow the audience for their recording artists. Rick is smart and trustworthy, and is probably the most influential music educator in the world right now.

He does his work on YouTube, where he has more than five million subscribers. I’m one of them. I learn a lot from Rick’s videos, and have been fortunate to be his guest on two occasions (here and here).

He offers sharp commentary, and has conducted smart interviews with Sting, Pat Metheny, Rick Rubin, David Gilmour, Ron Carter, George Benson, Keith Jarrett, Michael McDonald, Jimmy Webb, and many other legends. These artists open up with Rick, because he is so knowledgeable, with big ears and a big heart.

So why is Universal Music upset?

Like any music educator, Beato plays a few seconds of the songs he discusses on these videos. But he’s very careful to limit himself to just a short extract—and this is allowed by law.

It’s called fair use. And it’s part of our copyright law.

Universal Music can’t change fair use standards. But it can file a constant stream of copyright infringement complaints with YouTube. And this puts Beato in a difficult situation—because he will get banned from YouTube after just three copyright strikes.

If that happens, his 2,000 videos disappear from the web—including all those historic interviews. His five million subscribers lose a trusted voice.

That may be what Universal Music wants. Listen to Beato explain this dire situation:

Universal Music is making surprising claims. On a short 42-second video on Olivia Rodrigo, Beato included just ten seconds of a song. But UMG still charged him with copyright violation—although this seems a straightforward example of fair use.

Beato pushes back and successfully defends his fair use rights—but the disputes keep coming. He showed us his email box on the recent video.

Rick has been forced to hire a fulltime lawyer to handle the endless stream of infringement claims. He has won repeatedly—but maybe that’s what gets the label so upset.

“We have successfully fought thousands of these now,” Rick explains in the video. “But it literally has cost me so much money to do this. Since we’ve been fighting these things and have never lost one, they still keep coming in….And they’re all Universal Music Group.”

“It looks to me like Rick Beato was targeted,” claims lawyer Krystle Delgado, who runs the Top Music Attorney channel on YouTube. “What the major labels have said in their closed door meetings to me is nothing short of shocking.”

“If you try fighting them, they get upset,” she adds. “And that’s when this thing starts to escalate.” She notes that her other clients run into this problem and one company—Universal Music Group—is the leading instigator. (...)

I could share many other videos expressing support of Beato. But you get the idea—the wider community of music educators and commentators is alarmed.

This is sad confirming evidence for my Idiot Nephew Theory. Maybe some corporate lawyer thinks this is a smart strategy for UMG. But people who care about music see it differently—they know how destructive this kind of behavior really is. (...)

His audience knows how much good Beato does. We see how much he loves the music and how much he supports the record labels and their artists. They should give him their support in return.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Rick Beato

[ed. Everyone knows about Rick, right? If you don't, choose any musical artist that comes to mind and you'll probably find an interview or analysis of their music on his channel. A great educator, historian, and fine musician in his own right. Also, for an additional dose of stupidity, see: We've Reached the Sad Cracker Barrel Stage of Cultural Evolution (HB):]

***

"Hey, I love American traditions as much as the next bumpkin. But Cracker Barrel isn’t a tradition by any stretch of the imagination. The company was founded on September 19, 1969. That’s exactly one month after the end of Woodstock.

Even Jed Clampett could sniff out the phoniness at this chain restaurant.

Cracker Barrel is a postmodern pastiche of rural tropes. Jean Baudrillard would call it a simulacrum. By that he means that it’s a symbol disconnected from reality—it merely refers vaguely to other symbols.

So you can’t bring back my grandpa’s Cracker Barrel—because my paw-paw never saw a Cracker Barrel. (...)

The biggest shareholder is BlackRock. Did you think it was Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson?"

Summer Travel Stats

Gen Z Spending the Most on Travel

All generations are spending more on trips this summer, with trip costs rising an average of 36% compared to 2023.

Notable Stats:

• Gen Z is spending an average of $11,766 on trips, surpassing all other generations for the first time in 4 years

• While Millennials are spending the least on travel this year, their year-over-year spending has increased the most by almost 50%

Costs and lack of interest are keeping non-travelers at home

Domestic trips may be more wallet-friendly, but many Americans still cite cost as the top reason they’re not traveling this summer. More than 6 in 10 non-travelers (65 percent) say they can’t afford to travel this summer, while 23 percent say they’re skipping summer travel because they aren’t interested in traveling right now (respondents could choose more than one option). Other prominent reasons behind not traveling include: 

• Can’t take time off work: 16 percent
• Too much of a hassle: 16 percent
• Worried about air travel safety: 15 percent
• My health and age: 15 percent

Read more: Summer 2024 Travel Trends: Gen Z Spends, Europe Reigns; and, Survey: Fewer Than Half of Americans Plan to Travel This Summer; Cost is a Major Concern

Evolution of Emotions

"If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, psychologist Paul Eckman, PhD, and psychotherapist Esther Perel, PhD, explain how the brain constantly rebuilds emotions from memory and prediction. According to their research, by choosing new experiences today, we can reshape how our past influences us, gain more control over our feelings, and create new possibilities for connection and growth.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you. That they bubble up and cause you to do and say things, but that experience is an illusion that the brain creates.

Not everybody has as much control as they might like, but everybody has a little more control than they think they do. When you're experiencing emotion or you're in an emotional state, what your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body in relation to what's happening in the world. Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain, and your brain isn't wired in a way for you to experience those sensory changes specifically. Instead, what you experience is a summary. And that's where those simple feelings come from.

If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present. Just in the same way that you would exercise to make yourself healthier, you can invest energy to cultivate different experiences for yourself. The fact that your brain is using your past experience to predict what you're going to see, and hear, and feel means that you are an architect of your experience, and that doesn't involve breaking predictions. It involves seeding your brain to predict differently.

PAUL EKMAN: It's my belief that the way in which emotions evolved was to deal with things like saber-toothed tigers, the current incarnation of which is the car that's suddenly lurching at your car at a high speed. You don't have time to think. In split seconds, you have to do and make very complex decisions, and if you had to think about what you were doing, you'd be dead. It's a system that evolved to deal with really important things without your thinking about it.

So that means that sometimes, you're gonna be very unconsidered, very thoughtless. Well, these exercises that we're giving people, moving their facial muscles, concentrating on the sensations to make them more aware of an emotion when it arises, so that they will feel it at the moment and then can say, "Did she really mean to ignore me? No, it was just an accident." Or, "Maybe I shouldn't jump to the conclusion that she doesn't care about me at all."

The way in which we can improve our emotional life is to introduce conscious awareness. Nature did not want you to do that. So you have to do it yourself.

ESTHER PEREL: All relationships are colored with expectations about myself and about the other. My expectations influence that which I then see or hear. It is a filter, as well as my mood. That is one of the most important things to understand about relationships and communication — how people actually co-create each other in the context of a relationship because those people make part of who we are.

We will draw from them the very things which we expect from them, even when it's the opposite of what we really want. A lot of emphasis is put on our ability to say certain things, to say them in the right way, to articulate our needs, our feelings, our thoughts, our positions, our opinions. What is lacking is the ability to see that speaking is entirely dictated by the quality of the listening that is reflected back on us.

by Paul Ekman with Lisa Feldman Barrett, Big Think |  Read more:
Image: Jon Han

May require a larger vessel
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Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

[ed. The boys are back. Coming September 12 to a theater near you.]

Image: via

[ed. See also: Rob Reiner on ‘Spinal Tap II’ and His Real Rock Memories (RS).]

Rethinking A.I.

The Fever Dream of Imminent ‘Superintelligence’ Is Finally Breaking

GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence system, was supposed to be a game-changer, the culmination of billions of dollars of investment and nearly three years of work. Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, implied that GPT-5 could be tantamount to artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — A.I. that is as smart and as flexible as any human expert.

Instead, as I have written, the model fell short. Within hours of its release, critics found all kinds of baffling errors: It failed some simple math questions, couldn’t count reliably and sometimes provided absurd answers to old riddles. Like its predecessors, the A.I. model still hallucinates (though at a lower rate) and is plagued by questions around its reliability. Although some people have been impressed, few saw it as a quantum leap, and nobody believed it was A.G.I. Many users asked for the old model back.

GPT-5 is a step forward, but nowhere near the A.I. revolution many had expected. That is bad news for the companies and investors who placed substantial bets on the technology. And it demands a rethink of government policies and investments that were built on wildly overinflated expectations. The current strategy of merely making A.I. bigger is deeply flawed — scientifically, economically and politically. Many things from regulation to research strategy must be rethought. One of the keys to this may be training and developing A.I. in ways inspired by the cognitive sciences.

Fundamentally, people like Mr. Altman, the Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and countless other tech leaders and investors had put far too much faith into a speculative and unproven hypothesis called scaling: the idea that training A.I. models on ever more data using ever more hardware would eventually lead to A.G.I., or even a “superintelligence” that surpasses humans.

However, as I warned in a 2022 essay titled “Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall,” so-called scaling laws aren’t physical laws of the universe like gravity, but hypotheses based on historical trends. Large language models, which power systems like GPT-5, are nothing more than souped-up statistical regurgitation machines, so they will continue to stumble into problems around truth, hallucinations and reasoning. Scaling would not bring us to the holy grail of A.G.I.

Many in the tech industry were hostile to my predictions. Mr. Altman ridiculed me as a “mediocre deep learning skeptic” and last year claimed “there is no wall.” Elon Musk shared a meme lampooning my essay.

It now seems I was right. Adding more data to large language models, which are trained to produce text by learning from vast databases of human text, helps them improve only to a degree. Even significantly scaled, they still don’t fully understand the concepts they are exposed to — which is why they sometimes botch answers or generate ridiculously incorrect drawings.

Scaling worked for a while — previous generations of GPT models made impressive advancements to their predecessors. But luck started to run out over the last year. Mr. Musk’s A.I. system, Grok 4, released in July, had 100 times as much training as Grok 2 had but it was only moderately better. Meta’s jumbo-size Llama 4 model, much larger than its predecessor, was mostly also viewed as a failure. As many now see, GPT-5 shows decisively that scaling has lost steam.

The chances of A.G.I.’s arrival by 2027 now seem remote. The government has let A.I. companies lead a charmed life with almost zero regulation. It now ought to enact legislation that addresses costs and harms unfairly offloaded onto the public — from misinformation to deepfakes, “A.I. slop” content, cybercrime, copyright infringement, mental health and energy usage.

Moreover, governments and investors should strongly support research investments outside of scaling. The cognitive sciences (including psychology, child development, philosophy of mind and linguistics) teach us that intelligence is about more than mere statistical mimicry and suggest three promising ideas for developing A.I. that is reliable enough to be trustworthy, with a much richer intelligence.

by Gary Marcus, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Maria Mavropoulou/Getty
[ed. See also: GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it. (MoAI):]

***

"The real news is a breaking study from Arizona State University that fully vindicates what I have told you for nearly 30 years—and more recently what Apple told you—about the core weakness of LLMs: their inability to generalize broadly. (...)

And, crucially, the failure to generalize adequately outside distribution tells us why all the dozens of shots on goal at building “GPT-5 level models” keep missing their target. It’s not an accident. That failing is principled.

That’s exactly what it means to hit a wall, and exactly the particular set of obstacles I described in my most notorious (and prescient) paper, in 2022. Real progress on some dimensions, but stuck in place on others.

Ultimately, the idea that scaling alone might get us to AGI is a hypothesis.

No hypothesis has ever been given more benefit of the doubt, nor more funding. After half a trillion dollars in that direction, it is obviously time to move on. The disappointing performance of GPT-5 should make that enormously clear."

For Bill Belichick’s Debut, UNC Came to Party — But Got a Buzzkill Instead

Chapel Hill, N.C. — At least the party was fun, right?

Right?

It better have been, for what came after: North Carolina, high on nine months’ worth of Bill Belichick-induced hope, being completely humiliated, 48-14, by TCU in a prime-time Labor Day opener.

Not only is that the most points UNC has ever allowed in a season opener, it’s also the most points Belichick has ever allowed as a head coach.

“Look, they just outplayed us. They out-coached us,” said a red-faced Belichick from behind a postgame podium Monday night. “I mean, they were just better than we were tonight.”

That’s a tough truth to swallow, especially considering the larger circumstances. Ever since December, when the Tar Heels pushed their chips to the center on a 73-year-old who’d never coached a game in college, the spotlight has been on this one night. On B-Day — Belichick Day, the day when the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach would signal a new era of football in Chapel Hill.

Which is why, understandably, UNC threw the pregame party to end all pregames. Everything, on 10, everywhere. Even on the fringes of town — in parking lots, on Franklin Street — you had fans tailgating in crevices and alleys, smoking cigars while sitting in baby blue picnic chairs, the soft thud of bean bags slapping against cornhole boards around every bend. Closer to campus, fraternity ragers spilled into the streets, while gigantic banners — like one that read “What the f— is a Horned Frog?” — hung in the background. And the soundtrack to it all? Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” the pop star’s apt lyrics reverberating throughout fraternity court: “I can take you for a ride…”

STRONG pregame vibes in Chapel Hill pic.twitter.com/fMUjdqTHWe
— Brendan Marks (@BrendanRMarks) September 1, 2025

Meanwhile, at He’s Not Here — one of UNC’s most popular bars, famous for its 32-ounce blue cups — liquid courage flowed freely hours before kickoff. “This is like the Duke game!” hollered one fan, barely able to move through the masses after the three empty cups in his grasp. Clearly, plenty of the season ticket-holders who signed up for the Belichick experience wound up here, elbow to elbow, marinating in pregame enthusiasm. Another late-arriving customer, seeing the beer line wrapping outside the bar and down a black metal staircase, had to talk himself into even attempting to buy a drink: “Lord, have mercy.”

By that point, two and a half hours before everything unraveled, the buzz had migrated to the Old Well, the iconic drinking fountain that serves as a UNC emblem. As part of Belichick’s push to elevate Tar Heels football, the coach said he wanted to bring back certain elements of the school’s football history — including the Old Well Walk, which originated under Carl Torbush in 2000. And there fans were, four-deep, walling off the space around the fountain, where buses would deliver North Carolina’s players and coaches. The only issue? Those buses arrived minutes before the designated 5:30 p.m. start time … leaving dozens of stragglers, from across a wide quad, late for the party. (...)

That crowd, more than any, provided a snapshot of modern-era UNC football. Plenty of CHAPEL BILL merch in the crowd — T-shirts, buttons, the works — but also a surprising amount of New England Patriots gear, fans of Belichick’s former team showing out for their old coach. Small clusters of students, almost apologetically proclaiming: “We’re really into football, but we just don’t know any of the players.” (And with 70 new names on Belichick’s first roster, nor should they.) Old-timers, too, in their worn Lawrence Taylor and Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice jerseys, mingling with the shiny-new Drake Maye and Omarion Hampton ones. And lastly, the curious, those who came to see the spectacle of Belichick, who could only stare with wide eyes at the sea of blue rolling across Polk Place.

As one said on the phone before the cell signal dropped out: “Mom, there are a lot of people.”

And then, hours later, there weren’t. The pregame light show, the fireworks, all that momentum swelling inside Kenan Stadium? It didn’t vanish in a flash, but rather, in gashes. (...)

What began as a celebration, as a precursor of future success, could not have turned more sour. UNC waited nine months, and spent millions of dollars, for empty stands before the fourth quarter began. For loyalists who stayed until the final whistle, so few and far between, you could quite literally count them? (Unofficially 69 in the eastern end zone, by one reporter’s count.) The countless UNC dignitaries who made the pilgrimage back to Chapel Hill — Michael Jordan, Lawrence Taylor, Mia Hamm, Julius Peppers — couldn’t leave early, for optics, but buried their heads in their phones all the same.

Anything but what was right in front of them.

The official time of death — not just for this one game, but for the larger UNC hype machine — was 11:24 p.m., a whimper of an end to a day that once held so much excitement.

by Brendan Marks, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Six games in 5 days: What a college football road trip taught me about the state of the sport (Athletic).]

Cressida Campbell, John Dory, 1987
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Basic Phones: A Brief Guide for Parents

In 2021, Common Sense Media found that half of U.S. kids get their first smartphone by age 11. Many parents now realize that age is too young for kids to have an internet-enabled phone.

But at some point, you’re going to consider getting your kid or teen a phone. Maybe the closest school bus stop is far away and the bus isn’t always on time. Maybe you’re sick of your kid borrowing your phone to text their friends. Maybe they’re getting older and it seems like the right time. So what type of phone should you get them?

In some cases, the answer might be a flip phone, the old-school cell phone that was the standard until the smartphone came along. Flip phones have some downsides, though. Since there’s no keyboard, texting involves pressing the number keys multiple times to type one letter (if you had a cell phone in the 2000s, you probably remember this). If your kids’ friends communicate via text, replying on a flip phone is going to be awkward and time-consuming. Flip phone cameras are often low-quality, so they’re not a great option if your kid likes taking pictures. Because they don’t look like a smartphone, flip phones also stand out — and many kids don’t want to stand out.

Fortunately, parents no longer have to choose exclusively between a flip phone and an adult smartphone for their kid, thanks to the many “basic” phone options. These middle-ground phones have a screen keyboard and a higher-quality camera like a smartphone, look very similar to a smartphone, and they can use many smartphone apps (with parental limits and permissions). Unlike a regular smartphone, though, they don’t have an internet browser or social media.

Basic phones are the training wheels of phones. They’re safer for kids right out of the box, with built-in parental controls that are easier to use and harder for kids to hack than those on smartphones. With no internet or social media, it’s much less likely that unknown adults will be able to randomly contact your kid, or that kids will stumble across pornography. Basic phones are usually Androids with a modified operating system, so they look like a regular smartphone and thus don’t stand out like flip phones do. For all of these reasons, Rule #4 in 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World is “First phones should be basic phones.”

If you want your kid to have the ability to easily text their friends but don’t want them using social media or going down internet rabbit holes, basic phones are a great solution. They’re a stopgap between the age when texting and calling becomes socially useful (usually in middle school, by age 12 or 13) and the age when they’re ready for a smartphone and possibly social media (at 16; Rule #5 in 10 Rules is “Give the first smartphone with the driver’s license,” and Rule #3 is “No social media until age 16 – or later.”). My younger two children, ages 15 and 13, have basic phones.

Here’s a brief overview of some popular basic phone options to help you figure out the best choice for your kid.

Option 1. Gabb Phone 4

This is the most basic of the basic phones, with calling, texting (including text-to-speech), clean music streaming, and a camera, but no capability for adding additional third-party apps. “You can’t do anything on it,” my middle daughter once said about her Gabb phone. “That,” I replied, “is the point.” If this is what you want, make sure you’re buying the Gabb Phone 4 and not the Pro, which allows more apps.

Option 2. Pinwheel, Troomi, Gabb Phone 4 Pro, Bark

These are basic phones that have access to an app store where you can add additional features. They come with an online parent portal where you can set a schedule (like having the phone shut off at bedtime) and approve new contacts. Some allow you to see the texts your child has received and sent.

The parent portal also lets you see the apps available for the phone. You can then install those you want and approve (or reject) those your kids ask for. These phones don’t allow certain apps at all (mostly dating, pornography, and alcohol-related apps, as well as AI chatbots and those that allow contact with unknown adults). That’s a relief, but there are still tough decisions about what to allow versus not. The tradeoff for more flexibility is more complexity in managing the phone. Still, I’d much rather have this challenge than giving a 12-year-old a smartphone with unrestricted internet and social media access.

Through the parent portal, you also have the ability to remotely control bedtime shutoff, app installs, and time limits for apps even after you’ve given your kid the phone — so you don’t have to wrestle it away from them to change your parental control settings.

If you’re looking for more details about specific basic phone brands for kids, check out the pages at Wait Until 8th and Protect Young Eyes.

Option 3. The Light Phone

This is a grown-up basic phone. Unlike other basic phones, it’s not necessarily meant for kids, and it’s not an Android phone — it’s a unique device. It has a paper-like screen like a Kindle so it’s not as colorfully tempting as a smartphone. It has a maps app, calling, and texting, but does not have internet access, social media, or email. The newest version has a camera. All of the features are optional so you can choose which features your kid’s phone has.

Many adults who want a pared-down phone, sometimes just for certain situations, use Light Phones. Because their target audience is adults, Light Phones do not come with a parent portal like the phones designed for kids.

***

The biggest challenge with basic phones (with the exception of the more limited Gabb Phone 4) is deciding which apps to allow. The parent portals that come with many of these products give more information and sometimes even a rating for each app, but it’s often hard to judge what’s appropriate and what isn’t without using the app yourself (something to consider). If you allow game apps, make sure to put a time limit on them (maybe 10-20 minutes a day each) so your kid doesn’t spend too much of their free time on their phone.

One other issue to be aware of: All of these optional apps display ads, and the ads – even on a so-called “kids’ phone” – are not filtered. Your kid might be playing “Find the Cat” and be served ads for AI girlfriends. They won’t be able to download the AI girlfriend app, thank goodness, but you may find yourself explaining what an AI girlfriend is to an 11-year-old. If that’s a non-starter, you’ll have to say no to any optional app, including games and educational apps like Duolingo.

If you do allow games and music, use the parental controls to block them during school hours if your kids’ school still allows phones during the school day. That way you’ll know your kids are paying attention in class instead of playing BlockBlast. And if they say they want to play games during lunch, tell them they should be talking to their friends instead.

What if your kid says, “It’s embarrassing to have a kid phone”? My reply: Who’s going to know? Most basic phones look like a regular Android phone. My middle daughter once told me she was embarrassed when a friend asked her, “What kind of phone is that?” I told her she could honestly answer, “It’s an Android phone.” There’s also no need to disclose that the phone doesn’t allow social media or internet. If your friends ask if you have a certain app and you don’t, I told her, just say your parents don’t allow it. All kids understand that parents are lame. :)

by Jean M. Twenge, Generation Tech |  Read more:

Image: Troomi

[ed. New school year starting up...]

Jim Benton
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Happy Labor Day
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