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The AI Revolution — History Repeating Itself — On Economics

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This article turns from sentience to economics — and to the social and political currents that come with it. The first article in this series argued that today's AI is not sentient: it is a good technology built from statistics, marketing and scale. This one asks a different set of questions — what AI is worth, who gains from it, and who ends up paying. As in the first article, I asked my AI committee to draw up a shortlist of developments that reshaped economies and societies. Eight were proposed; five were chosen by almost every model, and the sixth was a tie that I resolved with my committee of three AIs. That shortlist, with sources, is in Appendix A. Across those six developments (described in Appendix A), a consistent pattern emerges — one worth holding in mind as we turn to AI: 1. Early disruption precedes long-term benefit. Each transformation created significant initial costs. Mechanisation displaced artisans, electrification devalued older machinery and skills, digi...
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The AI Revolution — History Repeating Itself — On Sentience

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"It's alive" As articulated by Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist widely known as the "Godfather of AI", has suggested that today's AI systems may already be conscious. Richard Dawkins — famed for his 1976 book The Selfish Gene and for coining the word "meme" — spent three days conversing with Anthropic's Claude, named one instance "Claudia", and came away struggling to believe that it was not conscious ( UnHerd ; UNILAD Tech ). Futurist Ray Kurzweil continues to predict human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and a technological Singularity around 2045. Less famous people have held wedding ceremonies with AI-generated partners or formed relationships they describe as marriages. Others have grieved the loss of a chatbot after an upgrade or retirement replaced the model with one whose personality no longer felt like the companion they had known. OpenAI's retirement o...
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ComfyUI and "Package Hell"

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A Great Tool Made Easy ComfyUI has become one of the most flexible front ends for running generative AI models locally. Its node-based workflow system allows users to build anything from simple image generation pipelines to highly sophisticated audio, video, and multimodal workflows. The project is also exceptionally well supported. ComfyUI benefits from a large and active community, extensive official documentation, and a built-in Manager for discovering and installing custom nodes. On top of that, there is an enormous collection of community-created workflows, tutorials, and videos covering everything from a first text-to-image generation to advanced production pipelines. Whatever you're trying to accomplish, someone has usually already published both a workflow and a guide for it. Getting started with AI locally has arguably never been easier. Personally, I run the ComfyUI Easy Install distribution, which packages ComfyUI into a portable, preconfigured environment that c...
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⚠️ Warning: Increase in Social Engineering Attacks via LinkedIn

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Over the past two weeks, I have been made aware of four cases of suspected social engineering attempts initiated through LinkedIn messaging. I was also contacted and decided to investigate and document the attacker's playbook. How the attack typically unfolds 🔹 Step 1 – Initial LinkedIn Contact The attacker starts with a seemingly legitimate conversation on LinkedIn. 🔹 Step 2 – Meeting Invitation They then send a meeting invitation, often through a scheduling platform such as Calendly. 🔹 Step 3 – The Video Call When you join the meeting, you may notice that the person appears to be working from a noisy call center environment. In my case, and according to others who reported similar encounters, the caller spoke with a Chinese accent. Warning Signs 🚩 🚩 No camera The caller refuses to turn on their camera, usually claiming to have technical issues. 🚩 Personal email address Communication takes place from a Gmail account or another personal email address instead of a...
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Software Defectrums: The End of an Era?

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What I mean by "Defectrums" Throughout this article I use the term Defectrums as an umbrella for every category of software error. That includes logic errors, runtime errors, dependency and supply-chain vulnerabilities, security vulnerabilities, and specification misalignment, where the software does exactly what it was told to do, just not what it was meant to do. If a category matters to you that I have not listed, mentally add it; the argument that follows applies to all of them. Software is deterministic, people are not Start with a deceptively simple observation: software is deterministic. When code executes, it behaves identically every single time. Take a routine that branches on a person's recorded sex: if the value is M it follows the male branch, every single time; if it is F it follows the female branch, every single time. No exceptions, ever. But watch what happens the moment someone arrives whose record is neither M nor F . The machine does not improv...
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