Archive for category: Blog

In the wake of some of the wealthiest tech company leaders standing directly behind the new President during his inauguration we pause for thought on the implications of this image. America is all about business as has been said. Yet this blatant show of force implies an even greater co-option of government by the elites reminding us of the days of Henry George who argued against such excesses during the Gilded Age of the 19th century. This blog post considers how these two periods mirror each other and what makes our current experience different from legal support to technology influence to a leadership mentality at odds with democratic principles.

The development of AI has been centuries in the making. We notice it’s seeming instantaneous emergence in recent years as if it landed in a flash of light. Yet this lightning strike has been glowing within the computing world for over 75 years and much longer with philosophers and mathematicians. In most cases with the emergence of new technologies there have been some growing pains. However, science, engineering, and policy have acted to improve the solutions at each step. In this blog entry we will turn our attention to the history of AI, some of its key building blocks, and how its maturation may impact the types of social interests which Henry George discussed at length.

If you were born in the 1990s you might never have questioned the pervasiveness of companies like Google in the Internet domain. For you, such companies, products, services, and technologies have been ever present and seemingly unassailable.

Yet in the past few months we have seen the emergence of a set of technologies, especially ChatGPT, which have opened the real possibility of a technical and business threat to Google’s near monopoly on Internet search.