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Musings of a Pathological Optimist

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Outdoors guy, tech nerd, photographer, adventurer, admitted eccentric, pathological optimist.

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  • Between Hype and Humanity: The Challenge of an AI Bubble

    I’ll begin this post with an admission—if you want to call it that—that I’m a business guy. I believe in many aspects of the capitalist system. I believe in moderation. I’m also an optimist (a pathological optimist, according to my wife). My strength is not economics, so I’m not going to attempt a technical analysis…

  • Humanizing AI

    There are many conversations about the threats and opportunities of AI in our “modern” world. The media is overflowing with stories about the coming destruction of people’s livelihoods, the dangers of rogue machines taking over the world, monopoly power in the hands of the “tech bros”, and superficial (and false) AGI narratives designed to stoke…

  • Openness

    Thoughts on ego, empathy, and the challenge of staying open. There is a quality of human intelligence (and maybe other intelligence yet to be discovered in our world) that is often characterized as openness. For me, it’s a difficult quality to define because I think of it as relying on a jumble of attributes –…

  • Authoritarian Fools

    I was a recently graduated art school student with a degree in photography about a million years ago (the early 1980’s to be more precise) when I discovered and became fascinated with West Berlin. Many are too young to remember, but there was a time when an island of the democratic west existed in the…

  • Stillness

    I think the human brain is wired for both immediacy and contemplation. Without over-simplifying, the modern world is increasingly out of balance because forces, including the relentless monetization of attention, have aggressively tilted the equation toward the former. Some of the best experiences in life are to be had, or have their genesis in, the…

  • On Adventure

    Persisting with the idea that there are a load of aphorisms in need renovation, I’m sure most people have heard the saying: It’s the journey, not the destination. I would like to suggest that in fact it’s the adventure, there is no destination. I interpret adventure in a much broader way than most people. For…

  • Thoughts and Reality

    Your thoughts create your reality. It’s a well know aphorism in need of some renovation, or maybe a bit more context. A quote from the late Pete Postlethwaite, the famous English character actor sums it up for me: “Your thoughts are weightless.” In the context of an actor’s profession, it’s a way of communicating the…