Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb Personal computers and the internet were supposed to democratize information and the power to analyze and use it. Instead, they are contributing to the increasing concentration of wealth and power and putting us on the road to authoritarian rule.
Either the Trump administration doesn’t understand that making personnel cuts across the U. S. government in this manner will not increase efficiency OR it intends to make government agencies ineffective.
Giving Elon Musk and his callow team of computer coders access to the U.S. Treasury payments system is very, very dangerous.
The dramatic drop in the cost of AI demonstrated by Chinese upstart DeepSeek is great for buyers of AI tools, but very bad for the incumbent developers of those tools.
Empowering the individual has become a frequent slogan for today’s tech pioneers. As that empowerment grows, it makes it possible for an individual or a small group to threaten all of society. I have now posted my most
Can you think of anything built by humans that you would expect to last 100,000 years? I can’t.
A long-running elevator outage at my favorite cinema lead me to find out about America’s “elevator crisis.” It’s a symptom of our infrastructure predicament.
Increasingly, it seems that the ongoing spread of bird flu among cattle and the possible evolution of a strain that can be transmitted between humans will be the biggest story of 2025. I hope I’m wrong.
All the recent talk about government Bitcoin reserves has gotten me thinking about what happens when governments speculate.
Somebody needs to buy U.S. trade policymakers a periodic table of elements. China last week banned export of the key high-tech metals antimony, gallium and germanium to the United States. In this case, China has the upper hand.
Those coming into power now on a worldwide wave of discontent appear to understand little about the ultimate underlying causes of that discontent.
Deglobalization is proceeding apace for many reasons. Here’s one more.
