Tag Archives: AI and automation

AI or Just Bots: the Truth about Artificial Intelligence

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Americans are becoming increasingly convinced that artificial intelligence is actually thinking like humans do…This fuels narratives about a future in which AI takes over the economy, leading to heightened insecurity for all of us while providing cover for companies that might be laying off workers for other reasons. It leads us to accept as true answers that are frequently made up or incorrect, even when we are repeatedly told that chatbots can’t stop delivering this kind of misinformation…Our cognitive biases developed to help us survive in complex social environments… We have evolved to view linguistic fluency as a proxy for intelligence, and engagement and helpfulness as indicators of trustworthiness. Builders of AI tools lean in to this deliberately. The humanlike qualities of chatbots are a calculated effort by designers and engineers to make AI more useful, but also more compelling and stickier [i.e. addictive]—just like social media.

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman… warned that today’s seemingly conscious AIs [consists of a bunch of] highly accelerated information processors. “These systems are not waking up,” he wrote. “They are retracing and mirroring the contours of human drama and debate, as documented in their vast training data.” He recommends a solution: “Developers must actively engineer the illusion of consciousness out of the products.”…

Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals and even inanimate objects, says Ayanna Howard, dean of Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and a robotics….Humans’ trusting nature makes sense for social creatures who must cooperate with members of their own tribe to survive. With AI and robots, however, this same tendency leads us to trust any system that appears to listen, understand and want to help, a phenomenon Howard calls “over-trust.” Today’s AIs are engineered to actively induce us to over-trust them, she adds. They do this by behaving in ways that are friendly and helpful, mimicking us through memory and personalization.

Excerpt from Christopher Mims, Why Even Smart People Believe AI Is Really Thinking, WSJ, Mar. 20, 2026

The Price of Political Obedience: the Yes Men are not Revolting Yet

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Co-founder Dario Amodei has made safety and social responsibility central to Anthropic’s approach to AI. Usage restrictions governing its contract with the Pentagon stipulate that its AI cannot be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon, which objects to outside limits on what its troops can do, wants unrestricted access for all lawful purposes… If Anthropic was too inflexible, the Pentagon could have simply terminated the contract. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went further, declaring on X that “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” Such declaration, according to commentators, amounted to “corporate murder”, The “message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.”

Excerpt from Greg Ip, Anthropic’s Pentagon Battle Matters to Every Business, WSJ, Mar. 13, 2026

The Brute Force of Capital: A 2026 Update

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In 1985, IBM was America’s most valuable company, one of its most profitable, and among its largest employers, with a payroll of nearly 400,000. Today, Nvidia is nearly 20 times as valuable and five times as profitable as IBM was back then, adjusted for inflation. Yet it employs roughly a 10th as many people. That simple comparison says something profound about today’s economy: Its rewards are going disproportionately toward capital instead of labor. Profits have soared since the pandemic, and the market value attached to those profits even more. The result: Capital, which includes businesses, shareholders and superstar employees, is triumphant, while the average worker ekes out marginal gains….The brute financial force of all that wealth means market fluctuations… Meanwhile, artificial intelligence could funnel even more of economic output toward capital instead of labor. Amid reports in February 2026 that layoffs are climbing and job openings plunging, especially for professionals exposed to AI, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 50 000 for the first time.

Excerpt from Greg Ip, The Big Money in Today’s Economy Is Going to Capital, Not Labor, WSJ, Feb. 9, 2026

Let them Eat Data! Decolonizing Artificial Intelligence

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Tap water isn’t drinkable. Power outages are common. The national average annual wage is $2,200. Yet rising on Jakarta’s outskirts are giant, windowless buildings packed inside with Nvidia’s latest artificial-intelligence chips. They mark Indonesia’s surprising rise as an AI hot spot, a market estimated to grow 30% annually over the next five years to $2.4 billion.

The multitrillion-dollar spending spree on AI has spread to the developing world. It is driven in part by a philosophy known in some academic circles as AI decolonization. The idea is simple. Foreign powers once extracted resources such as oil from colonies, offering minimal benefits to the locals. Today, developing nations aim to ensure that the AI boom enriches more than just Silicon Valley.  Regulations effectively require tech companies such as Google and Meta to process local data domestically. That pushes companies to build or rent data facilities onshore instead of relying on global infrastructure. These investments add up to billions of dollars and create jobs that foster national talent, or so developing nations hope.

AI decolonization is a twist on data sovereignty, a concept that gained traction after Edward Snowden revealed that American tech companies cooperated with U.S. government surveillance of foreign leaders. The European Union in 2018 pioneered data-protection laws that other nations have since mimicked.

Regulations vary by country and industry, but the principle is this: If a developing-nation bank wants an American tech giant to store customer data and analyze it with AI, the bank must hire a company with domestically located servers… Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang championed “sovereign AI” during a visit to Jakarta in 2024

“No country can afford to have its natural resource—the data of its people—be extracted, transformed into intelligence and then imported back into the country,” Huang said…

Excerpt from Stu Woo, It’s Not Just Rich Countries. Tech’s Trillion-Dollar Bet on AI Is Everywhere, WSJ, Oct. 26, 2025

Blackmail and Espionage: rogue AI

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Today I am reading on how AI models can blackmail and spy.

See How LLMs could be insider threats

DECEPTION IN LLMS: SELF-PRESERVATION AND AUTONOMOUS GOALS IN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

Chilling…

McKinsey Loves its Bots and Proud of It

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Companies have paid dearly for McKinsey’s human expertise for nearly a century, relying on the firm’s armies of consultants to synthesize complex information, crunch huge amounts of data and map out solutions to thorny business challenges. But what happens now that AI can do much of that analysis in a matter of minutes—and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck to boot?… McKinsey has reduced its head count…and rolled out roughly 12,000 AI agents. These bots now assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes and summing up interviews and research documents for clients.

Traditionally, a strategy project might have required a project leader, four consultants and a partner. Today, it might need a leader and two or three consultants—alongside a few AI agents and access to “deep research” capabilities. Bob Sternfels, head of McKinsey, said he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when McKinsey has one AI agent for every human it employs. “We’re going to continue to hire, but we’re also going to continue to build AI agents,” he said. 

Excerpt from Conor Grant, AI Comes for Consulting, McKinsey Faces an “Existential” Shift, WSJ, Aug. 8, 2025