Wherefore Art Thou AI?

 

Today my department received news it didn't want to hear - four of our colleagues were being let go and for now their workload would have to be shared out among the whole department.  A department that after an earlier round of layoffs in 2025 was already crushed under their workload.  To say that people in the department were alarms, concerned, frustrated, etc. goes without saying.  The words on everyone's lips was that this was the start of the "AI layoffs" which most of the department has been expecting for a while.

As a person who works with and/or adjacent to AI, there is a lot of hype or maybe myths that these things are the reason that we will have many problems in future.  AI is neither the panacea that it is being sold as, nor is it the dystopian wasteland that others see it as.  As with other previous technology waves, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  The problem is that like the dot com period or the cloud computing period, or the much shorter crypto period.....a crash with lots of disappointment will have to come first.  And how much economic devastation that will bring depends a lot on how things play out in the very near future.

When looking at AI and the promise it brings - and I have worked with the LLM AI that most people are familiar with (Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, etc.), but also agentic AI, and even have demo'd VLM video AI modeling - it is important to understand that AI is a technology, it is software mixed with hardware (servers, storage, etc.) and rather than bringing about the apocalypse, we are much more likely to see mundane bugs and clear limitations as time goes on.  And it is for this reason that I worry about the dangers of the short term versus the promise of the long term.

Short term has very real concerns with companies embracing AI without fully understanding its limitations.  And companies trumpeting their use of AI, when what they claim to use it for doesn't exist and is an empty bag.  Companies are racing to build data centers regardless of capacity planning or even needs and are going about it in a reckless way.  OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Anduril, and other AI companies are borrowing money from each other, from Private Equity companies, and even in some cases investing in derivatives (remember those from the 2008 housing crash?) to raise money to build huge data centers.  When AI turns out to be just another mundane new tool that can be used in limited ways (like all technology) I fear that these loans embedded in loans and data centers, built or being built will be abandoned and cause a very nasty global recession.

Let me explain from the technology industry coal face:  LLM AI models will help workers in building slides for customer presentations, ingesting data and outputting graphs and data analytics, helping workers/engineers summarize issues that their own customers are seeing.  But AI cannot do their job for them, they cannot make phone calls, they cannot troubleshoot problems diplomatically, they cannot do a lot of the things that every day workers do.  Can they make those worker's jobs a bit simpler or easier?  Absolutely.  But the day to day task of most workers or engineers are not fully replicable with AI.  Also as I mentioned AI is software married to hardware with the problems that come with that.  I have been around for many huge technology roll-outs and the first 5 years is spent finding defects or flaws in the configurations and patching or fixing them.  It won't be any different with AI.  It will not change everything immediately, there will be trials and there will be errors.  Humans created it, so it will have all the flaws and foibles that we bring to it.  

Agentic AI has a lot more promise - these are very specialized AI models embedded in devices or systems.  For instance, agentic AI inside of routers and switches as part of the internet backbone (corporate or otherwise) that can monitor traffic on the network in real time and if something goes wrong will work to resolve it based on the collective knowledge it has inside.  It is a self contained AI that is used for a very specific purpose.  It could revolutionize financial technology, network security, risk management, and HR.  But again, it is not part of some large AI "monster" but rather is limited to the goals it was designed to do.  

VLM or video AI has some pretty amazing potential as well, but also many dangers around privacy.  VLMs can be used in limited ways for building security (schools, restricted buildings, etc.) and localized law enforcement.  The real danger here is that a system that can analyze tons of data around video and/or pictures can violate privacy and utilizing facial recognition software in partnership with it to track individuals and society.  The recent ICE/CBP raids in Chicago and Minneapolis should give us pause over the use or abuse of VLM AI.

So AI technology has a lot of good potential to help in a lot of areas.  But right now we are riding a huge wave that is saying it is going to fix or destroy everything depending on your views of it.  I think that the current irrational exuberance for AI will lead in the short term to instability and a financial crash is not out of the question.  Companies moving quickly may cut staffing and turn over large portions of their systems to AI, and then later realize what AI can and cannot do.  

But longer term I think AI will be of benefit for us all, but only after we learn to understand its limitations and think of it as tool, not as something that is going to destroy the world.  

Life Can Be Tasteless

 I am in a bit of a rut right now.  Nothing much happening, nothing much doing.  And I got a bit down about it.  And then I had a long philosophical think on the situation and decided to write about it.

We often in our hyper-curated Instagram, Facebook, X, Tik Tok, etc. world often forget that our lives happen in the mundane everyday world.  Life isn't a series of disasters or triumphs endlessly posted about.  Rather 90% of life is really just the day to day grind.  It is this grind and what we do with it that defines our lives and who we are and how we grow.  What do I mean?  Well life isn't all bells and whistles, most of us get up at the crack of dawn and either throw on yesterdays clothes or stay in our pajamas as we get our kids fed and dressed and out the door to the bus - or into the car for the drive to school.  Life is the perpetual search for what food to give the kids in their lunchbox, what to prepare for dinner, get off to work or home office, deal with daily work issues or emergencies (that aren't really ever real emergencies), deciding what to order or what restaurant to go to if the day got away from you and you didn't prepare that dinner mentioned above.  Picking your child up from school, or meeting their bus.  Asking after their day, there homework, etc.  Discussing the day with your partner/spouse or with your kids before getting their teeth scrubbed and getting them off to bed.....so that you can catch a couple of hours of quiet (maybe some TV or reading) before you sleep and start the whole thing over.

Life happens in the above moments rather than in the holidays, graduations,  or festivals we attend.  We shape our world view based on much more intimate conversations with those we love and who are present in our lives. Our politics and worldview are shaped by the community we live in, but more so by the people we share space with day in and day out.

So life can be bland and tasteless or meaningless sometimes.  We need to learn to embrace the grind as it makes us who we are and who we want to become.  Accepting that most of our life will be made up of these moments and the structure it gives us is important.  I spent six years of my life caregiving for my wife and many of those days just blended into the next - rinse repeat.  But all the way up until she passed I know that this experience, those meaningless days made me into the person I am now.

So all of us should recognize that we can't always everyday be the super-hero in our own story.  But through our every day actions no matter how boring (laundry, vacuuming, etc) we build a life that at the end of it is amazing.  How else do we grow our children into adults we are proud of?  How else do we make our own parents proud?  How else do we build a career that we are satisfied with.....even if it isn't the one we have hoped for?  A brick for each day however bland or uneventful the day.

We are each of us heroes in our own lives and we build the huge edifice that our friends and family see on the outside and if lucky on the inside too.  But that heroism isn't from some incredible act or pivotal moment - rather it is the thousands of hours and days strung together over a long life that makes us the heroes of our own story.

Live each day.

On Life Struggles and How We Never Stop Learning

 I planned on writing in this blog all the time, charting new stories as I started a new life after the loss of my wife and then my remarriage and the birth of our daughter.  But as with a lot of things - hardship and struggles come and derail even the most put together person.  And thus my last post inaugurating this blog was from 2017 and now it is 2025.  

Let me explain the gap as best I can.  Our daughter was born at 23 weeks of gestation, what is today called a micro-preemie.  So premature that they told us she may not survive the first 24 hours.  So premature that they told us there was a good chance she would have heart developmental issues or a heart defect.  So premature they told us she may have detached retinas and be blind her whole life.  So premature that they told us there was a possibility of brain bleeds and/or cerebral palsy.  She spent the first 5 months of her life in the NICU, and we spent those first months suffering with all the possibilities that might come....each more horrific to consider than the one previously told to us.

In the end we are eternally grateful that none of these things came to pass.  She survived, her heart was fine, her eyes and eyesight were fine, no brain bleeds or cerebral palsy.  We were blessed with a tiny little girl who was healthy.  Except......she wasn't.  Almost immediately it was clear that there was some things wrong.  When you think of prematurity you think of these above worst case scenarios, nobody thinks about the "secondary" systems like digestion or development.  And so almost from the beginning she would vomit anything and everything given to her.  Breastfeeding, didn't work.  Formula, didn't work.  The doctors had to insert a Nasal Gastro tube through her nose into her belly directly and only then could we feed her.  But even then she was vomiting constantly.  And each time we had to change the NG tube it was like waterboarding your baby - screaming due to the discomfort of it, making sure you got it down into her belly and not into her lungs.  And so we struggled with this from the time we took her home from the hospital until she was 1 year-old - at that time at the behest of her doctor she had her first surgery to install a Mic-Key button.  A hole with a plug directly through her stomach and her belly, allowing us to pump or use syringes to feed her directly into her stomach.

And this is how we grew her from ages 1 through 5 years we had a feeding pump that fed her in the night, and we used syringes to feed her in the day.  Moving from formula into pureed regular food over time.  Any attempt to feed her orally was a complete failure.  Even with this Mic-Key button she was vomiting anywhere from 10 to 15 times in the day - we actually carried a bucket around with us for years.  When she was 5 years old she began to slowly eat small portions, anything large would cause her to vomit.  By the time she was almost 6 we were able to get the Mic-Key button removed.  She was eating, with some difficulty, but eating!

Then another hardship came to visit.  We discovered in Kindergarten and 1st grade that she is "developmentally delayed".  We were concerned and had her evaluated for autism,  and were told thankfully that she was not.  But it was clear to us and the doctors that while she was 6. years old....she was developmentally more like 4 years old.  And this new challenge continues.  She is now 8 years old, but developmentally is more like 6 years old.  The local elementary school is great and has her on an IEP and work with her well.  She is a happy, bubbly, mischievous little girl but we worry about her a lot since she is always behind the other children.  And as they age the innocence of this world (which never lasted long to begin with) will fade.....but will remain for her longer.  This can be a blessing, but also can be quite dangerous.

As if this wasn't all enough, during the same period I was alerted to some outstanding medical bills belonging to my late wife that I was unaware of - apparently in the last year of my wife's life she had tried to deal with them unbeknownst to me but hadn't been able to.  And so I suddenly found myself in possession of a huge medical debt that I wasn't aware of, at a time when I had just invested money in a neighborhood cafe.  Sufficed to say I had to damage myself financially to pay it off and once the COVID pandemic started the cafe failed as well.

Why am I telling this tale of woe?  I think it is to show that I came through hell dealing with my wife's cancer and sickness and ultimate death.  I rebuilt my life and moved forward and found love again and started a new and beautiful family.  But the hardships of this life never stopped, there are always bad things happening to us or to those around us all the time.  We are buffeted by the winds of this world and sometimes the wind never seems to stop blowing.

I have learned one important lesson through all of these hardships - sickness, death, love, premature birth, years of struggle with our daughter's health.........it is that we have no control.  We live with an illusion of control in our lives.  It is necessary to build that illusion and feed it, it is the only way to be comfortable and not live every day in a state of anxiety.  Nevertheless we actually have no control, our lives can end or irreparably change in any moment.  Embracing the lack of control is terrifying, but necessary to move forward.  We as humans do it every time we start something new.  But the true strength is in knowing all along that you are powerless before the furies of life - know it, and then decide to move forward anyway.

The Dangerous Path of Banning Religious Observance

Today in a decision that surprised many the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that workplaces could enforce bans on obvious religious garments and/or paraphernalia.  We have gotten used to seeing headlines about local municipalities in France banning the Burkini (the wetsuit that covers the head that religiously observant Muslim women choose to wear when swimming), or a German province ruling that hijab-wearing Muslim women teachers cannot wear hijab in state schools, or the banning of the niqab (or full face veil that some conservative Muslim women choose to wear).  But to have a court of justice whose job it is to protect the rights and freedoms of all European citizens - including the Muslim ones come down in favor of allowing corporations or other workplaces to ban religious items or clothing is shocking.

What we are seeing in Europe today is something we've seen before.  The slow moving train that started with the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1800s and moved on to the ban in Germany of outward displays of Jewish clothing and the wearing of fabric stars of David - side locks on the Ultra-Orthodox, tzittzit, kippahs, etc.  To Kristalnacht and the Final Solution.  Am I getting a little worked up and blowing the horn too loudly perhaps?  It seems like everyone and their friends are making Nazi references.  About President Trump, about Steve Bannon, about Turkish President Erdoğan or from him against others.  But since I'm not hearing any other horns going off on this particular issue then please let me blow it.

This is not a high speed train.  Rather just like the 1930s it is a slow moving train that creeps slowly enough that nobody pays a lot of attention.  But we cannot be in any doubt about its destination.  The moves by Le Pen, Wilders, AfD, PiS, UKIP, The Northern League, Fidesz, etc., have one endpoint - the end of Islam and Muslims in Europe to one degree or another.  And if European Jews or Sikhs or other minorities think they will get off without any problem they need to think carefully.  In the 1930s and 1940s it started with the Jews but ended by sweeping up the Roma and homosexuals too.

It is also not just political rhetoric or posturing.  When AfD in Germany rails against refugees, attacks against refugees spike.  When Geert Wilders in the Netherlands calls Moroccans "scum" there is a rise in hate crimes against Arabs.  It means there is a direct correlation between what they are calling for and the outcome they seek.  Thus if Wilders states his goal is to ban the Qur'an and close all mosques in the Netherlands, you had best be assured that this is exactly what he will do - using whatever chicanery he can find.

The push for these rising nationalist parties to leave the EU is not just a nativist urge, I believe that they also wish to exit the EU so they are not beholden to its democratic institutions or human rights courts.  When they begin the process of stripping citizenship from their minority and non-Christian populations and expelling them or worse they do not want to be part of any extra-national entity that may try to check them.  They seek impunity.  You see this also in the Polish nationalist party's moves to weaken their supreme court and curtail press freedoms.

Nor do I see this rising nationalism as only a European phenomena.  Europe is certainly the epicenter right now, but Turkey's movements against press freedom and concentration of power certainly mirrors parties in Europe and in Putin's Russia.  And the increasingly nationalist Myanmar government and their subjugation of ethnic and religious minorities there also flows along this path.

We have a world where the worst types of nationalist right-wing parties and governments having taken a rest from the chaos of 60 years ago are now coming out of the woodwork again.  The United States along with her NATO allies formed a bulwark not only against Communism but also against the type of destructive nationalism that had destroyed the world previously.  But how can it be a bulwark when its original members are the ones with the biggest problems with these parties today?  How can it thwart tyranny, nativism, and autarky when our own President is too busy worried about fighting the last conflict and navel-gazing?

We are in a dangerous situation.  The slow train left the station a while ago.  It is picking up speed.  Who is going to halt it before it brings the destruction it promises?

First there was love, then there was loss, then love again

You never contemplate life from the position of a widow or a widower.  It isn't something you consider in your day to day life.  That is, until the person you love takes their last shuddering breath and you can almost feel the angel coming to take the soul of your loved one.

The death of a spouse, like the death of a child is a wrenching soul destroying experience.  And it leaves you numb and shattered for a long while after.  My wife as she suffered through the last months of her life talked to me insistently about finding love again, about marrying again.  "You are not the type of person to sit alone for the rest of your life." she would tell me.  Or, "Who will look after you when you are old? You should find someone to spend your life with."

For a couple of years after she died the thought of meeting someone of opening my battered heart again was anathema to me.  But in the end it was my love of travel that opened my heart and soul and brought me back to love.  I love to travel and thus set out to see some of the world.  Little did I realize that once I started this journey it would lead me to a new life and new happiness.

It has been 4 years since my wife died.  I never forget her and I am always thankful to have known her, had a son with her....learned valuable lessons from her.  I have been married 2 years now and there isn't a day when I am not thankful for the new love I have in my life.  It is the old love, but with wisdom and heartache that has tempered it and grown it into a strong and powerful tree.

In November we had our first child together.  It is strange to be starting a new family amidst the ashes of an older one.  But my life and the mixed family I have is truly like the phoenix, a terrible thing happened - but a new more robust and beautiful family was born out of that fire and adversity.  I will raise her to be a strong and powerful woman in a world where these things are sometimes not appreciated.  I will tell her stories of that first family so that she appreciates them, and her big brother will look after her and talk to her about the mother he had that she will never know.

I am writing this article and the new ones to follow to talk about many subjects.  But one overarching theme will be about renewal and navigating a world filled with triumph and joy, but also unbelievable heartache and desolation.  I hope you will journey with me.