AI Software – education and deconstruction.com

The Lords of Strategy

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “The Lords of Strategy, The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World” by Walter Kiechel III, published in 2010. This wordy, redundant volume showed how: times have changed; capitalism has become leaner and meaner; and in one way, American society has stayed the same since the Era after WWII.

In the 1950’s, the major reasons American companies began to acquire other companies included:

Dividends paid by public companies were highly taxed, so instead of paying dividends to shareholders, a growing company that was sitting on a pile of cash would reinvest it by acquiring other companies.
There were antitrust laws prohibiting companies from acquiring others in their same industry, so the companies bought others in industries unrelated to their core competencies, or snapped up companies in their supply chain.

By the end of the 1960’s, companies were going bust because, blinded by greed and ego, the stupid corporate executives had no experience in industries unrelated to their own.

In the early 1970’s, management-consultants began to counsel their clients (who mostly manufactured physical products) on strategy. Also, Boston Consulting Group began to advise their consumer-goods clients to engage in deficit financing to grow their businesses. Corporate executives began to adopt an even more greedy mentality. Maximizing shareholder value became their main goal.

The author listed four game-changers of recent decades:

deregulation;
new technologies including computers, the internet, the maximization of computing power and simultaneous minimization of costs in connection therewith;
the way target-companies wised up after the hostile takeover-mania of the 1980’s; and
globalization.

As America has switched to a service-oriented economy in the last fifty years or so, the consultants have been forced to pivot to advise clients on human-resources, public-relations and technology. In the early 1980’s, a Harvard Business School professor did a study of senior executives at major U.S. corporations, and found that their game-changing stemmed not from bossing people around or speechifying, but rather, from infinite interactions with their social networks whose relationships they’d been developing over the course of years.

The author commented that when internet use was becoming widespread, there was a brief flirtation with socialistic entities arising from the open-source movement, including but not limited to: the Linux operating system, wikis, BitTorrent, and Napster. But the inclination of the American powers-that-be, to monetize everything, has largely put the kibosh on those.

Generation X and the Millennials have picked up the cudgel of capitalism and it remains to be seen how Gen Z is going to make a living. Having evolved rapidly in the last thirty years, the internet is currently plagued by creative destruction. But not to worry. There will be jobs in national healthcare, geriatrics, building charging-stations for hybrid vehicles, and harnessing renewable energy. Lying politicians (a redundant phrase) will say they “created” those jobs. Don’t vote for those politicians.

On the other hand, it’s deja vu all over again in American society. Nowadays, AI software is replacing consultants because: American management-consultants were mostly elitist, sexist, racist alpha-males in the “old boy network,” and AI software is created mostly by elitist, sexist, racist greedy alpha-males, still in the “old boy network” (but that network is slowly shrinking).

And the stereotypes about the consultants (and now AI software creators) are still true: They’re like seagulls– they fly in, leave a mess, and fly out; they show their clients a line graph that looks like a hockey-stick– that represents how their services will do financial miracles for the clients’ business, but the line graph has no correlation with reality.

Read the book to learn the details.

Breakneck

WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Breakneck, China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang, published in 2025. In this hodgepodge of a volume whose language is awkward in spots, the author made vast generalizations in comparing China to the United States, sometimes oversimplifying things.

The author contended that China’s economy has grown in leaps and bounds economically in the last few decades because its government has thrown vast resources into engineering.

The author argued that the United States is in political and economic decline: due to its obstructionist legal system, and for failing to stop the offshoring of its factories to lower-cost facilities in China.

Capitalism involves profit-seeking. Communism involves a government that steals the economic surplus of the profit-seekers. Socialism is a collective, non-profit-seeking effort to provide essential services that fulfill basic human needs such as food and shelter. Some believe that the government is obligated to provide these essential services to the people.

Historically, business start-ups in the capitalist economic system have been forced to rely on mostly private funding. In the United States, when a business becomes monster-sized and politically entrenched, it gets government assistance in terms of tax breaks and legislative favoritism. The United States government sometimes makes taxpayers pay for a corporate bailout after executives have bankrupted their employer.

China’s Communist system grants a revolving credit facility to all businesses that start to show profitability, taking a financial interest in them. Some businesses still go bankrupt later on, due to a proliferation of fierce competitors engaged in price wars, because they jump into making products unrelated to their core competencies. Those failed companies don’t get bailed out. There is creative destruction.

Economics 101 says a nation needs to have a healthy, well-educated workforce to stay in good economic shape. Both China and the United States sabotage themselves in this regard in different ways.

China has become capitalistic of late– rewarding entrepreneurs who build hospitals rather than their staffs who dispense their medical expertise, resulting in engineers with robust financial health, and patients with poor physical health.

In the United States, whenever the government tries to be socialistic– say, by passing laws that financially benefit consumers who are patients, students or tenants– the medical providers, schools and landlords whose bottom lines are adversely affected, simply pass the extra costs onto those consumers by raising prices!

The bright spot in America’s selling out its manufacturing is: worldwide economic incestuousness has given rise to co-dependence, and thus forced cooperation among rivalrous nations. All the countries heavily involved on the world stage must sit down at the bargaining table now, or their own people will face severe economic hardships.

Of course, there have been world leaders in the recent past whose heartlessness sparked peasant revolts. The current leaders know that, and in order to stay in power, they keep their populations just fat and happy enough, amid their saber-rattling at their (phony) enemies.

The author commented that Boeing lost its way. It used to have a knowledge base– had a reputation for institutional memory– learning from mistakes. Its products inevitably would improve because it paid attention to process. Now China is the country obsessed with process rather than product.

A stupid employer has workers meet to discuss a recently failed project, but whose list of suggestions of how to do better in the future is shoved in a drawer, never to be seen again. A wise employer will add the list to its knowledge-base so no one has to reinvent the wheel. China currently has the latter bent.

Other factors at play in the current situation include: China has one-Party rule while America’s two political parties are in a constant tug-of-war over how to deal with its fragmented and complex economic issues. True, America’s production of consumer goods has drastically declined in recent decades, while all kinds of services now drive its economy. Its attorneys are obstructionist; however, the glacial pace of construction of infrastructure is also due to the politicians’ goal to stay in power.

No voters want politicians to raise taxes to pay for infrastructure. So the politicians don’t raise taxes; so, no infrastructure. Besides, ground-breaking ceremonies are long forgotten at re-election time. Politicians know that campaigns are more likely to succeed through mudslinging rather than through (usually empty) bragging about accomplishments.

The author asks a question for the ages: “Should it [the United States] really go all in on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other things that the Communist Party mocks as fictitious economy?”

Read the book to learn about additional issues facing China and America, their histories, and about their quest to dominate the world while they have been reversing their roles of late, politically and economically.

One last telling quote: “His reign was characterized by regulatory forbearance, perhaps because he was a personal beneficiary of the sector’s growth.” – written about Lu Wei, director of the Cyberspace Administration in China, the chief internet regulator prior to 2018. Sounds familiar.

ENDNOTE: The author failed to mention that, prior to this writing, the United States had illegal immigrants making significant contributions to its GDP, while China’s sex industry makes significant contributions to its GDP. Sexual issues in China are linked to its “underground” economy, while sexual issues in the United States are a whole different ball of wax.

Speaking of such issues in the United States, two assumptions apply in connection with unwanted sexual advances.

The crimes were more evil when the victims were under eighteen years of age.
If the alleged perpetrator was punished through jail time, job loss or fining, he was guilty.

That is not to say the alleged perpetrator wasn’t guilty if he wasn’t punished, but mere accusations are less conclusive indicators of guilt than actual punishment. And yes, lack of punishment can also indicate how powerful the alleged perpetrator was when the allegations surfaced.

Here’s an alphabetical list of the most famous American alleged perpetrators of unwanted sexual advances:

Roger Ailes, Woody Allen, Mario Batali, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., John Conyers, Jr., P. Diddy, Jeffrey Epstein, Mark Foley, Al Franken, Matt Gaetz, Dennis Hastert, Michael Jackson, Brett Kavanaugh, R. Kelly, Matt Lauer, Roy Moore, Larry Nassar, Billy O’Reilly, Bob Packwood, Kevin Spacey, Jerry Sandusky, Clarence Thomas, Strom Thurmond, John Tower, Donald Trump, George Tyndall, Mike Tyson, Anthony Weiner, Harvey Weinstein.

In the United States, the causes of sex crimes are of course, complex and fraught with political, cultural and social hysteria.

The ongoing hysteria is more lucrative than prevention. Sex crimes create business for: lawyers, therapists, the media (including social media), the medical industry, the justice system, law enforcement, and politicians. Also, who is still largely in charge of these parties? And what is the gender of all of the alleged perpetrators listed above? Arguably, preventing sex crimes threatens America’s paternalistic society.

The Optimist

The Book of the Week is “The Optimist, Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” by Keach Hagey, published in 2025.

The Baby Boomers generation of the 1960’s had its Timothy Leary, who was a big advocate of dropping out of school, work and society in general. The goal was to experiment with LSD and other drugs with the hope of becoming more creative.

From the 1990’s into the single-digit 2000’s, computer programmers and Web developers chose to engage in tech startups as their drug. In 2011, Peter Thiel, born in 1967– just around the time Leary’s popularity was waning– also encouraged students to drop out, but awarded them grant money with the hope they would manage successful businesses.

Sam Altman, one such student, was typical for his time and place. Born in 1985, Altman grew up in the Chicago and Saint Louis areas. His philosophy was “Go big or go home.” He never heard the word “impossible.” Beginning in summer 2005, a Boston-area technology consultant called Y Combinator helped startups get started with funding and mentoring. Altman was accepted to this program.

Altman’s first venture was a social-media application eventually called Loopt. The major drawback of its business model was inefficiency. Another was privacy concerns. Years later, the concept was joked about by comedian Aziz Ansari — meeting up with his friends (if they happened to be nearby) by seeing their locations on their electronic devices.

Back in 2006, Loopt had to negotiate separate contracts with multiple, competing cell phone companies across the country. Big Tech had yet to introduce the smart phone, on which the internet would be visible worldwide on one website that Loopt could have had, regardless of which phone service its tech-savvy, young customers subscribed to.

Altman’s peripheral hobby consisted of working to achieve nuclear fusion (not to be confused with the radioactive– carcinogenic!– fission) as a “clean” energy source. Propagandists repeatedly use certain words, such as “clean” in an attempt to reassure people that certain products will do them no harm. The following is just a small sample of other overused, euphemistic words:

free (nothing is ever free; someone is always paying for, say, government programs; usually taxpayers);
safe (nothing is ever 100% safe; instead, say “low-risk” or “high risk” but never safe);
cheaper (everything is expensive; instead, say “less expensive”).

Anyway, fusion is one of those problems that will be solved when enough resources are thrown at it. But even when it gets solved, it is possible such an endeavor isn’t worth doing in the long run, like when chemist Glenn Seaborg proved that alchemy could create gold from bismuth.

At any rate, the author went on a tangent naming the Silicon Valley men who joined the Extropian community, thinking deep thoughts on the mysteries of the universe.

Simply put, AI software applications can replace any kinds of human activities that have mathematics behind them: all games of 100% skill such as chess, some vehicle-operating skills, robotics, medicine, marketing of consumer products, etc. But, AI will never replace, in a completely unbiased way, activities with linguistic-oriented aspects to them: music and art.

Creative works need to be translated into words for AI software to work on them, and the translators (with all their ethnic, religious, cultural, social and political biases) control their interpretation. Besides, in order to take the actions that allegedly improve humans’ lives, AI software must become spyware on everything users do.

The propaganda of American science fiction in popular culture, is no longer:

“Commies are going to infiltrate the world so we must kill them!”

It has become:

“AI is going to infiltrate the world so we must learn to control it via a few thousand alpha males’ brain power, financial power and political power!”

The arrogance is matched only by the title sequence of the TV show, The Outer Limits: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control…”

For decades, the world has seen the ways the United Nations has monitored, and tried to stem conflicts, among diverse peoples. AI presents a similar challenge, as it can globally manipulate human thought and systems.

It is unclear whether the world is ready to sit down at the bargaining table to discuss international cooperation on the future of AI. In the United States, in recent years, waves of propaganda have screamed about:

privacy concerns;
of various kinds of online crime; and
of how psychologically damaging all-day, every-day, staring at, working, playing and communicating through, an electronic toy really is.

The prolonged, forced confinement prompted by the COVID lockdown got anti-social (solitary) behavior out of the country’s system. Influenced by more of the above propaganda, in the future, Americans might be ready to spend less time on their toys, and more time on face-to-face activities, outside.

Read the book to learn about Altman’s career, and the common problems that plague tech startups in the context of the brave new world of AI: bureaucratic shenanigans, hypocrisy, secrecy, conflicts, competition, and regulation (or lack thereof). Hint: It is yet one more worldwide technology project consisting of redistribution of wealth among the wealthy, run by alpha males.

ENDNOTE: Grammar sticklers would take issue with the less than perfect writing in this book. The author made errors commonly seen in books published in recent years in America. She didn’t know what “a.m.” and “p.m.” stood for, and awkwardly put “being” in the middle of sentences, among other minor errors.

No Better Time

The Book of the Week is “No Better Time– The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet” by Molly Knight Raskin, published in 2013. This short, slightly sloppily edited volume whose title exaggerates, described the brief life of a dot-com startup genius.

Danny Lewin was born in May 1970 in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. His family moved to Israel when he was fourteen. He enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, and then he moved back to the United States to attend school at MIT.

While in school, with a friend, Lewin helped develop a technological innovation within the big-picture innovation of the whole Internet. Initially, his dot-com business, named Akamai Technologies, provided the service of preventing of the crashing of the browser when: a video went viral or a website got overwhelmed with traffic, or a denial-of-service attack was launched against a website. Through algorithms, obviously, eventually, computer scientists discovered the required optimal number of servers communicating among themselves to maximize computing power to minimize latency and downtime.

In the second half of the 1990’s, worldwide usage of the Internet, a decentralized network of potentially infinite networks, was in its infancy. This meant, for ordinary users, downloading of data was extremely slow. Impatience was growing in leaps and bounds as time-saving devices (like office software) were, too; resulting in “irrational exuberance” over securities sold to the public that funded dot-com startups. The likely reason Akamai still exists today while so many other tech startups failed, is that there was an actual, valuable service behind it!

By spring 2000, after receiving ginormous funding from its IPO, Akamai’s customers’ servers collectively numbered more than 2,750 in more than one hundred fifty networks in forty-five nations. At the book’s writing, Akamai controlled between fifteen and thirty percent of the world’s Internet traffic.

Read the book to learn much more about Lewin, the people who helped him, and his startup.

the signal and the noise (sic)

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The Book of the Week is “the signal and the noise (sic)” by nate silver (sic), published in 2012. In this volume, the author described in redundant and wordy terms, why human beings are so fallible in their predictions and forecasts (and explained the difference between the two). Basically, humans get distracted by noise, so they don’t zero in on the right signals in order to tell the future correctly.

Ironically, the author used less-than-ideal language in describing the epic failings of ratings-agencies in the 2008 financial crash. He should have pointed out that they could have mitigated, just a little, their false advertising by using better risk-assessment wording.

Silver wrote, “… trillions of dollars in investments that were rated as being almost completely safe instead turned out to be almost completely unsafe.” (Never mind the awkwardness of the word “being” in the middle of the sentence, or “it” in the middle of a sentence– so many recently published books have that kind of bad writing.) The ratings agencies should describe investments as “low-risk” or “high-risk” and use the adverbs “extremely” or “very” or “somewhat” or “slightly” as applicable, but never use the word safe.

Anyway, another irony was that the author appeared to be distracted by vast generalizations that were just noise– as cherry-picked data tend to be. He provided all sorts of line graphs and scads of data on housing bubbles. He cited a study on market prices of the “American home” completed by Robert Schiller and Karl Case that created an index based on a century’s worth of data– the years between 1896 and 1996, inclusive.

The research indicated that an inflation-adjusted home bought for $10,000 in 1896 would be worth $10,600 in 1996. Is that noise or what? Silver didn’t specify what “American home” meant. Anyhow, who would buy a home in 1896, and sell it in 1996?

Silver did admit that predictions and forecasts were less inaccurate when qualitative data supplemented statistical models. Worded facts are considerations that add real-world conditions because numbers never tell the full story in complex situations, which are dynamic.

Incidentally, at the book’s writing, he had had success in making predictions in professional baseball because: 1) an excessive amount of data on it had been collected, and 2) he claimed its rules didn’t change. The latter is not true anymore. And besides, performance-enhancing drugs, not to mention new stadiums– among other factors– have put new noise and signals in baseball statistics.

The author pointed out that more data actually made for worse accuracy in predictions in many areas of life. Technology in the form of software that can process scads and scads of data in record time has improved humans’ ability to specifically forecast severe weather, but not earthquakes. As an aside– in any area that involves linguistics, technology is overrated. A chatbot cannot comprehend complex concepts and nuanced language (like sarcasm, irony and idioms). American English is especially fraught with words that have multiple meanings, so it is highly contextual.

There are still financial crashes, gamblers who lose big-time, and “experts” who can’t modify conditions to improve the economy with certainty. Incidentally, as is well known, more and more, daily life in America has been infiltrated by politics.

Read the book to learn about futuristic pronouncements of: television pundits, professional-sports commentators and gamblers, seismologists, chess software, national-security advisers, poker players, and many others.

The New Cool

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “The New Cool, A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts” by Neal Bascomb, published in 2011.

In the single-digit 2000’s, Amir Abo-Shaeer taught robotics in a “STEM” (four subjects that would help the United States remain economically dominant in the world: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) program at Dos Pueblos high school in Goleta, California (a western suburb of Santa Barbara). If he was able to raise $3 million, he would receive matching funds from the state of California to start to build STEM academies all over the state. Dean Kamen’s goal was to have a robotics team in every school in the country.

Kamen was gravely concerned that the United States education system was falling woefully behind that of other countries. He might best be remembered as the inventor of the Segway, but at the dawn of the 1990’s, he also began to change the world in a much more impactful way.

Kamen and Woodie Flowers’ goal was to spark students’ interest in STEM. They wanted to give young people hands-on, real-world skills, not just convey knowledge. In 1992, they co-founded an annual program of STEM competitions for American students called FIRST. About a decade into the program, there were hundreds of thousands of students of different age groups competing in different events.

Elementary schoolers built structures out of LEGO. Each high school team was required to build a robot, and then in the competition, form alliances with other teams in playing a complicated physical game that differed every year, against another alliance.

In January 2009, the aforementioned Shaeer and his robotics team (consisting of high school seniors he taught) attended the briefing that Kamen, Flowers and NASA simulcast– of the terms and conditions of the robotics competitions to take place in the next three months. If their team emerged ultimate winners, they could win scholarships and might be more motivated to pursue a STEM career.

Read the book to learn of Shaeer’s students’ extremely hard work in preparing their contest entry (the robot), and the suspenseful story of how the team performed with its alliances in its very emotionally charged matches against other alliances, and whether Shaeer got the funding for his schools.

Life after [sic] Google

The Book of the Week is “Life after [sic] Google, The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy” by George Gilder, published in 2018.

The author explained that Google’s business model is being eclipsed by blockchain technology. Google offers many services for free, and derives revenue from advertising. The author neglected to mention that one sign that Google is on the wane, is that, in 2013 it stopped updating its PageRank data– a measurement of the extent to which each website on the World Wide Web is networked to other websites.

A bunch of tech-industry greats are improving blockchain technology in the form of various competing cryptocurrencies, which are a financial instrument whose value fluctuates (See this blog’s post, Digital Gold). Blockchain technology’s advantages include efficiency, scalability, improving cybersecurity, and the fact that it is virtual.

Google data centers (comprised of physical servers) derive their power from the Columbia river. Worldwide demand for additional power is growing every day. According to the author, another possible power source for data centers is atomic. He wrote, “China plans to build as many as forty new-fangled nuclear plants, the next wave of data centers may well be in Shenzhen.” Considering that parts of China are in an earthquake zone (!), China might not want to end up like Japan. However, politically, it does have a sociopathic disregard for the health and safety of its citizens.

Anyhow, cryptocurrencies’ major cybersecurity feature is that they are comprised of a decentralized peer-to-peer network so they don’t have a central point of failure. Nevertheless, a major rival of Bitcoin– Ethereum– was hacked for a $150 million loss on one of its nodes. Google has all its data in one place, so theft of data and cyber-attacks are much more efficiently accomplished.

One other financial entity that uses blockchain technology is a hedge fund of the company called Renaissance Technologies. Its software mines terabytes (inconceivably large) quantities of data in order to find minute, even obscure correlations between (at times unrelated) variables that allows it to buy and sell securities at a profit. For more than thirty years, it was delivering inconceivably large returns. Until, starting in 2020, it didn’t. The author argued that since the software isn’t generating new knowledge for the world, it is not generating real wealth for society. Economically, that is bad.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional information about the features of virtual reality versus artificial intelligence in connection with Google and other technological marvels.