Might do the same for you

In The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis, the latest episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra compresses by Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, into 55 minutes of pure inspiration. Not just because Demis is a hugely inspired and driven dude, but because a pile of ideas came to me while I was listening.

Big fact

YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly users.

Here's almost looking at you

Imagine scattered bits of coffee grounds, floating in space in front of your face, a few inches to a few feet away. Among them, blurred filaments float around, like zero-gravity worms. These are bits of debris inside my left eyeball, not far from my retina, exfoliated, I am told, by my cornea, which is slowly healing from the effects of cataract surgery that required a somewhat aggressive emulsification of the lens before a new replacement lens was installed.

An interesting thing: if I don't move my eyes, the debris slowly vanishes, erased by my brain as if by Photoshop's healing brush. Then they reappear when I move my eyes. Strange shit.

Observations

Explore these observatories. Read what they are about and how they are produced. One more way (within which are many more ways) that the world will never be the same. Bonus link in the same vein. Big HT to Jim Cowie of the Berkman Klein Center, the Internet History Initiative, and much else.

Unanswered

I still have questions about two Dorothy Parker quotes.

I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, titled Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures, which just came out. Here is the full report, which runs 376 pages. I am generously sourced on pages 11, 16, 142, and 358. There is a lot of great stuff in the report, which I highly recommend. For what it’s worth, here is the full text of what I sent them.

We are digital beings in a digital world. That’s the main thing. And this world is still very new.

We’ve operated in the natural world for as long as we’ve been a species, and we are experts at it. But the digital world is not only new, but sure to be with us for many years, decades, centuries, and millennia to come. And we still lack countless graces we take for granted in the natural world, such as privacy and independence from algorithmic manipulation.

Making full sense of this new world is very hard because we understand everything metaphorically, and natural world metaphors mask what’s really going on in the digital world. So, while we speak of “domains” with “locations” that we “build” and “own” (though we only rent them), and speak of “loading” and “transferring” “packets” of data in “up” and “down,” data are actually collections of ones and zeroes that are by design immaterial non-things that are instantaneously both here and elsewhere, even though “where” only makes full sense in the natural world. How will all this change and make whole new kinds of sense after a few more decades of digital existence?

Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. In the digital world, that transition is now happening almost instantly, and in many domains, because AI is endlessly useful.

Big AI does its best to ingest the totality of human expression in all digital forms, and then to make any and all of it available in the most useful ways it can. At the moment (for me, Noon in The Bahamas on February 2nd, 2026), it does this by bringing hunks of that expression back to us, on demand, in constructive conversational forms. Big AI is the world’s largest Magic 8 Ball, within which floats a polyhedron of answers with trillions of facets, each ready to help.

As with all tech, Big AI has its downsides. (Just ask Gregory Hinton or Gary Marcus.) But its usefulness verges on absolute, so we can’t stop using it, no matter how abyssal some credible prophesies may be.

But there is one saving upside. It’s the same one that saved us from HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s our humanity and independence. Specifically, in the form of personal AI.

We need personal AI for the same reason we need personal homes, shoes, and computers. We need it to know our natural and digital selves as fully as possible, and to participate with full agency in society, its economies, and its governance.

Think about all the data in our personal lives that is not in our full control, and could use some AI help: our schedules, our past and future work, our property, our finances, our obligations, our writing and correspondence, our photographs, our sound recordings, our videos, our travels, our countless engagements with other persons online and off, our many machines, you name it.

Truly personal AI—the kind you own and operate, rather than the kind that is just another suction cup on a corporate tentacle—is as hard to imagine in 2026 as personal computing was in 1976. But it is no less necessary and inevitable. When we have it, many of the questions that challenge us will have new and better answers. And new challenges.

Every form of life, from the microbial to the human, is fraught with challenges. Personal AI is necessary for us to meet and surmount our challenges in the digital world, and to answer all the questions posed to us in this very research exercise.

Amara’s Law says we overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long. I’ve been doing both all my life, and in all my answers to good questions asked by Pew over the years.

Perhaps the most glaring example of short-term overestimation was my response to a request by The Wall Street Journal in 2012 to compress my new book, The Intention Economy, to a single cover piece for the paper’s Marketplace section. My editor at the Journal suggested writing about how the intention economy would look ten years in the future, which is three years ago as I write this. The piece I wrote was titled (by the WSJ) “The Customer as a God.” In retrospect, I was wrong. The economy I described still hasn’t happened. We are not gods in the marketplace. But there are encouraging signs, and I’m still sure my prophecy will prove out. Meanwhile, the first half of Amara’s Law applies.

I’ve been young for so long that I now have the life expectancy of a puppy. So I don’t expect to see personal AI or the intention economy prove out in my lifetime. But I am sure both are worth working toward, so that’s what I do. And I advise anyone wishing to make the world better to look for their best work to manifest somewhere beyond their own life’s horizons.

MVP thoughts

I nominate Tyrese Haliburton for MVP. He hasn't played at all this year, because he's out with a hamstring injury he suffered when the Pacers (our Indiana home team) were neck-and-neck with the OKC Thunder in the final championship game. This season, without Haliburton, the Pacers are among the league's worst. Why? No Halliburton.

And we have a controlled study of sorts. Boston lost its star, Jayson Tatum, to the same Achilles injury that dropped Haliburton, and then the Celtics stayed close to the top of the league without Tatum and three valuable players who left last summer. So Haliburton was clearly a lot more valuable to his team than was Tatum. (Who is back and making Boston look even scarier.)

By the way, before the season, I picked the Knicks (my lifelong fave) to win the championship. They're kinda meh right now. So, in the same way I think Tyrese Halliburton is the most valuable player this year (just given the delta between his presence and absence), I say the same about Tom Thibodeau, the coach fired by the Knicks after the team's good run last year. (Hell, they beat the Celtics in the playoffs.) This year, the Knicks aren't as good, with essentially the same team and a different coach. So my vote for coach of the year goes to Thibs (who, by the way, has been NBA Coach of the Year twice. So we know he doesn't suck.)

Even more after we die

Population growth is slowing.

Where it's Sunday all week

Pew Research: A quarter of all radio stations in America are "faith based."

The what  behind the who

My DNA (according to 23andMe, which still exists) breakdown goes like this:

48.3% Swedish (mostly central and northwest Götaland)
5.2% Norwegian
17.1% Irish (mostly central and northern)
10.8% Belgian, Rhinelander and Southern Dutch (Hesse)
7.9% Scottish (mostly Glasgow City)
6.7% English (mostly Greater London)
2.6% Dutch and Northern German (Northwestern states)
0.7% Northern Italian and Maltese
0.4% Welsh
0.2% Egyptian and Southern Levantine

For what it's worth—
Mom was Swedish. Her parents (Sponberg, Oman) were from Swedish Immigrant families who came over in the late 1800s to homestead in Minnesota and North Dakota.
Pop's mom was Irish on her mother's side. Her parents (McLaughlin, Trainor) came over in the early 1800s. And she was German on her father's side (Rung, Englert). That couple emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine. Pop's father was of early American stock (Searls/Searles/Sarles, Bixby, Reed, Allen, Johnson)

Only one of the surnames I just mentioned is among my 1500+ DNA relatives listed by 23andMe. That was an Englert I wrote to (inside 23andMe who never wrote back.