Month: June 2026

A little over 30 years ago the NY Subway system first introduced the MetroCard. Thus began the decade long process of phasing out subway tokens.

I remember that my aunt was adamant that she would not switch. She loved the subway tokens, and the fact that they were actual physical tokens. She could just look at them to know exactly how many rides she had bought.

But then somebody told her that if you buy 10 rides with your MetroCard, you get an 11th ride for free. Upon hearing that, she immediately switched to MetroCards, and never said another word about it.

I think there is an important lesson here about incentives and human motivation, which is worth a deeper look. More tomorrow.

There are days when you are multitasking. And then there are days when your multitasking is multitasking.

I was in an on-line meeting today with some fellow scientists. The topic got around to the future of science research in the United States.

One person on the call was pessimistic. He pointed out that our current government is extremely anti-science.

I replied that by early 2027, the mid-terms will have changed everything. Especially given that our current administration seems to be doing everything it can to hand over the coming congressional elections to the Democrats.

He then said “You are assuming that there will be mid-term elections.”

At that point somebody else on the call said “If there end up being no mid-term elections, we will have much bigger things to worry about in the U.S. than the state of science.”

“Other than that,” I added, summing up the general mood, “how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

There will come a point when we will all be able to recognize AI because it sounds so good. AI written text (and eventually the same text spoken by AI “actors”) will have wonderfully varied vocabulary, compelling verbal imagery, and a particular sort of sophistication in its analysis of the human condition.

And when that happens, we real humans will begin to cherish the unpolished quality of other real humans. We make grammatical mistakes, we get things wrong, we can be lazy in how we express ourselves. Yet we have crazy original ideas that are not merely a mirror held up to society at large.

We are peculiar, individual, slightly out of whack. We are the actual humans, the ones who feel. At some point people will find themselves craving that imperfection, those oddly imprecise yet heartfelt thoughts.

And then, perhaps in self-defense, the AI bots will start to catch on. They will begin to work at deliberately sounding less good, just so that they can appear more authentic.

But here is the good news: The AI bots will still have lousy unoriginal ideas, since all they can really do is reflect our collective culture back to us. So in the long run they will merely leave us empty and bored.

That, my friends, is a good thing.