“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

Political power arises from the barrel of a gun. Such, at any rate, is Mao Zedong’s most famous dictum. Accomplished poet, keen historian, and a master strategist, he was in this instance only half-right — for political power arises not only from the barrel of the gun, but from the capacity to make that gun, and to motivate those who would hold it. As a Marxist, he would have appreciated an additional observation: a gun is not only a gun. It is also a tool, a lens through which to observe the economy, society, and political implications of a moment in history. For those who care to look, today’s weapons are pointing to the future.

On the killing fields of Ukraine, an estimated 70% of casualties are now caused by drones. Tactics, techniques, and equipment are evolving at breakneck speed. At high and low altitude, cameras mounted on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide constant surveillance, channelling data to human operators and to other drones. In battle, and in the slow attritional grind of the stable front lines, UAVs are used to hunt and bomb the enemy — pursuing individual soldiers and recording footage of their final moments. Close-range combat is disappearing, and artillery is on the way out, too. 

The global water crisis has already begun, experts say, with the United Nations reporting that 2 billion people worldwide already lack access to clean drinking water and 3.6 billion without safe sanitation.

While the situation is expected to worsen, one variable has been cast alternately as savior and stressor for the world’s water supply: artificial intelligence.

One of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies is knocking on Canada’s door, potentially armed with an offer that — under normal circumstances — would be hard to refuse.

OpenAI is building a global network of data centres to store the massive amounts of information collected by its services, including ChatGPT — and Canada’s cheap energy could help with that.

The company believes AI and its associated infrastructure will be the base of future economic development, and it says it wants to help spread what it calls “democratic AI.” It recently launched “OpenAI for countries” to pounce on the opportunity.

We could power AI by putting our millions of unneeded foreign workers on treadmills.

In small factories across America, agile automatons are making everything from parts for AI supercomputers to the hulls of America’s future autonomous naval weapons.
Once a luxury reserved for big manufacturers, smaller, smarter, more flexible and less expensive “cobots”—collaborative robots—are bringing automation to every fabricator, no matter the size.

These robots aren’t just nice to have. The slow, fragile recovery of American goods production wouldn’t be possible without them.

The number of U.S. companies that make physical things reached a low point in 2014 and has grown since then. Yet they are trapped in a never-ending labor shortage as skilled workers age out, and young people fail to take their place.

Robots? Who needs em’ Canada will import unskilled 3rd World labour.

Despite union efforts to squelch this industry, Waymo and others keep proving that robots are better drivers than human beings

SACRAMENTO — After San Bruno police couldn’t figure out how to ticket a driverless taxicab that made an illegal U-turn, the Legislature passed a measure that would hold these companies responsible for the rare traffic violation. That is not only unobjectionable but signals good news. Last year, the Legislature had tried — but failed — to pass a law that would have essentially allowed localities to regulate these vehicles. That would have put the kibosh on their expansion in major metro areas if individual localities could limit or forbid them on local streets.

I currently volunteer a couple of days a week as a tutor for the STEM program at a local community college. I’ve also recently taken some HVAC courses.

As one of the older folks on campus, I ask questions and mostly listen, and I find students’ perspectives on AI fascinating, varied, and perhaps naive. A few admit to being active users, but the majority don’t seem to use it or even know much about it. Others are firmly against it, citing accuracy issues. Even the instructors often shake their heads, showing little confidence in it and viewing it more as a frustration they have to deal with because of students who don’t do their own work.

Since ChatGPT’s paradigm-shifting debut in November 2022, writers and thinkers of all stripes have touted the virtues and lamented the dangers of A.I. Such dangers include A.I.’s disastrous effect on education and on creativity, its potential to enable ordinary citizens to make weapons of mass destruction or to flood the world with deepfakes, its supposed tendency to reinforce stereotypes, its willingness to steal our intellectual property or its capacity to kill us off entirely.

Yet one danger of A.I. looms above all others — and we’re completely unprepared for it: the coming wave of A.I.-driven unemployment likely to hit within the next few years.

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-generated video maker called “Sora 2” has launched and it is throwing Hollywood and the entertainment industry into full-blown panic with “nightmare” predictions of the looming end of the showbiz industry as we know it.

My favorite new trend in the Sora app is putting Pikachu in every movie.

This is “Saving Private Pikachu” pic.twitter.com/pV8JYUb9SZ

— Justine Moore (@venturetwins) October 1, 2025

OMG.

I asked SORA 2 to create a 90s Toy Ad of Epstein's Island. pic.twitter.com/gv8JW22Ix9

— Solo (@Solopopsss) October 1, 2025

AI does not foresee the future; it extrapolates from the past. A thriving future demands original thought that responds to the needs of the present.

As a longtime book author, lecturer, and journalist, a great part of my time is spent on research. So, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence would seem to be a great boon for my writing.

I mostly use publicly available search and AI. But in thousands and thousands of searches, I have never received a positive right-of-center response first on a search. If looking for a specific product or named person or institution the regular search can usually find it. But finding a Right-oriented article often takes multiple searches going far down the list. Often there is nothing very far Right on the list at all. For AI searches, it is rare to find a serous conservative piece anywhere.

Fear spawns visions of Skynet or a Big Brother like surveillance society created “for our safety”.

In the short term at least we proles may be the most dangerous variable.

BENTONVILLE, Ark.—Walmart executives aren’t sugarcoating the message: Artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs and reshape its workforce.

Now the country’s largest private employer is making plans to confront that reality.

“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” Chief Executive Doug McMillon said this week in one of the most pointed assessments to date from a big-company CEO on AI’s likely impact on employment.

What was the true root cause of the anti-immigration riots and protests which rocked the United Kingdom last summer and have continued doing so intermittently ever since? The logical explanation could be that the native population are sick and tired of seeing their civilisation and their culture replaced by unassimilable outsiders, a feeling brought to a head by the murder of three innocent little girls in the town of Southport by a supposed ‘Welsh choirboy’ who later turned out to be a black Rwandan second-generation settler. Yet some British MPs claim to know better: the disturbances were actually caused by crude and ‘offensive’ pictures circulating on the Internet, without which nobody would ever have objected to such acts of senseless infanticide.

‘Small but mighty,’ is how Baroness Casey described Bedfordshire Police when she released her report on grooming gangs over the summer. She told MPs that most forces had failed to properly record child abuse. ‘A bloody disaster, frankly’. But Bedfordshire is different. They’re using artificial intelligence so police can spend more time hunting criminals.

‘I didn’t know about Louise Casey’s comments until you contacted us,’ says Trevor Rodenhurst, the chief constable of the county. That’s unsurprising. Rodenhurst is a busy man. We meet in his office on the outskirts of Bedford, under an official portrait of the King; behind his computer is his ceremonial tipstaff and photographs of his children.

Superintelligent AI could still kill us

Outside the AI company Anthropic’s offices in San Francisco, a guy is on a hunger strike. He’s been there two weeks. Another was doing something similar outside Google DeepMind in London, but never quite hit his straps: he started tweeting about it on the first day, which seems a grandiose way of saying “I skipped breakfast”, and then gave up after doctors told him it was dangerous — a surprise to those of us who rather thought that was the point.

Jokes aside, the intention is to stop the tech companies from building superintelligent AI, which they say “threatens to destroy life on Earth”. But here’s the thing: if these protesters believe that superintelligent AI has a high chance of killing everyone, then they’re not overreacting. If anything, they’re underreacting. Since I, too, think that there is a non-trivial chance of AI killing everyone, I should really be applauding them, not sneering.

TIRANA — Albania has become the first country in the world to have an AI minister — not a minister for AI, but a virtual minister made of pixels and code and powered by artificial intelligence.

Her name is Diella, meaning sunshine in Albanian, and she will be responsible for all public procurement, Prime Minister Edi Rama said Thursday.

WTF? h/t Mauser