" Modern Monetary Theory " is a great introduction to the subject, but I went away feeling that the treatment was rather vague and lacking in detail. In particular, the role of government debt was barely mentioned. MMT claims correctly that the government can create whatever money that makes sense within a broad range of budgetary constraints, but dismisses concern over the "deficit", merely remarking that "deficit = spending - taxes" makes no mathematical sense since it implies that taxes are raised to cover expenses. But why does the government borrow money it can just as well print? MMT claims that such debt can always be serviced by printing more money, but who receives such money? My hunch was that it went into bank profits and savings by the rich. This remains an un-answered question. To shed more light on this, I turned back to " Web of Debt ". While the MMT book focused on government debt, "Web" is mainly about bank debt - ...

I'm an avid reader, often getting through two or three books a week. This partly due to my enviable status as a retired armchair philosopher and partly due to a thirst for knowledge - asking impertinent questions - that goes back as far as I can remember. A persistent feeling I get with all this reading is: (a) there is so much to know and (b) almost every great idea I thought I had has already been written about by somebody smarter than me. At length. Today, I read a special kind of book, namely Melanie Mitchell's " Artificial Intelligence: A Guide For Thinking Humans ". Melanie's mentor was Douglas Hofstadter, someone we have both admired for a good part of 50 years. She "gets" Hofstader in a way few do. Inspired by Hofstader's alarm at the way the fiel d of AI is heading, she provides us a deep, knowledgeable and informative overview of how "AI" actually works and what still remains as its fundamental challenges. As it happens, h...

Pop fears about the AI apocalypse often feature the machine suddenly and inexplicably "coming to life." The "lights go on," and all of a sudden, the machine supposedly feels like us, has a consciousness like us and (therefore) starts to exhibit all of our worst attributes. In particular, it "wants" to live and suddenly "sees" us as a threat. All of this plays on thousands of years of confusion about what it is to be human in the first place. What is it to "feel alive"? What is consciousness? What is "self"? I think that thousands of years of superstition and religious "theology" shed no light at all on this question. If you are one of those who are looking for a detailed treatment of the "soul" as distinct from the body, I wish you good luck. As for me, I see no reason to invent a separate realm of reality to house my mind - even as I admit that it is difficult to say just exactly how a slab of meat be...

A quick note, loosely related to Damasio's ideas (Strange Order of Things). All cells in the body have the same DNA, but, during development, they are persuaded (by means not entirely clear) to suppress almost all of it and express only the DNA needed to create proteins appropriate to their assigned role. Thus, for example, a cell "decides" to become a skin cell rather than a neuron or stomach lining. The same thing happens with the individual embedded in the body of society. As a teenager, I imagined I had the "DNA" to become any one of the following: airline pilot soldier architect high school teacher drug dealer philosopher reporter author politician What I finally became (computer programmer) was a result of external pressures - the need of society at the time for computer programmers. This need was expressed by meeting my own needs (for money to support my new wife). In this way, I was convinced to suppress all my other possibilities and ...

I have been down this road before: inspired to write a book. The conclusions I came to before seem relevant. For one thing, any book is a lot of work - years of focused effort. At the end of it, the book may or may not be published. If it is self-published, it may attract a dozen readers who may or may not actually get all the way to the end or understand any of it. On the other hand, a podcast, e-book or well-designed blog can easily out-perform a self-published book in terms of reaching people (economics are irrelevant - authors get rich at about the same rate as lottery ticket buyers). Another consideration is that, to rise up to an appropriate level of quality, I can't do it on my own. An editor or collaborator is essential in the long run. Just sayin'

This is not just about technology. As one who has spent a full career in "Information Technology", I can testify that "IT" is directly or indirectly about language. New languages and new development environments come and go, but they all boil down to the interpretation of text . As Mitchell's book teaches us, even "deep learning" models that "recognize" faces ultimately depend on masses of text - even "languages" whose vocabulary is nothing but ones and zeros. This touches on a problem that has been recognized for thousands of years, most notably by Buddha and Lao Tsu (founders of Buddhism and Taoism respectively) and recently by Ludwig Wittgenstein, that "language", no matter how clever or deep, only stands for reality . It is about reality but it is not reality itself. You may say that this points to a fundamental problem that we may share with machines - "software" can never be more than a "descrip...