Eleanor and Me.

There's a quotation attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt that, no matter who said it first, I've always liked.

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

For my two cents (a valid measure until the tump misministration decides to take all the dollars and feed the pennies to the poor) we could easily re-write Roosevelt's words for today.

Allow me:

The spillage of digital ink over AI is among the most staggering onslaughts I've witnessed in my almost-68 years. It's like an avalanche wrapped inside an earthquake covered in a tsunami.

You'd think, given the hype we've heard, the intelligence we're supposed to be harnessing, the breakthroughs and advances that are just about to cascade through every aspect of life on earth--and into the outer reaches of the solar system, you'd think we'd all be able to cite chapter and verse of all the great things that have happened or are on the cusp of happening.

Like even a good coffee Heath bar ice cream from a company that isn't anti-Israel. Oh, and won't make me fatter.

But I can't name one.

I take that back. 

Trying to get help through a bot has decreased my "time-to-scream" by 48% and my personal NPS score by about 1900%.

All I really see from AI is that somebody made another crappy commercial for 29-cents that's been seen only on LinkedIn, had no revenue consequences and none of us can even remember the brand it was for. I'm not feeling that the inevitable "parachuting gorilla" commercials are worth all the mucky-bushwa we've had to wave through.

I also can't help but be reminded that not too many hours ago

we were hearing the same cacophony of blather about bored apes and NFTs and fake money. And google glasses. And a thousand other things that have had the salutary effect of a bucket of warm spit.

We're all gonna be rich!

The number of people, panels and pomposticators who promulgate and proclaim that "this will change everything," and "everything else is dead" is in itself practically deadening. And 99.79-percent of these non-entities pass like a banner ad in the dark of dumbness.

Two ships passing in the night. (Artists rendering.)

In 1916, just over 100 years ago in the country formerly known as amerrykaka, the poliovirus infected more than 27,000 Americans and killed more than 7,000 people. This in a nation of 100-million, not today's 340-million.

About 40 years later, say 1955, Drs. Sabin and Salk raced to bring the polio vaccine to the world. When they did, they fundamentally changed life on earth. 

Their discoveries and their science made a provable, empirical, non-adjectival difference in the (longer) lives of billions of people. They didn't have to fake-name their potions "super-intelligent," or "claude," or "anthropic," or any other concoction to re-label a stock manipulation to package financial ponzi-ing and legerdemain as progress.

They didn't have to have their product pretend it was a person and use human pronouns. Their product didn't presume to address you by your first name as if they're a friend, not a surveillance bot looking to steal your soul, the better to sell you crap.

They had actual data that showed the difference they were making. And none of the difference they were making involved an unhelpful, inscrutable chatbot, another shitty commercial and answers praising nazism excused as an purportedly benign ha-ha-hallucination.

Salk and Sabin and real advancers of life on earth often employ this increasingly rare side-dish. I call it "real data." (Not we got 458,570,485,948,472,409 trillion earned views and created a verb out of Q-tips. 'Dude, are you q-tippin'?' ie. we became part of culture. Which to my mind is like becoming part of a Superfund site.)

In fact, imagine if the vaccine "hallucinated." "Sure it eradicated polio, but people grew a second head." Heroes don't hallucinate. And real progress is not based on press-releases and things that will happen and spurious predictions by the unaccountable class who shoulder no consequences for their lies.

Last week, GeorgeCo's 2025 revenue officially outstripped that of WPP, according to Form 10K which this particular Delaware Company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

All of the above might be biting the well-manicured hands that feed me, because much of GeorgeCo., LLC's revenue come from various technology companies who are working on various AI advances. Some of them could read all this and decide that I am a traitor in their midsts, a veritable eggs benedict arnold. 

The truth is, I tell them and wrestle with them, is no one really cares about AI. They care about what AI actually does. That's what we should be talking about. Not the purported "gold in them thar hills," but actual gold you've sluiced out of a mountain, taken to the assay office and converted into cash (not crypto.)

I'm tired of small minds dominating large news feeds. 

I'm tired of small minds issuing blanket statements with no accountability or follow-up or scrutiny.

I'm tired of small minds promising big things.

How about big minds making big progress small-step by small- step by small-step--the hard-work way, not the 'next-round-of-funding' way.

Here's one Eleanor Roosevelt didn't say but could have.

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BTW, if you think of progress as an inevitable march toward the better, please consider this:

Way back 2,500 years ago or so, the Greeks discovered that building curved fortifications was smarter than building forts with right angles. Spears, javelins and the ballista from catapults would do less damage to rounded walls than flat walls. A missile that hits obliquely and from an angle is not as powerful as a dead-on hit.

The Greeks conveyed that information to the Romans. And for about 1,000 years, curved fortresses were all the rage throughout the Roman world. This got carried over to a lot of the Medieval world, too. Look at the 13^th Century Cathedral Basilica of Saint Cecilia in Albi, France and you get the general idea.

Except, people decided to stop building things that way. They forgot what the Greeks had discovered and the Romans had executed.

This chateau in Angers, France was built in the 13th Century"

This Palais in Avignon, one-hundred years later.

As Holding Company potentates call 58-percent drops in revenue "negative growth," you might call this change in design "backward progress."

There was no material reason for this architectural shift.

But it became the style.

The old way, rounded walls, though superior, was rejected because because. And because. And also, because.

I fear this is happening today globally.

We spend time talking about the miracle of AI.

When as a species we've virtually forgotten the miracles that come from actual thinking, laughter, and hard work.