Like a horde of zombies coming over the hill, the dead are returning. Holocaust museums now have holograms of survivors and Anne Frank chatbots to answer our questions. Tech-savvy adult children are building AI versions of their dead parents. Griefbots stretch conversations with the dead into the indefinite future. Digital seances can be […]
A geeky kid from St. Louis has poised himself to take over the world. A kid whose parents were married on this campus, and who grew up in my favorite St. Louis neighborhood, Hillcrest, where the gracious tree-lined Aberdeen and Arundel streets coast down to Forest Park. Sam Altman’s mom earned a medical degree, […]
In May and July I wrote about the decades-long legal fight by local environmental groups to protect the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. On Thursday, September 4, a federal judge at the US District Court in East St. Louis held a hearing on a temporary restraining order against the US Forest […]
All these “I asked AI and look what it said” stories are becoming tiresome—but they do help us gauge what is and is not possible. My latest foray is to ask Perplexity.ai, “What was the first time a human being worried publicly about the chance we would create a machine that would then […]
Several weeks ago I posted a piece on environmentalists who have long worked to protect the Shawnee National Forest, one of the most beautiful and diverse natural areas in the country. Sam Stearns, caretaker of a 500-acre Illinois Audubon Society property in southeastern Illinois, and founder of the Friends of Bell Smith […]
Toes wriggling in warm sand, grass cool underfoot, release from tight suffocating leather… I have always loved being barefoot. In the years when I bothered with pretty shoes, I slipped them off the minute I reached the office. I was nicknamed, no doubt with a few eye rolls, the barefoot contessa, and my […]
The voice comes from over my shoulder, cheery but somehow grating, exhorting me to buy some sort of frozen slurpy drink. It rattles on, touting slurpy wonders, as I try to fill my Mini in peace. Ads that were once trapped inside TVs or stuck to paper now fly through the air, aimed […]
When I think of national parks, I think of craggy iced mountains, hot geysers, and drippy, haunting everglade swamps in a slow canoe. Mike Bezemek, writer and outdoorsman, thinks of mysteries. Some natural—how did an Indiana sand dune swallow a little boy? Some historic, or mythic. And quite a few tinged with sinister […]
I just keep letting my technology fail. Our ancient TV is so blurred, I cannot read the plot summaries from the sofa, and I have to get up anyway, because the remote is not fully functional. My car has gone wonky, so that airbag warnings appear now and then (random, unwarranted) and block […]
After months of deft interrogation and feedback, a friend of mine has his Chat GPT AI trained like Rin Tin Tin, sensitive to his tone of voice, eager to help him think through thorny problems. He sends me one of their conversations—which I promptly misunderstand. Here is an excerpt. First, my friend—who works […]