June 25, 2026

Here We Go

I've been thinking about this writing space for a while now. I've been writing on Penned for a while, but that space feels more experimental, more stream of consciousness. Don't get me wrong -- I love that kind of writing -- but this space is going to be concrete, more feet on the ground. It's going to be about what's happening now, what I'm thinking about, where the world is going. More about humanity than thoughts and ideas. More about action, consequences, real stuff.

With that said, let's start with the state of the world.

Things are changing fast. My LinkedIn feed went from people selling marketing and SaaS tools, to people selling AI tools, in just a matter of months. My news feed went from "Trump blah blah blah" to "AI blah blah blah" in about the same amount of time.

In a lot of ways, I expected this. We've been talking about AI since ChatGPT came out in late 2022, and I figured at some point it would take over. In other ways though, it really surprised me. The biggest way is with agentic AI, which is far beyond what a chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT can do. It acts something like a project manager, running multiple AIs and threads for you. It has a memory, and it learns and adapts. It's much more like a real human sitting next to you, helping you work on a project.

It's basically all LinkedIn can talk about right now, which honestly says a lot. The smartest, most connected people in the world are all talking about AI, in a super excited way.

Guess who's not talking about this the same way? Pretty much everyone else. Like 80%+ of the population.

Again, not surprised. Just a few months ago, I was very bearish on AI. Apocalyptic even. It's a scary thing, and FUD reigns supreme. There's so much mystery about it, and most people haven't used it, let alone understood what it is and what it does.

And what it is, really, is just a really sophisticated pattern matching system. I really don't deign to call it intelligent at all, although it's very convincing in terms of how it talks to you. It really sounds like a very smart person.

But a person it is not. It is just software, just an algorithm, just a piece of code that happens to be very complex.

Having said all that, it is an absolutely MASSIVE change in technology and the impacts of it are far reaching. We will have no idea what impact it is having or it will have for a while.

So. What to do? Where to go? How to deal? So many questions, so few answers.

This space will attempt to answer that -- one idea at a time. We need to think about things like:

  • How are we, as a society, going to live with computers that know more than us, and appear to be smarter than us?
  • How are young people just graduating from high school or college going to learn and grow when AI can do everything a Junior (insert title here) can do?
  • What about art? Music? Humanities in general? AI can replicate this, but is that a good idea? How does something that doesn't have a soul create art? (And what is a soul, anyway!)
  • What happens when enough people reject the present and refuse to let it go into the future (Luddites v2?)
  • Other things that we have no idea about yet!

Interesting times call for interesting questions. I'd like to take some time in this space to slow down, talk about things, and maybe, just maybe, help ensure that our humanity remains intact.