Techno-politics

Walking along the railroad tracks up to the main building at Birkenau was chilling. I was about to enter the largest of the 40 Nazi extermination camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex, and its reputation preceded it. Continue Reading →

CES® 2026 opens in nine days, and for the thirteenth year, the Shelly Palmer Innovation Series Breakfast will bring together C-suite executives from the world's most influential media, marketing, and technology companies. Continue Reading →

The controversy over Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated "actor," has exposed something deeper than union postures and moral panic. It forces us to reexamine what acting is, what AI does, and why the usual arguments miss the point entirely. While reading this I'm going to ask you to keep an open mind. I know this will not be a popular interpretation of this issue, but musicians lived this experience during the transition from acoustic to electronic musical instruments, the advent of the digital synthesizer and again at the advent of sampling keyboards. Evolution is an amoral process. We must adapt. Let's explore. Continue Reading →

According to multiple reports, SpamGPT is an underground tool being sold on dark-web forums as a turnkey “spam-as-a-service” platform. Think Mailchimp for criminals. Instead of helping brands send newsletters, it’s designed to help attackers launch large-scale phishing campaigns. Continue Reading →

The debate over AI and its role in creative industries often centers on one question: Can AI ever be as creative as humans? While it’s tempting to philosophize about inspiration and ingenuity, this line of inquiry misses a crucial point: If the audience can’t tell the difference between AI-generated and human-generated content, or if they don’t care, for all practical purposes, there is no difference. Continue Reading →

Singapore-based Sapient Intelligence just open-sourced their Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), and the AI community is buzzing about a 27-million-parameter model that beats Claude, OpenAI's o3-mini, and DeepSeek R1 on certain reasoning benchmarks. The headlines scream breakthrough. The reality demands nuance. Continue Reading →

The question arrives with clockwork predictability after every keynote I deliver: "If AI is eliminating entry-level positions, how do we develop tomorrow's senior executives?" Parents at the Newhouse school ask the same question with barely concealed panic. Fortune 500 CEOs frame it more diplomatically, but everyone sees the trend, the traditional corporate ladder is quickly losing its bottom rungs? Continue Reading →

On September 30, 2025, AOL will finally turn off dial-up internet service. The AOL Dialer and AOL Shield Browser will go dark the same day. For millions of Americans, that distinctive screech of a modem handshake was the sound of the future arriving. Now the last of the original on-ramps is closing, and the highway it led to is unrecognizable. Continue Reading →

In popular lore, the “street fighter” – the dropout entrepreneur, the scrappy immigrant, the self-taught visionary – gets romanticized for beating the odds through sheer force of will, despite lacking money, power, or formal training. Until now, though, the mantra has been clear: ideas are worthless; execution is everything. That was then. Continue Reading →

Instead of buying or earning your way to the top of a SERP, you are now going to do everything you can to help a reasoning engine respond to a prompt with a glowing endorsement of your product and, in a perfect world, a link or a path to a direct transaction. How will you get an "intelligence decoupled from consciousness" to favor your brand? Let's explore. Continue Reading →