Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Pillars under the pyramids, megaliths at 12-16,000 year old Göbekli Tepe, ancient Egyptian granite vases that are so precise, modern equipment would still make them challenging to reproduce… it seems that every time we look a little further into the history of humanity we uncover yet another unexplained and unexpected mystery. There is so much more we don’t know about the origins of humanity.
And with the mystery comes some pretty far-fetched speculation. From giants to aliens to portals, imaginations run wild. I find it both exciting and frustrating. There are so many amazing new scientific discoveries, and then there are ideas that masquerade as insightful discoveries while being nothing more than crazy speculations based on extrapolations and circumstance.
It gets tiring listening to people share their wild, unsupported claims when there is so much intrigue with the actual facts. Let’s marvel at what we know. And sure, even speculate as wild as you want. But we don’t need to invent proof of aliens or use the size of sculptures and heavy rocks to make claims about giants. There’s already enough to marvel at.
Just spent a week at my sister’s house visiting her family and my mom. I managed to get 4 nice hilly walks in, and a casual bike ride, but by far this was the longest I’ve gone without really working out in years. I’ll count the walks as exercise days, but now I’m home and about to hit the treadmill and weights for a nighttime workout session.
Usually I find ways to do way more exercise on holidays. I did do some pushups and leg dips one day, but if I’m honest, I had the time to do that or other body weight workouts on more of the days than I did… I just didn’t do it.
This isn’t me beating myself up for taking most of the week off. Rather it’s recognition that it can be easy to let things slide if I don’t pay attention. At home, my routines make things easy. I wake up, I get a workout done. It’s that simple. On holidays I need to either: build in a routine or make a conscious effort to workout. Or if it’s a week or less, give myself permission to have an easy week.
That said, I’m back home and my basement gym is calling me.
I had a bout of food poisoning that put me out of commission for a good day and a half. While I am not yet 100%, I can say that other than my tummy feeling a bit off, I am not feeling any other effects. I wrote yesterday that I was in recovery mode, I realize that I was also in a bit of a reset.
I was getting swallowed up in news about the Canadian election and the goings on of US politics as well. I was swept up in the news and for me that’s never good. In the last 48 hours I just didn’t have the mental capacity to care, and so I haven’t been paying attention.
Refreshing.
I need to remember to take these small breaks, small resets, where I let the crazy news headlines of the day slip by without putting mental energy into them. I don’t need to be dismissive, just less sensitized to things beyond my control. Because when I’m paying attention, I get deep in because even my social media algorithms get pulled towards news and so even my mental breaks end up being more of the same information.
Reset completed, I’m going to try to stay away a little longer… there will be enough craziness happening next week that I can let this week’s news go for a little while longer.
Well, despite eating only things that many other people ate for takeout yesterday, I’m the one that got hit with food poisoning. I’m usually the one with be iron stomach. I didn’t get sick once in my 2 years living in China, and I was the bravest of everyone when it came to eating street food.
I broke my streak of not throwing up in over 25 years, not even when our whole family got the Norwalk Flu many years ago. I guess that’s a pretty good streak and it was indeed my turn.
Unfortunately tonight is the night that my niece is cooking for the family. She’s an incredible cook and I’ve been looking forward to this meal for days… and now I’ll barely be able to eat. Poor me! Again, it was my turn. I’m glad I was the only one that got hit, and hopefully I’ll be back at 100% tomorrow.
Creating a subversive anti-ad campaign against Tesla is an absolutely brilliant way to protest.
Vandalizing cars and dealerships is an embarrassment to the civil society we should be living in.
Holding a protest at a rally, and speaking out against someone you disagree with is the foundation of an open and free society. Shouting and throwing things at a speaker is immature and inappropriate behavior. Even if the person is spewing hate… in which case they should be dealt with legally, not with vigilante violence.
We need a society that allows disagreement. We need to be civil about how we protest. Because there is no civil society where violence and damaging property works one-way… only the way upset people think it should. Societies that tolerate inappropriate protest are inviting responses that are less and less civil. And nobody wins.
My post yesterday, ‘Immediate Emergence – Are we ready for this?’ I said, “Think about how fast we are going to see the emergence of intelligent ‘beings’ when we combine the brightest Artificial Intelligence with robotics…” and continued that with, “Within the next decade, you’ll order a robot, have it delivered to you, and out of the box it will be smarter than you, stronger than you, and have more mobility and dexterity than you.”
On the technology front, a new study, ‘Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks’ proposes: “measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under five years, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.”
More from the article:
“…by looking at historical data, we see that the length of tasks that state-of-the-art models can complete (with 50% probability) has increased dramatically over the last 6 years.”
“If we plot this on a logarithmic scale, we can see that the length of tasks models can complete is well predicted by an exponential trend, with a doubling time of around 7 months.”
And in conclusion:
“If the trend of the past 6 years continues to the end of this decade, frontier AI systems will be capable of autonomously carrying out month-long projects. This would come with enormous stakes, both in terms of potential benefits and potential risks.”
When I was reflecting on this yesterday, I was thinking about the emergence of new intelligent ‘beings’, and how quickly they will arrive. With information like this, plus the links to robotics improvements I shared, I’m feeling very confident that my prediction of super intelligent robots within the next decade is well within our reach.
But my focus was on these beings ‘emerging suddenly’. Now I’m realizing that we are already seeing dramatic improvements, but we aren’t suddenly going to see these brilliant robots. It’s going to be a fast but not a sudden transformation. We are going to see dumb-like-Siri models first, where we ask a request and it gives us related but useless follow up. For instance, the first time you say, “Get me a coffee,” to your robot butler Jeeves, you might get a bag of grounds delivered to you rather than a cup of coffee made the way you like it… without Jeeves asking you to clarify the task because you wanting a bag of coffee doesn’t make sense.
These relatively smart, yet still dumb AI robots are going to show up before the super intelligent ones do. So this isn’t really about a fast emergence, but rather it’s about convergence. It’s about robotics, AI intelligence, processing speed, and AI’s EQ (not just IQ) all advancing exponentially at the same time… With ‘benefits and potential risks.’
Questions will start to arise as these technologies converge, “How much power do we want to give these super intelligent ‘beings’? Will they have access to all of our conversations in front of them? Will they have purchasing power, access to our email, the ability to make and change our plans for us without asking? Will they help us raise our kids?
Not easy questions to answer, and with the convergence of all these technologies at once, not a long time to answer these tough questions either.
I have two daughters, both very bright, both with a lot of common sense. They work hard and have demonstrated that when they face a challenge they can both think critically and also be smart enough to ask for advice rather than make poor decisions… and like every other human being, they started out as needy blobs that 100% relied on their parents for everything. They couldn’t feed themselves or take care of themselves in any way, shape, or form. Their development took years.
Think about how fast we are going to see the emergence of intelligent ‘beings’ when we combine the brightest Artificial Intelligence with robotics like this and this. Within the next decade, you’ll order a robot, have it delivered to you, and out of the box it will be smarter than you, stronger than you, and have more mobility and dexterity than you.
Are we ready for this?
We aren’t developing progressively smarter children, we are building machines that can outthink and outperform us in many aspects.
“But they won’t have the wisdom of experience.”
Actually, we are already working on that, “Microsoft and Swiss startup Inait announced a partnership to develop AI models inspired by mammalian brains… The technology promises a key advantage: unlike conventional AI systems, it’s designed to learn from real experiences rather than just existing data.” Add to this the Nvidia Omniverse where robots can do millions of iterations and practice runs in a virtual environment with real world physics, and these mobile, agile, thinking, intelligent robots are going to be immediately out-of-the-box super beings.
I don’t think we are ready for what’s coming. I think the immediate emergence of super intelligent, agile robots, who can learn, adapt, and both mentality and physically outperform us, that we will see in the next decade, will be so transformative that we will need to rethink everything: work, the economy, politics (and war), and even relationships. This will drastically disrupt the way we live our lives, the way we engage and interact with each other and with these new, intelligent beings. We aren’t building children that will need years of training, we are building the smartest, most agile beings the world has ever seen.
I’m visiting my sister (and mom is visiting too). It’s great to be together with family, and to be somewhere where a morning walk doesn’t involve rain gear. My wife and I are continuing our tradition of going for morning walks while on holidays. I love that this little vista is just minutes away from my sister’s house.
Holidays can be hard to maintain fitness habits, and I likely won’t be visiting any gyms while here, so these morning walks are going to be a good balance to offset my sister’s awesome cooking and restaurant meals. They are a great way to start the day with something physical, and with some pretty nice views too!
It’s March break, and for me the start of any break means it’s time to enjoy a good fiction book. Scanning my options last week, I saw that a science fiction series I really enjoyed had the next book out. So I added it to Audible and started listening on Friday. I’m not going to mention the series beyond saying it’s a science fiction, because I do enjoy it, but my critique below is far from flattering.
The author is a total nerd. How do I know this? Every reference to earth is related to things only a nerd would think worth referencing, and the dialogue is extra nerdy. Meanwhile the science of the scifence fiction seems to follow a level of theory that is intelligent and beyond my scope to critique… And while I’ve enjoyed the plot line of every book, including this one so far, the dialogue is very painful, and getting annoying.
The banter is always the same, no matter which characters are talking, and while the women are all intelligent, they all eye roll to the same style of corny jokes and all have similar responses to male dialogue. I bet if I met the author, I could typecast both him and his wife.
Robertson Davies was a novelist who seemed to be able to put himself into characters and ‘be’ someone completely different. I remember reading Fifth Business, and when the protagonist lost a leg I actually looked up the author to see if he had lost a leg too, because I couldn’t imagine that this experience wasn’t at least partially autobiographical.
On the other hand, I’ve read another series by this nerdy author and the humour and banter between characters does not diverge. Not one bit.
I know dialogue is hard. I’m not sure i would be emotionally intuitive enough to live the perspective of fictional characters well enough to create good dialogue beyond my own experience. Still, that doesn’t take away from my critique, and this author only has the ability to write dialogue from a single, very predictable perspective. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his books, but I think this is going to be the last one that I’ll read, and it’s because of the very nerdy, and very predictable, banter and dialogue between characters.
In 3 generations, no one will even remember your name.
If that doesn’t give you liberation to just drop your problems and find some joy, I don’t know what will.
Life is inherently ridiculous and guaranteed to end sooner or later.
So you might as well enjoy the ride.
I had a simple reminder of this yesterday. My original Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog was down for a while and I finally got around to going into the back end and figuring out what plugin was preventing it from working.
Then my phone got a notification:
“The site’s downtime lasted 4 months. We’re happy to report your site was back online as of 2:37pm on March 16, 2025.”
For 4 months a blog that used to be my baby, that I put thousands of hours into vanished, a white screen followed by an error page… and not even I noticed that it was down for a full 4 months. And anywhere from 1-5 years after I’m gone the DavidTruss.com domain hosting will expire and literally thousands of blog posts will be lost to all but the internet archive. When is the last to you visited that site to find a dead article? For me it had to be at least 5-6 years ago.
The frame to think about this is the one Chris shares above, “In 3 generations, no one will even remember your name. If that doesn’t give you liberation to just drop your problems and find some joy, I don’t know what will.”
Our journey here is short. The things we should worry about should not outshine the things we should be grateful for. The reasons to be frustrated or upset should not compete with or get in the way of things we appreciate and bring joy to us and others. We can all take at least a small dose of not taking ourselves so seriously.
