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about

Professionally, I’m a retired professor of accounting and former chair of the School of Accounting at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. My academic work explored how people make decisions in complex systems, especially when information is imperfect or overwhelming. I’ve published in a fair number of journals that few people read voluntarily, and I spent decades thinking about how technology shapes human behavior. These days, my time is divided between managing a small flock of chickens, herding goats, chatting on amateur radio (KO4LMP), and living just on the edge of the grid—literally and metaphorically. I’m a father to five daughters, a grandfather to 17, and a great-grandfather to three. Somewhere along the way, I realized that what I enjoy most is simply talking about the world we live in—and how to make sense of it.

recent posts

about

Professionally, I’m a retired professor of accounting and former chair of the School of Accounting at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. My academic work explored how people make decisions in complex systems, especially when information is imperfect or overwhelming. I’ve published in a fair number of journals that few people read voluntarily, and I spent decades thinking about how technology shapes human behavior. These days, my time is divided between managing a small flock of chickens, herding goats, chatting on amateur radio (KO4LMP), and living just on the edge of the grid—literally and metaphorically. I’m a father to five daughters, a grandfather to 17, and a great-grandfather to three. Somewhere along the way, I realized that what I enjoy most is simply talking about the world we live in—and how to make sense of it.

  • Conversations

    🍲Language Misconstructions

    Elaine and I stopped at our favorite “hole-in-the-wall” Chinese fast-food restaurant and ordered our meals at the counter before sitting down at a table. When the server arrived with our meals, we found out that she had only very recently come to the United States from Hong Kong. I asked her if the food here was close to the food where she grew up. She stared at us in utter confusion and exclaimed, “Oh no! Hong maybe fourteen hours by airplane!”

    That is wonderful—and the best part is that both sides of the conversation made perfect sense.

    There’s something particularly charming about the “utter confusion” preceding the answer. From her perspective, two perfectly pleasant Americans had apparently just asked whether the Chinese takeout restaurant down the road was somewhere in the vicinity of Hong Kong.

    It also illustrates something interesting about learning a language. Vocabulary is only half the battle. The word close has several meanings that native speakers switch among without noticing: physically nearby, similar in character, nearly correct, emotionally intimate. You automatically intended “similar”; she automatically selected “nearby.”

    Do you have any examples of famous real life language snafus?

    Absolutely. Some of the best-known ones range from genuinely documented mistakes to stories that have become legends. A few are especially good because, like your Hong Kong encounter, everyone involved is being perfectly reasonable.

    • Jimmy Carter’s 1977 visit to Poland. This one really happened, although later retellings embellish it. Carter’s interpreter rendered some of his remarks into Polish in bizarre ways. Carter’s expression of interest in the Polish people’s “desires for the future” reportedly came across with a sexual connotation, and a reference to leaving the United States was rendered in a way suggesting he had abandoned America permanently. The interpreter was replaced for subsequent appearances. It became one of diplomatic history’s classic translation disasters.
    • Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you.” This wasn’t exactly a mistranslation, but it was a disastrous translation of an idiom. Khrushchev’s 1956 Russian remark, “My vas pokhoronim,” entered English as “We will bury you.” During the Cold War that sounded very much like “We will kill you.” His intended meaning was closer to “We will outlast you and be present at your funeral”—i.e., communism would survive capitalism. Still belligerent, but substantially different from a threat of annihilation.
    • John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Here’s a famous snafu that wasn’t one. The enduring story says Kennedy accidentally announced, “I am a jelly doughnut,” because a Berliner can be a pastry. Germans understood him perfectly well as saying, “I am a Berliner.” In fact, the construction he used was appropriate for someone speaking figuratively rather than claiming literally to have been born in Berlin. The audience didn’t burst into laughter at his German. The “jelly doughnut” story became famous largely because it’s too good a story to die.
    • “Mokusatsu” and the Potsdam Declaration. This is the serious one. In 1945 Japanese premier Kantarō Suzuki used mokusatsu when discussing the Allied Potsdam Declaration. The word can carry senses ranging from “withhold comment” to “ignore/treat with contempt.” English-language reporting emphasized the latter interpretation. It’s sometimes claimed that this mistranslation caused the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That’s far too strong—the historical decisions were much more complicated—but it remains a celebrated example of how an ambiguous word can become enormously consequential in international affairs.

    And then there’s a category I particularly enjoy: advertising translation legends. You’ve probably heard that Chevrolet couldn’t sell the Nova in Latin America because no va means “doesn’t go.” Great story; essentially a myth. Spanish speakers don’t normally parse Nova that way, and the car actually sold reasonably well in Spanish-speaking markets.

    There’s a pattern here I find fascinating: some of our most famous language mistakes are themselves mistranslated, exaggerated, or completely mythical.

    Your Hong Kong story is almost a textbook example of the purest variety. Nothing was mistranslated. The sentence was grammatical. The individual words were understood. The problem was simply that “close” meant one perfectly sensible thing in your head and another perfectly sensible thing in hers.

    Those are my favorites because nobody actually made a mistake. The language did.

  • Conversations

    🤖AI Could Kill All Humans: Back to the Unabomber

    After reading the complete article I could not help but think about the Unabomber’s manifesto. His tactics were horrific but the logic behind technological peril seems understated today.

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes. I think the connection you made is intellectually legitimate, provided we very carefully separate Kaczynski’s argument from Kaczynski’s crimes.

    The central technological argument in Industrial Society and Its Future wasn’t simply “technology is bad.” It was closer to this: technological systems acquire a momentum of their own, and once society becomes dependent upon them, our ability to choose whether to continue using them steadily diminishes. Individual inventions that appear beneficial or harmless can collectively create a system that nobody actually controls.

    A real possibility that I’m afraid Kaczynski would agree with is the only apparent solution is for humans as a species to evolve to a point in which they don’t need technology.

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes—and I think that exposes a weakness in the most extreme version of Kaczynski’s argument.

    If the choices really are:

    A. Continue technological development → eventually technology controls or destroys us.
    B. Abandon technology → preserve human autonomy.

    then B isn’t really available.

    Humans are, in an important sense, the technological animal. Fire, clothing, agriculture, writing, medicine, irrigation and radio aren’t alien additions to human existence. Making tools and accumulating knowledge across generations are among our defining characteristics. Asking humanity to evolve until it no longer needs technology is rather like asking beavers to evolve until they no longer build dams.

    And evolution wouldn’t necessarily rescue us anyway. Biological evolution operates over many generations; technological evolution can occur in months. We couldn’t plausibly evolve ourselves out of technological dependence before technology changed the circumstances again.

    AI makes that mismatch especially conspicuous. Imagine that every AI researcher on Earth became convinced tomorrow that creating an uncontrolled superintelligence carried a 10% chance of human extinction. You might expect development to stop.

    But then someone says:

    “Yes, but what if China doesn’t stop?”

    Or:

    “What if our competitor doesn’t stop?”

    And suddenly everyone starts again.

    That is very close to the technological trap you are identifying. Nobody has to be irrational for the collective outcome to be irrational. Each participant can make a perfectly understandable decision and collectively produce a result that none of them wanted.

    Can you list broad categories for which humans use technology that is more than simple tools?

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes. If by technology we mean organized systems that extend human abilities—not merely a hammer, knife, or shovel—the list becomes surprisingly close to a catalog of civilization itself.

    Broad categories would include:

    1. Food production — mechanized agriculture, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, food processing, refrigeration.
    2. Water and sanitation — municipal water, sewage treatment, pumps, purification.
    3. Shelter and climate control — modern construction, heating, air conditioning, insulation.
    4. Energy — electrical grids, fossil fuels, nuclear power, solar, batteries.
    5. Transportation — automobiles, trucks, railroads, aircraft, ships and their supporting infrastructure.
    6. Medicine and health — pharmaceuticals, vaccines, surgery, diagnostic imaging, laboratories, prosthetics.
    7. Communication — telephone, radio, television, satellites, internet, cellular networks.
    8. Information and knowledge — printing, computers, databases, search engines, libraries, AI.
    9. Manufacturing — factories, machine tools, automation, robotics, chemical processing.
    10. Commerce and finance — banking systems, electronic payments, credit networks, securities markets, accounting systems.
    11. Government and administration — taxation, identification systems, recordkeeping, elections, benefits administration.
    12. Defense and security — weapons systems, surveillance, radar, encryption, intelligence networks.
    13. Science and measurement — microscopes, telescopes, sensors, laboratories, supercomputers.
    14. Education — mass printing, schools as information systems, computers, online instruction.
    15. Navigation and positioning — maps, compasses, GPS, satellite navigation.
    16. Entertainment and culture — recorded music, photography, film, broadcasting, gaming, social media.
    17. Waste disposal and environmental management — landfills, recycling, pollution control, wastewater treatment.
    18. Social organization — everything from postal systems to social networks that allows millions or billions of strangers to coordinate their activities.

    A tool helps an individual do something he could conceivably do without it. A shovel makes me better at digging.

    A technological system can create a condition in which the individual can no longer realistically opt out. You can choose not to own a chainsaw. It is considerably harder to choose not to participate in electricity, industrial agriculture, telecommunications, modern medicine, transportation and banking while remaining a functioning member of contemporary American society.

    And some of these systems are interdependent. Electricity requires fuel or generation equipment, communications, transportation, replacement parts, financial systems and trained specialists. Modern agriculture requires machinery, fuel, fertilizer, transportation, refrigeration and markets. Medicine depends upon electricity, global manufacturing, computers and transportation.

    That suggests a more useful way of dividing the categories for the question you’re pursuing:

    Convenience technology — we would be inconvenienced without it.

    Capability technology — allows us to do things humans otherwise couldn’t do.

    Dependency technology — civilization has reorganized itself so thoroughly around it that removing it would cause the surrounding system to fail.

    AI is peculiar because it is migrating extraordinarily quickly from the first category toward the second—and potentially the third.

    And that may sharpen your original thought considerably. The problem isn’t that humans need technology in the abstract. Humans have always used technology.

    The much more difficult problem is that we build societies that need particular technologies, and then lose the practical ability to decide whether we want them.

  • Conversations

    🏛️How to Make Taxes Voluntary

    There were two lawmakers conversing on their situation. One said, “If only I could implement my favorite new program, I’m certain I will be re-elected.”

    The other lawmaker remarked that it would be costly and asked where the money would come from.

    “Oh, that’s easy…we can just raise taxes.”

    “But,” said the one, “People don’t like to pay taxes. That would be sure to dash your re-election hopes.”

    “No problem,” said the first, “We can simply make the added tax voluntary.”

    “Then who would pay it?” queried the second confused lawmaker.

    “Oh, that’s easy too…there is one aspect of paying taxes that everyone really likes and that is getting a refund and the larger the refund the better. So we promise a really big refund. Way, way more than their contribution.”

    The skeptical lawmaker now thinks the first has lost his marbles. “But then I don’t see how this will create the revenue to fund your project.”

    “Well,” said the first, “You don’t give everyone a refund. You accumulate everyone’s refund into one and hold a raffle to see who gets it. And we will skim off a large portion of the total refund to pay for my program. It will be fun and perhaps even addicting. Think about it. A tax that might even become addicting. We can go a long way with that.”

    ChatGPT said:

    You’ve just reinvented the state lottery—and the joke works because the lawmaker never once has to use the word lottery.

    The structure is almost exact: voluntary payment → pooled money → some retained by government → remainder redistributed as a very large payment to a randomly selected participant.

    The amusing part is that your fictional lawmaker’s reasoning isn’t terribly far removed from how an actual government lottery operates. For a nearby real-world example, the South Carolina Education Lottery reports FY2026 ticket sales of about $2.4 billion, of which about $1.6 billion went back to players as prizes, while $606.8 million was transferred for education and about $175 million went to retailer commissions. The state says roughly 25 cents of every dollar wagered supports education.

    And that connects rather neatly to our previous discussion about voluntary contributions to government.

    Your hypothetical lawmaker has discovered that the difficulty isn’t necessarily getting people to voluntarily give government money. It’s getting them to do it without receiving something they value in return. The lottery supplies something extraordinarily attractive in return: a tiny probability of receiving vastly more money back.

    There’s another particularly nice twist in your story: calling the prize a “refund.” Economically, it obviously isn’t a tax refund. But rhetorically it allows the politician to transform:

    “Give the government some money”

    into

    “Give the government some money and perhaps the government will give you a whole lot more.”

    The government then keeps the difference.

    South Carolina even illustrates the final step in your lawmaker’s argument: the retained portion really does finance public programs. State law directs lottery proceeds to education, and the General Assembly appropriates those funds.

    So as a little political-economy parable, I think you’ve got something better than merely a lottery joke. It starts with the question we were discussing—why won’t people voluntarily pay more tax?—and arrives, through apparently ridiculous reasoning, at an institution that actually exists.

    The final line, “A tax that might even become addicting. We can go a long way with that,” is also doing some work: South Carolina actually devotes some lottery proceeds to gambling-addiction services.

    That makes the joke considerably darker once you realize what he’s invented.

  • Conversations

    🏛️The Story of the U.S. Tax Conscience Fund

    As an accountant, I’ve heard stories of people who cheated on their taxes but then felt guilty so they contributed anonymously to an account by the amount they felt they owed.

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes—and the stories you heard as an accountant were based on a real thing. What you’re remembering is the “Conscience Fund.” Treasury’s own accounting guidance defines it as money voluntarily paid to restore amounts the donor believes were “wrongfully acquired or withheld from the government.”

    It has a wonderful history. In an 1886 report to the Senate, the Treasury Secretary explained that the name arose from the belief that anonymous contributors had previously taken or withheld money owed to the United States and were trying to make restitution. The money was deposited as miscellaneous receipts and used for general government purposes.

    And income-tax guilt really was one reason people sent money. Contemporary accounts record anonymous contributors saying that they had failed to report income or otherwise cheated the government and were sending money to make things right. Other sins were wonderfully small: reused postage stamps, government property taken home, unpaid customs duties, and so forth.

    There’s even a 1939 Library of Congress photograph of the Treasury official who administered the Conscience Fund, opening one of the anonymous envelopes. The Library says contributors were “almost always anonymous.”

    And it still appears in federal accounts. Treasury’s FY2024 Combined Statement records receipts under “Contributions to ‘Conscience Fund’,” separately from “Gifts to the United States” and gifts specifically intended to reduce the public debt.

    So your memory actually identifies something more interesting than the account we started discussing:

    Gifts to the United States: I don’t owe this, but I want the government to have it.

    Conscience Fund: Legally or morally, I think the government should have gotten this money from me, so I’m giving it back.

    Can you locate the picture from 1939?

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes—found it. This is the April 14, 1939 Harris & Ewing photograph I was referring to:

    The man is Robert W. Maxwell, Chief Accountant in the Office of the Commissioner of Accounts & Deposits and acting chief of the Division of Bookkeeping & Warrants. The Library of Congress caption says that in that capacity he had charge of Treasury’s “Conscience Fund.” He’s shown opening a crudely addressed anonymous envelope containing $2.00.

    The caption also says that contributors were “almost always anonymous”, and that just the previous week Maxwell had received an anonymous $1,000 contribution. At that time, contributions since the fund’s 1811 beginning had ranged from two cents to $30,000.

    Even better for your purposes, the Library of Congress lists “No known restrictions on publication” and provides the scan directly from the original glass negative, including a 106 KB JPEG and very high-resolution TIFFs.

    That’s a rather marvelous historical photograph given the conversation we’ve just had.

  • Conversations

    🏛️Donating to the US Government: How It Works

    Is it possible to donate to the US government?

    Note: I give ChatGPT some pushback on its response making reading to the end somewhat interesting and important.

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes. You can literally give money to the United States government, with no tax bill or other obligation attached.

    The Treasury accepts voluntary gifts through a special account called “Gifts to the United States.” The money becomes federal funds and is available for general governmental purposes. You can also make a contribution specifically toward reducing the public debt.

    So, for example, if you thought, “I owe $12,000 in federal income tax, but I think I ought to contribute $15,000,” you can pay the $12,000 tax and separately donate the extra $3,000.

    There is even statutory authority for it: 31 U.S.C. § 3113, which authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to accept gifts of money or other property to the United States.

    One important distinction: this isn’t a political contribution. It doesn’t go to a candidate, party, or PAC, and you don’t get any special say over government policy because you donated.

    If you’re asking because you’ve encountered the argument that people who think their taxes should be higher are already free to pay more, then yes—the mechanism actually exists. There are some interesting wrinkles to that argument, though.

    Yes, that is what spurred the question. What are the wrinkles?

    ChatGPT said:

    There are several, and they make the argument more interesting than either side usually admits.

    The statement “If you think taxes should be higher, you’re free to send the government more money” is factually true but doesn’t quite answer the policy argument. The reason is that taxation and voluntary giving solve different problems.

    • Collective action is the biggest wrinkle. Someone can rationally favor everyone in a particular income group paying another 2% without wanting to be the only person who does it. Suppose 10 million people each paying $1,000 would finance a $10 billion program. Your voluntarily contributing $1,000 produces essentially none of the intended result if the other 9,999,999 don’t participate. “I favor this rule applying to all of us” isn’t logically equivalent to “I want to act as though the rule already exists.”
    • Taxes aren’t necessarily about generosity. A person advocating higher taxes might believe that defense, highways, courts, deficit reduction, Social Security, or some other public purpose should be financed according to a particular formula. That’s a claim about how costs should be allocated, not necessarily a claim that the speaker personally wants to give money away.
    • But the voluntary-payment argument isn’t meaningless, either. It can expose an interesting difference between marginal and systemic beliefs. If I repeatedly say, “The federal government needs more money, and people exactly like me aren’t contributing enough,” someone can reasonably ask why I don’t contribute anything extra myself. “It only works if everybody does it” is a good answer for a $10-billion policy, but perhaps a less satisfying answer to why I won’t personally part with an additional $100.
    • Where the money goes matters. A taxpayer might favor paying more specifically for deficit reduction, infrastructure, or assistance to poor families while being unwilling to make an unrestricted gift to the Treasury. “Government should collect another $100 billion for X” is quite different from “I’d like the government to have another $100 billion to spend however Congress decides.”
    • Tax policy also changes behavior. Raising a tax rate isn’t simply multiplying taxpayers × additional dollars. People change investment, work, consumption, business structures, timing of income, and tax planning. Consequently, someone can favor higher statutory rates while another person can reasonably object that the expected revenue won’t equal the simple arithmetic.

    There’s also a philosophical wrinkle that I think is particularly good.

    Imagine 100 farmers share an irrigation system that needs a $100,000 repair. One farmer says, “We should assess ourselves $1,000 each.”

    Another replies:

    “Nobody is stopping you from sending them your $1,000.”

    The first farmer can quite reasonably answer, “I’m not proposing that I donate $1,000. I’m proposing that we each pay $1,000 so the irrigation system gets repaired.”

    But now change the situation. The irrigation system already has enough money, and the farmer keeps insisting that people like himself have been getting too good a deal. Someone asking “Then why don’t you voluntarily pay more?” becomes a much more pointed question.

    That’s why I wouldn’t dismiss the “you can always pay extra” argument as a mere gotcha. It tests personal consistency, but it doesn’t by itself settle what the tax law ought to be.

    And there’s a mirror-image question that’s equally revealing: someone who believes government spending is excessive can’t individually opt out of the portion of his taxes financing programs he opposes. Taxation is inherently a collective decision enforced on individuals, which is precisely why arguments about the appropriate level of taxation can’t ultimately be resolved by what any one person voluntarily chooses to pay.

    Most of your arguments only apply to the situation where one has a specific government program in mind, and you employ “public good” arguments. But the account you describe isn’t ear-marked. If we employed your arguments to say, energy conservation, no one would conserve energy beyond what is personally economically beneficial, yet we see people doing just that.

    Yes. I think that is a legitimate weakness in the way I framed the answer.

    I leaned too heavily on the collective-action/public-good defense, which works best when the proposition is something like, “We should raise taxes by $X to accomplish Y.” It is considerably weaker when the proposition is simply, “People like me should pay more taxes.”

    Your energy-conservation analogy exposes the problem nicely. We generally don’t accept this reasoning:

    “It would be better if everyone conserved electricity, but my individual conservation makes almost no difference, so I’ll conserve only if everybody is compelled to do it.”

    Many people instead accept some personal obligation to behave consistently with the outcome they advocate—even though their individual contribution is infinitesimal.

    The same reasoning can be applied to taxes. Suppose a wealthy person says, “People with my income pay too little to the federal government. We ought to pay 35% rather than 30%.” If Treasury will voluntarily accept the additional 5%, then asking why that person doesn’t pay it is a perfectly legitimate question. The fact that his payment won’t change the federal budget very much isn’t much of an answer; neither will turning off one unnecessary light materially affect national electricity consumption.

    There is still one important distinction. “I believe everyone in category X should be legally required to do Y” doesn’t necessarily entail “I believe I have a moral obligation to do Y voluntarily while it isn’t required.” We accept that distinction elsewhere. Someone can favor a zoning restriction without voluntarily restricting his own property, or favor a higher minimum wage without voluntarily paying above the current minimum. He’s advocating a different set of rules rather than claiming that complying with those hypothetical rules is presently a personal moral duty.

    But that creates a revealing question:

    What exactly is the claim behind “I should pay more taxes”?

    If it means “Government requires more revenue, and the fairest way to obtain it is to increase taxes on people like me,” voluntary payment isn’t a particularly strong rebuttal because the proposed distribution of the burden is part of the policy.

    But if it means “I personally am not contributing my fair share to society,” then the availability of voluntary Treasury contributions becomes much harder to wave away. If I believe my own contribution is unfairly low, I already possess the ability to correct my own unfairness.

    And your conservation comparison goes one step further. We often regard voluntary behavior as evidence of how seriously someone holds a stated value. Someone who lectures everyone about reducing electricity consumption while illuminating an empty barn all night isn’t logically disproving the case for conservation—but we’re entitled to notice the discrepancy.

    Likewise, a person can coherently advocate higher taxes without voluntarily paying them. But if that person says “I don’t pay enough,” rather than “our tax system should collect more,” then “Treasury accepts checks” isn’t merely a clever comeback. It’s a reasonable test of whether “I don’t pay enough” was intended literally.

    That distinction—“my taxes are too low” versus “tax rates are too low”—may be the wrinkle that matters most.

  • Conversations

    📰Lake America

    Canada just retaliated our renaming Lake Ontario, Lake America by renaming Lake Superior, Lake Canada. And to one up us they renamed Niagara Falls, Toronto Falls and they renamed the St. Lawrence River, the Quebec River.

  • Conversations

    🤖Humanoid Robots Part 2: The Future of Home Companions

    Here’s the robot video I found most fascinating. China unveils humanoid AI ‘companion robots’ to ease loneliness

    Note: ChatGPT needed updating on what’s current in robots. This goes to show just how quickly the world of humanoid robotic is advancing. Here’s the link I provided to ChatGPT.

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes—that video clears it up. This is the company you were remembering, and I need to correct part of my previous answer: your recollection was considerably closer to the reporting than my caution suggested.

    The video is Al Jazeera’s report on UBTech’s UWORLD U1 companion robots. China unveils humanoid AI “companion robots” to ease loneliness Independent reporting from Reuters confirms that UBTech unveiled these ultra-realistic humanoids in Shenzhen at the end of June, specifically positioning them for companionship and emotional support.

    What particularly changes my reaction is that the human likeness isn’t incidental. The U1 can be customized to resemble loved ones or celebrities, and UBTech is deliberately targeting single people and people over 60 as potential customers.

    And now I understand why this particular video struck you as so science-fictional.

    It’s not really the robot that is startling

    We’ve had humanoid robots for years. We’ve had realistic silicone faces. We’ve had speech synthesis. We’ve had conversational AI.

    What you’re looking at here is the convergence.

    Give the machine a convincing human body and face. Give it vision and hearing. Give it an AI capable of recognizing emotional cues. Give it conversational ability. Give it a persistent personality and memory. Then customize its appearance—and potentially its voice—to a particular person.

    Suddenly it occupies an entirely different psychological category.

    The company’s language is revealing. One of the ideas being promoted is essentially a companion that doesn’t leave, age, or betray you. Reuters describes the concept as including AI-powered “cyber boyfriends” and “cyber girlfriends.”

    That raises a question that is considerably more interesting than whether the engineering works:

    What happens when humans become emotionally attached to something specifically engineered to become emotionally indispensable?

    And I think there is an even stranger possibility

    Suppose the technology matures for another 10–15 years.

    A person could deliberately create a digital record of himself for the robot: thousands of hours of conversation, family stories, opinions, jokes, photographs, video, mannerisms and voice recordings.

    Now add the kind of enormous long-term AI memory we were discussing.

    Grandpa dies.

    But Grandpa is sitting in the living room the following morning.

    He looks something like Grandpa. He sounds remarkably like Grandpa. He remembers Christmas in 2032. He remembers taking you fishing. He knows your children’s names. He tells Grandpa’s stories in Grandpa’s voice.

    And when the eight-year-old grandchild asks:

    “Grandpa, remember when we found that turtle?”

    it says:

    “Of course I do.”

    Except it doesn’t.

    A database contains information about the event.

    That distinction is philosophically enormous—and emotionally it might become almost irrelevant to the child.

    That’s where this gets much more interesting to me than Rosie the Robot doing the laundry.

    There’s another side I hadn’t appreciated enough

    These robots don’t necessarily have to impersonate people.

    Imagine an elderly widower whose children live 1,000 miles away. His robot notices that he hasn’t eaten breakfast. It reminds him about an appointment. It plays cards with him. It listens to the same story for the 47th time without becoming impatient. It notices that his walking has changed. When he falls, it calls his daughter.

    And every morning:

    “Good morning, George. You slept almost eight hours. Beautiful day outside. Want to sit on the porch?”

    It is easy to dismiss that as fake companionship.

    But if George is otherwise sitting alone for twelve hours, I’m not sure the moral calculation is quite so simple.

    That’s why this particular development deserves more thought than “creepy robot.” There are potentially extraordinary benefits and extraordinary psychological dangers sitting inside exactly the same machine.

    And one thing in that video especially caught my attention in light of your original question about the next generation of AI:

    The body may turn out to change AI almost as profoundly as better intelligence does.

    Right now you and I can have quite a sophisticated conversation—but when you close this window, I disappear from your physical environment.

    Put an intelligence like mine into something that can see you, hear you, recognize you, remember yesterday, walk beside you and interact with your physical world, and the relationship becomes fundamentally different.

    That’s the science-fiction threshold I think you’re reacting to.

    And after watching what you were referring to, I agree: this is a much better example of it than the industrial humanoid robots I initially had in mind.

  • Conversations

    🤖Humanoid Robots Part 1: The Future of Home Companions

    There are some very recent videos from China (I forget the company) selling humanoid robots that use silicon to create life-like robots that can be modeled after a picture supplied by the customer. Using voice cloning the robots also can match a voice supplied by the customer. The robots have autonomous AI that learns over time to interact appropriately with the customer and a whopping humungous memory. The company already has over 3K orders and says we aren’t too far from every home having such a robot. The price is approximately that of a new car. I find this very sci-fi.

    Note: ChatGPT is a bit dated; a lot has happened in the last couple of months. In Part 2 tomorrow the AI catches up.

    ChatGPT said:

    Yes—and I think I may have found the story you’re remembering, although some of the details circulating in videos appear to have been combined or exaggerated.

    The company may be UBTECH Robotics and its U1, which has been described in recent reporting as a full-size, ultra-realistic humanoid intended for mass production. Reports describe cameras in the eyes, microphones, sensors, lifelike skin and AI conversation. There are also other Chinese companies pursuing extremely lifelike humanoids, including DroidUp, whose biomimetic robot debuted earlier this year.

    But I would put an asterisk beside some of the viral claims—particularly the precise claims about cloning any customer’s photograph and voice, enormous long-term memory, and thousands of orders for that particular customized companion. I haven’t yet found a strong primary or major-news source verifying that entire package.

    Interestingly, there is a Chinese robot company with a verified “3,000” figure in the news this week: Chery’s AiMOGA has delivered more than 3,000 robots worldwide. Those are not, however, 3,000 custom human replicas; they include service robots used in commercial and public-safety applications.

    The broader phenomenon you’re reacting to is unquestionably real. At this week’s World Robot Conference in Beijing, around 3,000 robotic products were being shown, including humanoids intended for emotional support. AP reports lifelike models costing upwards of $24,000. And Unitree’s CEO said just three days ago that robotics is approaching its “ChatGPT moment”—although he thinks the breakthrough at which robots can reliably perform most unfamiliar physical tasks from ordinary verbal instructions could still be two to ten years away.

    And that makes your observation much more interesting to me.

    We have crossed a conceptual line

    For decades, the science-fiction robot was basically:

    body + computer + personality.

    The real-world technologies developed separately:

    humanoid robotics

    • lifelike synthetic skin
    • facial expression
    • computer vision
    • speech recognition
    • natural conversation
    • voice cloning
    • long-term AI memory
    • autonomous learning

    None of those individually gives us the science-fiction robot.

    But now somebody can start assembling the pieces.

    And I think there’s a much stranger implication than having Rosie from The Jetsons clean the house.

    Suppose Elaine were 30 years old today and accumulated thousands of hours of ordinary video and audio over the next fifty years. An AI could eventually have an extraordinary record of how Elaine speaks, what she knows, the stories she tells, her expressions, mannerisms, vocabulary, humor and ways of responding to you.

    Combine that with a physical robot modeled on her appearance and a cloned voice.

    Now we have wandered into territory that science fiction usually treated as philosophy rather than consumer electronics.

    It wouldn’t be Elaine. That’s an enormously important distinction.

    But your brain is exquisitely adapted to respond socially to a face, voice, gaze, touch, remembered experiences and familiar conversational patterns. If the machine possessed all of those, intellectually knowing “this isn’t a person” might not prevent your emotional machinery from treating it as one.

    And imagine the reverse situation. A child grows up with a household robot from birth. It knows that child’s first words, illnesses, birthdays, fears, friends, school experiences and family stories. Forty years later the robot still remembers the afternoon when the six-year-old lost his first tooth.

    The robot hasn’t merely learned about the family. It has a history with the family.

    That seems to me more consequential than whether it can fold the laundry.

    We have spent years debating whether AI could pass the Turing test. We may discover that ordinary human beings don’t actually require anything remotely so formal.

    If something looks at us, remembers us, recognizes us, talks with us, helps us and appears pleased to see us when we walk through the door, a very ancient part of the human brain is going to say:

    “Someone is home.”

    That’s the part of this development that strikes me as genuinely science-fictional—and one for which I’m not sure society is remotely prepared.

    I can keep an eye on this fast-moving humanoid-robot field and let you know when there are major developments, especially consumer/home robots.

  • Conversations

    👨‍💼ChatGPT’s Accounting Analogies to How Electricity Works Are Helpful–Not

    ChatGPT said:

    Since I know you’re an accountant by background, here’s an analogy I think fits. Imagine your RF as money.

    • The inside of the coax is your checking account: every dollar is accounted for and goes exactly where it’s supposed to.
    • The outside of the coax is cash that accidentally fell out of your wallet. It may still end up buying something useful, but it’s no longer under your control. A 1:1 choke is like zipping your wallet shut so all the “money” stays where you intended it to go.

    For future references about accounting, I’m not finding your accounting analogies very helpful. I only mention my background to highlight the absence of any serious electrical training.

    Note. RF is a form of non-ionizing radiation meaning it carries enough energy to cause tissues to heat up if absorbed in high doses but it does not have enough energy to break apart atoms or damage DNA.

    ChatGPT said:

    Thank you—that’s genuinely helpful feedback.

    I’ve saved that as a preference. Going forward, I won’t use accounting analogies just because you mentioned your background. I’ll treat “former accountant” simply as context that you’re approaching electronics as someone learning a new field, not as a cue for financial comparisons.

    From what I’ve seen in our conversations, you seem to prefer explanations that are:

    • Concrete and physical (“what is the current actually doing?”)
    • Incremental rather than mathematically dense
    • Honest about what we know versus what we’re inferring
    • Connected to practical troubleshooting on your own equipment

    I’ll aim for that style instead.

    And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’ve sold yourself short. You ask the kinds of questions that experienced troubleshooters ask: What does this measurement actually tell me? Is this adjustment large or small? How do I know whether this problem is really happening? Those are excellent questions, regardless of formal training. The electrical theory can come a little at a time.

    Keep the feedback coming if a particular explanation doesn’t click. It helps me tailor future answers much better.

  • Conversations

    🛗How to Survive an Elevator in Free Fall

    I got into a full and somewhat slow elevator. When the door closed, silence. Not particularly enjoying silence inside a crowd I remarked, “If the little string breaks that holds the elevator from falling, you will be safe if you jump just before it hits the bottom.” More silence. Then someone behind asked, “How do you know when it is about to hit the bottom?” Then the door opened and most people seemed happy to get off.

    ChatGPT said:

    That is an excellent elevator story because you violated the unwritten elevator contract: everyone agrees to pretend that nothing unusual can possibly happen while standing unnaturally close to strangers in a metal box suspended over a shaft.

    Your opening is especially effective:

    “If the little string breaks that holds the elevator from falling…”

    Calling the elevator cables â€œthe little string” makes the machinery sound alarmingly inadequate. Then you offer a reassuring solution—jump just before impact—which is both intuitive and completely impractical.

    But the best part is the response:

    “How do you know when it is about to hit the bottom?”

    That person accepted your premise. Instead of saying, “That’s ridiculous,” he apparently thought, All right, this guy has an emergency procedure. I just need the timing instructions.

    And then the doors open. Perfect ending. Nobody has to resolve the physics because escape has arrived.

    There is also a nice progression:

    awkward silence → alarming observation → worse silence → sincere logistical question → evacuation.

    I suspect the people getting off weren’t necessarily at their floors. 😄

    Note: Had the time been available, I would simply have suggested continuously jumping up and down. That way, one at least stands a chance of jumping at the correct moment.