Originally posted at TomDispatch. I give myself credit for being significantly ahead of my time. I first came across artificial intelligence (AI) in 1968 when I was just 24 years old and, from the beginning, I sensed its deep dangers. Imagine that. Much as I’d...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving? For me, that last question is...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow....
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the Blindman’s Buff variation of tag, a child designated as “It” is tasked with tapping another child while wearing a blindfold. The sightless child knows the other children, all able to see, are there but is left to stumble...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In late March, I was taken aback by a news story about a drone attack on American troops at a joint base with Kurdish forces in Syria. Though five U.S. soldiers were wounded, there was only one death and, as Eric Schmitt reported in...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Honestly, it should take your breath away. We are on a planet prepping for further war in a staggering fashion. A watchdog group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), just released its yearly report on global...
I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than "Mama" or "Dada," in some strange fashion, I...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In our present social media world, who even remembers that the Internet’s first “mothership,” as Ben Tarnoff put it at the Guardian years ago, was the U.S. military, thanks to a Cold War era urge to link computer...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In some ways, it’s still hard to take in. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush and crew invaded Afghanistan, the very country in which the Soviet Union’s military had failed so...
