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]]>Indeed, Trump’s ascendancy is regal, not presidential. The division of powers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution is not working. The result, America is ruled by King Trump, the successor to George III, a monarch that Americans chose to overthrow in 1776.
The impacts are far more than political. Trump’s executive decisions have been detrimental to fighting the causes of climate change. The health of the U.S. and the rest of the world has been put at risk. Cutting off U.S. Aid has worsened global food security and aided disease outbreaks in the Global South. His war pursuits have disrupted global supply chains. His court jester cabinet and appointees are making a mockery of the law.
Trump’s administration is anti-science and anti-knowledge. This is after more than 80 years when the United States led the democratic world, attracting the best scientists, built the most innovative technologies, and sparked the Green Revolution to reduce global food insecurity and disease. US largesse raised all boats as a Pax Americana ensured a more peaceful world even in the face of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the Berlin Wall fell, some historians proclaimed the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy over communism and fascism. These were heady times despite blips like the Vietnam War and America’s internal racial strife.
America turned swords into ploughshares, taking a military communications technology and turning it into the Internet. Instant global telecommunications became the new reality, which further allowed America to share its intellectual capital with the world.
Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). American scientists gave us our understanding of the environmental challenges our industrial society was creating. They developed insights into pollution and atmospheric chemistry, ecosystem and biodiversity loss, and the growing threat of climate change.
The EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitored Earth systems using American-built satellites and a network of Earth-based monitors (air, land and water). Their research led to the undisputed scientific conclusion that human activities on Earth were causing greenhouse gas emissions to rise and global warming. Americans collected data and supplemented brilliant science minds and researchers.
Under Trump, through budget reductions and staff firings, today’s EPA and NOAA are hollowed out. Their research-produced environmental standards are no longer being followed. Deregulation has given the industrial polluters a free hand.
The United States, post-World War II, became a leader in contributing to health and food security around the world. It operated through programs set up by the federal government: US AID, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and others.
U.S. programs promoted vaccines, provided maternal and child health and nutrition, supported family planning, research on diseases, health worker training and more. This wasn’t exclusive to when the Democratic Party was in the White House. Republican administrations were equally involved.
The programs combined money, knowledge, data systems, infrastructure, research and partnerships within countries around the world. American support for food security included supplying emergency food during drought and famine, food to counter malnutrition, help in improving local agricultural productivity, and rural financial assistance.
Since the beginning of 2025 under Trump’s second term, foreign aid has been paused. US AID is dismantled. Global health programs to fight HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and Ebola have been decimated. The current Ebola outbreak in Africa has been impacted.
America’s federal international crisis response has been severely weakened by significant funding cuts. American aid is tied to Trump’s America First agenda and national security priorities.
The loss of continuity in funding to support international health and food security programs has been consequential. America’s soft power credentials are in question.
The U.S. has always championed lowering barriers in trade to allow American companies access to global market opportunities. From its days as the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II, to the post-war Marshall Plan, to the championing of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. has always led.
America promoted open markets, WTO rules and regulations, shared trade rules, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), bringing Mexico, Canada and the U.S. together to create a continent-wide free trade zone. Since Trump’s first term, when he replaced NAFTA with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), free trade has been under threat.
Trump sees international trade as a win-lose contest. A trade surplus means you win. A trade deficit means you lose. What gets counted and what does not determines winners and losers.
Trump’s Liberation Day announcement last year established arbitrary tariffs on countries that sell and buy from America. This managed trade strategy through the application of tariffs, without congressional oversight, is a departure from how America conducted business with the rest of the world. Everything is bargaining. Everything is transactional. Tariffs no longer follow the WTO guardrails. Signed agreements like the USMCA no longer hold weight.
In the last two days, Canada and the United States have entered a trade war. The two countries in 2025 participated in two-way trade in goods and services totalling CDN$1.287 trillion. The two countries have integrated industries with finished products often going through assembly processes that go back and forth across the international border. It is the world’s largest bilateral trade arrangement and Trump’s managed trade strategy and brinksmanship has brought it to crisis? This is a test case for any other country negotiating under Trump’s managed trade strategy.
Once the global leader in the world, its most powerful political actor, often establishing unilateral positions that led to military blunders like Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S. can no longer assume that allies will follow its lead.
By the end of World War II, America was the sole superpower. It was soon joined by the Soviet Union. These were the first two nuclear-armed nations. Post-war Europe came under the U.S. defence shield through NATO. Canada and the U.S. created NORAD for North American defence.
The Soviet Union fell in 1991. For a little more than a decade, no other nation challenged America’s hegemony. China’s rapid rise in the first two decades of the 21st century has changed the balance of power. As Russia succeeded the Soviet Union, it remains a nuclear-weapons threat. Its war in Ukraine has consumed it for the last four-plus years with little success. That doesn’t lessen Russia as a dangerous global player.
Meanwhile, regional wars are ongoing as new ones emerge. The great power competition and might-makes-right diplomacy are making for a less safe future.
The alliances of the past are less automatic. Economic interdependencies are being weaponized (see the Canada-U.S. trade dispute). U.S. leadership approval among allies has fallen dramatically while more positive perceptions of America’s chief rival, China, are on the rise.
Global confidence in Trump’s America is on a rapid decline, reflecting the administration’s attitudes toward alliance members (Denmark and Greenland), Canadian trade and 51st state threats, restrictive immigration policies and deportations, climate policy, and military interventions like the current Israel-Iran-U.S.-Persian Gulf nations’ conflict.
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]]>I am a baby boomer. Although the mechanism for anthropogenic climate change, carbon emissions from the Industrial Revolution, was well known in the late 19th century, scientists and engineers working for fossil fuel companies were writing internal reports in the late 1970s linking the burning of their products to rising global temperatures. Human-caused trends indicated that by the early 2000s, warming in the atmosphere would be increasingly noticeable, with anticipated negative climate consequences. That’s why Gen Z is the generation that has grown up with the risk very much a thing. It’s personal.
One young Gen Z member, Greta Thunberg, began a protest movement, sitting across from the Swedish parliament in Stockholm every Friday, missing school to make a point. She began her protest to point out that if grownups weren’t going to do something about climate change, then it was the Gen Z generation that would have to take up the mantle.
If you haven’t read some of Harper Lane’s contributions to the Techso Mogro, I encourage you to do so by typing her name in the search window on the menu bar of the 21stcentech.com homepage. Harper has written on several important topics since she began offering her talent to this site. Harper resides near Birmingham and has been into technology for a long time. She is big on astronomy and many other scientific and engineering topics. Clearly, climate change is one as well. Comments from Gen Z would be welcomed.
Climate change is often discussed in terms of rising temperatures, extreme weather events, carbon emissions, and energy transitions. These are all important. But another crisis is unfolding along with all of those. It is one receiving far less attention despite its enormous potential consequences: the growing sense among young people that the future is slipping beyond their control.
Talk to enough members of Gen Z, and a pattern begins to emerge. Climate change is part of the conversation, but it rarely exists in isolation. It is bundled together with housing costs that seem permanently unaffordable, a job market that increasingly demands credentials while offering uncertainty in return, political polarization, social media burnout, and a constant stream of headlines forecasting disaster. The result is not always activism. Increasingly, it is apathy.
Ironically, that apathy may be one of the most dangerous outcomes of all.
In 2023, millions of people across North America saw smoke-filled skies and orange-tinted cityscapes, including areas far removed from the fires themselves. For many people, the Canadian wildfires that year cemented the idea that climate change was no longer some abstract scientific discussion. It wasn’t some number on a chart, or a prediction made decades into the future. It was right here, right now. This week brings 2023 back in spades with the same smoke-filled, orange skies over much of Eastern North America.
Climate anxiety is not a fringe phenomenon. In a global survey published in The Lancet, 59% of young people reported feeling extremely or very worried about climate change, with more than half reporting emotions such as sadness, anxiety, anger, helplessness, and powerlessness. Nearly half said those feelings negatively affected their daily lives.
What stands out is that climate change is rarely experienced in isolation. Many survey participants expressed frustration with government and society’s leaders. In other words, the distress being felt is not simply about rising temperatures but rather about the belief that the people responsible for addressing the problem are either unable or unwilling to act.
That distinction matters because psychology has long shown that people can tolerate extraordinary hardship when they believe their actions matter. What people struggle with most is the belief that nothing they do can influence outcomes.
For previous generations, there was often an implicit expectation of progress. Technology would improve lives. Economic growth would create opportunities. Each generation, while facing its own challenges, generally believed its children would inherit a more prosperous world.
Today, that narrative feels less certain.
Many young adults are entering a society where college degrees do not guarantee stable employment, housing costs have dramatically outpaced wage growth in many areas, and economic mobility often feels harder to achieve than it did for their parents. Against that backdrop, climate change can begin to feel like not just another problem to solve, but additional evidence that the future itself is deteriorating.
The psychological impact is significant. When multiple systems appear to be failing simultaneously, people are less likely to focus on solutions and more likely to question whether solutions are even possible.
Technology has transformed how information spreads, but it has also transformed how humans experience problems.
Historically, people learned about major events through newspapers, television broadcasts, or community discussions. Information arrived in discrete packages. There was still bad news, but there were natural limits to consumption.
Modern social media platforms operate differently.
Algorithms are designed to maximize engagement. Unfortunately, human attention is naturally drawn toward threats and uncertainty. From an evolutionary perspective, ignoring danger was costly. Social media exploits this tendency at an unprecedented scale.
Every day, users encounter:
Even when these stories are legitimate, when millions of people are consuming them by the dozens daily without meaningful context, they lose impact. Our brains evolved to respond to threats within local communities, not to absorb a continuous feed of global crises from across the planet.
The result is what some researchers are calling an availability cascade. Negative stories tend to be more visible and, therefore, are easier to recall. That’s why they can dominate the narrative.
If you spend two hours daily consuming climate-related content, your mental model of the future, therefore, becomes based almost entirely on catastrophes. You tend to be unaware of positive developments such as declining solar costs, expanding battery storage deployments, grid modernization efforts, or advances in carbon removal technologies. Although the information is out there on the web, search algorithms simply do not prioritize it.
One of the strangest features of modern society is that public gloom often coexists with measurable progress.
For example:
None of these developments eliminate climate risks, but they complicate the simplistic narrative that humanity is doing absolutely nothing.
The problem is that technological progress generally arrives incrementally, while disaster narratives arrive instantly. A new battery chemistry breakthrough rarely generates as much engagement as footage of a wildfire.
One of the underappreciated consequences of the digital age is that information has become disconnected from action.
Imagine receiving hourly notifications about a wildfire thousands of miles away, a glacier melting in another country, political disputes occurring elsewhere, and economic developments affecting industries you have no influence over.
You are informed, but are you empowered?
Not really.
Psychologists have long studied learned helplessness, a condition in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events reduces motivation to act. While modern climate anxiety is not identical to learned helplessness, there are striking parallels.
When young people are constantly told that climate change is worsening, democracy is under strain, automation may replace jobs, housing is unaffordable, and economic inequality is increasing, many eventually arrive at the same conclusion:
“If all of these enormous systems are broken, what exactly am I supposed to do about it?”
This question is rarely answered effectively; after all, public discourse excels at identifying problems, but it is often far worse at communicating practical pathways forward.
As a result, concern frequently mutates into resignation.
The average person can consume dozens of global crises before breakfast yet possess no practical mechanism for influencing most of them.
This creates what psychologists call a diminished internal locus of control: the perception that outcomes are determined primarily by forces outside one’s influence rather than by one’s own actions.
Fear can motivate action, but apathy rarely does.
History is full of examples where societies overcame serious challenges through collective effort, technological innovation, and political compromise. Progress does not require universal optimism, but it does require enough people believing improvements are possible.
Once that belief disappears, participation tends to decline. People stop voting because they assume nothing will change. They stop engaging with environmental issues because they assume catastrophe is inevitable. They stop investing in communities because they assume decline is unavoidable, and they stop pursuing ambitious careers because they assume opportunities will increasingly become inaccessible.
In other words, an expectation of failure can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is why the mental health dimension of climate change deserves much greater attention. The danger is not merely that young people are worried about the future. The danger is that many are beginning to detach from it altogether.
A society that convinces its youngest members that progress is impossible creates conditions where progress actually becomes impossible.
Human history is filled with examples of seemingly insurmountable problems that were eventually mitigated through innovation. Disease mortality has fallen dramatically. Agricultural productivity has expanded enormously. Renewable energy costs have declined at rates that many experts did not predict two decades ago. Advances in battery storage, grid modernization, materials science, carbon capture research, and nuclear technology continue to accelerate.
None of this means climate change is not serious. Rather, it means the future remains uncertain rather than predetermined.
Many online narratives treat worst-case scenarios as inevitabilities rather than possibilities. Yet technological development rarely follows straightforward trajectories. Unexpected breakthroughs frequently reshape what societies believe is achievable.
This same generation exposed to unprecedented climate anxiety is also witnessing the fastest rate of technological innovation in human history.
Artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics, synthetic biology, nuclear fusion research, and next-generation energy systems all present new opportunities that did not exist a generation ago.
The future contains risks, but it also contains tools.
The evidence increasingly suggests that action itself is one of the most effective antidotes to climate anxiety. The American Psychological Association has been focusing on helping young people move from anxiety toward meaningful participation and climate action rather than leaving them trapped in cycles of worry. It advocates:
An individual alone cannot solve climate change, but communities, industries, and institutions can.
Research consistently shows that people experience less helplessness when they participate in collective efforts where outcomes are visible and measurable.
That could mean:
The goal is not merely environmental impact, but restoring a sense of agency as well. Additionally, when the focus becomes more localized rather than national or global, the solutions become much more actionable rather than simply vague policy prescriptions.
Many young people spend hours consuming news about problems they cannot influence.
This is especially relevant for technically minded readers.
Software engineers, researchers, data scientists, and entrepreneurs have opportunities to contribute to energy efficiency, climate modelling, resiliency planning, transportation systems, and environmental monitoring technologies.
Creation provides feedback, but consumption rarely does.
If nutrition science teaches us to think critically about what we eat, information science should teach us to think critically about what we read and watch.
This can look as simple as verifying sources and avoiding misinformation, but there’s also value in tuning out stressful noise. Not every notification deserves attention, and not every viral story deserves emotional investment.
Limiting algorithmically curated news feeds and intentionally seeking long-form, evidence-based sources can help reduce the perception that disaster is the only possible future.
Perhaps the most important challenge facing Gen Z is not reducing anxiety itself. It is rebuilding self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that they can perform actions that successfully influence outcomes. In simple terms, people need to believe that effort matters.
Without effort and participation, nothing changes. Economic reforms without advocacy may never happen. Technological solutions that could matter never get built. Whereas social media tends to make us think like spectators, real-world progress depends on active participation.
That does not mean individuals must solve climate change single-handedly. It means recognizing that meaningful change has always emerged from millions of imperfect contributions rather than a single revolutionary event.
Climate change is undoubtedly one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. But the greatest threat facing young people may not just be rising temperatures. It may also be the growing belief that the future is fixed, that society’s problems are too big to solve, and that individual action no longer matters.
That is the real challenge confronting Gen Z and the generations that follow. Climate anxiety, economic pressure, political polarization, and the constant noise of algorithm-driven media can make the future seem smaller, darker, and more constrained than it really is. But uncertainty cuts both ways. The same future that contains risks also contains rewards: breakthroughs, innovations, policy changes, new technologies, and solutions yet to be imagined.
The question, therefore, is not whether climate change will shape the decades ahead. It undoubtedly will. The question, rather, is whether we allow fear, helplessness, and pessimism to shape our response.
A healthy Gen Z response to the climate change challenge is neither blind optimism nor hopeless despair. It is informed determination. The recognition that while no individual can solve the problems of climate change alone, millions working together can. Gen Z and following generations may not control every outcome, but they can direct the narrative. The future is not written in stone. It is something that Gen Z and subsequent generations can shape.
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]]>How do we distinguish ourselves from the machines we create? The answers include cultivating reasoning, wisdom and discernment.
Ask an AI if it can reason, and the answer Google’s Gemini gives you states that “AI does not possess human consciousness.”
How Gemini creates a facsimile of reasoning involves a series of structured processes that emulate human thinking, supported by underlying complex computer code and logical steps. The result looks like reasoning as we know it, but it is not human.
Reasoning doesn’t drive most human decisions. Habits, emotion, heuristics (mental shortcuts involving no mental effort), context and more determine the decisions we make. Humans often talk about commonsense. Commonsense, however, is biased by habit and often ignorant of many facts and evidence.
To perfect reasoning requires learning a decision-making process that is repeatable and reliable. That’s what underlies the scientific method. This structured reasoning process begins with observation, hypothesis and prediction. The goal is to find whether your reasoning leads to a predicted outcome. That’s where experimentation comes in to test the validity of the hypothesis and see if your prediction is accurate. Based on the test outcomes, you can revise or replace your hypothesis and test again. The scientific method requires that reasoning be validated by repeatability.
Many hypotheses fail the repeatability test. Think, for example, of the cold fusion hypothesis that emerged from a 1989 experiment at the University of Utah and captivated some scientists and engineers to try and repeat the results.
Training to perfect reasoning involves asking questions. From questions come ideas. From ideas come potential solutions. The ones you want to be true need to be tested. Wishful thinking is wanting something to be true even though it isn’t necessarily the case. Wishful thinking isn’t reasoning.
When I was a child, my Grade 6 teacher called me a walking-talking encyclopedia. I was unusually well-read and a brat about sharing what my plastic youthful brain had absorbed. Was I wise? Hardly.
Wisdom doesn’t come from facts alone. Wisdom requires seeking different perspectives, asking questions, observing role models, and study. Ask Gemini if it is wise, and this is what it says:
“If we define intelligence as the ability to process information, solve logical puzzles, and find patterns, then Gemini is highly intelligent. But wisdom is a different story.”
Human wisdom isn’t based on statistical patterns but rather on lived experiences, reflection, empathy and moral accountability.
AI intelligence is about finding statistical patterns in vast amounts of training data and algorithms programmed to find the right answers.
Human wisdom knows that sometimes there is no one right answer, but possibly many. Human wisdom achieves answers through understanding, judgment, knowledge, intelligence and a moral compass. Wisdom is often learned from making mistakes and not repeating them. In some sense, it is the scientific method applied to thoughtful daily living.
Ask Gemini if it practices discernment, and the answer it gives is “No.”
At best, an AI can create “the appearance of discernment.” That’s why, when asked a question, an AI can end up going down a rabbit hole to produce conclusions that seem reasoned but represent poor and often dangerous results. That’s why befriending an AI and asking it for advice can lead to a tragedy like the interactions between ChatGPT and an 18-year-old that led to the killing of eight people in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, on February 10, 2026.
Human discernment involves consequential thinking, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of potential decisions, and a pregnant pause before articulating a response. AIs don’t do this.
Discernment doesn’t arrive from wisdom alone or accumulated facts read in books. It comes out of human interactions and life experiences that include mistakes and teachable moments. It involves curiosity, empathy, humility and the ability to recognize cognitive biases picked up from the social groups and individuals with whom you interact. Discernment involves admitting being wrong and revising ensuing behaviours.
Although an AI like ChatGPT claims that it can exhibit faulty reasoning when responding to questions, it cannot discern its error from an emotional state, but rather from its training and human-engineered code. In other words, faulty “information in” leads to faulty “information out.” No blaming the AI for its implied lack of moral compass.
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]]>His work with scientists and experience in risk communications have served him well in his work as a science communicator, promoting evidence-based decision-making and debunking the disinformation makers.
Today, his article in the Science Literacy Project, formerly the Genetic Literacy Project, includes 12 messages for science communicators that provide common-sense reasoning to counter misconceptions, fear, and the doubt spread by those who mislead the public on science, health and environmental issues. If no one comes readily to mind, see the picture below:
RFK Jr’s disinformation preceded his rise to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He has turned measles, a childhood disease that had disappeared, into a health hazard in the U.S. and other countries. His anti-vaccine messaging and policies are reducing the number of people getting vaccinated in the United States. It is particularly disturbing in terms of the growing number of children who are not being vaccinated to protect them from vaccine-preventable diseases. He has singlehandedly defunded mRNA vaccine research in the United States. mRNA vaccines have played a preeminent role in containing COVID-19 during the recent global pandemic.
The following table shows the negative impacts of his disinformation campaigns around the world:
| Country / Region | Affected Diseases | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| United States (national; specific states: Texas, New Mexico, others) | Measles, polio (risk), and general childhood vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs) | Rising measles outbreaks and localized deaths have been tied to increased vaccine hesitancy and permissive messaging; experts warn that polio vaccination coverage declines increase the risk of the disease re-emerging. |
| Samoa | Measles | Investigations and reporting link anti‑vaccine campaigning (including high‑profile visits and messages) to a collapse in vaccine coverage before the deadly 2019 measles outbreak that killed many children. |
| Other Pacific island nations | Regional vulnerability increased where external misinformation amplified local hesitancy and weakened coverage. | |
| Certain U.S. communities/localities with low vaccine uptake | Measles, whooping cough (pertussis), other VPDs | Local clusters with preexisting hesitancy saw disproportionate outbreaks after amplification of anti‑vaccine messaging sites. |
| International low‑coverage influenced by U.S. policy | Measles, polio, and broader routine immunizations | Public‑health experts warn that erosion of U.S. leadership and funding or rhetorical support for anti‑vaccine views could indirectly reduce program effectiveness abroad, risking routine immunization gains. |
| Canada (influencing policy and R&D exposure in some provinces) | Drops in the percentage of Canadians being vaccinated for influenza, RSV and COVID-19. | Commentaries and reporting flagged risks from defunding or policy shifts affecting mRNA program support and public confidence in vaccines. |
(Information source: Perplexity.ai)
The Internet has made access to information universal. That includes the latest information about science and nonsense. David’s mission is to create simple, clear, reliable, common-sense reasoning for public consumption. He tackles misinformation and disinformation head-on to allay public fear and doubt. The goal is not to confront but to reassure.
Here are 12 messages to share for those who write and communicate science to the public. I promise to use more of them in future postings to the Techso Mogro site.
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]]>The post Peter Diamandis Shares What Our AI World Might Be By 2028 – Part 1 appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>There is no doubt that AI is changing the way we interact with our digital world, becoming the interface between us and the apps we use. But Peter is talking about much more in the near future.
The adoption of AI by app developers is happening at such a rapid pace that its societal impact has yet to be fully understood.
Peter notes that AI will be no different than other transformative technologies that have become the background of our lives. For example, the telephone was miraculous in 1900 and invisible by 1950. The Internet was astonishing in 1995 and ambient by 2010. AI will follow the same arc, but compressed into a fraction of the time.
I have adapted Peter’s mindshare and divided it into several parts for subscribers to the Techso Mogro. Let me know whether you agree or disagree with this future vision as he describes it. Is he overselling AI, or describing our near-future reality?
PETER’s Prediction: In the next 2 to 3 years, AI will become ubiquitous, always on, always enabling, something that surrounds you, something that acts on your behalf, something you stop noticing, the same way you stopped noticing electricity in the walls of your home.
For 15 years, Peter has been talking about the day every human will have their own butler, like Jarvis in the Tony Stark Iron Man movies. Your AI-equivalent Jarvis will access all your data, interactions and be clued into your desires.
The benefits of this will outweigh privacy concerns because the value will be simply too enormous to ignore.
Peter describes how he recently upgraded Skippy, his OpenClaw AI agent, connecting it to everything possible: iMessage, WhatsApp, Google Drive, Calendar, email, Granola, and all of his files, set up within an Andrej Kaparthy-style second brain. He describes this AGI sharing moment as palpable and accelerating.
Here’s what it means. Peter’s AI, which I call Jarvis, since he references the Tony Stark movie’s AI, can now:
Peter’s Jarvis knows all of the above. It is no longer an AI chatbot, but rather, Peter’s chief of staff.
When Peter finishes breakfast and heads to the front door for work, Jarvis knows his schedule. Jarivs sees where he is going and summons a Cybercab before he takes one step outside. But there’s more. Since Jarvis cross-referenced Peter’s Oura ring data, it notes that he has not slept well. So the summoned Cybercab has reclining seats for a restorative nap during Peter’s commute. Peter has never asked for any of this or even thought about it, but Jarvis has, and adjusted the world to conform to Peter’s needs.
Peter has an upcoming board meeting today. Jarvis has read all the documents in Peter’s files and has provided a summary with talking points. Jarvis has pre-scheduled a 10-minute call with Peter’s CFO because of a discrepancy in the Second Quarter numbers that needs resolution before the meeting.
Meanwhile, Peter wakes up from his Cybercab nap with his presentation draft already prepared. No prompt. No request. Just done. This shift from an AI Peter talks to, to one that acts on his behalf before he asks, is revolutionary.
Today, when you and I walk into a room in our home or at work, we tweak it to meet our needs. We turn on the lights and adjust the thermostat. At work, we turn on computers. At home, maybe a television or audio system. We make ourselves comfortable.
In this new AI world, Jarvis senses Peter’s home and workplace. Jarvis knows biometric feeds and uses knowledge of his preferences to:
Even Peter’s food regimen can be anticipated.
Jarvis adjusts Peter’s diet to his physiological needs, taste profile, and blood chemistry.
Jarvis knows when Peter plans to work out and adds extra protein and creatine to his lunch.
There is no menu, no guessing, and no asking. The meal Peter eats has been dialled in to his biochemistry.
With Jarvis, Peter’s home has become a biological dashboard, an environment that responds in real-time to what his body needs. A living space that literally keeps him healthier.
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]]>So what did I say? I described AI as a useful information aggregator when asked the right sequence of questions. The information I receive follows a chain of discovery used by AI. It is not reasoning as we humans know it, but rather an accumulation based on word associations. As a result, any information an AI provides me is subjected to a confirmation of the “facts” using the 3-source reporting methodology made famous by the movie, “All the President’s Men.”
Umair has written what follows for those who write for web applications. In truth, however, his words apply to anyone who aspires to write prose, whether fact or fiction, and use the online digital resources that have replaced endless hours researching through library card catalogues.
Enjoy the read!
Something quietly extraordinary happened on the Internet in the past two years. A study published in early 2026 has found that over 74% of web content now contains AI-generated material. This statistic should make every human writer stop and think.
We are no longer competing with other writers. We are competing with machines that can produce 10,000 words in the time it takes us to finish our morning coffee.
But here is the irony: The arrival of AI has never made human writing more valuable. The question is simply whether you know what to do with that value and how to deliver it in a way no language model can replicate.
What follows is for anyone who writes content for the web, whether you are a blogger, a content strategist, or a journalist. I offer it as a guide to help not only with how to survive upon the arrival of AI, but also how to thrive with it.
Before you can differentiate yourself, you need to be honest about what AI does well. Modern large language models — GPT-4.0, Claude, Gemini and others, are genuinely excellent at:
The dirty secret of the content industry is that most SEO articles, product descriptions, and generic blog posts fall squarely into this category. If your writing is primarily structured information delivery with no original perspective, current AIs can do it faster and cheaper.
“The question is not whether AI can write. It already can. The question is whether AI can think, experience, and feel — and the answer, in 2026, is still no.”
This is the most powerful weapon in a human writer’s toolkit: lived experience.
AI models are trained on existing text. They have never walked into a data centre, interviewed a stressed startup founder at midnight, attended a product launch, or felt the specific anxiety of publishing original content.
Instead of writing: “Agentic AI is transforming enterprise workflows by automating multi-step processes.”
Write: “Last month, I watched a mid-sized logistics company replace three weeks of manual invoice reconciliation with a single AI agent, and then watched the CFO quietly cry with relief. That is what agentic AI actually looks like when it lands.”
The first sentence could have been written by ChatGPT. The second could only have been written by a human who was in the room.
According to research from the Reuters Institute, readers are significantly more likely to trust and share content containing original reporting and first-person observations.
AI is systematically cautious. It hedges. It presents both sides. It avoids controversy. This is by design. Language models are trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, which often means they produce content that is perfectly balanced and perfectly forgettable.
Human writers who take a clear, defensible stance on something, even a controversial one, create content that is shareable, debatable, and memorable. The goal is not to be provocative for its own sake, but to have a genuine point of view that your reader can react to.
“Depth over frequency. One well-researched, opinionated piece that challenges conventional wisdom will always outperform ten polished summaries of what everyone already knows.”
This aligns with what Google’s Helpful Content guidelines increasingly reward: content that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). The Experience component, added specifically in 2022 and reinforced since, is something AI fundamentally cannot fake.
One of the clearest ways to produce content that AI cannot replicate is the interview with a real person and the citing of primary sources.
AI models scrape the web. They cannot call an expert, attend a conference, or request a comment from a company spokesperson.
Even a single original quote from a real expert transforms a generic article into something a reader cannot get from an AI summary. It is the difference between a Wikipedia entry and a piece of journalism.
The writers who will thrive in 2026 are not the ones who refuse to use AI — they are the ones who use it strategically while keeping their human judgment at the center of the work.
This approach keeps you in the creative driver’s seat while using AI to handle the parts of writing that are genuinely tedious. The result is work that is faster to produce, but still unmistakably human.
It is tempting to see AI writing tools as threats to human creativity. A more useful framing is this:
AI is raising the floor of writing quality across the entire Internet, which means the bar for content that actually stands out has never been higher or more rewarding to clear.
The writers who will matter in 2026 are the ones who write from a place AI cannot reach: Real experience, genuine opinion, sources, and intellectual honesty. These qualities have always been the foundation for great writing. AI simply makes them more visible and more valuable than ever before.
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]]>Now, the term is being applied to business as AI transforms how it is done. The term is “Organizational Singularity,” which is the theme of the latest Metatrends newsletter from Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Singularity University and the XPrize.
Peter sees the emergence of AI in business as both disruptive and revolutionary. Humanity has faced multiple revolutions from our emergence as hunter-gatherer, erect-walking intelligent primates, to where we are today. Here is a list:
Organizational Singularity
Characterizing the organizational singularity. Peter calls it “the inversion nobody predicted.” What does he mean?
The Organizational Singularity changes businesses, working from the top down. This challenges our ideas of how automation impacts business.
Why?
Organizational Singularity will pose a greater challenge to white-collar rather than blue-collar employees. The latter group will be threatened more by automation and AI-enhanced humanoid robots.
AI’s ability to replace white-collar jobs in middle management represents the dehumanizing threat. The work of 20 will conceivably now be done by one. In this scenario, middle managers are most at risk, replaced by AI agents, each subscribed to for $20 per month.
AI agents will speak and understand multiple languages, and manage scheduling, production, logistics, delivery, invoicing, and customer service.
Paint this picture: A single human employee will supervise 20 AI agents, all capable of outcompeting former human employees, and doing it at a fraction of the cost.
We are talking about shrinking payroll by a factor of 50, from $20,000 monthly, to $20 times 20, or $400.
Business owners and senior managers salivate at the prospect of cost savings that will accompany the organizational singularity.
Our traditional view of big corporations in the 21st century includes glass towers, central and branch offices, all places where thousands to tens of thousands gather and work. That is, until COVID-19, which changed the paradigm. Suddenly, those glass towers were empty, and employees began working remotely, usually from home.
Today, business and government, in the post-pandemic world, are trying to herd remote workers back into those glass towers. But wait, what if AI agents replace much of the workforce? With AI agents, even the glass tower is no longer needed. With the onset of the Organizational Singularity, the few remaining humans in senior roles only need slimmed-down facilities, while AI agents do much of the work. The few remaining humans on the payroll will still hold meetings with the space needs of corporations devoted to computing resources populated by AI agents.
The Organizational Singularity will extend beyond the glass tower, impacting factories, warehouses and distribution. The combination of humanoid robots infused with AI plus AI agents will manage every aspect of production. AI-informed autonomous robots will operate warehouses and do the picking and packing. AI-informed self-driving autonomous trucks and drones will handle supply chain responsibilities.
The human workforce in factories and warehouses will shrink as AI agents supervise and coordinate production and distribution. Humanoid robots will work side-by-side with this diminished workforce. Fewer humans will occupy higher-value jobs focused on quality and the maintenance of equipment and robotic companions.
AI agents will work with real-time virtual replicas of the business. These replicas are called digital twins. For AI agents, the digital realm is their home. There, they can test new scenarios and implement operational changes before replicating them in the physical world. Through digital twin interactions, AI agents will redefine how corporations operate, accelerate the learning curve, increase innovation, implement new operations, improve timelines and build new products.
If I were a senior manager in a business that adopts AI agents and digital twins, I’d be looking over my shoulder, because other than a boss, there’s no need to apply for a job, because no humans will be needed.
What are the short and long-term implications of the arrival of the organizational singularity?
A surplus of displaced humans, representing as much as 75 to 80% of the workforce, will pose a significant social problem for governments. Hopefully, this is a short-term problem that companies and governments can address through unemployment insurance, retraining, upskilling, universal basic income (UBI), and new startup funding programs.
If mature businesses can dehumanize their workforces and still succeed, what will stop some with good business concepts who lost their jobs from starting new minimalist companies built from the beginning with AI agents and a few human employees?
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]]>This March, I read lots of articles on the history of the Middle East, trying to explain Iran, the Arab nations, Israel and the United States strategic interest in the region. The word drama defines what has been happening over the last month. This drama has also involved people dying, many civilian bystanders to the conflict. A war to decapitate the leadership of a country that has recently seen massive protests on its streets, and that has been aspiring to build nuclear weapons, has been targeted.
All this has happened during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and a few weeks before Easter and Passover. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Jew, Muslim or Christian; the events we are witnessing are sobering and having a deleterious effect on more than those living in the Middle East.
I know you are used to me writing about science, technology and the future, but the geography and history I studied in university focused on the Middle East. It remains an area I continue to research and study to this day.
So many voices have weighed in on the current war. That’s why I thought a historical context might be of value.
Those who practice any of the three monotheistic faiths originating from the Middle East see the history of its conflicts through different-coloured lenses. What many may not know is that these three current antagonists, Iran, Israel and America, were once steadfast allies.
How so?
Iran was always coveted for its oil fields. That’s what drew America and Britain to it in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1953, however, America and Britain became alarmed when the Iranians democratically elected a government that was deemed anti-Western and a threat to their economic interests. In a coup, the two overthrew the government to reinstate the monarchy under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. For this, the Shah granted expanded oil concessions. The 1979 Islamic Revolution ended the Shah’s reign and America’s presence in the country, with the U.S. embassy staff held hostage. Iran called America the “Great Satan.”
The story for Israel and Iran was different. Both shared common Arab neighbouring enemies. Why Iran saw its Arab neighbours as enemies is explained in the next section of this essay. Nevertheless, Iran was among the first nations to recognize Israel in 1950 against the protests of its Arab neighbours. Iran also supplied Israel with oil. It supported Israel during the wars in 1967 and 1973. Israel supplied technical and military assistance and expertise, as well as security intelligence, to the Shah’s government. With the 1979 revolution, Iran’s rulers declared Israel the “Little Satan.”
So, why are neighbouring Arab countries Iran’s enemies? The story begins at the very beginning of Islam in the 7th century CE. When Muhammad died, two competing groups claimed leadership of the “umma,” the community of believers. One of the leaders was chosen from early followers of Muhammad by the general Muslim community, or “Sunna.” Sunni Islam comes from the word sunna.
The second competing group wanted the leadership to devolve to Muhammad’s descendants. There was no direct male heir, but rather Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin, Ali. Shia Islam got its name from “Shiat Ali,” the followers of Ali who chose him to lead the Muslim community.
For a while, there was peaceful coexistence between the rival claimants. Eventually, however, the dispute turned violent with Ali’s son, Husayn, killed and martyred in battle in 680 CE at Karbala in what is modern-day Iraq. The Shia faith symbolically began with that martyrdom.
Currently, nearly 90% of Muslims are Sunni. In Iran, nearly 95% of Muslims are Shia. As Shia, Iran’s Muslim identity reinforces the country’s perception as unique within Islam. The Iranians are direct descendants of the Persian Empire and dynasties that existed a thousand years before Muhammad.
With the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran, under the banner of the Shia faith, has championed a revolutionary version of Islam elsewhere. Iran has doubled down on its position on Israel, backing Palestinian resistance groups. Shia Iran has established military proxies to combat Israel and its Arab Sunni neighbours. It fought a 10-year war with a Sunni-led Iraq. Its proxies include:
When Israel and America launched an aerial and naval war on Iran on February 28, 2026, likely both saw this as a short, sharp conflict to assist an Iranian native uprising to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Precision strikes targeted the leaders of the government with a degree of success. Decapitating those in control was seen as a quick way to produce regime change. What didn’t happen, however, was the collapse of the state. So what were Israel and America going to do next? How would the very much alive Islamic Republic respond to the aggression?
Geography and economics provide the answer. Iran overlooks the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, the outlet to the Arabian Sea. Through the Gulf flows oil, gas, fertilizer, helium, pharmaceutical precursors and more. If Iran could threaten to close the Strait, the country would create an economic chokepoint. That’s exactly what Iran has done. At the same time, the Houthis, who have been firing missiles and launching drones and shipping going through the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea, upped their game.
Two straits, two chokepoints. Oil prices have skyrocketed. Natural gas exports are blocked. With just a few drones and missiles, Iran has stymied the more powerful militaries of its two enemies. Short of sending in troops and seizing control of the two straits, Iran and its Houthis proxy can maintain control of these chokepoints indefinitely.
What’s incredible to me is that a study of the region’s history would clearly have shown the weakness in America’s and Israel’s war strategy. The two straits have been chokepoints, fought over for centuries, going back to the Roman and Persian Empires. The Portuguese in the early 16th century fortified the Straits of Hormuz to protect their trade monopoly in the Indian Ocean. Great Britain’s navies controlled the two straits in the two world wars. With the lessons of history ignored, what will likely be the outcome?
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]]>The number $1.5 trillion was first thrown out by Trump on Truth Social. Trump, who never backs down from a lie and always doubles down once he spouts one, has now given the number wings, with the Pentagon figuring out new ways to spend Americans’ money.
Does the war in Iran justify the $1.5 trillion? Certainly not, although it is adding several billion dollars a day to war spending, and War Secretary Pete Hegseth has recently requested that Congress authorize a $200 billion supplement to the existing nearly $1 trillion annual spending.
If the $1.5 trillion is to be spent, much of it will go to the seriously under-budgeted Golden Dome. This proposed U.S. defence shield to protect domestic land, air and space assets has been given an initial $175 billion price tag. That number appears to be another pulled out of a hat.
Why? Because many of the proposed technologies have yet to be invented, and because the scale of coverage will likely be well beyond the country’s capacity to implement.
To stop incoming drones, missiles, and bombs, current interceptor technologies won’t cut it. No defence research or science laboratory has yet to create Star Trekkian shields.
Shielding all of American airspace isn’t the same as putting an Iron Dome over a tiny country like Israel. Iron Dome, despite press accolades, has had limited success protecting a land mass of 20,770 square kilometres (a little over 8,000 sq. miles). It consists of 10 Iron Dome batteries designed to protect populated areas covering 155 square kilometres (60 sq. miles) each. That’s why we see newspaper reports that Iranian and Hezbollah missiles are killing Israeli civilians. The reason is simple. Iron Dome has too many holes.
U.S. defence experts, when considering an equivalent to Israel’s limited Iron Dome, describe a system with a minimum of 10 to 20 times the density of coverage to cover America’s urban areas. That leaves most of the rest of the country, amounting to more than 5 million square kilometres (3 million sq. miles), without a defensive shield.
There is no chance that the proposed $1.5 trillion will cut it in implementing the Golden Dome. The last time the U.S. government considered something like it was back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
Reagan called it Star Wars. Its real name was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In 1980’s dollars, the never-built SDI budget estimates varied between $170 and $540+ billion.
The current U.S. defence budget sits at around $895 billion without the $200 billion Hegseth funding request. That puts the number over $1 trillion annually. Now add planned Golden Dome expenditures.
The proposed war budget of $1.5 trillion is hard enough to contemplate. But the numbers described above add trillions more, costs that will fall on an America with an increasingly ageing population and many other priorities.
Is this a price worth paying to feed the ego of a malignant narcissist President?
What sane and rational American would see the Golden Dome as a good investment? What does it say about the current nuclear deterrent, supposedly the shield built to protect the country from enemies?
Annual maintenance expenditures for America’s nuclear deterrent today amount to $40 billion annually. With modernization underway, the nuclear deterrent budget is being topped up annually by $60 billion until the mid-2030s.
Consider the Pentagon’s own assessment of 1% likelihood of using the nuclear deterrent in a future war. That’s $100 billion spent annually for a defence that would only be used after an enemy’s first strike because its deployment is guided by the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).
Some at the Pentagon argue that the Golden Dome would be a substitute for the current nuclear deterrence strategy. Build a protective shield over the country, and nuclear weapons will no longer be a threat.
Reality suggests a very different scenario. Building the Golden Dome could be the invitation for an enemy first strike before its full deployment. If that were the case, then the Golden Dome would make Americans less safe, and for the rest of us, make life as we know it even more precarious.
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]]>China in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere and Russia in Eurasia are carving the planet into geopolitical spheres and circling one another like boxers in the ring. Meanwhile, humanity continues to consume the sum total of Earth’s resources every three months. This is unsustainable.
When I received a telephone call a few days ago from a friend in the Liberal Party of Canada from a neighbouring riding, (full disclosure, I am a Policy Chair for the Party here in my home riding in Oakville, Ontario), he asked me if I wanted to join a group of Liberals concerned with the current state of geopolitics and wanting to create a new narrative, I said yes.
The latest war in the Middle East involves the United States, Israel and Iran, as well as the latter’s neighbours, who are being dragged into it. This has happened not more than a few days after President Trump chaired the first meeting of the Board of Peace for Gaza and Palestine. This new conflict is costing more than a billion-dollars-a-day. The goal appears to aim at changing the Middle East status quo, but it will likely do nothing more than cause death and destruction, followed by a massive rebuilding effort without resolution, leading to future violent outbreaks. War in the Middle East appears to be an endless cycle.
Meanwhile, China keeps building a nuclear arsenal and navy to bully neighbours in the South China Sea, and to assert its hegemony in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean. China talks about reuniting Taiwan with the mainland, if not peacefully, then by force. Taiwan’s supporters remain steadfast in defence of the island’s independence. The unanswered question remains. Will this spark the next world war?
Then there is the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which appears to have no end in sight. Russia’s “police action” is more than 4 years old. Today, the frontlines of the conflict resemble the Western Front in World War I. Ukraine is supported by NATO countries and the European Union. With the front inching in metres rather than kilometres, the static land war has turned into a bloody grind. Where the action lies is in the air with drone swarms, missiles and glide bombs dispensed upon enemy targets, both military and civilian. It is the biggest Eurasian land war since World War II. That it hasn’t gone global is more about the fear of Russia’s nuclear capacity leading to a global Armageddon.
Israel has been using this latest Middle East conflict to re-engage Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. It is a continuation of the war initiated by Hamas in its attack on Israel in October 2023, followed by the latter’s subsequent retaliation in Gaza. Gaza’s status, the future of Hamas, Hezbollah, and a weakened Iran, remain up in the air. Meanwhile, in a strange twist, Iran’s latest response to the United States and Israel is to align more Arab countries with them to stop Iranian attacks. Israeli weapon systems are now being used in Arab countries to combat Iranian attacks.
The first two world wars featured identifiable combatants. World War I had its Triple Entente (Britain, France, and Russia), joined by Italy, Japan and the United States, facing the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire).
In World War II, the Allies (Britain and the Commonwealth, France and its overseas empire, and China) were joined by the USSR after it was attacked, and the United States, even later after Pearl Harbor, faced the Axis (Germany, Italy and Japan). These combatants could be identified by cause, ideology, and goals.
That cannot be said about wars today, a long and growing list, as you can see below:
Today, we have a Great Power struggle emerging involving the United States, Russia and China. These are the national players of future global conflicts.
Wars in the 20th century and earlier were fought to control land and resources. In World War II, Germany sought Lebensraum while Japan sought to establish a Europe-free East Asian Prosperity Sphere. Will we see 21st-century wars follow a similar path, carving out spheres of influence?
Another player in future global conflicts is not a country. It is climate change which will exacerbate scarcity and disrupt economies.
A closer look provides a glimpse of the struggle that lies ahead.
It is hard to describe Trump as a peacemaker, although he craves the Nobel Peace Prize.
His “America First” policies pose threats to both his adversaries and allies. He has reasserted the 19th-century hegemonic Monroe Doctrine, threatens to seize Greenland from Denmark, and questions NATO’s purpose, challenging members to spend more on their militaries.
Trump displays revised American maps showing Canada as the 51st state. He threatens to invade Mexico to quell the drugs coming across the border.
Where will all of this posturing take America? With Trump having three years left in his mandate, how many more allies will he target?
What form of “manifest destiny” will drive his next ambitions?
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President, is the Trump of Russia with a dose of more cunning. He wants to restore the post-World War II Soviet empire. He has referred to the collapse of the USSR as the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
Are his territorial ambitions limited to reabsorbing Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus and the Baltic states? Will it end there, or will the Central Asian republics be fair game, as well as the nations of the former Warsaw Pact?
His willingness to play the nuclear card makes his threats more sinister.
Xi Jinping sits alone atop China. It is his vision to reunite Taiwan with the mainland. He is behind China’s industrial, economic and trade strategies. He seeks control of the South China Sea, asserting exclusive sovereignty over its waters and resources.
China’s “no limits” alliance with Russia is Xi’s policy. It secures China’s northern border, gives the country access to discounted Russian energy, and counterbalances the future threat from a rearming Japan and America’s vague assurances to defend Taiwan.
China’s nuclear arsenal and rapidly expanding navy represent future points of conflict with America, reminiscent of Japan’s naval expansion before World War II. If that history lesson isn’t enough, then China should look to the guns of August 1914 that began World War I, started by a naval arms race between Germany and Britain to build ever-more Dreadnought-class battleships.
The last conflict accelerator is climate change. Its influence in 21st century conflict is already profound, and many climatologists recognize that the next El Niño event may prove to be not just a global warming but also a conflict amplifier.
The next El Niño will begin later this year. Past climate data shows that the last half-decade, even during La Niñas, presents an alarming trend. We are experiencing the warmest temperatures recorded since the mid-19th century, and they continue to climb.
In studying the past through the lens of climate change, we now know that climate variability plays a critical role in conflict. A world heating up acts like a conflict accelerator and risk multiplier.
Here is a past example that I have previously described on this blog site. It involves the Roman Empire with new paleo-climate evidence explaining the impetus behind tribes from Central Asia migrating to the edges of the Roman Empire in the 2nd, 3rd and 5th centuries. It turns out, climate change was the driver. Now, classical historians see climate change pressures as key to explaining the Western Roman Empire’s disintegration in the 5th century.
A more contemporary example can be found in today’s Africa. Here, evidence shows the role increasing temperatures are playing in disrupting the African nations of the Sahel. Climate change is causing crop failures, droughts, food shortages, freshwater scarcity, and disease outbreaks. These conditions are linked to rising violence and civil wars across the Sahel, to the tragedies in Sudan’s Darfur, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Climatologists express concern that the next El Niño could drive mean global temperatures well above the 1.5°C (2.7°F) acceptable lower threshold agreed to by signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement.
One can hope that instead of being a conflict accelerator, it speeds up mitigation efforts to tackle wildfires, crop failures, food and water shortages and the spread of vector-borne diseases. Then, climate change can be seen as a de-escalator of conflict and an accelerator to transition from carbon energy to renewables. Instead of conflict, our collective efforts can focus on projects to reduce climate change, rather than on conflicts that point to a darker 21st-century future.
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