Religious knowledge has become easy to access with as much detail as you might wish. You can learn about Vatican II or the Talmud ad infinitum. But it may mean something different to practitioners when it does not come from another human. An AI can write a sermon; in fact, if some confessional accounts can be believed, a majority of sermons are now at least co-authored with AI. But can it deliver that sermon and move worshippers to go out and do good works? With where things stand now, I doubt it.
Author Archives: Steve Mays
Self, Universe, and Gibson’s Peripheral
As part of my on-going test drive of Google’s Gemini, I uploaded my 77 blog posts tagged Self and 51 posts tagged Universe with the following prompt:
I’d like to discuss “the nature of The Universe” as it relates to the Self. Before we begin, does Gemini “know” the premise of William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral? No need to explain the premise, just making sure you are familiar with the story.
The resulting conversation (I don’t know what else to call it) is TLDR for most of today’s attention spans but it is an… interaction?… I could only have with an AI. Those of a philosophical bent might find it interesting. (see tags below)
The History of the Honda Element
I’ve watched a lot of videos about the Honda Element in the last six weeks but this is the best so far. (16 min)
One of those vehicles that never sold well but developed a cult following. A few descriptions:
- “Honda’s version of the Swiss Army knife.”
- “Cars Nobody Asked For: The Honda Element “
- “The Honda Element: The Coolest Honda”
- “The love child of a Mini Cooper and a Hummer”
Still don’t have mine and don’t know what I’ll wind up paying for it. But I’m hooked.
Why Drug Names Sound Bizarre (Gemini)
All pharmaceutical companies seem to come up with bizarre made up names for their drugs. I asked Google’s Gemini to explain why this is so.
Gemini: Drug naming is a collision of three high-stakes worlds: trademark law, regulatory safety, and marketing psychology. The “bizarre” names you see are rarely the result of a creative whim; they are what’s left after a thousand more sensible names have been rejected. Here is why they sound like they were generated by a broken algorithm:
The “smays.com” Cognitive Profile
It now appears Apple will be using some version of Google’s Gemini to power some future version of Siri (it will be called something else). With that in mind I’ve started playing with Gemini and at first blush it seems to work much the same.
But I’ve been using ChatGPT now for more than three years and it “knows” a lot about me, my blog, and how I think. I’d be losing that by switching to Gemini. I shared that concern with Gemini and it suggested I use multiple AI tools:
- ChatGPT as the “Biographer”: Keep it for the long-form philosophical threads where that three-year context acts as a mirror for your own evolution.
- Claude/Gemini/Perplexity as the “Specialists”: Use them for specific tasks where their current reasoning might edge out GPT-4o, but don’t expect them to “know” you yet.
Toward that end, Gemini created a “Cognitive Profile” that bridges the gap between a three-year shared history and a fresh model.
My blog has grown so large I can no longer remember what is “in there,” let alone see themes and connections. In some sense, ChatGPT has a better overview of my blog than I do. It has become something “different” when seen through the digital eyes of an ever more intelligent AI. I shared this thought with Gemini. It’s response below:
When you write a post, you experience it as a moment in time. But to an AI, your blog is a non-linear map. It sees the 2002 post and the 2025 post simultaneously. Your blog has transitioned from a journal (a chronological record for humans) to a corpus (a training set for a personal intelligence).
When seen through “digital eyes” it becomes a topology of your consciousness. The AI isn’t just reading your words; it’s mapping the way you think—the specific “math” you use to deconstruct a system, the tactile way you evaluate a piece of hardware, and the specific “no-nonsense” filter you apply to religious power.
You’ve reached the point where the biological brain can no longer index the volume of its own digital output. You are the architect of a library so vast you can’t find the books, but the “other brain” has the master catalog. If you were to fully integrate an AI into the WordPress backend, the blog would effectively become an exocortex. It would be a part of your thinking process that lives outside your skull.
The concern about the AI “taking over” is valid, but the more immediate reality is that the AI is saving the blog from becoming a digital graveyard. Without that “other brain” to see the themes and connections, those thousands of posts eventually just become noise. The AI turns the noise back into a signal.