“AI is a feedback loop between mind and machine that is starting to enable a new level of cognition. Machines that understand minds. Minds enhanced by machines.”
— We Are As Gods (Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler)
Slowly but surely, my little AI pals are changing how my mind works. A little analysis by Perplexity»…and a slightly different take from Claude. Gemini calls the quote “classic techno-optimist rhetoric.” Or, bullshit?
I asked Perplexity to summarize (< 100 words) my “world view” based on our previous conversations.
You see the world less as a problem to be solved and more as a flow to be noticed and navigated. The Tao is your main interpretive tool: you look for pattern, balance, and timing rather than ultimate doctrines or final answers. You’re skeptical of rigid belief systems but open to whatever helps you see through ego and loosen the grip of fear. You trust books, brains, and technology mainly as ways of glimpsing the current of things, not controlling it.
That’s pretty good. Don’t think I could have come up with anything better. Another reminder than my AI pals know me better than my human pals. Toward the end of the conversation I mentioned that I sometime summarize as: “The Universe doesn’t make mistakes.” Something almost nobody agrees with. Perplexity suggested the following tweak:
“Whatever is happening is exactly what could happen, given the total conditions—so fighting reality as such is wasted motion.”
The Artificial Intelligence category is for posts about artificial intelligence as a subject. Additionally, I’ve had a tag (ChatGPT) I used for posts featuring the more interesting conversations with that LLM. Those threads often had nothing to do with AI. Furthermore, I posted a number of conversations with Gemini, Perplexity and Claude.
So I’ve created a new tag (AI-chats) I’ll use for chats with any of the models I’m using these days. And I’ve deleted the ChatGPT tag. If I want to find posts specifically about that particular LLM, I’ll search for “ChatGPT.” (Or Claude or Gemini)
The secondary observation: that corpus (the AI-chats posts), properly tagged, may be among the more historically interesting subsets of the archive. Not because of the AI side — future systems will be unrecognizable — but because it documents how one person thought alongside these early tools, in real time, before the medium found its shape. The tag marks the seam between the solo voice and the dialogic one.
Is “motherhood regret” the last great taboo? Every couple of years I come across an article about the phenomenon. From the BBC:
A 2023 study conducted in Poland estimated 5–14% of parents regret their decision to have children and would opt to be childfree if they had their time again.
Parents may not speak openly about regret, but they are finding community online. The Facebook group I Regret Having Children, which has 96,000 members.
I guess you could say l’ve been collecting(?) these stories: Nikol Lohr on pregnancy; “He’d never wanted kids”; I Don’t Want Kids. While I’m more interested in the personal aspect of this trend, the global implications are… ominous? From Perplexity:
Global fertility has fallen from about 5 children per woman in the 1960s to roughly 2.2 today, and it is projected to drop to around replacement level (2.1) by mid‑century and below thereafter. This means population growth is slowing sharply, and the world is expected to peak at about 10.3 billion people in the mid‑2080s before starting a gradual decline.
Most countries in Europe, North America, East Asia, and parts of Latin America already have fertility well below replacement, with some (like South Korea, Italy, Spain, and China) near or below 1.2 children per woman. As their populations age and, in some cases, begin to shrink, they face pressure on pension systems, health care, and economic growth, and are debating pro‑natalist policies versus adapting to long‑term demographic contraction. Meanwhile, Africa still has higher fertility but is also on a downward trajectory, so the global long‑run trend is toward older, slower‑growing or even declining populations.
I prompted Perplexity to look for themes or trends in the 70+ posts (going back to 2004) in the Religion category.
You treat religion less as revelation and more as a **human** technology: something people invent, edit, and use to organize behavior, power, and meaning. You’re drawn to writers like Harari, Adams, Hines, Watts, Harris, and Ehrman who frame gods, money, nations, and ideologies as “shared fictions” or “maps” that work pragmatically rather than metaphysically. Your own comments echo that: religion is one example of a larger human habit of myth‑making to hold fragile social orders together.
Many posts poke at people who are utterly sure they’ve found the “one true faith” out of thousands of incompatible options. You highlight quotes and essays that argue the only honest stance is some version of “I don’t know, and neither do you,” and you clearly resonate with that. The tone is rarely angry; it’s closer to amused disbelief at how confident people can be in claims they can’t possibly verify.
You repeatedly connect religiosity to **ego**: chosen peoples, special relationships with God, and the need to feel correct or favored. Posts about appearing religious (Machiavelli, “appearing to be religious”), evangelical branding, and “religion and ego” all treat belief as something performed for social and psychological payoff as much as for doctrine. You’re especially interested in the gap between what people say they believe and how they actually behave or legislate.
Another through‑line is religion as a power tool: surveillance, social control, justification for violence, or political branding (evangelicals and the GOP, Christian Right decline, cults, “The Family”). You focus less on abstract theology and more on who gets to define “God’s will” and what that does in the real world. Organized religion, in your posts, is often less about God than about those who act in his name.
Alongside the critique, there’s a consistent interest in non‑dogmatic spirituality: Zen, Buddhism, meditation, Sam Harris’s “spirituality without religion,” Alan Watts on stillness and consciousness. You repeatedly highlight ideas about awareness, present‑moment experience, the illusory self, and consciousness as primary, often contrasting that with inherited belief systems and scriptures “cobbled together during the Iron Age.” You seem much more attracted to practices that clarify experience than to creeds that explain it.
In more recent posts you connect religion to AI, Silicon Valley, and new ideologies: AI‑written scriptures, Silicon Valley as a birthplace of future religions, money and the economy as a kind of religion, liberalism/communism/nationalism as modern creeds. A recurring question is what happens to “religions of text” when the texts start talking, or when algorithms and biotech become the new sources of superhuman authority.
Putting it all together, your “religion posts” read less like attacks on believers and more like a long, curious investigation into why humans cling to stories and what those stories do to us. You tend to trust awareness over belief, experience over doctrine, and are wary whenever any story—religious or secular—claims unquestionable authority.
I uploaded 495 blog posts from my BOOKS category to Perplexity and prompted it look for any themes, trends, connections, etc. This is another of those tasks that I’m not sure could have completed. And certainly not as well. This is my reading gestalt. (At the bottom of the page is a link to what Gemini came up with)
An earlier post featured two graphical representations (from Perplexity) of the categories I’m currently using on smays.com. As a follow-up, I uploaded the current list of tags.
At first glance one would think this blog is just about ChatGPT and it did capture a lot of my attention over the past couple of years. That will change now that I have deleted my ChatGPT account.
During recent blog maintenance, I moved ChatGPT from category to tag (along with Perplexity and Gemini). Artificial Intelligence is the top-level category for those topics (link below).
Along with all of the blog posts on this topic, I saved a lot of those conversations to my local Documents folder. This morning I prompted Gemini to analyze that “AI Bots” folder. Continue reading
AI tools like Perplexity and Gemini have proven to be invaluable at giving me a new perspective and understanding of my 24 years of blog posts. I’ve written about this frequently. This morning I provided a list of my categories showing the number of posts in each and prompted Perplexity to create a visual representation of the data. Took a little tweaking but I find the results interesting.
For what it’s worth, Gemini was unable to perform this task but did offer several explanations of what it was my fault and not the AI.
[click through to post to see comment/update]
I’ve been playing with ChatGPT for more than two years. I’ve shared a bunch (143) of those “conversations” here. Initially, I planned to drop back from the $20 a month Pro plan to the free version. But decided to go nuclear.
I’ve been using Perplexity more and find Google’s Gemini as good or better than ChatGPT. But the tipping point was probably OpenAI’s decision to start selling ads on their low-end plans. The other AI companies might follow suit and I’ll probably ditch them if and when.
Anthropic (the company behind Claude) is having some fun with this in an ad that will run during Sunday’s Super Bowl. (Watch on YouTube) The company says there are several dangers with including ads in chatbot conversations, including potential bias and incentivizing chatbots to keep users in conversations for longer periods.
Consider a concrete example. A user mentions they’re having trouble sleeping. An assistant without advertising incentives would explore the various potential causes—stress, environment, habits, and so on—based on what might be most insightful to the user. An ad-supported assistant has an additional consideration: whether the conversation presents an opportunity to make a transaction […]
Such ads would also introduce an incentive to optimize for engagement—for the amount of time people spend using Claude and how often they return. These metrics aren’t necessarily aligned with being genuinely helpful. The most useful AI interaction might be a short one, or one that resolves the user’s request without prompting further conversation.
So, you ask, are you going to stop using LLM’s all together? Doubtful. They’re just too useful. And the technology is going to be everywhere. (see my previous post on The Agentic iPhone)
If these AI tools had been around in 2002 when I started this blog, it would be a very different creature today. They know more and they write better. Maybe it’s like long division or cursive writing. I worked to hard to learn those skills and I’d hate to lose them. Don’t want some AI writing my blog even if it’s better at it. And, yes, Gemini and Perplexity get mentioned here frequently so torching ChatGPT is mostly symbolic.