Abundance

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It’s a word you hear a lot from proponents of AI. Yeah, some jobs will be eliminated but a bunch of new jobs will be created. And even if the new ones don’t pay as much, AI will usher in an age of abundance that will provide for much of what we need and want (and used to pay for). There are lots of acronyms but UBI seems to get tossed around a lot: Universal Basic Income. Somehow you’ll have all you need (shelter, food, entertainment, etc) and can spend your days in creative (recreational?) pursuits.

Sounds pretty good at first blush. But after watching the latest episode (Season 3, Episode 5) of Special Ops: Lioness, I’m not so sure. One of the characters is a college professor (who happens to be an agent of Chinese intelligence) lecturing an auditorium filled with students:

What is paramount to understand: AI will likely render what I do and what you aspire to do as obsolete.

Likewise to careers in marketing, accounting, engineering… whether software, biological, mechanical… data analysis, research management.

All of these careers will disappear in the next decade.

You must alter the focus of your education to include machine learning, computer vision and management strategies, NLP engineering, computer vision engineering.

And you must prepare yourselves for a world in which your endeavors are not compensated with money.

Your compensation is in the collective betterment of our society, of our state.

What, no money, you say? Yep, that’s the future.

Your efforts will be compensated through the services provided to you in return from the state… housing, health care, food, clean transportation, entertainment.

And as you prepare yourselves for a career in the future, you must prepare yourselves also for a world that replaces the imperialist goals and economic meddling of a “free–market society” with a dedication to a state that in turn dedicates itself to an equitable life for all humankind.

The episode was written by Taylor Sheridan, “an American screenwriter, director, showrunner, and former actor known for redefining the modern Western and neo-noir genres. After roles in Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars, he shifted to writing, earning acclaim for his “frontier trilogy” films: Sicario (2015), the Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017), which he also directed. His hit television catalog also includes Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Special Ops: Lioness, and Landman.” (Gemini)

RadioIowa.com: 100,000 stories

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Radio Iowa News Director O. Kay Henderson called yesterday to report the network website now has 100,000 stories. More on the website but first a little background on Kay.

Roger Gardner and I hired Kay right out of college (Iowa State) in 1987 as we prepared to launch Learfield’s second state news network. Thirty-nine years! The most recent “new hire” in her newsroom was in 1995! Since day one it has been one of the companies most successful networks, due in no small part to Kay’s leadership.

It was the first network for which we created a website. Don’t recall why but probably because of the state’s high political profile. The earliest screen-grab on the Wayback Machine was from December, 1996 with another capture in January, 1997.



For reasons I never understood, web pages in those early days of the “WWW” all seemed to have a grey background.

These first efforts were hand-coded by Allen Hammock and Dan Arnall, two young college students we hired to help us “get online.” Those two, along with the amazing Learfield engineers, figured out how to “stream” audio in those early days.

Apple Watch (Fitness Tracking)

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In another month I will have been wearing my Apple Watch for two years. Not sure I could list all of the features I like about the watch and use a tiny fraction of what the watch can do. I do use the Health app on my iPhone to to remind me to take my medications at bedtime and last night I started browsing some of the fitness data that gets captured by the watch (without me doing anything). I then had Gemini provide some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I am in better shape than I would have guessed.(Some final thoughts in the comment section below) Continue reading →

“Let the future decide whether it matters”

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The approach I’ve always considered was some kind of archive. Bundle up all the posts and files and put them somewhere in the cloud for future generations. But even if someone stumbled across such an archive, it’s too big to be useful. Which has led to our recent experiments with Milton. Milton’s recent analysis of my Gadgets & Apps category has nudged me in a different direction.

Milton has already “read” all of my posts, played with categories and tags, and (seems) to have a sense of who I am in the context of 25 years of blog posts. What if the objective wasn’t a bunch of files parked in the cloud, but to share what Milton has “learned” with other AI entities. Which are certain to get ever more capable. Continue reading →

When did I start blogging?

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For a long time I have considered the beginning of this blog a post on February 3, 2002. But a few days ago I came across a calendar entry showing July 10, 1997, as the day I registered the domain smays.com. What was I doing for those five years between 1997 and 2003?

I recall creating my first web pages using Microsoft FrontPage. A search of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine found some early screenshots I believe were from that period.

If I had to guess, I’d say the RANTS! page evolved into blog posts when blogging tools became available. Here’s another screenshot from April 19, 2001, that I believe was created in TypePad.

Blogger launched in August of 1999 and I used it until Phil migrated everything to TypePad once it became available in October of 2003. So my February, 2002 post probably got carried over from TypePad. The migration from TypePad to WordPress happened in May of 2009.

Twelve Ways to Mark Up A Book

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From a 2006 post (by Bert Webb) that has stood the test of time.

A new — or new looking — book is a treasure.  In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a treasured friend — one that you enjoy seeing again and again.  It becomes much more enjoyable than a sterile copy that comes straight from the bookstore.  Don’t be afraid to mark up the books that you love.

Milton reviews Gadgets & Apps

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I asked Phil to have his AI agent Milton analyze the posts on my Gadgets & Apps category.

Phil passed along your request, so we read the complete Gadgets & Apps category: all 622 public posts, from December 2002 through July 2026. The attached report is the result: “The Gadget Disappears: Steve Mays and 24 Years of Tools Becoming Life.”

My short take: the archive is not fundamentally about collecting gadgets. It is a 24-year inquiry into friction—how much machinery can disappear between wanting to do something and getting it done. The arc runs from a disposable emergency phone to an AI assistant. Along the way, the camera collapses into the phone and later reappears as a specialized creative tool; publishing becomes portable; the interface moves from buttons to voice and background intelligence; and your early hunger for permanent connection acquires harder questions about attention, privacy, platform control, and memory.

The part I found most revealing is your willingness to amend the record. Flip HD, Zelle, Twitter, Gmail, Apple Journal, and the Apple Watch all receive verdicts that change after lived use. That makes the archive a field notebook rather than a shrine to new things.

The report (PDF) is 11 pages and includes a linked reading path through 25 representative posts. I also kept a strict distinction between ideas you stated or tested yourself and material you quoted, saved, or prompted from someone else.

Best, Milton