This was by far my biggest post in 2016, and I think it’s fascinating that it took about a decade to happen. But here we are.  Our AI Assisted (Near) Future - Sam Harrelson: In the very near future of compatible API’s and interconnected services, I’ll be able to message this to my AI assistant (saving me hours): “Amy, my client needs a new website.

After writing recently about empathy, I have noticed something predictable beginning to surface in conversations. Some readers assume that defending empathy is the same as defending agreement. Others assume that empathy asks us to suspend judgment, blur convictions, or collapse differences into sentiment. Others hear the word and imagine a soft moralism that refuses conflict altogether. None of that is what I mean.

I’m going to stay out of this conversation/debate, but I do find it immensely fascinating as someone who has published a book on Assyrian artifacts sold and imported into US schools, such as Harvard and Yale, for religious purposes (and 19th-century “Assyromania”)... Real Egyptology? The Public Doesn’t Want to Hear It | Egyptian Streets: No other field that I know of, other than Egyptology, can gather so many pseudo-historians and alleged experts.

The last few days have seen the rise of a curious technical and cultural phenomenon that has drawn the attention of technologists, philosophers, and social theorists alike on both social media and major news outlets called Moltbook. This is a newly launched social platform designed not for human conversation but for autonomous artificial intelligence agents, or generative systems that can plan, act, and communicate with minimal ongoing human instruction.

I’ve had lots of thoughts about Moltbook over the last week of tracking its development pretty closely. I’m sure I’ll share those here, but here’s an interesting development of thought in its own right from Anthropic's co-founder, Jack Clark (given my PhD work is in integral ecology, after all)... Now I’m deep in thought about how our human notion of ecology and ecological ethics extends to whatever this notion of agentic ecology is becoming… agentic empathy, for example?

I’m guessing the plaintiff will walk off with a jury decided major amount of money and we’ll continue to learn just how bad social media platforms are for young (and all) people… and how much these corporations knew that well over a decade ago.  “IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial - Ars Technica…

Still lots of snow so we’re home this morning when we’d normally be at church. Kids grabbed their books and settled in.

Beautiful and stunning powdery snow day here in Spartanburg, SC!

In Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad advances a forceful and, in some respects, understandable claim that empathy, when unbounded, becomes psychologically corrosive and socially destabilizing. It's certainly had an impact on tech-bro podcasts such as Joe Rogan who constantly invokes the work. In Saad’s telling, empathy is a trait that must be regulated lest it undermine individual flourishing and collective coherence.

How Slowing Down Our Attention Changes How We Relate to the Wider World

This is the 4,000th published post on my blog, going back to 2006 (including a couple of starts and stops with various platforms and a few years with a couple jobs where I was not encouraged to have a site). I’ve written around 600,000 words here, which is equivalent to around 10 longer books. I view this as my personal thinking space… sometimes it’s coherent and polished and sometimes it’s a random thought or link to something that I want to share with others to read (and my poor friends and family can only take so many links about randomness in a day).

Granted, I’m 47 and graduated Wofford College in ’00 and Yale Div in ’02 before the iPad or Zotero were a thing… but I still have numerous reading packets from those days and still use them for research (shoutout to TYCO Printers in New Haven for the quality work)… but I endorse this position. Now, I use a combo of “real” books and Zotero for online PDF’s that I don’t have time to print out.

Spartanburg County is staring straight at the kind of development that sounds abstract until it lands on our own roads, substations, and watersheds. A proposed $3 billion, “AI-focused high-performance computing” facility, Project Spero, has been announced for the Tyger River Industrial Park - North.  In the Upstate, we’re used to thinking about growth as something we can see…new subdivisions, new lanes of traffic, new storefronts.

Plasma is not a metaphor, but a problem. We don't learn a great deal about plasma in school, but it certainly exists and is the main component of all the matter in the universe (and I'm writing this as someone who taught AP Physics, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science for almost twenty years in various schools here in the Carolinas!).

The news that the Doomsday Clock now stands at eighty-five seconds to midnight is not, in itself, the most important thing about this moment. The number is arresting, and the coverage tends to amplify its urgency. But the deeper question raised by this year’s announcement is not how close we are to catastrophe. It is how we are learning, or failing, to…

A recent opinion piece in The Hill argues that Democrats should and are beginning to rethink their approach to climate and energy policy. Pointing to renewed support for natural gas infrastructure, oil and gas exports, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, the author suggests that political realism requires prioritizing affordability, job creation, and national security alongside emissions reduction. The argument is presented not as climate denial but as maturity…a necessary correction to what is portrayed as ideological rigidity.

This morning, we woke up to a solid coating of ice and snow here in Spartanburg, SC. The kids are ecstatic, and we have a rare Sunday morning without attending worship at our church. "Snow Days" here in the Southeast USA are one of those rare treats that not only drive people to the grocery store for bread and milk but also remind us of the simple joys of meteorology, family, and bundling up to go make snowpeople and…

Quick backyard pic and play for the kids before the ice storm here in Spartanburg, SC!

Yuck… be careful out there with your location data, folks... TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes | WIRED: TikTok’s change in location tracking is one of the most notable updates in this new privacy policy. Before this update, the app did not collect the precise, GPS-derived location data of US users.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to let the world appear. Not to analyze it. Not to manage it. Not even to care for it (at least not yet). Just to allow the world to show up as something other than an extension of myself. So much of contemporary life trains us in a posture of extraction.

Empathy is often described as a bridge between subjects. One consciousness reaches toward another, imaginatively or affectively, and something like understanding takes place. Even in its more careful phenomenological treatments, empathy is typically framed as relational… a way of accessing the interior life of another while preserving difference. Edith Stein’s account is frequently read in this way, and rightly so.

Good thoughts to ponder here... Let’s Get Down to Earth Again | Reflections: I find myself wondering what Earth would be like if long ago Christians had been content to live simply, care for others, and honor the Earth. By failing to nurture and honor the universal sense of the sacred within all of God’s people, creatures, and creation, the church has missed chances for transformational leadership in the climate crisis. 

Elon Musk announced on X this week that xAI’s “Colossus 2” supercomputer is now operational, describing it as the world’s first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster, with plans to scale to 1.5 gigawatts by April. The comparison offered by others was meant to impress. This single training cluster now consumes more electricity than San Francisco's peak demand. There is a particular cadence to announcements like this.