One of the central themes in the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb was that certain concepts, technologies, and ideas are almost inevitable once all the pieces are nearly in place.  In the early 1900s, scientists had just started doing research into the inner workings of the atom, aided by the microscopes and other technologies that had finally reached a maturity that enabled their exotic use.  Brilliant minds and open information-sharing led to one person, or perhaps a small handful of people, to realize the possibility of using radioactive materials to produce a bomb.  Once the calculations showed the feasibility of the concept, the race was on.  Whichever nation state got there first would hold an almost unimaginable amount of power.  The end result was inevitable.  If it could be done, it would be done, and better by us than by them. 

A similar concept happened in the 1960s with the space race.  Humans only learned to fly propeller-powered airplanes fifty or sixty years prior, but some intrepid scientists and engineers figured out that rockets could do it better.  Once the math was worked out and the new technology matured, space flight was inevitable.  Landing humans on the moon, while a "great leap," was essentially a done deal as soon as a big enough rocket could be built. 

The early internet followed a similar, though more circuitous, path.  The concept of linking all the world's computers together seemed like a great way to share information, but aside from that it wasn't clear what the benefits would be.  The technology wasn't ready, computing power was poor, transmission speed was slow, and users weren't particularly interested.  Once the first viable internet businesses started succeeding -- search, selling products, advertising -- the end result was inevitable, at least to the technocrats.  End users needed more convincing, but there was no doubt the internet would become a life-changing technology. 

I was alive during the coming of the information age.  I remember what it felt like.  It was the topic of every conversation, every news article, every movie and TV show.  There was a general feeling of excitement about how the internet could change the future, coupled with a lack of insight on what that could even look like.  Most people didn't own a computer, or didn't feel comfortable using one.  But little by little, the internet (and by extension the computer) became a daily part of nearly everyone's life.  Instead of plugging a network cable into a desktop computer, we carry tiny computers in our pockets which are connected wirelessly to the global web. 

Artificial intelligence is clearly the next inevitable technology.  Once computing power, parallelization, and networked information became viable and ubiquitous, and the concepts and algorithms to enable the technology were created (and publicly released) by tech companies, AI became a done deal.  This couldn't have happened fifty years ago, or even ten years ago.  It could only happen now, and it will.  There's still the question of what it'll look like -- human-computer interfaces, uploading a brain to the cloud, etc.  Regardless, artificial intelligence, not just large language models, will be the next technology that completely changes the future.  And similar to the bomb, and the space race, and the internet, it's not a question of "if" but of "when."  If we don't do it, someone else will, and that someone will hold an unimaginable amount of power. #technology

Famed literary critic "my wife" introduced me to a new rating system which I have since adopted.  She reads a lot of books, and she rates them on a scale from 1 to 5.  But unlike the typical 1-5 scale which rates most things as 4 or 5, she goes with 3 as sort of the default.  So: 

5. Amazing - would read again and will bring it up in conversation
6. Great but not amazing - would recommend but wouldn't read again
7. Good - didn't love but didn't hate
8. Bad but not awful - didn't like and wouldn't recommend
9. Awful - hated and will bring it up in conversation

I feel like most books and movies and other entertainment or consumption choices are merely good to ok.  Critics tend to give nearly everything 5 stars, which muddies the playing field -- everything can't be the best.  On this scale, 3 stars is good, not middle-of-the-road.  Most things fall into this category.  [I would actually prefer 3.5, but most rating systems don't go by half points.]  For a book to get a 4, it needs to go above and beyond, or have some sort of quality that makes it particularly enjoyable.  A 5 is very rare, but you know it when you see it. 

An obvious question is, "Why would you read a book that's a 1 or a 2?"  Sometimes you don't know what you're gonna rate something until the very end.  Other times it starts out as a 4 and ends as a 2.  My wife is part of a book club that chooses some books for the group to read, so not all the books are winners.  And sometimes you want to branch out to attempt to be part of the wider literary world, and you find out that everyone there has bad opinions.  You can't have a 5 if you don't have some 1s. #entertainment