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What bank ATMs teach us about AI

Editorials and columns

New inventions and technologies, from the lightbulb to the farm tractor to the automobile to the laptop computer to Uber drivers, cause serious job market disruptions. They also cause a backlash, as horse and buggy operators, cab drivers, video rental stores and typewriter makers inevitably predicted chaos and job losses. Artificial intelligence will make life much better and healthier for most people, but it will bring massive disruptions too. What will happen to the people whose livelihoods are jeopardized by what ChatGPT or Claude can do faster, cheaper and better? It is a fair ...

“You may also like”—algorithms and addiction

Editorials and columns

Some of you are digital subscribers of The Alpena News and are reading this column on your cell phone. Imagine that! You can read your hometown newspaper while you are out of the county or country! Technology is truly something! This week, I Facetimed a friend in Australia. Not only did I ...

Class act: A president who knew right from wrong

Editorials and columns

"Don't it always seem to go," Joni Mitchell wrote decades ago, "that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?" Last week's Senate passage of legislation authorizing new sanctions against Vladimir Putin's Russia was much-ballyhooed, but much ado about little: The most meaningful ...

A foreseeable and dire munitions crisis

Editorials and columns

A foreseeable and dire munitions crisis BYLINE: By Rich Lowry --- During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, a defiant Iran starkly demonstrated the limits of American power. Forty-five years later, it is doing the same thing, although in vastly different circumstances. Back then, when ...

No price too high for evading back-to-school shopping

Editorials and columns

In the pantheon of parental duties, shopping for school supplies stands alone. At the tripart crossroads of "least enjoyable," "most expensive" and "least negotiable," it is an intrinsic part of life in late summer, and it has been since I was a kid in the Cretaceous era. I remember it much ...

As our children head back to school, teachers need our support

Editorials and columns

For the past several years, I have enjoyed viewing friends' photos on Facebook of their children heading back to school. Many now have children in college, while some still have kids in high school. My friends often post their kindergarten or elementary school pictures next to the current photos to proudly show how much their children have grown. I can tell by the half grins on some of my friends' kids' faces that they were probably thinking, "Mom, whyyyy do you post these pictures of me every year?" I always find these reactions amusing, but I believe that when they are older, they will ...