Artificial Intelligence?
THIS PAGE WAS LAST TOUCHED ON, ON SEPTEMBER 27TH, 2026
*.Notes on A.I. by Roman Kowalczuk.*
“Washington and Beijing will soon discover that putting A.I. in the hands of every person and robot on the planet will super-empower bad people to levels no law enforcement agency has ever faced.”
-- writing in the New York Times last fall, Thomas L. Friedman said that bad guys are always early adopters
Also, WIRED magazine contributor Steven Levy raised questions about A.I. safety in the wake of the dust-up between the Pentagon and Anthropic.
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Check out this book review: .https://ai-frontiers.org/articles/summary-of-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies.
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2026 - September
“As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind” - an important review in the New York Times on Sunday ... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/tech ... ation.html
This item is archived at https://archive.is/GsQuE
Anthropic CEO calls for a slowdown of artificial intelligence development - www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/technology/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai-slowdown.html
Wednesday July 8 - the New York Times had a rare mention of A.I. and housing prices (at least at the high end) - in San Francisco 144 houses have sold this year for $1 million or more over their asking price. That’s an 18-fold increase from the first half of last year, one of many signs of the area’s scalding hot housing market.
According to the Times, thousands of tech workers are expected to rake in millions when OpenAI and Anthropic hold initial public offerings over the next year or so. Buyers expect home values to skyrocket, sellers are asking for pre-I.P.O. stock as payment, and landlords are pushing out tenants, betting that wealthier ones will show up.
2026 - May
Privacy commissioners were up in arms about OpenAI two months ago... there was a report that was supposed to come out circa Wed. May 6
March
"Ontario's A.I. Economy" - huh?? Stephen Crawford apparently talked up tech and networked computers at the Empire Club - during a period when the legislative assembly was adjourned. It took them a few days to post Crawford's speech to Youtube.
CBC Radio's "Day Six" program had a headline: "The case for a public, made-in-Canada A.I."
April: SpaceX plans to launch one million satellites to power orbital AI data center - https://archive.is/gvE9S
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Brian Tyler Cohen posts scary-sounding interview with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders circa March 8th. Link = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDsrnYoW4qg
February: Canadian federal A.I. minister Evan Solomon expresses concern over reports of OpenAI's process, following the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
See "OpenAI did not mention Tumbler Ridge shooter’s posts in meeting with B.C. officials day after mass shooting: province" in the Globe and Mail, Sat. Feb. 21st
The URL for that item was https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-tumbler-ridge-openai-rcmp-disclosure... It is archived at https://archive.is/ZbUxx
January: Queen's Park Observer writer Sabrina Nanji posted notes from a chat she had on the subject of the province of Ontario's guidelines on A.I... Jan. 28 was "Data Privacy Day". Nanji had previously mused about a new ministerial position in Ontario (ergo a Ministry of A.I. Guidance?) back in December. I don't think there's been much in the local news about guidance since Rachel Chernos Lin's summer 2024 letter to the province... this was of course back when Chernos Lin was chair of the Toronto District School Board - coincidentally that was just before she jumped to city council before the Ontario government took over the TDSB.
Google Corp. started to push out its "Gemini" A.I. module in the New Year - for instance when I searched for the federal/provincial housing forum after Ontario housing minister Rob Flack posted on Instagram, Gemini was quick to put together a summary. On January 16 a feature that allows users to opt in to having Gemini read your entire e-mail database made the daily news summary podcast in the New York Times.
Late September 2025: a new book on Amazon's U.S. pages: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. This item was prominently displayed at Indigo... it starts off with the author underscoring his strong links to OpenAI people.
The sub-file where Google's Gemini service describes itself has been updated a bit. Note that Gemini did not mention OpenAI, and in turn Karen Hao's book Empire of A.I. did not mention Gemini, back in January 2025.
The Toronto Public Library has a tutorial going, about A.I. - see https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/using-the-library/computer-services/learnai/ai-learning-circles.jsp
----------
CBC Radio hosted a wide-ranging discussion about "AGI" circa July 21, 2025. "AGI" meaning not rent increases as per ACORN and the FMTA, but rather Artificial General Intelligence.
Commenters said that it was all a fiction ‒ ergo "timelines" that are all the rage in the chatterverse are all illusory ‒ and that nobody is making any new money off of this stuff. Which casts doubt on its future.
Another point that was raised is that big tech organizations are not doing very well in the planning and ethics department: one guy mentioned a survey that included all of the big players (like Meta and Microsoft say) and none of them scored very well. The whole broadcast seemed to hove towards caution and clarity as the world works towards establishing guardrails. See their web page
I should note that in the months of June and July 2025 I had Google's "Gemini" artificial intelligence service provide several articles - everything from phpBB and nuclear reactors to the Council of the Federation, ergo the group of provincial premiers and First Nations reps that met in Huntsville in July.
Apparently the "OpenAI" company or syndicate or consortium introduced a modified ChatGPT module in mid-August. "GPT-5" has the emotions turned down a bit? See this WIRED magazine item: https://www.wired.com/story/gpt-5-doesnt-dislike-you-it-might-just-need-a-benchmark-for-empathy
----------
EARLIER 2025 NOTES
So what's next, in A.I. for urban dwellers?
Assuming Toronto is not invaded by our neighbour to the south, I suppose my main concern is the onset of driverless cars and trains in my area of the city (St. Dennis Drive, across from the Ontario Science Centre) and what will undoubtedly follow, eg. ai-augmented property surveillance (who gets to review the records, and how often?) and ai-generated maintenance reports.
In the new A.I. city, (look up what will be "real"? Will your resumé ever be read by a human, at corporate H.Q.?) going forward, will landlord-tenant tribunal members be an A.I.? (You may want to look up recent Ontario government press releases, or go to web pages like metaworldx.com - the key string here is "digital twins")
----------
April 18, 2025 - your reading list, pertaining to A.I. just got longer with this report from Microsoft's Canadian operation - microsoft.com/en-us/industry/microsoft-in-business/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2024/06/Canadas-Generative-AI-Opportunity-White-Paper-FINAL-English.pdf
----------
Did you catch the first two global A.I. summits, last year (2024)? In the second week of February the New York Times had a guy in Paris for the third conference; he suggested that the first two events were much more focused on the potential risks and harms of advanced A.I. systems.
The Times reporter said that the “gloom and doomers” had been sidelined this time around, in favor of a “sunnier, more optimistic vision of the technology’s potential”. He suggested that a leaked draft of the official summit statement was panned by A.I. safety groups for paying “too little attention to catastrophic risks”.
See www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/technology/ai-summit-paris-technology.html _or_ (ARCHIVED COPY) .https://archive.is/zOrmU
At the end of February 2025, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was on Bloomberg TV talking about "Alexa Plus".
Also in 2025, Steven Levy posted a note about a third-week-of-March executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump that purports to put an end to U.S. federal data silos. So hoovering up unclassified data will become a one-stop shlopping experience, under the Trump regime?
And there was also an important letter last year, from the then-outgoing TDSB chair Rachel Chernos-Lin to the government of Ontario. See this link - www.tdsb.on.ca/home/ctl/Details/mid/43824.... See also theglobeandmail.com/life/article-kids-artificial-intelligence-parent-reactions-mixed
Additional Resources
The Toronto Public Library has information about A.I. tools and portents:
"Artificial Intelligence" by John Mueller (Wiley "Dummies" series) - https://tpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S234C4606547
Full disclosure: in addition to several sub-page articles, some of the accessory code for some of the underlying features on these web pages was created by generative A.I. systems
Additionally, by early 2026 I had posted several reports and summaries that were made by Google Gemini.... - Roman
...
*.Notes on A.I. by Roman Kowalczuk.*
“Washington and Beijing will soon discover that putting A.I. in the hands of every person and robot on the planet will super-empower bad people to levels no law enforcement agency has ever faced.”
-- writing in the New York Times last fall, Thomas L. Friedman said that bad guys are always early adopters
Also, WIRED magazine contributor Steven Levy raised questions about A.I. safety in the wake of the dust-up between the Pentagon and Anthropic.
----------
Check out this book review: .https://ai-frontiers.org/articles/summary-of-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies.
----------
2026 - September
“As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind” - an important review in the New York Times on Sunday ... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/tech ... ation.html
This item is archived at https://archive.is/GsQuE
Anthropic CEO calls for a slowdown of artificial intelligence development - www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/technology/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai-slowdown.html
Wednesday July 8 - the New York Times had a rare mention of A.I. and housing prices (at least at the high end) - in San Francisco 144 houses have sold this year for $1 million or more over their asking price. That’s an 18-fold increase from the first half of last year, one of many signs of the area’s scalding hot housing market.
According to the Times, thousands of tech workers are expected to rake in millions when OpenAI and Anthropic hold initial public offerings over the next year or so. Buyers expect home values to skyrocket, sellers are asking for pre-I.P.O. stock as payment, and landlords are pushing out tenants, betting that wealthier ones will show up.
2026 - May
Privacy commissioners were up in arms about OpenAI two months ago... there was a report that was supposed to come out circa Wed. May 6
March
"Ontario's A.I. Economy" - huh?? Stephen Crawford apparently talked up tech and networked computers at the Empire Club - during a period when the legislative assembly was adjourned. It took them a few days to post Crawford's speech to Youtube.
CBC Radio's "Day Six" program had a headline: "The case for a public, made-in-Canada A.I."
April: SpaceX plans to launch one million satellites to power orbital AI data center - https://archive.is/gvE9S
----------
Brian Tyler Cohen posts scary-sounding interview with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders circa March 8th. Link = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDsrnYoW4qg
February: Canadian federal A.I. minister Evan Solomon expresses concern over reports of OpenAI's process, following the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
See "OpenAI did not mention Tumbler Ridge shooter’s posts in meeting with B.C. officials day after mass shooting: province" in the Globe and Mail, Sat. Feb. 21st
The URL for that item was https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-tumbler-ridge-openai-rcmp-disclosure... It is archived at https://archive.is/ZbUxx
January: Queen's Park Observer writer Sabrina Nanji posted notes from a chat she had on the subject of the province of Ontario's guidelines on A.I... Jan. 28 was "Data Privacy Day". Nanji had previously mused about a new ministerial position in Ontario (ergo a Ministry of A.I. Guidance?) back in December. I don't think there's been much in the local news about guidance since Rachel Chernos Lin's summer 2024 letter to the province... this was of course back when Chernos Lin was chair of the Toronto District School Board - coincidentally that was just before she jumped to city council before the Ontario government took over the TDSB.
Google Corp. started to push out its "Gemini" A.I. module in the New Year - for instance when I searched for the federal/provincial housing forum after Ontario housing minister Rob Flack posted on Instagram, Gemini was quick to put together a summary. On January 16 a feature that allows users to opt in to having Gemini read your entire e-mail database made the daily news summary podcast in the New York Times.
Late September 2025: a new book on Amazon's U.S. pages: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. This item was prominently displayed at Indigo... it starts off with the author underscoring his strong links to OpenAI people.
The sub-file where Google's Gemini service describes itself has been updated a bit. Note that Gemini did not mention OpenAI, and in turn Karen Hao's book Empire of A.I. did not mention Gemini, back in January 2025.
The Toronto Public Library has a tutorial going, about A.I. - see https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/using-the-library/computer-services/learnai/ai-learning-circles.jsp
----------
CBC Radio hosted a wide-ranging discussion about "AGI" circa July 21, 2025. "AGI" meaning not rent increases as per ACORN and the FMTA, but rather Artificial General Intelligence.
Commenters said that it was all a fiction ‒ ergo "timelines" that are all the rage in the chatterverse are all illusory ‒ and that nobody is making any new money off of this stuff. Which casts doubt on its future.
Another point that was raised is that big tech organizations are not doing very well in the planning and ethics department: one guy mentioned a survey that included all of the big players (like Meta and Microsoft say) and none of them scored very well. The whole broadcast seemed to hove towards caution and clarity as the world works towards establishing guardrails. See their web page
I should note that in the months of June and July 2025 I had Google's "Gemini" artificial intelligence service provide several articles - everything from phpBB and nuclear reactors to the Council of the Federation, ergo the group of provincial premiers and First Nations reps that met in Huntsville in July.
Apparently the "OpenAI" company or syndicate or consortium introduced a modified ChatGPT module in mid-August. "GPT-5" has the emotions turned down a bit? See this WIRED magazine item: https://www.wired.com/story/gpt-5-doesnt-dislike-you-it-might-just-need-a-benchmark-for-empathy
----------
EARLIER 2025 NOTES
So what's next, in A.I. for urban dwellers?
Assuming Toronto is not invaded by our neighbour to the south, I suppose my main concern is the onset of driverless cars and trains in my area of the city (St. Dennis Drive, across from the Ontario Science Centre) and what will undoubtedly follow, eg. ai-augmented property surveillance (who gets to review the records, and how often?) and ai-generated maintenance reports.
In the new A.I. city, (look up what will be "real"? Will your resumé ever be read by a human, at corporate H.Q.?) going forward, will landlord-tenant tribunal members be an A.I.? (You may want to look up recent Ontario government press releases, or go to web pages like metaworldx.com - the key string here is "digital twins")
----------
April 18, 2025 - your reading list, pertaining to A.I. just got longer with this report from Microsoft's Canadian operation - microsoft.com/en-us/industry/microsoft-in-business/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2024/06/Canadas-Generative-AI-Opportunity-White-Paper-FINAL-English.pdf
----------
Did you catch the first two global A.I. summits, last year (2024)? In the second week of February the New York Times had a guy in Paris for the third conference; he suggested that the first two events were much more focused on the potential risks and harms of advanced A.I. systems.
The Times reporter said that the “gloom and doomers” had been sidelined this time around, in favor of a “sunnier, more optimistic vision of the technology’s potential”. He suggested that a leaked draft of the official summit statement was panned by A.I. safety groups for paying “too little attention to catastrophic risks”.
See www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/technology/ai-summit-paris-technology.html _or_ (ARCHIVED COPY) .https://archive.is/zOrmU
At the end of February 2025, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was on Bloomberg TV talking about "Alexa Plus".
Also in 2025, Steven Levy posted a note about a third-week-of-March executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump that purports to put an end to U.S. federal data silos. So hoovering up unclassified data will become a one-stop shlopping experience, under the Trump regime?
And there was also an important letter last year, from the then-outgoing TDSB chair Rachel Chernos-Lin to the government of Ontario. See this link - www.tdsb.on.ca/home/ctl/Details/mid/43824.... See also theglobeandmail.com/life/article-kids-artificial-intelligence-parent-reactions-mixed
Additional Resources
The Toronto Public Library has information about A.I. tools and portents:
"Artificial Intelligence" by John Mueller (Wiley "Dummies" series) - https://tpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S234C4606547
Full disclosure: in addition to several sub-page articles, some of the accessory code for some of the underlying features on these web pages was created by generative A.I. systems
Additionally, by early 2026 I had posted several reports and summaries that were made by Google Gemini.... - Roman
...