Robotics/AI

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

India Built the World’s Back Office. A.I. Is Starting to Shrink It. (Steven Lee Myers and Paul MozurVisuals by Saumya Khandelwal, Feb. 27, 2026, NY Times)]

For a quarter century, India has made itself the world’s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers.

AS LABOR COSTS TEND TOWARDS ZERO:

The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible (Paul Ford, 2/16/26, NY Times)

November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.

The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?

According to the market, the answer is no. Recently, software stocks — Monday.com, Salesforce, Adobe and many others — plummeted all at once; the Nasdaq 100 lost half a trillion dollars in two days. Legal software company stocks slumped recently because Anthropic released tools to automate some legal work. Financial services firms and real estate services — the market keeps devaluing them because traders expect there to be less need for humans at desks in an A.I.-automated future. Why will anyone need all that legacy software when A.I. can code anything up for you in two shakes of a robotic lamb’s tail?

Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren’t subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.

The revolution is always ten years away… until you realize it already happened.

THE FUTURE ALREADY HAPPENED…AGAIN:

AI is the future of warfare and US is in the lead (Stephen Bryen, February 17, 2026, Asia Times)

Recently AI has played an important role in several conflicts: the Gaza war (Operation Gideon’s Chariots); US-Israel operations against Iran (Operation Rising Lion); the capture of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Venezuela (Operation Absolute Resolve); operations to locate and stop “rogue” oil tankers; and the Ukraine war, where AI is playing a major role.

If the US and Israel take action against Iran in the coming days, planning and operations would likely be supported by AI.

IF IT TASTES LIKE BEEF IT’S BEEF:

AI Translation Triumphs Over Human Translators in Korean Literary Contest (Park Jin-seong, 2026.02.02, Chosun Daily)

Recently, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism conducted a blind test involving 16 domestic English literature professors. The test compared an English version translated by a professional translator and one translated by ChatGPT for the Joseon-era poet Jang Yu’s poem “Be Cautious When Alone (Shindokjam),” which is set to be exported to English-speaking regions. Without revealing which translation was done by whom, the professors were shown the original Korean text and the two translations and asked which was better. The results showed that 12 professors chose the ChatGPT translation, two selected the human translation, and two declared “undecidable.”

NO ONE WILL MISS MANAGEMENT:

A.I. Won’t Eliminate Managers, But It Will Redefine Leadership (Dominic Ashley-Timms • 01/02/26, The Observer)

For more than a century, the prevailing management model has been one of command-and-control. Managers were expected to be the nexus of knowledge, the primary problem-solvers and the arbiters of work. Promotion into management was typically a reward for attaining technical proficiency in a particular area, creating a legion of what the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has called “accidental managers”—individuals promoted for their knowledge but utterly unprepared for the human complexities of leadership. In the U.K. alone, the CMI estimates that 82 percent of managers receive no formal preparation or training to take on the people management aspects of their role.

This is the category of manager that A.I. is coming for. The manager whose primary value lies in holding information, creating reports, assigning tasks and resolving routine problems is standing on a trapdoor. Generative A.I. and advanced analytics can now perform these functions with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Knowledge is no longer power because knowledge is ubiquitous. A recent MIT Sloan study found that access to A.I. tools increased productivity for knowledge workers by over 40 percent, largely by automating the synthesis and retrieval of information—the very tasks that once consumed a manager’s day.

Information wants to be free.

GREEN ENERGY VS RED TAPE:

These Companies Want To Use AI To Make Cheaper and Cleaner Energy—If the Government Lets Them (Jeff Luse, 12.29.2025, reason)

While reducing paperwork may seem like a trivial fix, it’s an important one; a reactor license application can easily exceed 10,000 pages and undergo up to two years of review from federal regulators. And simple errors in these documents can set projects back and cost thousands of dollars. For one of Everstar’s clients, fixing an error in the licensing documentation, which CEO Kevin Kong tells Reason was “essentially a typo,” required “developing and getting approval for a formal License Amendment Request.” This request cost the developer “tens of thousands of dollars in engineering time and external consultants” and added months in regulatory review, according to Kong.

Gordian, the company’s AI-enabled platform, aims to eliminate cases like these by “automat[ing] compliance, technical documentation, and regulatory navigation for the nuclear industry,” says Kong. Since launching earlier this year, the technology has yielded impressive results. After Last Energy was given federal funding in August to demonstrate its advanced nuclear reactor, it partnered with Everstar to write a 50-page environmental assessment. What would normally take eight weeks was completed in one. The system was also able to turn around a 200-page ecology report—a revision that usually takes a few weeks—in one night.

Kong says his clients have been able to cut “30-40% of the time spent on major regulatory deliverables,” which can be the “difference between projects penciling out or not.” The company plans to scale up operations in the coming year.

IT’LL NEVER FLY, NOAM…:

For the First Time, AI Analyzes Language as Well as a Human Expert (Steve Nadfis, 12/14/25, Wired)

For some in the linguistic community, language models not only don’t have reasoning abilities, they can’t. This view was summed up by Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist, and two coauthors in 2023, when they wrote in The New York Times that “the correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data.” AI models may be adept at using language, these researchers argued, but they’re not capable of analyzing language in a sophisticated way.

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Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. Photograph: Jami Smith
That view was challenged in a recent paper by Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley; Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who recently received his doctorate in linguistics at Berkeley; and Ryan Rhodes of Rutgers University. The researchers put a number of large language models, or LLMs, through a gamut of linguistic tests—including, in one case, having the LLM generalize the rules of a made-up language. While most of the LLMs failed to parse linguistic rules in the way that humans are able to, one had impressive abilities that greatly exceeded expectations. It was able to analyze language in much the same way a graduate student in linguistics would—diagramming sentences, resolving multiple ambiguous meanings, and making use of complicated linguistic features such as recursion. This finding, Beguš said, “challenges our understanding of what AI can do.”

Chomsky is a synonym for “wrong” in every language.

YEAH, BUT IT TOOK A COUPLE YEARS…:

World’s largest polymer 3D printer helps speed construction of nuclear reactors parts (Georgina Jedikovska, Dec 05, 2025, Interesting Engineering)

US scientists have introduced a groundbreaking approach to building nuclear reactor components faster than ever before, using one of the world’s largest 3D printers.

The researchers at the University of Maine’s (UMaine) Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) utilized the super-sized polymer 3D printer to design enormous, precision-shaped concrete form liners.

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

As the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ends, the future of forecasting is AI (Greg Allen, 11/29/25, NPR: Weekend Edition)

A week before the hurricane made landfall, however, forecast models disagreed on where it would go. One model that got it right — accurately predicting Melissa’s path and its category 5 intensity — was a new one: Google’s DeepMind AI-based hurricane model.

James Franklin, a former branch chief at the National Hurricane Center, analyzed how the forecast models performed this year, and says Google’s DeepMind outshone them all. “The model performed very, very well, which was very impressive,” he says. “It was the best guidance we saw this year.”

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce (MacKenzie Sigalos, 11/26/25, CNBC)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.