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Open Photo Gallery

monticello middle school science fair



folks at glens falls parade stop



sue kirk betty christmas 1985 waltham



don burrows glens falls



dad as wittenburg godfather



in coshocton tree grandmas backyard



christmas in euclid



with dad sick at euclid christas



with mickey



with todd beecher at sanford street



family in ocean grove new jersey july 1983



first sousaphone marching in glens falls



with dylan murray glens falls may 1986



dad with moose antlers falling leaves festival oct 1980



doing my play starpox



grandma



mrs beale and the monticello orchestra cleveland heights



cornell jordan in my euclid room



camp neosa eric dana and beau hill



camp neosa wiley tammy ford and eric dana



neosa water mafia critter on left



elaine smith and cornell jordan camp neosa



heidi e at dhq



neosa youth band before mexico



neosa youth band col payton and tammy mclaughlin



jeff amd jenn in mexico



brian and tammy mclaughlin capt carvill and joe mercer



jimmy hevsila and beau hill mexico 1989



youth band in mexico 1989



youth band in mexico 1989



tammy mclaughlin



youth band in mexico



plaza d angel mexico



cornell jordan



lesly in mexico



plaza d angel



wall at disney world spring 1989



susan with mickey shrub



french epcot spring 1989



with aunt susan at disney



young mike witczak at locker



with matthew and bruno



gooch in mdm pla class



mr sarich bandleader freshman year



with wendy wang freshman band awards slovenia workers home in cleveland



lynn gessler in mr jablonski room

The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and dictatorships. Historically, autocracies have faced crippling handicaps in regard to innovation and economic growth. In the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is one reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you'll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data are strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century--the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place--may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.