AI: the falling knife...

Mar 02, 2026

Investing 101 teaches us to be cautious of falling knives. They can be opportunities or a trend reversal harboring significant risk and loss. Depending on your perspective, this whole AI debacle is indeed something requiring context and a hype-meter.

At this point I will also suggest that if you aren’t considering the environmental ravages of AI peripherals such as data centers it’s because you don’t want to know.

Who on earth is using Generative AI?

I don’t know why so many people are fans of what Nate Hagens calls “ultraprocessed information”. We can trace the thread from industrialized agriculture —> processed food —> obesity —> GLP-1 induced cachexia. Does anybody want this?

Generating content from mimicry and chatbots vs quiet contemplation considering multiple resources and ideas that you alone have processed and spurred into existence is indeed like a Sword of Damocles. Although most of us don’t have the resources to recover from where we are headed…

This section is my plea for humanism in our data stories. Here are a few links to interesting things I discovered this week.

Listening

Werner Herzog Isn’t Afraid…* of bad reviews, meager financing, or artificial intelligence. But he is worried that the world is full of sloppy thinkers who mistake facts for the truth.

HERZOG: I saw a film which was scripted, by artificial intelligence, and the images made by artificial intelligence.

DUBNER: How was it?

HERZOG: Completely dead on arrival…. It’s no spark of life in it. Only mimicry of invention, only mimicry. So I’m not worried. There’s no artificial intelligence that really would challenge me.

Books

If you find yourself passing through Princeton first head to the Art Museum and then to my favorite U.S. bookstore, Labyrinth books. Asterisks indicate recent purchases from Princeton. They have a robust sale table in most sections and a used and rare collection in basement.

absolute ethical life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx*