Michio Kaku and the Electromagnetic Forces Used for AI
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Sep 10) Michio Kaku and the Electromagnetic Forces Used for AI. apennings.com https://apennings.com/data-analytics-and-meaning/michio-kakus-electromagnetic-vision-for-em-in-ai/ Introduction In his (2011) book Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku argues that to understand the future we must first understand the four […]
The Computerization of Society Revisited: French Social Theory and the Geopolitics of Information and Data Centers in the Age of AI
Nora and Minc concluded that the only way to prevent France from being subjugated by American computing conglomerates was for the state to build and regulate the national telecommunications infrastructure, ensuring that the informational grid remained a public utility rather than a corporate monopoly.
How Developing Countries Will Access US Stablecoins
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 28) How Developing Countries Will Access US Stablecoins. apennings.com https://apennings.com/uncategorized/how-developing-countries-will-access-us-stablecoins/ Introduction This post covers topics that my students and I have been addressing in a course called EST 230 – Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for Sustainable Development that I have been teaching for the last six […]
The $100 Trillion Question: Treasury-Backed Digital Dollars and a Democratic Political Economy
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 27) The $100 Trillion Question: Treasury-Backed Digital Dollars and a Democratic Political Economy. apennings.com https://apennings.com/global-e-commerce/the-100-trillion-question-treasury-backed-digital-dollars-and-a-democratic-political-economy/ Introduction As the United States national debt accelerates past historical milestones, traditional economic orthodoxy, “goldbugs,” and manipulative politicians continue to issue dire warnings of imminent fiscal insolvency, surging bond yields, and currency […]
Marshall McLuhan and the Age of the LLM: The Medium is the Prompt
By outsourcing the labor of synthesis, drafting, and dialectical reasoning to an external electronic oracle, we are rewriting our internal cognitive architecture. The spreadsheet turned the economy into a quantitative model; the LLM is turning culture itself into an automated, editable simulation.
The Conversational Oracle: A Tetrad Analysis of Artificial Intelligence
By restructuring the primary human interface into a conversational dialogue, AI has fundamentally altered the grammar of knowledge acquisition. Humans no longer navigate static databases; they consult an omnipresent, animistic interlocutor for interpretation, foresight, and meaning. This secondary computational orality satisfies a deep-seated human desire for unmediated guidance, yet it introduces a profound structural vulnerability. The oracle we converse with is inherently a “black box,” masking hyper-complex statistical probabilities as authoritative truth.
All Watched over by “Systems” of Loving Grace
Adam Curtis’ documentary series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, delves into the relationship between technology, political ideologies, and human agency. Inspired by Richard Brautigan’s poem, Curtis explores how technology shapes our governance systems and worldview. In “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts,” Curtis critiques the adoption of natural systems thinking in political and technological contexts, tracing the origins of ecological systems thinking back to the work of figures like Jay Forrester, Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and the Odum brothers. These ideas, initially intended to describe natural ecosystems, were later applied to human societies and governance, conflating nature with machine intelligence. Curtis raises concerns about how these systems-based frameworks reduce humans to mere nodes in networks, challenging the Enlightenment view of humanity as autonomous and separate from nature.
Curtis also explores the legacy of systems thinking through the work of the Club of Rome and its 1972 publication Limits to Growth, which used computer simulations to model the Earth as a closed system. The documentary raises questions about the consequences of seeing human and natural systems as mechanistic, potentially leading to a distorted understanding of complex, dynamic realities.
Four Futures and the S-Curve
Dator’s Four Futures is a framework developed by futurist and educator Jim Dator. It presents four broad scenarios or perspectives on the future that can help individuals and organizations think about and plan for different possible outcomes. These scenarios provide a structured way to consider alternative futures and potential developments. The four generic alternative scenarios are: four generic alternative futures” (continuation, collapse, discipline, transformation). This post discusses the use of S-Curves with Dator’s scenarios.
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About Me
Professor (full) at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Research Professor for Stony Brook University. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and global political economy
You can reach me at:
anthony.pennings@gmail.com
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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