I've been tinkering around with various AI bots for a while now. I've found that if you already know the answer to a question AI works great. If you are asking questions blindly not so much - your mileage may vary or YMMV as they say in the motorcycle forums, I used to hang out in.
Here's an example.
Use Google AI search feature for these 3 prompts:
1. "Donbas natural resources"
2. "Donbas natural gas reserves"
3. "Donbas oil and natural gas reserves"
In the first case we are assuming that the bot will include all natural resources. If you happen to be a person who does not know that the Donbas contains significant oil and natural gas reserves, you'll be happy with the Google bot's summary -
"The Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is exceptionally rich in natural resources, particularly coal and other minerals. This wealth has made it a strategically important area, both economically and politically, especially given its role in Ukraine's energy sector and the ongoing conflict with Russia."
However, if you know there are proven natural gas reserves in the Donbas you use prompt number 2 and get this summary -
"The Donbas region of Ukraine is significant for its natural gas reserves, particularly within the Dnieper-Donetsk Basin, also referred to as the Dnipro-Donetsk basin."
If you know there are proven natural gas and oil reserves, you will use prompt 3 and get this summary -
IThe Donbas region of Ukraine is rich in natural resources, particularly coal, but also holds significant oil and natural gas reserves
I suppose the point is if you are going to use AI, that is at this stage of development, it's best to know more than the machine.
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AI, or A1 (A one) as the United States Secretary of de-Education Linda Mcmahon calls it, is something. It's hard to say what sort of something AI is at this stage, On the other hand, unlike AI, human nature is old and well defined, so we end up with headlines like "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity"
Some examples -
An MIT study published in August 2025 found that 95% of corporate generative AI pilot programs failed to produce any measurable financial return, with companies seeing little or no increase in revenue or productivity. The laughable response of the AI cheerleaders is that it wasn't AI's fault - the puny humans are at fault for using AI incorrectly. Interestingly one of the profitable uses of AI involves people using AI to create viral AI slop on YouTube, Facebook etc.
AI data centers are power hungry monsters. Meta is constructing a data center in Louisiana that MIT Technology Review describes as follows, "The AI data center also promises to transform the state’s energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it’s up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region’s grid—one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity."
AI is attractive to people who are unwilling or unable to invest in education. Education gives us people capable of creating new things. China's focus on education means they will continue to outperform the U.S. Students from fundamentalist Christian-based educational systems are not particularly good at sciency things that are so important if we want to live in a post-enlightenment world. If we want to return to the dark ages, I suppose people capable of calligraphy and good penmanship are in demand.
AI's large language models allow machines to parse and recombine existing knowledge. Sometimes in amazing and surprising ways. The idea that AI could solve humans most pressing problem - climate change, seems ludicrous given humans have become servants of some types of technology. So called free-market capitalistic systems implement technological changes based on profitability rather than any assessment of benefit to humankind.
