Daily Archives: 26 February 2026

An Overblown Concern

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Citrini Research wrote a report that’s associated with Monday’s stock market spike down. Its report centered on the risk of heavy white collar job losses from AI’s alleged ability to do white collar work and completely replace those white collars.

For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium.

And so on.

Not so much, though. It took more mental acumen to run the steam drill than John Henry needed to run his hammer. It takes more mental acumen to work a modern auto production line, with all of that automated equipment, than it did—and does—to work an artisan, unautomated auto production line. The move extends into the white collar milieu, also. It begins with requiring more mental acumen to check AI’s work than it does to work the spreadsheets or do the research oneself. It takes a great deal of mental acumen to ask the right questions and then give AI the tasks of answering them—and then checking AI’s responses. Creativity is something AI cannot do.

AI is good at the artificial part; it’ll be quite some time before AI gets good at the intelligence part. Alan Turing once said that when a computer can answer certain kinds of questions, they’ll be impossible to distinguish from humans. That doesn’t prove computers’—AI’s—superiority, though. Answering questions isn’t the same as asking them.

Trump is Right, and He’s Wrong

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President Donald Trump (R) delivered his State of the Union Speech Tuesday evening. In it, among a variety of topics (as is the nature of SOTU speeches), he touted the large improvement in our economy, from inflation down sharply, the stock market up strongly, manufacturing coming home, energy costs coming down, and so on. On all of this, Trump was absolutely correct: our economy is much better, much stronger, much more stable than it was under his predecessor Joe Biden (D). He also touted a number of projects and statutory proposals that would cement existing improvements and lead to further improvements.

Those, though, are national, population-as-a-whole, items. Our national population is made up of individuals, small clusters of individuals, and regional collections of individuals.

What Trump didn’t do was acknowledge the further work necessary to make those individual, cluster, and collections of Americans’ lives better in particular. He should have, he still needs to do, and what Republicans in Congress and running for Congress in Progressive-Democrat incumbent districts and States need to do, is talk to those folks specifically and directly about their economic situations and how Republican policies and proposals will help them in particular, how they’re already helping them (without talking down to them).

Failing that, both houses of Congress are in peril of falling to the Progressive-Democrats and the economic and security destruction they will inflict with their big, intrusive government; increasing taxation; and exploding spending policies.

One other thing: Trump got the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen to demonstrate, with their own behavior, how useless, if not dangerous, they are to our Republic. Trump challenged all of the Congressmen in the room (and it was most of them, as the threats of fully a third of Party’s House Representatives to boycott Trump’s SOTU speech proved empty words; they showed up instead) who agreed with the simple statement that the primary goal of the government is to protect American citizens and not illegal aliens to stand. To a man and woman, all of the Republicans stood. Nearly all of the Progressive-Democrats (there were a couple of exceptions) remained seated. They showed, thereby, that they don’t agree that protecting us American citizens is paramount.

Come to that, this was a Party that refused even to stand for the proposition that child transition hormonal or surgical treatments is wrong. This was a Party that refused even to stand for a little girl who survived a traffic collision caused by an illegal alien with an illegally granted Commercial Driver License driving a truck. This was a Party that refused even to stand for the mother of a young Ukrainian immigrant brutally murdered in a subway car.

This should be remembered in this primary season and in the fall elections.