The “Protect Our Games Act” is the Pinnacle of First World Problems

Posted on May 17, 2026 by Stephen Packard

Imaging this situation: You purchased a video game and really enjoy it. You may even invest something in becoming a great player. Then, suddenly, the game’s developer shuts it down. In the past, you could probably play it offline or on private multiplayer sessions, but increasingly, games are cloud-based and require backend infrastructure to run at all.

That can be a huge bummer. A massive one. It’s like many things in digital life. Stuff gets sunset. A lot of people were sad to see AIM die, and there were certainly people who still relied on it. Perhaps you were one of the few who really loved the Metaverse. Now it’s being shut down too. The same happened to a huge number of other services. GeoCities, MSN messenger, Skype and plenty of others are gone.

There is a legitimate question is to whether providers owe their end users some level of continued support, or at least providing some kind of open source or third party option for support of deprecated software and IT infrastructure. There is already a mechanism to enforce this, for those who take it seriously: contractual obligations for ongoing support or graceful sunsetting and be built into agreements, but rarely are.

But where does that leave video games?

As mentioned, this can absolutely happen with video games, but that would seem to be one the least concerning examples. After all, video game developers can’t really be expected to provide the support for old games forever. They are private organizations and they exist for entertainment purposes. They may well find that old game infrastructure operates at a net loss and cannibalizes new game sales. There are also times that a game just is not that successful. Even with a few dedicated fans, many games just fail in the market.

There’s also the issue of video games as a form of artistic expression. If the game developer really has created something in their vision, there’s an argument that they should maintain creative control over its destiny, even choosing to shut it down when it is still popular, the way that Jerry Seinfeld took his show off air before it began to fade.

Well California feels differently, and I have to call this what it is: the most first world problem I have ever seen in my life. Because, while we can go around in circles endlessly, debating whether it’s not fair to the consumer or whether the producer should have greater rights, one thing is undeniable: these are video games.

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AGI: Cutting Through The Confusion

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Stephen Packard

AGI, ASI and the extreme confusion of it all

There has recently been a huge amount of confusion over the concept of Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, and exactly what it means, whether it is something that should be expected, and what it means for society. One thing that is seen frequently is speculation of the “Race to AGI” or questions like “How will we know when we have AGI” or “What if they already have AGI and haven’t told anyone?”

This whole line of reasoning, the way it is framed, and the questions being asked here indicate complete incoherence about what AGI or Artificial General Intelligence is, or at least what it is supposed to be. If that is not bad enough we now are being told that AI is close to “super intelligence” or “ASI.” This is an entirely fictional idea, and nobody can even agree as to what it is, other than it might be scary.

The Basic Idea of AGI

The concept of artificial intelligence in the form of a fictionalized “thinking machine” goes back centuries. The modern concept of computer systems that simulate intelligent behavior dates to the 1950’s. As systems dubbed AI were developed, it was clear that they were relatively narrow and bounded in what they could do. Machine learning and cognitive simulations could optimize systems and respond to variables, but they lacked the kind of “intelligence” that we think of in a human.

Intuitively, it was always clear that there existed a higher level of “general intelligence” of the type found in humans and other thinking beings. In the simplest sense, an AI that could be communicated with, like a person and could understand human-like concepts, like situations being subjectively better or worse. It made perfect sense that the mental model for what general intelligence would look like would be a synthetic human mind.

The terms for Artificial General Intelligence versus Narrow Artificial Intelligence was coined in 2007, but the basic concept goes back much further. It had been often called “strong AI,” “human-like AI,” “full AI,” or “true AI.” In fact, this distinction became obvious early in the field of AI, when it was clear that systems that could mimic certain aspects of human intelligence were distinct from the popular nation of a fully digital mind, or anything like human level capabilities across domains.

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Restaurant Automation: The Bad Idea That Won’t Die

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Stephen Packard

While researching the wild claims that everyone is going to lose their job forever, because of AI, I came across a claim that struck me as strange. A large number of organizations, which claim to help understand potential job displacement have indicated food service and restaurant automation would soon be coming to take the jobs of cooks, waitstaff and everyone else who works in the sector. In fact, some have predicted that within a year we may lose 80% of jobs in the restaurant sector to robots.

I was pretty stunned. A large number of commentators, for many years, have smugly preached that the waitstaff, cooks, chefs and everyone else who works in the sector were in a terrible position, where their jobs were about to go away for good. Really?

The restaurant sector has been on of the most resistant to automation, and for obvious reasons: it’s a messy, irregular, fast moving business that operates favorably with human labor economics and seems to be purpose built to be hostile to automation. Still, this idea is not new at all.

In fact, restaurants have been the subject of nearly constant efforts to automate processes. There is really nothing at all modern about the idea. Fully automated kitchens and restaurant that deliver food by motorized cart or conveyor have been a staple at Worlds Fairs for decades and other novelty settings. The concept is rehashed every few years and with it comes the predictions of the robotic takeover of food service work. Of course, this never happens.

From the numerous attempts to replace the service staff in restaurants, which many engineers have spent much time on, since at least the 1930s, and the ongoing hype, this presents an interesting case study in an attempt to automate jobs that really have no rational reason to be automated. What is clear here is that there are many roles that technically can be automated, but are far worse off by automating and have little to no economic incentive to do so. It’s an important lesson to keep in mind with the “AI will take everyone’s job” rhetoric that has been making the rounds.

Here is a video on the topic from 1966

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The Problem of False Expertise in AI

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Stephen Packard

There is something worse than ignorance, and that is false expertise. This happens in all fiends, but it’s worse in fields that are poorly understood and those which are hot and popular in the press. Of course, nothing is hotter than AI and few things are more poorly understood.

There are quite a few people out there calling themselves experts. There are legitimately not that many people out there who understand AI, and even fewer of them are known for public speaking. Yuval Noah Harari is an example of this. He’s an historian and best selling author.

But does that mean he knows AI? No. No, it does noit.