A Human Moment for AI: Short Blog Post

Monday, November 24, 2025

Monday Morning Musings

After awakening to listening to a congressman talk about upcoming legislation debate on whether Congress should intercede with a bill imposing a block on respective states regulating the AI sector on CNBC’s Squawkbox this morning, I decided to finally open my eyes and drag myself out of bed and take black labrador retriever Serena for a jog through the heavy humid air in our neighborhood. 

Left the iPhone behind, just me and my dog–needed to feel the air, hear the busy sounds around and overhead–need to move this weary physical frame that can barely process the speed of information on a daily basis. The drive to feel human.

The Palm Beach International airplane traffic has picked up, private and commercial jets fly overhead in their departures and arrivals every few minutes especially in the morning hours.

The houses in our neighborhood have slowly been morphing from the old Florida 1970s ranch-style one-story homes into tall and often two-story mega-mansion type homes on these 1-2 acres of land plots that are almost unheard of east of the Florida Turnpike and Interstate 95.  Horseshoe Acres is a mix of the old and the new, a brackish water so to speak.

As Serena and I fall into a comfortable rhythm, I can sense my mind relaxing and beginning to sift through the Artificial Intelligence debates that abound–taking into account that AI software and algorithms have been set in motion long before the public square began to whip into a fury about it. 

I also ponder and acknowledge the sad but real fact that there are great segments of our society that pay no mind to any of these public policy struggles when it comes to the exponential speed of the advancement of AI technology, i.e latest versions of ChatGPT versus Gemini and so forth…then my right knee starts twinging in pain and I make the reluctant turn back to the house to continue packing the car for our Thanksgiving trip.

We are all still learning what it is to be human and here we’ve taken our free will and creativity to make something like us and better so in terms of data processing and calculations.  

Is the teacher truly glad when the pupil becomes “smarter” than he?

The question of ROI, or more critically, the risk of harm versus benefit is something we must keep in mind as we unveil our latest and greatest AI tool.  

What should we do if an AI system shows in training models that it has the capacity to advise a human to do a detrimental thing like create a bioweapon capable of mass casualties?  What if a human child emotionally connects to an AI model server and not its actual parent? The “what-ifs” can hit a critical mass with something like this lightning fast technology.  

And yet, there’s no stuffing it back into the proverbial Pandora’s box. How do legislators and public servants proceed? What does the regular human do in light of these advancements that he/she can choose to engage in or not?

Suddenly I understand the reservation of those people in our past who were wary of the invention of the wheel, electrifying one’s home, sending emails and now: to use or not use AI (at least when you’re aware of it) is truly the question of the day and already many people are defaulting to one setting or the other.

I have purposely avoided using AI platforms if I can help it- I don’t engage with “chatbots” and when calling a bank/billing service it’s become a game to me to find the human on the phone.  Even that they’re trying to mimic on the phone with new AI models–tricky business customer service is these days.

Am I better for avoiding integrating AI in my every day if I can help it? No, absolutely not, it’s just a free will choice such as I don’t use social media every day to find my news, etc.

Will I be left behind by the human race? I don’t feel anxious that I will, just perhaps that I will help be a mediator between our version of the “old” and the “new”.

What I am sure about is that as I’ve taught my children and other students in my online academy: we humans are still in “school”, we are still learning what is to temper ourselves and at the same time expand, conquer old habits and create new ways to help calm our common fear of finality—we crave Eternity.

Ramona V. Saridakis Bean

Humans Take Note: Start Learning Again, AI is Coming Fast

Sunday morning, April 2, 2023

In the last few months I’ve been trying to read 3-5 books every month- it is a difficult undertaking in case you’re interested.  I have to work for it each time I open a book to actively read and that’s if I’m able to carve out the unfettered time to do so!

At the same time I’m trying to keep up with the current news on the advancement of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and I’m feeling awash in déjà vu as I process the fact that it’s coming faster than we can comprehend.

In the early aughts, I recall writing an essay about nanotechnology and how its prevalence in our society was not registered as it was so small.  Today nanotechnology is all around us (and dare I say “in” us) and most of us hardly ever think about it.

With AI, the learning curve is so quick for the systems that are cranking away like ChatGPT that we are not understanding how it is already infiltrating our human experience. As a teacher and writer, I’ve not delved into this world for my daily applications but have had conversations with friends and colleagues who have and it’s truly a whole new world experience our society is entering.

In this past week alone, there have been conflicting reports by “experts” and big business magnates speaking out on the progress of AI and includes caution on how quickly this ever-learning technology is advancing https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-experts-urge-pause-training-ai-systems-that-can-outperform-gpt-4-2023-03-29/ to the admonishment that there is “fear-mongering” going on https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeseq/2023/03/23/why-does-technology-scare-us/?sh=1926f61a73be.

Here’s my blog short message for today:

Dear fellow humans,

Please start learning again and try it every single day with your mind no matter how busy your life is today.  In my humble human opinion, the best way to adapt to this fast-developing world around us is to never stop learning through reading, experimenting and interacting with each other and our physical world around us.

R.V.S.B.

P.S. Some book reviews coming soon from my February and March reading lists…

The State of Media Affairs in the USA

The State of Media Affairs in the USA

Here’s what happens when a busy teacher and parent sits down finally after a long day following Memorial Day weekend: She (in this case, myself) turns on the television and hits up the cable news networks to see if she can get a mosaic-view of what’s going on in the world—or at least our country here in the United States of America.

History Repeated? We Wish

Let me be clear. My philosophy on life in general is that we humans have the tendency to run the same algorithm over and over again in our life cycles, perhaps in a futile effort to see if we can garner the unique ending that we’d prefer on a Hollywood screen or Netflix episode finale. In 2017, however, I believe we may be hitting a whole new low as a culture.

What I saw in the span of a few hours last night floored me. It’s not that I haven’t seen it before in recent months: CNN says President Trump is awful. MSNBC says President Trump is awful. Headline News says President Trump is awful. FOX News says CNN, MSNBC and Headline News are all awful. We all feel awful.

As a teacher and a mother, good grief as an American whose parents immigrated here, I feel like we’ve all been run through a mill and thrown out on the other side without regard for where we’ve all been and how we may actually see the world in other colors other than just black or white—in other symbols other than a donkey and an elephant.

June 2017

And just like that that, we have hit the 6th month of this year and where are we at when we look at our pop-culture news culture?

I’m afraid it’s an awful smokescreen where we’re at as Americans. Do we really believe that the greatest threat to our respective “pursuits of happiness” is who is our President of the United States at the moment and if or who around him/her had intimate talks with the Russian authorities? нет, спасибо.

Jobless June, July and Beyond… 

Seriously, is it too much to hope that those who have the time and resources to sit in front of cameras would try to focus on some of the issues that truly are impacting Americans right now and in the future?

Here’s a few things that we all need to keep in mind while talking heads are whining about who is running our federal government, who they’re talking to and such:

  1. Artificial Intelligence: AI in our daily lives is a fact now, no longer a musing of what the future holds. With or without our knowledge, AI will touch every American who resides in an urban area and even a good portion of those still in touch with our rural side.
  2. Deep Learning: We humans, especially Americans, could stand to learn a thing or two from this new movement/technology called Deep Learning where a machine or computer is accumulating knowledge based on experience. Unfortunately, I’m afraid to admit that many of us may be regressing in our ability to learn or create—thus creating an easy pathway for Deep Learning technology to trump us (forgive the pun).
  3. In line with points number 1 & 2 above, vehicles that automatically drive for us will start to displace many jobs. This is the story that no one seems to really be talking about but is so obvious for our truckers. This is a major job sector that is set to be shattered if this technology takes off without them being re-trained to either be involved in it or transition to something else.
  4. Our Environment: We’re all talking about it but not really doing anything proactive. I personally have found it most difficult to reduce our trash in the household and have attempted to recycle nearly everything away but my heart still sinks every time I put a plastic wrapping or bag in our waste basket because our local recycling plant won’t accept them.
  5. Biomedical Engineering – Genetic Advances: I don’t even have to be well-versed in these areas to understand that already we’ve far surpassed the idea of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We’re fast approaching a human reality where we may be able to reproduce/clone humans without the standard male + female = human baby.

Looking Forward

These are literally just a handful of the countless other issues having a direct impact on most of us Americans today.

How do we proceed? Can we all apply so as to be hired and perhaps have some of these news media pundits fired? Obviously not.

The best we can hope to do within our busy schedules is to look at the world from our own eyes and act upon it with our own hearts. Such was the case recently on the Portland commuter train where folks died while protecting a couple of muslim young ladies.

We have to deny cable news media and social media their supposed delusion that we look to them for direction as to how to react to our political parties and our government officials.

Instead we should direct ourselves to evoke what the real truth is, that many of us want to have an enduring part of our nation’s history—not this re-run of Gore vs. Bush malaise or post-Vietnam War hangover types trying to define who and what we are as a nation here in the United States of America.

United we stand, divided we fall.

God we pray to stay united and hear each other out.

R.V.S.B.

Ramona cell phone 389