
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


