There is much work to do to make this revisit worthwhile, however, the following is posted as a stopgap. One thing to note is that the BBC news website has a tremendous amount of valuable content. They are obviously not burdened by the wordpress formatting nightmare. Onward… note on AI, followed by something on dementia… opposite sides of the coin perhaps. AI up, brain down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6gr0xkyr3o

AI is ‘not smart’ so what’s next in artificial intelligence?  Ben Morris BBC

Yann LeCun:

“They’re not a path towards human level or human-like intelligence, or even animal-like intelligence, because they cannot deal with real world data, they just are not built for that,”

“We don’t have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat,”

large language models

“They [LLMs] basically just accumulate knowledge… They can regurgitate something, you train them to regurgitate, but they’re not particularly smart. They don’t have an underlying understanding,” he says.

*** invasive agents

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260930-metas-new-ai-is-about-to-break-the-internet

AI is already decimating online business. Google and chatbots now answer questions directly. As a result, people are visiting fewer websites. Robots don’t click on ads or buy subscriptions, and it’s causing an extinction event for companies across the web. Agents will supercharge this problem.

If Muse plans your holiday trip, Shroeder says there’s no way to know if it got you the best deal, or if it chose flights and hotels that benefit Meta’s business partners. If you ask for music recommendations, will they be based on your taste, or will you hear about artists who inked deals with the social media company?

More than any other digital service, my email is a window into my brain. Now Meta has it. If that’s not enough, Muse also suggested I give it my bank accounts.

I’ve had the same Gmail address for 21 years. It’s my login for hundreds of accounts. It holds medical test results, contracts and legal documents, conversations with family and endless receipts and financial information.

*** New Normal with Katty Kat, BBC, 16oct26

Katty Kay speaks with Dr Murali Doraiswamy, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Duke University School of Medicine, about a phenomenon called the birth cohort effect. Each generation seems to be arriving at old age with a lower risk of dementia than the people born before them. But no one is exactly sure what is causing the decline.

“Genetics loads the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger.”   Dementia % risk down, total number up.   https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0pgtn31/watch

“What’s good for the heart is good for the brain… get 7 or 8 hours [ or enough- what about sleeping for 10?] of sleep, sleep is where memories are archived, and a lot of toxic proteins are cleared… a walk a day keeps Alzeimer’s away…”