Independent journalist in consumer / tech issues. Author of 5 books, 15 years at MSNBC.com. Now BobSullivan.net, podcast host.
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People around the world who wanted to bet on the U.S. election results (and other stuff) on Polymarket couldn't today after a company named DeBugBear was hacked. Don't worry, everything is fine
cnbc.com/2026/10/29/polymark…
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Mark Cuban says AI isn't smart, and he'd trust a seeing-eye dog over it to get across the street
"AI is not smart. It just knows how to use statistics basically to predict the next word. It’s predictive. It’s not deterministic. If you asked 4 different AIs the same question, you’re going to get 4 different answers"
"AI doesn’t know the consequences of its actions. AI doesn’t have inherent ethics"
"If I’m standing at a 4-way intersection and there’s cars going back and forth, and I have video in my phone and the best models ever, and I have a seeing-eye dog right here, I’m letting the seeing-eye dog take me across the street before I let the AI take me across the street. It’s always going to be behind"
"A 2-year-old sitting on a high chair with a sippy cup knows that if it pushes the sippy cup off the high chair, Mom’s going to come running, and it knows it’s going to crack up. AI is not going to figure that out ever"
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Bob Sullivan retweeted
the negative case against AI gets stronger every day; even Altman admits the problems are very serious with no obvious solution.
the positive case, meanwhile, looks weaker every day. a quote from Apollo’s Torsten Slok:
“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is… flat for the S&P 493…. Profit margins are… flat for the S&P 493…. No signs of AI boosting [measured] productivity growth…. Mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending… as a cost center…. Mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited.”
apollo.com/wealth/insights-n…
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The Knicks have inspired a generation.
I texted my children that we got the puppy they’ve been begging me for and sent them a link with pictures. 🐶When they clicked on the link, it took them to a webpage that said YOU’RE GROUNDED. They’ll be spending the weekend retaking our family’s cybersecurity training course.
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Bob Sullivan retweeted
Researchers mathematically proved that AI will cause something worse than mass unemployment.
They call it “The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons.”
Every industry relies on a shared pool of deep professional expertise. This expertise doesn't just magically appear. It regenerates generation after generation.
How? Through struggle.
Junior employees do the hard, repetitive, frustrating work. In exchange, they slowly build what researchers call "Internalized Mastery."
But right now, AI is completely annihilating junior-level work.
Companies are celebrating massive productivity boosts by automating the entry-level grind. (Anthropic’s own data shows their technical junior hiring has plunged 33% as AI agents take over the pipeline).
It looks like efficiency. But it is actually a time bomb.
The researchers highlight a concept called the "Validation Tether."
Effective human oversight of AI depends entirely on deep domain expertise. When an AI hallucinates or makes a critical error, a human expert catches it.
The experts validating AI outputs today look competent because they spent a decade doing the grunt work before AI existed.
The terrifying question the paper asks is this:
Who comes after them?
When the current generation of experts retires, there will be no one left with the Internalized Mastery required to spot when the machine is wrong. We are completely severing the pipeline that creates human competence.
We are trading our long-term intellectual independence for short-term productivity boosts.
Every time you let AI bypass the struggle, you are borrowing expertise from the future.
And the interest rate is our ability to think for ourselves.
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Sound like "Too Big to Fail" is the next act in this play.
cnbc.com/2026/10/14/blackroc…
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"Tech has created a disability where none existed before." This is a pattern, not a one off. Tech is often cost-cutting disguised as magic, and we need to confront that.
Again, high tech has created a disability where none existed before. This has to be addressed, either through the ADA or congressional action. Anolog means must be made available by law. Call your representative or send an email. If your rep only responds to digital communication they are part of the problem.
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I believe this is the new opioid epidemic; every day we don't reckon with it adds to the pile of human suffering it creates.
Meet Thomas, a 35-year-old who got hooked to FanDuel and DraftKings in the pandemic, ended up $50,000 in the red. He filed for bankruptcy and signed up for a Pennsylvania registry that banned him from using betting apps.
More recently, he saw an ad for Kalshi offering a cash bonus. He got the app and couldn’t put it down. He’s now living with his mom and grandmother and taking loans from them to afford food and car insurance payments. “I have a gambling addiction” he wrote to Kalshi, begging for them to ban him, which they eventually did. But not before he was more than $25,000 in the hole.
Thomas represents dark side of the prediction market boom: Problem gamblers who relapse with Kalshi, which has blanketed TV, social media, sports stadiums, bus stations, trains, with ads trying to attract new traders, just as they insist they are not a gambling operator. That means they don’t honor “self-exclusion” registries maintained by states like Pennsylvania. Mental health clinicians say that creates a loophole for people like Thomas.
What really got Thomas were Kalshi’s 15-minute crypto markets, where you can make a binary trade on whether Bitcoin will be above or below a certain number every 15 minutes. There were times he was betting 18 hours a day in these markets.
He told me: “The odds flip so quickly. It’s such a rush. And when I’d lose, my brain just kept wanting to win it back. I never even traded Bitcoin or any crypto, but I just kept coming back to the rush of how unpredictable the markets were.”
A clinician I spoke to called 15-minute crypto markets “a slot machine in your pocket”
npr.org/2026/10/02/nx-s1-598…
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Amen.
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
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Dynamic pricing is gonna crush us all, y'all. Hey @amtrak Train 131 NYP-WAS has left us all stranded in Newark. "Free to get off" is all we're told. I go online to book the next train -- while it's IN MY CART the price jumps from $211 to $265. But that's not all /1 ...
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Then, the next, next train, same thing -- jumps from $115 to $211. As all these stranded passengers race to figure out a way home, you are gouging us. Paging @owenslindsay1 Look up Gotcha Capitalism if you get a moment...
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Bob Sullivan retweeted
The Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association says that AI is already driving *up* healthcare costs, as hospitals use the technology to find instances where they can bill more for the same level of care. bcbs.com/about-us/associatio…
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I'll keep repeating it - AI is mainly about cost cutting. Like almost every tech innovation in thr past few decades.
Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare.
In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”
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Bob Sullivan retweeted
Jaw-dropping documents from our lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI reveal how tech leaders talk when they think no one is listening: We may have pulled off “the largest theft of labor in human history” motherjones.com/politics/202…
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So, personal AI agents will be most useful doing battle with corporations' AI agents. "I was surprised by how much easier the agent had made it to deal with insurance." I hope people catch on to what's really happening here...
nytimes.com/2026/09/22/techn…
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Bob Sullivan retweeted
Heard it more than once from people we interviewed putting this story together: “this is America’s next opioid crisis.”
A 29-year-old pest control salesman says he bets on sports every day, wagering between $80,000 and $120,000 a year — as much as or more than his $97,000 salary.
He tells @JimAxelrod he sometimes puts an entire paycheck on his bets. cbsnews.com/news/sports-bett…
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Well, this clears it up
To clarify, this false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for FDA’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms.
Over the weekend, FDA alerted Taylor Farms that a new sample of shredded lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico tested positive for Cyclospora during import examination at the Southern Border. This ended up being a false positive, and Taylor Farms was alerted to the corrective test result Sunday.
FDA’s traceback investigation and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico. FDA will continue to work with federal and state partners to investigate this multistate outbreak and ensure products implicated in this outbreak have been removed from the market.
Protecting the American public remains our highest priority. We encourage the public to continue to avoid all products listed in Taylor Farms’ voluntary recall. fda.gov/safety/recalls-marke…
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Almost exactly 100 years ago....
Hundreds of uniformed members of what appeared to be Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, marched through D.C. and toward the Capitol.
Their faces covered in white masks, the men carried flags — some upside down, others Confederate — as they chanted, “Reclaim America!” wapo.st/4f6y9tM
ALT A commuter sits as members of the group Patriot Front stand at the Eastern Market metro station, on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. Photo by Nathan Howard for Reuters.
ALT Members of the group Patriot Front exit a metro station, on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in New Carrollton, Maryland. Photo by Cheney Orr for Reuters.
ALT Members of the group Patriot Front wait to board the Metro on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. Photo by Cheney Orr for Reuters.
ALT Members of the group Patriot Front load U.S. flags into a vehicle, near the Eastern Market metro station, on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in D.C. Photo by Nathan Howard for Reuters.
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