Bob Herbert wrote an interesting op-ed piece this morning in the NY Times titled “Stop Being Stupid“.  Bob credits Madoff for saying that he paid investors with “money that wasn’t there”.  The piece ends by saying that we need to go into serious debt to jump start our economy and that we need to start investing in world-class infrastructure.  

I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation?  Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to.  Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science.  What is the next frontier?  Artificially Intelligent robots in every home?  Mars?  Flying Cars?  What is America’s dream?  Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.

This morning’s Editorial Notebook in the NY Times had a piece by Lawrence Downes titled A Disappointing Truth.  It seems I am not the only one thinking about the effects of marketing on worldly matters.  In my post last, I referred to Al Gore’s work and marketing efforts as positive and helpful to the cause.  Downes takes a more critical look and says that they are doing a poor job at marketing the cause.  Downes makes a good point, saying that we need new ideas and need to bring more of the best faces and thinkers together in a room to help.  He even made reference to the Axe body spray marketers, hoping they would run the campaign.  

For the climate issues, I think we should have the people who created the Truth campaigns do it.  They have been successfully riding a very fine line with their campaigns.  They are all witty, educational and make people aware of the hazards of smoking cigarettes, marijuana and doing drugs.  

On the other hand, for AI I would love the Axe or even the Mac marketers working on our cause.  They could make it sexy and cool and then all the kids would want to be working on it!

This post is kind of a followup to my last post on marketing AI.  I have been thinking of other causes that have been expedited or have benefited from good marketing and global warming came to mind.   Read the rest of this entry »

In this month’s AI Magazine there is an article titled “The voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?” by Doug Lenat.  Doug lists what he calls the top 12 reasons why AI hasn’t taken off to its fullest potential and where many already expected it to be by now.  I am not going to address all his 12 points, I am going to focus on one:  The Media and the Arts.

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