Episode 57: Artificial Intelligence Explains Locally Grown Government

With the election of Donald Trump as our 47th President and promising to downsize our federal government, I thought it appropriate to re-introduce the principles of Locally Grown Government, as outlined in my book “Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government”.  It’s an updated version of the concept of federalism that is the basis of our constitution which gives the federal government certain enumerated powers, like national defense and a common currency, and reserves all other powers to the states and the people. I draw from my technology background to support federalism by illustrating how “decentralization” allowed computing to scale from single-point-of failure mainframes in beginning the 1950’s to the robust and redundant decentralized internet of today. Having lived through the shock and awe of this human innovation, I can vouch for the power of decentralized networks. Bottom-up, grass roots, locally grown promotes diversity, stability, freedom and opportunity. So why would we want to run our federal government like a one-size-fits all, top-down mainframe that we have been building for decades?

“Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government” is available on Amazon for ten bucks and I’m told it makes a great Christmas present 😊

While we are on the topic of the power of decentralization, I think it’s only fitting that I use AI to summarize my book.  There is no artificial intelligence without the internet becoming the main source of machine learning. There are many Large Language Models (LLM) out there that can do a pretty good job at a written book summary, but during a cribbage game with my friend Scott last week, he turned me on to Google’s new LM Notebook.  He showed me how you could drop in a link to say a medical journal, whitepaper or any internet page, and LM Notebook creates a podcast with natural human characters talking. Complicated subject matter is boiled down to layman’s terms so it’s understandable with a level of interaction that is indistinguishable from real humans. I was blown away.

Literally, the next day I navigated to notebooklm.google.com, logged into my Google account, and uploaded a Microsoft Word version of the final manuscript for my 2019 book. In about 20 minutes, AI read my 285-page book and produced a cool podcast summarizing the key ideas. Again, I was blown away. So, the remainder of this Episode 47 of the Locally Grown Podcast will be hosted by AI avatars. I think I’ll call them George and Lucy. Enjoy, and remember,

United We Stand. Divided We Fall. Each One for the Other and All for All.