Digital health applications and psychotherapy follow different capacity, evidence, and reimbursement paths. Baumol’s cost disease explains one pressure on labour-intensive care; it does not explain a particular German fee decision or establish that an app substitutes for a therapist.
There is no seahorse emoji in Unicode. A language model may nevertheless claim there is one or emit a plausible substitute. That failure is real, but the output alone does not tell us whether tokenisation, training data, prompting, decoding, or verification caused it.
In early 2026, variants of a prompt about a nearby car wash spread online after some assistants recommended walking instead of taking the car. This is neither the tokenisation failure from the strawberry post nor the grounding failure from the rainy-day post. It is a pragmatic inference failure: the response followed the travel wording but missed the likely purpose of the trip, assigning its advice to the wrong interpretation of the question. A third and more subtle failure mode, with Grice as the theoretical handle.
A viral video this month showed an AI assistant confidently answering “should I go to the car wash today?” without knowing it was raining outside. The internet found it funny. The failure mode is real but distinct from the strawberry counting problem — this is not a representation issue, it is a missing-context issue. The words posed no special tokenisation difficulty. What the system lacked was access to the state of the world the question was about.
AI companions promise to address loneliness. Daniel Wegner’s ironic process theory offers one speculative account of why companionship use may be risky for some people; current studies do not establish that companions cause loneliness.
The red-pill choice is under-evidenced, not formally impossible to make rationally: its evaluation depends on priors, likelihoods, utilities, and unknown consequences. Cypher’s preference for simulated experience can be separated from his betrayal.
The Oracle is the most interesting character in The Matrix for anyone who thinks about AI alignment. On one reading, she manages Neo’s beliefs for an outcome she judges good. That makes her a useful fictional case about honesty, autonomy, and paternalism—not a textbook diagnosis of a real AI system.
On 2 December 2024 I gave three workshops at HfMT Köln’s Thementag on AI and music education. The handouts covered data protection, AI tools for students, and AI in teaching. This post is the argument behind them — focused on the curriculum question that none of the tools answer on their own: what should change, and what should not?
On October 8, 2024, Hopfield and Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Hopfield energy has Ising form, and Boltzmann machines import statistical- mechanical distributions. Those are genuine mathematical connections, but they do not make transformers, AlphaFold, protein folding, and spin glasses one causal lineage or universality class.
For an imperfect binary classifier with unequal group base rates, predictive parity and equal false positive and false negative rates cannot all hold simultaneously. This is not an engineering failure. It is a theorem. Choosing which criterion to prioritise is a normative decision, not one made by mathematics alone.