Thought Provokers: Week of 7/15/2026

Any articulate person whose personal lexicon exceeds a fifth-grade reading level will be accused of being a bot or using AI. It’s already happening: The Great Regression.

Insect populations are collapsing around the world, which has dire consequences for agriculture and the natural order.

Healthcare will be essentially out of reach for a large proportion of Americans soon

ALL of the Beech trees and ALL of the Ash trees in North America will be dead or dying within 15-20 years. The country will look very, very different.

The dead internet theory holds that once AI becomes so good we can’t tell what’s real or fake, the internet will become stale as bots interact with other bots 24/7. There’s nothing authentic left, and even “creators” lose their jobs to great prompt writing on Sora.

Real conversations are about to become rare and valuable.

The Klarna bubble is going to pop, and millions of people are suddenly going to find themselves in collections.

The AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) is slowing and may slow considerably over the next century, though we don’t know when. When it happens, we will experience a mass extinction, sort of like the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Europe will freeze, crops will fail, and it will be really bad.

Everyone’s talking about AI and politics, but clean water’s quietly becoming the next big disaster.

People self-organize in elevators to maximize space.

A decade or two ago we were just worried about kids no longer being able to read or write in cursive. Now we’re worried about them being able to read or write at all.

It’s sad people are confusing CGI with AI in media like they have with WIFI and the Internet.

Americans are relatively easier to scam because the culture encourages casual small talk between strangers, which gives hostile actors an easier way to get their “foot in the door.”

Thanks to colonoscopies, the average number of cameras up one’s butt is between zero and one.