By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: I don’t know if anything has ever in such a short time moved from being a pretty esoteric science topic to being a concern on everyone’s lips… but ChatGPT could probably tell me. With literally billions of uses per month, the artificial intelligence-driven chatbot has captured our attention and created a mix of excitement and dread. It has become a cliche to talk about how dramatic the shift will be as the technology moves toward displacing tasks like writing and customer service. It is also a cliche to talk about how the “jury is still out” on

By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: It is a jury’s first task: Pick a foreperson, someone who will lead the discussion, help the group walk through the evidence, and work their way to a decision. Who gets picked? The person who is experienced at being a juror? The person who holds a leadership role in their work life? The person who is the most knowledgeable or intelligent? The answer from the research is that it is none of those. What best predicts the emergence of leaders in a small group is talkativeness. In other words, the person who speaks the most, regardless

By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: It’s been a season of some firsts: An ex-President, and the leading candidate for a major party nomination, has been criminally indicted (twice so far), and found civilly liable for defamation (once and counting). Rather than mounting a substantive defense, the candidate and ex-official has used the remaining ‘bully pulpit’ to repeatedly attack both the civil and criminal justice systems as well as those who work within them. To many of us, these daily attacks might seem so exaggerated and so self-serving that they can’t possibly be gaining traction. But they are. After bringing a majority of his

By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: Trump’s second indictment is now unsealed, this one framing 37 federal felony counts for willfully retaining classified records at his private residence, and for trying to obstruct the efforts of the FBI and others in trying to recover these documents. Predictably, the response from the former President’s supporters has been to focus on what they say are the comparable actions of others. For example, you may have heard about 1,850 boxes of documents that President Biden supposedly has illegally kept in a Chinatown location. Except he doesn’t. The claim stems from Biden’s records from his time

By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: Right now, we are in a liminal moment with technology. No, I’m not talking about the new Apple goggles, necessarily, but about seemingly sudden emergence of engines like ChatGPT, which have opened a lot of possibilities on where it is likely to go. The proverbial jury is out about how and when generative artificial intelligence will be changing our lives. Many seem to prosthelytize a bright future with many human tasks being eased, while many others are issuing dire warnings about reduced human creativity and a slipping grip on reality. Amid the intellectual turmoil, one truly