So Leary Had It Right

Timothy Leary, the Acid Guru of the 1960's, said in an interview in the 1990s that when it comes to technology and humans, one would benefit most from Intelligence Augmentation, or Augmented Intelligence – using tech to enlighten and improve one's mind and life (sort of philosophical view of Steve Jobs' famous quote of using computers as a “Bicycle for the mind”.

Here, in 2026, AR (Augented Reality) has dissipated greatly in favor of AI, AI has grown in push from tech companies (SO much money riding on the success/non-success of their LLM models for them), the AI images (as I call Artifical Imagery) continues to look terrifying, hideous. The code spat out from the best LLM/AI models still has to be edited by programmers, and engineers, to be usable, presentable, even if an LLM/AI model is being used to answer one-off questions that is queried by an individual, that information may very well be hallucinated (AI term) or false.

So intead of Artificial Intelligence, or Augented Realty, we got Artifical Reality. Non-human tech “content”/results that serve very little purpose that we, humans, wouldn't have been beter off just finding out for ourselves – either through research, education, experience, practice, or anything else that builds the human spirit.

××× ttyl