“If Dante were alive today, the tortured souls in the ninth circle of hell would suffer an eternity of being on hold listening to a brain-scrambling tune interrupted every 20 seconds by a robotic she-devil intoning, “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and a customer service representative will be with you shortly.” No!!!!!” —

The folks at money.howstuffworks.com think companies are really trying to keep us on the phone with such irritating wait buffers. Really?? Hard to believe…

How AI could upend the world even more than electricity or the internet

“Previous technological advances from electricity to the internet ignited powerful social change, says Siqi Chen, chief executive of San Francisco startup Runway.

“But what we’re looking at now is intelligence itself… This is the first time we’re able to create intelligence itself and increase its amount in the universe,” he told AFP.

Change, as a result, will be “orders of magnitude greater than every other technological change we’ve ever had in history…” More