'I Hope We Choose Love'(Kai Cheng Thom). Before DM read ext bio. 60yo Mom, grandma, wife, Kumon, views my own, writing WIP contemplative activist she/her 🇨🇦
Hamilton, Ontario
Joined November 2009
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Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
Please, please, always keep your dog on a lead when walking in the countryside at this time of year. The fields and moors are full of babies and vulnerable nests. 🪺
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
When the world is too loud and too fast and too worrying, just remember that there are still woods full of birdsong, where the sun drops down through the trees to fall in splashes on the ground. Where the bluebells and stitchwort flowers add colour to the green, and where a stream bubbles close by.
📍 Peak District, England
© Peaklass, all real, no AI
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
"He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea."
~ Kenneth Grahame,
'The Wind in the Willows'
🔹️Illustration by E.H. Shepard 🔹️
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
Nvidia just admitted that "AI efficiency" is a LIE.
Every major tech company is doing the same thing right now:
Firing humans and replacing them with AI to "cut costs." 92,000 tech workers laid off in 2026 so far.
Every single earnings call sounds the same: "AI is driving efficiency."
But the VP of Applied Deep Learning at Nvidia, the company that literally SELLS the AI infrastructure, just told Axios:
"For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."
The man whose entire job is making AI work admitted that AI costs his company MORE than the humans it's supposed to replace. And he doesn't work at some struggling startup. We're talking about the most valuable company on Earth.
An MIT study backs this up too:
Researchers analyzed whether AI could actually replace human workers at a competitive cost and found that AI automation only makes financial sense in 23% of jobs. In the other 77%, humans are still cheaper.
So companies are firing cheap labor and replacing it with expensive labor, then telling shareholders it's "innovation."
But it gets even WORSE...
Uber just revealed that they burned through their ENTIRE 2026 AI budget in 4 months.
Their CTO said: "I'm back to the drawing board because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already."
What happened is that Uber gave their engineers access to AI coding tools and encouraged them to use them as much as possible. They even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how many AI tokens they consumed, basically gamifying their own budget crisis without realizing it.
By March, 95% of Uber's engineers were using AI tools monthly. 70% of all committed code was coming from AI. Monthly API costs per engineer hit $500 to $2,000.
One software engineer in Stockholm told the New York Times: "I probably spend more than my salary on Claude."
A human being now costs LESS than the AI tool they use to do their job.
And Uber isn't some edge case. Big Tech has announced $740 billion in AI capital expenditures this year alone, up 69% from 2025, according to Morgan Stanley.
Meanwhile the Yale Budget Lab says there is NO widespread data showing AI is actually displacing jobs or improving productivity at scale.
So follow the money:
Companies fire humans
↓
Stock goes up because "AI efficiency"
↓
Those same companies spend MORE on AI than they saved on salaries
↓
That money flows to Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft
↓
Those companies use the revenue to justify their own insane valuations
↓
Everyone books growth
↓
But nobody's actually saving money
McKinsey projects total AI spending will hit $5.2 TRILLION by 2030.
The biggest wealth transfer in modern history is happening right now, and it's not from workers to companies. It's from companies to AI infrastructure providers.
Every dollar "saved" on layoffs is being spent twice over on compute, tokens, and data centers.
Nvidia posted $31.9 billion in profit last quarter. And somebody is paying that bill - the same companies telling their employees that AI made them "redundant."
The entire narrative is a shell game:
CEOs get to announce layoffs, Wall Street rewards them with a stock bump, and then the real cost shows up three months later when the AI budget explodes and nobody connects the two events.
What's your take on this?
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
You open ChatGPT. You type the question. A clean, structured answer comes back in three seconds. You read it, it makes sense, you move on. You feel like you learned something.
Forty-five days later, a professor walks in and hands you a test you weren't expecting. You don't remember most of it.
André Barcaui at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro ran the experiment to find out if the feeling was accurate. 120 undergraduate business students, ages 18 to 24. All told to spend two weeks researching AI concepts, ethics, societal impacts, technical foundations, and prepare a 10-minute presentation.
Sixty used ChatGPT freely. Sixty used textbooks, library databases, articles, and standard web search. Then, 45 days later, with no warning, a retention test.
The ChatGPT group scored 57.5%. The traditional group scored 68.5%. Cohen's d was 0.68, a medium-to-large effect. In most grading systems, that's the difference between passing and failing.
This is called cognitive offloading. When your brain delegates thinking to an external tool, it reduces the mental effort required during encoding. Effort is what makes memories durable. Struggling to find, synthesize, and connect information is not an inefficiency in the learning process. It is the learning process. ChatGPT removes the struggle and takes the encoding with it.
Barcaui calls what the AI group experienced "borrowed competence." The answer was structured, the vocabulary was right, the reasoning felt sound. It just wasn't theirs. And 45 days later, it was gone.
The AI group's forgetting curve was steeper and didn't stabilize the way the traditional group's did. The memories weren't just smaller. They were more fragile from the start.
You didn't learn it. You borrowed it.
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
This MRI study on young kids just exposed something terrifying:
They scanned the brains of 60 children aged 3–5 — including 5-year-old Rose — and found interactive screen time is causing measurable loss of white matter in their developing brains. Even just 2 hours a day is linked to impaired neural connectivity, language, and literacy development.
Professor Mike Nagel (neuroscientist and father) said his first reaction was simply: “Wow… I was not anticipating seeing anything like that.”
We’re physically changing children’s brains before they even start school — and the damage is visible on scans.
This one actually unsettled me. I’ve always suspected too much screen time was bad, but seeing real white matter loss in toddlers hits different.
Parents of little ones — has this kind of research changed how much screen time you allow?
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.
Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.
The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."
An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.
Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.
The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.
No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.
Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.
Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·
arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20617
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
One of the more sinister trends of the past 40 years has been a cultural taboo against having any kind of intellectual life. We’re bombarded with relentless propaganda about how knowing things makes you a nerd and loser. Curiosity is empowering, & they don’t want you empowered.
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
Shifting Baseline Syndrom. Eins der großen Probleme in der Wahrnehmung des Artensterbens. Kurz gesagt: Das was wir als Heranwachsender kennen, wird als der Normalzustand empfunden. Damit verschiebt sich aber die Baseline von Generation zu Generation, und viel Information geht verloren… der tatsächliche Verlust an Vielfalt ist viel dramatischer als wir ihn wahrnehmen.
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.
What went wrong?
In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:
1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.
The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.
This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.
Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace…
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
Long COVID is defined as an symptomatic condition. However, COVID-19 can also cause organ damage without symptoms.
New Paper:
Spectrum of COVID-19: From Asymptomatic Organ Damage to Long COVID Syndrome
#LongCovidAwarenessDay
whn.global/scientific/spectr…
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
An Ontario court has ruled that Premier Doug Ford must release logs of government-related calls made on his personal phone, affirming that such records are subject to freedom of information laws. As far as I’m concerned, @fordnation not handing over his cell phone records is breaking the law and he should be arrested immediately. Changing important laws like the freedom of information act should be illegal and henceforth not possible. Governments have to be transparent and accountable at all times. Without checks and balances governments can do whatever they damn well please without fear of legal repercussions. Making any changes retroactive shouldn’t even be allowed to begin with. Bypassing public hearings on any important legislation should also be illegal. #DougFord and everyone else involved in his corrupt activities need to be held accountable. #onpoli #Ontario #Canada #FOI
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
One of the obvious tells that people aren't behaving rationally about covid, is that very few are curious about how the first wavers are doing?
A lot of people don't want to stumble onto information that they might not like.
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
What a privilege it is to carry heavy grocery bags, to have laundry to do, to sleep in freshly changed sheets, and to eat your favorite meal. What a privilege it is to laugh, to love, to be cared for, and to begin again.
It’s a gentle reminder that a meaningful life isn’t built only on big milestones, but on the small, often overlooked moments that quietly sustain us.
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
From a two-year follow-up study of COVID-19 survivors with acute neurological symptoms,
"Acute neurological symptoms, particularly central nervous system manifestations such as delirium and brain fog, were strongly associated with both cognitive decline (aOR, 2.16) and cognitive impairment (aOR, 2.75)..
most acute neurological symptoms had subsided [in two years], yet fatigue (8.66%) and brain fog (5.99%) persisted..
For the new-onset symptoms, the proportion of insomnia, tinnitus, blurred vision, movement disorder, palpitation, muscle weakness, and respiratory symptoms were much higher in the neurological symptom group, with a highest proportion in insomnia (9.99%)..
[In conclusion,] Acute neurological symptoms, especially central nervous system manifestations, were strongly associated with long-term cognitive decline and new-onset symptoms (mainly insomnia) in COVID-19 survivors."
How is your sleeping?
'Two-year trajectory of cognitive decline and neurological sequelae in COVID-19 survivors with acute neurological symptoms'
frontiersin.org/journals/agi…
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
A marca britânica de produtos para gestantes chamada Mothercare decidiu mostrar o pós-parto real após descobrir que 50% das mães sentem vergonha de seus corpos por culpa de padrões irreais.
Depois de realizar uma pesquisa com 1.500 mães e descobrir que mais da metade dela não sentiam orgulho de seus corpos nesse período, por compará-los a imagens publicitárias idealistas, de corpos sem nenhuma marca, cicatriz ou gordura.
O seu corpo não está errado; ele é uma máquina incrível!
Vergonha deve sentir quem lucra com o sofrimento alheio.✨🤰
#MaternidadeReal #Maternidade #MaternidadeSemFiltro
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
Avez-vous déjà écouté un rouge-gorge chanter ? 🎶
La nature est magnifique.
Profitons de ce spectacle gratuit sans l'abîmer...🤩
Nicole Smith 🇨🇦 retweeted
This is what we’ve done to something as simple as a pear.
Grown in Argentina.
Packed in Thailand.
Sealed in plastic.
Floated across oceans.
Sold halfway around the world.
We’ve turned fresh fruit into a global supply chain that burns fuel, creates waste, and doesn't even taste like the actual fruit anymore.
Why can't we just grow and package our pears here?
