What's The Deal With ... ?

---

Over the course of four meetings will explore somewhat related topics of current interest with technical underpinnings in an effort to objectively assess the situations they pose.  Some subjects will extend more than one meeting and some less. Topics (in this order) will include:

• ChatGPT: Large Language Models like the notorious ChatGPT are now able to write essays and computer code, compose verse, perform language translations, summarize articles, perform high school level math and even solve college-level physics problems. Is this capability to be feared or embraced? How far can it go? Where can this take us, and do we really want to go there? 
• America’s Economy: What is special about America’s economy relative to that of other developed nations, and is American Exceptionalism in this form likely to continue?  We look at various measures of our economy, both positive and negative, to include growing federal debt, demographic trends, inequality, some more recent developments such as bank failures, inflation and threatening recession, among other factors.  
• Americans’ Life Expectancy: We address the recent trend of American’s declining life expectancy relative to that in other wealthy nations, having peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years. And while other nations recovered from a large drop due to Covid, America has not. We will examine causes for this trend relative to other developed nations and look into related trends that bear on the health of Americans, including the health care system itself and looming shortages of medical professionals. 
• Covid Learnings: With the pandemic largely in the rear view mirror and a great deal of data available to examine, we explore the various factors that collectively contributed to getting it under control (for now) and important learnings for future threats of this nature.  We will compare how different countries managed the pandemic and their relative successes and failures with regard to fatalities and economic recovery. Time permitting we may also explore the mRNA techniques used for Covid vaccines and how such techniques are being leveraged in other ways.