Wired magazine has the article with click bait headline The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI.

Friston’s free energy principle says that all life, at every scale of organization—from single cells to the human brain, with its billions of neurons—is driven by the same universal imperative, which can be reduced to a mathematical function. To be alive, he says, is to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy.

I found the article rather fascinating to read. I had feelings of getting close to understanding something important, with the realization that I had a lot of research to do to understanding what was new in AI which was a subject I only barely understood in the first place.

Naked Capitalism has the article When the Middle Class Lost Its Wealth.

Middle-class households prominently own houses, while the top-10% predominantly own shares and business equity. This gives rise to a race between the housing market and the stock market in shaping the wealth distribution. Housing booms lead to wealth gains for leveraged middle-class households and tend to decrease wealth inequality. Stock market booms primarily boost the wealth at the top of the wealth distribution. Asset price changes can therefore lead to major changes in the wealth distribution. Over extended periods in postwar American history, such portfolio valuation effects have been key drivers of shifts in the U.S. distribution of wealth.

he more I think of this, the more I realize that this should come as no surprise.

As I saw people prior to 2007 refinancing their houses to take out the equity in cash, the more I warned that home equity should not be used as a piggy bank to make up for lack of income gains in the economy.

In 2006, we retired and returned to Massachusetts from Oregon. I could see the end of the real estate boom coming, We decided that we’d better harvest our Oregon real estate gains and move back to Massachusetts while we could still afford to do it. It has taken 12 years for our Massachusetts house to barely regain the value it had in 2006. Meanwhile, the stock market has been very kind to us,

The recent Trump tax cuts to the wealthy went mostly into raising stock market prices, and nothing else.