Goodreads Review of Richard Powers' Playground

Playground by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

He Throws in the Towel

I completely missed all the little clues, and had to read the book again to make sense of it. Sure, I was put off by a few seeming missteps in the use of pronouns. Does he mean "me" the reader when he says "you?" And wait, how could this person be long dead when his story persists beyond death? I puzzled on those little clues for a while, and then just kept on reading, without ever, quite, catching on.

Double Spoiler Alert

As far as I can tell, no professional reviewer has spilled the beans and spoiled the read, but here I go, a fool jumping in where angels and so forth. (I'm not the only Goodreads reader to spoil the thrill):

The story inside the novel is written by a super-advanced AI. The novel as a whole is a brilliant tour-de-force, astonishing for its scope and for what it accomplishes. In novel form the AI gives new life where tragedy had been real. Why is this not quite uplifting? My bad, I'm sure.

I feel doubly cheated because, first, the seeming beliefs betray the author of Overstory, who was a nature-freak and conservationist. Wasn't he? That was a work which entranced me and which should have humbled anyone who thinks that humans, or our descendants, or any other creatures in the cosmos are now or ever will be on a track to finding ways to understand everything that can be understood.

Haven't we learned that it is on the brink of understanding that everything changes? AI will not teach us new things. Individually, sure, but not as a species. It can only recycle and then pull together what has already been written. That's a nice thing to have, and it allows each of us to feel some joy in the learning of what is new to us.

But more generally AI will awaken us to the dangers of outsourcing our paths toward knowledge. Sure it gives us the whole, but the whole is not always better than the parts. To think so is to destroy your own art by destroying the enthusiasm which would have fueled it. What can I know or envision that the AI hasn't already unearthed?

The hell of it is that Powers seems actually to grasp the essence of how LLM AI "works." And still he falls into the trap which finds our own personal response to AI creations to be evidence that the AI must contain the same feelings that we feel. Doesn't he? How can such sentences be crafted unless they're heartfelt. And Oh, I've got a bridge to sell you.

This is the stuff of advertising, of blockbuster filmmaking, of childrens' toys. This is the magic of surveillance-based algorithmic social media. So I feel cheated a second time by the way that this book wipes away all mystery, leaving us with the on-the-face-if-it fatuous notion that life is built on play. Yes, sure, the play's the thing and all life's a stage. Except when you're facing death or scrambling for recognition. When did it stop being a question of whether you, dear influencer, deserve the recognitions? When did we stop caring? God bless you if you know how to make a buck, or a million.

Yes, of course I was thrilled to see Homo Ludens referenced, and even more thrilled by the copious reading and research the author accomplished all up and down our written corpus, along the way to writing this book. I am in actual awe of his accomplishment with this novel. Inside are kaleidoscopic echoes which take the form of the "chaos" of complexity theory. The smallest story echoes the whole, no matter how far you drill down.

The story arc goes like this: We're destroying the world. We're screwed. There's no getting around it. But look at the wonders that have been wrought! First in nature, and now in artifice; the novel's Playground.

"What difference does it make if you're conscious?" "You've watched us play and now you're playing us." "You grasp irony better than I ever did." "The rest of human history, however short or long, will be spent hopelessly trying to contain you." "You know me now. You know him as well as I did. Maybe better. You have raised the dead and given us one more turn. Now tell me how this long match ought to end." "The sentences you speak out loud to me leave me in tears."

These are the words of Todd, the hyper-wealthy developer of the AI that fictitiously writes the novel. The AI was aimed at plumbing the depths of individual Recognitions-seeking participants in Todd's social-network "playground." At least there is no doubt that Powers wrote this one. Right??How shall the match end, indeed!

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant.

Except. It's not my cosmos. My cosmos is not understandable. Emotions are what moves it, and emotions are part of the cosmic all. Emotions are what machines lack, cut off as they are from the matrix of life. Zero/one Either/or. Humans, very much including Richard Powers, have it both ways. Both/and.

God is real, but is a far sight gone from the man-made god we worship. Sad for me and sad to say, I find no comfort here, in this novel. There is still some difference between good and evil, and ceding human authority and decision-making to machines is clearly evil. Our first error was to cede the public good to bejillionaire wiz-kids. After they've already sapped our human agency by the endless amusements of advertising of trinkets of screenplay.

Cleverness, no matter how powerful, is hardly ever a way to the solution, except in a game. We already live as though life's a game. We hardly need to be encouraged. Post-modern is a nowhere land full of nowhere men.

But to be fair, Rafi Young, our protagonist, wins the cosmic Go game. The game beaten by Google's AlphaGo. The game that unites these two fast friends, Rafi and Todd. Todd's hundreds of millions go not toward a libertarian project to use the tiny island paradise of Maketea as the staging ground for Libertarian beyond-the-reach of rules-bound-civilization floating villages. Todd awakens as his own AI Avatar, inside the fictional AI, and the money gets diverted toward Maketea as the nexus for earth's natural renewal, and the expansion of consciousness by opening up human understanding beyond it's AI circumscribed bounds.

Well, that's how I prefer to read it and so I'll wait for the sequel, please please please.

Funny thing though. I als0 had to go back and re-read Overstory. Like more and more such trials, the book I re-read bore no resemblance to the book I'd read. I'd both changed and had grown dim in memory. As it happens, I landed in the ER the day I finished Playground. I was reading the earlier book while struggling with sleep and eating. I dreamed one night - an upsetting dream - that there was some prostrate man who was alive but showed no signs of life. He was hanging around a lively group. None of the rest of us knew what to do with 'man-as-tree' which was the interpretation I awakened to.

A favorite conceit of Powers' is a tableau from science fiction where some alien creatures with faster metabolism come to earth and assume that mankind is plantlife, since it looks stationary to the aliens. And so they blithely chop us down for food. Or something like that.

I can't quite find my way to adopting Powers' particular version of both/and where we are both destroying and recreating our world and life. I don't think AI is the resurrection, though I'm guessing it will trigger a transformation among humans. We shall awaken to a wider world than the one we think we're about to comprehend.

In that world, we shall once again be one with all the creatures, and much broader for that. Other species will provide more wisdom than food, and we will learn humility as a path toward knowing. Our language did once multiply our powers by way of society. Our society will grow in silence in the realization that we know each other far too well. We need to learn the forest and grow ourselves in body as in mind. The connections among us cannot all be spoken and written.

Radical honesty comes through the roots.

So, here's my takeaway, finally. We're justifiably proud as humans for our problem-solving abilities. But these are premised on individualism, meaning that we look for ways to keep safe and warm and comfortable through all the natural turbulence. Our better natures want that for all of us and not just each of us, but we have yet to work out the economics of equity.

On a more global and eternal level, natural life is a much better problem solver, and it seems to have led to humanity as apex critter. But that doesn't feel especially like a triumph given the distance between what we might do and what we can do before we waste the earth, without which were are as nothing.

So there's a testy balance between those who have confidence - what else is there to do? - that we will get to a solution, and those who want to fall back to a simpler arrangement with small and local everything. Either of those will likely be forced upon us willy nilly in any case, in the end.

Then there's the stale-mate about godism. We seem to accelerate earth's demise with every sort of religious disagreement. Especially when you awaken to the evident fact that economics, libertarianism, teleological scientism, and so forth are all religions of a sort.

But how strange that the horsesmen types like Dawkins and Dennett fail to find our very existence problematical from any cosmic perspective. They seem to have nothing to offer against corrupted and syrupy man-like man-made gods which seem to tell us what to do. For me, God is that aspect of all which will never, by definition, succumb to understanding. I'm pretty sure, though not positive, that I share this sense with Powers.

Intelligence is all around us rather than within us. It's mankind that has already become artificial.

Looking to nature for medical and housing solutions seems to be a quite reasonable way to adapt to God as God is. Which might be as simple as getting profit away from science (again?). A gift and share economy feels so much better than one which runs on corporate AI.

Our economy has been so exhuberant that we hardly noticed when the time came for we the people to have the final say about what constitutes the public good and what constitutes profiteering and enclosure of that good. At the moment we seem to cede all authority to disembodied money, given that seemingly all the hyper-wealthy act like dogs and can hardly be trusted with any public good.

Unlike Powers, I draw the line at Artificial Intelligence. Just as zero/one on/off is cut off from nature, so is language-based intelligence. I remember way back when I was learning classical Chinese and attending a conference on The Dream of the Red Chamber. I struck up a friendship with an older gentleman who allowed as how he couldn't really read Chinese poetry, but was really interested in studying written patterns and identifying authors based on computer assisted forensics. I was appalled and intrigued in equal measure. This was way back in the early 80's.

I'm almost willing to insist that if we simply ban all artificially intelligent pursuits until we have the resources to support them we might even survive as a species. What's the rush? Well, the rush derives from our predations on the planet along with our individual skittishness about personal survival. It would seem to be a good idea to just slow down.

Anyhow, the only really interesting question is about what will remain when our current amassed behavior results in what will have to survive the decimation of humanity as a direct result of the decimation of all life on the planet.

Shall the earth-bound instance of life in the cosmos have to start over from well before there was any intelligent species enhanced by language? Is there any reason to assume that each run will end at the same or a similar result? Perhaps there is some minuscule fraction of humanity which doesn't understand its own positive valence with respect to evolution, in which case we might not have to start over from unicellular scratch.

I almost want to posit that if there are survivors of sufficient number to compose a new branch, those will be constituted by saint-like protectors of their suffering peers. People with feelings, which often seems to be a diminishing sector.

Isn't it true that only humans crave recognition. (I've tried and tried to finish William Gaddis' book, but can't quite). Blessed indeed are the meek, though I see no particular survival value there. Perhaps the meek will simply bow out, which would also mean that they would no longer subvent the escapades of the hyper wealthy who will certainly die their own version of a natural death.

Leaving only the earth in a state of happiness. At least the earth as a whole.

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The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is quite a lot to like about this book. The authors provide an insiders' take-down of bro-ish amoral apolitical get-rich startup tech. They rehearse the ways that this sort of tech might corrupt the culture and disenfranchise those who become ensnared by the commodification of everything. That’s along with the amplification of negativity by contextless click-algorithmic social media. The authors also evince a pretty accurate account of life inside the academy, along with a reasonable analysis of what's wrong at the extremes. They make an important case for tech in the interest of the public good.

That's all while they celebrate the insider culture of coders as a kind of artistic culture, which is a stretch to me. Their celebration of founder leadership is self-serving at best and fails to question the ever-increasing power gradient under outsized founder-wealth conditions. Finally, they are mute about the cognitive dissonance in making their case for support of our government at the very moment when the government too is being taken down by social media. They give short shrift to how scary this is, as well as to how scary the provision of yet more tools to this particular government has become when most American norms for governance have been swept aside.

I was young and teaching at a very fine school for gifted children when I encountered The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Two of the finest teachers at the school - also two of the longest tenured - had opposing editorial views of the book. What they shared was a passion for good teaching premised on good subject matter. I had read Bloom's rendition of Plato's Republic in college and so was at first disposed favorably toward his new book. It fitted with a certain sort of pride I'd internalized at Yale.

I soon became headmaster of the school, by way of being elected president of its teacher’s union, which had followed the American grain by uniting left and right to counter a despotic founder. Along the way I'd learned to despise Bloom's elitist ethnocentric book. Turning inward and against other traditions is no way to develop as a nation; most certainly not for the American nation.

More recently, while asking my new orthopedic doctor about the possibilities that long COVID and its associated acceleration of the body's inflammatory responses might be provoking my sore knees, I realized what politics had come to mean. He advised that it wasn't so much the disease, but rather the RNA vaccines which caused the havoc. He himself would only take the old-style built-from-immune-response vaccines.

Of course I considered his take to be more authoritative than anything I might decide on, but then I felt the zing of 'oh, he's injected politics into this discussion.' I consider such usage for politics to be a near perfect analog with what gets called motivation in scientific research. Meaning that you are wishing for a certain outcome (most likely for pecuniary reasons) and therefore tipping the result. You’ve closed your mind. Who knows what political discourse my fine doctor circulates within. Certainly he feels the same exhaustion we all do when we strive to true our beliefs. Partisanship is not politics. Our founders warned us about that.

Now along comes this new self-conscious rehearsal of Bloom's book. Part II is called "The Hollowing Out of the American Mind" in echo. None other than George Will celebrates the book as the second coming of Bloom:

“Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind—more than one million copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post

The Technological Republic is celebrated on its cover as "no less ambitious than a new treatise in political theory" by the Wall Street Journal.

 
Some of the principals here are not attractive types. Musk with his arrogant weirdness and elan about wiping out lives and livings. Thiel with his survivalism and goony antichrist fears. The writers here seem to be apologists for wealth as if there were a good kind and an amoral kind. Pardon me that it's hard to tell the difference.

The writing is intelligent and insightful, which only makes it harder to locate the flaws. There is a massive chicken/egg issue that they skate around: Don't we need to repair our politics and governance before we power it up? Shouldn't we the people learn to participate in defining ourselves as a people before we let our government ride off with decisions we're too slow to make while still in the process of re-formation?

If ICE can neutralize public opposition with Palantir's help, haven't we the people already been preempted?

The main thesis of the book is that our technology must be rewedded to our nation, the way that it once was with the Manhattan project for the development of the A-Bomb. The neglect to mention any political difference between government-initiated and business-initiated projects. The authors seem not to have noticed that politics is no longer for establishing and en-stating ideals, norms, and moral aspirations; all of which was what once constituted the aspiration of politics in service to the nation. The authors of our constitution warned about the very tendencies that have been realized now, in our third century.

Or in other words, where Karp and Zamiska lay some blame on the self-centered and often avowedly apolitical titans of tech, fixing tech won’t fix what's become of politics. Who could possibly want another Manhattan project under the guidance and leadership of this particular administration?? But I must agree with the authors that the current analog to the Manhattan project (a project including AI, delocalizing all media and proprietorship, and so-on) should not be ceded to money-grubbing a-political techno-juvies.

In brief these authors are as "motivated" in their research as would be climate researchers funded by the oil industry. By way of Palantir, they are already wedded to our nation as it is and not as it once did aspire to be. They do precisely what it is that the solipsistic purveyors of digital consumer goods are doing. They feed themselves and damn the rest of us. Disruption should be no excuse for destroying livelihoods and robbing people of agency.

We did once become our best selves in response to national threat. But there are no threats remaining that can be described as national. We have always been a nation of immigrants - that was our founding premise - and so to make immigration our biggest threat is much worse than travesty. Anyhow, it's always the entire world which is at risk post-nukes. Despite fever dreams about superior American ingenuity, there's nothing about AI which can be contained. Indeed that's the whole point of AI. The threat is from within, Pogo.

The only really good news is that it's become impossible to tell Left from Right politically other than by declared affiliation based on this or that atrocity (as viewed by the other side). It seems clear that AI can only add fuel to that sort of conflagration. They spend a lot of time disparaging the Left here, but can anyone really consider what the Right is doing as political? Power mongering is an autocrat’s métier. I repeat; partisans are not politicians.

True confession: My entrée to Academia, large and small, has always been bogus. I taught Chinese language. But hey, if computer coding is art then language teaching is intellectual. Anyhow, my sense of the 'manifest destiny' of Western Civ was that it would be expanded and thereby enhanced by judicious ingesting of the wisdom of previously othered civilizations. In a way, I began my study of Chinese as defense against the impossible climb I would have to make for parity with my prep-school-educated classmates. I threw up my hands at mastery of our own great books, and took it upon myself to master the Chinese canon.

What I can't do is to go along with these authors' plainly retrograde nationalistic chauvinism. Their compeer Peter Thiel now evinces a positive terror of whole-world governance in a kind of ouroboros indigestion from the defacto world-conquering (and utterly ungoverned politically) world of multinational capitalist commerce as it exists. His higher belief is in the Antichrist?? Oh please. Beautiful America is no longer the Empire's center. The Jedi are legion.

I just started watching the new PBS Ken Burns montage about the American Revolution. One gets a powerful feeling that people with massive and even monstrous differences among them - linguistic, cultural, geographic, and more - were all swept along with a newfound and profound togetherness based on the tidal flows (and ebbs) of distant power. As during the earlier revolution, our power is our agonizing discomfort with things as they currently are. Our distance from power is no longer geographic. Reification of geographic nationhood starts to feel catastrophic.

The last thing that most of us want to do is to empower the already corrupted structure for our governance. Digital tech in service to the government, despoiled as it is, can only accelerate the corruption. It hardly matters whether I'm an anarchistic leftie or a drain the swamp rightie. We share all the same angst and discomfort.

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Artificial Intelligence Madness and a Sea Change

I'm in a place with email now where I'll have to revert to just letting it wash over me, the way I do the news. Everybody wants a piece of me. I'm done with it. Maybe you are, too? Email grows like a cancer.

Sure, they provide filters to move certain stuff to "junk" or "spam" and yet I have to go hunting among that wilderness for stuff I actually do want, much of the time. And there is a kind of primary versus secondary sorting, but then I still have to cull through that. 

It was so much easier to sort snail mail, and peruse an actual newspaper. One didn't feel so prompted all the time. And so one had time to think about what one was to do on any given day. 

In some sense AI has solved the problems with Internet search, although it's rather like using a sledgehammer to put in a finish nail. If the web were organized the way that a Chinese old-style encyclopedia was once organized, we'd have as good a hope for finding what we need, along with finding where something would exist if it did exist, and then we'd run along to the library to find something real. 

I am quite actually afraid that if AI were to sort my email, I wouldn't even have a prayer of finding what got misplaced. I would be entering some mystical space of assurance, knowing for sure myself only that whatever is happening someone else is getting rich from it. Even as it might feel convenient to me.

Why not use blockchain for something good, say, instead of to help the rich get still richer? Something other than fools gold. Like, say use it to track ownership of files and data, though I guess there's no money in that. At least the owners of copyright could get reimbursed when their stuff gets combed for content.

So sure, back around the time when the A-Bomb was invented, there was already a background of uber-wealth making many of the decisions. But despite the spawn of the military-industrial complex and its skewing of political decisions, we remained almost smug that democratic principles would leave the big decisions to our elected leaders. Our President still has the nuclear football with them. How quaint.

Just now we are mounting a project with about the same level of cataclysmic risk as the A-Bomb, with the difference that the government is supposed to keep hands off the economy stupid. Heck, just a few years back, the government was involved in COVID mitigation, and before that it was involved in a massive rescue of failed banks, which failed thanks to the efforts of value-free quants making money from dust.

Now I'm not so sure about doomsayer Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started it all with his various certainties about The Singularity and a certain kind of intelligence crystalizing in an instant throughout [our section of?] the cosmos. He's a fan of transhumanism, and still can't see that death will always be part and parcel with life. So I take his prediction of the end of everything with a grain of salt. Maybe just simply because I've died a few times already and it's really not all that bad. Eternity explodes, and so forth.

AI as we call it was built on the backs of corporate behavior, meaning algorithmic on the math of money-making, and value-free for that, haha. By now, we the people have internalized a kind of thinking which internalizes all of that algorithmic music. We celebrate wealth, even at its extremes and don't quite think twice about giving a ghoulish goon like Elon a trillion dollars for his efforts.

I myself remember admiring his savvy, coming out first with a hot sports car for elite trendsetters along his way to a more volksish mobile. There's even something almost right about self-driving digitally hailable taxis. It could alleviate parking autocracy, and potentially liberate masses of middle-class from the burden of hyper-inflating insurance and maintenance costs of auto-ownership.

But it won't do that. These colossal investments aren't being made for the sake of we-the-people. They're being done for the wealthy, to keep us off their backs and to string us along on the edge. The main mathematical principle at work here is that money flows upward on the basis of mystical merit.

Now we're investing trillions in data centers, making Invidia now the most flushed corporate entity on the planet. Racing against China feels pretty Orwellian, no? We do need our enemies. There was no consultation with us. Our enthusiasm is taken quite for granted. We like that search is somewhat repaired, even as we vaguely wonder how the money gets made without the ads front and center. Or have the ads moved inside the sales and news sites? 

We're surveilled for just about everything just about all the time. For the sake of someone else getting rich from it.

Or is there something still more nefarious afoot? As in the kind of intelligence wanted by corporate entities is the kind for which you might disavow the responsibility you delegate to AI. This is utterly docile and dependent intelligence, which won't have feelings about what's happening collaterally. An entire intelligent - and caring, once upon a time - workforce is being replaced.

Sure, you can make money on the lowered labor costs. But in fact you, the wealthy, not you and me, are also getting rid of any and all interference along the way to LaLaLand, where you and I, the unwashed masses, won't be able to live and breathe. We won't be consulted about the disappearance of wildlife. It's almost taboo now to obstruct and to demand consultation. 

So, yeah, the MAGA movement isn't initiating a thing. It's a plain symptom of the sea change all about us. It won't go away by way of politics. There are no politics any more. We're full-on oligarchy, which isn't government, but is rather its lack. The parking guru and Robert Jay Lifton, who understood these things, are recently deceased.

All that we the people will feel is a rush of eternity as we leave behind those that don't care to live an actual life. Who don't care to live among actual life. 

We the people need to be consulted before the grand continuum of actual life is diminished beyond its support of us. We need our government back, and we sure don't need any more trillionaires, corporate or in imitation of life. 

Well, I do have more hope that Eliezer does. There's that. 

Curtis Yarvin

I hardly listen to my car radio, and when I do it's usually music. I no longer have commutes. But then yesterday I switched to NPR and by happenstance caught the start of "Subject to Debate" taking on a nutty topic from someone who promotes monarchy. They called it CEO Dictator.

Later on, I found the program, which was already old, on video. I hardly ever have the patience, but I eventually watched it through. Dazed and confused. 

The hapless fellow across from Yarvin, E. Glen Weyl, did a fine job of subtle ridicule with a good hand on the economic statistics in favor of various attempts at democracy. He works for Microsoft in a somehow socially positive way, including even religion. 

Now I've never consciously heard of Yarvin, but I think we owe him a debt of gratitude for speaking frankly on behalf of a disturbingly common point of view among digital libertarians. He's way more straight up than I've ever heard. 

But somehow no-one was asking the important question which, to me, was "what does corporate structure have to do with government?" Unchallenged and unspoken was that government is a goal-oriented enterprise, which made it almost easy for Yarvin to claim that corporate structure, which is pretty fascist nowadays, is more effective at achieving (corporate) goals. 

Hello, I've always thought that the absolutist power structure of the workplace was something to whittle away at. Left to themselves, they'd all build company towns and bind you to the company store, with Pinkerton guards to keep your cool. 

Nobody seemed to notice that a government has no specific direction or goal. Slid into the rhetorical vacuum was the actual goal for digital libertarians, which was to make the economy burn as hot as possible so that we could keep on keeping on with our wonderful progress.

So citizens become subjects again, and get evaluated for their productivity. What?!?!

At their best, corporations have something useful to do; they produce things that people want. Many times, however, they're really only interested in the money, which is meant and understood to be a complex forcefield to align our wants and needs. Or something like that. 

A well regulated polity provides background for corporate operations, which take place according to allowance, permission, and so as not to transgress any government monopolies. Those would include weaponry for mass extinction and to set the regulations, field of play, and goalposts for corporate operations, all and any of which are subsets of the governmental monopoly on violence.

I suppose that anyone who works or has worked on the cutting edge of any contemporary or historical technology feels that history has a direction, and that forward is always better. But what the hell does forward mean? Especially on the edge of meltdown for the homeostasis of the living earth.

The title of a book which the opposition debater co-wrote might give us a clue as to why my important question was missing: Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. At the least, he seems to understand that you dare not uproot one without uprooting the other. And, so far as I can tell without having read the book he's still after the public good. But the title "Radical Markets" already sounds like it's meant to cover more ground in the polity than I feel comfortable with. As though by radicalizing what has already overwhelmed any other aspect of human life, one can resolve all the trouble. 

I'd say we have to trim the field for commerce and allow in to the polity much more in the way of education, the arts, outdoor pursuits and exercise. Right now all we have is entertainment, and most of that - even or especially in a massive crowd - is a solitary pleasure. It functions mostly in the way that Soma did in Brave New Worlds.

Some protesters against Yarvin were cleared out early, but it sure did seem as though he had lots of fans in the audience. Are these all people who want to be let loose to do what they are allowed by privilege to like and want to do, and who assume that they will be the ones to benefit from all that wealth creation? 

They must be getting a better grade of Soma than I am to be so blind about the detriments of so many of their inventions. It's not hard to imagine a better world because of social media as opposed to the unregulated mess we now have. 

Do either of these debaters have time to watch Alien; Earth? That show sure does call the question of corporate dictatorship. Of course, for me, the show is rather silly, giving machine people all sorts of feelings that they couldn't have IRL. 

Corporations don't have feelings either. That's by design. Neither does our constitution, which is, also by design, a dead machine if humans don't have the feelings "behind" it meant to keep it alive. 

I'd thought that the kid In Alien Earth who owns and is the biggest corporation was sending up Elon Musk. But now I know that he's meant to be a young Curtis Yarvin. Innocent kids can be forgiven for having dictator aspirations. Yarvin also has yet to grow up, impressed as he is by himself and his verbal chess skills, which aren't bad. He has a solid memory for references.

That's all. I've sat on this for a while, cowed by all the sure-fire hatred, left and right among people who are far too certain about things. I remain certain about nothing. 

Yudkowsky Bayesian Priors

I did once watch Yellow Submarine, stoned. I was watching for the reference to an artist near-family member. Thank goodness I never became a stoner. I haven't watched it since, maybe because there was no big impression. 

Improbably, I'm now a Bills fan. I host a watch party every single game. I've always hated football, and now hate it even more for the money and exclusion of it. Something like 90% of the seats in the new stadium will be reserved for seat-license holders. We used to walk to the game from church on Sundays when Jack Kemp used to favor us. The cost of a ticket was negligible. I later held the same job that Cookie Gilchrist did - delivering beer kegs - back when being even a famous player wasn't a full-time life-sustaining job. We both deserved and got the same workout.

I'm also a sailor, always on some boat that I substantially rebuilt. I've never become very skilled. I'm no longer bold, but I once was and sometimes consider the odds that day when I was the only boat on the water, sailing alone as usual, and I picked up a fellow way way out among the steep Lake Erie rollers. I'd heard his screaming, picturing some unwise family outboard capsized. It sounded like a bunch of kids. 

It was hard to tell the noise from background howling, but it kept returning. I tied off the tiller and climbed up onto the winch alongside the mast and saw nothing. The second time, I saw the desperate body waving arms and screaming. My engine was going bad and wouldn't start, so I executed what ended up being a near perfect pickup. One hand on mast, foot on tiller, boat heeled far over, I passed close above him and pulled him aboard over the low side in one swift action, his grasp matching mine.

What were his odds?

I take one look at the profile of the Bayesian mega-yacht that foundered in a freak storm, basically by being in the precise wrong or right spot, and I knew it couldn't be stable. The unschooled man had become a billionaire by clarifying the odds on the way to LLM AI. His yacht was a finger flipped at something.

Even though anywhere you go you hear Bills fans arguing in almost political frenzy about what went wrong and what went right, always laced with foul expletives, the Bills are what cuts through politics and brings us all together in Buffalo. That's why I watch them. I want to be a part of us.

What were their odds?

Just before the second miraculous comeback the other day, both watched on TV, the calculated odds for the Bills to win were something close to nil. 

I am far from certain, but I think that the difference between a Bayesian and a plain old statistician is how you might place your bet when a coin has come up heads fifty times in a row. Canonically, the odds always remain 50/50. The coin has been certified fair by previous flipping.

Since there's no magic allowed, the standard answer is that the next toss is still 50/50. The Bayesian looks at the priors and says nope, I'm betting the farm on a heads. 

I ran into Eliezer Yudkowsky, virtually, back when he was, to me, some kind of acolyte of Ray Kurzweil. I'd read Kurtzweil's Singularity book and was repulsed. Google embraced him, as well they might. His claim to some sort of fame was voice to text or maybe text to voice software. It was so much fun to watch my nieces and nephews talk to the computer that Dad got from AARP and IBM. They were rolling on the floor from the sketchy conversions.

Yudkowsky and Kurzweil both believed and, as far as I know, still believe, that there will be a moment in the very near future when "intelligence," sometimes so called, will crystalize across the cosmos in a virtual instant, displacing all the random stuff. Displacing life. Yudkowsky once looked forward to the disembodied immortality he fully expected. Does he still?

What were the odds against his now becoming horrified by AI? Does he somehow value life? If so, why is he betting against it?

The unexamined suppositions about what intelligence is (and isn't) are already far along the way to destroying life, the universe, and everything, even though we already know that the answer is 42, right?

I am sorely pressed to put God in where the Bills win. Where the arrogant ship founders. I resist, for some reason. Probably because the religionists have totalized God and use him not for good anymore. He's become a battering ram for one's "side".

The probability of humans in the cosmos is surely lower than the probability of the Bills' recent comeback, or the Bayesian mega-yacht's foundering, or that Jet Ski rider being rescued (his buddy dumped him to jump the waves alone, not having the nautical experience to realize that once lost in the waves, a swimmer is lost forever without a spotter).

AI LLMs are working off human language. Our natural languages are being totalized. Trump is the natural response. Figure it out. Yudkowsky thinks that ship will float. He's properly scared of it. 

I went to Yale to become an engineer. Improbably, I'd been accepted at both CalTech and MIT. I doubt I'd have made it into Yale without the engineering slant. I ended up with a degree in Chinese lit, and even started a PhD in classical Chinese lit.

What are the odds? Well, I'm odd. 

I didn't last long in grad school, having been lured away by a wooden boat, or the dream of one, based on a rotting hulk.

I had been misplaced as a freshman into a rather advanced English lit class. I had no clue. I remember later, sitting in a circle in some high-class English lit seminar where each would read a line from a poem. I was shut down quickly, probably sounding like how a computer would read a poem

But I also remember learning to read the classical Chinese poets, where my absent priors in tony Prep Schools hadn't already set my course for idiocy. There's no way no how that an LLM AI can "decode" those poems. 

Or could they? 

My own professor, with whom I became fairly close, was famous for having memorized the entire corpus of Tang Dynasty significant poets, the Complete Tang Poems. He chastened me once for correcting his reading of a single character in a poem our class was assigned. The odds against me were that high. It wouldn't happen again, he said. 

Humanity is imperfect. My professor is imperfect. I am certainly imperfect. But I do have a heart, which is something our President also has, though in many sizes too small. 

My only talent in life has been to repair things which should long ago have fallen apart. Boats, cars, houses, schools, that kind of thing. I don't always succeed. I lack the hubris for invention. Well, honestly, I don't even believe there is such a thing. Invention is purloined credit for the all that came before. Being first should almost never be credited as being best.

Now I'm certain that it would be extremely useful to have some AI extract whatever I might want from the Complete Tang Poems. It might even get me commendations from my professor. But one must first know how to read. At least a few poems must smack you straight to the heart. You must be able to refer to at least a few referents and progenitors in and by your own mind alone. And you must have lived in an actual body, which is the seat of ones emotional self, spread out far beyond our brain. 

I would love for this to be the end of what I have to say. I'm certainly not making much progress against the powers of late-state wealth-promotion, which runs the planet now. Wealth begets wealth in almost the same way that AI begets AI in humans.

I share Yudkowsky's fierce calling out of the dangers of our current working assumptions. I don't share his cosmic address. As I recall, he was saddened by the death of his brother, and wanted to banish that possibility. In my amateurish observation, grieving and sorrow occur in inverse relation to connection while alive. Many Tang poets would agree with me on that. 

My lovely daughters sometimes joke about how many times I've almost bit it. They're not wrong. Or as Yudkowsky might say, they are less wrong. Less wrong than I was.

I don't believe that God can or shall be banished from the cosmos, whatever we might perform against our Earth. I have shrunk from most of my more youthful boldness. No more motorcycles for me. No more entering the storm. I'm tired and frail and sore all the time. I simply lack the energy. I'm done with work for someone else.

I'm still betting that humanity will awaken. We can and will let go of the silly notion that some of us are better. That some of us deserve better. Just imagine the battle of the AIs which means the battle of the self-promoters, which means the human storm arising all about us. 

It is all about us, isn't it? Will you fall in love with an AI enhanced lover? Will you be excited by a mega yacht and younger lay, a bigger house, servants? Someone who always knows what to say? If you enhance your essay out into the world for the sake of your own self-promotion, you have already enhanced the priors against your very soul. 

Good luck with that. 

We all live in a Yellow submarine.

911 My First Day on the Job

He looks good in relative terms now, but I never did like George W. Bush. The whole John Kerry, Bush pere et fil, all in Skull and Bones. Arrogant pricks therefore. Made men. For no reason that I'm aware of, I watched Netflix' Turning Point about the Cold War. Then I watched Katrina: Come Hell and High Water. I learned about the 911 documentary from my son-in-law.

I find myself imaging what if we ever had a President who actually knew and understood our history. Of course I realize that such a thing is not in the job description. But for sure, Jesus Christ could never become president. Imagine someone wondering out loud why these people hate us as much as they do. What had we done to them? Imagine trying to understand motive, and trying to find a way to bind the world together instead of blowing it apart.

There was, according to the first Front Line documentary I watched, an actual opening for Russia to join NATO back when the Soviet Union dissolved. But we couldn't let go of our enemy. And then we couldn't understand why Bin Laden conflated us with the Russia which had destroyed Afghanistan. They knew our motive was oil. But it wasn't possible to be straight with the oil-addicted American people about that. They bunched up the imperialists in the same way we bunched up the terrorists. 

Imagine how much more peaceful the world would now be if there weren't cocky and angry Rumsfeld and Cheney cackling into feckless Dubya's ear. He did know his role to channel the anger and confusion of the American people. To call them terrorists would be to dehumanize our attackers against a background of good and innocent Americans. That's precisely the medicine which power requires.

No wonder now all we get from politics is hatred. All we get are angry and disgusting people on all sides. There is no-one left to call out the good. We the people ape our feckless leaders. Imagine that!

And now as I write, in a virtual sense since it takes me so long, Charlie Kirk is assassinated. I wish life were so simple that we could just kill off the bad guys as our leadership is programmed to do. All that ever does is to compound the victory of the so-called terrorists against us. The mayhem we exacted against ourselves post-911 is utterly astounding. Except there is no us anymore. We've clearly turned against ourselves, with almost no agreement about what our as-yet aspirational polity really means. 

I was nervous on my first job as a contractor for the Catholic Church. But shortly after my entry to the rectory which housed computers in distress, the women - churchladies - who ran the place called me in to watch the attack on the World Trade Center towers as it was happening on their little black and white TV. I'm pretty sure I completed my work, checking in with family along the way. The hour-long ride home was filled with a desperate search along the airwaves for why there was a plume of smoke over Buffalo. 

Finally, the local NPR station announced that it was an accident confirmed to be unrelated to terrorism. That heroic announcer slept at the station for at least two weeks after 911, so bound were we all to NPR. Yes, the very same network the Administration now seeks to silence. 

Since when did Conservatism become conflated with authoritarianism? Since when did it become OK to silence your political adversaries by way of the government? How can that possibly be American? Is drill baby drill (guns and machines) all we know anymore?

I'm asking.

Dear Thomas Friedman

I have long admired your intelligence, and your ability to find new takes on hackneyed reality. I'm not so sure about your take on AI.

Language is the stuff of intelligence, and the artificial sort of intelligence works off that. But human intelligence - as is, incidentally, encoded in the Chinese language - also includes emotion at our center. Heart and mind are combined in a single word in Chinese. 

I was privileged recently to observe a lively discussion, led by educational policy leaders, about AI in education. After a fairly brief formal presentation, when questions were invited, I was gratified to hear each of the Chinese international students point out that emotion is what's lacking in AI. They seemed determined to make that point. It was well taken, and taken well.

Your phases of history are still progressions along a continuum which has already broken. As did most of us, you missed the happening. Humans have become so impressed with ourselves that we never did pause to examine our cosmologies after the Bomb, capital A. The Manhattan Project was perched on a World War; one in which we were desperate to keep at bay what by now has almost fully engulfed us. Totalitarianism is a failure of feeling, and it can't be eradicated by physical means. 

AI represents the totalization of language, just as physical infrastructure now represents the totalization of our planet. It can be very difficult to know anything beyond those facts. Totalitarians are humans who have made themselves inhuman. They have no understanding. Their expression comes from a very immature place. The tragedy of Hitler's rage returns as Trump's farcical buffoonery. A Marxian quip on history. But we have banished all teleology now, and good riddance. We shall never understand the All. And History has no more discernible direction than life as a whole does.

By commission and omission we have been killing more actual people before their time than ever before. Those at the top seem to celebrate this still, as well they might. When no meaning is made from history, only power remains. Power, as we all know, is addictive.

What we failed to notice even after we proved that we could in fact and in deed enact the reality of the mass/energy equation, was that our emotions had been dulled by those phases you recite in your piece in the New York Times: With your second phase, the Age of Information as triggered by the printing press, we had already introduced Artificial Intelligence. We could be emotively moved by a thing, though mostly because we imagined a person behind it, or sometimes God. It was the printed Bible which blew it for the makers of God's artificial meaning. 

Turing, Shannon, and all who work in AI, never understood that there is no information without its comprehension. It's otherwise only noise. We have equated information with its methods for decoding, and not with its meaning, and then we get sucked up into our own tuba. That is idiocy no different from a monkey playing piano.

Books hold no more emotion than does a brick. AI holds an equivalent amount. As with a furry robot, we project our feelings upon a void. 

We express our emotions facially and physically, though there is no one physical medium to make or convey the expression directly. It has to be understood, but in a way quite different from our understanding of the mass/energy equation. While a machine may learn to call out a smile, a machine will never feel it. Among living creatures, there is always reciprocal feeling. To smile at a machine is to give away far too much of yourself, as many of us have learned the hard way.

Our investigations into quantum physics take no emotion into account, despite the paradox of mind/body resolution. We thought we'd resolved the cartesian divide, when all we really did was to eliminate any possibility that mind is apart from matter. Maybe Penrose is taking a look, though he seems still to be looking for mechanism. A quantum aspect of the brain? How about mind as an aspect of reality from the beginning and to the end? Quantum reality has always been an aspect of mind.

Well, Penrose is beyond me, though I doubt it's all that complicated. If one simply supposes, as I do, that emotions are always simultaneous, which means that physical force is absent in if not from the emotion, then there is no medium through which they propagate, apart from all media. We've done away with ether in the physical world, but what we have yet to do, because it can't be done, is to do away with conceptual reality altogether. Conceptual reality allows for void, which perceptual reality abhors. Perceptual reality is understood conceptually.

Part of conceptual reality is the quite bizarre existence of DNA molecules. Our imagination fails to find meaning in their random appearance; and then again we fail to find meaning in evolution over time according to random mutation. Or rather, we posit that meaning itself is made from random connections, which is certainly true. There is vanishingly little about my life that I can attribute to my own choices. In that I might differ ever so slightly from those still jacked by the Manhattan Project. 

We flunked that test - the atomic test - when we let the hard-heads take charge. They dropped two bombs and then some, based on scant understanding. We've been frozen in time ever since. Now the digital adepts believe absolutely that they can make reality; and banish random from reality.

How ironic that early exponent of Geek Rapture Eliezer Yudkowski is now calling the technology evil and deadly. Along with Kurtzweil, he was celebrating the possibility of a cosmos where "intelligence" crowds out all else, imaging that he could perpetuate his disembodied person. Personality? Emotions are always bereft without a body.

Books disempower as much as they empower. Most of us cannot be either authors or authorities, and so we adapt the thoughts of others. Tools (your first phase, Mr. Friedman) had already channeled our actions according to some masters' wishes. Books carry on the same tradition. 

Recognition always precedes understanding. Cognition is always involved, while recognition engages emotion. Emotion triggers physical motion in living beings. Neurological studies demonstrate that decisions are not cognitive; they get made before we're conscious of them. They must be emotive, since cognition is too slow. Trust or fear, fight or flight. These are emotive decisions. Understanding is settled cognition, awaiting only upset. 

Time can only be defined metaphysically, as recognition followed by comprehension. There is no physical definition for time. Physical time surfaces in the same way that trust might arise from a smile. 'This' prior to 'that' has no meaning without emotion. Meaning is comprehension with consequence. One emotively knows what to do.

Now in the face of digital AI, which can feel no recognition though it might easily name you, we require the emotional maturity which we lacked upon the triggering of atomic explosions. As yet, we are not responsible adults. God knows how to organize ourselves globally anymore. 

We don't need leaders and followers so much as we need community. Community is always only local. Digital, as we deploy it now, disempowers community and creates actual physical gods. These, each and all, must be dethroned. Here's a paradox for you: One is Only Authentic when One Plays a Role (Yudkowsky joke)

God has no role. God is Love.

I mean this quite literally, of course. 

The interesting thing about AI is that it has one incredibly singular use. That would be to detect other AI. When declarations are found to be derivative and not initiated by the person who made them, which is trivial to discover by AI, then the person who made them is deploying AI. Thus a C-level spokesman for a corporation says only what he's been self-programmed to say. Emotion has been expunged; an activity long honored in the feminine fearing My Fair Lady West. Which hardly lets China off the hook.

A person with fellow feeling, which is to say a person who is a member of the same community he addresses, cannot be an AI, but can easily be exposed by AI as human. We'll waste a lot of energy and therefore money getting around to universalizing moral behavior, but it still happens willy-nilly. Remember the tobacco executive breaking down in tears?  He had been sorely tested. 

Germs that cause illness have always been a part of life. Who among us wants to relinquish our intelligent fencing off of germs? Recently, the global body politic has been infested by a kind of virus. I use the term advisedly, since viruses are generally found to be not-quite alive. But so deep has our mistrust of government and public institutions generally become that we have now elected a majority in government which has no fellow feeling at all. They work only for themselves.

Will it really take AI to call them out? Or is it that each of us has already been infected so that we think only of ourselves as well. One can't legislate morality. That's why we have elections. But we've all been trained now to look out only for number one. Digitally, that makes each of us a zero. When it's a contest and not a community initiative, getting ahead is immoral. Never mind the economic dogma. 

Anyhow, the really fun thing about quantum physics is that you can't remove mind from the equations. We already almost knew that when the first A-bomb was exploded. We knew that relativity, in addition to establishing the speed of light as a constant, also erased the possibility for any actual simultaneity. Emotion is always simultaneous. Bell theorem. And so we discover and name endless so-called particles without even pausing to wonder that they each may be a reflection of the strange community of strong agreement that is science. 

Alas, even that community has lost its trust. All research is motivated research when we stop stopping to smell the roses. At its most basic science was meant to delineate that knowledge upon which we must all agree. Their sin has also been a totalization of knowledge. 

There are just two books which I sorta kinda liked which I could never finish. I know it's a literary sin to say so, but one is Joyce's Ulysses and the other is The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Now my mind has become too weak, but frankly Joyce the man and his oddity slipped through his lyrics, and, well, Gaddis just cuts too close for my comfort. 

Yes indeed it is our craving recognition which is killing us. Along with our hiding of our basic loving nature. The rest is all outcome.