Artifice Artifice Artifice Wow!
Many women can hardly go out without being made up. Stories are made up. We call them fictions or lies. Lately when I see someone coiffed for the screen, it's hard not to see the animal beneath the disguise. What's made up highlights what is true.
I've been reliably stern about the miracle of life; that we shouldn't mess with it as much as we do. I guess I'm in line with Ernst Jünger (who I have yet to read), seeing all technology as being about power. He's pre-modern in time, but post-modern in fact.
Curing disease when we can seems the right thing to do, as does the artifice of clothing and houses. We've been evolving in that direction for a very long time. But how can we cure our minds of artifice when we start messing with the life-force of evolution. Should anyone be deciding what sort of people we want to bear? Is it OK if we're just 'curing' diseases before the fact?
Isn't that a lot like jailing criminals before they commit a crime, since we might easily predict that they will. I know I'm reporting from the minority here. I understand that China is about to start tracking citizens according to their likelihood to be critical of the government. Or, haven't they been doing that for a while now? It's positively Trumpian, which just goes to show that we're hardly ever the real innovators.
Isn't gene editing identical to artificial intelligence? It won't be long before we can order up beauty and intelligence as we like it. We'll set the AI loose on the genome. But what do we do with the monsters that will likely result? Will there be guarantees? Will there be insurance?
Look, I don't actually mind things or people being made up. There is no such thing as an authentic me; though I am authenticated by everyone who knows me. They know when I'm making myself up better than I ever could.
Now the New York Times wonders who will benefit from AI? Isn't it obvious that the answer is, of course, the cheats, the liars, the power-mongers. Power bettors on the prediction markets. People who play the spread market to market, and can't loose.
Long ago I suspected that insurance companies would scotch self-driving cars. It's still a somewhat interesting question, given the massive awards made by governments to wronged people. Will the resolution of that one tilt us back toward public ownership of all of it? We'd better not call it socialism, which is, strictly speaking, public ownership of the means of production, in Marxist terms.
I'm not sure anyone wants that sort of socialism. The market economy works, except that it works far too well when it gobbles up our futures by gobbling up the public good. The public good is what we the people must own. Or, as an economist friend suggested from Spain where they can seem way more open-minded than we are, we need to differentiate between needs that are inelastic and those which more easily blend with adjustable wants.
That would include communication industries as descended from the once productive Post Office. It would include energy, to end the gift of resources to those who can afford to exploit them. It would, of course, include clean air and water, as well as the preservation of wildlife and parkland.
A whole lot would be left over for private business, especially once surveillance capitalism is demolished by block-chain engineered privacy for all of our communications activities. Social media belongs with the Post Office. We the people should decide where advertising billboards and postings might be allowed, digitally or otherwise.
Influencers have to be out of politics and out of healthcare. I truly resent that we have to worry about measles again. Meaning that we have to divorce the attention economy from both those arenas. Money out of politics, duh, and profit out of healthcare. These are not commodities. They are necessities.
Finally, without objection, we need to end the 'creative destruction' which uses futures investment to price goods at a loss, for the purpose of driving local smaller enterprises out of business. We need local business more than ever, because we need local shoppers walking our downtowns. It's almost impossible to run a restaurant anymore from what I hear. We can't reserve good taste for the wealthy alone.
In my frenetic travels around the country, by bicycle, car, motorcycle, and eventually while towing a little camper, I've gone from the pleasure of tasting local fare to the nightmare of nothing but national chains with lines of cars around the block. This has made me very sad. Factory designed and processed food never tastes good.
I honestly don't think humans are done evolving. The very last thing I want to see is for us to take over the processes of evolution by virtue of our excessive pride in human intelligence. I'm fairly certain that, ultimately, AI will guide us to understand that there is no intelligence without emotion. Which, among other things to me, means that our evolution will largely be a moral evolution.
Sadly, while we were moving smoothly in the direction of moral evolution right up until money in politics put partisanship on steroids and prevented us from knowing how to talk to one another. We were making so many strides against racism and sexism and homophobia. So many strides toward preserving our natural environment.
Corporate persons controlling "progress" is nothing but Artificial Intelligence on steroids. We've all forgotten the high of holding the tobacco companies accountable, along with all the other polluters and poisoners. Corporate persons managing money is what stopped our evolution.
Finally, what, really, is the rush? Actual human progress is not automatic, we have to work for it morally. The powers that be want us to be afraid of nature, based on a false understanding of evolution as survival of the fittest. Think wealth of the merited. Same thing. Wealth alone should never be a badge of pride.
Evolution is about changing species within a changing environment, and not about competition. competition is for sport and not for living. There. is no merit in finding ways to beat your neighbor.
Intelligence is a social construct and not a permanent asset of neurodivergent techies. I once ran a school for "gifted" children, and therefore resonated with this recent Intelligencer article from New York magazine. There is no measurable trait which endows you for a lifetime. Your intelligence is mostly a reflection of the bonds of love and community which you enjoyed.
Sure there are sublime masters in all fields. There is no sublimity in mastering your fellow humans.
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