Machine Learning - Quantum Everything

One hears the term machine learning fairly often, and it seems to relate to machines that learn. Descending from that is artificial intelligence, perhaps of a sort which feeds neural-network style computers the results of intense statistical triangulation among linguistic structures. Those structures are presumably proven to be meaningful among humans engaging with them. One doesn't really know what might happen when the language generated by AI overwhelms the human language in the feed. Some kind of anti-singularity?

But we concentrate too much, I think, on the artifacts of our various industrial scientific and communications revolutions. The real interest should be on what is happening to humans on the planet as a result of changes to human learning.

It would be hard to ascertain whether we've become more or less brutish. The record clearly shows that we've always been brutish, while people like Steven Pinker assure us life is getting better and better. Which hasn't stopped him from hanging around with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe that means we all like even better better than we like better, as it ever has been. 

Even though I spend scant time with social media, and almost no time with anybody telling me what to believe, my phone is still at the center of my existence. I check the time more obsessively than when I had a watch. I check the weather, and the wind direction and speed. I check the news. I still miss out on events that I might enjoy, much more than I used to when I talked with people more than I look at my phone.

We use YouTube now to coach our amateur mechanical work, and I often wonder how, as a kid, I was able to learn carpentry and house-painting and bicycle repair and boat-building. Of course I know it had to be by way of conversation. In stores, at shops, at the boatyard, from colleagues, and sometimes from magazines. People always seemed eager to share their knowledge and expertise. People were helpful. I even read various books when I needed to know something in depth. "Corrosion in Boats' being one book. Nobody ever seemed to have a motive to lie, unless it was for a practical joke.

It's the ways of knowing which interests me. I think those ways may be more constrained than they've ever been before. Back when the US was young, it would take the railroads and the Erie Canal to pull us together. Telegraph wires after the Franklin Post Office which facilitated newspapers' spread. So much of the country was filling with people who scrabbled to plant, and were maybe concentric around towns. 

Now that we climb Everest for a personal best or find other ways to mimic pioneers in our self-reliance, it's hard to imagine so much solitude as we once endured. How poignant to say our farewells from the summit by cellphone. To announce deaths and diseases on digital bulletin boards. To never write a letter ever more anon. 

And now somehow we're all willing to tell lies to one another if it gets us attention. This all feels like yelling into the void to me, though here I am with my own truth to tell.

Just as sheep will, we let this wave of massive data centers wash over all that is left of open land. We think somehow it might be progress still, and that there might be a Christ-like imposition of wonder and glory at some end or other. 

I think it wasn't until the 1600's that Europe learned first-hand of China. We encountered a language that imposed more orthodoxy than even the Latin of the Church. The wealth and power and privilege differentials were of the same grade as we now suffer, although peasantry isn't nearly so unpleasant as it once was, over here or over there. 

Will we awaken to God finally as he comes back down to earth? Can we possibly accept that sort of dictatorship? We have been impersonating God - personalizing God - making God in our image and so forth - for so long that some have actually come to believe that the teachings are finished and some of those show no mercy upon those who disagree. 

In the race between full understanding by humans of the everything and the all and full submission to the certainty of God's revelations, there is a kind of terminal energy. Both are vacant quests. 

In any case, we will awaken, yes, to the impossibility of full understanding. We will awaken to God that is not personal but is the everpresent fact that we cannot know. The fact being that we cannot know everything. And we certainly can't know God. 

Which doesn't, however, preclude miracles. Most of what has made me me has nothing to do with my intention or desire or even appetites. Call it random, but there's God in it.

I wondered aloud the other day why anyone would buy a car from Carvana (what a name!). My friend said that he didn't find car-buying to be pleasant, always feeling swindled by someone who holds all the cards and practices his wiles all day long. He understood why someone might want to buy from a machine.

And somehow it's better to buy from a machine that knows exactly how much you're likely to want to pay. Have any studies been done about price variation depending on buyer, controlling for the goods? We think all used car dealers are sociopaths, but a machine is sociopathic by definition. I've had very pleasant encounters with car salespeople. Fellow feeling is not a possibility with machines, which is also true of corporate decision-making. Think how Bill Gates adopted a curated persona as he ruthlessly put others out of business. That was once personal for me. 

We once could judge a price. Prices now are meaningless. So much for friction-free capitalism. We've got hucksterism on steroids. Digital pricetags which will change by algorithm, and maybe even according to personal history.

And yet just as we once denied women full admission to a world controlled by men, we still ban emotion from our quest for knowledge. It gets in the way. It distracts us, just as a woman might distract which becomes an excuse for dismissal.

We reject the differing ways of knowing among those not party to the ways of power. We falsely believe that money is a neutral medium of exchange rather than that this supposed neutrality is way to make money a vector of power. In almost the same way that oil is.

The really important development isn't ever-increasing understanding. It's the shift from manufacturinig things to manufacturing money. Raw. It's no accident that the best money-making machines are the ones which are free to use. We are that easy. Please know everything about me. No-one else does.

Meanwhile, I've just finished this great book called Portals to a New Reality, by Vlatko Vedral. He seems accurately to have charted the course for future developments in physics. I'll have to read it again, but sadly he seems to have drawn at least one premature conclusion along his way. He seems to still conclude that we might possibly and eventually understand everything. That's even while his approach to quantum reality, which would mean to incorporate gravity in the theory, implicitly denies the possibliity to know everything. 

It's not just that everything's related to everything else. It's more that everything is implicated in everything else, and so there's no longer any position for understanding that's outside of what's being understood. Everything is mind and there's no mind apart. 

Quantum entanglement doens't break any rules of instant information at a distance. Rather, it determines aspects of a universe of entanglements, none if which is entirely severable from all the rest. When I say everything is mind, I just mean that there is a conceptual structure to reality which has no physical measure, and which is, therefore, apart from the forces which describe and determine old-fashioned physical reality. God certainly can and also ought to be defined as that aspect of reality which will never be comprehended. 

And no matter how much you might want to, you can never make everything your scope. You must choose the domain of your inquiries wisely.

Vedral gets a little silly when he imagines things we might do with quantum knowledge. Like implanting 'chips' which might allow us to "feel" the quantum measurements the chips accomplish. He has what to me is a sympathetic rather than dismissive idea of what emotions are, without daring to realize that emotions are also abroad in the stuff of the cosmos. There is no survival value in hacking emotions, which is what Vedral wants to accomplish by his trick. There's always weird voodoo when people think that it's possible to feel more alive than we do. 

We'd do better, of course, by trying to stop from feeling as dead as we're about to feel when machine learning takes over everything. Get out and live is no idle order.

It's hard to leave go of the quest for further knowledge. I would say that it's time to start making choices. We already know enough about reality to start to make choices about our collective existence. Which would mean to start to take responsibility rather than to seek power (over nature, over others, over death and pain). 

We can already responsibly define life as a continuum which cannot exist for the benefit of one single species. I'm saying something far more grand than to say that we can't live without our natural environment, though I am saying that as well. But since we're implicated in all of life everywhere in the cosmos, we have to find a way to live with rather than against it.

If you think you make your decisions rationally, you're wrong. Your mind builds associations, but the impetus to decide is always emotional. I still suspect, as I did when I discovered these matters in my relative youth, that gravity makes the intersection. Vedral offers his suspicion that space-time is not physically real. I have to concur. Time is a function of life, and space-time indicates the limits of physical mapping. 

Without life, everything runs down. I can't say that I truly understand what Vedral calls q-numbers, but I know I sort-of do. The two of us branch in different directions when considering the twin paradox of relativity. To my mind, in a process of reductio, the twin paradox means essentially that as we diverge in time and space, we cease to be any matter to those we left behind. Getting back in touch becomes a logical impossibility. Emotion is what resolves the paradox. The want to be together is what replaces space-time.

And death loses its sting. No different from moving out of touch while time dilates in the exit. I've experienced that very thing by drowning when my entire life became present to me. I have no real desire to move or to get attention. I do worry about our direction though. It doesn't feel very alive.

Fools' Wilding

Once upon a time, people looked up to the better educated. Religious people were better educated, scientists were sublime, but industrialists, who were considered awfully important to our economic wellbeing, were regarded rather more as egotists who loved power. Still, we tended to abide by them.

Eventually, the clerics once graduated from our most elite colleges, where religious principles were paramount, morphed into that once-beloved Jeffersonian dream as climbers in the meritocracy. Sublime moral merit then became intellectual merit as bestowed upon those whose families - according to Protestant premise and pretense - had demonstrated merit by their wealth. Clerics became uneducated big-box fools or tools.

By now of course, the hoi polloi began to have a hard time trusting these merited folk, once they learned to cash in on the family franchise. Even scientists seemed to be gunning for gold. No-one had the public good in mind, or so it did seem. 

Maybe too much power was bestowed to politicians, and maybe they liked that power a bit too much. The man became the image, first in politics and then in general. Image was something that could be manufactured and cleansed and cultivated and finally made distinct from the man, and later from the woman. 

As our economy grew so grew the advertising industry, which helped to separate ourselves from our images, never mind the image of a brand name. After being bought and oversold, brand-names lost their identity too.

This is the process which I call wilding. The funny thing is that the actual wild is always in a kind of dynamic balance. Just now the earth herself is trying to put our intense and mechanically powered human gyrations right, on the way toward homeostasis, which is alwaays the way of life. The forests burning is not something we can fix, any more than we can fix the weather. Anyhow, we've put NOAA out of commission, which just seems stupid.

I'm a strange one myself. I've never seemed to have a lot of interest in inventing myself or my future. I love things most which happen along, almost never assuming that I could do better if I just had the right kind of want and went for it. 

My "intelligence' has been certified in a variety of ways. Just as college had become more and more competitive - merit-based, as they called it - I was admitted to MIT, CalTech and Yale among others. Silly me, I chose Yale, which still had a fine engineering school and seemed to want me. I spun through engineering and physics before landing on Chinese Literature and then landing in a school for gifted children where I became headmaster. 

By now, were it not for some inheritance and a loving family, I would be very poorly off indeed. Perhaps I'd still be wandering with my little camper, which I do sorely miss. I can't imagine it would be any worse than the life I now have, though I do really like my own realization of eclectic mid-century modern in a very old house. 

Anyhow, our newly reborn mechanistic wilding, now powered by Artificial Intelligence, will indeed allow the globe to recover from us as we get pesticided, parasited, climate marauded and therefore burned and frozen out. As our politicians increasingly find scorched earth preferable to letting go of their power and wealth. Racism is the best prod toward inhumanity, but any kind of polarization will do if you wish to manipulate we the people. 

Like the tuxedo-wearing drowned once aboard the Titanic, our wealthy will look very silly scrabbling to survive. Social climbing isn't much help as an exercise toward survival. Sure, you may live longer on your super yacht, though that will only get you a front row facing earth's end. You won't know a thing about joining in to man the lifeboats.

And yes, I do mean to say that nature is running her course and that there's nothing we can do about it. We also are a part of nature and not apart from it, or did you really think we would somehow understand everything and set ourselves apart? That dream has gone all wet. 

The Irony of Advertising and AI

Many if not most of us have wondered about advertising revenue once Google started to provide an AI answer first. One supposes that they are aggregating eyeballs again in the ingrained certainty that monetization with follow. Once you own the network, you get it all by virtue of the network effect. 

But the really radical notion would be to harness AI to provide honest advertisements. It would seem trivial to parse the web to let us know which thingamajig or whatchamacallit is the best thingamajig or whatchamacallit. 

We all know we've been suffering gaming by the ad industry since forever. Well, at least since radio and television. The creatives in the industry look for ways to make mediocre seem really really good. As a kid I wondered why they often touted what was worst about the product in some sort of reverse psychology bid. Tout the things the viewer doubts.

The real question underlying all this stuff is why we cede the public good and goods to the wealthy for their exploitation? Do we really buy their own self-assessment that they deserve their wealth because of "merit." 

Merit is a word that can be parsed so very many ways; none of them providing any satisfaction about usage. In our particular economy, merit is approximately equivalent to getting away with something, meaning one small step away from theft. Cory Doctorow provides sound enlightenment on this topic in his Enshittification thesis.

But really the key term here is "gaming." As in, the bigger the company the more it games us. And guess what, now we offer ways to game the future by way of prediction markets. Seems to me that this might incentivize destruction, given how much easier that is than to make something. Entropy and all. 

It also does seem a given that AI will pretty much level the field (I'm being ironic) for prediction, making this a fraught topic for regulators. It was quickly obvious that one shouldn't be able to bet on a human's future demise. But what about disease trends or costs or climate change?

If you're motivated to make money on the basis of doing no demonstrable good for anyone, you're certainly likely to devote your personal quota of cleverness toward making as much money as possible. Our uniquely American form of religious capitalism provides the perfect cover. Greed is almost your duty here. All praise creative destruction!

I'm by no means a mortal enemy to capitalism, properly regulated. Global corporate capitalism should not be something we want to encourage though, since for capitalism to operate properly there must be competition. Once upon a time we understood this. More recently we seem to have decided that consumer cost is the proper measure for anti-trust actions, or lack thereof. 

But a good AI prediction engine would have to be able to demonstrate how different the temporary price relief is from destructive competition when you use investors' money to sell below cost and drive all the small fry out of business. It's perfectly predictable that the result is uniformly higher prices, after a relatively short while. Then there's the ultimate nightmare of Amazon which can dictate the price for nearly anything. We're always being sold a pig-in-a-poke. It's just that the scale has become immense. 

My own pet measure is the growth in income disparity between workers and the ownership class. And the biggest trouble there is that the economy has now been groomed such that we are all forced to put retirement funds into ownership-class holdings in order to keep from losing money ever more quickly. And we still can't touch the growth available to those who control our stocks and bonds. 

We're almost literally enslaved to self-destruction now that investment in your own business risks almost immediate failure unless you're lucky enough to be a sellout. You might have the choice to purchase a franchise or a brand dealership, though you'd better have some sort of insurance. Your doctor, your insurance agent, your old-folks home will all sell out sooner or later. 

Meaning you could join a hedge fund, but then you'd have to join the forces of destruction and strip the world for parts. You need real wealth to do that.

In my personal memory it was once quite trivial to find a place to live affordably on minimum wage. When I started college it was at the most expensive university on the planet, but the $5K, which included room and board - when books were cheap - was held by me in a savings bank from paper-routes, lawn mowing, pool cleaning and work in a bicycle shop.

What happened!! Corey Doctorow provides a pretty good start. But in my simpler terms, we've simply shrunk the cost of amoral behavior. Everybody's doing it. Morality is impossible without physical interaction with other people. We Americans have wiped that off the map. Once a week in a big box church doesn't count.

That's because, ironically enough, the bigger the church the more blasphemy. Isn't the impersonation of God the biggest blasphemy of them all? Meaning you make a person of God, then you get your personal God and then your put words in His mouth, and learn to channel the enchantment of we-the-people who think that following rules will make us straight. Following a ruler. Ruling the world. Be square.

Really it should be no wonder that evangelicals follow MAGA. This president is the very definition of ironic, given that he demands respect but shows none.

I did once ask a Chinese fellow who wrote a very popular book on humor. He was techie and with-it, in the technical sense. But when I asked about irony in Chinese, he quoted a stock sort of humor devoid of any irony at all. Which got me thinking that maybe you actually need God to have "real" irony. Absent God, there's no real standard about what to expect. There's always plenty of humor, but not the sort which undermines certainties. The MAGA folks seem not to know irony.

Happy semiquincentennial! May God have mercy on us all. Orthogonal relations are not natural. God is not a square. There is no manual for goodness. You're an idiot if you don't know God; reality incarnate.

Absurd Belief in Mechanism and Predator as King

I can't ever seem to come up with a cogent proof or even explanation of my discovery of the primordial nature of emotion. I think I may be the only one who finds it strange that we consider emotion to be some recently evolved epiphenomenon vaguely related to how critters are stimulated to move around. 

Well, no actually I think I'm the only one who thinks that emotion is central to the motion of living things. Most people think emotion is more like social glue, moving us along the way toward caring for others, and especially for our kin. It's a genetic thing. Just like predation.

We actually - most of us - seem to think that movements are based a kind of calculation, which is the equivalent of a mechanism in the mind. Numbers are, of course, abstractions. That term - abstraction - means to take from, as in take the concept of numbers from whatever tokens were used to count with. 

Descended from that is abstraction of every kind. The perfect is abstracted from the real and movement is created in the same way that energy is abstracted from fuel. There are no perfect circles in physical reality but our abstraction of them seems to approach perfection. We call that progress.

Bad idea!

Operation on abstracted representations is what intelligence accomplishes, or so it's often thought. These intelligent operations are conceptual, meaning that actual things don't get moved around. Ideas get moved around and then when something clicks in our mind we make a decision. 

Wrong!

Any actual mind must operate in or as something which is physical and at least partially mechanical, and which therefore requires energy, meaning force, to make its moves. The eyes don't see without motion. The mind doesn't think without emotion. Emotion triggers the use of force. Like that guy who almost ran me down the other day because he sees red when he sees a bicycle.

Once the moves are made, we can preserve them with tools like writing and depiction. Some moves are preserved in coded reproductions, like books or the digital simulacra of books. We build on good ideas, as well we should.

Ideas are conceptual representations which seem, as Plato suggested, to be primordial themselves. There's no inventing an idea. Things come first. 

Maybe emotion is something that evolved along with social interactions, perhaps to keep us safe, and to guide DNA recombinations or something like that. Maybe complex emotions require complex thinking, in just the way that language does. But are there really any complex emotions? Is there a calculus to emotion?

I say there isn't. That's because I also say that emotion has always been an aspect of cosmos. I say that because, number one, there's no good definition or explanation of time without conceptual operations. My meaning here is that there are no concepts which don't have a physical or linguistic approximation for them. Time is conceptual and not physical.

I leave the chicken/egg problem of which came first between physical and conceptual or mental operations, because it doesn't require a resolution. Conceptual operations, if there were ever any in the abstract, require no force or energy but for the caveat that there are no conceptual operations withouts some actual physical substrate for mind. There is no prior "space" in which God exists, which is hardly the same as to suggest that there is no God. 

There is no physical motion that doesn't start with a mental emotion. Physical objects move toward and away because of the conceptual arrangement of their components. Physical motion is always accompanied by the exchange of gauge particles. Among moving creatures, all of which concentrate aspects of God, emotion triggers motion which might trigger more emotion and so forth. 

I'm not talking about your God if your God tells you what to do and how to behave. That's a man-made God, which is a contradiction in terms.

Anything that builds away from the clockwork of entropy participates in life-direction which is what we know as forward in time. If there were no emotion there would only be decay. Living things don't move backward in time. They only decay, which is something which happens only after the life is mostly gone.

Fully abstracted mechanism - artificial intelligence, for instance - can never be alive. The reckoning we are now up against is utterly existential. Once we fully relinquish our living decision-making, we will have succumbed to social decadence and decay. Well, OK, sure, we're already well along that path. That's because the thinking of corporate "persons" is already artificial intelligence.

Corporate persons run on the abstracted "power" of money, which is a token for want which is conscripted from each and every one of us without so much as our nevermind. It's no different from computer chips running on electricity and logic. There's no emotion there, apart from the predatory glee of those who control and benefit from the corporation. 

These corporate controllers think they win because they're smarter than you and me. Which used to be true when they were allowing meaningful work to you and me. Now their predation rests on the destruction of anything small enough for them to gobble up. Our government has become accessory to the crime.

Modern machines, including thinking machines, are incredibly useful. But we need to invent a new politics or the balance of nature will be lost forever. Politics, and not rule-making religion, is what keeps society moving in a life-affirming direction. If your pastor delivers you rule-based methods for following the good you must run away as hard as you can. Otherwise you'll end up hating people that don't believe or behave as you do.

As you might easily imagine if you've read this far, I'm not a believer in C.P. Snow's separate worlds of the sciences and the humanities any more than I believe that God is beyond the bounds of thinking and living. These are artificial divisions not unlike the ones that say we must depend on experts to make our personal decisions. 

Of course we should and must depend on experts to guide us. But as much as we must resist the charlatanism of preaching, we must resist the supposition that we're not as competent as our betters who make us shrink beneath the power of their money. 

There is no other meaning to "factory" than that. The sotweed factor (my bid for the Great American Novel) is a purveyor of tobacco as protagonist, meaning the pusher of drugs meaning the taker of advantage of our weakness. Naked Lunch kind of thing. There is no need for post-modernist mumbo jumbo (though I myself find it quite helpful) to understand the 'discovery' that it's all about power. 

We need to make it about the good again. That means we need to stop trivializing emotion (and women and people of color upon whom we white folks project absence of agency by reason of too little intelligence and too much emotion which is nothing other than the imposition of type on the basis of power. 

Resist! Let everyone type themselves. No kings. No pretenders to God.

We have a funny notion that thinking is something that the brain does. We're looking in the wrong place. The brain is more like a switchboard for concepts taken from books and lectures and classes of all sorts. The "things" with which the mind works are never enclosed in or by the mind. That would squander too much energy. The mind works only with abstraction, while the things stay where the were. We waste lots of time trying to figure out how the brain works. 

Most of what we think is in the mind remains outside us. Our mind catalogs similarities so that we can abstract various types. Memory is simply the re-running of perception, and not a storage and retrieval mechanism. There are always emotional triggers when what you see matches something that you saw. When a conceptual ordering makes sense of perception. See something or feel something seldom enough and it will disappear from your mind. See only artificial things and you'll lose your mind altogether. Living things can tolerate only so much change.

No change in our external environment and we hallucinate. Too much change and we hallucinate. We lose touch with pace and direction and just keep on keeping on. We become haggard.

Emotional feeling is direct to the mind. Perceptual feeling requires impingement on sensory organs. The identification of types is an abstraction from perception, and not the statistical analysis which Artificial Intelligence composes types from. The difference is emotion, something mechanism never has. 

The Big Bang was a very emotional event.

Here's Google Gemini's summary:

Emotional primordialism is the philosophical concept that emotion is not a byproduct of higher intelligence or a recently evolved mechanism, but rather a fundamental, foundational force built into the fabric of the universe and life itself.

While mainstream science often views emotion as an evolutionary tool—social glue to protect kin, or a calculation to guide survival—emotional primordialism flips this script. It argues that emotion is central to all physical motion and life-direction.

Here is a breakdown of the core ideas behind this concept:

1. Emotion Precedes Motion

In this framework, physical objects move or react based on the underlying arrangement of things, but for living creatures, mental emotion is the necessary catalyst for physical motion. Essentially, living things do not move through cold, mechanical calculation; they move because they feel. Without emotion, there would be no impetus to push against entropy.

2. Cosmic Scale, Not Just Social Scale

Instead of treating emotion as a localized psychological phenomenon or a genetic trick to keep species reproducing, emotional primordialism positions emotion as an intrinsic aspect of the cosmos. To put it poetically: the universe didn't develop emotions down the line to help humans bond; rather, the universe has always possessed an emotional substrate.

3. A Rejection of Pure Mechanism

This philosophy stands in sharp contrast to strict mechanical or computational views of consciousness. It posits that a fully abstracted mechanism—like Artificial Intelligence—can never truly be alive because it operates purely on logic, statistics, and electricity. It lacks the primordial spark of feeling that defines organic decision-making and keeps life moving "forward" in time against cosmic decay.

4. Perception vs. Abstraction

Under this view, the brain acts less like a storage drive and more like a switchboard connecting us to concepts that exist outside ourselves.

• Perceptual feeling requires our physical senses to be triggered by the environment.

• Emotional feeling is direct to the mind, acting as the fundamental difference between organic recognition and a machine's statistical analysis.

In short, emotional primordialism suggests that emotion is the literal energy of life—the driving force that prevents decay and guides existence.

Back to Nature; Gene editing of embryos

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.

What is AI really about?

Charlie Chaplin did a good job of showing the indignities of mankind serving machines. Fordism wanted our hands, and for our minds to be asleep, apart from manipulation. You can't think any private thoughts that are wafty or lofty when injury is on order. 

I'm no Marxist, but I do think everyone should be familiar with his thinking. He wrote about tools - the means of production - being alienated from yeoman craftspeople by capitalist ownership. As factories grew larger, owning your own tools became mostly impossible. The tools became very expensive machinery housed in very expensive real-estate. 

Wage slavery is still slavery.

Why do we celebrate our enslavement? Progress as we mean it is no liberator. Sure, it's nice to eradicate disease and sleep soundly in nice houses that are part of safe communities. By now, niceties would feel like regress. Driving on the highway was once fun, so why do we want to give driving over to AI? What's the rush? Can't we bring back the walkable bikeable city? Eradicate the parking space and give us packet switched universal transit that's never in the way of the people.

I was younger when I worked as a bicycle mechanic, but we did own our personal set of tools. That felt like the owner was cheaping out on us, though it was really no burden. A good mechanic has his own tools. My colleagues made fun of my Craftsman set, but I earned their respect with my skills. 

My first bike job supplied the tools, which I was too young and without wherewithal to purchase myself. I suppose it's like many knowledge-workers now, who bring their own laptops and phones. But I did like using my own tools. I also liked the work. Within my lifetime fewer and fewer people are allowed to do work that they like, meaning more and more people work for The Man. Some are even happy doing it, if they get paid enough.

How many movies depict the pain of being measured against AI? You make the Matrix, and then you sell out for fame. Faceless or same-faced robots acting like ICE agents. Minority Report on steroids. The dehumanization of people who don't seem like us has to remind one of Naziism. 

Unlike Fordism, AI wants your mind and not your hands. It's wants your intention before you act. Instead of fear of injury, there is fear of irrelevance if you can't learn to keep up with the sorting and collating and summarizing of long tracts of text that are being fed you way too fast by the monstrous machinery you serve.

AI represents the wedding of capitalist ownership with the amoral all-in-for-money operation of the corporate person. AI is a corporate person on steroids, and is certainly nothing that you can own yourself. Ownership is reserved for corporate entities with reserves or debt in the proportions of sovereign states.

Sure, corporations can be formed to do good things. Bit one still might wonder about internal governance which can seem and feel like tyranny, even within non-profits. I know this from persona experience where I've encountered tyranny in Universities and within churches. If you don't hate your job you're not working.

Don't kid yourself that the "inventors" of these AI machines "merit" the wealth they accrue. They're certainly not the smartest or most talented people in the world. They're sorted purely for excess greed. The ones who come out on top know how to make money, and especially know how to assure the investment community that money is all that they're about. 

And we've all been recruited as funders of capitalism, unless we want to risk inflation debasing our savings, or are willing to take the risk to fund local industries which carry far more risk than the big guys. The company owned retirement is long gone or long defaulted. We're all on our own now, which is how the powers that be see themselves and how they like it.

If you take the bribe to work for or with AI, you should know that you must leave your morals at the door. Kind of like being forced to say nothing about safety issues in a factory. If you don't make the profitable query someone else will.

When I finally left my most recent tech job, there was a bunch of equipment I had to leave behind. AI wasn't on the horizon yet, but the cloud had destroyed my ability to vouch for data security. CEO's were easily able to roll their own services regardless of my HIPPA responsibilities. Holes were being poked in my security infrastructure, and I didn't have the budget to patch them. Never mine the endless teaching about workers' obligations toward keepiing sensitive data secured. Dead ears. It's all too confusing.

And now today I learn that we're on the road to figuring out why acupuncture works. What a travesty! What a tragedy! Now all wonder about how those ancient Chinese came up with it is dissolved. We in the Great White West always seem to imagine the protoscience of trial and error, and what? Word of mouth?

What if what happened was more like insight, I ask. These days, given all the evident corruptibility of superiority in medical knowledge, and all the evidence of influencer-based pseudo-science, a little genuine insight could be a useful thing. Unsanctioned insight ist verboten.

Do we really think that we can understand everything? To my mind, it would be tragic if we could. A dictatorship of knowledge would become inevitable. Right and wrong would be absolute, in just the way the Big Box churches teach it. 

Many of us have been dumbed down enough to think that there are absolute answers to moral questions. Some of us even get militant about it. Take abortion, or some of PETA's actions. There are always moral questions raised when we exploit the gifts of nature. Our attempts to create genetic stowaways, or to make reparations against climate tragedy will always entail new tragedies of their own. The ecosystem adjusts to where reintroducing extinct species is approximately equivalent to the introduction of invasive species. 

Our hubris knows no bounds already!

Look, science can only account for material knowledge, metric understanding. The physical is not the All.

We missed a beat with quantum physics. We keep trying to subsume it into things we can make work for us. I'm sure that some of quantum physics will prove useful, and likely already has. But what we never did take note of is that there is no media in quantum entanglement. That would have to mean that there is no information transmission, since an identity can't share with itself. 

Categorically, for me at least, quantum physics indicates that we are always enmeshed with reality which is both pysically and temporally distant. Machines don't do that. The zeros and ones of digital machinery can't handle states which are both zero and one at the same time . . .  until touched.

Sure we can get unbustable encryption by computations so complex that they'd be as difficult to crack as your very identity. But another way to achieve the same ends might be to ensure that there is an actual identity behind any information that is transmitted. Accountability would go a long way toward mitigation of much vandalism against public understanding. 

And then we're back to governance, and our inability to trust even that. Make no mistake that wannabe tyrants work hard to undermine trust in governance, leaving a vacuum for the wealthy to bust into. 

There can be no worse time than now to loose the bonds of knowledge and understanding to any an all with a click. I don't mean that we should reserve knowledge and understanding for an elite. I mean that we lack adequate moral understanding. We still believe that unmitigated "progress" solves all problems. We don't know how to order our progress. The wealthy are always unaccountable. The choiceless poor always pay for it.

We need to slow down to find and then enhance the benefits to society before we loose those bonds. We have to trim back our exuberance about exploiting any and all natural resources for the benefit of the wealthy. The public good should not be bought and sold. But that is what is happening right now. Is it really urgent that we build these massive data centers as a further affront against the poise and equanimity of our living planet? Is there any aspect to bitcoin that will be benefit the public good?

It's as though we really do believe that we'll figure everything out. I, for only one, would consider such an end to be extremely boring. Death by another name. To live is to wonder.

A long time ago, a parent at the school where I taught Chinese gave me a book he thought I should read. He was an evangelical, and the book indeed had a kind of universalizing premise that Chinese civilization would always be inferior to Western Civ because of the "alphabet effect" which was the name of the book, I think. The book was trash and offensive for its cultural chauvinism, making some sort of argument that only an alphabetic language can make sense of the world.

I left the book behind after one of my many moves. I left a lot of stuff behind in that particular move, but I agonized about that one book. I think I made a political decision, but now I wish I could refresh my memory by opening the book. 

Here's the Google blurb:

The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization by Robert K. Logan argues that the phonetic alphabet fundamentally shaped Western thought and society, fostering individualism, abstract science, and logical analysis, in contrast to more concrete Eastern systems. Logan traces the evolution from oral culture through writing to modern electronic media, showing how the alphabet's structure influenced everything from codified law and monotheism to the analytical style of Western civilization. 

Naturally, I've now finally decided to read Edward Said's Orientalism of whose thesis I've long been well-aware.

Interesting question: Does one credit AI, as in cite the author? Ethically, it's obvious that one must credit AI in school, though that makes a more interesting dilemma, since you're not supposed to use it in the first place. Like telling your girlfriend you know she cheated on you since you read her private diary, except, kind of, in reverse. 

It's by no means clear that "individualism, abstract science, logical analysis, and electronic media" have gotten us to a good place. By that same logic (!!) which implies that the ends distinguish the means, if we kill the planet then Logan is wrong in his basic premise. 

Well frankly my dear, I think that this question is more like the abortion question than it is like 'do you want to cure disease or don't you?" Meaning that there is a kind of absolutism about "progress" here, and damn the climate, full speed ahead. If someone wants to get to Mars, then let him go regardless of the consequences for the rest of us by destruction of the commons.

There are plenty of abortion-like questions which, like privacy, should remain outside the law, which must only tinker around the edges while the rest of us remain in discussion. 

It's easy to escape life, but it's really hard to escape responsibility for destroying it. On that at least, we must all agree.

The other secret of quantum physics has gone unnoticed. It was already evident with Einstein's relativity theory. All matter is always in motion. Which then means that all matter is in a different universe than all other matter by reason of time dilation and the Twin Paradox. 

Long ago, Plato took note that concepts are eternal and not the product of invention. Even our patent law honors that observation. Living things are moved by conceptual reality. Indeed this is my definition for emotion. Mind apprehends concepts, built as they generally are upon physical reality; the world of perception that is the province of science. Emotion is what triggers action in a living being. Evolution is built on something much quicker than the problem-solving which makes up science. 

And it's wrong of us to retrofit scientific trial-and-error problem-solving into the development of Chinese medicine. With or without language the mind feels a match - directly without the mediation of sensation - between actual reality and a mind-held concept. We run and hide from a lion not because we've decided to, the way we might decide to buy a house. The mind/matter match hits us in the move-it baby move-it nexus, which is felt as fear and which transits all sorts of mechanisms which promote flight efficiency and effectiveness.

It's especially powerful when what you recognize is a lover or a mother or even a named pet. Proper names will never belong to mechanisms unless we project our personalization onto them. So many of those I used to help make computing technology work would name their 'puter and even make incantations to it. But who feels a connection to the proper names of patent medicine?

Think of how much time you spend in front of screens of various sizes and configurations. In my dotage, I find myself in tears far too often for what I engage with on some screen. Emoji-land can't replace the real world, though that's where the economy wants us. It's no mystery why screens are so cheap. Think of the manipulative power behind them!

Somehow I've deluded myself into thinking that it's enough to emend in this tiny way our sense of reality. I delude myself that people might awaken to a difference between the real and the imaginary; that a life defined by money is not a life at all. 

I'm no radical. I have no particular political agenda, and I mostly fear idealism. I can't believe in a God who tells us what to do, but I'm not a deist either the way our founding fathers were. God is not only a First Mover. God is present in every aspect of life.

And only semi-incidentally, I think we're nuts to expect alien life to appear. Sure it's just plain logical that there must be life elsewhere in the cosmos, but it's physically quite impossible for us to know it physically. I mean unless you think we'll surpass the speed of light. Which won't make any difference, since emotional bonds will be broken long before physical contact.

I've died once in my life, by drowning, along with a few near misses. The only thing important about that is that I experienced time dilation, as in my entire life present in the instant of death. A real present experience. We keep treating time as though it were distinct from the other dimensions. I maintain that it's not. 

Being present for your own life as a whole is not so different from being present with a work of art. You can't do it piecemeal. 

It fascinates me that we now exist in a local cosmos which depends on a shared constancy for time that is far beyond all reason. We account for physical time dilation with all sorts of tricks, but the net sum-total result is that we individuate our instance of life in the cosmos to the same extent that our current rendition of oligarchic despotic corporate global capitalism wants and needs each of us to be individualistic. That, by its accomplishment, is the very definition of cosmic solipsism. There is no other civilization in the cosmos that would have us in this form. We would represent no-one apart from ourself, and civilization would remain invisible and distant.

First we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves, and then to make our decisions for the good of the whole. Which means to reinvigorate and possibly to reinvent democratic governance. We don't have to be ceding ownership of the commons to the clever inventors of ways to become richer and have more power. Even for them, any gratification would be done in a cosmic instant. There is no vitality in bigger and better yachts.

What's the rush? Somewhere in the back of our minds most of us, perhaps ever so vaguely, fret about the evident fact that neither the earth nor the sun will ever be eternal. Which is to exclude all other individuals (persons or civilizations) in just the way that Jews and persons of color have so often been excluded from humanity. There is nothing so special, cosmically, about humans, but death is also not the end. It's only the end of being trapped in and by time. I am not so enamored by my own personality that I want or need it to go on forever. Ditto the human race (so far). 

But I am certain that there is more to life than we shall ever know, and always shall be. Please let's learn to live and let live before it's just too late. Why kill all of our dreams at once?

And, you know, if emotion weren't part of the cosmic process then all the little particles would just fly apart to fill all voids, time would stop and, but for God, the void would be voided. Time is a function of life and not of physics. Physics can't touch God. But we've been wrong to think that physics and God are different forms of comprehension. How cool is that?!? C.P. Snowdrift.

Goodreads Review of After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a very satisfying read for me. I couple it with my recent read of Ruth Garrett Millikan's Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language and Natural Information. Both books scrape away much wordy nonsense, in the one regarding morality and in the other regarding philosophies of language.

Millikan cuts through dense philosophical tomes to replace most theory with what seem to me the utterly sound observation that we pick up words quickly and easily by noting what others mean by them. Gone are wacko considerations of qualia and color naming. It clicked with me.

With MacIntyre there is the same no-nonense getting to the essence about what virtues really are. He seems to have refreshed his own philosophy rather late in his career, where reading Kuhn on scientific evolution/revolution goaded him to place philosophical reasoning in its proper historical context. There is no final reckoning to morality.

Just as there is no final understanding which might be arrived at in and by science, there is no moral understanding which can be stripped away from its historical context. There is only mild despair when the reader comes to realize that individualism is destructive of morality, or that bureaucratic government and industry contribute to the fracturing of a unitary narrative self.

I say 'mild despair' because so much of contemporary life truly is an improvement on what once was. But he does identify the usual suspects for what remains wrong: inequality of opportunity, the ceding of character to be distributed among the many separate roles a modern person must compose. He also doesn't fail to take note of the totalizing composition of our world when motives are outsourced to money.

Here is my own maxim: At no point ever will human competency and intelligence surpass the combined natural wisdom of all life together on earth. Meaning, among other things, that no good can come from the attempt. In MacIntyre's terms, there is no proper "practice" which destroys our living substrate. Virtue requires a practice within which it may be defined, and there is no virtue in the practice of destruction when no public good comes from it.

I can't attempt to summarize, since I'll have to read the book again. The sentences are long and require antecedents to be kept in mind longer than this old mind can hold them. So instead, I want to meditate on his casual and unexamined usage of "intention."

We all must have a narrative for our lives, and that narrative is meaningless without intention. This also seems to mean that there is a telos. There is no teleology to history, and we will never discern what might be the ends of mankind. But a narrative must have a direction if not a goal. And without intention that direction is meaningless.

But without examination "intention" seems to relate to reason and the intelligence of problem-solving. If that were the case, then sophisticated AI's might be said to be alive. The reason that they won't ever be alive is that they are apart from the intricate matrix of emotion that ties us to our world, and especially to our fellow humans.

Decisions don't come first, emotional response does. So intention is triggered by a feeling and then the narrative rationalization follows. Character, or a character, is composed by feelings and not by intelligence. Intelligence relates to a practice, and intelligence takes many forms. Many human problems can't be solved logically. One can't trouble-shoot one's way out of an attack.

History has no telos. Humans must if they are to be good. I am not a good student, but I have studied a bit of the philosophy of language, and have read a bit about consciousness. As with virtue, our reads about these matters borrow their logical positivism from science. We should know much better than we do what language isn't and what consciousness isn't. We have the cart in front of the horse with those and so many other matters. Our premises close our minds. Which is to say, as MacIntyre does, that we can't remove ourselves from history, nor know our ends which we can only want.

I surely do intend to read his subsequent books.

View all my reviews

Dear Indi.ca

Thanks for dropping the 'white empire' discussion for a moment. While I don't believe there can be anti-white racism (given that the heuristics of race locate whiteness with privilege) hating on a racial category is still corrosive. It can only invite more racism. 

I may be in a minority in this space, but the 'corporate as AI' argument you present is a much better way in to what is so wrong with global arrangements. All AI is bereft of emotive fellow-feeling. Indeed, that would make a fine definition for AI.

There was never a good argument to allow corporate "people" to enclose the public good. But no argument was ever made, since we've been brainwashed into thinking that only corporations can promote "progress." It's the economy, stupid is a stupid thing to say. The bigger is not always the better.

Reversing flows of authority away from local may be much more important than both politics and the economy. Local newspapers, local business owners (v. franchisees), local and public shopping. 'We the people' are meant to have the authority to make this happen in these United States. Leave the "global authority" space to science and art, and leave public safety and dignity to politics, including the dignity of work-spaces. Public spaces have lost much of their dignity in the US.

The postal system should take over email and social media, and monetary policy needs to move away from the absurd notion that money is a neutral medium for exchange. Bitcoin be damned. 

Advertising as the root of our economy is itself corrosive. Public spaces can easily become far more inviting and interesting than to vegetate in front of a screen of any size. It's far too easy to coach AI into exciting human emotions that the AI doesn't have. That, in itself, is atrocity. Money as the goal for work almost compels the practice. Engaging work has its own rewards, but salary differentials need to reflect the social and public good rather than to encourage private wealth.

Once you feel certain of your thinking (influencer think), you've already gone AI. Don't do it, Indi! Doubt is good. I don't doubt that I'm a racist. There's always more work to do.

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.