Does AI Dream of Virtual Sheep?

I read Going Postal by Terry Pratchett the other day, and this section got me thinking...

“...We were good, so we tried to do better”
And somehow, it was all familiar.
Moist listened glumly. Time travel was only a kind of magic, after all. That’s why it always went wrong.

That’s why there were postmen with real feet. That’s why the clacks was a string of expensive towers. Come to that, its why farms grew crops and fishermen trawled nets. Oh, you could do it all by magic, you certainly could. You could wave a wand and get twinkly stars and a fresh baked loaf. You could make a fish jump out of the see already cooked. And then somehow, somewhere , magic would present its bill, which was always more than you could afford.

That is why it was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizard – not “not doing magic” because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could do but didn’t. Pg 154

There is the famous quote form Arthur C Clarke...“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

I suspect he thought backwards people without technology would see any technological wonder as magic rather than science.

I want to offer that most people do NOT really understand science and technology, we just accept it and feel modern by calling it “science”. When, in effect, we have merely substituted the word “science” for “magic”. The only real difference is we strip away any humility or wonder by “thinking” we understand how things work.

In this instance I am thinking of Artificial Intelligence, AI. For most people it is a magic genie we ask to do stuff we don’t know how to do, and blammo we get a result. I don’t know how to take one music style and turn it into another, but AI can do it for me quickly. I am sure there are many better examples, but that is the gist. Whether it is General AI, or LLM or something else, for most people it is the result that counts. And the results appear like magic.

In some Fantasy worlds MAGIC is a part of the world, but for some authors it isn’t just the skill of the wizard, but magic is not free. Somebody, somewhere pays a price. With AI who will “pay the price”

A second thought come to mind, with AI, automation, robots and such, doing all the work. What is the point of it all anyway? If a bot can do your job better than you, why are you even here? If a AI can write a better blog than you, why do you bother?

A third thought related to why do anything? With the supremacy of the Jack Welch model of capitalism, making things, hiring people, doing stuff, is no longer the purpose any business. It is just finance in general and shareholder value in particular. So much for the invisible hand of business fueling the world and giving purpose.

Maybe it is better this way. There is no longer the fiction that “work” brings dignity. Even with the “magic” of high tech and AI, ultimately we are thrown back on ourselves, where we have to deal with meaning/no meaning on our own.

The State Of The Union, The State Of Things, The State Of Texas, The State Of Me

a free form riff on the world we live in

The world is big, the world is complicated, and filled with all sorts of people with diverse and conflicting actions and motivation. Basically “the world” as it relates to humans...is a mess, perhaps unavoidably so, given I brought humans into the discussion.

I believe thinker Erich Fromm has a perspective that applies to our current situation, politically, morally, and psychologically. In very broad terms he thought there were two fundamental types of people, those who love death and those who love life. The classifications he came up with was biophilia for those who ‘love of life’ versus necrophilia for those with a ‘love of death’. In The Heart of Man Fromm broadens it out some so the love of death also includes the death of spirit and creativity which he held was core to a fulfilled human being.

And THAT in a nutshell is the current state of our world and the U.S. Not completely, but it is necrophiliac path we are on. Politically, the Trump administration wants to hurt as many people as possible and still maintain the Republican/Maga support. It is only residual effects of a functioning judicial system that has prevented mass deportations to torture prisons in foreign countries, when that is gone, anybody can be picked up by masked somebodies and disappeared. For once there is no due process for somebody there is the possibility of no due process for everybody. THIS is a desire to kill the spirit, creativity, of whatever convenient victims they can find.

The focus on immigrants is just the shortest path to the most cruelty, the disease of love of death, like any disease, searches for the weakest part to consume. But as Trump has declared anybody who disagrees with him as an enemy, all of us are also vulnerable.

In Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, the tech bros like Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen (and more) part of their crusade is reach “the singularity” where they (and the chosen who meet their standards) will have a technological “rapture”, where they will be either lifted away from Earth in space ships and live on space stations surrounded by the emptiness of space, or possibly on a barren, poisonous planet like Mars, OR go full "assumption" to digital heaven where their consciousness is upload to an AI managed computer and they can “live” forever. The irony is lost that this theoretical or virtual life comes at the expense of actual lives, from the effects or global warming or diversion of money away from real people to a vastly more expensive endeavor of questionable validity.

The uploaded consciousness scheme is the most obviously religious (but really they are all religious) in that you have to die before you can be resurrected in the new digital form. This sociological approach of this goes beyond turning people into to commodities but instead “life” is turn into a digital backup. Unstated is if it will be an NFT.

Another plan of the tech bros is the creation of Dyson Spheres to power space exploration. These Spheres would be megastructures designed to capture a star's energy, and consuming planets for raw material to continue moving through space eating more stars and planets forever.

Like so much of the tech bro imagination this was already thought about in old adolesent entertainment, in this case it is Marvel Comics from back in the ‘60s with Galactus who devours planets to sustain his existence. Also lost of them is that Galactus was considered a villain, now, for them he is the hero. Comics and misinterpreting old Science Fiction is the intellectual foundation of our Tech Overlords. Climate change is irrelevant, because massive power plants to power ever increasing data centers to drive all the AI and crypto computing are required for the new technological heaven, either in space or online. The upshot is with these unlikely futures, sacrificing lives and imposing suffering of “others” demonstrates their means to fulfill their ends, falls well within the necrophiac diagnosis.

In Texas, the hatred for humanity come masquerading as protecting life in order to inflict as much pain as possible. Anti immigrant measures like razor wire buoys across border rivers and designed to hurt or maim so the desire to hurt is blatant.

The ultra strict anti abortion laws are more sinister since while shouting about protecting the life of the unborn, this is done while deliberately imposing pain and possible death to the living, the already born. In the cases of pregnancy gone horribly wrong for women who want to have a child, thes woman cannot get a procedure to save their lives or save them from suffering. So again, like the theoretical, or possible, or theoretically possible virtual life of the AI tech overlords, REAL people are appropriate to torture or kill. These laws have been in place for years now and it is obvious they should be changed, since this is not debating when life begins (which I would, but that is for another time), it is all about causing suffering...that is the spirit of Texas and it is “not a bug, it is a feature”

Take all the above and when we see ALL republicans moving to the goal of removing any publicly funded healthcare the goal is clear, cause more suffering, more death...again the diagnosis is necrophilia...a love of death.

Oh, but don’t forget, ruin the budget so Republican MUST cut social security. The goal? To cause as much suffering to masses of older people. Fortunately there is a propagandist pipeline of news, bloggers, tweeters, whatever, to bring younger angry voters in on board to replace the dying oldsters.

Maybe I am riled up because I am now one of the oldsters in the sites of Republican guns that will kill Social Security.

Of course this type of insecurity has hung over the heads of millions before me, maybe the realization that it could actually happen to me is something I should have thought of before.

BUT, in another Erich Fromm book, Escape From Freedom, he feels it is is financial and psychological uncertainty, basically capitalism, that lays the groundwork to entice people to be drawn to the certainty of authoritarian regimes. But for me I can’t fall for for the Bullshit, not that I have any wisdom or extra intelligence, it is just that this kind of over the top BS is so blatant and so unpleasant I could never fall for it. Unfortunately ALL republican politicians have fallen, either willingly or cynically, but either way the result is the same, they sold their souls.

I mean I don’t even know if there is such a thing as a soul, but I can’t even sell out a possibly fictitious soul.

[Message ends]

First Time Book Repair

The Omnibus of Crime with Dorothy L. Sayers - (Editor)

Front and back boards of the book had pulled away and the linen (mull) exposed on bot. The Spine with the graphic was detached on one side exposing the spine of the book block.

It was a heavy book so likely any further reading would cause the boards to tear off completely and the edge graphic to fall off.

There are many YouTube videos with different techniques but combining a few I opted to replace the hinge (replace the linen mull) with "binder tape".

Then use a similar color book cloth to cover the spine attach to the boards.

Here are all the pieces of the puzzle

Replace hinge ingredients

• Single stitched binder tape 1 1/2 inch
• Allure Bookcloth Black
• spine stiffener - 10 point paper
• PVA
• Bone Tool
• knife and/or paper cutter

The final result below.

I suspect a master book repair person would dislike this method, since they would have replaced the end papers and used new "mull", the linen mesh that goes across the text block spine, and is glued to the endpapers which is then glued to the front and end boards. I have the book cloth spine maybe a 1/8 to 1/16 too high on the spine, that in no affects how it sits on the shelf and most people won't notice (I thing and hope)

BUT that was beyond my skil level, and from what I gather by watching you tube videos, this is what a library might use for "reading volumes" not collectibles. This particular book was actually a first edition from 1929, but I found multiple first editions of this title in the $20+ range on ebay so I didn't feel too bad about this more direct method.

In the end it feels really solid and should give years of reading pleasure.

Long Time, No Post...Linux note

Quick reminder on how to access USB stick from the portable UBUNTU installation sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt for usb drive works rw

A New New Beginning...?

Another year rolled by. Another symbolic opportunity to reflect, reassess, remember, rethink. OR do none of that.

I am pretty calm about there being no “meaning”, or rather “meaning” is the wrong perspective, the wrong question, the wrong word. There is still plenty to consider and think about in the world, but assigning meaning is essentially assigning worth. And figuring out “worth” of any thing or person requires adopting a host of preconceptions and premises, often without even knowing it.

Not that there aren’t preferences and opinions. I may be fooling myself and talking in circles to myself, in that, how can I think some ways of doing and thinking are better or worse but still think I am not applying value to that. As I write it, I guess we can debate ways of doing things, but any value is tentative or provisional, in that we are just doing the best we can since there is no galactic rule book we can follow..

Yeah, that is it…I am more at peace with the uncertainty of it all.

I am not a rigorous thinker but in trying to figure things out I feel my current world view is this accepting, I still can’t do embrace of, uncertainty. And part of that I credit to my late discovery of Erich Fromm in Escape From Freedom where he outlines how people having trouble dealing with uncertainty (which is a side effect, or maybe and inherent part of Freedom).

Fleeing freedom/uncertainty people dive into the arms of authoritarianism and anything that promises “certainty”. This is why our current melding of religion and authoritarianism meshes so easily. The theology is actually secondary to the certainy of the religion, like political philosophy is secondary to confidence of authoritarians.

Of course why the rich power brokers full of security and confidence go for all that is a whole 'nuther can of crazy worms.

Anyway, those of the kind of thoughts bouncing around my noggin this blog anniversary

And I finish with a quote from another one of my inspirations, Terry Prachett..

“But is all this true?” Said Brutha.
Didactylos shrugged. “Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends toward guesswork.”
“You mean you don’t know it’s true?” Said Brutha
I think it might be,” said Didactylos. “I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.” Pg 187

And another quote from another of my sources

Reporter: Professor Habito, what is the meaning of life?
Ruben Habito: …There is no “meaning of life” apart from living it, breath by breath, moment by moment, one day at a time, grateful for the mystery, the miracle, the wonder of it all.
Ruben Habito: By Excellence Reporter on July 16, 2015

https://excellencereporter.com/2015/07/16/ruben-habito-on-the-meaning-of-life/

Words to Remember

Came across these words in two differfent podcasts, Collective Effervescence and Absorption

On Straight White American Jesus they used Collective Effervescence to describe the unifying feeling people have in a church where people are swept up in the ecstasy of the moment.

And Absorption I heard on I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist in a discussion about why some people go all in for with the pentacostal features and others don't.

Google Definitions

Absorption is a disposition or personality trait in which a person becomes absorbed in their mental imagery, particularly fantasy.[1] This trait thus correlates highly with a fantasy prone personality. The original research on absorption was by American psychologist Auke Telleg

Collective effervescence (CE) is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim. According to Durkheim, a community or society may at times come together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action.

The Time I Tried to Read a Mark Levin Book

I tried to read Mark Levin's The Democrat Party Hates America and made it maybe half way through before I switched over to hyper-drive reading speed. Not because it was so easy to go through, but because every page is overflowing with venom and hatred, hatred of the “the Democrat Party”, of Joe Biden, of Hunter Biden...pure, pulsating hatred. I just wanted get through it as fast as possible. But even then I had to quit before the end of the book. It was just too depressing.

I thought it would be a good exercise to get out of my comfort zone and see another point of view. I thought I would examine his logic and admit where I saw it as...well ,logical, and point out where there was poor reasoning (as I saw it). But really after getting into it, I don’t remember any actual arguments, just an avalanche of hateful rhetoric directed at “the Democrat Party”. And if you didn’t know, calling the Democratic Party “the Democrat Party” is meant to be an insult, or it is when you hear it spoken and that same tone comes across in this book.

I probably overvalue my own skill at analyzing arguments. But this was an exercise for me, and nobody else will likely read it my thoughts, so I plunge ahead with my own limited abilities.

Anyway, it wears you down putting your mind in the mind of somebody so very angry, so filled with the opposite of compassion. Page after page of saying the current state of the country is horrible, really horrible, but really he “tells” and doesn’t “show” us about that.

The upshot is IF you already think the Democrats are really bad I bet you are fine with believing they are all Marxist. Yet he never defines what he means so I assume he thinks social secruity, laws protecting minorities, any acknowledgment of prejudice..THAT is Marxist. I mean if Marxism means the state owns the means of production then none of that stuff is actually Marxist.

Assuming he equates Marxism with Communism, he never shows where Democrats are trying to obolish private property, much leess have the state take over the means of production (BTW, take over is not the same thing as to regulate)

So he goes on and on about how Democrats are Marxist. Then there are some really long sections where he repeatedly tells us "you know who really liked slavery in the 19th century??..DEMOCRATS...And you know what else, guess who was really racist after the Civil War...DEMOCRATS. So THERE. " I mean yeah, but the unstated conclusion is that all Democrats today therefore also believe in all that stuff. And that goes on and on for multiple chapters and he is really indignant about it. So really super disingenuous reasoning for page after page is simply draining, it is so disingenuous it is hard to even know where to start.

And YES I know Woodrow Wilson was super racist, EVERYBODY knows that. But it doesn’t dissuade me from voting for a stronger social safty net or anything that would make rich people pay more in taxes. Another unstated assumptions is that taxation is marxism.

And the Coup de grâce is the last chapter where he talks about the worst thing that has ever happened in America...attempts to save lives by implementing COVID lock downs. If you come to this book already thinking like him then no reasoning is required. If you think the lock downs were a tool people tried to make things better, and we should look at what worked and what didn’t for the next time, then Levin is of no help. Although I have to admit I skippped most of the last chapter for my mental health, but from the tone of the opening I am pretty sure he did not work out a nuance position.

Below are some highlights I saved from the library ebook I checked out. Remember he is saying the stuff below about Democrats. I guess during his schooling his dictionary had no entry for “irony”

And of course the biggest irony is that with half or more of the population voting for the Democratic Party he is the one who really, really, hates America. Or at least 1/2 of it

# #
The police state is growing—as is monitoring and spying
the police state is growing (elsewhere he says police budgets are slashed??)
Our borders are wide open
The Democrat Party is responsible
The Democrat Party is responsible
eviscerate the Constitution
Democrat Party apparatchiks
Biden’s radical agenda
American Marxism
the progressive left who hate America
the American Marxist agenda,
their “Marxist paradise.”
Democrat Party today is more Leninist than Jeffersonian
the horrendous story of the Democrat Party’s past
Wilson’s racism
American Marxism

No longer would states with smaller populations, rural areas, etc., have any effective say in the selection of presidents and vice presidents. Indeed, only nine states make up about 50 percent of the nation’s population. Thus, representative government, where all areas of the country have a say in the conduct of the national government, would end. Tens of millions of people would be without meaningful input in governmental affairs—most of whom just happen to be Republicans and Independents. Representative government would be over for tens of millions of American citizens.

Of course, slavery is unconscionable. There is no excusing it. But capitalism did not drive slavery. Slavery has existed, and exists today, throughout the world and in noncapitalist societies. As Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, explains: “Slavery… was not an American invention, or a European one. It has existed in human societies for thousands of years.

They have a totalitarian mind-set. This means the party must come before country