Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I was just watching a cute video  of animals freaking out over toys – you know, the dog that goes into a barking fit when confronted with a plush dog, the cat not knowing what to make of a cat on wheels, a very large dog unwilling to enter a room because the doorway was guarded by a plastic dinosaur…that kind of stuff.
Nothing terribly new, except the toys get a little bit more high tech and realistic year after year.  The Yoda figure wielding a light saber who could turn around might not be convincing to a human child, who has been to the movies and likely knows who Yoda is and that that is just a toy, but a dog wouldn’t know that.  And this is going to be a bit more confusing to them with each passing year.
Watching their reactions was very funny, and I doubt if any of the animals were permanently traumatized.  Animals are pretty resilient creatures, and they are far better than humans about living in the present.
But, they are more like us than they are different, and it’s worth noting their reactions.  A lot of these toys are already well into ‘uncanny valley’ territory.  That is the  point were an android – you can’t say android if they are animal shaped, maybe zooid – makes people uncomfortable, because it’s real enough to fool them, or almost.  If you’re this side of the uncanny valley, they don’t bother you because it’s obvious you are talking to a machine, and most people are totally fine with that.  If you’re the other side of the valley, where the droids are so real you can’t tell the difference, like in Bladerunner, then you won’t be bothered because you won’t know.
But, in the middle, there are problems, and animals are giving us a pretty good clue as to how we’ll react, when the time comes.  They are the canary  in the coal mine, in this case.

We say ‘it’s only semantics’ as if that’s an end to the argument, but come down to it, all of our arguments are semantic, they all relate to words, that abstract representation of real life that gets us through the day.  When I say “Have a nice day,” I’m not doing anything to help anybody have a nice day.  If  I write a poem about a tree, it does not actually have the feel of the bark, or the cooling effect of its shade.
One argument we are trapped in today is ‘Socialism’ vs. ‘Capitalism’ and it’s a totally bogus argument, much like that between ‘big government’ and ‘small government,’ when what we really need is good government.
Both socialism and capitalism have been around a long time, long before anybody hung those labels on them.  Capitalism, etymologically, is from caput, Latin for head, as in ‘head of cattle.’  So the word goes back as far as Rome, and the practice probably goes back to whenever people started herding cattle, or goats or whatever, which is a few thousand years even further back.
Socialism, (using the Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez definition) the idea that governments should use the people’s money to do things that benefit the people, is at least as old as the first time the people of a tribe, or wandering clan, killed their chief because he wasn’t doing what was best for the tribe, and replaced him with somebody who would.  That goes back a long, long way because I’ve seen it happen on Monkey Island.

If our goal is to create a perfect society, a utopia, a paradise on Earth (and it should be) it’s probably going to be about finding the right mix, the right balance between the two, rather than choosing one.  Because both, quite clearly, are part of who we are, and who we’ve been for a very long time.

Christmas comes but once  a year, so the saying goes, but semantic  arguments are  forever.  24 hours a day, 365 days a year, forever.
Of course,  this whole nonsense about whether to say ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ has only been in place since Bill O’Reilly, commentator extraordinaire (Fuck it, we’ll do it live!), the most passionate of pundits, the looniest  of the loons, although the competition for that title has become severe, and sexual pervert  without parallel (the idea of jamming a felafel up a lady’s hoo-haw is just gross, but even a loofah is kind of kinky), decided he could convince his loyal viewers, and they were legion, that liberals had declared war on Christmas.  Maybe he believed  it himself, maybe he was just showing off.  We may never know.
He based this on a couple of stories of schools which had disallowed nativity scenes, which happens every year because they are, by definition, a religious display and, according to the principle of separation of church and state, should not be on state property, and also on the fact that lots of liberals say ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of Merry Christmas.
I’d never thought about it much before, I think I usually said Merry Christmas, but  now I try to say Happy Holidays.  Because, you know, it’s a war so all hands on deck.

You don’t hear much about O’Reilly any more.  He got  to be too much even for Fox News, probably all the sexual harassment stuff, and there are plenty of younger, fresher, and just as angry pundits out there.  But his War on Christmas lives on, as every year you hear a few people arguing over whether or not you should say Christmas, and how often and under what circumstances.
This is Bill O’Reilly’s legacy.  May we never forget.

The other day I got onto  a jag of watching videos about robots and AIs, because a friend had been raving about Sophia, but I  couldn’t find any one of her that I hadn’t seen before, so I wasn’t quite as impressed as he was.  Don’t get me wrong, she’s impressive, but once you’ve seen her a couple of times, it’s like, O.K., a robot can answer real time questions, logically, in grammatical English, certainly quicker and more intelligibly than some of my students ever could, but so… I guess I’m just expecting a bit much, and the fact that she actually can’t fool anybody into  thinking she’s human (the fact that they don’t put a wig on her really  sets her back in that respect.)
But, they still have to wheel her out, so there are the mobility issues, and despite the speed and appropriateness of her answers, there was still a somewhat inhuman (but not unpleasant) cadence to her speech, and she would flunk a Voit-Kampf test in about two minutes.

What I don’t get is this:  they are doing such amazing things with robotic mobility, I’ve seen robots that can walk down stairs, and do back flips and such, and they are doing such amazing work  with AI programs, so when are they going to put these two together?
That would be cool.

I was watching this thing on TV and it was pretty interesting, as I’m interested in the future and stuff, I mean, I plan on living there at some point, or at least visiting.  They were talking about how our cars would be  on a car intranet, and connected to the human internet, and everybody else through their mobile phones, plus they’ll have AI and be a million times smarter than us. You’d have stuff like you could know what music people  were listening  to in the cars around you and it could tell you which drivers near you might have mutual interests, so I guess you could contact them and agree to meet at the next diner, to conclude a business deal or just hook  up.  It all looked very interesting until it came time for the commercial break and I realized it was called Future Car, logically enough, but at that point I realized that the future they are selling is one that is directly contrary to what I want and probably not the best one for the future of mankind, no matter how cool it looks.  It’s still an  endless parade of individuals or small, small groups encased  in metal  and hurtling rickety split here and there on  and endless, world-girdling strip of concrete, consuming some kind of  energy  and gaining a minimum of satisfaction.
We need to go with trains.  Oh, sure, these future cars may be electric, and driverless so  that they’re massively more efficient. They might even be powered by magnets embedded in  the pavement, but a train could  do all  that too, carry a lot more passengers for a lesser amount of energy (which still costs something, and  I’m talking  about  costs in terms of resources, although  cash is a  consideration  as well), not isolate human beings into units of four or  less,  and make the journey oh, so much more pleasant.  You can even meet  people on the  train.