Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Well, the next free Kindle book giveaway is up.  Four Syllables on Water, which is one I’m particularly proud of, because I worked out that meter with reason and logic and stuck to it throughout, and yet most of the poems wound up rhyming pretty well anyway and, in the process of writing poems about water in it’s various states of existence, I think I tumbled across a true statement or two, and I love it when that happens.

re the Mark Zuckerberg hearings, I don’t get this.  If a law was broken, then it needs to be tried in a court of law.  If no law was broken, then congress should butt out.  I’m not making a comment pro or con re Zuckerberg or Facebook, I just don’t see how it’s any of Congress’s business.  They are pretending to be protectors of the people, but the country is crumbling around them and they aren’t doing shit about it.  Interviewing Zuckerberg, which will  have no real result, is like naming a Post Office or deciding that May 6th will be National Asparagus Day or whatever.

Just had a seriously unpleasant conversation on Facebook.  The original poster put up a little  meme attacking some poetry for being too trivial, like a bumper sticker, like a meme.  I raised my objections, because that’s the kind of poetry  I  write.  Then another person, who’d put in  a comment above mine, heaping praise on the OP for his thoughtfulness, said ‘What are you talking about?  I never said anything about poetry.”  I  pointed out that the original post was all about poetry.  Then the original posted jumped back in, with a semi-coherent and ungrammatical diatribe, the gist of which was “Don’t argue with me, mate, you’re an asshole.”  So, I blocked the site he  was sending from for thirty days, because that was all I could do, and then I noticed later that he’d liked my comment, and sent me a friend request.  Weird, eh?

Last night I didn’t get around to writing my  blog until almost 1 a.m., nothing was inspiring me as a topic as I sat, immobilized, at the keyboard and simultaneously flipped through the channels on the TV from one grisly murder to another.  Watched one real case, they can generally hold my interest longer than the police procedurals where they always find the clue by blowing up the CC footage to a point beyond which it can be blown up in real life, or finding, via a quick computer search, the only store in  New Jersey that sells that kind of carpet fiber.  In this case, it was a rabbi who murdered his wife, I was surprised they didn’t suspect him from the beginning because I thought the husband was always a suspect but it was complex, a murder for hire, and they did nail him eventually, and then I was watching the last half of a movie that I saw maybe the last 15 minutes of the night before and maybe eventually I’ll see it from the beginning but maybe not.  Essentially, it was an absurd amount of death by guns interspersed with some funny quips, a few humorous accents, and one hot lady FBI agent.
Then, when I’d finally decided to say ‘screw it’ and just start in trying to write a stream of consciousness screed to get the blog done and go to bed, my blog popped up without the little box in the upper right hand corner that says ‘write.’  So, since my ‘IT department,’ as I sometimes refer to her, had already gone to bed, I put it off until this morning (she fixed the problem in about 2 seconds), and here is my make-up blog.  I’ll write a proper one  this evening.

Very often conversations about AI descend into crude jokes about sexbots, and I’m  sure there will be that, but robots will  be in demand to perform a wide variety of  tasks.  In fact, an almost infinite variety of tasks, once they get rolling, because honestly, deep down, as much as people talk about the need to keep busy  and be productive, and the nobility  of human labor and crap  like that, nobody actually  wants to do  any work they don’t have to.
Boston Dynamics is not just designing humanoid robots, they’ve got the big dogs, too.  So, police dogs are going to be out of a job, and  maybe  sheep dogs, eventually, although I think it might take a long time, because sheep dogs are pretty amazing.

It will  take a lot longer to replace them than it will, for instance, truck drivers, shop clerks and assembly  line workers.
I’m sure creative people will continue to create and brilliant people will continue to invent, and theorize, and explore, but as far as the nuts and bolts are concerned, the mundane daily tasks that keep  our civilization running, those jobs are going to the bots, and I’ve  got no problem with it.
The sexbots will  all look sexy  as hell, of course, and they will be of both sexes, but the factory workers will look like smiley little elves, the garbage collectors will look like Shrek, gardens will be tended by drones that  look  like fairies, or pixies, or whatever, the construction trade will be filled  with giants.  It will be sort of a magical  world.  After all, the brain is always the same even if  the  programming is different, you just  need some slight  adjustments to the appendages and the rest is just latex.

It started off kind of productive.  My project for this weekend is to set up accounts on Tumbler and Reddit, and to clean up my  Twitter account so  it’s a bit more legible and coherent and not like a slightly jazzed up version of my  hotmail junkmail.

So, I did that first and I even found out about one more site, Kialo, which  seems promising from what I read but seems as if it’s going to be the hardest to actually establish an presence on, because when I tried to post a comment it said first you need to get approval to send messages and so now that is pending and could take forever.  That’s the thing with the word ‘pending.’  You have know idea  of when, or whether, it will end.
The others I’m not too sure about, either.  They may go, for me, the way of LinkedIn and Quora and GooglePlus, all of which I’ve tried and then drifted away from.  LinkedIn I wish I could figure out how to quit.  Actually, GooglePlus, too.
Anyway, I looked at them  for a while and then went over to clean out my Twitter account, which my plan was just to scroll through and delete all  the boring stuff.  O.K., there’s a difference between unfollowing and blocking, I suppose, I wound up just blocking again and again because it was quicker, and the  stuff did disappear immediately, but it seemed after a bit like I was trying to empty the creek with a tin cup.
So, I’ll look at them all again tomorrow, and see what happens.

As artificially  intelligent androids begin to take over all of the jobs, one field at a time, they will meet with almost no resistance.  This is why  I think so.
We were in the mall the other day.  I had to buy a pair of dress shoes  for a ballroom dancing course my wife signed us up for and  we had our first lesson last name and it was kind of fun, at least something to get me away from the computer for awhile.  But, I digress.  That’s not what tonight’s blog is about at all.  After that, we stopped into  a drug store to make a couple  of small  purchases, and it was there that I had my epiphany.  It was a routine transaction, H paid with a credit card and as she waited for the sale to clear and her receipt to be printed, the clerk  had such a blank look on her face – it was somewhere beyond indifference, but it wasn’t pointed  enough to be hostile – that it was clear she hated her job, probably  resented us for having come to her register, and couldn’t  wait for us to be gone.  Now, this is not an uncommon occurrence in the Czech Republic.  It can happen in  other countries, too, but Czechs are kind of famous for it.

Anyway, I realized in that instant that if that girl gets replaced by a robot, which will have a couple, cheery pre-programmed phrases to pass the time, and an absolutely gorgeous smile, nobody’s going to be bothered.  Nobody’s going to say “Hey, we want the grumpy girl back.”

We will see, but that’s my prediction,  entered into  the  official record on this date, April something I’m not sure what, 2018.