Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

My niece is here, with her husband who I’d never bet before today, so that is great.  My nephew (they are cousins, and both are my kids’ cousins)  will arrive the day after tomorrow.

So the blogs through Christmas might be a bit shortish.  I probably also won’t get much done on the book through the next week but I’m not terribly worried – it’s so close to done.  There is a beginning, a middle and an ending.  I just need to fill in a few holes, change a few names, proofread for typos and spelling mistakes, and it will be done.

We went out sightseeing this afternoon.  Is it my imagination or are the crowds of tourists in Prague constantly getting bigger?  Walking from the Orloj over to the Christmas tree took about half an hour, and I kept thinking  we’d lost one of the kids.

She’s been to Prague a couple of times before – it was his first time.  Both were suitably impressed by the stunning beauty of the city.

I’d better wrap this up and let everybody get to bed.  All for now.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before, but time marches on, the game changes, and a fresh update is due now  and again.  Just the other day I saw a story about a guy with two totally prosthetic arms, like from the shoulder.  Grip of steel.  And there’s almost no part of the body we can’t, now or in the very near future, replicate.  The blind will see, the lame will walk.

The hard part, of course, is the brain.  Thus, the quest for artificial intelligence.  And, of course, with the quest for artificial intelligence comes the ethical argument against it, which is “Are you crazy?  They will kill us all!”

The way I see it, though, is like this.

Computer minds are nothing like human minds.  No matter how much computing capability they have, that doesn’t mean they can feel.  Or, imagine.  Or desire.  They will not suddenly kill us all unless somebody orders them to.

I believe the first AI will be a hybrid, and we are seeing the development of it right here, right now. This sentence, which originated in my mind (one tiny and discrete cell of the hive mind), flowed out through my fingers to a keyboard, thanks to the miracle of written language and praise be forever unto the unknown genius-scribe who first thought that up. From there it goes to your computer screen, just like the thought, or the impulse, will leap from neuron to neuron via incredibly rapid chemical processes. In an instant, others can respond, adding variations and objections. This is the thought process of the internet, backed up by all the information in the world, or at least all the information that anyone has deemed worth recording, the constantly changing views from our deep space telescopes, the ongoing research at universities, laboratories, hospitals and factories all around this sweet, little world of ours and beyond. It has not yet reached the point where we can call it artificial intelligence (it is clearly artificial – it is the word intelligence which gives us pause), but the potential is there.

‘Tis the season to have our annual argument about Bill O’Reilly’s totally imaginary War on Christmas, which is fiercely fought by legions of keyboard Christians, well intentioned old ladies who seriously think we’re all going to literally burn in hell, and those who don’t know the difference between a public school and a church, bravely defending their religious ritual against a non-existent threat.

Bill O’Reilly, most paranoid man in the world

One person today in faceplace space was saying ‘If you don’t want to celebrate Christmas, which is Christ Mass, then you shouldn’t have a tree, you shouldn’t give gifts, you shouldn’t be disrespecting, even co-opting, our religious holiday.’

This was my reply:

It’s not a religious holiday, pure and simple. It’s three days after the Winter Solstice, the days are beginning to get longer, the Sun is not actually going to go away forever. This has been a holiday since people first started to look at the sky and wonder what the heck was going on, which means it probably goes back to before we were properly people at all. Gifts and gift giving were a part of human culture long, long before the time of Christ, like maybe a million years before. Alcohol? Probably about the same. Trees also preceded us and, since it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to chop one down and bring it to the place where you live, that too has probably been part of the celebration since before Christ was born. Snow? Goes way back. A roaring campfire? Well, I’m sure that’s a question archaeologists would like to answer, but I’ll bet it’s at least 500,000 years.

Christmas has been known as Saturnalia, Yule, and probably many other ancient names. Just because the power cult you happen to belong to came along a couple thousand years ago and started claiming everything in sight, doesn’t actually make any of it yours. Happy Holidays.

Democracy, Theocracy,  Monarchy, Empire, Communism, Capitalism, Socialism,even Anarchy, these are all just different formats for managing  civilization and the problem is that  all of them could  work, in theory.

But, as I have heard attributed  to Yogi Berra, although  I kind of doubt that ‘In theory is the same as in practice, in theory.  In  practice, it’s not.’

The problem is obvious.  What do all of these systems have in common?  People.  It’s always the damned people.  Anarchy would be beautiful, it is the most poetically beautiful of all of them, the beautiful belief that  people, left to their own devices, would do the right things.  99% of the time, that might be true, but that other one percent of the time you want the police or the fire department or the  ambulance to arrive on time.  It’s  like that stupid Adam Smith  metaphor about the invisible hand.  It’s invisible, people!  That had  could  just as easily whop you up the side of the head.

In an  unregulated, free-market capitalist system, an  ever tightening group of people at the type make more  and more money, and leave the  paupers in the dirt.

In communism, dissent and individuality are strongly discouraged.

In theocracies around the world, people are poor, and  oppressed, and ignorant.

Democracy may well  be the  fairest system so far devised by man, but it  is only as good as the Demos it represents.  And  quite honestly, I am not convinced that Gruber was wrong.

I just wrote a long, insightful piece on Kim Jong Un and why it is terribly uncool that he hacked Sony Pictures computers and intimidated them out of showing that film with Seth Rogen and James Franco about him getting whacked, because if he wants the world to stop laughing at him and random comics making fun of him, maybe he could try being a better dictator, like by allowing his people a bit of freedom, to head south if they want, to have the internet, to not die in concentration camps.  But, I wrote it it on my son’s computer becaus mine crashed and this one doesn’t want to do what I tell it to, I feel like I’m writing on a phone and then it lost the whole piece so this is the short version and good night.