Dateline April 2023

Strange News in the World today. Most of it, even as honestly reported as can be found, is moderately alarming, moderately disappointing, as Humanity continues with all it’s unconscious behaviors.

That said,  here are my thoughts on a few selected items from Today’s News — 7 April 2023.

MidEast “handshake” between Saudi and Iran. SEVEN YEARS after relations were broken off. Friend of mine (vastly more knowlegable than I am in many areas) claims that major events in the World run in 7 year cycles, it’s a thing one can verify by examining the historical records. So… given that, should any one be surprised by this? Did the participants even need to be there, really? (For real, an interesting question, *if* one adopts the 7-year cycle thing, for which really strong arguments can be made. Makes on wonder, yes?)

Tennessee removed two democrats from state legislature for expressing anti-gun opinions. (Well, it’s more complicated than that, and the whole story almost justifies the action — though not really. But that’s not why they were removed, I suspect. This action sets Tennessee up for a republican super-majority and the remaining democrats might as well just go home now — that’s the real why, more than likely. And, if that is the true motive, then it amounts to Treason against the citizens of Tennessee.

Heaven forbid that a legislator should make his
opinion known! Geez…. what *was* he thinking?
(that’s sarcasm, in case it isn’t obvious)

(Why Treason? Because moving from a two party system [it’s not really a two party system, there are 30+ political parties in the United States, but the others are mostly ignored in the news] to a single party would create the long prophecised Totalitarian State. There’s a reason for at least two political parties. Ask Soviet Russia or Cuba under Castro. Weaken one party against the other and you might as well openly throw everything away that America was meant to be about. Totalitarianism is where Tennessee is headed. Others of the American states also. Will it be nation-wide one day? Or perhaps the Mason-Dixon line will be drawn on a north-south boundary this time.)

ChatGPT has been found “lying” about real people, implicating them in fabricated crimes. I keep telling people how any software based on human behavior as gleaned from the Internet will be nothing but disappointing. Except to a software engineer, of course. And possibly to an investor in “AI” (see notes below on that subject).

ChatGPT was also accused of sexual harassment, which is really peculiar and says more about the person making the claim than about the software. It can hardly force itself on anyone, and that’s what Sex Harassment Charges are meant to protect one from. This is a non-starter, but it is a reflection of our current culture, which is really all any (so-called) “AI” could possibly be (at this point, since it’s based on large-language models [technical term] and the AIs tend to be “educated” by feeding them Social Media content, which is — frankly — a very bad idea.) It tends to make Chat Robots anti-social, mysogynist, bigoted, and prone to Big Sounding but Highly Ignorant Statements (that is, “bluster”). Yet it’s always the software that gets the blame, not the culture it “learned” these behaviors from.

I noticed that the news channel 1440 gives stock market changes in % not in raw numbers. This is a tactic I’ve been wishing all the major news outlets would adopt, as it’s far less distressing (and more informative) to hear that the market closed 0.4% down instead of “the market lost 450 points today.” It’s far more meaningful, as it puts the change in perspective (0.4% is a meaningless change overall — might even be inside the margin of error), which the reporting of raw numbers never does. Which is why the major news outlets almost never give context to the numbers they toss at you. (They sell more adrenalin that way.)

I have another posting on this website concerning “numbers” and their use and near-criminal misuse in news and government reports. Without meaningful context numbers are never anything except inflammatory and misleading.

 

Russia is giving a hearing on a journalist arrested and accused of espionage. Does anyone actually engage in physical espionage any more? It’s so much more efficient (and invasive, and misleading) to just mine the Internet.

No, the fellow was undoubtedly arrested soley because he was an American and Putin is gearing up for the new Cold War he has single handedly engineered. That in itself is a Major Crime of Global Proportions. Everything else is obvious once you realize his goal is to bring back the Cold War days and the “glory” of the Soviet Union, under which the few at the Top enjoyed Power, Money and Debauchery, while the People enjoyed poverty, fear and brutality.

Way to serve your people, Mr Putin!

Empire hates giving up power. That’s the nature of Empire, and clearly demonstrates that it’s a diseased frame of mind.

“MySpace” is claimed by a reporter to be the first social network started, and first to collapse.  But that’s wrong: AOL Online was the first (before the Internet). But that’s wrong. Before AOL was CompuServe (CI$, as we used to write it out back then — CompuServe Information Services) And before that was the loose affiliation of private Bulletin Board systems, out of which CI$ and AOL grew. And before that… oh well. “But only Computer Geeks were doing that stuff back then,” you might say. Well, maybe (not really), but when it’s numbered in millions of participants you just gotta’ call it Social, yes?

News Journalists who weren’t there and are poorly educated nevertheless making absolute pronouncements. Always amusing… and never amusing.

“AI” and the MEDIA — all news outlets continue to erroneously use the terms “AI” and “Artificial Intelligence” instead of “MI” and “Machine Intelligence.” There is at present absolutely no technical basis for an artificial consciousness or self-awareness in software, which Science Fiction has taught 3+ generations is what “AI” means.  No matter how deep the neural net goes, it can’t set its own agenda, it can’t take charge, even of itself. Fortunately. Remember Colossus the Forbin Project? No, you probably don’t. Take my word for it — a computer that can set its own agenda and has no off switch is a really bad idea.

My first thought the first time I ran into “hiberate” and “sleep” as options that could be attached to the power button — rather than the power button being a true on/off — was the scene from the opening of the movie Colossus. Geez. What were they thinking? It also created a great many problems, as people were suddenly going a very long time between actual reboots of the computer on an OS that requires periodic rebooting to clear away the accumulated debris from , poorly designed, mis-written  and badly maintained software. Alas…

(By the way: I know how to fix ChatGPT and its ilk, but I haven’t been asked, and I don’t think the developers nor especially the investors would like the answer. But this *would* fix it and make it into something far more useful to everyone.

I also have a ideas for a new hardware platform that *might* make an artificial self-awareness possible, with very careful software design, but it’s an entirely different kind of computer hardware than is now in use, so I doubt that it would be very popular either. A global, trillion dollar empire [see notes above about “empire”] won’t want to see itself superceded.)

Concerning “Intelligence:” In absolute terms, “AI” has no agreed upon definition, because “intelligence”, “consciousness”, “mind” and “self-awareness” have no agreed upon definitions. A behavioral psychologist might define them one way, a medical doctor another and a quantum cosmologist yet a third. There are many other opinions as well. A computer “scientist” — generally way too young to have probed and understood their own minds yet, who nevertheless keep trying to create an artificial one — will have rarely thought about the precise definitions of these terms. Yet they throw these words around as if everyone knows what they mean.
In fact, no one knows what they mean. So there…

Remember:

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the
majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

~ Sam Clemens