All the fuss today is about the metaverse, how it is a three-dimensional version of reality. Around the world trillions of dollars are flooding into this commercially-focused technology. When one considers why the public is interested in the metaverse, it appears the metaverse is just a three-dimension version of social media and entertainment. Very few of us may remember when silent movies gained sound, later color and today computerized graphics; shortly the metaverse will introduce interactive watching. All in all, the metaverse still will be entertainment with a huge snack bar. A customer needn’t go to a mall with movie theaters, one soon will be able to go to a theater that has a shopping mall – and stay home as well!

In other words, humans will continue to experience a whirlwind of new services, entertainment and gossip but life at the street level still will be the same.

But a true shift in human culture is coming – not through metaverse, avatars and emoji, rather through a new computing age called quantum computing. Quantum computing, already a growing industry, will make today’s computational speed seem like an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter. The speed, along with miniaturized storage, will allow computers not only to run stock market trading as they do now but computers will run governments in a similar fashion. Computers will manage supply chains and huge corporations – automatically with minimal human attention.

In short, computers will become our policy makers. Congress can’t keep up with today’s computational speeds; will Congress even be needed when computers figure out policy at the speed of light?

What quantum computing gives to computers is a primitive version of consciousness. They can do their own research, learning and decision-making. It will take a generation or two to iron out stable, human oriented parameters (a sort of automated Supreme Court) but after that, politics may not be a front row influence.

The danger, of course, is the power that Lord Acton talked about will be in the hands of even fewer humans. This is evidenced today in the stock market where a few corporations control parameters for the computers that do the buying and selling instantly before any human notices a change. Conversely, common investors like us don’t have a chance. Will this be the world of quantum computing?

The missing element, which we live with today, is emotional judgment. Scruples and fairness require more than speed-of-light analogs and algorithms. Run by capitalists, oligarchs, dictators, socialists or communists, will the quantum age simply automate today’s inadequacies?

Ancient Mariner

It is true that the hearing impaired can be a nuisance, causing the speaker to repeat words and phrases and often requiring moving around so sound waves are not distorted by walls or distance and may require lip reading and over enunciated spelling of each word. Television is a show stopper; hearing aids cannot focus between sources talking simultaneously.

The hearing impaired are as bothered by this as much as the nonhearing impaired. But the difficulties don’t entirely lie at the ear of the hearing impaired.

Unlike the Germans and Russians who love to pound out soft consonants, the Americans pretend to say their soft consonants. Oh, there may be a lip gesture or a soft noise deep in the throat but the rhythm of syllables is lost as the word becomes a slurred reference to any properly articulated word or phrase. To hear English properly spoken, tune into CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley; odds are the reader speaks three times faster than Jane – on-the-scene reporters perhaps four times as fast.

What follows is a sample or two that emulates what the hearing impaired may hear. It replaces supposedly spoken consonants, words and phrases with an underscore (_). For those who like puzzles, mariner will not provide an interpretation.

The _o_ was caught in _  _o_  _cause of _  _o_. I used _  _o_ to bring a _ow truck.

The _rolu_ is you _int lock _ door this _or_. You _oly were _stract_.

Along with mariner’s lifelong friend, a philologist, together we used to collect some really lackadaisical speech patterns. Here’s a few with impaired hearing added:

_kowe_      skoeet, let’s go eat

_roly          probably

Jeetjet       did you eat yet?

In addition to word enunciation, many speakers significantly drop their volume on a predicate phrase – whole phrases are not heard.

Mariner hopes this illustrates the difficulties of impaired hearing versus hurried, inarticulate speaking. As the impaired listen, their brains, for tiny milliseconds, must stop listening and do a dictionary search for probable meanings. In that millisecond, a conscious link with the conversation is lost, likely will be halted and require the speaker to start over again.

Achint Manner

Economically, and therefore culturally, the planet is a mess. Way too many nations are on the brink of revolution, starvation, oppressive war by authoritarian governments or destructive, violent, militarized guerilla groups. Human rights are declining – including in the United States. More rapidly the assets of the world are being sucked into the secret coffers of the planet’s oligarchs. In the US, children are routinely shot; across the Middle East women are brutalized.

Further, in the book “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan, he lays out how ‘nation states’ will be replaced by internet-enabled ‘network states’ run from the Cloud.

This universe sucks.

Our saving Grace is in the universe of hobbies. The hobby universe has different physical laws. For example, time flows at arbitrary rates controlled by the hobbyist; global dynamics simply don’t exist; hobby ambition and success are forces in the atmosphere and with a good location, the troubled universe completely disappears.

But one must be serious about this path. One needs a noncritical subject in which to invest serious attention and dedication. The whole object of the hobby universe is to escape the troubled universe, to forget everything except the target of one‘s hobby. Before all other thoughts and emotional interests, except for family and very close friends, the hobby is foremost in one’s mind.

Give a moment to consider what noncritical activity has drawn unusual interest in the past; what interesting thing floats in your mind during casual moments? Perhaps you are fortunate to have a hobby but haven’t made it the most important activity in your daily routine.

Once the hobby is chosen, it requires religious intensity, a desire to engage in the hobby at every chance. There are many subjects that are common for hobbyists: one thinks immediately of handiwork such as woodworking, pottery, glass blowing, metalwork, restoration of an object, art, weaving or building furniture.

There are activity hobbies like gardening, fishing, competitive biking, stock car racing, canoeing, hiking, camping, golfing and neighborhood sport leagues. There are social hobbies like working for charity building homes, cooking meals and providing transportation. Intellectual hobbies include activities like reading, becoming a world class expert on the dung beetle or mastering a new musical instrument; perhaps private tutoring or a part time librarian. If one has room, animal husbandry.

The key, however, is to walk through the warp door into the other universe. Desire. Determination. Curiosity. Achievement. As the old Eddy Arnold standard says, ‘Make the World go away’.

Ancient Mariner