Category Archives: Technology

AI’s vision of society is a panopticon

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Atlantic Magazine published an article about AI’s perspective on the shape and function of society: it will perform in the manner of a panopticon.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Mariner did not realize how frequently this term is being used today until after the Atlantic article. Despite being originated as a philosophical metaphor, it is as popular as Schrodinger’s cat and Pavlov’s dog. It also is more interpretive as a description of the future than mariner’s two movies of similar prediction, 1984 and Matrix.

The single corrections officer can be interpreted as a bucketful of AI corporations in operations today. Just to mention a few – Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Adobe . . .  Already in active use are most search engines, Alexa, Facebook, etc.

All the futurists like Jeremy Bentham, the movies, the active user applications and social media gossip predict a social panopticon where all there is left for a human to do is sit in a room and conjure reality through their smartphone.

Enjoy looking at wilderness sites on your smartphone? Did it occur to you it would be a genuine experience if you actually went to one instead?

Armageddon proceeds.

Ancient Mariner

Same-o, Same-o

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Hello Readers –

The reason all the honkies are getting behind Trump and his non-white deportation program (citizen or not)  and the idea of paying only honky women $5,000 to have a honky baby is because for several years now the population studies show that honkies will become a minority in 2045. Just wanted the readers to know that motive.

On to somewhat nicer stuff:

This definitely is the year of the dandelion. Mariner and his wife have spent several days removing dandelions from garden beds. Lawns can be treated chemically but garden beds are much more sensitive to chemicals and acidity. Dandelions are like mulberry tree seedlings = one must get the entire root, leaving not even a splinter. Otherwise, it will grow again. Maple trees are an insidious weed, too, but cutting it below the surface kills it.

It is hoped that there will be no more frosts. This past winter was unusually brutal. It was hard on roses and azaleas. Fortunately, the peonies and bulb flowers are bursting forth. Mariner has lots of irises and they all have big flower buds about to bloom. Spring has come. It seems in the Midwest that there have been regular occurrences of big stormy fronts with floods and tornado warnings. Fortunately, all his town gets is an occasional thunderstorm; he lives in a strip of Iowa that is declared a drought zone. Agriculture agencies have moved mariner’s side of Iowa from growing zone 4 to zone 6 suggesting warmer winters. He’ll believe it when it happens.

The title of this post is “Same-o, Same-o” because he has been watching a documentary series about early Rome during the age of unbridled, typically narcissistic emperors – like feeding typically lower class Christians to lions or murdering relatives to assure the proper succession. It is amazing how today’s President has mastered their style.

As to AI, everyone has been exposed to this new phenomenon enough that a rewatch of the film “The Social Dilemma” would be meaningful. It is available on Netflix.

Have a happy summer everyone!

Ancient Mariner

 

Mother Earth ups the ante

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Mariner has harangued his readers about the Armageddon consisting of excessive population, disappearing natural resources, global warming and uncontrolled AI. But Mother Earth has just started to get involved.

In a report from Nature Geoscience –

“North America’s geological core has persisted for billions of years—it’s what scientists call a craton, a massive block of continental rock that withstands the natural recycling system of plate tectonics. Typically, scientists think of cratons as unchanging, nigh on eternal. But new research published on March 28 in Nature Geoscience suggests that a long-lost geological plate may be siphoning rock from the bottom of the North American craton, eroding it from below, right under our feet.

Such a scenario would not be unprecedented—scientists have evidence that the North China craton thinned dramatically millions of years ago—but it would certainly be surprising and intriguing to study in real time. “Cratons are the oldest cores of continents, so they have been sitting near the Earth’s surface for billions of years,” says Claire Currie, a geophysicist at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the new research. “They’ve persisted through time, so this is quite unusual.”

Mariner could find no projected dates for these events but at some point in the future, the next tectonic shift may turn the Mississippi River into the Mississippi Sea or conversely, The Mississippi Mountains.

Mother Earth’s stash seems unending. Much of Florida and much of the Gulf-facing land in the US will disappear under rising seas; Global warming will disrupt political, economic and environmental conditions that may cause even more famine and unrest among human populations.

Mother Earth wants everyone to know that AI isn’t the only player in the future of us Homos.

Ancient Mariner

Trekking amid Armageddon

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In these days, attempting to live a stable life is like being an empty trashcan in a tornado. All the headlines focus on what “Wanna be a dictator” is doing to the fabric of government; there are large situations like global warming, rational health care, personal civil rights, what schoolchildren will not be taught, the emerging isolationism of each state in the Union, and the precarious ripping apart of economic relationships between democratic nations.

That’s just one whirlwind in the storm. Another whirlwind swirls around the corporate freedom to dissemble independent human behavior and replace it with computerized corporate manipulations of behavior and intervene the interface between humans and genuine reality.

Having one’s own private perspective on how to engage in the community has been diminished and largely replaced by the new town square, Facebook – which is a behavior similar to smartphones, which requires no social intervention at all.

Corporations have automated out of existence places and activities where ‘community’ could be felt and engaged in – places like small storefront businesses, shopping malls, and computerized food services that have a negative effect on restaurants.

Slowly, humanity (in the wealthy nations only, there is no life to be had in poor ones) is being corralled into the world of one of mariner’s benchmark icons, the movie Matrix. The model is identical but Matrix says humans were put into wired coffins, their brains filled with artificial life experience and their bodies were used as batteries for the great “system”

In this reality it is the same model but for different reasons. Smartphones replace the coffins, social control replaces batteries. Remember Zuckerberg’s fantasy about everyone having their own online town? Sort of like the false life of humans in Matrix.

But the Armageddon swirl is closing in. Everyone must now store their personal computer backups on the ‘cloud’. Metaphorically, your smartphone provides verbs, your computer provides nouns. Your computer is no more than a data entry keyboard – sort of like a typewriter but wired to the corporate database.

Mother Nature will step in big time in a few years. Not that it will necessarily make things better; Mother owns the largest corporation – the planet.

Mariner is inclined to go looking for his two ponies and a cart. He has no smartphone, will not store his data in the ‘system’ database and continually searches for ways to shop face-to-face with other humans and to spend cash for purchases. He is a Homo sappien approaching extinction.

Ancient Mariner

More info for peripheral view

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Everyone, around the world in fact, is inundated with the Trump phenomenon. Everyone around the world is troubled that their economics are so vulnerable to disruption. This vulnerability has a broader, peripheral circumstance that can explain this vulnerability: environmental resources are running out – whether they are elements, minerals, biomass, space or the effects of global warming.

As the population post cited, in all of human history, the population reached 1 billion. Then from 1800 to 1987, the population grew by 4 billion. What grew as well was the rate of consumption. Human laissez-faire about consumption is reflected in human treatment of the resources available: The world generates nearly two billion tons of municipal solid waste each year (MSW).  MSW includes trash from companies, buildings, houses, yards, and small businesses. The United States and China lead the way.

Mariner’s wife, a librarian, has a program where she reads stories to preschool children. She brought home a book which, with astounding clarity, demonstrated human disregard for environmental resources. The book is ‘One Little Bag – An Amazing Journey’ by Henry Cole.  All pages are drawings showing a small boy’s affection for his paper bag by always having it at hand for whatever purpose; it is the tale of a little boy who carried his one original lunch bag to school for over 700 lunches even using it to offer a wedding ring to his girlfriend. The pages also show all the industrial steps required to make a paper bag from chopping down the tree to paper manufacture, delivery, etc. One cannot read this simple story without realizing how trashy humans are. What is important is this trashy behavior does not show concern for the more important issue: disappearing resources.

Wastefulness is not limited to MSW. About four or five years ago, mariner watched a TV interview with a Federal Department head (mariner apologizes for forgetting the name). He was an advocate for expanding our ability to sustain natural resources in order to offset the impact of increasing consumption caused by rapid population growth. He addressed many industrial practices and the careless lack of concern by humans who consume large, irreplaceable areas of the environment just for profit or pleasure.

The Department Head went so far as to challenge lawns. “We need the space to grow food! Every bit of space around the home should be dedicated to self sufficiency, to help ease the pressure caused by disappearing food sources.”

It isn’t just food. Trickling through the news today is the concern for how much electricity and water the new computer age consumes. Computers alone have a special shortage in several minerals including Lithium, Cobalt and Zinc. Microsoft has just contracted the use of a nuclear power plant.

Mariner has a personal example: He and his wife maintain bird feeders. Many who offer this service find it invaded by squirrels. Mariner disregards this complaint knowing that he and his fellow Homos have leveled the natural environment of the squirrel to build huge, clunky houses, streets, tennis courts and businesses. The least we Homos can do is to be sympathetic to the shortage of food for the squirrel and any other wildlife that may still live here. It is interesting that only Homos need 1,200 square feet for a nest, plus lumber, steel, plastic, electricity, heating fuel, TV, a phone, a garage and two stories. Meanwhile, tigers and elephants are disappearing and wolves can’t live in the Midwest which is their natural environment because Homos will shoot them.

This peripheral information may shed light on why economies are not robust, why food and energy prices continue to rise and why every planet resource is at risk.

Ancient Mariner

 

Are food prices really going up?

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There was an informative chart from NPR. The chart pointed out that a frequent pattern was the reduction in package size as a means of not raising prices. Mariner’s local supermarket also reduced options among items by taking more expensive brands off the shelf. Interestingly, the manufacturing sector distributed their goods to fewer but larger retailers. For example, mariner can no longer find Lipton decaffeinated instant tea in his county but it is still available online at Walmart.

Now he can no longer find Planters Honey Roasted mixed nuts. Mariner often has expressed concern about the future of storefront economy. He described in his home town the disappearance of a dozen stores, some were large corporations,  – thereby reducing town domestic product to virtually nothing. Grocery stores are gone, pharmacies are gone, 5&10 store is gone, numerous restaurants are gone, hardware store is gone, car dealerships are gone. One is lucky to have a job less than 20 miles away.

Converts will say, “Poo!” It’s easier to call Walmart or Amazon with our smartphone. Thinking of smartphones, how many old timers realized the precedent that was set when a simple telephone allowed a person to speak to an artificial human being instead of having an interpersonal experience that sustained community society? “Well, it’s easier than harnessing the horse!” Today, that “human voice” can’t be guaranteed to be real – even if you see them on a screen.

Tribes, extended families, individual skills, community-based cultures soon will no longer exist unless they match Google’s data bank of common values – which is an oxymoron.

Perhaps mariner is old fashioned.

Armageddon progresses.

Ancient Mariner

Mariner warned about this

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The biotech company Colossal Biosciences has long aspired to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, which roamed the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago  during the last ice age. But for now, as a step along the way, the company has come up with something decidedly less mammoth: meet the woolly mouse.

What was the purpose of this feat of genetic engineering? Colossal’s pitch is that, with biodiversity going the way of the dodo (which the company also hopes to resurrect), saving existing species will require tweaking their DNA to make them more resilient.

In other words, Colossal has decided to fire the planet’s ecosystem and take charge of the planet’s evolution process. Ain’t the mouse cute? Just think, your great grand children will be able to go to Walmart to pick from a menu what their children will look like – sort of like buying a puppy.

Well, mariner could use some hair . . .

Ancient Mariner

Ever metaphor?

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Greetings, readers – This is an unusual post about one of our intellectual tools – the metaphor. The human brain has a logical process that, he suspects, AI and all its fellow technologies will never master – human comparative analysis (HCA).
There are about 80 million neurons (brain cells) in the human brain. On top of that, each neuron has over one million atoms. Recent scientific discoveries show that each neuron can reorganize itself internally based on the situation. A recent article wrote “The cell can call together committee meetings within the cell when conditions call for it.” It will be very hard for common electronically-based atoms to compete with neurons that can reorganize their algorithms in committee meetings at the level of an atom.

Here is a simple metaphor that encompasses the entire Trump conflict:
A cup on the counter contains creamer, honey and coffee, three liquids which have been taken from their normal world in containers. They are confused about what is happening. Then they see the approaching spoon. In fear they say, “Oh no! Here comes a spoon! What will we become?”
The spoon is Donald Trump. The liquids can only hope all will be well in the end but who knows, maybe they will end up in the kitchen drain.

Let’s label this the ‘spoon metaphor’. In one simple picture, the brain can pull together the context of its human experience involving many subconscious experiences, spatial conditions and conscious awareness to understand the comprehensive, real world experience from an approaching spoon. Mariner can’t accept that AI, seeing an approaching spoon, could interpolate the specific, undocumented meaning and provide a correct assumption.

Metaphors come in all sizes, shapes and scope. It is a common way to transfer broader meaning without using a ton of words; it a key teaching method as well as an expression of attitude. Waiting in a doctor’s waiting room, one could say they’ve been there so long that the doctor should provide beds; a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the situation is provided by the metaphor ‘provide beds’, reflecting emotion, physical restraint and organizational efficiency.

Metaphors are especially powerful when they are used to provide insight into very complex ideas. Last November 30 mariner wrote a post about what reality really looks like. He pondered the different reality seen between a human, a snail and a dog. Each will claim they see what reality really looks like but actually, the structure is completely different for each species. Without the use of broad metaphors, an article on the same phenomenon was published in an online magazine called Salon referencing an article in Discover Magazine. It ran on for pages.

Mariner habitually converts experiences into metaphors. Be glad, he saves the reader pages of reading which is often replaced by a simple and often entertaining metaphor. Eat your heart out chatGPT.

Ancient Mariner

Good AI perspective

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Virtually every commentary about AI approaches the topic at a too low perspective: the impact on jobs, privacy, energy vulnerability, etc. In fact, AI is a global issue that will change global politics, global trade and a new era of feeding the world. Below is an expert’s insights as to how AI will change the world – worth reading. From AXIOS:

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-167e2440-d545-11ef-86f8-718f1121da12.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Ancient Mariner

Our career molds our empathy

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Readers know mariner’s distaste for the invasion of privacy by new technologies embedded in our vehicles, budgets, social life and that of our children as well. Perhaps his unusual resistance can be traced back to his career.

He has had dozens of jobs from paper boy and soda jerk to preacher, parole officer and computer system consultant. The longest career was as a freelance consultant hired by corporations to install computer upgrades – thirty years. He never was wanting for the next contract because he ran a stable project that met its goals. One would think that such a consultant would have to be a computer expert and indeed he had a major in computer science but not one in computer engineering.

In fact, what made mariner successful in project management was his previous experience as a preacher and a parole officer. Mariner did have an associate or two who were computer engineers and coding specialists which made it possible for him to manage the difficult part of the project: people. He had learned a technique that creates team ownership. Each project worker was assigned to an eight to ten member group; each member owned a segment that was an integrated segment such that the other workers had a role in the worker’s success. Mariner was always present at these group meetings playing the role of coach and at times, decision maker but never taking away segment ownership. In the end, the group managed itself.

But the transition in the corporate power structure caused by a new computer system was often tragic. Employees who had worked there for many years were told they would be laid off; workers were transferred to lesser jobs and hopeful careers were interrupted. coders and technicians who were unfamiliar with the new technology were pushed into dead end corners of operations. In larger corporations, there were fierce political battles between vice presidents and key managers because their political power, created by the amount of data they controlled, was no longer needed. Everyone will own all the data.

Did the reader catch the phrase ‘everyone will own all the data’? Were the upgrades in mariner’s projects ancestors to Google, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok? The major reason for mariner’s projects was to move from a network where the workstation computer created data that was uploaded every night to data storage devices where it could be integrated with other workstation data; the core work data remained in the workstation to be managed by a network of employees. Hence, a supervisor, manager or vice president was important because they managed (owned) the data in their unit’s workstations.

The effect of his projects forced a reorganization of the corporate workforce without, he suggests, any grace or feelings about a large segment of displaced workers and managers. In his projects, the workstation became a data entry terminal little more complex than an ATM.

Now, long out of his career, he understands the subtleties of data ownership and how it creates, metaphorically, a democratic operation. Today, one’s private computer – much more personal and life-important, is being taken away to live in the clouds of the AI corporate data banks. Now everyone owns all the data – including the reader’s data. The reader’s computer is just a data entry terminal.

Democracy will have a hard time existing in an AI world.

Ancient Mariner