One year ago today: January 29, 2017, my first Lambert tune.
Five years ago today: January 29, 2013, was I rambling?
Nine years ago today: January 29, 2009, stay away from Rio?
Random years ago today: January 29, 2008, nobody knew what ‘bridged’ meant.
If you start getting sporadic or abbreviated blogs in the near future, it’s the new band displacing my time. My $267 per month budget for entertainment in 2017 may seem like peanuts to all the big spenders, but I prefer to make money when I go out. It’s an activity, that when I do it, consistently gives me the upper hand around big spenders. This morning, after squirting that feral cat with vinegar again (he’s a slow learner), I got reading an MSN list of the twenty most hated companies in America. Hmmm, six of them were listed in this blog years ago as bad guys. That’s Phoenix University, Monsanto, United Airlines, Comcast, Facebook, and Equifax. I don’t know if I mentioned Phoenix by name, but any school that won’t let you pay as you go is shy of the honesty mark.
Several companies on the list, I never heard of. But I do know a few that are missing. Google, MicroSoft, and Greyhound. The list is suspect because it was salted with at least three companies most people do not hate, namely Uber, The Trump Organization, and Weinstein. These were obviously placed there by liberals as a lame attempt at stigmatization. Or as with Weinstein, to jump on the sexual abuse bandwagon. While some guys might want details of which women tried to sleep their way to the top, trust me, nobody much cares who they slept with. It’s not like nobody knows it’s the women who didn’t get anywhere that are doing the complaining.
Read today’s addendum for your world-class short article on an untouched aspect of artificial intelligence. The part they don’t want you to ponder.
It also says here the average payout for illegal telemarket calls is $40,654 per call. But is that a fine, or does the offended party get it? That would put a stop to the illegal calls faster than any government program, if they let the victim collect such rewards. The answer is to fine the companies who advertise, not the people who do the actual telemarketing. Trust me, until you move to Florida, you have no concept of the sheer numbers of real estate agents who are going to dial your phone number by mistake shortly after 1:30PM. Are you sure your name isn’t Tom? Because Tom wanted to be called at your number whenever there was a hot deal on the market.
And in the ‘something funny is going on’ department, have you ever used Belarc Advisor? This was an excellent little application you could run on a computer to tell you everything from the memory allocations to the keys of the installed software. But not no more. I downloaded it for use on my new tablet, and guess what? Belarc has lost the ability to do what it has always done unless you have a live Internet connection. That sucks and stinks. I have my old versions which work fine, and anonymously.
Long hair.
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Bushnell adultery radio kept me company all afternoon as I worked on the flooring. I’m about half done. God sakes, will everybody shut up about this FBI director? Nobody cares, alright. America would be better off if the whole lot would retire and let things start over again. I think one news report every other day is enough for anybody who’s got a real life, with a special broadcast if anything important actually happens. Like Pearl Harbor, I mean.
Later in the afternoon, I’ve got one joist that is just not cooperating. It is visibly higher than the rest. I cannot proceed until I find the problem or trim it. This had me working till past 8:30PM, under the floodlights. By now, Tarzan was on the trail of people stealing army equipment. The only radio that picks up that station is my old GE. The bad guys had lured Tarzan and the local police chief into a warehouse and planned to jump them. Hey, you can’t jump Tarzan! Thank goodness the station faded off the air before they got that far.
And I’ll tell you what grinds my gears. Every time I buy a box of staple for my staple gun, I misplace them. I have a special leather pouch that I keep my staples guns in and each size has a compartment for the correct size cartridges. And I still manage to lose the box. The last time, I split the box in two, putting one in my electrical pouch so I’d never loose it. Today, both halves are gone missing. They’ll turn up after I make a special trip downtown for the next box.
ADDENDUM
There are increasing numbers of reports and articles on AI, artificial intelligence. Since I’ve already stated that this intelligence already outperforms most human beings, it’s time to specify what I meant. In a nutshell, I’m saying that regardless of their measurable intelligence, most human beings do not continually operate at their maximum level, and this is the real issue. Much as I’d like to, I cannot program microcomputers, play music, and work crossword puzzles all day long. Most of the time people cannot function at optimum mental efficiency very long, and in far too many cases, they avoid or just never do it by choice.
And I’d go on to say that hereditarily, mental laziness is necessary for proper evolution in the species. The historic ratio is 5% leaders, 95% followers. And the capability of those leaders is not a matching set. Basically, you got your leaders of tens, your leaders or hundreds, your leaders of thousands, and so on. Very few supreme leaders actually come along, of which the presidency of the United States since Woodrow Wilson is recent proof. The dangers or blessings of artificial intelligence are plain going to be harsher on humans who function at sub-optimal levels, and that’s what the real hoopla is all about. You see, the IQ also represents a cap on each human’s mental abilities.
The scariest prediction I’ve looked at says within the next twelve months, there should be a cyber attack comprised of at least some AI. Surprise attack always works and it always will. The telling feature of this event will be how ill-adapted humans are to defend against not just higher intelligence, but to even significantly lower intelligence when it consistently and rapidly applied. Say, by a robot. This situation is made the more serious by how society and culture has evolved over recent centuries.
The ratio of winners to losers may well be the slowest evolving of all human traits, possibly due to the way civilization has organized itself. We may have more and better leaders than ever, but the counter-evolutionary pressure of politics ensures they cannot act in favor of what is most intelligent. (If progress is confined to democratic states, as it appears to be, it is impossible to become the leader by any appeal to strictly the smartest voters available.) It doesn’t take much of this before your average human becomes an average entity, an average performer, and an average decision-maker.
The parallels can be observed throughout history. Plant cultivation and animal domestication must have seemed the most intelligent thing ever seen by your average nomad. The primitive machines of the the industrial revolution would have appeared wonderment to the average laborer of the day. And so it will be when even the most basic forms of artificial intelligence bump up against the mass of average thinkers that compose the bulk of humanity. They’ll get walked on.
One question nobody can answer is whether this time humans will recover from the attack. The former advances of our technologies, from taming fire to launching rockets, were all mechanical advances. They possessed no inherent ability to redefine themselves, to attack on their own, or to prevent their own ultimate deterioration. They were hardware. Remote control is a mixture of hardware and software, that is, the human brain. Artificial intelligence dispenses with that. If weaponized, there is nothing to stop it from learning it doesn’t require a human operator.
But I’ll stop here. There have been a number of historically significant people who have suggested the world might not be so bad off if certain groups of undesirables were taken out of the mix. While I could handily name fifty of those groups I definitely do not belong to, what’s to stop the government record keepers from construing otherwise?
Last Laugh
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