One year ago today: May 28, 2017, remember Freakenomics?
Five years ago today: May 28, 2013, it was forty.
Nine years ago today: May 28, 2009, phooey on Nokia.
Random years ago today: May 28, 2008, I score $11.
I took the day off.
By 9:00AM I was lost in Davenport, looking for that bookstore. I took the car, but I drove the old motorcycle route and got lost. What can I say? Compared to the Honda, driving a car is like watching B&W video. Finally, I found the Dunkin Donuts from last Xmas, but only after I had covered 48 miles for a destination only 22 miles from where I started. In the course of this, I stopped and asked a lady for directions. There she was, on her way to work, crossing the sidewalk.
It turns out she had lived in this place her whole life and worked across the road. She didn't know. I told her I’d give her a dollar for the name of the town, she slapped herself in the eye and the thigh over that dollar, because she did not know the answer. Later, I found out it was Haines City. The problem was not the road, but situation where because of GPS, the state quit replacing road signs and the mapmakers haven’t been keeping up.
If I had been on the motorcycle, I would not have got lost, since I was on familiar roads. This is a picture of the 2018 Honda Goldwing, priced at $23,800. Coincidentally, that is 14 times more than my car. I was only going out for a while, but wound up all day. Coffee, and reading books I never intended to buy. Yeah, I know that’s cheating a bit, but it is not like I read the whole of every book. For instance, I only wanted the plans for a bluebird house, not the volume of 36 plans which included duck barns.
Once again, I was at one of my favorite Dunkin’s, the one where the Xmas lady took a shine to me. One of the reasons I was out there is the excellent magazine stand. I wanted to see if there was anything printed concerning Artificial Intelligence. Not really. Second to finding life on Mars only, I would like to live long enough to see this emerging field begin to wholesale take jobs away from what they politely call “Tier One” workers. My years at the corporation taught me to disdain the average menial worker who, for all purposes, was an automaton. The brainless majority, blurry eyed television addicts blocking the way. That seems harsh, but it is also accurate.
I find it amusing how just now a few major players are beginning to wake up to the potential of AI. If I use the terms AI and robot interchangeably, that is due to the close association I make with the two. It does not require that much intelligence to perform the average job, plus the hardware and software have already long been on the drawing boards. All that is lacking is the will. Think of it as the key to freeing the masses who have been chained to the industrial revolution.
It’s cute how some want legislation that takes the wages saved by robotic workers to be distributed to the new idle masses. That’s your typical liberal thinking that always backfires. It creates a permanent subclass who expect to be paid for doing nothing. I say let them use the time for what they should have in the first place—learn job skills that require brains and skills. After all, have they not forever been telling us we are all equal sort of thing? Here’s there big chance to prove it.
Gone fishing.
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Which got me over to the music section. That was after I leafed through some home improvement books and found this picture of two gal renovators. Call me old-fashioned, but this is still what I consider good-looking. Skinny white girls in tight jeans. No visible tattoos, natural enough hair color, sense of humor, normal-sized breasts.
So I felt no guilt flipping through some thirty music books and scanning sheet music with my wand. Why? Because there is a similarity between music albums and music books. The manufacturer’s plan is to get you to buy the whole set when you just want a few passages. This is why I quit buying LP records and CDs. Too much filler. If they connive to make me pay for what I don’t want, I’ll protest by not paying for what I do want. To make you feel better, I am not stealing the music to listen to it, but as an easier way to learn thornier passages—and what kind of blackheart would object to anyone willing to learn?
If you must know, the passages I scanned are the jazz improv chords during the instrumental of “Passionate Kisses” and the intro guitar lick to “Boot Scootin’ Boogie”. I did not scan the entire sheets. I could eventually have gotten the material for free anyway, so match that against me paying nearly $60 for the same in these books. I could only academically agree it would be wrong if I further copied and sold the copies, but not if I intend to learn to play the music, after which I usually delete the scans. Don’t need ‘em. This is trivial compared to what copyright people do to squeeze money out of people.
Did you know they want to produce play-once music? You pay for it, hear it, then it self-destructs. You have to pay each time you listen, the concept of the jukebox gone digital. I think that is disgusting, but if it flies, it just makes live music all that more valuable. So don’t think of all piracy as a crime, especially when the bad flows both ways. And some crime is funny. I know these two guys who got drunk in Philadelphia and stole a baby carriage. Then they went to the zoo and used the baby carriage to steal a baby penguin. They put it in their bathtub and in less than three hours the secret service was at their door. Well, I don’t know these guys personally, but they brag about in one of the clubs I play.
ADDENDUM
More on AI. China is poised to take over the field. The USA has lost that contest already. China is just beginning to graduate and entire generation completely trained and groomed for this upcoming technology. Some say by 2030, the blink of an eye. It will not have to be a big breakthrough, more like a few advances that let the expertise gain the slightest upper hand. Then take and run with it. This relates to the learning curve discussed here just days ago. Unlike human brainpower, there is no ceiling to AI. Whoever gains the lead is likely to retain it a long time.
What little research being done in America is by outfits like Google, the last people that should be trusted to do right. The use of computers and electronics to spy on their own people is largely and American invention, which I will label “the invisible dictatorship”. Every capability is turned on people’s freedoms and privacy. All mail is scanned for both addresses, every telephone call is recorded.
Worse, I fear these private companies will do to AI what eventually happened with computer coding. It becomes an incomprehensible wasteland of incompatible systems. The C+ language has devolved into unreadable strings of punctuation, thus preventing better and more capable code from ever getting off the ground. Why? Because C+ and its derivatives are primitive types of approach that anybody can learn, get wrong, and get away with it. Majority rules programming.
To be more exact, the problem is the development of what they call neural networks. True neurals are a way off yet, but I feel it is not the correct approach. They are attempting to duplicate human thought patterns, which they feel is superior despite the fact that in most cases it is not. What they really mean is code that can do things like suspect itself when making a mistake, but I say that ground can be covered by banks of memory. Thus, I would like them to focus on optimizing the code long before they get around to bothering whether it is lucid to the average human. We drive cars without knowing how they run, so why the concern over making networks in a neural format? That can come later.
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