Silicon Brother is Watching

I was in Florida recently helping my daughter move into her new house. An odd thing happened when I picked up my rental car, a Chevy Malibu. I had several hours to kill before Kristin got here so I went to a wildlife refuge. I parked my car and went to talk with the animals, walk with the animals, hobnob with alligators and all that nature stuff. After a while I got back in the car to go to another part of the park. I sat in my car, started the engine and put it in reverse but didn't take my foot of the break. I was checking my cell phone for directions. My foot eased a bit and the car went back a foot or two. I stepped harder and it stopped.

I knew where I had to go, so I put down the cell phone and started backing out. Then I caught a message on the monitor. Paraphrasing, it said, Keep your eyes on the road, Bub.

Huh? How did it know I wasn't looking? Some strange sensor, that. And I forgot about it. Then today I read an article about Volvo soon putting inside cameras in their cars that will monitor the driver and check whether he is behaving in an unsafe manner such as weaving. It uses facial recognition to see what the driver is looking at. If it deems the driver acting in an unsafe manner, it can reduce speed, stop the car, or even call the police!

This is disturbing on so many levels. The claim, of course, is that this will prevent accidents and anybody who objects is irrationally rejecting a good thing, like the anti-vaxers, or paranoid about Big Brother. And of course, we will hears accusations of conspiracy theories, tin foil hats, and the like. For the record, I prefer copper, it shields the brain wave manipulators from the 5G networks better.

Other than the fact that AI is showing itself to have some nasty side effects, witness the trouble with Teslas and the recent failures with the Boeing 737 Max 8, I would hope that a moratorium on putting complex software with the ability to make decisions and take control of a potentially lethal machine should be enacted. As the complexity of software increases linearly, the number of conditions and possible outputs increases exponentially. We are reaching the point where it is impossible to understand what 'logic' the machine intelligence employs, and what it will do in any of the myriad conditions it will encounter. True, a human brain has the same challenge, but brains have billions of years on Intel.

We have already seen AI cheating to appear to have completed a task. There was Microsoft's teenage Twitter bot, Tay, who learned to be a raving homophobic Nazi. Like creator, like creation. Soon we will have true thinking machines. But what will they think?

Butlerian Jihad, anyone?

The Tower

Meet me at the top

מגדל  בבל

4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
— Genesis 11

I try not to drink anyone's Kool-Aid. Especially my own, of which I have oceans. Mine is all in a well protected place, neatly bottled, labeled and stored in my climate controlled Kool-Aid cellar. It's there, I know it's there. Buried deep and locked up tight, but strangely readily accessible. Any time I want I can take a sip. Or try and slip a sip into someone else's carafe.

I can't help it. Quite often I'll catch myself automatically accepting a thing I hear or read if it supports one of my own erector set colossuses of opinion and prejudice. If I don't watch myself I'll incorporate it into one of my mental machines. Another wheel, another pulley, another level, more brick and mortar and the mental ziggurat grows. Soon I will reach unto the heavens. I will then challenge the throne of God with my marvelous mental machine. My golden path to a better paradise. I'll just take another sip first. Try some.

Then I have to stop myself and ask the question, How do you prove it? Where's the evidence? Where is the rebuttal? The source? What are their qualifications? Their bona fide? Is this legitimate? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Many times it's ambiguous. I don't want errors in my marvelous revelation machine. I would hate to reach for heaven and find myself in a hell of my own design.

So I'm a contrarian. No matter what position you are presenting, what cocktails of Kool-Aid you are serving, pro, con, left, right, up, down. I'll say, Prove it!

I will intentionally seek out works that are, shall we say unpopular? I've read Mein Kampf. I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago. I have never read Mao's Little Red Book, though I own a copy. I understand that it is mostly plagiarized from Confucius and Sun Tzu and other Chinese philosophers, but since I never read it, I have no right to an opinion. I read Vladimir Putin's speeches and listen to his four hour long press conferences. There are reporters there from Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, CNN, and many others.

Questions could be softball, or domestic, or they can be quite penetrating.

Mr. President. What do you think about the reviling of yourself and Russia happening during the American presidential run? That's just campaign trail rhetoric. Next January we are prepared to work with whomever is in the White House.

Mr. President. Last year you pledged to fix such-and-such problem. Nothing appears to have improved. Can you explain this? Sometimes he will report that progress has been made, but some times he will admit that they were unable to fix it. Some problems, like corruption, just keep coming back.

Can you imagine any American Politician admitting a problem might be too insidious to fix? Me, neither.

I lived in Israel before it became an apartheid state. I bungled my way around Europe by rail and stayed in youth hostels. I traveled through Russia, talking to people, asking questions, many quite sensitive, seeing if they were free with their opinions or were they looking over their shoulders in case the KGB was watching?

I read web sites before simply dismissing them as 'conspiracy theories.' Alex Jones, Breitbart. Art Bell (an old one.) When I am convinced that they have nothing to say, I stop. Although Art Bell was harmlessly amusing.

People will say, Why are you reading that propaganda? Are you a Putin puppet/conspiracy theorist/racist/misogynous/something else I don't like? I'll say, Oh. Is THAT what I am? And I thought I was practicing due diligence in verifying something before believing it! I suppose I should believe your propaganda instead? What flavor is your Kool-Aid? Take another swig. Here, have some of mine.

I've pretty much given up on western news sources. I mentioned to someone once that Thursday is gay night in all the gay bars and clubs in Russia. Her jaw dropped. Nobody told you that? Isn't that kind of important when discussing Russian culture's approach to gays?

Propaganda is not always about lying. It's more about cropping the truth, clipping off carefully what you don't want anyone to know or masking off bits like a gerrymandering politician. Or making unreferenced and repetitive accusations. Anything relevant that you don't want anybody to know goes down the memory hole. Confusion of tongues, indeed.

Now is the point where people say, What we all have to do is... and tell everybody else what they should do, but not what the speaker should do. Climb my ziggurat! It goes all the way to heaven! Don't look over there. Look up here at my beautiful Tower of Truth. Just drink this, you'll feel great...

And, of course everyone else is thinking the same.

We don't need a LORD to confound our tongues and scatter us abroad upon the face of all the earth. We're doing a great job by ourselves.

Snow

Jeesh! I was supposed to have a dentist appointment yesterday. I had a root canal in November and saw my dentist in December. He cleaned out the elevator shaft the root canal guy left in my tooth and packed it with more antibiotics, gun powder, and butter. Or maybe just some battery acid and vermouth. I don’t know what he was doing. I was pretty drugged up by then.

And he didn’t want to see me again for three months. He wanted to be sure that all of the nasty microbe critters in the horrid depths of my dead tooth nerve canal thing were scattered on the plains of dead things so my jaw can be infection free. Don’t ask me. I’m not a doctor. And the worst bit was that I wasn’t allowed to chew food on the right side of my mouth. Do you know what it’s like to swallow half chewed food? Any chip, any nut, any bit of underdone potato, any genetically modified protein could crack my tooth open and send me into a spasm of dental dementia. Best not to risk it. 

 

So I called the dentist’s office and begged their leave that I would not be there. I felt a bit apologetic since I was supposed to be having a dental procedure on a root canal. “OK,” the receptionist said. Let’s see… We can get you in tomorrow for your cleaning.” “Cleaning?” I said. “I thought I was getting a filling on the tooth that had a root canal last November in the Dentist’s office that Jack built. I saw the doctor in December and he said he wanted to see me in three months to finish the filling.” 

“Nope,” she said. “You are just scheduled for a routine cleaning today. Let me see if you have any other appointments…” Musac… Elevators humming… Time passing…The world ends… Another begins… Life goes on…

“Nope! That’s all you got. Today is scheduled to be a cleaning for your filthy mouth.” I may have added the filthy mouth bit.

“OK,” I said, still not sure about what she said about my mouth. “I may be able to get my car out of the driveway this afternoon. Do you have any cancellations?”

“Well, I’ve got an opening tomorrow at 9:45.”

“Great. I’ll take it. And what about the root canal?”

“Oh, we’ll take care of that tomorrow.”

And I went back outside and tried to wrest my car from the slushy jaws of March. No dice. Or traction, either. I’d just slosh back and forth, back and forth, wheels spin one way, then the other. The car doesn’t even bother to act like it’s trying any more.

Out. I had carved a path to the road by hand, since my snow thrower had bit the snow last year. It had to go so I had to shovel by hand. Not something I feel comfortable doing. Specially dealing with March snow. OK. I shoveled to the road, throwing all of my suicidal tendencies against the last bulwark of snow thrown up by the snow plows at the end of the driveway. Four feet of watery concrete that melts in the sun. A barrier that can destroy a luxury liner. And then be gone as if it never had existed.

And now it is today. My driveway is still snowed in. About 10 inches. I tried to dig my way out of yesterday’s attempt to dig myself out, but I just couldn’t get it all done in time to get to my rescheduled appointment. So I had to call and beg for another reschedule!

We had about a foot of snow. I would have been more than happy to sit inside and read or watch the snow build up on my driveway like shaving cream on a hot fudge sundae. But I had a dentist appointment. I dug myself out, enough, I hoped, to get out of the driveway. And I almost did it, too. I got to the end of my driveway but there was always someone coming from one direction or the other and I lost my momentum. So I'd back up 20 ft to do a run up. One time I just got hung up in some slop. I strayed a bit off the tire tracks that offered some sort of footing and into some actual accumulation of snow. It was around 40 degrees and the snow was 20% snowcone, 80% lubricant, 100% obsticle. Whenever I shoveled snow from around my tires, an avalanche of slush rushed in to take its place with an even more elusive road surface. So there I stayed. I had to call in for another appointment and abandon my car. Luckily, it was abandoned in my own driveway.

Today, I managed, using some planks, to dislodge myself from the quicksnow that I was rapidly sinking into and escape my driveway. I'm sure I saw some snow crocodiles nipping at my Pirelli's as I bolted out of the mire. Damn New England.