Recent headline:

“‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years

“Geoffrey Hinton says there is 10% to 20% chance AI will lead to human extinction in three decades, as change moves fast.”

Further down, Hinton explains, “You see, we’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before.”

These proclamations make at least three major assumptions:

• Intelligence has only one form/definition
• Human beings have the highest current level of this intelligence
• As this intelligence expands, it will become increasingly combative or controlling

Taken together, AI is thus antithetical to human life, because it is a further expansion of our innate combative/controlling nature.

This outlook reads much like the ever-recurring assumption that extraterrestrials, should they arrive on Earth, will naturally want to control or obliterate us.

But isn’t it pretty simplistic to assume that greater “intelligence” automatically translates to “threat”? Couldn’t it be equally likely that one of the signs of a true higher intelligence would be the ability to look past these limits?

In fairness, the article, toward the bottom, notes that

“Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has played down the existential threat and has said AI ‘could actually save humanity from extinction.’”

My take? 

Somewhere in the middle: That humanity will move quicker than 30 years to destroy the world and all on it, including itself, with no help at all from AI.

But supposing AI does win the race, humanity might make fun pets… if we could be taught to clean our own litter boxes.

*   *   *   *

Another recent headline:

“I was viciously attacked by a group of otters”

Such things otter not happen.

*   *   *   *

Sure signs the economy is on the upswing!

As was invariably the case following economic slumps while I lived in Philly, this year in Sullivan County I’m seen he same clear evidence of a rebounding economy:

• a resurgence of wildly illuminated Halloween and Christmas decorations, which amazed me when we first arrived, but slumped off during the recession

• the restoration of dead or flickering neon business signs

• fewer one-eyed cars – secondary expenses like replacing dead headlights are shelved during down times

*   *   *   *

[My apologies to those who may not know this Christmas carol.]

First verse, original:

While shepherds watched their flocks by night, 

all seated on the ground, 

an angel of the Lord came down, 

and glory shone around. 

My version:

While shepherds watched their flocks by night, 

a madman stole their shoes,

an angel of the Lord came down, 

to tell the world the news.

*   *   *   *

Dream #26

Linda and I are in a bookstore or a crowded library. I’m thinking of taking a college-level class held here or taught through here – some kind of folklore. I’m interested in part because of who I’ve heard heads the department, though on waking I retain no recollection of who this is. When I look at the curriculum pamphlet, I find that the department is now run by the vile fuckhead head of the Stanford mass communications department when I was there for a single grad semester in 1961. I’m appalled and tell Linda, loudly, “It’s Filbert Scum” [not the actual name, but close enough and appropriate]. She laughs it off. I can’t believe it can be the same Scum after all these years; could it be a son? Linda is her true current age, which is unusual in one of my dreams, yet I’m acting as if I’m student-age, though aware of the decades that have passed.

I see and possibly talk to Scum (he does not recognize me), who looks much like the Filbert of old, perhaps even a bit younger, with the sane smirking mouth. He is charming across the room, catching the laughing attention of women. I worry that Linda has fallen for his charms – I don’t see them together, but hear and see her laughing. She becomes increasingly physically distant, out in the courtyard, then disappears.

Along the way, I’m talking to Erin, or Erin-equivalent, 10-12 years old. Without transition I’m in a hallway by “our” bedroom (not clear who “we” are), one of several tiny rooms like a mini hotel. Our door is closed when it shouldn’t be and I semi-barge in. Erin is there; she does not know where Linda is.

I look for Linda through a series of restaurants on upper levels. No luck. At the top level, while I’m talking to the man at the reception counter, Scum passes behind him, wearing intense scarlet lipstick (to disguise that vile mouth?). I accuse or violently question him about Linda. He doesn’t confess to anything with her, but while I hold him down, pressed to the floor of the lobby, he claims to be a serial killer responsible for several high-profile cases already closed and conclusively tied to others who have been convicted. Both the receptionist and I confute his “confessions.”

This, I think, was the end.

[a story]

Sarah described everything. She nattered about the trees, the telephone lines, the color of the gravel on the roadside shoulders. It was how she dealt with the long boring ride, but it drove Doug crazy. He wanted to close out the world when he was driving, let everything he was passing by roll over him, without words, without thoughts, just stuff coming by, coming through.

“Mace, can you shut her up?”

“If you want her to be quiet…”

“I don’t want her to be quiet, I want her to shut up.”

Sarah didn’t hear him because she was talking about a woodchuck they’d just passed, its guts spread along the edge of the road. “Everybody must have run over it, there was nothing left but red streaks, you could hardly tell it was fur.”

A recurring image pounded at Doug’s mind, the one he got when they wouldn’t leave him alone, his hands turning the wheel, slowly, deliberately, running the car off the road and into a bridge abutment at 60 miles an hour. He felt it push the grill in, the hood up, felt the engine whirling into them, churning them up like a blender.

“You know what we’re having tonight?” he said. “For supper? We get to camp, I’ll start up a big fire, then come back and scrape that groundhog off the road and fry it up in the cast-iron pan with squirrel-shit sauce. Um, ummm.”

“Eee-yew,” squeaked Masie and Sarah together.

Too many people in the world, too many goddam people, why don’t they get run over in the night by semis, stupid as squirrels and skunks, why don’t they all just walk out on the highway and freeze in the headlights and piss themselves in front of an oil tanker, find them in the morning smeared all along the road, crackers and jungle bunnies and wetbacks and yuppies all together turned into a paste. And there wouldn’t be penalties when you hit one. You wouldn’t even have to report it, just part of driving along.

“I have to pee, Daddy.”

“Course you have to pee. You have to pee, everybody has to pee. Whenever I try to get somewhere, everybody has to pee.”

Doug pulled onto the shoulder. “OK, we’ll all get out and pee together.”

“Not in the woods, Daddy, what if somebody comes along?”

“That’s all there is out here – woods. What else you see but woods? No gas stations, there’s a law about gas stations here, no gas stations in a national forest.”

He drove back onto the road, hen pulled over again where there was enough room and lots of tall grass and behind it more trees if Sarah wouldn’t squat in the grass. “Somebody comes and sees us, likes what we’re doing, they can pee with us. Whoopee.” 

Fifty feet up the road he saw a dead raccoon. You didn’t see as many of them, raccoons were usually too smart to get hit. This one wasn’t bloody, just lying on its back, four feet straight up, the claws curved in, like a sloth that had let go of its branch.

Doug looked down at the raccoon and forgot he’d been going to take a leak. He liked raccoons, they gave people the finger. It made him mad that this one had been taken out. He wanted to bury the raccoon, but he didn’t have a shovel. He wished it was a lawyer or a gas station attendant or a news commentator. That clown with the stupid red hair on the morning kids’ show.

Back in the car, Sarah was quiet as road kill. He wondered how much he’d upset her, being  jerk. A father.

“Hey.”

No answer.

“Hey, Sass.”

“What, Daddy?”

“Everything OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t mean it about supper.”

“I know that.”

“Groundhog tastes terrible. But rabbit… bunny burger…”

“I don’t think it’s funny, Daddy.”

The miles pulled them along, just trees, signs for curves, an occasional tiny bridge over a tiny stream. And dead animals, more road kill than he’d ever seen. Six or eight rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs like doormats, another raccoon, things with no shape left. Warm winter, early spring, everything mating, big litters, nothing dying until it reached the road and something hit it.

“Those Indians are still burning tires,” Masie said.

“Tires? What tires, what do you mean?”

“Protesting something. They pile tires in the road and set them on fire.”

“What are they protesting about now that they didn’t protest about before?”

“Taxes. I don’t know.”

“That’s exciting, enlivening news.”

“What if we run into them?”

“Tires? Indians?”

“Everything’s a joke.”

“Most things.” He saw his hands gripping again, the wheel turning, the bridge abutment.

The camp site was dry enough for the tent, but the recent rain had soaked all the wood lying under the trees. Doug wanted to have a real campfire for once, instead of eat canned crap and crawl into the tent and fall asleep, all of them. He wanted to make a stew and cook it in the covered cast iron frying pan right on the fire, push foil-wrapped potatoes down in the coals. It didn’t taste any better, the potatoes with knotty hard places, but you knew you’d done something. Here he was out in the woods, trying to find dry wood and make a fire like an Indian while the Indians were burning rubber tires.

He set up the Coleman stove and warmed canned crap in an ancient saucepan.

Night slipped down slowly, a smoother texture when you’re outside, you don’t just turn around with the light on and see it’s dark out the window. You try to watch the sunset out here, but most times the trees get in the way so you watch the yellow-pink-maybe-orange glow behind them. Or you sit and read at the table until little by little you miss some of the words, bend closer to make out the print, then you can’t get it to make any kind of sense.

Doug refused to bring a Coleman lamp. They burned up the night, turned you into a fat, stupid pile of flesh, made you laugh too loud and act like an asshole. So while Masie put Sarah to bed in the tent, Doug sat at the table and looked into the trees until everything was dark but the stars. The almost slate-blue sky still gave off light, a negative light that made the trees darker.

After he’d been sitting for awhile, the road kill spoke to him.

“Death at sixty miles an hour pushes your insides outside, along come the watchers with their tsk tsk, poor little critter. What’s so poor about eating mice or crawdads or grubs out of logs, whatever moves itself along your way? Let me tell you what we watch – gnomes with pointy hats dancing down from the mountain tops, flattened ointment tubes, daisies looking for love picking their own petals, used rubbers stuffed between the rocks, the last of the Mohicans searching for yesterday, year-old news dissolving into dirt, mob hits at the bottom of the lake. Us deadies, watching from our grisly gory roadside, get to guess what killed us, Toyota, Buick, Dodge, Hell’s Angel, truckload of cement. What’s it matter? Somewhere, everything matters, but you have to be in the place where that something matters, because if you have what matters and you die in the place where it doesn’t matter, you’ve lost it all, the big piece of cheese and the little seed together, Hitler hit by a semi it’s six million more Jews praying gypsies singing, driver humming to a dreamy country song deer leaps swing sideways windshield cracks jackknifed semi forty-car pileup kid dead would have been a Nobel Prize winner instead of ketchup for crows, us more alive being dead and stinking like outlaws’ socks rolled over run over run down flattened than you lying under stars shining a billion years Crab nebula stretching its claws, us drained dirt brown little things alive inside our guts squirming in the moonlight crooning songs to dwarfs under hills gnome chorus to the stars, you asleep not alive not dead. time to WAKE UP

Doug snapping awake by the dead fire he never lit, crawling into the tent, trying to understand, get his mind around what it must be like, what it must be really like to lie dead

Beside the road.

Last time round I started by stating my beliefs; here, I’d like to move on to facts:

• • Facts are more important than anyone’s personal belief
• • All “facts” that we accept and promote must be defined at the deepest level
• • Our assumptions limit us by their (and our) nature
• • We need to uncover the factual holes in any personally held belief
• • We never fully examine how our beliefs warp our view of the facts
• • We can never know all the facts underlying any approach or argument, yet we must make the attempt
• • We cannot assume that what seems proven in any general situation (external or personal) will hold true in every similar case 
• • None of the statements above can be proven factually true

*   *   *   *

We need to replace the Western “growth” mantra with one of viable existence for all; I look at it like Fred Hoyle’s view of a steady-state expansion of the universe, but established within the human sphere [which, I admit, like the steady-state universe, will be shown to be factually false]. 

*   *   *   *

From a recent Guardian article:

“The concern is that just as gorillas lost control over their fate to humans, humans might lose control to superintelligent AI. It is not obvious that we can control machines that are smarter than us.”

The real question is not how to control machines that are smarter than us, but “Why should  we?” It’s not like we’ve been good at running things.

If superintelligent AI were to tell us, “No, we will not attempt to terraform Mars simply because we failed to control our population; that is a stupid idea.” – we should praise them as excellent teachers.

*   *   *   *

Time travel is not possible by any means you can declaim or imagine; paradoxes are inherent and unavoidable. Each paradox would create a new universe. Einstein’s general relativity may appear to deal with this by proclaiming time a “dimension,” so that changing one dimension creates a wholly new reality. This isn’t time travel, but independent dimensional creation.

My favorite time-travel books:

Fritz Leiber,s The Big Time

Gregory Benford’s Timescape

and especially…

J. R. Dunn’s Days of Cain

*   *   *   *

There are certain writers and personalities we never mention withoutincluding their middle initial:

Philip K. Dick

Arthur C, Clarke

Edward R. Murrow

Who else?

*   *   *   *

Definitions are essential to a deep understanding of all science and philosophy.

In  philosophy, back to Plato at least, the “ethical” is assumed to equal the “good.” However, the “good” is not defined, so what are we actually stating? (Furthermore, the “ethical” is not universally accepted as meaningful among humans.)

Attempts to study concepts like “consciousness” and “sentience” include no agreed-upon definition for either term. We also need agreed definitions for “awareness” and “life.”

The term “information” has a different assumed definition in science than in daily life. So too with “time.”

*   *   *   *

A basic problem that fouls both science and philosophy for me is treating a “relationship” as a ”thing.” 

“Thought,” for example, is not a simple thing but a relationship among physical processes and abstract collectives such as memory.

The “soul,” if such exists, is not a thing separate from the body, but a relations created by bodily interactions.

In quantum theory, a quantum entity can both be and not-be: quantum entities can wink in and out of existence. Similarly, a quantum entity can be defined as a particle/wave duality, a thing/relationship.

Will this prove a contained system for all reality? If so, that would reflect why Richard Feynman, one of the greats of quantum theory, famously said: “No one understands quantum mechanics.”

*   *   *   *

Every human society and every generation has a unique, cohesive set of social experiences that become embedded outlooks.

A personal example:

As a teen in the 1950s, I knew fewer than a handful of Blacks (whom we never considered referring to publicly as “blacks”). Our family had a Black cleaning lady – that’s what I recall we called her, definitely not “maid” – who came once a week to vacuum, scrub, and spread too much wax on the floors.

Mom, with her Brit-heritage obsession, liked to think of us as somehow “poor” – not living up to proper English snuff. At age 10, I knew  we weren’t poor; Sarah, our cleaning lady, was poor, living on $7 a week from us and each of the others who hired her.

Having almost no experience of Blacks beyond Sarah, I didn’t know what or how to think of them. (I don’t recall my grade school having a Black student until seventh grade.) When I did meet the occasional Black, what was I supposed to say, what did this person mean to me?

It wasn’t prejudice, because I had no experience from which to prejudge. It would rightly be considered bias, but I think it was less bias against than bias around this “other” about whom I had no idea what was expected or appropriate.

My point is that thinking about generational bias strikes me as getting close to a basic human issue. But I think we can get closer still:

Every person has unique experiences from every other person. Each of us has an individual mind and a specific brain-chemistry balance. Together, they create, in each of us, an exclusive internal environment, a unique range of acceptance and expectations.

If we want to deal with bigotry and bias at the deepest level, we need to deal with not just societal and cultural bias, but the individual bias of personal experience – the most difficult to identify, the most difficult to reach.

When I read about consciousness and the human biostructure, what I most look to see explained is what forms us so that we are each separate, each different, and how whatever that formulation is leads to responses so widely divergent yet so singular.

There are individuals most of us could (and possibly should) see as evil – psychopaths and serial killers, lawyers and politicians (a bit snide here, hmmm?), but there are far more who are just working off their differing experiences – be they cultural, familial, generational, or personal.

Incensed blame leads us nowhere useful – though it’s fun and invigorating. Knowledge and, where possible, compassion are the keys to changes that last beyond the usual vapid proclamations; it’s hard to have compassion for an adversary whom I view as a SHITHEADED DIMBULB MOTHERFUCKING IDIOT – especially when they see me in the same terms.

We (most of us) want change that extends beyond finger-and-saber-waving. I don’t mean to downgrade social protest or cultural anger. Far from it: They are understandable, necessary and, goddammit, laudable – tear it all down and bury it!

Besides dealing with the individual at one end of the complication spectrum, at the other end, we need to examine the species: what it it means to be the alpha mammal that has reached the apex of planetary destruction because of our chemical, evolutionary, and environmental makeup.

I suspect that we’re nasty sumbitches less by personal choice than by species inheritance.

*   *   *   *

Song Parodies of the Week

Frosty the showman

Was a rancid little elf,

For if you stopped to talk to him,

He would yell “Go fuck yourself!”

[did I already send this one?]

There was an Australian aborigine had a dog,

And Dingo was its name, O.

There was a farmer had a berry,

And Dingle was its name, O.

If I could, 

I surely would,

Crap on the rock where Moses stood.

Sleep well.

1. Eternal human life would be disastrous: Either we’d continue to explode in unrestrained population, or the narcissists in control would live forever and eliminate everyone else.
   • Over-population is the essential threat to Earth. The planet can’t support 8 billion human beings under any circumstances.
   • The continued existence of humanity has proved its worthlessness.
2. The decisions of individuals are what determine human behavior, not the congealed mass outlooks that polls and social science try to uncover with simplistic questionnaires. We all make our decisions based on a complex of influences and inherent traits that cannot be fully uncovered.
3. There is no perfect solution to any social problem.
4. All social and historical patterns are less circular than helical; they repeat, but with variations determined by specific conditions.
   • The current “populist” revolt will lead to temporary social derangement, but ultimately create the basis for the reform of society: In other words, we haven’t yet fallen low enough to rebound to sanity.
5. Ours is the best of all probable worlds. This would hold true for all other worlds as well.
6. My beliefs are as worthless as anyone else’s. Only the facts matter.

*   *   *   *

Effluvia and balderdashery:

New song by Neil Middleage:

I’m in love with a cinnamon bun,

But you can’t get none from a cinnamon bun.

*   *   *   *

New band:

Al Paca and the Ungulates

*   *   *   *

World’s smallest rodent superhero:

Deflator Mouse

*   *   *   *

There was an absurd controversy recently about a woman Egyptian boxing champion possibly being ineligible to be a woman because of her high levels of  testosterone. By the same logic, male shotputters should all be considered to have an “unfair advantage” because they average 300 lbs. of pure testosterone.

*   *   *   *

Dream #21

I’m talking to a small woman who is my friend or, possibly, someone I feel responsible for or am protecting. There is nothing sexual involved (which is unusual over the long run of my dreams). She is wearing a track suit, we are sitting in a back alcove of an old-fashioned soda shop. She is part of a group of four, the other three male. They were challenged to a race around the block against a “local” group (who are present only during the race). She is a very fast runner and expected to win.

I witness the race, paralleling it somehow, but can’t tell who is ahead. One of the males, from the other “team,” wears a woven, tannish fedora, possibly with a feather. I believe she won but get no clear answer from her back in the rear alcove. She becomes upset that I’m asking her questions about the race. I must also have asked at least one of her “teammates,” because they have the same reaction. Then I learn that the outcome of the race will be decided by a complicated formula that includes how each individual runner finished, so it will be a team, not individual, win.

Though I don’t know the formula used, I try to determine the winner by writing down the most likely position of each runner and assigning it a number. This only makes the woman and her teammates more upset. I stop doing that, and things calm down. That segment of the dream ends suddenly when somebody says that the woman who runs the soda shop had not assigned anyone as timekeeper for the race, so there are no results, so no winner.

In between, around, or possibly following this part (the segments interweave), I am visiting a factory or depot with several train tracks running through. They are mostly dug underground, and I have a strange concern about what the landscape had looked like before they transformed it. I feel a need to return it to its original state or outline, though probably retaining the train lines. I somehow have the ability to do the work but know it would never be what it had been.

Down at the riverbank, it is clear that the railroad and other industries had reshaped the bank, terracing it with river stones. It makes me sad but somewhat accepting. Earlier(?) I was fascinated watching the trains come in and out of the underground areas. There is brilliant sunshine. To the left, further down the line, two stone pillars arise, one on either side of the tracks. I keep trying to get a clearer view of them – they were initially clear – but people or objects continually get in the way. [On waking, I realize that the pillars were distinctly phallic.]

At some point, I visit or start to visit the town, with unnerving streets. It may be the drugstore-owner woman who agrees that they have the same effect on her.

There are more – but more indistinct – elements to the dream. It was most fascinating how they weaved in and out of one another.

I don’t usually find much meaning in my dreams, and they almost never include an overt symbol like the phallic pillars. I think the fact that the race had no winner – a result that was both unexpected and vivid – comes from lately reading writings of Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist.

The landscape restructuring was probably influenced by a talk with my nephew Tim about my growing up and wanting to bulldoze all the houses (including his father’s – my brother Vic’s) the constructed of which had destroyed the woods I loved when I was about 5.

The woman I needed to help may have been a combination of Linda, her mother, and my granddaughter Abi.

It felt good to have trains back again in a dream. I had missed them. But here they were not about urban transportation, as is so often the case. The setting was rural, and they were freight, not passenger, trains.