There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Month: December 2024
10DEC2024 – Photo of the Day
The End of the Penny’s Persecution
By a miracle there must have been some honest men on Penny’s jury.
Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09DEC2024 – Machine Efficiency vs Human Boredom
Valid points. However, social credit is not working for the Chinese very well. Imagine a time when you cannot start your car because you offended someone on social media. When AI doesn’t like your choice in blogs, music and political speech. There are oh, so many ways to silently pressure you to conform. Cranky internet speeds, debit card refusals even though you know you have money in the bank. AI will make a wonderful servant, but an awful master.
Yes, people need work, something to do. I agree that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I can get into trouble if idle too long. I tend to think “what if I do this?”. Like the time I took a 4 bore rifle and changed out the solid slugs for explosive dumdums when the weather had been gray and gloomy for two weeks.
Or the time the blasting boss at a local quarry was on vacation. Then his second came down with something nasty but temporary. That left the rookie in charge of blasting. The owner, whom I know, was worried about this youngster being in charge of that much BOOM, so I said I would “help” him. It was glorious from my prospective and we shifted twice the rock tonnage and kept the quarry on schedule. However, the seismographs at the major university about 50 miles away noticed the sudden change in activity, triangulated it, and the ATF visited. The owner said to please go back to the old method. So we did until the blasting master returned from vacation.
Idle hands.
The problem is finding gainful work for people. Real work. Not the equivalent of counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch sort of thing. That will be the hard part. You remember why Henry Ford had to pay such high wages for the time? Assembly lines bored people to death. They would quit if he didn’t. Repetitive work is boring as hell, as I found out pulling mess duty as a private. A common punishment for minor infractions while on mess duty was to peel enough potatoes to feed 3,000 Marines each meal. Or onions. Made you shape up pretty quick. Now, modern messes buy bags of peeled, chopped onions and potatoes.
Solving the problem of machine efficiency vs human boredom is going to be tough. Machines don’t get bored. Machines don’t get into trouble when idle. Humans can get into all sorts of mischief if left to their own devices too long.
H.O.P.E.
Elon Musk is all over the place. Everywhere you look he’s involved in any number of important and cutting-edge endeavors. And this is in addition to his business ventures. He runs a space company (SpaceX), a satellite communications company (Starlink), an electric car manufacturer (Tesla) and whatever X is.
Most recently Musk has volunteered to assist the nascent Trump administration in taking a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy (the imaginary D.O.G.E. or Department of Government Efficiency). And considering that Musk fired about 80% of the employees of Twitter to make X less unprofitable, it makes sense that he might be supremely qualified to pare back the Washington payroll. And based on the favorable results of Argentina’s experiment with government reduction I wholeheartedly endorse Trump employing Musk, Ramaswami and any other tech bros who want to help us get the national debt under control. Amen.
But if Elon Musk really is a very smart guy who understands how automation and other technology breakthroughs can be integrated into a livable world order then that would be a much more worthwhile contribution to the mess, we’re currently in. As things currently stand the last fifty years of computer advancement have revolutionized the efficiency of the workplace. Programs like a world processor and a spreadsheet have allowed on person to do the work that previously required whole departments. The secretarial pool is a thing of the past. Even the technical departments have been pared way back because a pc on every desk means that a computation department is unneeded. At most you need a couple of IT nerds who troubleshoot network issues. And in the factories, machinists have been replaced by CNC machines. Well, let’s say they’ve been replaced ten to one with a CNC technician. And so on and so forth. Even engineers and scientists have seen the handwriting on the wall. AI will begin to make them redundant too. And supposedly it will replace authors, musicians and other kinds of artists. And finally, AI is supposed to eventually replace software coders too.
If you’re a tech entrepreneur you are probably saying to yourself, “Duh! That’s what’s supposed to happen. That’s efficiency and progress.” And from your point of view, you’re right. Better, cheaper, faster. But if you’re a human being and the parent of human beings you’re saying to yourself, “Then what the hell do we do?”
And that is what the big brain guys should be thinking about. People like Jeff Bezos have been perfecting a way to eliminate ninety percent of the humans who sell us stuff. And then they want to whittle down that last ten percent forever. Instead, what we need is a plan to keep one hundred percent of Americans gainfully and happily employed. If you’re a libertarian you’ll say that competition is a good thing and allowing Amazon to bankrupt every retail seller except Walmart is a good thing that brings down the price of goods and helps everyone.
I disagree. Machines are more efficient and cheaper to use than humans. That’s proven. But we are human beings. If the machines aren’t benefitting us then they are the enemy. And we should fight back against them. In a sense, that’s what this recent election was about. The people who have been made obsolete by automation and globalization and efficiency voted to throw out of office the people who represent the people who make, run and own the machines. They want Donald Trump to turn back the clock and bring back a world where they could work in a factory that made cars or toasters or pencils and make enough money to raise a family.
Well, he can try and he can do a lot of things that will tilt the playing field in favor of those that have been left behind. But in the long run efficiency will triumph. So instead of a Department of Government Efficiency I think Trump and Musk and Ramaswami would be better off inventing a Human Optimization Planning Effort (HOPE). And they could use the existing monopoly laws to force people like Bezos to design their processes and systems to accommodate a new parameter; human happiness. If they don’t, then one day the forgotten men may come visiting the tech lords. And they may be armed with the proverbial pitch forks and torches. And despite what we saw in “Terminator,” my money is on the peasants.
09DEC2024 – Photo of the Day
09DEC2024 – Quote of the Day
He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Apropos of Nothing
Now here’s a mashup of sight and sound that proves nothing about anything. But I felt like linking it here.
LA Times Owner Attempts to Quantify Liberal Bias in His Paper
This is a wonderful development:
“The Los Angeles Times could roll out an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” as soon as January, in the latest shakeup as the paper’s owner tries to reshape the outlet.
LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong announced the upcoming AI feature on Wednesday in an interview with conservative commentator and newly appointed Times editorial board member Scott Jennings on The Mike Gallagher Show, which Jennings was guest-hosting.”
If this is what Trump’s re-election sparks, it’s a long awaited reaction. This would drive the “journalists” on the LA Times insane. Imagine if Californians actually started to get both sides of the story. Unheard of!
This guy Soon-Shiong sounds like he wants to get rid of most of his employees. Kudos to him.
That’s Entertainment
Over the course of three thousand years of western civilization, storytelling has transformed from an oral tradition of poet/rhapsodes reciting mythological epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey at religious festivals to information age books read on an electronic page or listened to from an audio-file. I find it interesting that the Greek epic poems are approximately the same length as a typical modern novel, something between one and two hundred thousand words. Reciting the whole poem at a festival would take up week’s-worth of listening. That’s comparable to the time it takes to read a book.
Now for shorter subjects, the Greeks had the drama. A play by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides was just an hour or two of the viewer’s time. Pretty similar to a Shakespearean play and interestingly enough, the amount of time that a motion picture usually takes to watch.
Does this mean that human beings inherently absorb story telling in these lengths of time? I can’t prove that assertion but you know, a three-hour movie starts to get to be a bit much for one viewing. And a four-hundred-page book better be damn interesting or it also begins to wear out its welcome.
So maybe our entertainment has been standardized to suit our mental, emotional and physiological parameters. Humans have a limited attention span. We also tire after a certain amount of time sitting or standing watching something. Also, hunger, thirst and the realities of hydraulic pressure eventually force us to interrupt even the most fascinating entertainment. To ameliorate these considerations, movie theaters are equipped with a snack bar and restrooms. But dramatic interest will begin to flag by the third hour.
So, I’d say we’re programmed for these lengths of entertainment products. Whether it’s Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or The Lord of the Rings at some point you either come up for air or you fall asleep. And similarly with a book. There have to be chapters or groups of chapters that allow for the reader to put the book down and come back to it later. It needs a punctuated progression. The action must go through a series of starts and stops. It needs a rhythm to the action, a flow. And if the rhythm isn’t right, the story doesn’t work because the reader is jarred out of the spell of the story.
You may be wondering what this post is about. It’s a transcription of an internal dialog I’m having with myself. I’ve been rereading my story and some sections seem choppy to me. Some of the transitions from one chapter to another just don’t flow. So, to make myself feel better I’m imagining Homer sitting in his office in downtown Mycenae and wrestling with the transition between the story of the cyclops Polyphemus and the Island of Aiolos. He’s plucking the strings of his lyre and thinking, “This Aiolos story is really boring compared to all the excitement of the cyclops. It needs something to punch it up a little. Maybe I can include some more man-eating giants again. No, wait, that’s stupid. There can’t be man-eating giants on every island. That’s just lazy.” I totally feel for him. The epic poetry-listening public is easily jaded. They demand good writing (or singing). Ah, the vicissitudes of the epic Muse Calliope. Like all females, she is fickle. Well back to the grindstone.