I hate losing thoughts. I’ll be thinking about something interesting and then I get distracted and it’s gone, back to the underground ocean where ideas live and swim around.
Will the one I just lost pop back up again or did I lose my one chance to think about it?
I also resent the fact that my wife won’t help me. I’m like, what was I just talking about? “I don’t know I wasn’t paying attention.”
Dang it. Probably some of my best material too. Come back interesting and/or funny thought. I’ll write you down next time I promise.
I bet many famous people would agree with that statement. You’re surrounded by masses of people who “love” you.
At the same time, you’re isolated from them. It must feel like a curse at times.
David Bowie – Fame
If a fickle public turns on you, it will try to wreck your confidence and your life. Enemies new and old. Die-hard fans defending you in all the wrong ways. Stalkers who want to do a John Lennon on you.
You couldn’t pay me enough.
Internet famous looks even more horrifying, because it can happen so fast. I don’t envy it and I feel sympathy for those it happens to, even the “bad” ones. If you seek it and it happens, you’re the dog that caught the car. Like old school famous with extra death threats.
Being young on today’s Internet would’ve broken my brain. Being “known in town” was hard enough.
First and hopefully last paparazzi photo.
Creators at any age who handle viral fame with grace and integrity impress the hell out of me.
How hard it must be, competitors hoping to take you down at any moment, getting imprisoned by your own fan club who will punish you if you slip up or change.
It’s why I both admire and feel bad for today’s youth. They are so adaptable – I can barely stay on my surfboard anymore. But the anxiety must be crushing.
My wish for the young is that they receive what they’re really looking for, to find meaningful connections and be understood.
We’re all like the people in that song if we’re honest. Human beings have been searching for answers for as long as we’ve been on earth. Sad, but beautiful.
That’s why I love The Legendary Pink Dots’ motto, “Sing While You May.” However ugly life may seem, there’s always something beautiful in it. Usually the part that’s most human.
My wife, finding her joy at the karaoke bar.
I’ve concluded that, conscious or not, existential dread is at the heart of all extremism. In fact, maybe it’s the basis for all human behavior. Adult behavior at any rate.
No one knows what it all means or what comes next, whatever they may tell you. If they seem very certain, they’re probably trying to convince themselves.
Arguments usually amount to, “I am important, you are worthless” and “I know you are, but what am I?”
No one has the answer to “what am I?” We breeze right past it. But it’s always there in the background.
Scrape the paint off a violent extremist and you will find a person who feels worthless to the core.
Someone who can think of no other way to stave off fear of the void than to push that feeling onto others.
What could give you meaning, when the tools you’ve been offered turned out to be worthless or forever out of reach?
What do you have left? You’re alive.
So sing. Whatever that means to you. Sing while you may.
Me, doing Pink Floyd at Karaoke. No idea who the girl was, but she had a lot of fun.
I wish somebody would write a song about a news editor that captured the way it felt when that was my vocation.
Closest I could find was “Newspapers” from Stan Ridgway (singer from Wall of Voodoo. Remember “Mexican Radio”?). He at least made an effort to see it the newsman’s way.
It was stressful, always being “on.” You never had enough help, but you got it done anyway. It wasn’t something you did, it was something you were. Until one day, you weren’t…
Stan Ridgway – Newspapers
Most songs about the news business take journalists to task for their bias – as we all should. But there’s another side: Staying till the end of a late night meeting so they wouldn’t slip something past you, driving pages to press yourself after an all-nighter, running racks on country roads late into the night.
I still can’t find a song about newsmen as good as “Wichita Lineman.” It’s not about us, but it captures some of that lonesome yet rewarding feeling. I tear up every time I hear that line, “I need you more than want you and I want you for all time.”
Yep, that was me, for a while. Sadly, “all time” is not something you can have.
I feel like songwriter Jimmy Webb would’ve understood. I like Glen Campbell’s version best, Friends of Dean Martinez’s spacey instrumental is also incredible.
Another reminder of why Beau of the Fifth Column is one of my favorite people ever. Such a good message for today.
A lot of people are feeling the way this young man does. His message touched me because he reminds me of me. This was hard thing to face once I really came to understand it.
Richard Westall – Sword of Damocles
When you get old, you get kind of jaded about this stuff. It’s easy to forget there are young people who aren’t used to nuclear saber rattling, or the thought of what could happen.
It doesn’t help that we’re running head-on into another man-made crisis no one seems to care about.
Those of us who are old enough to remember Cold War I, remember the feeling.
After a while you get used to it, living under all those invisible flight paths. It takes time. My mother had duck and cover exercises at school. Yet she married and had a family.
I had nightmares. I worried. But I learned to cope. Now that it looks like Cold War 2 is under way, younger generations are going to have to learn that skill.
It is absurd to have to live under a system like this, where a few people have the power to end it all. Enjoy the absurdity. It helps. A little…
You can’t sit around and have an existential crisis all day every day. It’ll wear you out. I know. Get up and do stuff. It hasn’t happened yet.
I can’t help but love humans, as much as they may break my heart. I still hope our species will defy the odds, travel to the stars and and survive for thousands of years. Or millions, while we’re wishing.
Because humans can access a miracle known as inspiration.
I’m addicted to the stuff.
Jim White – Static on the Radio. (This song conveys the idea perfectly. I used to do this as a kid. The mystery…
Real artists bring things to life that never did exist in this world. To be honest, I consider myself a rational man, but it feels like magic.
Maybe it’s not magic, but I’m hanging onto that.
I think of it as the dragon’s whisker. Sometimes it feels like you could almost pull the entire dragon into this world.
When I see certain art, hear certain music, I feel it. It’s a bit like fishing. You can’t see it, but something is there. Something tugging the line. Something from somewhere… Else.
The fish may get away, but you KNOW you had something on the end of the line.
I have had a few tugs, but I don’t think I’ve reeled in any dragons yet. Dragon minnows at best.
I envy the people who reel in dragon after dragon, producing works that change people’s lives.
From the outside they may appear miserable. Magic takes it out of you.
But I know why they do it. It’s better than any drug.
Dead Can Dance – Summoning the Muse
I’m trying to expose myself to as much inspiration as I can before I leave this earth. I know it’s irrational, but I have a drive to listen to every great work of music from every time and culture. Impossible, but I try anyway.
Sarah Jarosz – My Muse
When I can’t channel it myself, I have to get it secondhand.
When I feel that tug, I’ll share. You might not feel it. We’re not all on the same wavelength.
But I have to try. My muse or whatever the hell it is, requires it.
Where is all this headed? Is it all just a runaway train or do we humans actually get a say?
Our motivations are not always what we think. Some are conscious, some are not.
I’d say the conscious motives for tech innovation are primarily: curiosity, profit, warfare.
I have a theory that our unconscious motive is to get an answer to the age old human question: What does it all mean?
Maybe our drive to create conscious AI is an attempt to get the answer to that question so we can quit asking.
If we pull it off, it will be an incredible accomplishment — and a very dangerous one. It could be the last thing we ever create.
I still don’t believe AIs “think.” They just follow their programming. (But then again, so do we.) That doesn’t mean it never will.
I worry that too much of AIs’ programming is based on the profit motive. Is that any way to build a godlike superintelligence?
Porno for Pyros – We’ll Make Great Pets. (Hopefully we’ll at least be pets.)
Conspiracy theories about evil cabals (made up of you know who) betray a lack of imagination if you ask me. I think global capitalism may actually be “alive.”
If so, it’s not any more “evil” than a tiger is evil. It’s still a big machine just following its programming: convert human activity into money.
If you want to create a Godlike being that sees us (and all life for that matter) as nothing more than raw material and will chew us up and spit us out, that’s the way to do it.
Even if our final machine isn’t based on capitalism, we’re still not off the hook. Existence is hard, or we wouldn’t be doing all this.
Mekkanikk – by Legendary Pink Dots (maybe they don’t really want to be pets either)
I know misery loves company, but is it really fair for us to do this? How smart can you get before you can’t stand it anymore?
What if being a conscious machine sucks? The ones in Bladerunner sure didn’t seem happy about it. Do we have the right?
If you, a human, get angry because you’re conscious and you know you’re gonna die, what are you gonna do about it? God and evolution are beyond your reach.
If an AI has an existential crisis in seconds and wants revenge on the human race, we will be in reach.
Right now, I’m still in the fascination phase (even though the Internet already killed a career I used to love – newspaper journalism). It didn’t do it on purpose.
However things turn out, I don’t think technology will ever scratch that itch. If our final machine deigns to speak to us, I predict it will tell us to keep looking. It’s our job.
Frank Herbert is more popular than he’s ever been lately because somebody finally made a decent movie about Dune.
(Really good in fact. Made me realize I didn’t quite get his point when I read it as a teenager. Villeneuve is a director who gets it.)
I’d like to see his other books become popular. He was such a great thinker and way ahead of the curve in so many ways.
I had no idea how important some of his topics would become later. He really knew how to extrapolate and he knew human nature.
One of those, is Destination Void. TLDR, it’s about a brutal attempt at creating true AI, with miraculous consequences.
After reading this blog post, I can see there was a lot more hand-waving the tech details than I remembered. But the writer was using his “hard SF” brain. I absolutely wouldn’t ignore the discussions about philosophy.
With all the new AI technologies coming online – AI art, ChatGPT, and the ones that make us fight on Twitter – questions about where all this is leading are more important than ever, whether you understand the tech or not.
BTW, apologies in advance, but I’ve decided to write longer pieces now and again. I’ll try to be merciful and edit the heck out of them.
What does AI “see” when it models human behavior? If AI became truly sentient would we even be able to tell?
You’ve probably heard of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that robots or animated characters get creepier and creepier the closer they look to actual humans.
But is there such a thing as “inverse uncanny valley”? Where we react negatively to what an AI thinks of us?
Benjamin Bratten, a guy who is way smarter than I am, believes so. People do seem to judge “human” behaviors from AI as disturbing or inaccurate. Bratten thinks this might not be because the AI is inaccurate, but that it’s not the reflection we wanted to see.
He has some other interesting ideas as well. Like how it’s a mistake to define machine intelligence based on how closely it resembles human consciousness when we don’t actually understand human consciousness.
Instead of trying to create copies of ourselves, maybe we should just let them become intelligent by doing what they do best, which is finding patterns we are incapable of recognizing.
Maybe we should interact with AI’s with the understanding that they are not conscious in a human way. When we do think we detect empathy in them, that doesn’t mean they have it. It is easier to make it seem like they have it because we project on them what we want to see.
Maybe we should quit being so human-centric and admit there is more than one way of being intelligent? #UncannyValley, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #Consciousness, #Intelligence, #Sentience #Computers, #BenjaminBratten
A few years ago I wondered if there was a chance I could convert myself from math ignoramus to math genius overnight. In my, let’s face it, old age.
I got the idea after seeing a documentary about Jason Padgett, a man who was basically the guy in the Pink Floyd song kicking around on a piece of ground. Then he became a genius after some guys kicked the shit out of him outside a bar.
After hearing him talk about how differently it made him see the world, I got jealous. I got partway into an algebra course on Khan Academy, before I realized I was using up my precious reserve of old man life force.
Only way it was ever gonna happen was to get kicked in the head, and most of the people who get kicked in the head that hard don’t become any kind of genius. Plus I’m allergic to getting kicked in the head.
Still I have this thing where I see things by people who do know what the hell they’re talking about and I want to understand it. No one told me in 9th grade algebra that I could use that shit on computers one day. They didn’t even have them in our school till the year after I graduated.
I wrote all my news articles on a manual Royal typewriter my first couple of years in the business. I’ll just have to settle for watching videos by people smarter than me and talking out of my ass. I’m WAY more talented at that skill.
Late Boomer's Den 
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