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My ‘do nothing’ pet
I loved gardening as a kid, but I have a bad back and I don’t know how to grow anything around here.
The soil might as well be on the moon and the weather is crazy. But I do know how to compost.
I learned it from Dad, although he was much better at it. He would have those compost piles smokin’. I’m in the city, but some country boy ways never leave. You don’t put that stuff down the sink, you put it in the ground.
Now it occurs to me I’ve created a pet. A shaggy, too-dirty-to-come-inside pet. When it’s healthy it smells the forest floor. When it isn’t, it smells like the garbage disposal. I feed it the food it needs and it starts smelling happy again.
It stays in the back yard and doesn’t do much of anything. Except it does. Slowly.
It’s like a really boring dog that Nigel doesn’t hate. A dog made out of lawn clippings and kitchen scraps.
It’s not a demanding pet, and it’s easier to keep alive than a jar of sea monkeys. Or the toads like the ones I used to keep in a terrarium once. (Poor toads. You deserved better.)
Whenever I can I feed and water it. Nigel pees on it.
It shows its gratitude by getting smaller.
It may not be as exciting as a dog or cat, or the rare sea monkeys that actually hatch, but I raised it and I have a responsibility to care for it. (Sorry toads from when I was a kid.)
Digging through YouTube looking for compost songs and most of them were just too ridiculous. So is this, but I can’t resist. Apparently Lorraine Bowen is a minor celebrity in Britain. She’s been on Britain’s Got Talent and other shows. Go through her channel. She is very good at ridiculous!
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People pick the dumbest names
If your last name is Likely, do not name your kid Scam. And please tell your kid to quit calling me. I don’t want any!
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‘My hair is up here’
Using this cuz my wife hates Morrissey and he cares a lot more about hairdos than me. Plus he may be an asshat, but I will never not like the Smiths.
So my wife walked into the kitchen totally naked and said, “I want you to say something nice about my hair.”
She got her hair done this afternoon and I forgot. I always forget to notice until she points it out.
“It’s great,” I said. “It’s you.”
She said “My eyes are up here.”
I said, “Yes, they did a great job on your hair.”
The compliment didn’t count because I wasn’t focused.
I said, “Your hair was not going to be the first thing I noticed when you came into the kitchen naked.”
Which she admitted. It’s like when she took a picture she took of our cat (RIP Neko), who was sitting on the bed – barely hiding my junk while my bloated ass did the French Girl pose.
She said “I just wanted to tell you I got my hair done since you didn’t notice.” I said “You might have found a better time to tell me that.”
Since I don’t care much about hairdos or clothes, I reckon she has to be blunt if she wants me to notice, but naked in the kitchen was probably overkill.
The cat is NOT the first thing you see when you look at that screen!
#Hair, #Marriage, #Relationships
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What is driving us humans toward AI?
Giant Robot statue from Meow Wolf art exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico
With ChatGPT and AI art already threatening people’s livelihoods, I wonder if “the Singularity” might be closer than we think.
Discussing Frank Herbert’s Destination Void got me thinking about the implications of Artificial Intelligence.
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.
#Computers, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #Robots, #PornoForPirates, #LegendaryPinkDots
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Songs about one of my favorite topics: aliens
Score! Just found my Alien mp3 playlist on a long lost CDR that I thought we lost in the move. Let me share a few of the fun/beautiful/strange alien songs from that playlist.
I Come from the Sun by the Comsat Angels. Criminally underrated postpunk group I used to make playlists where I would pick a topic and find all the mp3s on that topic. It exposed me to a crazy variety of genres in a short time. So many cool songs I probably wouldn’t have heard otherwise.
Then I’d go on RateYourMusic and nerd out over them with my online friends.
I’m hearing songs right now I probably haven’t played since 2012. Didn’t find any of the other themed playlists.
If they turn up I might share some old favorites I’d forgotten.
Matian Boogie by Brownsville Station, a group primarily known for their hit Smoking in the Boys Room. I heard this a lot on 99.5 FM KISS of San Antonio back in the ’80s. Now that I think of it, that playlist could come in really handy. I think I’ll be bringing up aliens a lot. I’m a lifelong Science Fiction fan. How could I not?
#Aliens, #MP3s, #ComsatAngels, #IComeFromTheSun, #Brownsville Station, #MartianBoogie
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Destination Void: Is that our AI future?
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.
#Science-Fiction, #Sci-Fi, #Frank-Herbert, #Dune, #Destination-Void, #AI, #Artificial-Intelligence
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Got my Unitarian sermon badge
We Would Be One, by the The Chancel Choir of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland
Getting to like these Unitarian Universalists more and more all the time. If you’re a progressive type who got tired of dogma but you miss church, give it a try. I slept in every Sunday for 30-plus years and yet I look forward to church.
I was dealing with one an annoying situation when my wife jokingly proposed a few underhanded ways to get out of the problem.
I said knew she wouldn’t do it because she loves me and she knows I can’t do a sermon if I think my wife is going to Unitarian hell. I know there’s no Unitarian hell, but I was raised Baptist. It’s a reflex.
Gave a speech on non-duality. (They call those sermons around here). Looked at my notes too much, but it went OK.
(Not a preacher BTW. We’re preacher-less right now. It’s either step up or we have to draw straws.)
#Unitarian, #UnitarianUniversalism
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AI and the Inverse Uncanny Valley
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 -
Nevermind, don’t kick my head in
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.
#Math, #Mathematics, #Science, #Computers, #JasonPadgett
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Wealth is a tapeworm
Tom Waits – “Army Ants”
I recently came across an article about a strange parasite that infects ants. I’ve been fascinated by parasites for a long time, even though they terrify me.
https://newatlas.com/science/ant-parasite-anti-aging/
It’s not the one you’re thinking about. I just started watching “The Last of Us” and I’m as freaked out by the Cordyceps zombie fungus as everyone else.
No, this is a tapeworm. Any ant that catches it gets to stay young and live a life of leisure. Bring it on, right? You’d think that until you find out where it leads.
The host lives longer, but the colony slowly dies from overwork. I wonder how that could be applied to society?
It seems obvious now, but I never thought about it till I read that article: wealth is a parasite.
Not the poor like I used to think as a younger ant – and not the wealthy either, but wealth itself.
#Ants, #Parasites, #Temnothorax, #Wealth, #Tom Waits
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