Alien Intelligence

I recently read a newly published book on artificial intelligence. One thing was said early in the book that struck me as important. Children learn languages by shared experiences with their caregivers. So a child learns words and sentences by sharing these with someone who already knows the language. And that means that, once learned, the words and sentences relate to the shared experiences, not just the words themselves. All of the human part of learning a language is created by those shared experiences. And that is something a language model, no matter how many trillions of words it reads, will never replicate. It can never share an experience. It is just studying language for likely responses to prompts, and because of the advanced capabilities of chips and data centers it can go through billions of possible outcomes in almost an instant. But it doesn’t have any idea of what it’s talking about, no real knowledge is behind it. Only possible outcomes, or probable outcomes.

Over the last few decades, technology has managed to put a screen between us for most of the work we do. We don’t drive to job sites to see the work being done. We have the worker send us photos. Or we have drones fly overhead to give us an aerial view. We chat back and forth, or send emails, two dimensional communication instead of the vast influx of information we receive when in person. Now, in addition to a screen between us, they want to add a robot. So now a screen and a robot between each person and any other person. They’re trying very, very hard to convince us that these robots are just like us. ‘Robots are people too!’ They will never be people. They are not capable of having shared experiences. They don’t share anything with anyone, except prioritized responses to queries sifted from vast amounts of text. Humans are so much more than that, which you and I know, but which, sadly, the tech bros have never picked up on. They don’t have all of the human qualities which come into play between people. We think they’re feeling, caring beings because we hear them speak words which, coming from a human would convey those qualities. But there’s no shared experiences to back that up. It’s a mimic, alien to humanity.

So the dream of the tech bros to never have to deal with (stupid) people again is to create substitutes for real humans who can do the work of real people. Every CEO’s fantasy can come true. No more workers to try to make happy, pay a decent wage, or provide incentives for. Alien intelligence can do it all with no opinions, no down time, no family issues and no illness. Just the other day I read an article in which the CEO (a billionaire) said AI works 24/7, it doesn’t take a lunch break and doesn’t require health care. To his way of thinking, it’s the perfect employee.

Let’s not be fooled by all the hype around these programs. In some specific areas they may be able to do the work of humans without the risk of fatal mistakes. Even then it may require oversight. But it would be very limited and not profitable enough to justify the many, many billions being spent on them, unless, unless they replace employees on a mass scale. Is this the goal of big corporations now? Have we entered an era where ordinary people are no longer needed or wanted, where the joy of working together as a team to accomplish goals will be replaced by 24/7 machines? I don’t remember signing up for that. I suspect the vast majority of people don’t remember it either.

Posted on 12/03/202512/03/2025 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

But It’s All Over Now

Great song performed by the Rolling Stones way back when.

Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now. That’s how I feel about the internet. I remember when it first came about. We had AOL. You could get online via a dial-up modem. Most everything was home-grown, it felt like there was plenty of space. Of course there was pornography, my guess is it was one of the first things that got posted outside of educational sites, guys being what they are. I remember my surprise in visiting the Whitehouse website, when I forgot to use. .org. So you could end up in some bad spots but nothing you couldn’t just back out of.

Now I think of it as the failed promise of the internet. Then, it was a collection of small sites that we hoped would open up the world. Within a few years a couple of dominant players arrived and took over. About 2010 I realized, from my own family experience, that starting a delivery service for seniors would be a good idea. Before I knew it, Shipt was advertising in my area, and my dreams of setting up a local service for those who could no longer drive were dashed. Shipt was everywhere, and there was no need to speak to anyone to have things delivered. Just go online (most of the customers wouldn’t use computers but their families would). In this case, instead of humans interacting with each other, it’s humans interacting with machines. And you can repeat that a million times over. Because the simple fact is, it’s easier to work with a machine than it is with a human.

Now everyone who uses social media, and I am one of the very few people I know who don’t, puts details about their lives out on the internet, probably thinking that only a few people have access to it. That is so wrong. Once it’s out there, it can end up literally anywhere. A former law enforcement office told me a few years ago that he stays away from social media. Everything law enforcement used to have to get a warrant for is now available for free on social media. You may have nothing to hide, but the world changes, rapidly these days, and what was innocent last year may be incriminating this year.

But that’s not the worst part of it. The worst part is that social media has become a megaphone for everyone to shout insults at the world. As though this is how civilization is supposed to be. Every time something happens in the world everyone runs to social media and puts their two cent’s worth in. Every event has a commentary immediately, without time for gathering facts, without time for reflection. And the worst, most hateful, most arrogant and unfeeling comments are the ones that go viral. It is poisoning our society. People say things on social media that they would never say to someone face to face. They are shielded by the screen from immediate condemnation, or a slap in the face. But the screen no longer shields anyone for long. I’ve seen numerous accounts of people whose lives were crushed because of social media, and often for things that weren’t even true.

So why not disengage with it? If people would stop using it, the world would not end. They would still have friends. You might have to reach out to them directly, by text or heaven forbid, a real phone call where you can hear emotions in each other’s voice and not have to rely on emojis for kinda sorta what you meant. If the whole social media era ended tomorrow it would be the best hope we have of rebuilding our broken society.

Posted on 09/23/2025 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

Just What the Truth Is,

Heard this old song by the Moody Blues the other day:

“Nights in white satin, never reaching the end. Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send. Beauty I’ve always missed, with these eyes before, just what the truth is, I can’t say anymore…..”

Hard to tell what the truth is these days. Everyone is spouting their version to the universe daily, or sometimes multiple times per day. The internet has given us many wonderful things, but social media is not one of them. For the first time in history, anyone can say anything and have a global audience.

When radio and especially television came on the scene decades ago, there was wisdom enough in the world to know that there needed to be some rules about what could be broadcast. When a technology is new, it is not wise to let it run unchecked through society. Now, most of the controls that were in place back then are gone. Broadcast media bears little resemblance to the programming of the fifties and sixties.

But social media has shattered all the rules, which is the company mantra of one of it’s founders. Run fast and break things. What if the thing they are breaking is society itself? Because individuals can say one thing to journalists and then post on social media to talk about how ‘they really feel.’ We say things on social media that we would never say to someone’s face. That’s part of the charm. But these posts are finding their way to more and more audiences. More and more we are engaging in behavior that really had no place in society prior to the advent of social media. Sure, there was the National Enquirer, available at most grocery store checkout lanes. It was marketed with the magazines and entertainment, not with the newspapers. But now, people just read what they see on social media and think it’s the same as news, which it is not. Anyone can take a photo and post a comment about it. Many can alter photos, it’s not hard to do.

And what’s with Twitter, now called X. I signed up for it when it first came out but I never could see any value in it. Do I really need someone basically texting me every day, or several times a day with whatever’s on their mind? Isn’t this a kind of brainwashing, someone whispering little blurbs in your ear all the time? Or several someones, like a schizophrenic. I recently read about a woman whose life was ruined by some false social media depictions of her in a compromising situation with a teacher or coach, I don’t remember the details. I thought, if you weren’t on social media, it would never have mattered. It’s only because we let this form of technology invade our every moment that it has any power at all. And all we have to do to stop it is quit using it. It really is that simple. You don’t need it. I used to spend at least an hour a day checking in on my feed. I quit several years ago, when I realized all the damage that was being done, not to me personally, but to others who had gotten to far into it. And I got along just fine without it. Yes, I may have missed my friend posting a picture of the lovely steak dinner he had cooked, or another group of friends out at a local restaurant. But very little of any real importance has slipped by me after cutting loose from it.

It is an addiction, by any definition of the word. The harm that is being done to society, by breaking down the social norms may end up being devastating. Don’t for a second believe that the inventors of this technology care in the least about the plebes who use their tech. They absolutely consider you to be fools whom they have tricked into giving them all your data so they can profit from it. And profit from it they have, to the tune of billions of dollars. So it’s not just a place where you can go and check in with your friends. It’s a data-driven, world-wide surveillance system with no oversight, in most countries. In a few countries there is oversight in the form of the government knowing every single key stroke you make online.

Hope is a wonderful thing. It keeps us going when times are tough. I have little hope that the world will turn it’s back on social media on a scale large enough to stop the damage being done to our civilized world. I’ve been saying this for years and no one has listened in the least. But unlike the lyric in the song, I do know a few things that are true.

Posted on 06/17/202506/17/2025 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

It’s So Easy To Slip

Great song by Bob Weir, vocalist and guitarist for the Grateful Dead. “It’s so easy to slip, it’s so easy to fall. And let your memory drift and do nothing at all”. So appropriate. It’s so easy to let the world skip on by especially if you are a politician and more worried about your career than the people you are in an elected position to watch out for.

So easy too for a democracy to become that in name only. Russia calls itself a democracy. But notice how anyone who opposes the current ruler ends up dead. Usually they get put in jail and then die while there. Sometimes they are poisoned while in other countries, with substances that are only available to defense departments of large countries. Russian laws are there for the aristocracy, not for the people. The people have no rights against the government. Anyone challenging the ruling class is arrested or killed. The exact opposite of what the founding fathers intended when they wrote the American Constitution. A government by the people for the people, not for a select few who work themselves into positions of great wealth and power.

Because many have been left behind in the economy of today they are rightly upset about the way the government is functioning. Currently many people think that having three equal branches of government is too cumbersome and would prefer to have a CEO, or two, to take charge and get things done. It might help in the short term. but down the road when there are no restraints and things aren’t going the right direction it will be a different story. There are very few in history who have given up power once they were offered it. George Washington was one. He could’ve kept the presidency for as long as he lived but he chose not to. He realized that it wasn’t him but the people who needed to be in charge. Leaders of democracies are responsible to the people, who have the ultimate say over them. But if the leader sets out to tear down the curbs and restrictions on his power, and no one stops him on the principle of it, then it won’t be possible to go back. Hitler was elected too and he dissolved the governing body so that he could do what he wanted to without anyone standing in his way.

Our current leaders admire dictators. They think they themselves are good at dictating. They really don’t believe in the three branch system of government. I doubt they have ever read the constitution, or had any understanding of it if they did. It’s not in their nature. One person, or two, with a handful of cronies ruling the empire. That’s how they operate. Because it’s so much easier, of course, than having to convince others who disagree with you, that you are right. We’ve lost, not only the ability to compromise, but the ambition to compromise. All or nothing is the new modus operandi. And every day they are testing the limits of their power, always pushing for more and more, at the expense of the other two governing bodies. Whittle away at the legislature here and a little at the judiciary there and soon neither will have the powers granted by the constitution. All the reins will be in one set of hands.

Is this what America has come to? Are we really willing to give up the greatest democracy in the world because it’s easier than working out a solution we can all agree on?

All it will take from here is to do nothing. But it’s going to take an overwhelming majority to do something, and soon, before there’s nothing anyone can do.

Posted on 03/27/202503/27/2025 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

It’s a Mean Old World

The first time I heard that was from an unlikely source. Decades ago I had a client who was an elderly Jewish widow. She had all kinds of money, owned a condominium in the same building as Elton John in Buckhead, Atlanta. She and her husband had worked hard and been successful so I couldn’t understand why she had that outlook on life. Then one day I was at her home and her son stopped by. He was in his fifties I would guess and was permanently crippled from polio, which he had contracted as a child. I began to see how she might think the world was mean if she had seen him suffer, both physically, and in other ways from going through life with a disability. He, like my parents, was born before the polio vaccine was invented. None of my immediate relatives ever contracted it, but neither my mom nor my dad ever learned to swim because of the danger when they were growing up. I never found out any more about my client’s son’s story. All the money in the world could not cure what polio had done to him during childhood.

A lot of years have passed since I heard my elderly friend make that comment and for the most part I had forgotten it, being an optimist I guess because so many kind things have happened to me I tend to take the good in people for granted. But here lately it does seem like the world has gotten meaner. We’re all shouting at each other, cursing and threatening to kill each other over the slightest thing. I know social media has caused most of it, the more we give into our emotions online, the better our chances of going viral, which seems to be everyone’s goal these days. We can now vent our frustrations to the world. As I recall, pre-internet that was something I would only do with my closest friends and family and in private. Now it’s become the norm to show our worst selves to the world at large. And where a friend or family member would listen and try to calm our negative emotions, now once it goes viral there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The media companies themselves, but we all know that isn’t going to happen, not in a million years.

So there we are. Yes, there’s lots of good things going on but what gets the most attention in all of our media is the ugly, the frightening, the worst. Maybe that little old lady was right, it is a mean old world after all. Too bad because most people are really basically good. I still believe that, in spite of how it looks online.

Posted on 07/08/2024 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

Parking lot woes

Last week after work I stopped by the Neighborhood Market for a few groceries. It happened to be in an upper class neighborhood, with homes selling for much higher than the median home price in our city. I was checking emails on my work phone when I heard sirens going by, I thought, which is not unusual, a major medical center was just up over the hill. But when I looked up I saw that police had pulled up behind me and in front of me, lights flashing on their black SUVs, three of them, while another quickly followed. Two spaces away and facing me, was an older man in what looked to be a 1980s Toyota pickup. The officers approached the truck. I could not hear what was being said but the suspect apparently said something they didn’t like. When he got out of his truck one of the officers, a big burly guy, immediately threw him to the ground. There were no weapons of any kind. Now it is certainly the police officer’s right to apprehend someone they believe has broken the law. But the response was so overboard it seemed ridiculous. I could’ve taken that old man out and I’m 5’6″. He was no threat to anyone. But four officers, all stronger and much younger thought it necessary to tackle him on the asphalt. Again, I did not hear what was said between them but the tackling officer was so angry it seemed way out of proportion to the situation. I don’t know what he had done, I suspect he took something from the store. Walmart has a very aggressive policy towards shoplifting. And I don’t condone stealing but I am certain that the whole thing could’ve been accomplished without violence. They put handcuffs or zip ties, I could not see which, on him and took him away.

So much anger, everywhere. Was it because the man, who was obviously experiencing hard times, he was rough looking, driving an old worn out car, with worn out clothes and generally unkempt, had ventured into an upper class neighborhood? It was Walmart, after all, not Saks Fifth Avenue. Was it because the officer knew he could get away with it? It could’ve been something totally unrelated to the parking lot I was in, but still, the man did not resist and was no physical threat to anyone, especially the policemen.

It makes me sad to realize that this is the new normal. I tried to back up and leave when I saw this happening, but the officer’s vehicle blocked me in. A few other customers came out to their cars, most tried to ignore what they saw, didn’t want to get involved. I have seen, over the years many people being apprehended by police either inside a store or outside in the parking lot. This was the first time I have seen someone thrown to the ground, who was not even trying to resist. So much anger, it can’t be a good thing for our society.

One thing I did do, was drive away without entering the store. After the police moved their SUVs I decided that I would take my business elsewhere. Which is a shame because I shop at that location frequently. I’ll find another store that’s more peaceful. It may not change anything. But the least I can do is not ignore it.

Posted on 01/22/2022 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb 0

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Tag: society