The Singularity Is Here

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The paragraphs below is a literal quote from an article in the November Atlantic Magazine.

Artificially intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies.

By Ayad Akhtar

Something unnatural is afoot. Our affinities are increasingly no longer our own, but rather are selected for us for the purpose of automated economic gain. The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry. It is a late chapter of a larger story, about the deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals. This technology is no longer just shaping the world around us, but actively remaking us from within.

That we are subject to the dominion of endless digital surveillance is not news. And yet, the sheer scale of the domination continues to defy our imaginative embrace. Virtually everything we do, everything we are, is transmuted now into digital information. Our movements in space, our breathing at night, our expenditures and viewing habits, our internet searches, our conversations in the kitchen and in the bedroom—all of it observed by no one in particular, all of it reduced to data parsed for the patterns that will predict our purchases.

But the model isn’t simply predictive. It influences us. Daniel Kahneman’s seminal work in behavioral psychology has demonstrated the effectiveness of unconscious priming. Whether or not you are aware that you’ve seen a word, that word affects your decision making. This is the reason the technology works so well. The regime of screens that now comprises much of the surface area of our daily cognition operates as a delivery system for unconscious priming.

Mariner the Zealot

John Wiley

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John Wiley, the artist in Nonsequitur, captures in a few cartoons and few words whole philosophies and behaviors it would take a dozen books to express. Some of mariner’s favorites:

Mariner grows weary of a conflicted world. He knows that more and more he is seen as a zealot. It is hard for a humanist to be considered a zealot but that says a lot about society today.

There are real and validated social reasons for the uprising of the working class; how destructive their political payback will be remains to be seen.

Big data is an immoral capitalist snowball that has grown to a dangerous size. Mariner’s defense of personally owned privacy and the double whammy of not being able to share in the sale of his information are compounded by the fact that it is sold to interests who want to manipulate him for their own purposes, seems to the electorate much ado about nothing.

While his opinions about humanity are supported by many professional thinkers, again the electorate couldn’t care less. As a parting validation to mariner’s ‘zealotry’, the supermarket where mariner’s wife shops pays a handsome discount on her gas station prices in return for tracking her purchases – a fair arrangement in mariner’s mind.

But retreat is inevitable. Mariner is a member of the useless generation, an antique, aspiring middle class person and a humanist. He yearns to be off the grid electrically, politically and spiritually. One day he will buy a donkey cart.

Ancient Mariner

In Pursuit of Global Warming

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The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, begins this week. The United States and China are responsible for 40 percent of all carbon emissions. But hopes for successful U.S.-China engagement have dimmed since John Kerry’s preparatory meetings in China produced no results and ended by Chinese Foreign Minister WANG YI claiming climate cooperation can’t be separated from the overall situation of China-U.S. relations. China, in fact, will not attend the COP26 meeting in Glasgow.

When China and the US compete, one isn’t reminded of pole vaulters or curling, one thinks of sumo wrestling. Any number of issues in politics, civil rights, trade negotiations etc. can stop progress in important unrelated fields such as global warming.

For example, consider Taiwan. The brief history is that Japan possessed the island for fifty years until the end World War II; the peace settlements placed the island under China’s management – at the time the ruling party was Kuomintang (KMT). Then in 1949 China had a civil war that drove the KMT to retreat entirely to Taiwan, declaring Taiwan to be the seat of the Chinese government. Of course the new communist government never accepted this claim. Several political conflicts between China and the West kept Taiwan in an unsettled state until 2000 when on its own Taiwan began to seek full independence from China.

Today, in fact every day, squadrons of Chinese fighter planes fly over the island; warships cruise just offshore. The rhetoric between China and Taiwan is heated. Taiwan lies only 90 miles from China mainland. The US says, “Don’t worry Taiwan, we’ve got your back.”

What does any of this have to do with COP26? Nothing. Somehow though, mariner thinks the planet is winning. Check your inner tube for leaks.

Ancient Mariner

Theology for the twenty-first century

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Religion hasn’t been a subject on the blog recently. Religious belief, theology, morality, however one chooses to label it, has suffered ideologically right along with democracy, freedom and equality over in the political arena. What passes for theologically-based practice today is far removed from even a century ago, not even considering Holy Bible definitions. Just as with political ideology, religion is not a closed club, nor an autocracy of legal practices.

Let’s start with basics: How many of us have quoted God? How many have said, “God thinks . . .” If so, we have strayed from a proper twenty-first century relationship with our deity. God doesn’t ‘think’. God is. Gods of any religion are ultimate forces of existence, time, infinite power and the reason anything physical exists –including everything in the past and the future. God doesn’t have to think. God already knows. We are required to think, not God.

To offer a simple analogy, consider that God is a large brick wall. A person walks up to the wall and tries to break the wall. That person may end up with skin abrasions, wasted time and maybe even some broken fingers. The wall did nothing; it was just being a wall. An observer watching nearby comments, “The wall punished the person for trying to damage it.” Obviously, the wall didn’t have to think but the beat up wall abuser should have.

Unfortunately, humans being humans, they are highly susceptible to interpreting every phenomenon as if it were the product of human reason and human emotion. There is a popular theology around today that says every person has a god who thinks just like they do and has the same opinions. Somewhat convenient, each person belongs to a god-club where all their gods have similar opinions. One can see how putting people’s opinions in the driver’s seat has the same effect as raiding the Capitol on January 6 or in ignorance challenging the properties of a brick wall.

Gods have three qualities that humans can recognize:

1- omniscience, a fancy word that means God has no limits in any dimension or under any assumption. God is, was, will always be and is the essence of all existence. This characteristic is critical if God is to be the source of a common ethical value for all things living and nonliving.

2- God neither blesses nor forgives, nor punishes – just like the brick wall. It is the human mind that, like the bystander above, must judge cause and effect in human terms; the wall punished the attacker; the wall protects the home; the wall grants peace of mind. The proper interaction with God is to measure one’s own contribution to the wellbeing and sustenance of God’s kingdom, that is, one is measured by respect for and supportive effort to perceived reality.

Recent political awareness about the fact that humans are upsetting the planet’s priorities is a good example of recognizing that humans have been attacking the ‘wall’ called biosphere. Also becoming unusually evident is the problematic division between the well-to-do and the not-well-to-do, an unnatural circumstance that is both extreme and global in nature. What must humans do to rectify their relationship with God’s creation? As with the person who attacked the wall and was ‘punished’ for it, so, too, do humans suffer by their own accord when in conflict with God’s creation.

3- The third recognizable characteristic is a feature called ‘grace’. Whenever a person does a good thing for another person, creature, the planet or prevents damage by any definition, there is a strong reassurance of the self, a sense of completion, of being on God’s team, a positive feeling of personal growth. We are no different from any living creature that assures the great morality called God.

Ancient Mariner

Travelin’

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Autumn is traveling season for mariner and his wife. They are off to visit far flung relatives and friends. As the days grow cool and the wind chills the face in a way that hasn’t been felt since early spring, one is reminded of the passing of time. It is a time when melancholy may leak into one’s thoughts.

This fall in particular may bring on depression and fear. The entire world is in dire straits. No one can truly predict the twists and turns of the near future. In the United States, democracy and Constitutional freedom are frayed and dangling as the nation drifts into a serious split between authoritarian government and individual freedom to choose.

This political cleavage is deep, deep to the core foundations of the American way of life. Like a festering cancer it has been growing since the end of the Second World War. It is a battle between haves and have nots; it is a battle between racial elitism and equality for everyone; it is a battle between government and private enterprise; it a battle between tradition and science; it is a battle been humanity and the planet itself.

When one reads about the great tragedies of history, it is difficult to put one’s self into what it really must have felt like when Vesuvius erupted or the sudden flooding of the Middle East when the Black Sea broke through the Dardanelles or when the Spanish invaded and murdered the innocent cultures of the Americas or even today living under a Syrian dictatorship that gives no quarter with freedom of thought.

But now we know. Poverty is a growing disease growing as fast as any Covid invasion yet it remains invisible to the rest of the nation. The have nots continue to pay for the wealth and indiscretion of the haves, and they are paying with their very lives. This is slavery in modern form. Today the numbers of deprived have spilled out of the barrios into a labor class which has been denied equality of any kind for forty years – and who vent their anger by electing an incompetent President who has set the nation’s self-image back to the Revolutionary War and who blatantly tried to disrupt a national election.

Now we know.

Mariner thinks of an old automobile that is worn and rusted. It is time to buy a new one. What will it look like? How much will it cost? Will the old clunker keep running until then? Mariner, an old folk, thinks longingly about having a donkey cart. But he knows the future will not allow the past.

Does anyone know the future?

Ancient Mariner

 

Decisions

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Some will say, “I’ve made a decision – right or wrong. The important thing is that I made a decision.”

Some will say, “Someone else should make the decision. I don’t want the responsibility.”

Some will say, “There must be more to know before I have to make a decision.”

Some will say, “Occam was right – keep it simple.”

Some will say, “I make a decision based on how I feel. If it wasn’t the right decision, I’ll make it again.”

Some will say, “A decision is all about the vision – even if we have to move to Cuba.”

Some will say, “What is the decision I need to consider?”

Some will say, “What’s in it for me?”

Some will say, “I avoid making decisions.”

Some will say, “Just tell me what to do.”

– – – –

All of us are in this list somewhere. Decision making is like shifting gears; it changes our focus, our energy, even our scruples, even our sanity. Add the perspective of those who are obsessive and those who are attention deficient and the world becomes a conflicted decision-making environment. Further, add those who are bright and those who are dull and it is amazing that useful decisions are made at all.

Then add in those with ulterior motives: any middleman, any corporation, and God forbid any politician. Given their contribution to decision making, we may not know what decision was made!

There are different classes of decision making. Should I marry this person? Should I quit my job? Do we want children? Do I want to have a dog? There are procedural decisions: Should I go to the bathroom before I go? Do I need gas? Where are my keys? What color should we paint the living room?

Do I really want to argue with this ass? What is on TV? Life cannot move through one day without decision making skills. The downside is if we don’t know our own decision making style. So many arguments have been provoked by style rather than substance. To some extent we are constrained by our personality and often by dire circumstances. But resolution may require more than one style to be resolved. This is the main reason group discussions often are the only way to arrive at a rational decision. In business, team management is important. Virtually every organization has a group-based decision making group.

The advice here is to know thyself and accommodate other’s styles and conclusions – something the nation has in short supply these days.

Ancient Mariner

The countdown begins

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In a couple of weeks, the nation will be exactly one year from the 2022 General Election. Yes, we feel like this is a long way out there but the party troops have been organizing for months. Trump republicans are locked in to win their primaries and have spent a fortune in state promotions. Most elected representatives and senators are from guaranteed republican states.

The Constitution mandates 435 House members distributed according to population. Currently 220 are democrat, 212 are republican and there are 3 vacancies. Looking at state representation, 22 states are democratic and 28 are republican – including 23 republican states where the Governor, legislature and courts are all republican. Ironically, just 19 percent of the nation’s population lives in these red states.

Both parties have split in two; the republicans have become enchanted by authoritarian capitalism while the democrats have championed a socialist revolution reminiscent of the 1960s. Add to this the results of the 2020 census which moved several representative seats toward the south and west. [Based on population shifts recorded in the 2020 Census, there were six US states that gained congressional House seats: Texas (2), Colorado, Montana, Oregon, Florida, and North Carolina; and seven states that lost seats: New York, Illinois, California, Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.]

This noisy imbalance, in a nation based on one person, one vote has reached a painful cacophony – which falls upon the citizenry like bird droppings (Mariner loves to mix metaphors). At a time when the planet is racing into a totally new reality, the world’s most profound democracy is dropping bird poop.

Another issue is the age of the legislators who stopped experiencing new insights in the 1990s. Below is an excerpt from an HBO interview with republican senator Bill Cassidy. The interviewer is Mike Allen:

 

“1 big thing: Senator backs senility test

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, told me during an interview that he favors cognition tests for aging leaders of all three branches of government.

  • Why it matters: Wisdom comes with age. But science also shows that we lose something. And much of the world is now run by old people — including President Biden, 78 … Speaker Pelosi, 81 … Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, 70 … and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 79.

Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, told me during our wide-ranging interview in Chalmette, La., that in your 80s, you begin a “rapid decline.”

  • Noting he wasn’t talking about specific people, Cassidy said: “It’s usually noticeable. So anybody in a position of responsibility who may potentially be on that slope, that is of concern. And I’m saying this as a doctor.”
  • “I’m told that there have been senators in the past who, at the end of their Senate terms were senile,” Cassidy added. “I’m told that was true of senators of both parties.”

Cassidy said it’d be reasonable for Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and executive branch leaders to submit to an annual evaluation in which they would have to establish cognitive sharpness.

  • “We each have a sacred responsibility to the people of the United States,” Cassidy said. “It is not about me. It is about my ability to serve the people.”

Mariner has great expectations for the 2022 election. Don’t you?

Ancient Mariner

It is time.

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Mariner, for the sake of sanity, has stepped back from daily behavioral response to frightful, deliberately agitating news programs. Saner are selected on-line news sources, books and magazines. He is careful, as a citizen, to maintain his obligation to a national democracy; he is responsible to elect meaningful representatives to HIS government.

But mariner has begun to wonder. Is democracy becoming old fashioned? Is it the right philosophy of government for an era where international politics are growing more influential than national politics? Is the new global economy too expensive for a typical citizen to invest in and participate? Will each nation simply play the role of a labor union to reconcile humanistic virtues vis-à-vis international corporate politics? Will, in fact, super-sized corporations replace national governments? Who will govern the corporations?

As though to tease our brains, many of these questions already have emerging answers that seem to be pulling everyone into an age of supersizing – certainly causing stress on religion, secularism, humanism and the old fashioned descriptions of capitalism, socialism and communism. At the moment, without exception, the new frontier is fed and run by money.

Immediately important today is our concept of taxation. The rich have won the war on taxation: the richer one is, the less percentage tax they pay to the point of paying none; the same with corporations. It is the excessive wealth among a few that can launch a global plutocracy.

Ironically, the distrust between citizens has led to populism and identity politics, in effect dividing citizens one against the other while the rich unify their economic purposes.

If humans are to remain the significant influencer in human history, it may be that democracy is the last defense against authoritarian oligarchy. Democracy depends on an identity that evolves from human ethic while authoritarian oligarchy vacuums profit that denies human ethic. An excellent example is that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have the finances to underwrite a useless trip into the solar system while billions of humans live stressed, inadequate lives.

In short, our defense is to unify, to become one human force that controls its ethical experience. It is not a time to destroy democratic election processes; it is not a time to quibble over a measly trillion (many individuals in the world could pay out a trillion by themselves). It is not time to pretend superiority by hiding behind race and other social issues. It is time to defend the very core of humanity.

Will someone tell the electorate?

Ancient Mariner

Mariner’s calisthenics for older millennials+

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Mariner is growing older – well, a lot of growing older already has occurred but still, he is growing yet even older than that. Like many elders, he has aches and pains that lead him to a rehab center where he is led through a series of namby-pamby stretching exercises. Mariner agrees that the stretching drills do relax the skeleton’s pressure points and ease pain a bit  but when one is out in the garden and has one foot under an azalea bush and the other foot is in midair and must execute a one-legged bunny hop to land outside the garden, the little stretching drills do not help.

The reality is that, because humans have invented things like chairs, tables, chainsaws and elevators, we don’t use the muscles as they were intended. You know the trope: use it or lose it. As we age, stretching is important but it doesn’t help keep a body that is serviceable for daily life. If one is to be spiritually alert, strong and have a good feeling about one’s self, one must have muscle that works in the real world. So mariner proposes a muscle-based exercise rather than a joint-stretching one. The legal caveat: these exercises may not be helpful when recovering from injuries or operations.

If the reader has ever found themselves on the floor and literally can’t get up, e.g., mounting a lawnmower deck under the tractor or reaching the baby’s pacifier under the sofa or are prone to losing balance whenever the legs are off center, the following exercises performed every other morning may help:

  1. Squat thrust – Keeping your body over your knees, squat as close to the ground as possible. Place your hands on the floor and using them for balance, kick your legs back until they are straight behind you and your toes land on the floor. Once landed, quickly return to the original squat position and without hesitating kick the legs back again two more times. Then stand up, take a breath and repeat. Do this repetition five times as a beginner and work up to ten easily performed. In all exercises do not stop breathing and exhale at the point of maximum exertion. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4511oTkNls
  2. Weight-assisted squat – Find an object that you can hold easily and weighs five to ten pounds. Stand with legs ready to squat and hold the object at arm’s length in front of you. Squat as deeply as you can and immediately return to an upright position. Do ten squats at a slow pace. For a sample squat without the weight see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aclHkVaku9U
  3. Pushups – Compulsive jocks may do a full pushup hands to toes but mariner recommends using the milder version, hands to knees because many individuals have injuries and arthritis that may be aggravated. Lying flat on the floor, use your arms to lift the body off the floor so that only the hands and knees remain in contact with the floor. Lift until the arms are straight and keep the body straight throughout the lift. Work your way up to ten; do more to show off in front of friends. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyCG_5l3XLk

For upper back and posture issues, e.g., peeling potatoes without pain and remaining a fully erect hominid, here are a few exercises to help:

  1. Middle back. Have at hand a pair of small hand weights weighing two to five pounds each. Lay flat on your stomach with body straight to the feet. Stretch your arms out so you look like an airplane. Slowly lift the weights as high as possible without bending at the elbows, hold for two seconds then slowly drop back to the floor. Start with five repetitions but quickly build up to ten repetitions.
  2. Back and Shoulders. Find something that is easy to hold onto that can hang from your hands and down your back; a hand weight weighing ten to fifteen pounds would be perfect. Grasp the weight overhead and let it pull your arms down from over your head, letting the weight hang down your back. Very slowly lift the weight until your arms are straight above you. Very slowly allow the weight to fall down the back. Slow is better in this exercise. Do ten times; do more if you don’t feel satisfactory stretching of the upper back and arms.
  3. Shoe tie. This is all about balance. Put on a pair of string tie shoes; tennis shoes would be perfect. To tie the shoe, stand on the opposite leg fully straightened. Raise the target shoe to knee level but do not rest it on the other leg. Keeping the foot at knee level, tie the shoe. Repeat for the other shoe.

General posture is important and requires similar muscle-building exercises. These exercises are more difficult only because it requires constant attention to accomplish them:

  1. Easiest of these exercises is to walk at a comfortable pace for thirty minutes without stopping. Walk outside, not inside or on a treadmill. Walk every day; this exercise has meditative aspects to it. Distance is not the issue; mariner’s wife walks twice as fast as mariner. Walking together for exercise possibly may not be a shared experience.
  2. This is the most difficult exercise because you must do it constantly while awake for the entire day. Pretend there is an attached string at the center of the top of your head. Pretend that it kept in tension to hold your head as high as you can while keeping the chin in. Maybe God is pulling it or four eagles or an F-15.
  3. The strut. At the same time, push your chest out in front of your shoulders – all day whether sitting, standing, walking, etc.

You will find these posture exercises to be the most difficult because you must train your brain to pay attention constantly. It is important, however, because posture is what keeps the skeletal frame in place and enables muscle-centric health.

Mariner finds that the quads are the most diminished and need exercise if one is to be active or keep balance. The rewards are subtle but guarantee an enjoyable life in distant years. If the reader can sustain the effort, the posture exercises alone can improve one’s general well being.

Ancient Mariner

Gumption

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Among many words that describe the lifestyle of older folks, mariner feels the word ‘gumption’ is a major descriptor. Researching the usage of gumption suggests that the general meaning of the word is to have ambition, motivation or, colloquially, ‘get-up-and-go’. But being old can’t be captured by one behavior; it takes a lot to be old – or conversely it takes losing a lot to be old.

Gumption has a lot to do with energy. As folks grow older, their power supply becomes worn and becomes harder to generate. Using an old automobile as an analogy, the engine’s piston rings aren’t as tight as they used to be; it takes more gas, oil and electric current to create the same horsepower; the carburetor, sparkplugs, distributor and air filter aren’t as finely tuned. Translate the analogy to a human being and the parts become internal organs, angina, aneurysm, lost muscle and less resiliency.

Gumption is more complex than just having energy. Older folks don’t have much to motivate them. Society leaves them behind; their careers are over, family members have passed on, all leaving little social purpose and little need to ‘get up and go’. There is no need other than a compulsive disorder to jump out of bed at 6 AM before the alarm clock has finished its chime. As the trite phrase says, “use it or lose it”. Motivation can wane just as muscles do.

The brain has a large influence on gumption. Using the automobile analogy again, brains are like tires: the tread wears out. Without tires the automobile may have a brand new engine and still not be able to function. The brain isn’t called the brain for nothing – it controls every aspect of a person’s physiology from the shape of toenails to the ability to think. Unfortunately, such a complex organ is easily affected by wear and tear.

Most notable about brain dysfunction are concentration and short term memory. It is hard to have gumption if a person is easily distracted. It is hard to perform tasks if they can’t be remembered long enough to be completed.

The advice to oldsters is to have gumption to experience life in whatever intellectual or physical way that sustains a relationship with life in general.

The advice to youngsters is to have respect for folks who can live day after day without fancy mental tools, any power tools or any reason to have tools but they continue performing as a human being. That requires its own definition of gumption.

Ancient Mariner