Category Archives: Biosphere

New child care services

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More chatbox memes – look behind you!

From  https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-438426cc-d0dd-4ebc-8704-6f8fc768bcac.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top

What they’re saying: Interaction with generative AI could “fundamentally change the human brain,” says Dana Suskind, a pediatric physician and expert on early childhood and early language development.

  • Suskind says teenagers and adults are already forming relationships with AI companions. The same could happen with younger kids.
  • “The content and experience that kids are exposed to in early years isn’t just sort of changing things the same way social media impacted adolescent brains,” Suskind told Axios. “It is actually changing the foundational wiring of the human brain.”
  • “Children naturally anthropomorphize,” Suskind wrote in an email, “but with responsive AI, we’re entering uncharted territory for how this might shape their developing sense of reality and relationships.”

Between the lines: Some child development researchers worry that chatbots could reshape how children learn trust, empathy and connection.

  • A small study from 2024 showed that kids ages 3-6 were more likely to trust a robot than a human, even when that robot had proven to be less reliable than the human.
  • Trust is a particularly thorny problem for those who rely on AI, since many researchers argue that these tools might always be prone to making things up.

Chatbots also tell people what they want to hear.

  • They’re trained to please, which means they’re unlikely to say “no” — a word that small children need to learn to deal with.

 

Mariner recommends not using rapid fire weapons or shotguns. Your real loved ones may be close at hand. All these efforts to invade Homo’s anthropomorphic reality are just a step toward Armageddon. The next step is not to bother with babies – they’re too much trouble – AI bots may offer an age-seasoned teenage bot instead – or, if the reader is so inclined, adult bots (male and female) are available and quite charming.

We have come to accept robots in the workplace, despite union protests. Now the frontier is the home.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Life on Earth

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This strictly is a metaphoric, allegoric, analogous, anthropomorphized  post.  So keep one’s imagination and lateral thinking at hand.

The Texas flooding disaster is a tragic, quick, painful experience for many innocent people. It is an example of how Mother Nature will strike out for no good reason – same is true for tornadoes and forest fires. Similarly, the blatant, instant firing of tens of thousands of Federal workers by Donald Trump seems quite similar to Mother Nature’s Texas flood. Both seem vindictive; both were quick and painful; both attacked a large number of people without individual judgment.

Do Donald and Mother march to the same drumbeat?

Their tools are persistent: Mother uses water and intense heat by eliminating or adding too much water or by popping off a volcano or by melting polar ice. Donald uses cash money by building channels of cash flow that flow only in his direction or to those who help him extricate cash from the rest of the population which needs it for their own well being.

But what is the motivation? At the bottom, for both of them, it may be survival. In Mother’s case, she has a bad case of lice. They are dangerous to Mother’s health and a constant itch and tickle. She has taken to harsh baths and showers and a bug spray of methane but the lice continue to exude CO2 which gives her a fever and bad headaches. Also, the lice leave scraped and cracked patches on her skin which kills other desired creatures on her environmental skin.

Donald, too, must survive despite damage to his brain caused by any source such as damaged at birth, parental abuse, peer condescension and bullying – or all of the above. In any case, Donald must survive in spite of his disabilities. He lacks many defenses that assuage life: self-confidence, compassion, communal bonding. Despite “winning” a situation, he is not secure in his confidence. He must win and win again. Where Mother deals with lice, Donald deals with security. Both are looking for survival.

Ancient Mariner

 

Does the reader have a map?

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Sitting in the tunnel with Nosy Mole where it is a lot cooler than outside, mariner received an email from Wayside Gardens. It was a big splash sale with huge price cutting on Hyssop.  “That’s odd,” he said. “I just mentioned hyssop in my last post – and as far as I know, I’ve never seen a sale ad for hyssop before – its an indigenous plant.”

Know the world you live in.

⊗

Here is a short clip from The Atlantic magazine: “Imagine an intersection at which American national security, defense spending, the rise of China, technological innovation, regional conflict, and the future of liberal democracy all meet.” Mariner doubts this intersection has a traffic light.

The old fogies still around remember the last two centuries where global wealth was more abundant and disruption was between selected nations. This century is different. It is not just international bickering, it is way too many people for the environment and way too little resources available from a disappearing biosphere. The global economic stress challenges all forms of government. Then, like hot pepper tossed into a soup, AI is attacking the anthropological role of everything – including Homo.

So, who else is watching old episodes of Lawrence Welk? Homo is on its way to Matrix.

Ancient Mariner

In the garden

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Mariner spent most of the day in the garden. For the most part, he was pulling weeds to see if he still had garden plants under the weeds. He seldom meanders among the gardens because more pressing tasks are calling but today he poked about, swearing at rabbit damage and on a positive note, discovering plants that had survived despite all the interference of weeds, rabbits and droughts – even some, like Hyssop and Spider wort, had emerged on their own.

He keeps a stand of Milkweed in support of any passing Monarch butterfly but has never seen any. Until today. A Monarch was bounding about in the Milkweed, seemingly quite happy. Small gifts bring great reward.

While hunting wild crabgrass in the Azalea bed, he met up with a chipmunk. He’s always considered the chipmunk a mouse that is in show business; they have pleasant shades of brown with prominent stripes running down their back. We stared at one another for a long moment then the chipmunk went about its business.

This kind of puttering in the garden beds, for mariner at least, is one of the top enjoyments that can be had from gardening. The gardens have their own relationship with nature, stay busy with their own lives whether ants, birds, flowers or even weeds. They are the grand biosphere for shrews, caterpillars, moths, toads, moles and snails. A summer’s night can be blessed with dancing lightning bugs.

Plants, from algae to giant oaks to moss, have been around for billions of years before Homo came along. They know something Homos don’t know.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

We all need new top down awareness

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Especially the world’s governments but that’s another story.

Even more important is that you, me and every individual around the globe must stop living by the daily ethics of life that may have been true forty years ago. Computers are no longer smart typewriters and no longer fantastic libraries; computer technology has created a subhuman species capable of telling us what we should know and what to think. In a few years, computers, as our medical advisors and primary care physicians, will decide whether you continue to live or not. What is scary is that computers already think for themselves – technicians no longer solve ethical positions. Today a majority of stock market trades never see a human mind. Who tells you the truth – Mom or the smartphone?

We must cast aside the romantic image of farming as a rural life style with cute lambs and mooing cows and amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties above a fruited plain. Worldwide we keep clearing to make room for more farms to make more food. The image of a romantic farm should be replaced by the relentless spread of crops and pastures that already cover two of every five acres of land on Earth, obliterating the wild landscapes that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Further, it is propelling the worst extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago..

We must look beyond a world made of nations. Any nation, including the US and China, is incapable on its own to stabilize industrial development, international supply chains, artificial intelligence, humanitarian obligations and, importantly – open warfare. At the least, smaller nations, especially in Africa and the Middle East, must adopt a model similar to the European Union. On a global scale, it is time to make war less important than management of the planet and all its human disasters. It is time for one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all – including Mother Earth. It is time for the United Nations to be authorized as the ethical authority – including the right to wage international war.

The ethics of human society must leave behind the age of nationally defined variations of humans; it is of no consequence whether Italian, Brazilian, South African, Indian, Polish, Chinese . . . The issue is eight billion humans and growing. There are only two choices: let the population grow until there is a tragic, horrible collapse of controlled civilization, or take control of birthrates. Sardonically, computers may help us with the population issue. The Dixie style of birth control is simplistic. The following is an extract from a post mariner wrote last April:

“A tremendous change occurred with the industrial revolution: whereas it had taken all of human history until around 1800 for world population to reach one billion, the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 years (1960), the fourth billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years (1987).

  • During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
  • In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.”

Immediately, one grasps the idea that population and natural resources are the two issues that can’t remain under control given the ethical image we carry from the 1970’s. So, are we willing to go the way of the dinosaurs using our homemade asteroid or will humans have the wherewithal to live according to a new top down awareness?

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

Everything is true

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Without television news to occupy his time, mariner uses that time to explore other subjects like paleontology and ancient cultural histories, Then there is quantum mechanics. He was drawn to this subject because a number of journals were covering a new breakthrough which solved open issues that have been unresolved since before Einstein.

Of anything one would want to study, quantum mechanics is the most confusing and obscure subject. Mathematics is beyond comprehension and is understood only by the most dedicated mathematician. Relativity is an understated word by which any situation can be redefined and still be true. The wrench for manipulating anything is called a quantum.

A simple metaphor: Looking at a Mercator map of the world (everything is flat making land nearer the poles to be larger than it is), if one were to fly an airplane from India to Denmark, the shortest distance would be a straight line on the map between the two locations. However, if we change the shape of the map to include actual planet-shaped accuracy, the line doesn’t appear straight anymore. In fact, it is a curved line that passes close to the North Pole. Yet, it is the same line, the same length and is curved to match the curvature of the Earth. In one case, straight line; in the other a very curved line yet both are the same line.

The ‘quantum’ in this metaphor is the change in map representation. Let’s make it more realistic: In your yard, you have a very long garden hose. You also have at the middle of the yard a tree that needs watering. Does it affect anything if the hose lies straight between the faucet and the tree or does it affect anything if too much hose is used and it coils all over the yard? No. It’s the same hose whatever shape it has.

What is vital is the location at each end of the lines and hose: India must be India and stay where it is, Denmark must stay where it is. The faucet must stay where it is and the tree must stay where it is. These are finite values – everything else is relative to the stationary locations. These examples are almost too simplistic but mariner can’t go any deeper without getting lost. He dare not get a fancy microscope and use these rules to measure behavior among the molecules, atoms and ions that make up the Universe.

He learned, without understanding, that if you add a lot of differently shaped lines between the finite values, system behavior evolves – like Suns and planets and Homos.

Welcome to quantum mechanics.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

It’s our turn

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One of the subjects mariner has focused on during the TV news blackout is anthropology, especially the evolution of various species of humanoids and when the major integrations occurred. A clear example is the disappearance of Neanderthal when the last ice age subsided, the large animals they specialized in hunting for food went extinct, the plant culture shifted, and the seas rose as the ice melted. At the end, cannibalism was practiced and a recent immigrant, Homo sapiens, emerged to dominate Europe.

Stepping back to a larger ancestry, the first humanoid to emigrate from Africa into Europe was Heidelbergensis (700,000 years ago) who eventually evolved into the Neanderthal with the help of Denisovans who occupied Siberia. In fact, several ‘cousin’ humanoids left Africa during this era as the African climate shifted to create the Sahara desert; generally they moved East to occupy Pacific coast regions and Australia..

Fortunately, Homo sapiens developed in southern Africa and developed there for a longer period and did not migrate to the northern hemisphere until 130,000 years ago. They had become something close to the modern Homo sapiens and quickly dominated the older humanoids who also had the disadvantage of losing an ice age, their intended breeding ground.

Stepping back to an even larger transition, These migrations were caused by an European ice age and an African climate change. It looms as a very large question: What will happen to today’s human population if the planet chooses to create a severe global warming? As usual, we sappiens can’t manage ourselves enough to prepare for such a change – a change irrelevant of plutocracy, racism and classism. Oh well, maybe Alexa can conjure something.

Ancient Mariner

Mother Earth ups the ante

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Mariner has harangued his readers about the Armageddon consisting of excessive population, disappearing natural resources, global warming and uncontrolled AI. But Mother Earth has just started to get involved.

In a report from Nature Geoscience –

“North America’s geological core has persisted for billions of years—it’s what scientists call a craton, a massive block of continental rock that withstands the natural recycling system of plate tectonics. Typically, scientists think of cratons as unchanging, nigh on eternal. But new research published on March 28 in Nature Geoscience suggests that a long-lost geological plate may be siphoning rock from the bottom of the North American craton, eroding it from below, right under our feet.

Such a scenario would not be unprecedented—scientists have evidence that the North China craton thinned dramatically millions of years ago—but it would certainly be surprising and intriguing to study in real time. “Cratons are the oldest cores of continents, so they have been sitting near the Earth’s surface for billions of years,” says Claire Currie, a geophysicist at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the new research. “They’ve persisted through time, so this is quite unusual.”

Mariner could find no projected dates for these events but at some point in the future, the next tectonic shift may turn the Mississippi River into the Mississippi Sea or conversely, The Mississippi Mountains.

Mother Earth’s stash seems unending. Much of Florida and much of the Gulf-facing land in the US will disappear under rising seas; Global warming will disrupt political, economic and environmental conditions that may cause even more famine and unrest among human populations.

Mother Earth wants everyone to know that AI isn’t the only player in the future of us Homos.

Ancient Mariner

Trekking amid Armageddon

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In these days, attempting to live a stable life is like being an empty trashcan in a tornado. All the headlines focus on what “Wanna be a dictator” is doing to the fabric of government; there are large situations like global warming, rational health care, personal civil rights, what schoolchildren will not be taught, the emerging isolationism of each state in the Union, and the precarious ripping apart of economic relationships between democratic nations.

That’s just one whirlwind in the storm. Another whirlwind swirls around the corporate freedom to dissemble independent human behavior and replace it with computerized corporate manipulations of behavior and intervene the interface between humans and genuine reality.

Having one’s own private perspective on how to engage in the community has been diminished and largely replaced by the new town square, Facebook – which is a behavior similar to smartphones, which requires no social intervention at all.

Corporations have automated out of existence places and activities where ‘community’ could be felt and engaged in – places like small storefront businesses, shopping malls, and computerized food services that have a negative effect on restaurants.

Slowly, humanity (in the wealthy nations only, there is no life to be had in poor ones) is being corralled into the world of one of mariner’s benchmark icons, the movie Matrix. The model is identical but Matrix says humans were put into wired coffins, their brains filled with artificial life experience and their bodies were used as batteries for the great “system”

In this reality it is the same model but for different reasons. Smartphones replace the coffins, social control replaces batteries. Remember Zuckerberg’s fantasy about everyone having their own online town? Sort of like the false life of humans in Matrix.

But the Armageddon swirl is closing in. Everyone must now store their personal computer backups on the ‘cloud’. Metaphorically, your smartphone provides verbs, your computer provides nouns. Your computer is no more than a data entry keyboard – sort of like a typewriter but wired to the corporate database.

Mother Nature will step in big time in a few years. Not that it will necessarily make things better; Mother owns the largest corporation – the planet.

Mariner is inclined to go looking for his two ponies and a cart. He has no smartphone, will not store his data in the ‘system’ database and continually searches for ways to shop face-to-face with other humans and to spend cash for purchases. He is a Homo sappien approaching extinction.

Ancient Mariner

More info for peripheral view

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Everyone, around the world in fact, is inundated with the Trump phenomenon. Everyone around the world is troubled that their economics are so vulnerable to disruption. This vulnerability has a broader, peripheral circumstance that can explain this vulnerability: environmental resources are running out – whether they are elements, minerals, biomass, space or the effects of global warming.

As the population post cited, in all of human history, the population reached 1 billion. Then from 1800 to 1987, the population grew by 4 billion. What grew as well was the rate of consumption. Human laissez-faire about consumption is reflected in human treatment of the resources available: The world generates nearly two billion tons of municipal solid waste each year (MSW).  MSW includes trash from companies, buildings, houses, yards, and small businesses. The United States and China lead the way.

Mariner’s wife, a librarian, has a program where she reads stories to preschool children. She brought home a book which, with astounding clarity, demonstrated human disregard for environmental resources. The book is ‘One Little Bag – An Amazing Journey’ by Henry Cole.  All pages are drawings showing a small boy’s affection for his paper bag by always having it at hand for whatever purpose; it is the tale of a little boy who carried his one original lunch bag to school for over 700 lunches even using it to offer a wedding ring to his girlfriend. The pages also show all the industrial steps required to make a paper bag from chopping down the tree to paper manufacture, delivery, etc. One cannot read this simple story without realizing how trashy humans are. What is important is this trashy behavior does not show concern for the more important issue: disappearing resources.

Wastefulness is not limited to MSW. About four or five years ago, mariner watched a TV interview with a Federal Department head (mariner apologizes for forgetting the name). He was an advocate for expanding our ability to sustain natural resources in order to offset the impact of increasing consumption caused by rapid population growth. He addressed many industrial practices and the careless lack of concern by humans who consume large, irreplaceable areas of the environment just for profit or pleasure.

The Department Head went so far as to challenge lawns. “We need the space to grow food! Every bit of space around the home should be dedicated to self sufficiency, to help ease the pressure caused by disappearing food sources.”

It isn’t just food. Trickling through the news today is the concern for how much electricity and water the new computer age consumes. Computers alone have a special shortage in several minerals including Lithium, Cobalt and Zinc. Microsoft has just contracted the use of a nuclear power plant.

Mariner has a personal example: He and his wife maintain bird feeders. Many who offer this service find it invaded by squirrels. Mariner disregards this complaint knowing that he and his fellow Homos have leveled the natural environment of the squirrel to build huge, clunky houses, streets, tennis courts and businesses. The least we Homos can do is to be sympathetic to the shortage of food for the squirrel and any other wildlife that may still live here. It is interesting that only Homos need 1,200 square feet for a nest, plus lumber, steel, plastic, electricity, heating fuel, TV, a phone, a garage and two stories. Meanwhile, tigers and elephants are disappearing and wolves can’t live in the Midwest which is their natural environment because Homos will shoot them.

This peripheral information may shed light on why economies are not robust, why food and energy prices continue to rise and why every planet resource is at risk.

Ancient Mariner