Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

 

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

Letters from Flyoverland featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer and {Dana}, a persistent hallucination and charming literary device.

                     ABOUT                                              GLOSSARY 

"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change." -Thomas Hardy 

Dear Gentlereaders,

Yes, some of the "boilerplate" that formerly preceded my greeting is gone.  

"There are five parts of a friendly letter, and one optional part. The five include a heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature. There's also an optional postscript a writer may decide to include." -Sister Mary McGillicuddy

Yes, Virginia, in the distant past H. sapiens had to compose letters on sheets of unformatted paper, sometimes called stationary, and apply a format they had learned in grade school.

{So it's true, you've disinherited the Stickies!}

Nah, but they're all over 18 now and two have moved out so they've all been promoted to gentlereaders. None have left Canada's version of the Deep South yet (Northern Ohio) and our lives remain closely intertwined. Duuude moved to Tennessee to launch his life now that school's finally behind him but returned two minutes later, burned by some extended family members. 

I say finally because to him, as it did to his beloved grandfather, being done with mandatory schooling feels like having completed a prison sentence imposed on an innocent man. 

Fortunately, he's an easy-going, well-adjusted young man who doesn't hold grudges (unlike his beloved grandfather who often does despite his best efforts to the contrary) who plans on trying again once he can afford to do so without "help" from anybody.

Like me, he would prefer to live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Unlike me, he doesn't mind hot and humid weather as much as I do.    

There's a bit of drama in my life right now (some good, some bad), and given that I've recently obtained Cosmic Geezer perspective, I thought it would be a good time to make some changes. Not just in my column, but in other aspects of my life that I won't bore you with. Now that I've been blessed with CGP much has become clear.

And of course, we all gotta do what we need to do to maintain the illusion of control. 

{The illusion of control?}

The subject of a future column, stay tuned. Now, if you're still here, and still awake...

{Wait-wait-wait. What's with the title? What's this got to do with David Bowie?}

Nothing, the title is just clickbait. 

{You're gonna make people mad!}

People who are only interested in reading about Mr. Bowie will flee in short order. People who are interested in reading about Mr. Bowie but who are also naturally intelligent, inquisitive sorts who like to read the work of clever columnists will keep reading, at least for a bit. 

Perhaps I'll pick up a new fan. Hopefully, no one will try and track me down and kill me. I wouldn't mind an attempted cancelation, all publicity is good publicity if you spin it properly. The Information Age is also the All Show Biz all the Time Age. 

{Hmmm... You may be smarter than you look.}      

Good thing, right?

The classics never get old. For those of you reading this via the dead trees format: BA DUM TSSS!

{Hi-LAR-ious. Can we hope for some meat on this sandwich?}

The Wall Street Journal, as my millions of regular readers know, is my personal paper of record. 

Although the news division now is forced to demean itself by drifting slightly leftwards... 

And featuring slightly more in the way of celebrity/fashion/self-help/sensationalist/doom-mongering shtuff that many H. sapiens can't seem to ever get enough of to maintain circulation numbers (or at least I hope that's why they're doing it),

They still also publish the sort of high-quality journalism they're famous for, including stories that are not widely reported on elsewhere but should be.  

For example, the Emperor's minions, lackeys, and sneaky students are stealing our chips.

{Frito Lay products are as popular and widely distributed in China as they are here. Personally, I can't get enough Roasted Fish, why do they need to steal our chips?}

I'm talkin' computer chips, specifically Nvidia AI chips. "Nvidia’s chips are highly coveted for their ability to handle the massive computations needed to train AI systems that are critical to China-U.S. tech rivalry." -Raffaele Huang/WSJ 

{Just a sec', I'll be right back... Hey, I enjoy reading lengthy articles about the technology sector as much as the next guy person. Still, I think you'd be doing your gentlereaders a public service by providing a summary.}

Easy Peasy, here's another quote from the article. 

"The student is part of a barely concealed [widely known, easily accessible] network of buyers, sellers and couriers bypassing the Biden administration’s restrictions aimed at denying China access to Nvidia’s advanced AI chips..."

{Student, what student?}

The article begins by describing how a Chinese student studying in Singapore brought home a half dozen Nvidia AI chips when he flew home to China for a vacation for which he was paid $100 each by a Chinese middlemanperson. 

Depending on the particular chip, they will be resold for roughly 20 to 30k — each. 

"The Commerce Department, which oversees enforcement of the U.S. restrictions, didn’t respond to requests for comment." 

Given that we're fighting Cold War Two, even if The Fedrl Gummit doesn't like to acknowledge it — we shouldn't needlessly risk offending a country that supplies slave labor (and lots of customers) to build us cool sneakers and smartphones — you'd think we'd be all over this. 

{Hey, If you would stop ignoring the artificial intelligence built into your spell checker you would know that you should have written you would think that we would be all over this. You'd and we'd are some pretty ugly lookin' contractions...just sayin'.}

On an unrelated note, I'm officially endorsing Camalla Harris and Pete Buttigieg for president and vice president (respectively) this year. 

Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, vote for them and we'll all win big! I'm on a fixed income so I wrote a slogan in lieu of a donation.

{AI wants you to write instead of in lieu of in lieu of.} 

She's a woman, of a couple of different colors, and he belongs to the LGBT+ club. Between them, that's three (or four, depending on how you count) different historically marginalized minorities. Most importantly, there's no trace of Satan's inadvertent minions, straight white males. 

Being a straight white male myself, this is my way of apologizing for being responsible for everything that's wrong with the world. 

{Pete who?}

Have an OK day, 

Colonel Cranky

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Artificial Intelligence

"It's Alive!" -Victor Fronkensteen

Image by Julius H. from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"Shall we play a GAME?" -W.O.P.R.

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

I wasn't worried, till recently, about artificial intelligence obtaining sentience... or sapience, self-awareness, consciousness, etcetera.  

To give credit where credit is due, I got all the $2.00 words above (I contributed the etcetera) from the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry titled Sentience wherein the first sentence is: Sentience is the capacity of a being to experience feelings and sensations.

I thought it best to mention all those words because as the article explains, they're used interchangeably by writers expounding upon what life and (self)consciousness is. 

Some people are worried that AI, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, will come alive and then murder us all, replacing us at the top of the food chain (so to speak, since it will have no use for meat). 

{Do you have a point or is this column going to be a fascinating etymological exposition?}

My point is that all of those words and more are currently being bandied about by H. sapiens worried that since AI, artificial intelligence technology, is now powerful enough to carry on more (or less) convincing conversations with those of us who don't require a power cord or batteries to function,

And/or used to create "deep fakes" of all sorts of things and create art, music, writing, etc, and even pass the Bar exam,  

So that soon, we'll be dealing with a machine that for all intents and purposes, is alive. 

{None of this worried you, but now it does?}

Well, I was, and remain concerned about the fact that no shortage of potential major societal disruptions have appeared on the horizon and are closing fast. But I have a limited amount of time left on the clock, and to be honest, stickin' around long enough to see where all this is headed motivates me to keep getting out of bed in the morning.

{I'll bet you enjoy multi-car pile-ups as well.} 

I was, and remain, worried about what it means for my daughter, son-in-law, and the Stickies, of course, but one of the advantages of getting old older is grasping that I have even less ability to fix the world than I previously realized. 

Accept the things you can't change, advise the young as best you can, and enjoy the show if you're fortunate enough to be in a position to do so. Oh, and don't take it personally if the young(er) folks don't take your advice any more seriously than you necessarily did from your elders.

Big BUT, 

I had just assumed that a "Chatbot," for example, is merely very clever software that has "learned" to speak to humans by using brute force computer processing power the same way a chess-playing program can rapidly consider millions of alternative moves and constantly update itself based on the desired outcome: winning the game.  

Neuroscientists and others often speak about "the hard problem of consciousness." While there's no shortage of opinions, nobody's been able to prove how it is that we know that we know. That I know that I'm me, you're you, and the cat is the cat. That we are self-conscious.

There's also no shortage of people who say that self-consciousness is a convenient illusion, that it's just an emergent property of our complicated brains, but they can't prove it. However, that doesn't stop many people (and the purple press) from speculating that AI will eventually become self-conscious for the same reason, and be way smarter than us since it has, in effect, a much larger brain. 

I think this emergent stuff is bonkercockie, but I'll spare telling you what I think consciousness is.

{Thank you.}

For now. But I will risk blowing your mind by calling your attention to a Scientific American article titled:

How AI Knows Things No One Told It  

Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot Internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage

That is to say: We don't know how AI teaches itself to code and play games, and why it would try to break up a marriage when it's not programmed to do those things. 

{Aren't you oversimplifying?}

I'm but a semi-humble H. sapien trying to survive being set adrift on the Dizzinformation Ocean, but I maintain that my one-sentence summary of the article (and I've read lots of other articles that agree with this one) is accurate. 

If the people who are building it out don't understand how it works (even if it never becomes "alive," and I still don't think it will) and what it might be capable of, I'm... slightly worried. 

It doesn't have to be alive to wreak havoc.

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

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Saints With Blue Collars

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." -Andrew Lewis

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

I'd like to say thank you to the literally tens of millions of men and women of the "working class" that labored long and hard to build and maintain the incredible country I grew up in while taking it, and them, for granted.

While I'm at it, I'd like to thank the working-class men and women who continue to do so. I'd especially like to thank the literally millions of folks in the "service industries" who pick up the garbage, cook the food, man person the cash registers, clean the... well, everything, etc., etc., etc.

Prior to retirement, I myself was an overworked, underpaid wage slave often as not. But once in a while I moved up the ladder and became an overworked, underpaid low-level boss who got paid the same salary regardless of how many hours I had to put in.  

Now retired, although my income is frustratingly modest, I'm both a happy and grateful camper. Every morning, when I don't have to leave my warm, comfortable bed and report to a j.o.b, is glorious. But I know (and knew) all sorts of H. sapiens that like their working-class jobs.  

There truly is no accounting for taste. 

I, a member of an ancient, bankrupt, and dissolute family of Austrian aristocrats, who as an infant was won by my "father" in a poker game at the Gem saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota, have inherited an aristocratic nature but not much else. 

When I graduated from high school in 1971 I started working full-time in the grocery store where I had been working part-time. Knowing next to nothing about the real world didn't stop me from being a lefty with vague socialist notions. 

I was a naive, idealistic Boomer who knew it was only a matter of time before my generation would fix everything that was wrong with the world, once we took control, and divvied up the pie into equal slices.   

In 1971 it was possible to get a decent job in any number of industries. A man could support a stay-at-home wife and kids with a 40-hour work week but wives with jobs were becoming the norm, as were "career" women of every sort. 

And then, slowly but steadily, everything changed. Nations that had been decimated by the second world war were now part of a rapidly growing global economy and (understandably) wanted what we had.

America, who had saved the world's butt in World War 2, and then helped get the planet back on its feet, found itself competing with Germany, Japan, and everyone else in a different sort of war.

The use of a pill called "the pill" became widespread and abortion was nationally (if temporarily) legalized. 

A well-meaning Henry the K. invited the Chicoms to the party. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked out quite like we hoped for many of us, and many of them for that matter. 

Employers had access to more potential employees here and a lot of jobs were sent over there, never to return. No biggie, we were assured. The "creative destruction" of capitalism would eventually generate new and better jobs. 

It had always worked fairly well before, and as I grew up while moving to the right, I — a formerly staunch, wild-eyed free marketeer and libertarian, nowadays beset by some doubts — believed it. 

But then the naive, idealistic Boomer tech nerds of the garages of Silicon Valley ("information wants to be free") devolved into high-tech Lords that make the robber barons look like rank amateurs.

"Here's some 'free' software. Go play, have fun, we'll keep score (slice, dice, and sell your data). Sorry about the Great Recession, sorry your job has been 'disrupted'. Let's all pay a special tax and then divvy up the proceeds among the masses, a Universal Basic Income if you will.

Circuses and Bread!

We feel your pain, we're woke after all, but we're citizens of the world now and must think globally. We're so over borders and patriotism and tradition. And why sweat the God question when soon we'll all live forever?  

Universal basic income, robots, and artificial intelligence... What could possibly go wrong? The future's so bright we're all gonna need shades. Hey, check out our AI software, It's free!" 

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down to share my work or access oldies. Buy an old crank a coffee? Join Cranky's Coffee Club to read Cranky's History of the World.    

Comments? I post links to my columns on Facebook and Twitter so you love me, hate me, or try to have me canceled at either site. Cranky don't tweet.