I won't go into excruciating details here. Let's just say the 20-year-old bald-tired Lincoln Town car I was being gypsy-cabbed home in from a delayed flight into Laguardia spun out of control at speed and crashed into a concrete barrier. It bounced off that barrier and rebounded into another barrier before coming to a stop half in the fast lane and half in the shoulder of the highway.
When I came to, I could see the particulate matter from the driver's airbag drifting down like the downy flakes described in Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In my addlepated state, I heard Frost's faux-New England accent slowly reading:
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
I called an Uber from that shoulder and a car came and got me
took me home. The ambulance that arrived reluctantly allowed
me that prerogative. I didn't go to the hospital until six hours
later when the pain grew too intense.
In the hospital, I went through a battery of the latest diagnostic
tests. Nothing showed anything amiss. Then an intern put his
actual physical ear to my chest. "I hear a rattle," he said. That
sent all the other doctors scurrying and concluding. With that
vital piece of information, a diagnosis fell into place.
Right now, I am reading the odd little book above. It's a book
about a set of forensic techniques called "experimental
archaeology." The basis of experimental archaeology is simple.
Looking at old documents and sifting through soil for pottery
shards and ruined temples and palaces can tell us a lot about
times long ago. But trying to learn and live with ancient mores
and ways tells you even more.
So Kean looks to find food on a parched veldt of 75,000 years
ago. Or makes beer and bread (the 30,000 people who built the
pyramids were paid in such) the way the Egyptians did 5000
years ago. Last night I read a bit on the best maritime
navigators the world has ever known--the Polynesians,
Melanesians and Micronesians who lived in what we call
Oceania today.
The navigators had no maps and no compasses. Stars are good
at night when the weather is clear, you can navigate by them.
But what about when the weather isn't clear and you can't see
the heavens?
The those navigators--men and women who explored distances
greater than any European, in boats that were longer and
roughly three-times as fast, would actually lay in the hull of their
ships and feel, yes, feel the currents.
It's way more complex than that. They probably used all of their
senses and absorbed hundreds of thousands of navigational
clues. Like my car-crash story above though, they laid hands on
the world around them to better understand the world around
them.
To that end, not too many years ago, I read the obituary of the
guy who founded Dollar General stores. Someone asked him
how he determined where to locate them. Finding the right
location, not far from people whose budgets need stretching but
close to people with money, as you'd imagine wasn't easy. And
he was great at finding sites. He said, "I look in car parking lots.
If they have oil-stains in them, I know it's a good location."
Right now half the people in the world seem to be trying to
convince the other half of the splendors and the efficacy of
artificial intelligence.
The word "artificial" should be a red flag.
There are all sorts of tools, algorithms, white papers, blue
ribbon commissions, powerpoint presentations, Ted talks and
such we can use to convince the convinceable that we have a
machine-made way that will invariably get us to an insightful
answer. In fact, the ad industry so over-uses the word "insight" it
incites me to anger. If ten-trillion dollars is being invested in AI,
five billion is being spend marketing it--the better to cram it
down our throats and up our keisters.
Still, there's really nothing as good as smelling, touching,
hearing, tasting, seeing and thinking. And thinking some more.
Those are the components of Human Intelligence.
I worry about a world that no longer believes in such things.
Or humans.
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