When I was young, fit and fast, there was a running club in New York that had a slogan, "They said sit down; we stood up."
That defiant ethos was very much in vogue among people of my generation. We grew up during LBJ and Nixon and the second amerikan Civil War--with race riots and racism often enforced by "authority" figures. What's more, Vietnam was sold to us by a passel of authorities telling us a passel of lies.
We grew up knowing how to "question authority." In fact, you couldn't consider yourself grown up if you didn't question authority.
We questioned all sorts of authority--from ossified rules, to ossified parents, to ossified vice-principals still sporting buzz-cuts.
Of course, as a generation we were as slavishly obedient as any generation ever. We just thought we were being antipodal. But, as I like to say, "blue jeans were what everyone wore to be different." Our rebellion itself was conforming.
We all rebelled as a group. All-together now.
All that said, I have a very bad reaction when someone tells me to do something or when someone tells me something too often. I immediately feel like someone's trying to gull me and I'm being force fed bushwa that will be good for someone but certainly not me.
That extends from meaningless demands to 'have a nice day' to asses who wear t-shirts that say, 'we're all creators, now,' to agencies that say, 'make dope stuff.'
As Ishmael spake, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball."
That's how I feel so often today.
More and more, I feel rebellious--and angry--over the siege against humanity being perpetrated by the trillionaire, non-tax-paying tech humanoids foisting "Artificial Intelligence" upon us with a binary bludgeon.
The phrase artificial intelligence in and of itself is a semantic thrust against common sense. There's no intelligence, really, involved. That's why, for instance, as advanced and life-threatening and splendid as we're told AI is, it still has a hard time telling a blueberry muffin apart from a chihuahua. My vaunted Alexa by Amazon gets stoopider not smarter as more and more prompts accumulate.
Meanwhile, the house across the street from us up here on the Gingham Coast is being added to, and the construction guys quickly knocked out the cable that gives our little cottage access to something called xfinity internet.
If you believe in the salutary power of AI to help people, to resolve issues, and the "intelligence" part of AI, I dare you to spend more than six minutes typing into one of xfinity's dozen or so so-called AI-empowered bots.
I doubt despite the over billion dollars comcast spends showing people gushing over their giga speeds and the faux live faux
blondes in faux call centers who are faux smiling while helping you, that you can find an experience outside of reading about the trump misministration that does more to make you want to buy a fox-hole obliterating flame-thrower to burn down the nearest (pick-one) monopoly that takes a bit out of your soul with every passing tweezer-full of evisceration.
I can get no help.
I am finally promised a tech will show up at my house between 10-2. But first a phone call that tells me I don't really need a tech, I can use xfinity's diagnostics to fix the problem. The same thing their AI-"enabled" bot told me 31 times after I typed 31 times, "a wire has fallen. I can't use your diagnostics." The woman on the phone from xfinity repeated everything the bot said and I repeated everything I said. She told me that the bot didn't note that. Because the AI-"enabled" bot only answers the questions they want you to ask.
It's a sham.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is also in the act.
Why is their AI "co-pilot" automatically put into every doc I open? I don't want it. I didn't ask for it. It annoys me. I have to turn it off each and every time I want to type, costing me time. There's no way to override the flatulence they've built into their system. And with each flaming fart of fatuous, we're told once again about the genius of it all.
Have you seen any genius?
Have you seen any seamless?
You might have "friction-less payments." That is if nothing ever goes wrong. Try to resolve something and you'll have more friction than a ton of gravel in a stale piece of cheesecake.
Meanwhile, as an antipode to AI, I've taken to keeping a running tab of things I read, see and hear that delight me. Things that make me think or laugh or thlaugh--that delightful and rare combination of amusing thoughts.
With each one I write down, I say, "could AI have done that?" The answer is always the same.
Also, someone invariably will call me a Luddite, without really knowing what a Luddite is.
I am not anti-tech.
I am pro-proof. I'm anti-making things suck and telling us they're better.
Show AI making my life better (by my definition of better) and I'm in.
--
I found these three things over the last two weeks. Very human.
1. A description of the old New York Yankee right-fielder, Hank Bauer. One team-mate said his face was so grizzled and care-word, it looked like a clenched fist. The great Dodgers' manager Tommy LaSorda said, "Bauer's face looks like it could hold two days of rain."
2. Christopher Marlowe, the playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare wrote a line many assign to Homer. In writing of Helen, the world's most beautiful woman, who was abducted by Paris, thus starting the Trojan War, Marlowe asked, "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burned the topless towers over Ilium?"
The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov used that description to create a new measurement for female beauty. He called it the "millihelen." It's the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship. A person who was one millihelen beautiful was one-thousandth as beautiful as Helen.
3. "Long ago in the ancient Greek land of Arcadia, writes Plato, the people made sacrifice to Zeus on the slopes of Mt. Lycaeon, “Wolf Mountain."
"Their offerings included a single human being. When the meat of the animal victims was roasted and served to the worshipers, one bit of human flesh was mixed in. Whoever ate that bit was instantly transformed into a wolf."
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