Artificial Progress.

It can’t have been lost on future entrepreneurs that with the advent of robots, AI etc the market for their new gizmos will be for ever diminishing because there’ll be fewer and fewer people employed and able to pay for them, and computers and robots have no need of products aimed at human beings only an adequate supply of electricity. Already a growing proportion of society is influencing the market to make cheaper and cheaper products because they can’t afford quality on account of being unemployed or on minimum wage. At times it seems our best efforts are aimed at designing ourselves out of the loop. No need for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker when you can buy six Mr Kipling apple pies for 80p made by the thousand in a massive machine a kilometre long with two operatives on a zero hours contract. When AI can design the machines, CAD can machine them, computers can control them and big data can find the one remaining person with enough money to buy one one begins to see the fault in the logic. It’s rather like the new self guided personal drone transporters that look a great idea when viewing the grid locked traffic from above but forward twenty years and the aerial chaos will be horrendous. And it’s the same with AI itself. Anyone who’s every used a computer will attest to the absolute and total arrogance of anything digital. Miss out a nondescript semicolon or forward slash and no amount of swearing and threats will cause it to change its mind. Turning the bloody things off and on again may work in binary but for humans it’s tantamount to a near death experience. So for any AI experts out there remember if you finally reach you goal of true human intelligence all you’ll achieve is, well true human intelligence and consider where that’s got us. And remember unintended consequences only occur when you’re operating at the level of a ten-year-old boy who thinks playing cricket in a greenhouse is a brilliant idea. It’s not a brilliant idea. 

Neoliberalism and Guns.

Just read a squillion words about Hayek and neoliberalism. I’ll simplify using firearms. Once guns were the province of kings and governments for use in wars. In the UK at least society at large didn’t have them, being too expensive or restricted by law, moral values and common sense concluding they were harmful to social well-being. Hayek argued that this arbitrary restriction was unnecessary in that every individual would of his own volition regulate the marketplace in firearms. When morality held sway his ideas were laughed at but as pseudo economics gained prominence moral values, being not numerically quantifiable, could be dismissed as mere opinion. The marketplace, as the product of all minds, would more perfectly reflect human activity and aspirations than any government. Thatcher and other political leaders commenced deregulation. The market place in firearms grew as people took advantage of their newfound freedom, the economy prospered and explosives manufacturers made healthy profits. People wishing to better themselves exchanged their handguns for automatic weapons and grenades and the wealthy for tanks and rocket launchers etc. Manufacturers promoted their use to settle neighbourly disputes and resolve differences of opinion. Comparethemarket.com showed tables of firepower, accuracy and speed. This economic boom created a new wealthy set that was armed to the teeth and unassailable. Even the government couldn’t control them. The poor soon found guns didn’t solve anything and reverted to moral values but were dismissed as irrelevant losers, though they still secretly hankered for a guided missile of their own. There ensued a great divide in wealth, firepower and morality.

Hayek’s grand plan had a basic fault. He failed to account for a variance in integrity. Some would approach the marketplace honourably and some with various amounts of self-interest and duplicity. The latter would gain sway due to their lack of honesty and distort the market towards the baser traits of human nature in effect forming a negative feedback loop. Good will would equate to failure. Given time an unregulated marketplace will inevitably support and empower the most morally corrupt. It will corrode human interactions and thus harm the common good. Who knows what will happen when I get my AK47 off ebay. 

Not Watching Phantasmagoria.

Just bumped into Jackson Oz an Americanzoologist, Abraham his Kenyan safari friend, a Los Angeles reporter, a quirky veterinary pathologist and a French intelligence agent in ‘Zoo’, a CBS drama about an army of genetically modified kids taking on animal powers, imagine teeth, claws and super senses, and attacking us generic humans. What will they do? I’ll never know, I turned it off. There seems a lot of this high quality phantasmagoria around, weeks of the stuff going direct to TV from Netflicks, Sky etc. I turned it off because it was virtually indistinguishable from news footage and factual documentaries. It began to worry me that my donkey brain might at some future moment conflate this ‘Zoo’ with a News at Ten report about Nigerian immigrants and conclude AlQuida are actually a genetically modified sub race created by Mosad to enlarge Israel to include North Africa, India and most of New York state. In other words I will begin to believe everything and nothing is or isn’t true. And in other other word lose all sense of what I know and either become malleable to the propaganda of the loudest voice or not trust my own senses to do anything about it even if I don’t believe it. Is Netflicks an arm of the KGB, is Donald Trump an Umpalumpa? See what I mean, you don’t really know do you? So I’m not going to watch any of it. I recon when the shit hits the fan they’ll need people like me who can still glimpse the real world. (and put up guttering)

E=mC2

E=mC²

It’s always, well not always but for many years now, struck me this should be one of a trio of equations. I think because it links energy, mass and velocity. Well not velocity exactly because its mix of time and distance as in miles per hour. In the equation C, the speed of light, appears a constant, a simple multiplying factor, but viewing time and distance, as variables like E and m the equation links energy, mass, time and distance, which is the constituent of space as space is measured by distance in all its three dimensions. Thus energy is not simply derived from mass times a constant but also from time and space. Are you with me so far? OK it’s easy to imagine from the equation more mass produces more energy but what if energy also relates to amounts of space and time? Or the converse space and time are variables related to energy? Like increasing pressure in a balloon (energy) increases the space inside it. Could our units of length only appear constant because we appear to be in a constant energy situation? In other words at the big bang, at super high energy, a meter might in our terms measure the smallest fraction of a millimetre and as energy disperses length and thus space increases. For example our unit of currency, a Pound, £, has been fixed for centuries but its value has decreased massively. We are so used to space being dimensional in terms of our fixed understanding and measurement of dimension it’s hard to imagine that space is a variable and doesn’t exist in something larger as a chair might exist in a room. It simply exists within the limits of itself much like the chair. Likewise time might in the larger scheme of things also be a variable. In both instances we’re fooled by our dimensional understanding of time and space from our own particular standpoint believing them to be constants. For example we believe time at the big bang was in the units as we perceive them. How can so much occur in a few milliseconds? But if time and space at that point were hugely different to our perception of them now and have continually changed in the intervening period how long ago was it and how big was it? Entropy suggest energy and matter degrade to a state of inert uniformity and recent science suggests a rise in dark matter which seems an inert sub-matter material. Maybe the conclusion of the whole process is a huge amount of time and energy spent creating a very large amount of totally empty space, somehow reminiscent of Donald Trump’s ego.