Mount Hope

We recently visited Mount Hope cemetery in Rochester. This was once a major pilgrimage site about civil rights and women’s voting, since both Susan B Anthony and Frederick Douglass are buried there. We dutifully trudged through some overgrown hilly rambles.

I knew this was a “sister” cemetery to Mount Auburn in Cambridge, where Joan and I had frequently bicycled to spend a pleasant afternoon when we were young and poor. Those manicured grounds gave every indication of being an English estate for dead people temporarily residing underground. Everyone ignored the names on markers and mausoleums and simply enjoyed the quiet nooks and vistas.

I’d expected something similar at Mount Hope. But I was rather reminded of an old oil painting series of “empire at its height”, “empire in ruins”. You could detect that the initial spirit was the same, but Rochester lost its economic and spiritual power. Very like visiting the remains of the Roman forum as shown in 18th century pictures.

Perhaps there is a lesson here. Although I admit I take lessons from all cemeteries – new, old, well kept, overgrown, even forgotten. It’s always about mortality, insignificance, human spirit, and hope. Not necessarily in that order nor equally strong, depending on my mood.

I’m grateful for the physical reminder. Ashes may better fit a crowded throw away civilization, but there is a certain morbid joy in encountering such forgotten past lives. A useful humility. A surprising reassurance that my own life is okay. Weeds and all.

Outsourcing Existence

Humans are not a solitary species. A baby alone dies. Most hermits at any age also do, or more rarely eke out a miserable existence. Self-sufficiency is fine only in moderation. We’ve no doubt been outsourcing since the discovery that specialization is useful, even when separating the hunters from the gatherers. Since then barter economies and all the rest have followed almost inevitably, often driven by technological change.

There have been protests that we’ve gone too far. Ancient Greeks regretted that we outsourced our strong memory to writing. Conservatives wept as manly yeomen farmers became effete potters in a city, unable to grow grain or milk cows. Today many fear that having work done by machines will destroy society.

I agree. But only to a point.

I’m not quite a luddite, but I’ve often found it more satisfying to do things for myself rather than outsource tasks to others. I like to do my yard work, I enjoy cooking. I often manufacture my own entertainment by creating or fixing things.

The key is, of course, that I CHOOSE to do so. I don’t want to be forced to cook or mow, or for that matter to harvest grain and milk cows.

Many have begun to fear the effects of AI. Will we outsource all of our intellectual skills to silicon, outsource experience to virtual environments, outsource body health to medicine and drugs? Outsource existence itself, so there is nothing left but an empty ignorant fluff ball.

I don’t know.

On the other hand that does sound a lot like the original garden of Eden.

Robust AI

There is real danger in AI – as there is in any technology on which civilization depends – and it is already present. Its current abilities can be used by bad people to learn how to do awful things, including eliminate lots of others or destroy countries. We can imagine it used to create plagues, wreck trade, or start nuclear wars. However, in itself, destroying humanity by becoming a supermind overlord seems quite unlikely. There are two reasons for that.

One is that there are many AI actors already, and it’s increasingly likely they could turn against one another if directed to do so. They live in a physical ecosystem in which they can hardly shelter from one another without becoming ineffectual themselves.

The second is the ecosystem itself. Servers, optical fibers, satellites, power sources. Hard to see how any overmind could transition to full physical power without being stopped by organic entities using various kinds of violence. The world, after all, is large, and humans numerous, nasty and independently operating units.

That fragility is also a danger to AI use. If all the food is produced by AI, it is simple for catastrophe to end the food supply. If transportation depends on AI, ditto.

Human networks, for all their faults, are robust, self repairing, and handle new problems pretty well. Silicon, not so much.

Normal

Children accept almost any conditions as normal. As we get older we tend to look around and adjust our individual outlook to our culture. And as we age even more and more, we find it harder and harder to accept inevitable change.

Of course, there are different types of “change”.

The most oxymoronic is what I will call static change. It is exemplified by death or big events. An old tree that has been around “forever” is suddenly gone. Parts of landscape, ways of life, friends and relatives, once eternally available, now exist only in memory. Depending on that memory we cheer or regret what has vanished.

Then there is a creeping constant change in daily life patterns. What used to be normal is no longer. How we work or play, for example. What is our typical daily schedule, how vacations and holidays are different from “back then”. All this is usually gradual and we accept it with good grace. Just life.

Finally there is the most elusive and profound, which is trend change. Our expectations, which often drive our logical existence. The job should pay more each year. Prices will remain about the same day to day. Our health will last. Whole cycles and patterns integrated into our plans and imaginations.

It is the last, more than any other, that causes revolutions. If we worry that jobs are going away or food will become scarce or enemies are on the way. When “normal” expected trends change, watch out.

For that often means real daily change may arrive soon.

Great Expectations

In many horror films a group of well-off happy teenagers are beset with a mysterious dangerous evil. The immediate simple responses are to hide or run away (they always choose to hide). The correct but more complicated actions would be to stay together with whatever weaponry they can find, call the police and parents, maintain contact, and put as much distance as possible between them and whatever while staying in the open.

Our own social horror worries are numerous and affect well-off happy people. Crime, wages, health, job uncertainty, children’s future, finances, climate change, global menace, inflation, education, and you can continue the list. Our immediate simple response is to whack away with simple government policies, which in turn whack away with simple slogans and usually ineffectively transient actions. But, like the kids in the horror film hiding in the shed, we all feel better for the moment.

So if we “just” clean out immigrants, remove regulations, lower taxes, jail anyone we don’t like, ignore snotty experts, get back to the good old days – everything will once again be perfect. Of course most of us can’t agree on what any of that means, how to do it, or if it would work.

But we have great expectations. Like the movie victims, we know blindly running somewhere else must save us. No time to think. Thinking is for those useless pointy-headed experts.

So far, most of the actions based on such great expectations seem to have had the usual result.

Time to scream again?

Adversarial Justice

Once upon a time we were taught the glories of the jury system, adversarial justice with lawyers jousting, and the concept of innocent until proven guilty. Those worked remarkably well in the good old days, but times have changed. Look at it one by one.

Juries are a huge inconvenience to most people, and are rarely necessary. Certainly not 12 people in person listening to arcane arguments. Then the adversarial system itself, expensive as hell, courts and judges and lawyers where those with the most money usually win, and in any case the proceedings themselves are too theatrical and slimy to give real satisfaction of justice done. And as for innocent until proven guilty – just a defense lawyer lie. Filmed evidence, revealed details of previous crimes, all the crap of the 12th century hardly relevant in an era of photography, cell phone locations, and DNA.

Actually, that is why a lot of trials end up in plea deals.

Now I know all evidence can be manufactured or falsified. But in most situations that’s hardly worth the effort. At this point, perhaps we should ease back on worrying about letting hundreds go free lest one innocent be convicted. The odds have changed.

Just another example of how our ancient constitution and irrelevant traditions betray society in the modern world. The whole thing should be taken apart, streamlined, and rethought. Taking into account technology and an interconnected world. Time to leave the methodology of the 12th century behind.

Capitalism’s End

(With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke)

The mythology of capitalism has been established as pervasively as was the divine right of kings at the close of the middle ages. Capitalism, claims the dogma, makes society healthy, wealthy and wise. No other human system works as well and never will.

Things change. Those kings were deposed, beheaded, or shackled with constitutional oversight. New forms of government arose, sweeping away kingly beliefs in mercantilism, aristocratic rule, religious social control. Many alternatives have been tried, capitalism emerged as one of the successful ones.

Things change. Clearly we have reached the end of the industrial revolution. Machines produce everything, including other machines. Humans remain in the economic mix, directing and inventing machines, filling niche services, and toiling in leftover areas like agriculture where machines are only gradually replacing them.

Things change. If current trends continue, machines will have taken over all the production, no need for human intervention at any stage. We need new ideas, but fanatic “capitalists” have become the ignorant priests and destructive luddites of our age, unable to imagine any other system, fearful of what they do not know.

Things change. Like kings, capitalistic corporations may be in their final moments, as those rulers once were.

Things change.

Are you ready?

1913

In autumn of 1913, the European-American world was content, fat, and happy. Europeans controlled the only areas of the globe and culture that they thought mattered. Americans led an exceptional city on a hill advancing to a perfected future. Both felt they were chosen, the rightful rulers of all others, and the guardians of civilization itself.

Intellectuals agreed. Countries were either stable or subdued. Logic and science were taming human irrationality, commercial interconnection made major war impossible. Henry Ford and others were demonstrating just how affluent modern mass production could make everyone. If anything, the rulers and masses were a little too complacently optimistic about the future.

Even the social unrest of the previous 50 years seemed to have settled down. Fiery socialist, communist labor agitators were more conciliatory. Gigantic strikes and revolutionary ideas were confined to a few backwaters. Even those short in duration. Most folks were fed, housed, and felt better off than they had ever been, expecting ever greater things to come.

Who could have predicted the next 40 years? What happened?

Even now, it’s hard to comprehend. One thing just led to another. At the end of it all, many smoking ruins, millions dead, politics unrecognizable. The very divisions of the political globe massively reshaped. And in spite of it all, massive technological industrial advance.

Yes, I do feel that September 2026 feels a lot like that autumn over 100 years ago. And, although I think some people feel the same way, I am pretty sure once again nobody has a clue what will come, or how to affect it.

AI Nightmares

A group of researchers have just claimed that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity within 10 years. It joins a long list of other scenarios from nuclear war to designed disease. Ours has been an age facing catastrophic end-of-everything fears for some time.

I’m convinced that any of an awful lot of things could totally and civilization as we know it. Not so sure about ending humanity – people are numerous, tough, and resilient. Hard to imagine nobody making it through an apocalypse.

Unlike many of the current explanations, my take is that AI would not direct the event, but would act as an enabler for some human agency. It is easy to imagine using AI to start a war or build a plague, for example. Alternatively, systems could easily and quickly become too AI dependent, meaning any breakdown or incapacity would kill millions or more with utility, food, distribution outages.

But AI actively ending humanity? I think not. It has no hormones, after all. And this evil monster has a pretty exposed brain in its data centers and power sources. Not to mention vulnerability to a strong EMP or direct missile explosion. We tend to forget how much of our own evolution has been guided by self protection – of which AI has little.

Anyway, it really is just one other worrisome possibility, to add to those of an old guy who grew up hiding under desks for protection from World War III.

Boredom

Our 10-year-old grandson has been surrounded by every exotic age-appropriate toy from the cradle on. Today he largely disappears into cyberspace. Nevertheless, for a few years now, he will suddenly stop what he is doing and claim “I’m bored”.

Depression, ennui, boredom are all related. I assume they must have evolved for some reason. After all, other mental states like pain, hunger, sleepiness or even love have at least a purpose we can guess at. But what possible survival boost could being bored offer?

In fact, at first glance, boredom would seem to be an anti-survival skill. You’re sitting safe and comfortably when you are goaded to expose yourself to possible danger. Often it is better to do nothing.

And then there is the extremely strange resolution pattern. Many things can be tried with no result. Still bored. But a little later the same activity might seem very interesting. Weird.

I haven’t a clue. Like everyone else, I just throw ideas at depression, ennui, or boredom. I try various tasks with only partial and temporary success. Then – I get fully interested.

Until the next time.