Essays
Even The Wealthy Are Not On An Island
I am not going to lie, I am happy to be at the end of my career rather than at the beginning. I have no doubt that in the context of a greed driven United States that the wealthy/power class see AI as removing their greatest cost, which is the people they employ. The ends is ever more wealth no matter the means. How might this actually look like? Well I think Daniel Miessler’s description of AI Maturity is as good as any.
The biggest problem I see ahead of us in the United States is that because any thing that looks like “central planning” is deemed anathema, no serious consideration, let alone action, will be taken on the impact to us as a whole. In a society that expects every able person to have a job so that they can take care of themselves, what happens where there are no jobs to be had?
Further, I think the wealthy class should be thinking about this because for where that wealth actually comes from. All of their wealth accumulation is derived from us spending money on products and services they sell. What happens when there are no jobs for people to earn money to therefore spend money that makes them rich?
On Joy
I think the best advice I can give anyone is to learn the difference between happiness and joy. Most may think this is not good advice because they think happiness and joy are the same, but they are not.
Happiness is an emotion, joy is a state of being. Happiness relies on externalities, what makes us happy are those things outside of our self that trigger the emotion that we call happiness. Because happiness relies on things other than ourselves, our happiness and unhappiness is outside of our control.
How is it then that some people who are in situations most would consider unhappy such as poverty, starvation, or war, seem happy? It might be that what it is needed for them to be happy is much different than yourself, or what you think you see as happiness is really joy. People in joy choose to see the world differently, to practice gratitude (another choice) for what they have and for who they are, than to be unhappy for want.
Joy is a state of being.
Joy is what comes to mind when I read this blog post by Joan Westenberg that asks this question:
Imagine your 80-year-old self looking back at the day you’re having right now. What would they give to inhabit your body again, to have your knees that don’t ache, your schedule that seems so overwhelmingly full, your problems that feel so urgent?
Joan goes on the write:
We have pretty good data on what actually happens to people’s subjective wellbeing as they age. The U-shaped curve of happiness is one of the most robust findings in social science: people report being happiest in their twenties, hit a low point somewhere in their forties or fifties, and then happiness increases again in later life. The interpretation of this finding is contested - are older people actually happier or just better at regulating their emotions? Do they compare themselves to worse alternatives or have they genuinely figured something out?
And continues:
Does this mean the thought experiment is useless? Not quite. Its value is in what it reveals about your current priorities. When you imagine an elderly version of yourself looking back, you’re running a sort of values clarification exercise. You’re asking which parts of your current life would seem precious from a distance, which anxieties would seem trivial, which opportunities would seem worth taking.
I commend the entire post for your reading. I also recommend The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.
Copying Blog Posts To Day One
Manton has added cross posting of what I write here to a Day One Journal. I also learned via his post about this feature that there is a way to export blog posts to a Journal using the Day One CLI, which I did. Unfortunately, it looks like the export function doesn’t handle post titles. I am hoping that by getting my posts in to Day One I can find a way to get a nice hard copy version for archival.
Really Solving Problems Means Knowing Root Causes
I was born in 1966 and thus part of Generation X. The primary norm that I was taught to be in good standing within the U.S. social order can be summed up in the phrase, “get a job!” It is that phrase, and all of the expectations around it, that I think is at the root of our problems in the United States today.
The obvious reason why society wants one to “get a job” is so that others in society do not have to provide for me. We not only glorify the self made man, we demand it! Another, unspoken reason why society demands I “get a job” is that having a job provides me the money to buy things that make others in society wealthy. Nearly all of the wealth in the United States is because someone else has spent, and thus given them, money. (Think about the real reason why Trump gave us those stimulus checks at the beginning of the COVID Pandemic.)
And of course, this also means that those who have a job are superior over those who do not have a job.
Today the United States government is “shut down” because no Democrat Senators will vote yes on the Continuing Resolution law that approves the money needed to keep the government running. Democrats are voting no on the CR because they want the government subsidies that lower the cost of health care people buy via the Affordable Care Act extended. The subsidies are expiring at the end of the year and if not extended the resulting monthly health care premiums people will have to pay in 2026 can be double what they paid this year.
Republicans who oppose the ACA generally do so because they do not want to help pay for healthcare for those people who do not “get a job.” Of course, they assume that anyone who has a job can pay for their own healthcare, which itself is not necessarily true. Many people who get healthcare via the ACA do have jobs. (As do many people who get food stamps.)
So, “get a job” dogma is at the root of our current government shutdown. I would also say that dogma is also the kindle for the wildfire set by Trump and his supporters.
The thinking that those who do not have a job are just lazy, that anyone who has a job has enough to money to live on, and that healthcare (and thus the right to live) is only a privilege for those who have a job is the root cause of the problems of our times. How can this be for a so called Christian nation? We might say Christ is King in the United States, forgetting how Jesus answered Pilate when he asked whether Jesus was king of the Jews. And if Christ is King then shouldn’t we be following his commandments?
If you think the problems we have are bad now, consider what is going to happen when “get a job” clashes with the elimination of jobs by Artificial Intelligence. Further consider that many of the jobs AI is going to eliminate are the very white collar jobs that so many are told are needed for them to be wealthy.
Jesus does have the answer, but many in the United States do not like it.
Translating Handwriting To Text
Betting On Dependencies
Earlier this week a chunk of the Internet went offline, which should be a surprise for those who know the history of the Internet.
During the COVID pandemic just a few years ago prices of nearly everything in the United States increased because most products that we depend upon are manufactured in countries outside the U.S. and the shipping of those products was disrupted.
Both of these events exposed how fragile normal functions have become, and they should be lessons learned about the risks of depending upon an external entity. I think those who have long been warning us about these risks have been drowned out by the strong emphasis on open source and Internet application development that demands the use of external libraries. The culture says that one should not re-create the wheel and instead use the code already written by others as building blocks for your own application, thereby speeding up development in a race to toward making money.
The 21st Century is being built on blind faith of dependencies, with seemingly little thought on their risks, which is why all of the AI hype I see sets off nothing but alarm bells in my head. I see companies betting their future of the AI developed by a handful of other companies. I see the U.S. stock market driven up by the inflated value of those handful of companies even though most of those companies have not made any money.
What happens when capitalists stop throwing money at these companies when they realize there is no return? We saw this in the dot.com boom, as fast as those companies ran up they went out of business. So, if you are CEO of a company and you are “all in” on AI as the future for the products or services your company produces, realize you are “all in” on a handful of companies that might be gone tomorrow and ask yourself to which direction you are leading your company towards.
Physical and Metaphorical Demolition of America
While I thought that civil war could happen again in the United States, I never thought I would live to experience democracy die. I find the pictures of portions of the White House being demolished on the whim of a single person to be breathtaking. Unimaginable only a few years ago, now seemingly barely a blip on the news.
For years it became generally accepted to bitch about the U.S. government’s failures and inefficiencies. Government is too slow, they say, not knowing that was the very point. Dictatorships are more efficient but at the price of being enslaved to the whims of the dictator. Dictators being human are as prone to horrific acts in response to greed and anger as the human who decides to burst in to an elementary school and kill everyone inside. Worse still is the fact that the U.S. dictator has access to weapons of mass destruction far worse than AR-15s.
Freedom For Whom
I am reading Thomas Zimmer’s essay about Russell Vought that I think correctly states what is happening in the United States. The MAGA project is the destruction of the United States that they view as already been destroyed. In their view this is the third American Revolution, the second American Revolution started with the New Deal and culminated in Obama’s election. I think in order to fight against this I think more attention needs to be put on the question of what comes after the U.S. government is entirely destroyed.
Rooted in this question is the reality that these people only place value in freedom for themselves, freedom is not for their opponents. Democracy, including the U.S. Republican one, allows the possibility of one’s opponents gaining power and therefore impeding upon their freedom. Consequently, Democracy is flawed and the only way to assure their freedom is a dictator. The form of what is in place may have the appearance all one thinks of about the United States, a Congress, President, Supreme Court, but for that structure to remain there must be guarantee the opposition can never gain power.
Consider the current government shutdown, doesn’t it feel different to you? The difference is that the current Republicans behind the shutdown do not fear the voters, they don’t fear not being re-elected, because they believe so long as the fall in line with the MAGA project they will continue to have a share of power.
Of course, anyone who understands what is going on ought to be sober enough to know that when everything relies on human feelings rather than laws sooner or later you can, and likely will, become the opposition to that person. Marjorie Taylor Green might being finding this out right now.
The Viwoods AIPaper Mini
Reading The Web
Today I finished reading Stephanie Booth’s three series posts on “Rebooting The Blogosphere” cited by others who I follow. In general I agree with Stephanie’s points and her description of a web reading tool that easily provides a way to create blog posts based on another post being read, create new blog posts from scratch, and convert a comment you are writing on another’s blog into a full post for your own blog. Her suggestion assumes one is reading within a RSS reader app like NetNewsWire.
Like Stephanie I would prefer less friction between reading and posting about what I am reading to my blog. The problem, however, is that most RSS feeds that I follow do not include the full content of a post. The sites that rely on advertising usually include just a link to their site or a snippet only so that you must end up going to the site to read the entire post.