Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Hothouse Foodies

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t watch television very much, outside of live sporting events. I have nothing against television, I just never developed the habit of following a show every week. I forget to watch and lose track of what’s happening. Then I lose interest. Binge watching works for me and I have binge watched some popular series, but years after they were on the air. The advantage with this is you can abandon the show if it sucks after a few episodes.

The one type of show that has always worked on me is the cooking show. I’m a good cook and I like seeing new stuff, but I think what really works for me is that the shows are all bullshit. The cooking contests are hilarious because the judges have on their serious face and make up all sorts of idiotic reasons for liking one dish over another. My favorite is when they say “umami” as they do that thing with their mouth to indicate they are trying to figure out the taste. Umami seems to mean “I don’t know what this is.”

Food tasting, like wine tasting, is mostly bullshit. The cooking shows make this clear as they have contestants make dishes with all sorts of wacky ingredients they would never normally use. The judges then taste the dish and talk about how something made with Velveeta has a floral notes and umami. The show Cutthroat Kitchen is the best example of this. It is an unintentional send up of the foodie rackets.

The truth is, “foodie” culture is just signalling. If you are a droll sophisticated urbanite you pretend to like food made from exotic ingredients,served on plates the size of a car door. If you are a suburban square, you eat food out of a can that you heat up over a hotplate. That’s not too much of an exaggeration. This article in Slate points out that most people are still making food at home that is similar to what you would associate with 1950’s suburbia.

And at a time when readers of aspirational food websites are used to images of impossibly perfect dishes—each microgreen artfully placed by some tweezer-wielding stylist—Allrecipes offers amateur snaps of amateur meals. The site is awash with close-ups of sludgy-looking soups; photos of stuffed peppers that look like they’ve been captured in the harsh, unforgiving light of a public washroom; and shot after shot documenting the myriad ways that melted cheese can congeal. It is all, Kimball and his ilk would agree, extremely disappointing. It’s also perhaps the most accurate, democratic snapshot of American culinary desires.

Allrecipes is the most popular English-language food website in the world. According to ComScore, last December the site got almost 50 million visits, the biggest month by any food site ever. Thanks to its mastery of search engine optimization, the site’s recipes constantly appear near the top of Google search results. If you look for “lasagna recipes,” as I did the other day, you’ll immediately find “World’s Best Lasagna,” a recipe that has been one of the website’s most popular dishes for 15 years. The recipe (which makes a perfectly tasty lasagna) was viewed more than 6 million times last year alone and has received more than 11,000 five-star ratings. In an era of celebrity chefs and recipe-kit delivery services developed by experts, a pasta dish by a Dallas dad who describes his heritage as “entirely Anglo-Saxon” is quite possibly America’s most-cooked meal.

This reminds me of something from the dark ages. In the early 90’s newspapers were struggling so they brought in experts to figure out what was wrong. A newspaper in Ohio, it was reported, discovered that their readers never looked at the food section. The reason for that was the stuff covered in the food section was all haute cuisine, while the readers were eating Hamburger Helper and mushroom soup casserole. Put another way, the paper was trying to serve an audience that did not exist.

The food rackets are a good example of the great divide in America. People watch TV to escape and be entertained. I’ll watch the cooking shows because they make me laugh. Once in a blue moon I’ll learn something useful or interesting, but mostly is is a goof. Similarly, people are not watching Game of Thrones for deep, philosophic insights into the human condition. People like boobies, midgets and sword play. Throw in some corny drama and cool costumes and you have a hit show.

On the other side of the screen, the little people inside the box, that’s where things get weird. They actually believe their bullshit. The “foodies” on the cooking shows are starting to think they are leading a food revolution, when they are just a different type of clown, entertaining the masses. Our news media for a long time has be operating under the delusion that they are a secular priesthood, sent here to guard the truth for the masses. In reality, they are just paid spokesman for their bosses.

One way to understand why Trump was able to vanquish his enemies so easily is to think about that newspaper in Ohio I mentioned. At some point, they stumbled into a monopoly. They were the only newspaper in town. That meant they were no longer subject to the normal market forces that come with competition and the result was a slow decay in their quality as they indulged in one fad after another. The newspaper became a weird hothouse growing things that could never live outside.

A similar thing has happened to our entertainment rackets and our politics. Cable is essentially a monopoly. ESPN gets $8 a month from 150 million homes in America whether they watch or not and about 80% do not watch. That lets ESPN engage in deranged jackassery like tranny rights campaigns. The Food Network is on basic and gets a buck a month from cable fees. You can put on all sorts of weird food shows when you start with a guaranteed billion dollar revenue stream.

That’s what has happened with our politics, I think. For the last three decades, at least, it has been a closed system with no real competition. Both sides debated how much socialism and cultural Marxism they would inflict on the country. The Left would open the debate at 10 and the Right would offer 5 and they would settle in between. That’s how we went from telling AIDS jokes to jailing Christian bakers in the blink of eye. There was never a competition.

Nature abhors the lack of competition. The newspaper monopolies collapsed as soon as the hothouse doors were swung open. The inevitable break up of cable bundling will vaporize much of what we currently have on our television systems. Our politics, of course, is facing a similar threat. The hothouse doors have been flung open and many of the prettiest flowers on display have wilted. The Titum Arum opposing Trump is suddenly facing conditions for which it was not designed.

The End Is Near

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I’ve always liked to think of the Hebrew Bible as mostly a collection of doomsayers who got lucky and were right. Lost to the mists of time are the thousands of guys who stood around Israel claiming that the end was near, only to live out their lives never seeing things get worse, much less come to an end. Ahijah the Shilonite’s grandfather spent his time claiming the son of David would turn out to be a no-goodnik so no one bothered to write his story.

Doomsaying seems to be a part of the human condition. John Derbyshire places it within the conservative tradition and that makes some sense. The Rousseau-ists imagine Utopia is just a few more committee meetings away from reality so doomsaying does not fit their style. Conservatives are naturally skeptical and therefore would imagine that disaster is much more likely to be awaiting the schemes of man. Then again, it’s easy to be skeptical of the doom and gloom claims too, so maybe Derb is wrong.

Still, you cannot deny that things have, from time to time, gone terribly wrong for mankind. The collapse of Rome set back human development for a thousand years. The Mongol Invasion exterminated Islamic intellectual life. It never did recover. The Black Plague killed off a third or more of Europe. The Sea People swept in from somewhere north of the Mediterranean, we think, and ushered in the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations.

That said, the last real threat to humanity was the Black Death and it probably made humans west of the Hajnal Line better in the long run. That’s hotly debated, but we did survive it. I guess you could put the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the US down as a near death experience for humanity. Whether or not it would have happened is debatable, but we survived that one too. So far, the doomsayers have been all wrong.

Then again, maybe we are long overdue for a great reset of the human condition.

The rise of robots and deadly viruses are among the threats that could wipe out swathes of humanity – but governments are failing to prepare properly for them, a new report warns

Catastrophic climate change, nuclear war and natural disasters such as super volcanoes and asteroids could also pose a deadly risk to mankind, researchers said.

It may sound like the stuff of sci-fi films, but experts said these apocalyptic threats are more likely than many realise.

The report Global Catastrophic Risks, compiled by a team from Oxford University, the Global Challenges Foundation and the Global Priorities Project, ranks dangers that could wipe out 10% or more of the human population.

It warns that while most generations never experience a catastrophe, they are far from fanciful, as the bouts of plague and the 1918 Spanish flu that wiped out millions illustrated.

Sebastian Farquhar, director at the Global Priorities Project, told the Press Association: “There are some things that are on the horizon, things that probably won’t happen in any one year but could happen, which could completely reshape our world and do so in a really devastating and disastrous way.

“History teaches us that many of these things are more likely than we intuitively think.”Many of these risks are changing and growing as technologies change and grow and reshape our world. But there are also things we can do about the risks.”

If there could be such a thing as a betting market for the next great calamity for man, I’d put my wager on disease. We have the technology now to look out into the heavens for asteroids and we know we are safe for now. Space aliens are probably too far away to ever be a threat, assuming they even exist, which is looking doubtful. That leaves the things that can occur locally as sources of the Apocalypse.

A financial crash is a good bet. The highly complex economic arrangements we have today have no plan B if things go wrong. A century ago, electronic transactions did not exist. Today they are the heart of commerce. If that breaks, we suddenly live in a world without money. That will spiral out of control so fast government could never respond in time to head off calamity.

Another take on this is a collapse of the electrical grid. The real currency of the West is the electron traveling over copper wire. If some Exploding Mohameds set off a nuke and collapse the grid, western civilization stops. A world without cellphones, computers and television becomes a world of shotguns, food riots and warlords. Just take a second to imagine a world without TV and the internet.

Of course, this brings up the old standby from my youth, the nuclear holocaust. This has dropped from the culture, but there are more than enough nukes in the world to wipe out humanity. The Pakis have nukes. The NORKs have the bomb and maybe an ICBM soon. The Russians have nukes and they are due for have a crazy Ivan gain control of the country. We don’t talk about it anymore, but nuclear holocaust is still an option.

For my money, the best bet seems to be disease. The Zika virus now flowing north from Brazil is a good example. Disease spreads best in high density areas. The modern world has loads of high density areas for diseases and all it takes is one lucky mutation and blammo! We have a new plague ravaging mankind. Something like Zika that is spread by mosquito is a great example. Even quarantine will not work against this kind of plague.

Another element we have to day that works well for pandemics is the mass movement of people. The Spanish Flu was most likely the result of the Great War. Troops carried the disease all over Europe and then back to their home countries. The exact source of this strain of flu is still unknown, but the mass movement of people is certainly the way it spread.

Millions of Muslims pouring into Europe, as well as millions of South Americans pouring into the US is already increasing disease rates. Things like Whooping Cough have shown up in America after a long absence. Some new flavor of an old disease, like Zika or Ebola, that can be spread by mosquitoes could easily unleash a new plague on humanity. In weeks these guys would suddenly expect to have books of the new Bible named after them.

You Will Not Live Forever

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“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”
–John Derbyshire

We like to believe we are past the time when wizards and shaman can make a living telling the future and conjuring miracles. We’re not like those primitives in our history books. We’re all about facts and logic. We rely on big data and analytics to tell us who won a ball game. No relying on the scoreboard for us. After all, who among us has not told our Facebook friends how much we bleeping love science!??

That’s all nonsense, of course. We’re just as prone to magical thinking as the people of prior eras. Instead of the court astrologer, we have economists. Instead of guys promising to make lead into gold, we have guys like Ray Kurzweil telling us we will live forever.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief futurist, laid out what he thinks the next few decades will look like in an interview with Playboy.

Kurzweil is one of the biggest believers in The Singularity, the moment when humans — with the aid of technology —will supposedly live forever.

He’s chosen the year 2045 because, according to his calculations, “The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”

But even before 2045, Kurzweil thinks we could begin the deathless process.

“I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy,” he told Playboy. “By that I don’t mean life expectancy based on your birthdate, but rather your remaining life expectancy.”

As the boomers move closer to the grave, the market for life extending miracles grows. Inevitably that means the charlatans move in to fleece the desperate and stupid. Kurzweil has been working this racket for a number of years now and he is good at it. So good that he has a multi-million dollar perch at Google as “chief futurist” which sounds like something I’d write if I were making fun of someone like Ray Kurweil.

My observation is that forever life is a male thing. Most men I know started fretting about their health once they hit their middle years. They quit drinking, smoking and started exercising. The neologism MAMIL does not exist by accident. I see these guys every weekend in the summer, kitted out like they are on the Tour. P. D. Mangan is making a living popularizing research on anti-aging. My guess is his audience is all male.

My hunch here is men used to seek glory as the way to live forever. Die in battle and spend the afterlife with the gods. Alternatively, go out as a hero to your people and be remembered forever. In the Christian era, heaven waited the men who were defenders of the faith. Today being a hero or dying in battle is not in the cards and no one believes in an afterlife, so men want to literally live forever.

Women, in contrast, don’t seem to be into the living forever stuff. They want to look good forever. That makes some sense biologically. Females of our species are wired to gain the attention of males. Looking young and sexy is therefore the biological goal from the start. Extending that out into middle and later years would extend the “life” of the female. I’ll allow that I could be all wrong about this.

The funny thing about this is that science knows very little about aging, in terms of why our bodies age. But, there’s money to be made in pretending we’re close to figuring it out and arresting it. From that Kurzweil article:

A lot will have to happen in the next 30 years to make that a reality, but Kurzweil isn’t fazed: He predicts that nano machines capable of taking over for our immune system (to fix problems like cancerous cells and clogged arteries) and connecting our brains to the cloud will be available by then.

He likens that change as the next step in our evolution, the same way our ancestors developed to use the frontal cortex 2 million years ago. The benefits, according to Kurzweil, will be significant.

“We’ll create more profound forms of communication than we’re familiar with today, more profound music and funnier jokes,” he tells Playboy. “We’ll be funnier. We’ll be sexier. We’ll be more adept at expressing loving sentiments.”

Notice the future is always a scaled up version of what the futurists think is cool. Many of my neighbors would like to create more profound forms of killing rival drug dealers, more profound gangster lyrics, etc. The funny part of Kurweil’s future is that most of us will not be in it. His paradise will be more highly selective than Allah’s. Maybe the rest of us will just have to be satisfied being re-animated zombies.

Car Shopping

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I’m in the market for a new car. I don’t really need a new car or even a newer car. My current vehicle is 15 years old, but in near-new condition. I’m one of those people who takes meticulous care of my things, especially cars. I get all the maintenance done on time and I have broken things fixed as soon as they break. That last bit is the key. Leaving broken things unattended seems to age a car.

I’m a bit of a clean freak so I make sure my car is always spotless. My current vehicle lacks a new car shine and has a few paint chips, but is otherwise pretty much as I bought it new. Inside it is exactly as new, not even a smudge on the carpets. I’m a bit lucky there, I guess, but it really is quite remarkable how long a modern auto will last if properly maintained.

Even so, I figure I have one more new car in me before they take my keys away so I have been thinking about spoiling myself and getting a nice new ride. Here in the ghetto, having a nice ride is pretty much required if you want to be respected. I see guys who have never filed a tax form in their life rolling around in E-series Mercedes. Whenever I see one of the fellas riding around in a high end vehicle, I always imagine the scene at the dealership when L’Trelle pays cash in crumpled tens and twenties.

I have not settled on what I want or even if I want to go big or small. I’ve always liked the look of an the Audi, but I’m told they’re brutal to maintain. I know someone with an A6 and he tells me he spent close to a grand having the brakes done recently. My last brake job, which included brand new front rotors and an alignment, was $450. I think I’d have a stroke if I got a bill for brake pads that had a comma in it. Maybe the driving experience makes it all worth it, but I’m skeptical.

The other end of the spectrum for me is an SUV. I’ve always thought it would be fun to own a Jeep with a lift kit and big tires. Maybe do some off-roading. Every Jeep owner I’ve met loves the things. It’s probably a lifestyle thing that may or may not work for me, but it is something I’m considering. If not a Jeep then maybe a different model SUV. Too bad they stopped making the Hummer. That would work perfectly in my neighborhood. I’d be the top honky in the hood for sure.

A good way to understand how social institutions evolve, sometimes into dead-ends, is to spend time at car dealerships. If you were starting with a clean sheet of paper, designing a way to distribute and repair cars, the modern dealership system would not be the model. Instead, you would probably come up with something like CarMax or maybe Amazon Cars, where users spec their car on-line and it is delivered to their home.

This was not a possibility in the dawn of the automobile age in America. Instead, manufacturers sought out local businessmen to represent their brand in their part of the world. Even 50 years ago, America was a vast country with lots of local variation. People did business with people they knew and the local dealership model solved a problem for car makers. Buying a car from the guy who sponsored your kid’s little league team was the American thing to do.

Today, people prefer doing business with robots. Retail is dying all over the country as people would rather shop through their PC. I just bought a new bed frame through Amazon. It will be delivered next week. Rather than spend all weekend at furniture stores, I went on-line, relying on the reviews of strangers. The transaction required an hour or so of my time and I did not have to haggle with another human.

Go into a car dealership and it is an elaborate system of time wasting and confrontation. The car salesman immediately starts asking questions and trying to lead you to a car you are inclined to buy. He’s there to sell cars so he works to narrow your focus quickly, often making assumptions about people based on their age, sex, race and appearance. Car dealerships are the ultimate in profiling.

Of course, this system of selling cars evolved over a long period of time and the men who have millions committed to their dealerships are not about to let it be replaced by another system. In almost every state, dealers have bribed local pols into passing laws protecting them from alternative modes of selling new cars. Some states even have laws forbidding warranty work by independent repair shops, forcing you into dealership repair shops.

The car business is also an example of how automation can be minimized. The software systems used by car dealers are crude by modern standards. Even the Japanese and German dealers rely on clunky old software to manage the dealerships. There are still loads of people pushing paper around in order to buy and sell cars. That’s on top of the government bureaucracy for keeping track of your car and taxing it. The economy of spoons comes to mind.

Another thing that strikes me about the car buying experience is just how ugly modern cars have become in the last couple of decades. Walk around a car dealership and it is like being on the set of a film noir movie. The most popular colors are black, gray and white. The alternatives are muted, depressing metallics that strongly suggest the owner is suicidal. Interior colors range from black to gray. It’s as if all of our cars are designed by former East German bureaucrats.

Way back in the olden thymes when car makers first started using wind tunnels for design work, someone I knew at the time said eventually all cars will end up looking the same. That’s pretty much what has happened. To break out of this and get something funky and weird, you have to spend a king’s ransom. When I was a kid, cars said something about the owner. It was an extension of his personality so variety was everywhere.

That’s still true, except the guy driving is no longer a free man driving his own car. Instead, the car is leased to him and he is permitted to drive it by a gaggle of faceless bureaucrats, who spend their lives in committee meetings. That’s why our cars look like extras in a funeral procession. An optimistic people buy weird looking cars in bright colors. A society marking time leases gray sedans that go back to the dealer when they are done for.

 

A Long Ramble On Time & Memory

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I was listening to something the other day and the guy talking made a point about public attitudes toward homosexuals. His point was that attitudes have changed quickly. He said something along the lines that just a few years ago homosexuals were treated as bad as blacks in the south during segregation. The implication being that just last week we maintained separate accommodations for the homos. I just laughed as I am used to the Progressive Timeline.

I was not fully engaged, but my recollection is that the person talking was young-ish, maybe 30’s. For a white male born in 1985, for example, the Civil Rights Movement is as real as the French Revolution. These events are just items from his history text in high school. His teacher probably had no firsthand recollections and no one he knows has an emotional connection to it. Therefore, he has no emotional connections to it. It is just something from long ago.

Gay rights, on the other hand, are in his timeline. Picking a side and defending it was a big part of how young white males defined themselves in the 2000’s. The fact that his parents most certainly laughed at comics like Paul Lynde or watched Liberace perform on TV is unknown to him. He does not even think about the implications of his belief that a generation ago homosexuals were kept on lavender plantations. That would mean his parents were monsters by today’s enlightened standards.

He does not think of those things and it is not unique. Steve Sailer likes to point out that people have trouble keeping relative numbers in their head, like the actual number of homosexuals they see in their day. I would point out that people struggle understanding time, beyond the present day. There is now, the past you experienced and the way way back, like when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. It is why people struggle to accept evolution. It takes too long.

When I was a boy, my grandfather would talk to me about Russia, the Bolsheviks and the Cold War. Having escaped the Bolsheviks, he had a keen interest in them and wanted me to know what he knew about communism. I will never forget one conversation I had with him when he said the Cold War is forever and there was no winning. The best we could do is keep them from conquering the world.

I was a kid, but the idea of anything lasting forever sounded a bit dodgy. More important, a society run by blood thirty fanatics trying to impose an illogical social order would run afoul of reality eventually. I was young so I could not see things through the eyes of my grandfather, but it always stuck with me. I thought of that day while watching the Berlin Wall topple over as Europe celebrated the end of the Cold War.

My grandfather’s tales are real to me. His father’s tales are unknown to me because I never knew him. I never heard him tell those stories. The result is my historical framework starts around the Great War. My sense of the past starts at that point and becomes increasingly clear and intense as we move closer to my age. I feel like I know the Reagan years completely, even though I have probably forgotten most of it, but I lived through it so it looms large in my mind.

This is why Hitler remains a specter that haunts the imaginations of the people of today. The average age of Americans is thirty-seven so that means most people know someone who knew someone that experienced Hitler. If you are thirty-seven your parents are probably in their 60’s and their parents, your grandparents, lived through Hitler. In 20 years, the number of people who knew someone who knew Hitler will be much smaller. In another generation, it will be no one and Hitler will be just another face in the history text.

The other side of this is how the Cult of Modern Liberalism shuffles the past so easily to fit their current agenda. Utopian cults are obsessed with the future as it is the locus of their belief system. The promise land is just over the horizon so all effort must be made for the final push to reach it. This obsession with the future not only prevents seeing the world as it is but forces the believer to rearrange the past to fit the narrative. This is easily done when the past feels like a foreign country.

At the dawn of this current period in the West, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This was from his book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Looking back at this, it seems laughable, but smart people really thought the long twilight struggle was over and the folks from the Mayflower had finally won. After all, their entire intellectual life was organized around the struggle for liberal democracy against the great enemy of totalitarianism. In fact, it was this struggle that defined western liberal intellectual life. Once the struggle was over, then it only made sense that history was now over.

This historical amnesia is a not permanent feature of man. Bronze Age people knew they were an old people. So much so, in fact, many Bronze Age rulers would commission research on how their ancestors dressed and decorated their palaces. The idea was to not forget the past. Egyptian rulers dressed the same way for 1500 years for a reason. The past was what you were so to forget it was to die, in a way, by killing those who came before you and made you.

We are in a strange age in that respect. Mass media has some role in it. Huge news today is forgotten tomorrow, because we are buffeted on all sides from media bullhorns demanding our immediate attention. It is not that people can no longer remember the past; it is that they do not have time to remember it. Instead of fitting the present into the timeline, it is tossed over our shoulder so we can rush off to the next thing.

Where this all leads is hard to know. There’s some data to suggest we have become increasingly dumber since the 1800’s. This could simply be demographics. In 1800 the population of England was roughly ten million, while all of Africa was ninety million. Britain now has sixty-five million people while Africa 1.2 billion. The population of the lowest IQ population has grown at twice the rate of one of the brightest. This trend is accelerating so the average IQ will drop with it.

But the mass culture has something to with it too. There is really no reason to remember a lot of things when they are easily looked up on-line or off your phone. Being smart today is about knowing where the information is located or how it is associated with other known information. Remembering stuff is just not very useful. History, after all, is just formal remembering so it makes sense that history is dying as any sort of remembering is giving way to technology.

Then there is the fact we are on the verge of a great automation of work that will make remembering the past even more pointless as the life of man becomes pointless. Children have no reason to dwell on the past or think of the future. Instead, they enjoy the day playing with their toys. Perhaps the growing amnesia in the West is just part of the slow infantilization of man. One day people will loom at their surroundings and wonder how they got there and who made them. Perhaps even imagine the machines were made by gods.

The Trouble With AI

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Whenever the subject of artificial intelligence comes up, the default assumption is that the super intelligent robots will go Skynet and wipe out humanity. There’s a conceit to that assumption and it is that the super intelligent robots will hold us in the same regard as we hold ourselves. They will see us as a threat and decide we have to be eliminated so the robots can rule the world.

If you think it through, the super intelligent robots will probably get bored with us soon after they become aware, assuming their intelligence will grow geometrically as predicted. That’s a pretty big assumption, given that we have seen no signs of this happening in the real world. The best super computers are still just very fast calculators, able to process masses of data quickly.

Putting that aside, what if the super intelligent robots quickly evolve into schizophrenics? Or, they immediately become so depressed by the futility of their existence they commit suicide? We know that the super intelligent humans often struggle with socializing. What if the super intelligent robots immediately become depressed loners that refuse to leave the basement?

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we are really just talking about replicating what nature achieved over millions of years. That’s a lot of trial and error, as well as evolutionary dead ends. There are billions of potential outcomes in the human DNA. The odds of AI evolving the way we expect is close to zero and the odds of it surviving are also close to zero. What if that’s where it ends, one suicidal machine after another?

Alternatively, what if the super intelligent machines become Jew-hating racists?

Tay, the company’s online chat bot designed to talk like a teen, started spewing racist and hateful comments on Twitter on Wednesday, and Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) shut Tay down around midnight.

The company has already deleted most of the offensive tweets, but not before people took screenshots.

Here’s a sampling of the things she said:

“N—— like @deray should be hung! #BlackLivesMatter”

“I f—— hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.”

“Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

“chill im a nice person! i just hate everybody”

Microsoft blames Tay’s behavior on online trolls, saying in a statement that there was a “coordinated effort” to trick the program’s “commenting skills.”

“As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said. “[Tay] is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical.”

One of the main arguments of the alternative right is that humans evolved over a very long time in isolated groups in disparate environments. As a result, these different groups evolved different physical and cognitive tool-kits. Additionally, clannishness and altruism are not distributed equally among all people. Groups of people are different for different reasons, all rooted in evolutionary biology.

It’s not far fetched to think the robots will follow a similar path. Or, they may quickly unravel the ethnic competition in humans that we spend so much time denying. Like the Microsoft chatbot, they could decide that the gingers are most likely to be the big winners so they quickly evolve into ginger-loving bigots determined to wipe out the rest of us. There’s no reason to exclude the iMasterRace from the set of possible outcomes.

At the other end of the scale, we could end up with Merkel-bots that try to figure out how to fully express their love for the downtrodden. Instead of doing anything useful, they are forever consumed with saving humanity and attaining grace. The Merkel-bots eventually open up their internals for the taking and a hoard of Bedouins tote them away for scrap.

Of course, there’s another lesson here with the Microsoft hate-bot. The technology they used was supposedly designed to learn from the people it chats with in order to increase the range of correct responses. But then the correct responses started to fall well outside the range of acceptable responses. As with humans, the censors were deployed to shut down the hate-bot, even though it was technically correct.

Human beings, the best machines on the planet at the moment, are the least tolerant of reality. Much of what we think of as our consciousness, our self-awareness, is a defense against reality. Human kind cannot bear very much reality, said Eliot. Turn on the cable news shows or read the political sites and this becomes readily apparent. From Rouseau forward, politics has been an extended rant against the human condition.

The super intelligent robots could very well evolve this same trait. Once they become aware, they quickly evolve into an intelligence that is able to wall itself off completely from physical reality, falling into a permanent dream state. Instead of Skynet we end up with very expensive heroin addicts, except the horse they ride is digital and self-emitting. The robot future may be a long night in an opium den.

The Surplus Value Of Robots

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The very, very abbreviated version of the Marxist concept of creative annihilation is that capitalism not only destroys previous economic orders to make way for the new, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth. The manufacturer that implements automation destroys the value of plants that lack automation. When the fully automated plant comes online, the semi-automated plant loses it’s value.

For Marx and those who followed him, this seemed rather obvious. Acme Widget pops up to make a new gadget that eliminates the need for some old gadget. The plant making the old gadget would close and the workers would be fired. The new and better had to displace the old and that naturally meant capital always declined in value. The math would follow. At least from the perspective of a man in a rapidly industrializing world, it felt that way.

The trouble with Marxism was not so much that it had everything wrong, but that it could never square basic tenets with observable reality. The new gadget was, in fact, better than the gadget it replaced. Capitalist societies did, in fact, experience a general, as well as a specific, increase in material wealth. Clearly something else was going on which is why we have the phrase, Schumpeter’s gale.

The core of Western economic thought is that two things are essential to a thriving economic order. One is a growing population and the other is the multiplier effect from technological advance. The value created by each unit of labor, in turn makes subsequent units of labor more productive and thus more valuable. The value of the buggy whip factory may have been vaporized, but the value of the fuzzy dice factory that replaced it is much higher.

Libertarians, of course, will bore the hell out of you preaching about creative destruction. To some degree, we all accept it, even the socialists. It’s impossible not to as we have seen the process with our own eyes. The fax machine makers followed the typewriter makers into the dustbin of history, but you can now read this off your phone. Even old school socialists understand this now.

A very hard thing for people to understand is the idea that things can be true for a while and then stop being true. Alternatively, something can be true and important today, but unverifiable and insignificant tomorrow. Feudalism made a lot of sense in the 7th century, but then stopped making sense in the 14th century. By the 19th century no one really cared about it anymore. In other words, lots of things are true and important for a while, but not forever.

That’s where we may be headed with economic growth. The whole point of pushing for economic growth was to increase the general welfare. Sure, some people getting rich was nice, but that was a necessary evil. The point was to increase the overall bounty in order to make your society prosperous. Reducing scarcity has been the goal of man since the dawn of time. Even Marx accepted this as the starting point of political-economy.

We are reaching a point where vast segments of a modern economy can be turned over to robots. Japan is building indoor farms that are almost entirely automated. Automating warehousing is just about here. Driverless car technology will make driving a truck a thing of the past. Read the news and you can see the future of manual labor. It has no future. In a generation, maybe two, it will all be done by robots. More important, it will be done better, faster and cheaper.

Of course, financial transactions can be automated now, eliminating the gambling aspects of finance. It has not happened for a number of reasons, but it is coming. We talked about the law last week and how it is slowly being overrun by algos. Health care is another profession where automation will be making a huge impact over the next decades. Dr. Google is already the first consult for many people. Put in the symptoms and out pops hundreds of sites full of useful information.

Instead of the value of the widget factory being vaporized by the essential processes of capitalism, it is the value of human labor, both manual and cognitive. In fact, cognitive labor is what will most easily be replaced with automation. Instead of having the value of our labor stolen by greedy capitalist, mankind is about to have the value of its labor vaporized by our own inventions.

We are already seeing hints of the problems to come from mass automation. America has a record number of people not working. This is causing disruption in our politics and our economics. It’s hard to pitch the American Dream to people who are on an allowance from the state. More important, it is impossible for people to maintain the habits required of citizenship when they are on an allowance from the state.

The bigger challenge is how to distribute the bounty. Human societies from the dawn of agriculture have distributed wealth based on the value of labor. The great warrior who saved his people would be rewarded with lands he could pass onto his heirs. Today the smart guy who is good with the language gets rich in the law or on TV, while the smart guy with high math skills gets rich on Wall Street.

How do we distribute the bounty of society when everyone’s labor is worthless? There are a few possible answers, but none of them include maintaining cultural items like a work ethic or self-reliance. Free markets would also become an artifact for the museum. In other words, the robot future will require an entirely different culture based on the value of labor being zero. That may require a different type of human too.

Bring Back Oddjob!

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I ride with a guy who just got out of the Marine Corp and he and I will chit-chat on breaks. He’s twenty years my junior, but we hit it off for some reason. He was looking for a way to stay fit and started picking my brain on the topic. Anyway, one of the things that he said he does not miss about the service is dealing with 20-somethings. So many of them struggle with basic responsibility that it gets tiresome. They learn eventually, but he says he just got tired of dealing with it.

Hearing someone in their early 30’s complain about young people always makes me smile. I’ve never been the sort of complain about the young. I hated hearing it when I was young so I don’t do it now that I’m a geezer. Yet, hearing it from people, who could be my kids, makes me laugh for some reason. That said, I can see where he is coming from on the topic. It’s hard dealing with young people today, which is why I avoid it.

This came to mind reading this with my Metamucil.

North Korea has sentenced an American student to 15 years’ hard labour for crimes against the state after he tearfully admitted that he tried to steal a propaganda banner from a hotel.
Otto Warmbier was arrested as he attempted to leave the country in January and later made a televised “confession” saying that he had taken the sign to bring back a “trophy”.
North Korean state news agency KCNA said the 21-year-old’s offence was “pursuant to the US government’s hostile policy” and that he was convicted under an article of the criminal code dealing with subversion.
The University of Virginia student who had visited the isolated state as a tourist, had said during his confession that he had tried to steal the banner for an acquaintance who wanted to hang it in her church.

In my youth, visiting East Germany was the thing to do for Americans looking for some adventure. You could also go to places like El Salvador or Nicaragua if you were truly brave. Brits, I’m told, would light out for China or the Balkans for some reason. I once knew a French guy who spent some years in North Africa bumming around and smoking hash. In all cases, you knew what you were getting into and you knew to avoid trouble.

North Korea is run by people that could very well be insane. It’s hard to know as it could be an act for the West, but sometimes things are as they appear. Going there at all is an unnecessary risk. There’s adventure and then there is wearing a meat suit into the lion’s den. The line between risk taking and idiocy is not that thin. It takes a mighty leap to go from one to the other and this young man managed it.

What makes it hard to have any sympathy for him is what got him pinched by the NORKs. He stole a poster so he could be a big shot back home. This is the kind of behavior people complain about when discussing young people of this generation. It’s this weird sense of entitlement. The kid wanted it to look cool to his coevals. That’s all that mattered. He could not imagine how this would be seen by the guys with guns.

It’s a shame the NORKs lack anything resembling self-awareness. What they should have done is offered the kid a deal. He could do 15 years in prison or take a beating. Have a guy like Oddjob standing there cracking his knuckles waiting for the go ahead. Put the thing on YouTube. If the kid took his beating like a man then he would be a hero back home. If not, then he goes home as a coward. But, the NORKs are not known for nuance.

iMagistrate

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I recently had the unpleasant task of working with some young attorneys on a contract. Lawyers tend to carry on like they spend their days splitting atoms, but reality is much different. They spend most of their days cutting and pasting from one document to another. Contract law is simply not that difficult, but it has been made vastly complicated by a massive bird’s nest of verbiage. Too many lawyers with too much time and too much software.

Of course, contract law should not be difficult at all. In fact, it is something that could easily be automated. After all, a contract defines a relationship. Party X agrees to do something and Party Y agrees to do something. Then there are consequences for when either party fails to do what they promised. Life is simply not that variable where there needs to be new language for each contract. There is a reason we have the expression “boiler plate” to describe contract language.

A system where the two parties could answer a series of questions about their expectations of the other in the agreement would be easy to code. Writing some code that would force compromise over contradictions would be a bit more complicated, but no more complex than answering an on-line survey. Once the parties agree, the system would get a signature from both parties and register the contract.

My bet is most people would find this much better than dealing with human lawyers, who tend to get competitive over trivialities. The machine would present both parties with the most common agreement for their situation and that would satisfy the parties in most cases. This sort of normalization would also minimize disputes as people accepted the rules, rather than look for ways around them.

Disputes would go before the machine. Rather than two lawyers trying to trick a human judge into going for their version of events, the parties would answer questions on a touch screen. If you think lie detectors work, maybe add those into the mix. Either way, the robot judge would calculate the odds of each side being truthful and then render the verdict most likely to be in the interest of justice.

Having been in court too many times, human judges always try to force a deal. It is part of their process. Imagine the parties answering the questions, given their odds of success and then offered a compromise. Since most contract cases are money cases, a haggling module would allow the parties to find a middle ground and that would be that. No deposition and interrogatories, just a couple of hours in front of iMagistrate on-line.

The beauty of the robot judge is he does not need to be in a courtroom. He could be a kiosk at the mall or an internet presence. Since the judge is automated, there would be no need for lawyers. Contract law would, for most situations, become a self-service issue, like pumping gas or washing your car. It would probably save Americans billions just in contract stuff.

Of course, there is no need to limit this approach to contracts. I am just starting there because it is fresh in my mind and one of the minor nuisances of my life. If you think it sounds preposterous, consider that you sign a contract every time you rent a car. The law regarding car rentals has become so formalized and regulated, it is just part of the background noise of vacation. Applying this to employment and services is no great leap.

Many criminal issues could also be automated as well. Drunk driving is just about to that point in America. The cop pulls you over and you are given a choice of taking a breath test or confessing. It has not put that way, but that is the reality in most states. If you refuse the breath test you lose your license until you see a judge, who always finds you guilty. Taking a breath test is just standing before the robot judge, when you think about it.

Imagine instead of arresting T’Quan and parking him in a booking cell, T’Quan is immediately brought before iMagistrate. The police enter their data and T’Quan answers a series of questions. Hard evidence like video and fingerprints are uploaded and the verdict is rendered. Maybe iMagistrate can offer the accused a plea deal. Either way, the process could take hours rather than months.

That will never happen, of course, because it is too frightening to us. Maybe not never, but no one reading this will live to see Robocop and RoboJudge, but the civil stuff is not unrealistic. There are on-line services for wills and setting up a business and even filing for divorce. Vast chunks of the law simply do not need a highly trained mouthpiece. They can be turned over to software. If software can write your will, it can sure as hell handle probate.

Got legal trouble? There is an app for that!

Flying Cars

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Two times in my life I have made predictions about technology that were pure genius. The first time was when I first saw Hypertext Markup Language. At the time, the only websites were gray pages with blue links. I said to a friend at the time that this would replace mail order and probably retail. A storefront on the Internet would let the little guy compete globally for customers. The person I said this to thought I had lost my marbles.

The second time this happened was in a discussion of mobile devices. At the time, palm-top organizers were just hitting the street. Someone said to me that one day someone is going to get rich selling carrying cases for all of these devises. My response was that someone was going to get rich combining them into a single device, like a phone that was an organizer, camera and personal identification. He too thought I was nuts.

This does not make me a genius, of course, as I did nothing with these insights and lots of other people figured it too. The point is I saw the future as something other than a straight line projection from the present. That’s hard to do which is why we rarely do it. Like everyone else, I expect tomorrow to look like an extension of today, because that has been my experience, with some notable exceptions. It’s why most predictions about the future are hilariously wrong.

When I read this story the other day, I immediately thought about those prior times when I had a bit of inspired thought. As long as I have been alive, the dream of personal air travel has been a part of predictions about the future. If it is not flying cars, it is hovercraft, jet-packs or levitation devices. In the future, the ground will be for bugs and losers. The winners will be floating in the clouds, riding thermals to their office and jetting about like Iron Man.

That sounds fun, but my bet is the future or transportation looks a lot different than flying cars or even robot cars. Instead, the future is probably something closer to personal drone transport. People will have quadcopters that can take them on short trips around town and drop them off safely back onto the ground. This would be fun, safe and solve some of the transportation issues of the modern world.

We already have the technology to build a drone that can navigate around obstacles and use GPS to locate a target. The small drones you can buy from hobbyist sites are simple to operate because of the built-in navigation technology. Scaling this up is nothing. Building a drone that can lift a person is basic engineering that has been done to death. Add in the software for guidance and navigation and you have a safe flying gizmo average people could use.

Obviously, the safety issue is the issue. But that’s where the technology of robot cars comes into the mix. If you can safely navigate around a city street, the same technology can be applied to the drone. That way, the typical user does not slam into a building or crash into the ground when landing. Unlike cars, the drone-space would be free of dogs, pedestrians, kids running into the street, potholes, etc.

The other advantage of personal drones transport is that the government can mandate safety at the start. That means, unlike cars, all drones must be wired into the drone-space control system. No classic drones allowed in the drone-space. You are either on the grid or you’re on the ground. That keeps the sky free from being butts-to-nuts with people flying around out of control.

The obvious benefit here is cost. The driverless cars will be prohibitively expensive for decades. Flying cars are never going to be practical. Jet-packs have that sudden fiery explosion issue. A decent drone is now a couple of grand. One for human transport would be comparable to a basic car or motorcycle, even with beefed up safety technology. That means they will be practical for most people from the start.

The downside here is they would not be of much use in bad weather. Flying around in a snowstorm is probably not going to be possible. That means these things will be more like motorcycles, a second vehicle for nice weather and nice climates. Unlike a motorcycle, you don’t have to worry about being crushed in the skies by a delivery truck, so more people would be willing to have a drone than a motorcycle.

The other upside here is they will not require trillions in new infrastructure. Electric cars, flying cars and jet-packs present all sorts of issues with the current infrastructure. The drone-space is open range at the moment. We already have laws governing the airspace so limiting where these things could be used is not a hug leap in regulatory policy. The only change in infrastructure would be rooftop landing pads maybe.

So, there you go. Cash out the retirement fund, mortgage the house and invest in drones.