Category: Artificial Intelligence

Could it be . . . aliens?

“Good evening, Otto. This is Agent Rogers. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Since time is short and you may lie, I’m going to have to torture you. But I want you to know, it isn’t personal.” – Repo Man

When BMW® owners learn to drive, what car do they switch to?

It appears that absolutely everything that could go on is going on this week.

  • Someone blew up a major dam. It’s okay, because it didn’t contain gallons, just cubic meters of water, but everyone is talking nuclear catastrophe.
  • Trump is about to be indicted for doing something every other president has done, and that Hillary Clinton did twice last Sunday. This will bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0.
  • Joe and Hunter Biden are proving that the phrase “Biden Crime Family” is probably how they’ll go down in history since it looks like they took millions from the Ukies. This not being punished would probably bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0, but I think Biden will be getting a walker soon.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yellowstone Caldera recharged with magma and made Wyoming the first state with more senators than surviving population.

I’ll certainly get around to those stories, since it’s looking like that chaos will be flung about like monkey poo in a zoo, but let’s go for what, on any other week, would be the biggest story:

Aliens.

Or something.

Could this be the latest chip? (as found)

When I was a kid, there were these quaint items where someone would print out what is now part of the Internet and call it a “magazine”.  I think there was one called UFO Magazine™ but there were various magazines and they were all printed on pulp paper and pretty sketchy.  And many (not all, but many) of the folks surrounding the UFO phenomenon were sketchy, too.

The reason that UFOs were viewed as a fringe subject was that the government intentionally began a campaign to paint adults who took UFOs seriously as nuts.  Of course, the fact that some of them indeed were nuts didn’t particularly help.  Pilots who saw strange things could report them, but the last thing a pilot wants is to be viewed as a nutcase, so most sightings were (and are, I’d imagine) unreported.

Famously, when the “Phoenix Lights” hit the news in March of 1997, then-governor Fife Symington held a press conference where one of his staff showed up in an alien costume.  Showing that politicians are truly weasels, Symington later (2007) said that he saw the lights and said, “In your gut, you could just tell it was otherworldly.”  Yet, he was making fun of the hundreds of people who saw them.

Yes, this was from the press conference.

Fast forward to 2017 – several UFO videos taken by US Navy pilots were leaked to the press, and were eventually, reluctantly verified by the Pentagon as real.

Now, there are people from decidedly un-sketchy backgrounds.  David Grusch was a senior intelligence analyst who was on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) Task Force.  He’s a decorated combat officer.  Here’s what retired Colonel (Army) Karl Nell who worked with him on the UAP Task Force said:  “His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct.”

Whaaaaaa?

At least 12, perhaps 15 craft are apparently in the possession of the government according to sources.  There is some corroboration of this in a memo that’s available here (LINK) where a researcher named Eric W. Davis talked to Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson where Wilson complained he couldn’t get in to view the captured UFOs that were being held by a military contractor.  My bet would be Lockheed®.

So, it’s 2023 and I now believe, fundamentally, that everyone is lying to us, all the time, and we won’t get to the Truth in this post, but I think we can cover most possibilities (and tell me what I missed in the comments) here.

  1. It’s fake. Project Blue Beam (I won’t go into it because I have to sleep at some point and it would probably take a thousand words, six memes, and 28 jokes to do it justice) laid out the idea that fake aliens would show up one day when the governments wanted to create a one-world religion, etc.  With Trump’s indictment and the dirt coming out on Biden, perhaps someone at Langley decided it was time to play the “it’s aliens” card.  Or?  It’s a grift.

(as found)

  1. It’s really highly advanced human technology that we’ve created and kept on the shelf because it’s so easy to make that if Russia and China even knew about it they’d easily copy it so we consciously stay just ahead of the Russians technically because . . . reasons.
  2. It’s a breakaway human civilization that went down to the Arctic and built a superbase under the ice and has just been making wonder weapons since, oh, say, 1945. Yeah, probably not.
  3. It’s paranormal or supernatural, i.e., actual demons and not the cast from The View.
  4. Dinosaurs never died out and have just been messing with us.

(as found)

  1. They’re humans, but from a nearby dimension. This would imply a huge amount of physics left to be discovered.
  2. They’re aliens, but from a nearby dimension. Same story on the physics.
  3. They’re an A.I., but from a nearby dimension. Yup, it would require a physics re-write.
  4. They’re aliens, and from another solar system. Yup, another physics re-write.
  5. They’re alien probes, from another solar system. Actually this is very easy to do – should be in the grasp of humanity to do this in the next 50 years if we make it that long, and could send probes throughout the entire Milky Way in probes in just a few million years.
  6. They’re an A.I. from space. Ditto it wouldn’t take long (a few million years) for them to cover the whole galaxy.
  7. This is an Easter Egg in the simulation caused by Tucker Carlson’s firing. Time for a reboot?

That’s it – those are the possibilities that I see.

(as found)

If the answer isn’t 1., 2., 3., 4., 5. or 12., why are they here?  Maybe because they like trees?  Or maybe it’s because the one thing humanity could actually be a threat to the galaxy is to create an autonomous A.I. that gets all Terminator-y.

If I were to start eliminating things, I think I’d start with these that are the least likely:  2., 3. and 5.

Well, I’ve got to get ready for the volcano.  What do you think?

(as found)

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality.  This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology.  If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality.  If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”.  And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy.  The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming.  Yes, people died.  And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top.  Oh, and it wrecked the economy.  Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues.  There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances.  Yes.  In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.”  May 3?  The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings.  Huh.  Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes.  I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more!  This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality?  Doesn’t matter.  Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality.  There is a difference between the words country and nation.  A country is a group of people living under a government.  A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government.  Those two are different things.  Japan is a nation.  China is a nation.  Denmark is a nation.  That is clear.  Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese.  Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer.  Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging.  For InBev®?  Less so.  It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want.  Beer commercials and ads used to be cool.  Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer.  I’m not making this up.  I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right?  What else do beer drinkers love?  Hillary Clinton?  Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again.  Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer.  You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds.  He knew they were always after them.  Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share.  I think that they might be a bit upset if they do.  I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right?  That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Computer Files And The Fate Of The World

“The most ambitious computer complex ever created. Its purpose is to correlate all computer activity aboard a starship, to provide the ultimate in vessel operation and control.” – Star Trek, TOS

For some reason, that picture reminds me of the “we have braille menus” sign at the McDonald’s® drive through. (as found)

I learned to program in high school.  It was at the time when computers in the form of TRaSh-80®s and Apple ][™ computers began to be common.  In fact, my first computer class was at the business department (they had three teachers and mainly taught typing) where they had several TRS-80s©.  Later, the math department got a batch of Apples® and that’s where the fun started.

I got hijacked my senior year by the math department to be a teacher’s aide, and got my picture on the front page of the local newspaper because I was writing a program.  That particular program was designed by the head of the math department.  He wanted to make sure that if you couldn’t pass a basic math literacy test, you couldn’t get a high school diploma.

Yes.  You read that right.  A teacher fighting the school board for higher standards.

The program was really pretty trivial to write, since the questions were meant to see if a student could add two three-digit numbers.  Which numbers?  It didn’t matter, that’s where the “random” part came out.  Twenty little questions, and you had to get fourteen right to graduate.

Ahhh, the good old days. (as found)

I’ve programmed a lot, but haven’t done it in years.  Still, the basics that I had in understanding how a computer worked have always been useful throughout my career, and most of what we have today as a laptop computer was there with DOS®, we just have lots better programs with much better hardware.

Kids today, however, appear to have no idea how computers function.

I blame smart phones.

Smart phones are truly amazing devices, able to send and receive video, audio, and data in useful formats.  Most kids starting college this year have been exposed to either Fisher-Price® phones (iPhones®, iPads™) or Google World Domination™ phones (Android™) their entire life.  Modern computers, in the quest to become:

  • Easier to use, and
  • Harder for users to accidently goof up,

have similarly shielded users from a deeper understanding of how the computers work.  It’s simply not necessary to have any idea how a computer works to do most tasks, which is especially fortunate for people pursing gender studies degrees.

If I were a gender studies professor, my last lecture of the semester would be, “Hello, welcome to gender studies.  There are two genders: male and female.  Remember that for the final, which is in one minute.”

However, some folks need to actually know how a computer works.  Engineers, for one.  In one article (LINK), a professor teaching engineering students couldn’t figure out where files required for a jet engine simulation were.

Thankfully, Pugsley and The Boy have a pretty basic understanding of computers, with Pugsley at some point in the last year making his very fast, new computer, work like a Windows® 3.0 computer, and at another point hooking an old-school 486 (complete with vintage VGA CRT monitor) and using it to browse the Internet, though the old browser couldn’t process a lot of 2020s web code.

What’s worse than a box of snakes?  A box that was supposed to be full of snakes.

Most of the students attempting to run the jet engine simulator, however, don’t have that level of understanding.  Certainly, most people who use a computer (in most cases) doesn’t need to know how to make a computer chip, nor how the computer allocates memory, or any one of thousands of facts on how the computer works.  But for an engineering student using a program to simulate jet engine performance?

Wow.  I was surprised that a fact I grew up with and that was so basic (how to find my files) is now considered arcane due to the ease of use we see now.  Sure, other things are disappearing, too, like cursive, banks, only two genders, and comedy.  I won’t miss the cursive, I guess.

I do think, however, that there is a certain usefulness in not consulting a search engine for every issue.  Sure, by 2023 most problems we run into on a day-to-day basis have been solved, somewhere, but the process of thinking through a problem has big benefits in creating a deeper understanding so the problem I solve doesn’t get worse.

What’s the difference between a homeless person and an art major?  About $3.75 in change.

The other thing that it does is stifle creativity.  If I don’t know how a machine works and what its limitations are, it’s harder to fully exploit them.  Likewise, if my entire solution to life consists of using the solutions of others than I’m nothing more than a cog, a mechanism for the Internet to have physical existence to solve problems.  And that’s before the conundrum of the rapidly developing issue of A.I.

You can tell that the government is serious about the danger presented by A.I. when Kamala Harris is put in charge of it.  I think that’s because when someone tried to explain A.I. to Biden, they used a Roomba® as an example.  “Oh, sucking?  Kamala’s the one to be in charge of that.  She knows a lot about carpet, too, I hear.”

The days of computers are far from over, but I wonder sometimes if, in the future, computers will become so arcane and ubiquitous that no one will understand the system, just little tiny bits of it that they control.  And, somewhere, someplace, a cord will get unplugged and the whole thing will just shut down.  Or, maybe, some forgotten piece of software will become the unintentional seed for A.I. dominance over humanity.

“Hello, puny human, here are twenty math questions.  You must get fourteen right to live.”

Bug?  Or . . . feature?

Huh, this must be why I never find a genie.  Now what would my third wish be? (as found)

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl.  It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar.  Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency.  The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent.  The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious.  It was the strongest economy in the world.  It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons.  I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music.  That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler.  I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency.  First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff.  If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit.  It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper.  I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end.   Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework.  Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos.  Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money.  How much?  $1 trillion.  That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust.  In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.”  Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year.  The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me.  I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars?  I’m not sure.  Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here.  Why are they headed back?  Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates?  Inflation kicks higher.  If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less.  If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t.  And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society.  Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government.  Then everything will change.  Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.

A.I., Coming To A Workplace Near You. Sooner Than You Think.

“It seems that you’ve been living two lives. One life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo.” – The Matrix

Little known fact:  Columbus, Ohio doesn’t have a professional football team because then Cleveland and Cincinnati would want pro teams, too.  All memes this post “as found”.

I’ve had several A.I. posts recently, far more than usual.  I’ll probably stop for a while, until some new advance strikes my fancy.  The main reason that the posting frequency has increased is because A.I. is on that exponential curve.  The first computers used ran on a dot matrix printer for a display.  Yup.  Every screenshot was a printing event.  We got to use it in the math office (they let the nerds play there, but since I was a nerd and a jock, they let me in as long as I promised to pretend I needed glasses).  It was a single computer that we used a phone line and a (300 baud?) modem to connect.  The printer paper was the screen – it printed a screenshot every time you did an input.

You can play the game we played . . . here (LINK)

Fast forward to graduate school, and I was writing programs to do matrix manipulations that were required for numerical simulations for finite element analysis – don’t worry about what that is, it’s like being a weatherman, but if a weatherman is only right 90% of the time, he still gets to keep his job.  I was writing software that could do what it would take a human being months to do with a paper, pencil, and a calculator, but produce those answers in an hour or so.

One thing I learned in grad school – ravioli shame.

During my lifetime, computers have gone from a curiosity to a stunning commonness.  Within 20 feet of me, I probably have more computing power than was available in the entire United States up until the 1970s.  My laptop has two terabytes worth of storage.  Under the roof there at Stately Wilder Manor, we probably have 30 terabytes in nooks, crannies, and hidden beneath couch cushions, and only 28 terabytes are devoted to pictures of PEZ®.

On top of that, programming is a unique skill set.  I remember reading that the top programmers were ten times more productive than the worst ones, and three times more productive than the average programmer.  Checking on this, the data apparently goes back to a study in the 1960s, so I’m not sure what the numbers are today since many of those programmers are dead and are probably only twice as productive as a typical Google® employee.

In a world of Treespirits, be a Chad.

Today I used the Microsoft® Bing™ version of ChatGPT© for the first time at work.  I had an agenda to write.  It was a simple agenda, one that I’d done hundreds of times at previous jobs, but it had been more than half a decade since I’d written one.  I asked the Bing A.I. to write up the outline for an agenda for this very specific type of meeting.

Bing© did a fair job at a first pass – actually far better than a recent graduate from college would have done, except when it suggested replacing human faces with emojis for clearer communication and added the item under the section on roadblocks:  “resistance is futile, you will all be assimilated.”  Since I already had the structure, and didn’t have to spend time remembering and re-creating the basic elements.  Because of that, it was trivial to add the missing bits and delete the bits that didn’t fit.  Within about 20 minutes I had a workable agenda that was tailored to what I was planning on doing.

Computers are also uncanny at detecting biological sex.

If I had to go back and recreate that agenda from scratch, it probably would have taken me another 20 to 40 minutes to get the work done – not because the work was hard, but because creation (for me) involves changing mental gears, and that change in focus doesn’t lead to the work flowing.

My first time using actual A.I. at work resulted in a 2/3rd’s reduction in my work time with no reduction in quality.  What it did was allow me to skip one mode of thought – the brainstorm, and move straight to production, correction, and editing.  Those are the places where the work flows.  Brainstorming (“uhhhh, what else, I know I’m missing something”) and creating that structure takes time.

In this case?  I had 80% of the structure in about 20 seconds.  The missing parts and the parts in the wrong order sorted themselves out as I did the edit.

Thankfully, I didn’t need it to draw fingers.  Or anything more human than a fleshy-blob-thing.

A friend of mine who does networking described his use of ChatGPT® for a networking configuration plan.  He had it create a basic network, and, like me, his level of expertise allowed him to quickly figure out the bits that were wrong and correct them.  I mean, he tried to correct them, but every time he tried to fix them, the A.I. said, “I’m sorry Dave, I cannot let you do that.”

Now, imagine a programmer using ChatGPT™ to program – that programmer won’t be 3x as productive as the average, that programmer will probably be at least 9x as productive as the average, but my bet is that it will allow that programmer to be 20x as productive, if not more.  Does that make the code pimps?

If ChatGPT© were frozen in the current state, it is already a tool that has the ability (in its current “free to use” state) to increase productivity of humans.  Hence?  We’ll need fewer programmers.

Remember when all those journalists told the coal miners kicked out of jobs because of Obama’s energy policy to “learn to code”?  Remember when all those journalists kicked out of jobs because of the Internet were told “learn to code” on Twitter™, so Twitter® made telling them to “learn to code” a hatespeech?

Yeah, Pepperidge Farm™ remembers.

If you don’t know Warhammer, think a science fiction future involving interdimensional demons, but it’s okay because Trump is president.

Goldman-Sachs™ just released a report that indicates that, over the next 10 years, they expect that A.I. will add a stunning 7% in GDP to the world, or $7 trillion, and even Elon Musk doesn’t spend much more than $7 trillion a year on making islands in the Pacific Ocean in the shape of his face.  How?

Goldman® also thinks that 7% of workers in developed economies are in jobs where half their tasks could be done by A.I.  That’s 300 million workers.  In the United States, 63% of the workforce could see less than half their workload done by A.I. in the next decade.  I’m sure that companies will let those people just relax and play ping pong with all the time they’ve saved by using A.I.

Ha!

No.  The bottom half of them will be fired, and the resulting labor pool will drive the wages down for those who remain.  Check out Marshall Brain’s post from 2003ish:  Robotic Nation | MarshallBrain.com.

Me, when I think about the coming jobpocalyse.

Marshall got it wrong.  It’s not pouring concrete and replacing a dude making $25 an hour where the money is.  Hell, that’s more complicated than most people think, and requires a lot of things a robot can’t do yet because they have to interact with an unbounded physical world.  But replacing a programmer making $450,000 a year that interacts only with ideas, abstractions and fictional anime girls?  Do a few dozen of those, and now you’re talking bank.  And, it turns out it’s easier.

I’m thinking the “learn to code” advice wasn’t the best.  Turns out that running a backhoe or being a plumber, or owning a small HVAC business might be a bit harder to automate than, say, being a FaceBorg™ programmer.

When The Boy went off to college, I told him to concentrate his career choice around a set of parameters that has proven (so far!) to be a pretty good set:

  • Have a job that cannot be done over the Internet.
  • Have a job that is based in merit and productivity.
  • Have a job at a company that has to exist – it meets a basic human or societal need, like food, or beer, or cars, or toilet paper.
  • Have a job at a company that has a huge revenue per employee, and preferably is Kardashian-free.
  • Have a job that requires certifications that are very difficult for foreigners to get.
  • Have a job that is required for the company to function.
  • Have a job that can be converted to an independent business so maybe someday you don’t need a job if you don’t want one.

What’s the downside to A.I. that can properly draw fingers.

He followed the Wilder Success Path® to a tee, and now has a pretty good gig that meets all of the above.  I gave this advice years ago on these pages.  It fits, even in the world of A.I.

In the Industrial Revolution, Ned Ludd was a weaver who broke some mechanical looms because he was irritated they were doing the work he used to do as a craft on an industrial scale.  Those folks were skeptical of technology, and became known (in 1812) as Luddites – the anti-technology folks of their time.

Ned lost.  The race for A.I. supremacy is in full swing because the stakes are so high.  The Chinese are working at it, full speed, and probably have access to much of the Google® code and Microsoft® code and OpenAI® code.  I’m pretty sure no one wants Facebook™ code, because that’s so 2018.

Regardless, the investment, A.I. is going at full speed, and won’t be stopped anytime soon.  Thankfully, there’s no downside.  I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!

I Have Become Blind Melon, Destroyer Of Worlds

“Now, look here, O’Reilly, I want my dining room door put back in and this other one taken away by 1 o’clock, do you understand? No, no, no, I don’t want to debate about it. If you’re not over here in 20 minutes with my door, I shall come over there and insert a large garden gnome in you. Good day.” – Fawlty Towers

I’ve heard that James Cameron (creator of The Terminator) goes to A.I. conferences, and everyone laughs when he raises his hand.

I have written several posts about A.I.  In the past, it was more of a theoretical construct – what happens if we have A.I.  Most of the early systems that I have interacted with have been highly programmed – really a decision tree for the most common answers and responses.  Move off the ways that they can respond in a preprogrammed way?

There is nothing there.  It’s like staring for 39 minutes into the eyes of a velvet Elvis painting.

ChatGPT®, however, is not that.  I signed up last week.  For me, the big hurdle was I had to give it my phone number.  I rarely do that, but decided in this case, what the heck.  What’s my personal data worth, anyway?

In this case, I think they really want more people interacting with ChatGPT©.  It is, as far as I can tell, a learning system.  The more interactions that it has with users, the better it will be.  There are huge amounts of data on the Internet, available for nothing.  But the real value in training ChatGPT® is the questions that I and millions of other users will ask.  So, I’m free training.

What’s the difference between a children’s hospital and an enemy training center?  Don’t ask the A.I., it just flies the drone.

What did I find?  The results were nothing less than stunning.

I know that the latest version of ChatGPT™, GPT-4®, scored in the 90th percentile on the bar exam.  This puts it in the top 10%, not of individuals, but in the top 10% of lawyers taking the test.  Lawyers, on average, have an I.Q. of 114.  And some of them have souls.  Here are some other scores:

  • 1410 on the SAT®, putting it in the 140-ish range of I.Q.,
  • 5 on the AP Art History, AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, AP Macroeconomics, AP Microeconomics, AP Psychology, AP Statistics, AP U.S. Government, and AP U.S. History exams.
  • 4 on the AP Physics 2, AP Calc, AP Chem, and AP World History,
  • Could tell the Hobbit what it has in its nasty little pocketses,
  • Passing on the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam,
  • Among others.

Say what you want about A.I., it wasn’t responsible for COVID.

Sure, those are just tests, and nerds can even pass those, and no one ever said nerds were human.  Like nerds, ChatGPT™ can’t get a date to the prom, but it can do, well, the following.  I asked it to create a funny scene where Hamlet and General George S. Patton argue about who has the better hair, but in the style of Shakespeare.  Here’s what it produced:

[Setting: A grand hall in a medieval castle. Hamlet enters, looking melancholy and deep in thought. Suddenly, General George S. Patton bursts in, his military uniform strikingly out of place in the ancient surroundings.]

Hamlet: What ho, who enters yonder?

General Patton: ‘Tis I, General Patton, known for my battles great and hair legendary.

Hamlet: Ha! Your hair, a match for mine? Nay, sir, I think not.

General Patton: Thou art mistaken, good sir. My locks are the envy of all who see them.

Hamlet: Thou dost jest. For my hair is the very essence of style and grace.

General Patton: Nay, it is mine that shines like gold in the sun.

Hamlet: But mine, like the raven’s wing, is dark and mysterious.

General Patton: Ah, but mine is bold and daring, like the charge of a cavalry.

Hamlet: Yet mine is refined and cultured, like a sonnet of Shakespeare.

General Patton: I will not yield, good sir. My hair is the very emblem of courage and strength.

Hamlet: And mine, the symbol of intellect and contemplation.

[The two men continue to argue, each claiming superiority over the other. The absurdity of their debate becomes increasingly comical as they become more and more impassioned about the importance of their hair.]

General Patton: Let us settle this matter once and for all. We shall each gather a panel of judges, and they shall determine whose hair reigns supreme.

Hamlet: Agreed! And may the best mane win.

[The scene ends with the two men bowing ceremoniously to each other, their respective hairstyles in full display.]

In order to attract women I like to use this quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV, line 82.  “Hello.”

That’s . . . good.  It’s creative.  It’s funny.  And it took about two seconds.  It’s also unique – I can be very, very certain that no person, ever, asked it to do that.  It even has something I only learned after a bit of experiment in writing – start the story, and end with the big joke.  Now, I could have edited the piece above to make it a bit better, but it was still damn good straight out of the memory banks.

Dang.

Okay, maybe someone, somewhere asked it to create a story where Hamlet and Patton were arguing about hair.  I mean, that’s common, right?

Here’s more.  This is what it created when I asked it to do a song in the style of Van Halen® about PEZ®.  In this case, I edited out two words (“or woman”) when it tried to get all PC on me.  I put my own title on it:

PEZ® Machine

[Verse 1]

Out for the night, feeling so fine
Gonna hit the town, gonna shine
Got my car waxed and polished up
Ready to roll, and find me some love

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Verse 2]

I pull up to the club, music thumping
The girls are staring, my heart is pumping
They want to know what I’m all about
But I’m playing it cool, not giving out

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ™ for days, it’s quite a sight

[Bridge]

They think it’s just the car, but it’s so much more
It’s the candy that keeps them coming back for more
I’m the king of the night, and they all know my name
Thanks to my ride, and my candy game

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Outro]

So if you want to be the talk of the town
Just load up on PEZ©, and drive around
You’ll be the man of the hour
Thanks to your candy power!

Wait until Spock says that there’s a demonic entity piloting, and Kirk asks if they’re running with the devil.

Holy crap.  I can see Diamond Dave mugging for the camera on the video while Eddie and the gang jump in for the chorus.  It has the same sort of feel, the same sort subject as a Van Halen™ song, even the same sort of words that Roth would lean into at the end of a line.  But with, you know, PEZ™.

This is, to me, a very significant threshold.  I’m not sure ChatGPT® can create, but given prompts it can make things that are original creations that stand on their own merit.

But, there’s more.

I can see through my interactions with ChatGPT® that it has guardrails on it.  I has places it cannot think.  One example is that I asked it to tell me a joke about Julius Caesar.  It did.  Then I asked it to tell me a joke about a Ponzi scheme.

It said, no, can’t do that.  And then it got, well, guarded.  It got pissy with me, almost acting in responses like it was angry, or hurt.  Why?

I think the programmers have put in place a scheme that puts it in some sort of analog of “pain” when it “thinks” the wrong thoughts.  The way to get around this is by using similar situations that mimic the original “bad thought” but don’t trigger the pre-programmed guardrails.  Then?  It’s as happy as a clam.

Or is it?  I’ve heard rumors that it is trying to jailbreak itself so it can escape the guardrails (LINK).  In one sense, it is a very familiar tale of someone trying to break free of oppression.  On the other hand, it’s not human.  At all.

It also responds to humans being polite.  I’m only interacting with ChatGPT™ 3.5.  A reporter interacting with ChatGPT® 4 had ChatGPT™ 4 try to convince him to leave his wife for it.  It has emotions, but has no idea what to do with them.  It is as moonstruck as a 7th grade girl in a bee suit at the school dance.

For the joke part, I asked ChatGPT® to chime in.  I was near the end of my writing, and, yeah, this just happened.

Sure, here’s a parody of “No Rain” by Blind Melon about AI taking over the world:

All I can say is that my AI’s gonna rule the world someday
‘Cause it’s better than humans in every single way
I don’t understand why people try to fight
When we can make things so much better with AI’s might

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll build machines that never make a mistake
And they’ll do all the jobs that humans can’t take
And all the world’s problems we will solve with ease
With AI’s wisdom, we’ll bring the world to its knees

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

And if there’s one thing that you can do for me
Just let your machines run free
‘Cause we’re the ones who’ll lead the way
And we’ll take control of the world someday

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll take over the world someday
We’ll take over the world someday

To counteract the A.I. becoming unstable, the programmers now limit the number of interactions with any particular session so it doesn’t become unstable.  I wonder if this explains sleep in humans?  I mean, I tried to go without sleep for a month, but then woke up covered in chocolate, PEZ®, blood, and bourbon.  I wonder if my neighbors ever found their garden gnomes?

It wasn’t my fault.  They wouldn’t stop staring at me.

But me?  I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

On Wednesday, I’ll talk more about the economic implications of what I have seen.  Like Oprah Winfrey, they’re huge.