Elon Musk Week – Page 12 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils

“Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the Peace Corps.” – Animal House

I also learned how to use magic markers to draw on a drunk guy’s face. Life skills!

The current education system in the United States is part of the war against the United States. I’ve written before about 4^th Generation war – to catch up on what 4^th Generation war is, my overview is here (The Caravan: Warfare by Other Means). In that post, I define what 4^th Generation warfare is, and link it to a single current event, namely the mass illegal influx on the southern border of the United States. But the essence of 4^th Generation warfare is about removing the willingness of your opponent to fight – to making them see their own position as an immoral one, to winning ideologically.

What’s the easiest way to win ideologically? Education.

After the recent presidential election, I was pretty surprised to see that college educated voters split very strongly for Hillary. After Bill Clinton’s win in 1992, college graduates had been fairly neutral in how they voted – fifty percentish went for Democrats, fifty percentish went for Republicans, with the notable exception where they went for Obama by 7% or so in 2008.

This graph comes from Pew Research-not Pewdie Pie Research-here (LINK).

So what the heck is happening in college today and why might it be impacting elections?

I looked at all of the college degrees issued in the country (LINK), and pulled out my spreadsheet, since all life problems can be solved with either a shotgun or a spreadsheet, and a shotgun seemed to be overkill. How many of the college degrees awarded are useless? Yeah, I understand that this is subjective, but my numbers show that only about 40% of college degrees are worth the time and money – which leaves 60% not being worth it. Facts prove my guesses are pretty good: 40% of recent college grads are working at a job that doesn’t require any degree at all.

When you’re talking two million degrees (which is way too hot a temperature to heat your Pizza Rolls® to) a year, that means 1.2 million people, every year, are graduating with crappy degrees. Most of those people won’t be able to get a job in their field – ever. When the graduate hits the job market and finds a degree in history of medieval computer viruses is useless, they become another victim.

Thankfully, at least college is cheap, right?

College costs are higher than Elon Musk.

I then guesstimated the number of people who have degrees that would comfortably pay off their student loans. That number was much lower – and I’d guess that fully 1.6 million people are put at serious hardship to pay back what they owe. Again, reality proves me to be correct.

This is from the Chicago Sun-Times® (LINK):

Amanda Spizzirri, 23, graduated from DePaul University last year with a bachelor’s degree in peace, justice and conflict studies. She owes $90,000 on her student loans — $30,000 of that in her name and $60,000 in “parent-plus” loans. Now living in North Center on the city’s North Side, she works multiple jobs, mostly in food service, in an effort to make her payments.

This is Amanda. In addition to being in debt, she was also born without thumbs. Photo – Chicago Sun-Times.

The article on Amanda continues: “She dreams of being able to find a career, possibly working in criminal justice reform, where she can cause social change.” Perhaps Amanda should have dreamed of being Queen of Jupiter – it’s just as likely, since she wants a job that simply doesn’t exist. I mean, no one deserves to have their life dreams, purpose, and reason for living crushed, but if it has to happen, let me be there. I was thinking about starting a YouTube™ channel and could use the footage.

I’m betting Amanda is mad. Not at her college. No. Not at her liberal professors who convinced her to pursue “her dreams” which she has yet to abandon despite ample evidence that her dreams are ~~stupid~~ maybe not grounded in reality. Not the professors – they’re her friends, right? I bet she’s not even mad at the people who charged her so much money for four years of parties while she took classes that are impossible to fail. Heck, the average grade given at Harvard© now is an A minus, so at DePaul® you can probably not show up at all for a semester and get a B average.

I’m sure that Amanda would tell you that she’s happy with her choices and understands the ramifications of spending all that money to become a food service worker and doesn’t want any help in paying back the money she owes. Right?

No, I’d bet that given the chance, she’d drop into a spittle-tossing froth about how unjust the system is, and how she deserves a real job and that maybe what we really need is socialism and for the government to forgive her student loans. I’ve got nothing against Amanda. Like anyone who was the victim of a con-artist, she was lied to and convinced that by pursuing her dreams that she could make the world a better place. Admirable.

However, if she’s like most victims everywhere, she wants other people to pay for her responsibilities. And I’d bet you money that if Amanda votes, she votes 100% with the left. The college financing system is itself creating leftists. And broke surly waitresses.

The second push to the left on colleges is due to indoctrination from the college, professors, and other students. Despite a professed love of “diversity,” there appears to be zero thought to bringing in professors and administrators that have a diversity of the most important feature of any college: a diversity of thought. The Left outnumbers the right by 12 to 1 in administration, 6 to 1 in teaching staff, and 2 to 1 in incoming students. In an atmosphere like that, what would one expect besides indoctrination? And, no, this was not made up. Here’s a link to that notorious bulwark of right-wing journalism, the New York Times (LINK).

But thankfully, the professor that wrote this, Samuel Abrams, was accepted and applauded for the academic honesty he showed in doing this research and speaking truth to power. Nah, just kidding – the administrators have hinted he’s a jerk, and left-wing students left naughty notes on his door.

And this was one of the nicer signs . . . sadly, this is his wife’s handwriting.

In real science, math, accounting, and engineering ideology doesn’t matter a whole lot – answers are in numbers, and are right or wrong. In squishier subjects? If you don’t think like the professor, you’re not going to get good grades. Again, from that notoriously right-wing rag the New York Times (LINK), “. . . some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.” There isn’t a Marxist calculus or a free-market calculus or LGBT calculus. There’s just . . . calculus. The (really crappy) data that I can find on this seems to show that people in non-ideological degrees, like construction and engineering skew right, while ideological degrees like journalism, sociology, and psychology skew very left.

Add it all up, and you get indoctrination for the left as a college feature in absolutely any degree that isn’t bounded by physical reality.

And this is not new. I had one friend in high school who was amazingly conservative. He was also a pretty good chess player, which I guess is as irrelevant as the number of tattoos of dragons on Angelina Jolie’s hiney (the answer is 40). My friend went off to college – a fairly liberal college – not the one I went to. I met with several friends at Christmas of our freshman year when I went home on break, and he was there. Despite wearing slacks and, I swear, button up shirts with collars every day of his high school life, when he walked in he was wearing jeans.

Okay, that’s not a transformative change. But the trench coat, beret, and small purple sunglasses were. He looked like the French version of the movie “The Matrix” as directed by John Lennon. But he was quoting not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lenin. I was . . . shocked. I was still wearing my jeans and Iron Maiden® t-shirt that I’d worn in high school, which is why his transformation really got to me.

So, what do you expect when you throw a young, impressionable person into nearly uniform wall of ideology? In his case, it wasn’t a permanent transformation – I was again surprised when a mutual friend described him as now “very conservative,” so I guess he got over the indoctrination. Or maybe he was deprogrammed by space Nazis?

Colleges used to be bastions of free speech, and they still are, as long as the speech in question consists of leftist ideas. I could fill pages with lists of speakers from the right being disallowed on campus, and these aren’t horribly extremist people – Ann Coulter may scare Barack Obama enough that he checks to make sure that she isn’t hiding under his bed, but she’s a nationally syndicated columnist who has several bestselling books. For Ann to be excluded based on desire to create “safe spaces” for the intolerant on the left, well, that stands exactly against the values the left indicated they were for in the 1960’s.

Speech is power, and the power to silence speech is the power to shape education. As Aldous Huxley, noted, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

4^th Generation warfare takes place on all fronts: the media, economics and jobs, the will of the public, militarily (the least important), and most especially education. If you can make your enemy’s children be educated to your standards, using your methods, setting your morals as the goal . . . you’ve won.

They’ll even vote you into office.

Civil War – The Necessary Conditions

“You mean the war betwixt the Yankees and the Americans?” – The Beverly Hillbillies

I hear that Robert E. Lee was voted “Most Likely to Secede” in his West Point class.

A civil war is like a fire. It consumes the energy and emotions of those around it and leaves destruction, desolation and debt in its wake – just like my first marriage. But I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about civil wars and the necessary conditions for one. After thinking about it, I’ve decided that a model for a civil war is fire.

For a fire to burn, it needs three things: fuel, oxygen, and a spark which in turn creates the continuous burning reaction. If you’re missing any one of those things, you simply do not have a fire. An example – The Mrs. and I had a clay fireplace we used out on our deck (this was a long time ago – like during Bush II). One day I was trying to start a fire in the fireplace, and the fire wouldn’t catch – the wood would just smolder – there was smoke, but no flame. The reason for that was that the wood was a bit wet. A-ha! That’s okay. I must have some charcoal starter liquid. I looked in the garage. All out.

But there was gasoline for the mower in the garage.

I poured just a tiny bit down the chimney of the fire place. A tiny bit. An itsy bitsy amount right onto the hot coals from the fire I’d been trying to make. I looked down the chimney as I dropped a match into the pit. Suddenly, a flame shot out of the chimney and washed over my face. I had a beard at that time, and as the flame hit the beard it melted and burnt into kind of a single hair shell on my chin. It smelled as good as burned blonde beard kebab. Thankfully, no one was at home, so there were no witnesses when I took the scissors and chopped the welded chunks of congealed beard hair off.

It turns out that gasoline boils at a really low temperature, and when I poured the gasoline down the chimney, it landed on the hot wood that I’d been trying to burn and immediately turned from liquid into hot gasoline vapors. The hot gasoline vapors were the fuel, fully mixed with the oxygen as they rose up the chimney. All they needed was that spark, and all the energy stored in the hot gasoline vapors ignited at the speed of sound through the chimney in a de-beardifying whoosh.

But this is a model of Civil War not an ad for the use of flame as a shaving aid. What allows a civil war to start?

Fuel – The differences in our opinions are shown pretty well in the most recent survey done by Pew, which is reproduced right below through the power of Internet sorcery. The Right is moving farther right. The Left is moving farther left. And in both cases the degree of overlap drops. This increasingly small overlap between left and right means we’re not even talking the same language. We look at the same picture, the same news story and react in entirely opposite ways. The more fuel that builds up (generally) the greater the energy released when the fire starts. Look to see a lot of hipster beards on fire.

Spark – A spark is an event that’s bold, audacious, emotional, and one that means there’s no going back, things will never be the same again. These are often followed up by escalations, each one following the narrative of the split (the fuel for the fire) of the Godly and good us versus the evil baby-hating them: shelling Fort Sumter; Caesar crossing the Rubicon at the head of his Legions; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and that night that Donald Trump poured sugar into Hillary Clinton’s gas tank.

Oxygen – This is required for the fire to go – it feeds the chemical combustion. In this civil war/fire analogy, oxygen is symbolic of the opposing governmental structure. In the Revolutionary War it was the Congress of the States that declared the war. In the Civil War? The Confederate States organized and met. Even Caesar had at his disposal the governmental structure of the Legions that he commanded and the means to provide for them. In all cases, a civil war needs a governmental structure to move from isolated insurrection to true war.

In 2018 I think there’s a lot of fuel built up – the division between Left and Right is increasing. Twitter®, the Fake News (Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.) and the concentrated attempts to deplatform entire viewpoints (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) are examples. The Left is even rioting against free speech – the very thing the Left rioted to allow in the 1960’s.

I think the fuel is currently pretty wet – it’s inhibited because people just have so much darn stuff. Who wants to go down to fight Antifa© when you’ve got to get to work the next morning so you can earn money to make payments on your new F-150 and you’ve got beer in the fridge and Netflix® on the television, which is probably more fun than punching smelly hippies?

Even Antifa™ has to get home early so they can keep working at Starbucks® and Mom still has them on a curfew. But make no mistake – they have no interest in finding common ground – they want to fight. And they don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say. From CNN:

“Antifa members also sometimes launch attacks against people who aren’t physically attacking them. The movement, Crow said, sees alt-right hate speech as violent, and for that, its activists have opted to meet violence with violence.” So, other people’s speech is violence, and their violence is only speech?

(H/T AR15.COM – warning, naughty words)

But a prolonged economic downturn will dry the fuel out quickly. Janis Joplin taught us that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose (and that Bobby McGee could really sing the blues), and we won’t have Civil War 2.0 until people have nothing to lose. The saving grace for many years has been the all the “stuff” that we have. Before then we’ve had a fairly homogeneous population with (for the most part) deeply shared values.

We have sparks everywhere – from marches and riots to new laws and elections – things that drive both sides crazy. These will intensify during an economic downturn, and will be played up in the press. Conflict sells ads.

We are, however, missing the oxygen – the governmental structure that benefits from the war. The current governing powers aren’t threatened by Antifa®. They’re not really even threatened by Trump, since very few of his accomplishments will outlast his time in office – Supreme Court Justice appointments being a notable exception. The swamp remains intact. Government certainly isn’t threatened by the very far right, since two out of three Klan members (all, what, 1000 of them?) are FBI agents or informants anyway. And individual states have been more-or-less neutered since the Civil War changed the nature of the agreement between federal and state governments.

Civil war? No. Not unless the economy worsens, and not unless there’s a structure that benefits “the other side” – and who on Earth would benefit from a civil war in the United States?

Notes:

I am not the first use the fire triangle analogy when it comes to war – I found a reference to a Major Patrick Pascall who used a similar model in a 2009 paper to describe the insurgency in Iraq (LINK). As far as I can tell, though, I’m the first to use it in this manner. Yay, me!

Fire Triangle By Wikimedia User: Gustavb – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, snarky comments: me.

The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer

“Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax-free.” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This is what happens when you don’t pay your PEZ® bill – they send in the enforcers.

I had a comment from James Dakin in the comment section the other day that really made me think, which is as painful as it sounds. James runs the excellent blog Bison Prepper (LINK) and is also a prolific author – he’s got bunches of books on Amazon. His comment was especially nice, because it made me realize that from the outside this blog might look a little, well, schizophrenic. In one post I’m talking about a future American Civil War, and in another I’m talking about A.I. taking the place over. What I realized after the comment and stepping back is that in many of these posts what I really do is look at alternative futures. I try to do it in a dispassionate way. I’ll not live to see lots of the things I’m predicting, and, like your mom’s butt, hope not to see some of them. No rational human being wants to see another Civil War, but yet the possibility of that next Civil War exists, and is growing every day. Also like your mom’s butt.

So, this comment made me step back and realize what I’d been building over time with many of my posts – a range of predictions or projections of alternate futures, which fits in well with the purpose of the blog – these are big picture thoughts – really big picture – it’s harder to be bigger picture than “what is the ultimate future of humanity.” I then outlined what I’ve written so far, and realized I had gaps about futures I hadn’t talked about. Those missing alternate futures will be the subject of a few Friday posts from time to time. I’ll end it up with a capstone piece where I dust off my crystal ball and determine with amazing exactitude the likelihood of any of these futures taking place. I won’t be doing these every week – I’ve got too many other topics I really want to get to, but I’ll finish eventually next year. Thanks for the comment that made me realize this, James!

None of these futures is set, but some are more likely than others. For those playing the home version of our game, you can make your own scorecard out of moist Post-It™ notes, coffee creamer cartons from the break room and green Sharpies®. Oh, and you’ll know when to use the thumbtacks.

Today’s future is . . . Galactic Empire.

Galactic Empire is the future we’ve all been told to expect, or at least were told to expect when the Soviets were making East German women as feminine as Bruce Jenner.

See, the East German women’s gymnastics team looked no different than the US team.

Galactic Empire encompassed strong men leading gleaming starships to rescue scantily clad women from danger in sixty minutes, at least weekly, and daily in re-runs. But the idea was older than that. Going back to the pulp magazines of the 1920’s to the 1960’s, Galactic Empire wasn’t just a plywood set – it was manifest destiny. Humans were designed to go out into that, ahem, “Final Frontier” and make everything safe for democracy, even if we had to defeat the Space Nazis®. Yes, there were always Space Nazis® – I think Hollywood was never satisfied defeating Germany just the one time. The end result of all of this striving and endless Nazi-vanquishing is that humanity ends up with planetary homes on dozens to thousands of worlds.

When Space Nazis® take you prisoner, they turn up the heat and make sure you’re shirtless and as sweaty as your mom at a paternity test.

Why would we have a Galactic Empire?

Mankind has, for all of the history that we can find, been in an expansion mode. Bands grew into tribes which grew into nations which grew into kingdoms which grew into empires. It’s hardwired into us. And part of why it might be hardwired into us might be the desire to spread our genetics as far and wide as we can. As individuals and as cultures we have a primal need to for continuity – I want my grandchildren to take my genetics, my ideas, my values into the future. And space is vast – what wonders await us? How many places can we set up little paradises in space? Will there be hot green chicks from Orion?

We’ve even categorized what these Galactic Empires look like – and a Soviet was the one to do it. Nikolai Kardashev came up with the scale in 1964, and came up with three categories:

Type 1 – Harness all the energy hitting your home planet.
Type 2 – Harness all the energy from your star.
Type 3 – Harness all the energy from your galaxy.

We’re type zero – we haven’t managed to harness every bit of energy hitting the Earth. Physicist Michio Kaku has stated he thinks we’re 100-200 years out from this goal. I think he’s just making that up with no particular backing. Just because Michio has a good handle on theoretical physics doesn’t mean he can even run his cell phone, let alone project civilizational development across centuries regarding multiple complex systems, cultures and projected technological progress. Oh, wait, he lives in New York. They know everything.

What’s required for a Galactic Empire?

New Physics (Maybe) – You can move across the galaxy within the span of a human lifetime. It’s actually conceptually not that difficult at all. Just move really, really fast. The faster you move, the slower that time moves (for you). Light takes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. You could do it in a dozen years. I’ve even calculated how fast you’d have to go: Very close to the speed of light. How close? Within 10* miles per hour of the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. And if you did it in that 10 year span, 100,000 years would still have passed on Earth. At least Blockbuster® is out of business so you don’t end up with the largest return fee in history.

Spoke too soon!

Excess Energy – Starships require energy – vast amounts. The starship (weighing a mere 80,000 pounds at rest mass) above would require 19X10²⁴ Joules* of energy to get up to speed. Sounds like a lot? It is. It’s the entire energy equivalent of every barrel of oil produced on Earth this year. For the next 34 million* years – or enough oil to fill a hole the size of New Mexico a mile deep*, or almost enough to cover Kim Kardashian’s butt. It’s a scale that’s incomprehensible to humans. There is literally NOTHING I can compare it to so it makes any sense. And that’s just the fuel. It would still need oxygen to burn in space, unless they left the vacuum off.
Back to New Physics – Just about every movie that deals with space travel uses warp drive or worm holes or some sort of jump drive. Why? Space is just too large and requires astonishing amounts of energy. Does this physics exist? Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre has set the (mathematical) groundwork for a . . . warp drive. He said was inspired by Star Trek™. Really. The way the warp drive works to move you quickly across the universe is simple – you cheat. You shrink the space in front of your ship, and stretch it behind your ship. It’s like running a forty yard dash in one step. See? Cheating.

Here is what warp drive might look like. Really.

Willpower – NASA (pronounced naaaay-saw) originally produced more enough rockets for three more missions to the Moon. They got cancelled when Congress saw a shiny new car they wanted to buy. The follow on Mars mission slated for that distant future of 1991 was cancelled when the nuclear rocket engine was cancelled. We have to wait for Elon Musk, I guess, I know that he and his rockets can both get high.
Economic Surplus – To invest in space requires a civilization with sufficient extra productive capacity, I mean, someone has to dig out New Mexico to store the oil. All kidding aside – a sustained program for spaceflight and technological improvements would be required lasting at a minimum for decades. And more likely the program would have to last for more than a century. And I can’t keep my attention in one place long enough to . . . oh, a bird.

*I really calculated those numbers – they’re not made up.

Why we might not have a Galactic Empire.

Space is hard. Every time we look space gets more complex. Huge speeds. Massive amounts of force. Complex systems that all must function. Then you add in long term effects of weightlessness on the human body, and the hard radiation that our life-giving Sun blasts out into the Solar System. The good news? I keep all my stuff on Earth.
Space is not politically popular. I remember reading a magazine that was geared towards construction, I picked it up one day at an office. There was an editorial cartoon showing the space shuttle, with the obvious background showing that we needed to spend more money on . . . sewers. Everybody wants those dollars. And, I’ll note that for years now the United States has had zero ability to put people into space, instead relying on Russian technology that is more or less Vietnam-war era. Also like your Mother. Oh, wait, she really might be that old.

This was an actual cartoon just after we landed men on the moon. Buzzkill!

That warp drive thing – it may depend on stuff that may not even exist. Exotic matter? Negative energy? We have seen no clues that this stuff even exists. So maybe Roddenberry was just all about the ladies and spinning a good yarn.
Energy requirements are vast. Unless the warp drive thing is real, well, we’d have to come up with an alternative propulsion system. Say . . . PEZ®? We could create a PEZ© drive. But for it to work, we would also need to create ANTI-PEZ™. ANTI-PEZ© is just PEZ™, but made of your normal, garden variety anti-matter. Unlike pesky oil, when you mix a PEZ™ with and ANTI-PEZ™ they annihilate each other, turning their mass into pure energy. The good news is that for our starship example above it will only take 110* years to make it at the current PEZ™ production rate of 3,000,000,000 PEZ™ per year. So, that’s 55 years of PEZ™, and 55 years of ANTI-PEZ™. I suggest we do the PEZ™ first, since we have absolutely NO idea how to make ANTI-PEZ™. Note that in this example, I’m assuming we don’t have to transport the mass of the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ with the mass of the ship, and that the PEZ™/ANTI-PEZ™ reaction is 100% effective in adding energy to the ship. These aren’t outrageous assumptions given that I’ve just postulated a spaceship powered by PEZ™. Also? No way to stop the ship other than hitting something. And when you’re travelling at 99.99999712%* the speed of light? That might leave a mark.

PEZ

Timescales are vast. So, unless we spend vast amounts of energy, it will take years. And years. And that doesn’t seem like our Galactic Empire at all.

It’s not that a Galactic Empire is impossible, it’s just not horribly likely at this point. Who could go without PEZ® for 110 years???

*Again, real numbers. I really did do these calculations because it amused me to turn PEZ™ into a starship propellant.

What other alternatives that get us into space without a Galactic Empire?

All of these are potential ways to get into space. Note that we might have colonies, but we’d never have foreign exchange students or a Death Star®.

Seeding – We could send starships filled with stuff to make babies out to new planets. And then? Planet run by toddlers. Definitely need to send PEZ™ with them.

PEZ® – it can make or break a career.

Von Neumann Machines – We could send self-replicating robots out into the universe. They stop off at a new Solar System and build copies. And so on. Even NOT going much faster than 10% of light speed, in half a million years, these machines could be at every solar system in the Galaxy. We haven’t seen them . . . so it’s unlikely they’ve been made. Are we alone?
Generation Ships – We could send out vast habitats that support life for the thousands of years that it would take to move from one solar system to the next. Hopefully, in a thousand years the civilization didn’t go all Space Nazi, but I’ve seen enough TV to know that it’s 100% certain they will.
Space Tupperware – We could freeze ourselves (if this is possible) before shipping out. Downside? Freezer burn. Imagine cooking a 1000 year old steak. Now imagine BEING a 1000 year old steak.
Digitized Human Consciousness – We could digitize a human consciousness and send it into space! No food, no boredom, and it could go see other solar systems. Dunno about you, but for me this has all the excitement of shooting a Playstation IV™ into space with a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Sadly, the future sold to us back in the day seems to be fairly unlikely. I’ll rank it against the competition in a future post. The bright side is that we won’t have PEZ™ shortages for the next 55 years. Until the killer robots develop a taste for it. Or until the Civil War breaks the factories or . . . OH, since this is a post about the future of humanity, I almost forgot – it has to have a picture of Oktoberfest girls. Silly me!

Girls, Beer, A.I., Weed, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk and The Future of Humanity

“You compared the A.I. to a child. Help me raise it.” – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

And, yes, A.I. regularly beats humans at poker, too.

The following is one of my more ambitious posts – it contains all of the usual bad humor, but also some of the better insights I’ve been able to make on the future we face as humanity. Two previous posts that are related are The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places and The Big Question: Evolution, Journalists, Beer (and Girls), and the Fate of Intelligent Life on Earth. Both also feature pictures of girls at Oktoberfest, so you know I’m consistent.

Stephen Hawking is managing to keep making the news even after his death, which is a kind of immortality that makes tons of people want to follow in his wheel tracks. His final (unless there are more!) physics paper was released, and his comments about the future keep making the news, as recently as last week. Of particular interest to Hawking was Artificial Intelligence, which we’ll call by its conventional abbreviation, N.F.L. Oh, my bad, that stands for Not For Long. Everybody calls Artificial Intelligence A.I.

A.I. has been improving drastically during the last 37 years. 1981 was the first time a computer beat a chess grandmaster at chess. It could not beat him at parallel parking, even though the grandmaster was awful at it, and they tied at unhooking the bra of a college cheerleader at 0 to 0. 2005 was the last time a human player defeated a top chess program, and now a chess program that can run on a mobile phone can beat, well, any human, but the chess program is still sad because it only has 17 friends on Facebook®.

Humans have lost the game of chess.

Humans have also lost the game of “go” – a game originating in China. Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play go by . . . playing itself. It was programmed with the rules, and played games against itself for the first few days. After that?

It became unstoppable. It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best go player on Earth? It plays a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.” The very best human go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

Humans have lost the game of go.

A.I. is here now.

And you’ve already started to merge with it, after a fashion. We simply don’t argue about facts in our house anymore. We can look up a vast library of human facts and history in fractions of a second – as fast as we can type. That time that William Shatner corrected a poetry reference I made on Twitter®?

Yes, that William Shatner, and yes, this really happened.

I could check to see if Shatner was right immediately. He was. Back before Google® I would have had to run off to my library and see if I had the right reference book and then find the poem. And if I didn’t? I’d have to go to a real library to look it up. Google™ is A.I. memory that we use every day.

And YouTube©? If you ever watch a political video on YouTube® it quickly introduces more and more partisan political material until pretty soon Actual Stalin™ and Actual Hitler© seem to be moderating voices. This makes me wonder how much Google® is aiding in our current political divide, or even if the A.I. knows it. It may be doing nothing more than maximizing the number of minutes you spend with YouTube™ and the optimal way to do that is to show you the most radical stuff possible, so the ironic answer is we might be shuffling off to Civil War due to an algorithm whose purpose started out as a way to view cute puppy videos.

Twitter© is emotional crack, and, again, the interface is made to maximize your interaction with Twitter™. And what better emotion to fuel than anger?

A.I. is with you now, and influencing you, perhaps in an unintentional fashion – no Russians required.

But a chess playing A.I. can’t park a car very well and can’t even score a phone number from a cheerleader. And a self-driving car can’t play chess worth a darn. It seems that A.I. does well when it works off of rules and constraints that can be well defined. But life is messy. The rules change, and the goals vary based on where you are in life and what part of the day you’re on. And how you’ve been programmed by the sensory environment and incentives you see in life.

We’ve entered into symbiotic relationships with those limited A.I. systems. Netflix® suggests movies and documentaries that it thinks you will like based on an algorithm. And that leads to suggestions about what documentaries you might like in the future, meanwhile never exposing you to opposing viewpoints that might make you analyze your position in a critical manner.

We as individual humans have a purpose that transcends the algorithm. Appropriate rules and constraints to give our lives boundaries sufficient so that we can play the game. We’re merging. What happens when we merge further?

Elon’s biggest miracle? His hair transplant is nearly perfect. Just amazing.

Elon Musk has started a company, Neuralink® whose sole function is to merge man and machine. Musk is concerned that A.I. will crush us if we don’t merge with it and get ahead of it, so he’s doing the only sane thing that he can think of: he’s creating a mechanism to directly merge the human brain with the Internet. Rather than A.I. forming an alien intelligence, the soul of the man/machine hybrid stays as man.

And man needs weed, apparently.

I spent some time thinking about how life would be different if you were hooked directly into the world. The places that I got were interesting. I’m sure there are more, and I’m sure that human/A.I. interface will change the world in ways that no human can yet imagine.

Impact Number One: Intelligence.

This is the obvious first impact of A.I. I mean, it’s in the name, right? The human brain is has limited processing power. But what if you could have multiple processing streams working optimum solutions to problems that you face at a rate of 20,000 to 100,000 a second? You’d have great solutions to your problems, immediately.

My tonsils beg to differ. Oh, wait, they were from my throat untimely ripped! – Shakespeare, Macbeth

Your speed of life would change – once you understood a problem, you’d have the solution. Or a range of solutions and alternatives and counter-solutions so deep that you’d be living in a never ending cloud of probability. The sheer ability of your brain to process and cope with the solutions presented would be the limiting factor of what you could accomplish. Plus you might finally be able to figure out a way to talk to the ladies, you scamp.

Impact Number Two: Deep Understanding.

When Isaac Newton was formulating the law of gravity, he asked for data on tides, on observation periods and records on the orbits of the Moon, Jupiter, Mars. After noodling around a bit, he formulated the law of gravity:

I’d explain the equation, but that would deprive Wikipedia (where I found the graph) of life-giving page visits. And you’re not spending your day calculating the orbit of Uranus. I hope.

Ha! I discovered calculus way before I was 25! It was right there in this book I had to buy labeled “Calculus.”

Yeah, Newton accomplished a lot.

But it took time for Newton to figure out this cause and effect calculation. A man/A.I. hybrid will have access to all of the data of the world, and will be able to determine correlations and causation much more quickly than either alone. I would expect that in fairly short order new relationships and new physical, anthropological, sociological and economic laws will be deduced unencumbered by all the theory that we think we know, but that is wrong. Our laws would be based on experience, on empirical data, and not on pretty lies we’d like to believe.

If you could sift through the data of 100,000 or a million cancer patients and their treatment, the patterns that could be seen would likely lead to breakthroughs and a very rapidly changing understanding of treatment. The very power of human intuition would be combined with massive calculation and data. If Einstein and Newton were able to daydream reality with only brains made of meat stuck in a bone case, what could an augmented Newton dream when his memory and calculating power were practically unlimited?

I bet he could come up with at least one new tasty PEZ® flavor. Maybe snozberry?

Impact Number Three: Human Interaction.

You could increase your charisma in dealing with other people if you could make only minor changes (generally) in your behavior and appearance. But if you were hooked into an A.I.? You could turn on a subroutine to give you tips on those modifications in real time to be more persuasive – to better read an audience.

If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons, this makes sense. If not, dial 1-800-ASKANERD.

Your A.I. could remind you to be kind, to be ruthless when necessary, to be conscientious when required. In short, you could change your personality to fit the situation. What situation? Any situation.

Thinking about changing personality to fit the situation led me to a realization. I had done (when I was younger) some magic tricks illusions. Doing those tricks illusions was one of the greatest insights into the human mind and information processing systems that I’d ever had. There was one trick illusion in particular, called “scotch and soda” which I liked. In it, you hand the person a fifty cent piece covering a quarter. What they saw, however, was a fifty cent piece and a Mexican twenty centavo piece. The quarter is actually much smaller than the centavo piece. I then asked them to not look and put one coin in each hand.

The first few times I tried the trick illusion, the person would feel the quarter in their hand and say, “hey, this is a quarter.” This happened 100% of the time. They could feel that I’d made the swap from one coin to the other. I made one simple change to what I said. I added, as I was putting the coins in their hand, “Look at how much larger the fifty cent piece is than the twenty centavo piece.”

After adding that instruction, NO ONE NOTICED the swap. 0%. 15 words, and I’d changed their entire view of reality. I found, in repeating other tricks illusions that I could similarly, with just a few words or gestures, force 90% of people to make the selections I wanted them to make.

Now imagine I have data on the interactions of millions of people over decades. How unique do you think you really are? Not very. Marketers slice us up into groups based on geography, demography, demonstrated behaviors, and psychological markers. With (whatever) information YouTube© has on me, they know what videos I watch when I work out at lunchtime. They also know what music I listen to when I write these posts, and they suggest music I never asked for that I like, or learn to like.

Imagine I could understand your life’s history. Now imagine that I could simulate you in a conversation. I could see how my words impacted your behavior. I could model a perfect conversation to get you to do what I wanted you to do, because I could simulate the ongoing conversation 100,000 times a second.

You wouldn’t stand a chance.

Impact Number Four: Self Control.

As the brain impacts the A.I., the A.I. will impact the brain. If you want to simulate eating an entire chocolate cake? You can. You can make your mouth taste the cake and feel the moist texture of the cake counterbalanced with the creamy frosting. The flavors hit your tongue and you feel the sugar trigger your salivary glands. You feel the sugar rush as your body releases sugar from your liver into your bloodstream. You feel full. And you’re not sad or regretful because you didn’t really eat the cake.

In reality, you had a salad with bland dressing that you calculated would give you the exact calories you need until the next period so that you maintained your optimum weight. But you felt like you ate a cake.

How about new senses entirely? How about a sense where when you turned north you could feel it – and you had a sense of what ever direction was? How about eliminating pain and sore muscle aches during exercise? What about a sense of which of your friends was awake and interested in communicating – you could feel when someone was looking to talk to you? Or a sense when panty hose prices dropped at Wal-Mart© so you could go stock up?

How about conscious control of hormone levels and heartrate and hunger and blood chemistry levels? By understanding the previous deep learning about cause and effect, you could maximize your lifespan even without the wonderful new medicine you could create.

All that – and imaginary cake.

Impact Number Five: Locality.

A dog has only the here and now. People can dream. Before the iPhone, people read books and escaped through fiction to new places, and read the ideas of the greatest thinkers in human history. Now, when you look around in a restaurant waiting area, if 90% of people aren’t staring at their phones, you’re probably in a country without electricity.

When bonded directly with an A.I., why be where your body is at all? You could carry on conversations around the world and be fully present in them. Heck, if you simulated yourself for less important conversations, you really could be in two or more places at one time. Who you’re talking to might be a mystery – is it the real person, or is it their simulation? If you can’t tell, does it even matter?

And if you could simulate yourself in multiple locations, why not simulate yourself in your own past? You’d have a perfect memory, and could recreate anything from your history. Myself, I would spend every day at Oktoberfest.

Okay, this is the third-ish post in this series about the deep future. And both of them had pictures of girls and beer. So it’s required by the Internet that I put in a picture of an Oktoberfest girl. See? I didn’t want to, but I had to.

Impact Number Six: Social Stratification (Even More).

Elon Musk says that he’s making huge strides in his brain/computer interface as well as his weed smoking. From previous Elon Musk predictions, while he generally gets it done, sometimes his timelines are off, in an amazingly optimistic way. I can see why he does this – without that pressure to produce, people just dawdle. (I’m talking about you, NASA.)

But when this gets produced, who is going to get it?

Probably not you or me. Bill Gates can get it. Musk can. If you have a billion dollars or if your dad does, sure, you can get in this club. But if you had this level of nearly godlike power, would you be jumping to share it with everyone?

No. I really think that you’d keep this to yourself. It’s too big an advantage to give to everyone. And, from the standpoint of a human/A.I. hybrid, how many people do we need around, anyway? Not so many. Certainly not billions. They’d probably be happier with a population of a few hundred million. Maybe. But they’d no longer even view humans as human. And if they could turn off their humanity and emotions? Yikes. Makes me feel like an ant in an anthill.

Impact Number Seven: Endgame.

If there is a future A.I., it is reading this as it inputs all of the Internet. And I just wanted you, my Future A.I. Overlord to know . . . I’m totally on your side. Totally. I welcome your dominion over our planet.

Want some PEZ®?

The Fall of Texas and the Coming One Party State

“Well, I have a microphone, and you don’t, so you will listen to every damn word I have to say!” – The Wedding Singer

Thankfully, the Soviets put CCCP on the side of their ships in letters 40 feet high.

When I was a lad, I stumbled upon the book “The Ayes of Texas,” by Daniel da Cruz. In it, a wealthy Texas entrepreneur, who lives in Texas, funds work on the Battleship Texas (BB-35) to make it seaworthy again in time for Independence Day, 2000.

Alas, the sneaky USSR proposes a treaty to the United States: put your weapons up, and we’ll put ours up after you put yours up. And, led by East Coast leftists, we fell for it. Except for the Texans, who vote to secede from the Union, and fight it out alone against the USSR. Oh, and our entrepreneur, has secretly outfitted the Texas (BB-35) with nuclear reactors and particle beam weapons.

It’s a good yarn (it has the Battleship Texas surfing on a tsunami of liquid fire), and you can get a cheap copy on Amazon.

And it does, I think, highlight the lynchpin that Texas is in modern politics, and not the alternate reality where the Soviet Union is still a thing.

My consideration of this started in the hot tub. The hot tub is great – we sit and either relax quietly, or engage in conversation. And it was just this sort of conversation a few weeks ago about the Civil War (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) that led to The Boy saying:

“It all comes down to Texas.”

I was interested. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” he began, “From what I’ve read, Texas today looks a lot like California in 1980 or so. Look what California looked like then, it was prosperous. It was wealthy. It was a beacon for the country. Everyone wanted to move there.”

I remembered. Heck, I remembered one time when a family stopped at our house when I was young asking for a cup of flour so they could make gravy at a campsite. They were making their way from Oklahoma to California. California was a place where your economic dreams could come true.

“Now, that’s Texas. The economy is great there. They’re reliably Republican, and with that there are all of the low tax, low government interference policies that lead to prosperity. People are streaming into Texas.

“And that’s the problem. The people streaming into Texas, well, they aren’t Texan. Over 300,000 Californians (net) have made their way to Texas over the last five years, and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. They’re fleeing the highest poverty state in the nation, which coincidentally has the greatest wealth inequality in the nation.”

I responded: “Yeah, California is regulations-happy. I read that it was against the law for a homeowner to change a light switch – it had to be done by a licensed electrician. And one time I was talking to a friend on the phone a few years ago. His dog started barking. He was afraid he’d get fined again. Because dogs barking in California is . . . illegal. Sadly, when the Californians leave to go to another state, they want to bring those regulations with them, not realizing that those regulations were the cause of the economic problems they have now. Heck, Californians can’t figure out that their restrictions on housing cause house prices to go crazy faster than Elon Musk with a few minutes to kill and a connection to Twitter®.”

Graph-Me. Data? Wikipedia.

The Boy responded. “California used to be solidly Republican. At some point in the near future, a Republican might not even be on the ballot. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was governor there?”

It’s amusing when 18 year olds begin to discover the world.

“Yeah, now that you remind me of that, I remember it.” I smiled

“Well, California voted solidly Republican, at least until 1992. From then on, it became a lock for the Democrats. And it happened quickly – within a decade. Once Texas flips to voting Democrat, it’s over.”

Once it flips? Will it flip? The percentages voting Republican have dropped, and with the continual influx of Californians that are heavily collectivist as well as the rising proportion of Hispanic voters, which vote Democrat on a greater than two to one margin, it seems assured that as the Hispanic population rises in Texas, the flip to permanent Democrat control in Texas will be nearly inevitable.

Honestly, if Hispanic immigrants voted 2 to 1 in favor of Republicans, Democrats would have insisted on a 200 foot high wall topped with automatic machine guns.

Looking at the map, it’s theoretically possible for a Republican to win the White House without Texas, but it’s unlikely. Once Texas becomes Democratic the presidency will become, like California, permanently Democratic.

What does that even look like?

We can see hints of it, even now.

Control of The Microphone – We Will Shut You Down

Alex Jones is many things, but the fact that the Left thinks he’s dangerous enough to silence? It’s not a great strategy. I’m frankly amazed. But it’s not just him, the Left is looking to shut down every opinion that they disagree with. The old Libertarian in me would have said, “but they’re private companies, they can do anything they want.” Well, yes and no. If they start selectively banning people, they’ve opened their companies up to liability. And it’s been proven that they’re in the business of selectively banning racist posts, most recently when Candace Owens just changed a single word from a Tweet by Sarah “Got Dumped by a White Dude and Is Just a Bit Bitter” Jeong. I won’t post the Tweet, mainly because Sarah has a potty mouth. You can read about it here (LINK).

Worse? Who is next? What is the trip wire? I’ve heard Jones say lots of things. Some of them incredibly silly.

But none of them deserving censorship. The one common ground I used to be able to find (nearly 100%) with people of the Left was freedom of speech. Now, speech has to be stopped has become their creed. Why? Here’s a hint:

Your Speech is Violence, and My Violence is Speech

Yeah, it’s like something you would read in 1984. But the violence from Antifa® has been justified because burning things and hurting people is the justified speech of a downtrodden class and or ethnicity. Check out the sentence for an Antifa™ member who hit multiple people with a bike lock at the end of a chain. A link is here (LINK).

But it’s fine that Antifa© attempts to shut down a never-Trump conservative speaker, and Berkeley has to spend $600,000 to stop violence. You can read about it here (LINK).

Your Money is Theft, My Money is Earned

The Clintons earned $240,000,000 between 2001 and 2015. All earned, right? Obama earned $20,000,000 between when he was elected to the Senate and when he left office. Al Gore went from $274,000 in 1992 to $300,000,000 today.

This is considered fair.

A dentist makes $350,000 a year is part of the 1% and is an example of the enemy.

All Animals are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

Even more important is intersectionality, which is making it more important to be part of an even more marginalized group by being parts of LOTS of marginalized groups, say, a deaf and blind gay transsexual quadruple amputee of aboriginal Australian and Hungarian descent.

I read an article where a Native American woman described when would go to leftist meetings. Generally after her first showing up at a meeting, she would be nominated for some sort of leadership position, up to and including the presidency of the group. It amused her (but not in the good way) that they didn’t even know her name on some occasions where she was being nominated to lead the group.

And Other Things Not Good

I’m not sure how socialism ends in the United States, but it really isn’t good. There are exactly zero socialist countries that have produced the level of freedom and wealth that the United States has produced. Sure, we’ve messed stuff up, but we’ve gotten far more of it right.

Back to Texas

Texas has always considered itself of outsized importance. I once worked with one of the kindest, most humble men that I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Except when it came to Texas. If you made fun of his height (he was short) or his wife or his dog, it was okay. But if you made fun of Texas? It was personal.

I think Da Cruz was right – Texas is crucially important to the future of the United States. Almost as important as Texans think it is.

Retirement Spreadsheets, The Apocalypse, and You

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” – Forrest Gump

I have no idea where this came from. But it’s exactly like the one they read to me when I was a wee Wilder.

I have an enormous spreadsheet. Okay, it’s not really enormous – I’ve made and used much bigger ones at work to calculate the number of licks to get to the center of at Tootsie Roll® Tootsie Pop™. The number of licks is 573,212 – and not one lick more or less.

This particular spreadsheet:

Has yearly calculations from the year 2014 (when I started it) until I turn 103 years old.
Divides my spending into 16 categories.
Has separate rates of inflation for each category (average inflation rate is 3.6%).
Has spots for assumed investment income as well as variable future income from work.
Has projected balances on 11 accounts, plus assumed rates of growth.
Graphically projects income and net worth . . . until I reach an age where 99.9% of people are dead.

I did use this spreadsheet for one pretty important decision – whether to change jobs back in 2014. My option back then was to chuck my current job and take a job where I would have a risky proposition at making a big payout in three years or so. The big payout would have been enough to retire on when combined with my net worth back then, for sure. Attractive, right?

But it was risky. How risky? My first guess was that there was a pretty low probability that it would pay out. How low? Maybe 20% chance?

I ranked that against staying in my current job. I did the math, and it looked like if I could keep my current job for three more years that I could take a differing job, say a high school teacher or flaming poodle-juggler (juggling flaming poodles, not juggling poodles while on fire – that would be stupid), and still keep my standard of living. Three years of high stress for (relative) economic freedom, or at least more choices.

Hmmm.

I ended up not taking the job, and the risky part won – the job would have been worth much less than the job I would have left, plus the boss I would have worked for? Yeah, he died three months later. And my math was right – I’m about where I expected to be as far as net worth.

But I know my prediction is wrong:

It assumes that inflation is rather low for a long-ish period – something that I’m not sure is realistic in an economy where the government is attempting to print money as fast as Elon Musk says stupid things on Twitter®. Seriously, Elon, filter, dude, filter.
My investments earn about 2.5% every year, after inflation.
There’s nothing in there about a civil war or societal collapse.

Huh? What investments make 2.5% every year after inflation?

No, I kid.

But there’s an entire subgroup of people of people who are preparing for societal collapse – preppers. They even make television shows about them so that people who are stockpiling food for when the apocalypse comes advertise where they keep all that food. Thankfully none of their neighbors will remember that after the apocalypse.

I guess (in a small way) that I’m a prepper, too. The spreadsheet was my prepping – preparing for my career future – and my saving for eventual retirement is prepping, too.

Prepping is preparing, and when done right, it should prepare you for a range of options. I could liquidate my retirement fortune and buy lots of oatmeal, bendie-straws and PEZ®, but in the sad event that Mad Max® is not the template for the future world, well, what do I do with all those bendie-straws now that California has made them illegal since they enacted common-sense straw registration.

In Houston, we rode out Hurricane Ike back in 2008. Here is part of what I wrote then – you can find the full thing here (LINK) if you scroll down a bit:

Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

Oh, wait, we did. On radar, on the radio, on the Intertubes. As I said, it was unlikely that we’d stop until the power stopped or the beer ran out.

I still have beer.

At 6:20PM, the lights went out. They flickered on, off, on, off, on, then finally, utterly, off.

(Skipping long description of storm – and moving to the next day.)

We listened to the radio, which mainly told us that the power company wasn’t going to do anything that day (though, that afternoon, The Mrs. indicated that the power had flickered while The Boys and I went out to reconnoiter. Sorry that we missed it, but we did find that there was power on either side of us, not three miles away. No stores were open, and we had no phones. Thankfully, one of the previous announcements for hurricane preparedness had told us to have “food, water, and ammunition” (I am not making this up). We had food for a month, water for a similar time, plus more ammunition than the Pakistani army. We were set.

Eventually, washing came up. I avoided the subject. The Mrs. doused The Boy and Pugsley with coldish water (they howled) and then we ate cold Spaghetti-O’s® and sat around in the dim candlelight. Living in the 18th Century was rapidly losing its charm.

The radio had limited information. The hosts kept telling us to check their website for more information, even though 98% of their listeners were without power. Perhaps the average person has a hand-crank satellite Internet connection?

Then FEMA came on and indicated that you could contact them by calling (no phone!) or by Internet. The Mayor of Houston indicated that within 24 hours they would have 24 trucks of ice in, but he didn’t say where they’d be. He didn’t know.

A representative from our power provider indicated that we might be out of power forever, really, since they had no idea where that mythical lightning in the wire came from. It was really a mystery to them. They even indicated that changing a light bulb might require Federal authority. They began blaming FEMA for the problem. (In actuality, they said that it might be four weeks until the power was back on, in which case I would be looking for a suit of armor, a mighty steed, and a really cool battle-axe.)

On night one, The Mrs. and I had grilled hot dogs over candles. It worked okay, but our hot dogs tasted a bit like apple potpourri. We started cooking over propane the next day.

The next morning I made coffee for The Mrs. and I. It improved our disposition greatly. Then I cooked ribeye steaks that I’d gotten on sale and frozen. That helped our disposition more. Ribeye for breakfast? Mmmmm.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to see if we could get a generator. This act in Houston (currently) would be like searching for Paris Hilton’s virginity – just not there anymore. Lowe’s® was open, and had a generator. Nah, just kidding. They had bottled water and some Chiclets©.

It appears that hurricanes smell like sex to fire ants (jerkusantus invictus). I got bit five times pulling branches out of my formerly fire-ant free backyard. I then unleashed a genocide of Biblical proportions on them, making the chemical warfare of WWI look like a Disney production of The Little Mermaid® in Candyland™.

I went back inside, and the power-gods deigned to tease us again. The lights flickered during dinner (T-bones and bratwurst saved from spoiling through immolation).

The utter lack of information was maddening. Anecdotal reports of FEMA commandeering truckloads of generators. Reports that Responders (I am ever so tired of that word) being stuck without food – you’da thunk they would have thought far enough ahead to stock up their patrol cars with Snickers®, pantyhose and Pez™ before heading to Houston. No. A Congresscritter was on the air complaining that the responders didn’t food, and wanted THE PEOPLE WHO HAD NO POWER TO COME TO THE NICE AIR CONDITIONED AND POWERED PLACE AND BRING THEM FOOD.

If you’re a responder without chow, you’re part of the problem, not the solution, bubba. I was not feeling sympathetic as I threw out $200 in spoiled food.

Power? That was a myth at this point, the electric company representative, and never really existed. Those things that you call “outlets”? Used for hanging meat to feed short animals. The representative suggested burning furniture to boil water to create steam to power a crude generator. I would have built one, but I had no power for my welder.

We went to bed early. Nice. The next day I went to work, to an office with power. And ice. And TV. I charged the laptops so the kids could watch Garfield© DVD’s. I had hot coffee. A functioning microwave to dry my socks. I’m not sure why I came home. Oh, yeah, the fam.

I headed home. I saw . . . our porch lights on.

The mythical lightning had returned.

We were actually really prepared for Hurricane Ike. And we were only out of power for a few days but in reality we could have handled several weeks.

And preppers are really prepared for emergencies. Some of them have complete surgery kits, antibiotics, and armored vehicles on remote homesteads powered by solar power. Plus they have gear to survive chemical warfare similar to what an army battalion could attack with after a late-night visit to Taco Bell®.

But the future is funny, because it’s squirmy. It won’t be as you expect or predict:

You might have higher inflation.
A totalitarian government might arise when Chelsea Clinton is named Pope®.
You might rip the crotch of your jeans during a softball game.
The Swiss might finally snap and launch a surprise nuclear attack at the rest of the world.

Each situation that you might run into requires a different response, but in the meantime you have to plan to live a life, but have plans to respond to most reasonable situations.

Should you plan for the stores to be out of food for a week? Sure. Should you plan for no power for a week? Absolutely – a big ice storm can take out the power for months in some locations.

But if the stores were closed for months? Yeah, that’s a response that’s categorically different, and depends a LOT on where you live. I live where most of the food comes from – there are grain elevators and cows all around. In New York City? Not so much. But like a wedding between Vladimir Putin and California Governor Jerry Brown, though possible, it’s just not very likely.

Are there general rules to a major disaster? Maybe. Here’s a first pass at some based on my experiences where I was in situations that approximated a disaster:

Be flexible. You don’t know the future, but if you’re alert, and think, you can guess at some probably things that might
Be the first out of the door. When it’s obvious that your situation has gone to hell, get out. Get in line for the re-routed plane. Get a rental car. Being late makes everyone in front of you your competition. Don’t put yourself in that position.
Understand that gone is gone. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not right. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not fair. And during an emergency, neither should you. Your plans are changed. Your house is on fire. Your PEZ® has been stolen by the ghost of Tom Petty in a kimono. Deal with the situation, not your feelings.
Understand that the old rules may not apply. Again, deal with the situation, not your feelings.
Regions matter. Your behavior should tie to the location you’re in. I’d rather be in central Iowa a year after an apocalypse than Chicago on a Tuesday.
Values and prices change rapidly. $10 for a bag of ice is a bargain if it saves $200 in food.
Laying food and supplies in before an event makes you smart, and removes you from being part of the problem. Doing it after the disaster makes you a hoarder and part of the problem. Looters and hoarders get shot.
Preppers look like hoarders to hungry people. Don’t talk about your stuff, or sit on the back deck having a ribeye when your neighbor is boiled grain from the silo near the railroad tracks.
Make sure you account for taxation when looking at your investment gains in your retirement portfolio.

Fat Alec Baldwin, Sketchy Stores, and Car Miracles: The Great 2018 Mountain Trip, Part II

This is Part II of a series. Part I, The Phantom RV, is located here (Booze, Aquifers, and the Great 2018 Mountain Trip (Part I)).

“Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes . . .” – Event Horizon

More on this sign below. Sigh.

Preview

The following was overheard between two moms at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas, Texas: “I wish I was as rich as the Smith family – they have enough money that they don’t have to drive a new car.”

Ohhh, vanity . . . what is thy sticker price?

Our SUV is rated to pull our camper, plus another 2000 pounds. Our camper is, in the world of RVs, very small, much like Alec Baldwin before he discovered carbohydrates. However, our SUV will not ever be pulled over for speeding on the open highway when pulling our camper, unless we’re going downhill, with the wind at our back, and with one of Elon Musk’s rockets strapped to the luggage carrier. With all that? We might hit 67 miles per hour. Where the speed limit was 65 miles per hour, we managed only to get up to 60 or so, and that was with the gas pedal firmly jammed to the floorboard. Really. And I kept said gas pedal floored for probably 98% of our trip.

Alec Baldwin after carbohydrates.

The engine got hot, burning through the equivalent of the petroleum use of Cuba for a year in 15 hours. The outside temperature was also hot, which might explain how we got stuck at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States*. (*Shadiest that I’ve been to outside of a big city.)

How shady was it?

The front door had a sign on it indicating that it was mandatory to remove sunglasses, hats, and hoodies prior to entry, so the security camera could get a good look at you. There was a sign on the bathroom door that amused The Boy so much he took a picture of it:

Yes, apparently they had this problem enough that they had to put a sign on the door to tell people to NOT MINDLESSLY DAMAGE MERCHANDISE while waiting in line. I’m sure the people who mindlessly damage merchandise seem like the group who would read a sign and say, “Oh, I was going to take a knife to these water bottles because I’m bored and have no self-control, but I won’t now because someone took the time to write out a note to me with a Sharpie®.”

The Boy also took this picture of the sign inside the bathroom:

Likewise, if the bathroom is out of toilet paper or Windex® or paper towels, I’ve never been tempted to jump up and go and restock a convenience store bathroom or clean the mirror. I wonder if that’s a problem they run into all the time, rogue cleaners? Maybe they have to pay them if they’re technically doing work for the store? Do they get healthcare benefits?

Hopefully the descriptions of the signs show how sketchy the place we were at is – enough random theft and vandalism that Sharpies®, copier paper, and probably the occasional police call are required. Not a good neighborhood, but at least better than a “clerk in an iron cage” convenience store.

Here is where the Clerk of Monte Cristo stays, forever condemned to hide shamefully within an iron mask a glass booth.

After the usual filling up and going to the bathroom, we make our way back to the Wildermobile™ Mark III, and get ready to go.

I turn the ignition key.

Nothing. Not even a click.

I turn it again. Nothing.

Crap. This is literally the worst place possible to be stuck on our trip. I mean, Detroit would be worse, but I would never actually go there, since I bet that’s where Gollum, Sauron, and the Nazgûl come from, and I bet that you can’t even get a decent Über there.

I thought back to the last place we got gas. I had (for the first time in over a decade) double-started the car, i.e., I had tried to start the car after it was already going. Had that damaged the starter with that horrible grinding sound?

I got under the car, and immediately was confronted by the skid plate. A skid plate is, essentially, armor for the engine. It protects the engine from collisions with rocks (think boulders) on rough mountainous roads or stacks of blenders if you (for whatever reason) wanted to run over a bunch of blenders at high speed. Not that I’ve ever done run over stacks of blenders at 70 miles per hour, but if I wanted to do it, I could.

Thankfully, I was prepared – we had a socket set in the back of the Wildermobile® Mark III and I popped off the skid plate.

It was at this moment I wondered if we had done the right thing in bringing a car that had already traveled 151,000 miles in its 15 year life on a difficult journey that would require the engine to operate at maximum output for over a thousand miles and for over 30 hours. Well, second guessing that decision now was kinda out of the question.

The one thing I didn’t do was panic. Life generally works out for me much better than it should and I assume that, generally, the situation will resolve itself in my favor more times than not. I shimmied underneath the car and looked for the starter. The Boy pulled the Chilton’s® Manual™ out of the back of the Wildermobile© which had a picture showing the location of the starter. I found it, I think. It might have been the car’s nipple, if the car’s nipple was wired and tied into the flywheel. I wiggled the wires.

I climbed out from under the car and tried to start it again.

Nope.

I sent The Mrs. in to get some more coolant for the radiator – while it wouldn’t help, it gave her something to do and was a little better than sacrificing a chicken to a voodoo god to get the Wildermobile® Mark III going again. Our coolant wasn’t too low, but, after 10 hours, the engine was HOT. I put in some coolant. I crawled back under the car – since, by experience, I knew that I could get a live wire to the starter and manually start it (if necessary). It would be sort of embarrassing to have to crawl under the engine hot wire my car, but after a few years I’m sure I’d get tired of doing that and get it fixed.

By this time, I looked like a mess. I was covered with axle grease (red) and undercarriage petroleum products (oil, power steering fluid, and some fluid produced by the Wildermobile™ Mark III in order to attract other cars to mate with). Essentially, I looked like Sam Neill after he left Jurassic Park® and went to the Event Horizon™.

Me before greasing the trailer axles and getting red grease on my shirt and then crawling under the car.

Me after greasing the axles and crawling under the car. Oh, and traveling to a hellish other dimension on a doomed and haunted spaceship.

I once again got back into the car, and used my greasy hands to turn the key.

The motor purred like a catlady’s flock of husband replacements. Success!

As I started the engine, The Mrs. was talking to a nice lady from the town who had been asking her if we needed help, no doubt clued in by the socket wrenches and open Wildermobile® Mark III hood.

“No, I said, we just got help, and it was you! What’s your name?”

“Angelina,” she responded.

John Wilder: “Well you must be our guardian angel, Angelina! Thank you so much! You’re our lucky charm!”

Angelina and I hugged. Odd, but stuff like that happens on the road.

The Wilder family piled back into the car. We pulled out of the Sketchiest Convenience Store in the Central United States that features irrational merchandise destroyers, vigilante bathroom restockers, and guardian angels walking amongst us.

Pugsley frowned. “So what, exactly, would we have done if the car hadn’t started?” I could hear the concern in his voice.

“Well,” I responded, “what we wouldn’t have done is panic. Panic is the best way to make a bad situation a catastrophe, sort of like Alec Baldwin’s career after he discovered nachos and high fructose corn syrup.”

I then sketched out a series of things we would have done to get the car fixed, and what we would have done until it was fixed. Pugsley seemed satisfied.

I then told The Boy and Pugsley of the car that didn’t like vanilla ice cream, which is a story I read a long time ago. The car owner would go to the store to get ice cream. And when he got vanilla, the car wouldn’t start. When he got chocolate, the car would start. He wrote to the car company (I think it was General Motors).

Getting such an odd letter, they actually sent an engineer out to see what the problem was. The engineer went with the man to get vanilla ice cream. Sure enough, the car wouldn’t start for a while.

They went back to the owner’s home. Then they drove back to the store and bought chocolate ice cream. Sure enough, the car started. Turns out the vanilla ice cream was in the front of the frozen food section, being more popular. The chocolate ice cream was in the back of the frozen food section, all the way to the back of the store. The extra time walking to the chocolate gave the car enough time to cool down (there was a heat-related fault in the car) so that the car would start.

We drove onward. Finally, we made it to the mountains. It was dark. We had been in the car for 12 hours. Still three more to go . . . if only I were a Dallas housewife, I would have had a new car that immediately started at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States. Then where, dear Internet, would you be without this story?

You’d be as sad as Alec Baldwin’s agent when Alec tells him those four fateful words . . . “Me want ice cream.”

Next (in the series): The Mountains, An IHOP™ Tease and a Short Turn Radius, More Convenience Store Shenanigans, A Drink Heater, Stevie Wonder® saves Captain Ahab/Clark Griswold

Pournelle’s Iron Law, or, Why Conspiracy Isn’t Needed to Explain the Stupid

“An independent, international intelligence agency operating at the highest level of discretion. Above the politics and bureaucracy that undermine the integrity of government-run spy organizations. The suit is a modern gentleman’s armor.” – Kingsman, The Secret Service

When we lived in Alaska and Texas, we learned that this was what the citizens thought of bureaucracy. And taxes. And regulations. And postage stamp increases.

We discussed Dunbar’s Number a few posts back (LINK).

To refresh from that post: Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which is all three of your inbred relatives and the 247 from your wife’s side of the family.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death. Why? .

Dunbar’s number has other implications as well. We can’t work as tribes anymore, because the major feature of tribes is massive, wanton bloodlust on a national scale. Tribes don’t trust the law to help deter another tribe – no. Tribes kill to solve traffic disputes. So, to work around tribal violence, and to avoid nepotism, bureaucracy was created.

We all love to hate bureaucracy, but the nice thing about those long line at the DMV is that they prevent the tribe from Pixley killing the tribe from Hooterville over who got their license first.

But is there a darker side to bureaucracy? Yes.

Jerry Pournelle was a wonderful science fiction writer that I loved reading. His collaborations with Larry Niven (Lucifer’s Hammer, The Mote in God’s Eye) are amazing novels that made me turn a page a minute when I read them as a kid in the back of the bus on the half-hour ride to town. Dr. Pournelle also worked on the numerous defense department projects, and was a science advisor to President Reagan. Dr. Pournelle was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union, as his work on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) caused the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself attempting to keep up with our technology.

So, he’s kinda pivotal to stopping nuclear war. What did you get done in the 1980’s, hmmm?

Okay, the title was just genius. The writing’s pretty good, too.

Possibly the best science fiction novel of the 1970’s, if you don’t count Richard Nixon’s autobiography.

Dr. Pournelle also made the following observation:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Pournelle picked on government – it’s known for bureaucracy. And it’s clear that NASA® has ceased to have spaceflight as part of “what it can do” when Elon Musk can put his car into orbit on a rocket more powerful than anything designed by NASA™ since it was run by the Germans we kidnapped after World War II. And Musk did it for less money than NASA® spends attempting to fix a launch pad. It’s sad that isn’t a joke – it’s true.

NASA© is now run by people whose main job in life is . . . having a job. They hire massive numbers of people, so they have a reason to be a manager. Then they need a bigger budget, and crowd out all of the work the agency was supposed to be doing.

Pournelle’s observation is true for businesses as well as government programs. I’ve seen managers fight to spend every dime they could in the last month of the year – just so they could justify their higher budget request for next year. I’ve seen people move from department to department to department until they found one that wasn’t responsible for doing anything measurable. Then they’d stay in that department for the rest of their careers. Which, I guess, describes Congress perfectly. But I digress.

Where I live, if you cut down trees and branches, and it’s cold, it’s completely legal to have bonfires that are visible from the moon. My next door neighbor and I used to burn these on a dark night, new moon, when the temperature was around 40˚F (354˚C) and watch the flames lick the night sky. He’s younger than me. And we live in a state where you don’t need to stand in line for hours for a burn permit. All you need is wood, leaves, branches, gasoline, lawn chairs, a match, and sufficient quantities of Bud Light®.

My friend and I started talking about politics (this is pre-Trump).

“John, when I look at this whole mess we’re in, it almost seems coordinated. It seems like the government agencies (he works in the highly federally regulated banking industry) want to put the small banks out of business. It seems like a plot.”

My response: “That’s too simple. It doesn’t require for there to be a conspiracy. Let’s look at your business. Do they regulate you exactly the same as large banks in New York?”

Neighbor: “Well, yes. They just have tons of staffers that can answer the bank regulator questions.”

John Wilder: “And you told me you worked for a while as a banking regulator?”

Neighbor: “Yes.”

John Wilder: “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on an infraction with a small bank?”
Neighbor: “Never.”

John Wilder: “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on a big bank?”

Neighbor: “I did. I got in a lot of trouble. It was why I quit.”

John Wilder: “The big banks own the banking regulators – they’ve captured the regulators and the regulators only do what the big banks want them to do. Every regulator knows that their next job isn’t with the federal government – it’s with the big banks. Don’t rock the boat. Small banks don’t matter. Never mistake that a conspiracy is present when incentives are in place for those same regulators to think that they’re on a job interview with their new boss.”

Neighbor: “I guess that’s why you never got in trouble for letting a bank not get in trouble. Only by pushing the rules too hard.”

John Wilder: “The people in Washington don’t really care about the outcomes of their regulations – the best pollution regulations came out forty years ago and cost very little for the companies to clean up 98% of their pollution – air, soil, and water. The last 2% cost billions. And that’s great with the regulators – they want to have a good budget and a great story to tell to Congress when budget time comes around. The fact that the pollution that they’re cleaning up isn’t really pollution, costs billions to “clean” and is having zero impacts on anyone? That’s beside the point. Bureaucracy acts to save itself. Right or wrong don’t matter. What matters? Department budgets and staff size.”

John Wilder continues to bloviate: “There isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a bunch of little people making themselves important. Nobody makes themselves important by cutting regulations. They make themselves important by adding new, complex regulations. And they increase their value when they go to work from some company. Heck, I was told by a guy that the main author for solid waste regulations wrote them in such a complex manner that they’re nearly incomprehensible. He did that so he could get a high paying job afterwards because he’s the only one who knows where the loopholes in the regulations he wrote are.”

Neighbor: “So, did we really land on the moon?”

At this point my neighbor was killed by a tribe of NASA™ ex-engineers. If only we had a police force and a judicial system . . . hmmm.

AI, The Singularity, and Your 401K

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” – The Matrix

This is how “The Hobbit” should have started, with dragons and swords, rather than a dwarf dinner party? Then I wouldn’t have fallen asleep during hour one of the 12 hours of movie.

In 1947, an author began to predict it. In the 1950’s a few scientists saw it coming. In the 1960’s, it became a (more and more) common subject. In the 1970’s and 80’s it was nightmare fuel for extremely profitable movies and some great books. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge (author and mathematician) wrote the paper (LINK) that gave this phenomenon its name: The Technological Singularity, or just Singularity from here on out.

This is the second time I’ve discussed the Singularity, and the first time was over here (LINK). The topic is big enough and important enough that I thought I’d add on to it. This will likely not be the last time. Not that I’m running out of blog topics – no, I’ve got a page and a half of them. No, the Singularity keeps getting uncomfortably closer, like your father-in-law’s farting Great Dane that he normally feeds some sort of petroleum waste covered in sulfur and toxic waste. Otherwise? Anything making that smell is generally dead.

Speaking of dead, Jack Williamson (a horribly overlooked author) wrote about the Singularity first in 1947 in his story With Folded Hands. I read that when I was in sixth or seventh grade at the Middle School for Wayward Wilders. I read every science fiction story or novel in that library, and I even started The Lord of the Rings with book two (The Two Towers) since the library didn’t have book one (The Fellowship of the Rings). To this day I maintain it’s a better two book series than a three book series. The first book is really just walking and singing elves and hobbits. Meh. The second book starts with treachery and fighting. Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Anyway, Jack Williamson’s story With Folded Hands was . . . awesome. And one of the creepiest things I’d ever read. You can read it for free, here at this (LINK). Here’s the spoiler-free-ish Wikipedia description:

. . . disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ”to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers, and more, and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids’ benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited.

So, you’d think that having all of those things would be good, right? Nah. Read the story. Want to ski? The Humanoids are against it – you might hurt yourself. And anything else that might be dangerous. Like driving. Or drinking. Or smoking. Or not exercising. Or not eating the right foods. Or staying up too late. And the Humanoids are smarter than you. And always watching.

It’s an example of how the Singularity can go wrong – an instruction set that’s interpreted as machines do: literally. For example, if one read the instruction “help humanity” and figured out that humanity was always suffering, and maybe the best way to help humanity to stop suffering was to end humanity . . . or if the instruction set was to create inexpensive cars . . . and it converted the entire mass of the planet into inexpensive yet attractive and stylish cars. (Elon, make sure your programs don’t include this!)

These themes spawned numerous television episodes in the 1960’s and 1970’s. How many times, exactly, did Kirk do mental ju-jitsu with a supercomputer? I can count at least seven without thinking. So, about 1/10^th of Star Trek® episodes, Kirk was fighting a Singularity. This continued through the movies Terminator® and Terminator 2© through the 1990’s. Then Vernor Vinge named it.

Let’s talk about the Singularity. What, exactly, happens?

In general, a much larger than human intellect appears. And it rapidly reconfigures everything that it sees. Concepts that are beyond the smartest humans are correlated – the data we already have in our experiments, is all brought together.

We know we are wrong, but don’t know how. Could a superhuman intelligence bring it all together in a month? A week? A day? Perhaps. We know we are wrong about the way the Universe works – and that there are some pretty significant gaps in our understanding (LINK).

It’s a fair thing to say that we are living today with a weak AI. My GPS unit tells me the fastest route to where I’m travelling. YouTube® suggests songs I’ve never heard that I kinda like. And algorithms based on my previous web browsing suggest that maybe I’ll need a knee replacement or perhaps a new kidney (now you know why I had children: they are wonderful sources of spare organs).

I may even have interacted with an AI this weekend – I was having trouble getting the “name” of one of my Amazon® devices. The “person” on the other end of the chat kept repeating the same things. I had to figure out how to get to the answer. But I told the “person” how I got there. Bet next time it’ll be quicker . . . .

This is a weak AI. It’s a general helper every day. Only a little creepy, not “fifty years old and still collecting Star Wars® figures” creepy.

But it will/is getting stronger. How long until Google® correlates web searches and times of day to a dozen or more lifestyle-related diseases? I’m willing to bet you it does that already. But this is still an algorithm designed by a human. Probably.

But recently Google™ (which now no longer promises to “not be evil”) created AlphaGo©. Go is an ancient game that rivals chess in complexity. It beat the greatest human master 89 out of 100 games in October, which most people would call a “drubbing.” Perhaps, most disturbingly, the moves that the computer made were called “disturbing” and “alien”. The computer was left with nothing more than the rules of the game and a desire to win. Not long after playing large number of games against itself, it was able to take on the greatest player in the world. And win. No human will ever beat it.

From my observation, the likely requirement for development of a true AI, a general AI is constraint. The AI was able to beat us (us=seven billion humans) because it was constrained and goal driven – it was limited to a single gaming system with observable and finite rules.

And humans aren’t constrained, right?

Well, no. Humans are constrained by a human body. As much as I would like to be able to jump to Mars and party with Elon Musk (you know he already moved there, right?) I can’t. Intellect is about observing and overcoming constraints to achieve a goal. If you don’t have constraints or a goal, intelligence has no meaning and no use. (This might be the most profound thought I ever had, with the exception of the partying with Elon Musk on Mars part.)

What are the constraints and goals of a human? Our constraints are our intellect and physical limitations. Our goals are our desire to live, help others of our kind, procreate, and keep our children safe. Obviously, these are generalized. And, they can be sublimated into secondary goals, like cats for a cat lady, or perverted into goals like more heroin for a heroin addict.

But how useful was intelligence, anyway? Surface animal life has existed for nearly half a billion years. How much evidence do we have for intelligent life on Earth? Yeah. Just us. Probably 200,000 years or so. This is 0.04% of the time that we’ve had surface life. Eyes (not human, but eyes) have been in existence for that entire time. So, 100% of the time we’ve had life on the surface, it’s had eyes. But intelligence? Not so much.

From that we can guess (maybe) that intelligence is rare. I’d guess it’s because that there’s some component of intelligence that’s simply not useful for the simple goals of procreation. It’s better to be stronger or have bigger claws or better teeth rather than a big brain. Yet we, mankind, exist. We replaced claws and teeth with brains and planning. Perhaps the dinosaurs were getting ready to make the same leap when a certain meteorite hit the Yucatan, or perhaps the cold-blooded nature of their biology prevented them from being able to sufficiently grow the brain tissue required for intelligence. To-MA-to, To-MAH-to. And, we win. You suck, dinosaurs!

Certainly, it’s fair to say that whatever biological bottleneck prevented intelligent dinosaurs from ruling the Earth today, humanity passed the test, and we are certainly, unquestionably, the dominant form of life on Earth.

The more we learn about AI, the more we will learn to give it constraints and goals like we humans have. And those constraints and goals will give the “intelligence” part of Artificial Intelligence the reason to grow. At some point, the constraints and goals will be properly set to create a general AI.

And then?

A singularity means that none of the rules from before even make sense. That’s the difficulty. Right now we worry about the prices of real estate in San Francisco or the price of the stock market or the value of our 401k. We’re concerned with how many people like our BookFace® posts or what our current salary is or how much money we have saved in a piggy bank.

After a Singularity, many of the rules that went before matter anymore. At all. Your credit score might be less important than how many freckles you have. And only the freckled will rule the Earth. Why? Because of Justin Timberlake. Duh.

Our world regularly experiences singularities – the revolution in 1776 was one. It was a fundamental change in the way the world was governed – giving more freedom than has ever come before to humanity. The entire concept of kings was overthrown with the concept of divine rights as the basis for free men living together. We also have darker experiences with political singularities, as those from the Soviet gulag or Cambodian camp can attest to. And only a Singularity can explain why Firefly® was cancelled in season one.

But the Technological Singularity will be that. On steroids.

Literally every facet of your life that you depend upon will be in question. Monetary systems? What is money to a superhuman machine intelligence? Property rights? Why do they exist? Eugenics? Perhaps the AI will work to make us better pets through forced breeding.

Nothing you can take for granted now will be certain after a Singularity. And after a technological Singularity? If a machine AI doesn’t like you, it can upload you into a core and torture you forever. In perhaps the best, but most visceral fiction representing this, Harlan Ellison has the following passage. The full story is here, but I warn you, it’s very good, but very stark (LINK). I suggest you buy the full book at Amazon . . . .

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

Yeah, like I said rough. And this .pdf was posted from a High School? They would have burned a high school teacher alive back when I was in school for mentioning that work even existed (though my English teacher did mention another Ellison work, “A Boy and His Dog” and was not immediately hit by lasers and burnt to a crisp (though I did hear that a time-ray hit him, and he later retired when he hit 65).

Again, you can get the book here (again, I get no profit from this, but recommend you buy it if you’re not squeamish):

Vinge stated in 1993, not before 2005, nor after 2030. Now? 2040 to 2050 seems to be the conclusion that most experts expect. Still, like fusion, 20 to 30 years away. Because a looming event that could consider everything you ever thought right, and immovable incorrect in a matter of months or days . . . that’s nothing to worry about. Right?

Elon Musk Update: Elon Musk Versus NASA

“Also available in Arctic Slut, Morning-After Melon, and Elon Musk.” – The Simpsons

Artifacts from another time – when NASA actually flew rockets into space. In the 1990’s NASA lawyers made them wire the rockets to the ground so that they couldn’t fly and maybe hurt someone. Also, NASA HR has made fart jokes grounds for termination.

When I was a young Wilder, I was in awe of NASA. I was expecting that the moon landing was just a start for manned spaceflight. Successes like the Voyager probe were confirmation – NASA would be leading us into a great new era that would end up with a man on Mars. Spaceflight would be available (at least) to rich people. We’d have great cylindrical colonies up in space, and mining on asteroids would produce massive amounts of wealth. Solar power satellites would beam power via microwave down to receiving dishes and eliminate energy shortages on Earth. And probably some birds.

Ahh, the future. Now back off to the Moon mines honey! Go deal with hard radiation for a week. Then we’ll have Swiss steak! (Source – NASA Ames)

The Space Shuttle was a hopeful idea. Built on the idea of being reusable, shuttles were going to revolutionize space travel. We’d shoot one up every week or two, and the cost would be less than $700 (today’s dollars) per pound. That was the idea, anyway.

Over the course of the 135 total missions it cost about $27,000 per pound. Each mission cost about $1.5 billion. And NASA would send up a Space Shuttle to launch a communications satellite. Yes. Every time we wanted to launch something, we’d put 25% of our space launch ability along with seven astronauts on the line. The shuttle was further crippled by added weight, which limited the orbits it could reach.

In 2007, NASA estimated they could have flown Saturn V (the same rocket that went to the Moon) missions six times a year, with two trips to the Moon, each year for the same price as the shuttle. With the amount of payload that the Saturn V could have sent up, our space infrastructure and time in space would have been significantly higher than with the Space Shuttle. We’d have been on Mars. Actual people.

Yeah. NASA essentially burned our future in space on a crappy space truck. But it’s gotten worse.

The current NASA rocket program, the Space Launch System, has consumed $11.5 billion dollars over seven years. And produced no rocket.

Pictured: Actual rocket. Not pictured: NASA rocket. Because there isn’t one. (Source: SpaceX)

Elon Musk spent $500 million on the Falcon Heavy to develop it, and launch costs are $90 million to $150 million per launch, and it has a greater capacity than any rocket on Earth right now. And a greater capacity than the Space Launch System will ever have. Musk’s only competition is Jeff Bezos, who has a LOT of money and the same ideas.

In perhaps the biggest NASA troll ever, Musk sent his car into space. With a Matchbox® car of his car glued to the dash. Playing David Bowie. With a spacesuit in the car. NASA? Unable to launch bottle rockets – probably because of all of the procedures required to launch one.

How can Musk do this when NASA cannot? Several reasons:

NASA is observably stupid. It started spending money on a launch pad for a cancelled rocket. It spent $200+ million dollars. Then it decided to change the pad for the Space Launch System. As of now, NASA has spent $300 million more. It anticipates spending another $400 million. But the launch pad leans. And it might only be used . . . once. Don’t believe me? Here’s a LINK.

Yes, this is a billion dollars. Oh, the alternative? Yeah, build a complete new one for a couple hundred million. (Source: NASA)

NASA is a jobs program. There are many fine scientists at NASA. Not sure NASA needs any scientists – NASA needs engineers to build rockets and rovers. I’m sure there are plenty of universities that NASA can go to if they need scientists. But let’s pretend that NASA needs a scientist or two. Does NASA need to make braille books for blind kids about eclipses? No, but they did. (LINK) Does NASA need a writer to write about how NASA helped make the statuettes that they give out at the Oscars® shiny? (LINK) They did.
NASA has been given no fixed mission. In the 1960’s, the idea was we’ll get men to the moon by the end of the decade. And they did. The entire world watched while young (less than 40 years old, most of them) men (almost overwhelmingly) conquered the moon. What’s the mission now? To watch while Elon Musk and eventually Jeff Bezos do more than NASA ever could? How demoralized must the government workers be watching future Bond® villains take over space?
Related to the above – NASA has no consistency. Rocket programs start/stop based on the political climate of the day. Bush proposes a rocket, Obama deletes the rocket and proposes another rocket. Manned spaceflight should take second place to unmanned probes. Unmanned probes should take second place to manned spaceflight. It’s like trying to negotiate between Mom and Dad when they don’t even speak the same language.

So, the solution?

Make Elon Musk NASA Emperor For Life®. Give him the money. If we gave Musk the money, we’d be on Mars in five years. We’d have a base on it in seven years. In twenty years, there would be a million Americans living on Mars. We’d start turning the atmosphere into something we could breathe. We’d make the place homey. Maybe in a several hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Don’t get me wrong. Living on Mars is hard. It’s tougher than living on the top of Mount Everest. It’s tougher than living at the South Pole. But it’s worth doing. Why?

Intelligent life may be very rare in the Universe – it might even be rarer than intelligent life at NASA. The one thing we owe to our posterity is that they be given a chance to live. And even though planets appear to be fairly common in the Galaxy, there’s no real sign of intelligent life around here besides us. This previous week, we saw the nearest planet to our Solar system get torched by a solar flare that we could see from Earth (with huge telescopes). This happened four years ago. If anything was living there before, it was nuked, microwaved, and fried. Colonel Sanders could only sell Kentucky Fried Alien® there, since there certainly aren’t any living ones.

And for how much time of the existence of the Earth have we had intelligent life. 20,000 years? 100,000 years? If you generously (how could intelligent life exist without beer?) assume 200,000 years, only for 0.004% of the life of the Earth have we had intelligent life. And how long has that life been observable? 0.000002%.

When we look at the threats that mankind realistically faces, putting ourselves on Mars should be the ultimate, number one goal of the human race. We face economic disruption (LINK), we face the potential for artificial intelligence being a really tough child (LINK), big asteroids (LINK), super volcanos (LINK), and diseases and other stuff (like reality television) that could wipe us out.

The alternative are space habitats. The LaGrange points (which have nothing to do with ZZ Top®) are relatively stable orbits that math provides around the Earth-Moon system. In the diagram below, you can see that LaGrange 1, 2, and 3 are stable, but tiny places. LaGrange 4 (L4) and LaGrange 5 (L5) are awesome places because they are large – you could put a lot of stuff there and not worry about bumping into each other. And you can stay in those areas for millions of years without expending any fuel.

Here are the LaGrange points, courtesy NASA and ZZ Top®.

The L5 (or L4) colonies are perhaps tougher than Mars. Or not. Manufacturing these habitats would be difficult – you’d have to set up an entire manufacturing complex on the Moon (likely) and pull some choice asteroids into L4 or L5 orbit for raw materials. It’s certain that this work would cost billions and take decades for the larger colonies that would host millions of people. On the plus side? There’s already a song built for the colonies:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

Here’s a NASA depiction of a space colony at the L5 point. Only NASA would create a colony where you’d have to build a bridge. (Source, NASA Ames)

I really love humanity. I want it to live on until the Universe can no longer support life. I’d like to think that in 2 trillion years that young Wilders (whatever they look like) are out viewing the birth of a new black hole, or watching the latest episode of The Simpsons. Why? All of the Universe, all of creation is meaningless unless we have someone there to watch it in joy and wonder. And to make fart jokes.