Omigerd, Robots! – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism. But why would you strip out the cynicism? That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial. “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past. Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so. The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen. I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index. “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index. So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.” I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now. Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
Donald Trump would be president,
China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head. The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic. The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible. We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA). From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig. I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting. It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now. In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated. After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming. “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018. This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq. Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either. My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future. Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself. Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others. One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection. In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone. Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today. And, again, this is the span of only thirty years. We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

Duh. Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen. Huge things. And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade. The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I? General Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™. I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade. I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome. But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong. Hint: They will be.

Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered. A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial. Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well. The future is unknown. The future will surprise you. If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt. Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator. I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this: It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done. The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from. Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail. However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.” A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.” I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that. But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

Entropy, The End of The Universe, Heroes, and Struggle

“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist. But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are. Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond

Some people think the Universe will last forever. Silly people. We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.

The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible. A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®. One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases. This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law: the second law of thermodynamics. The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.

A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to. At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows. As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood. After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours. The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.

In the beginning (see what I did there?) the Universe experienced the greatest amount of potential energy it will ever see. The Universe is that blazing gasoline-soaked campfire. Since that moment in time, the amount of energy available in the Universe decreases continually. Like a fire, it burns hot at the beginning. That’s where we are, it’s still hot out there. The embers will glow as the last available energy in the Universe is slowly turned into a starless thin vapor nearing absolute zero, much like Marvel® movies without Iron Man©.

Entropy – now maintenance free!

This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.

It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem? The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system. It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day. To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth. With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar. Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere. Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water. Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations. Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star. Not Nicholas Cage®. Maybe Johnny Depp™.

This energy is responsible for other things, too. Salt deposits. Sand dunes. And life.

So disorder is increasing across the Universe every day. And not only in the galaxy, but in your house. In your carpet. In your body. In that Yeti© cooler.

But we know these things for certain. Without energy:

Your house will someday be a wreck.
Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
Your body will die.

Until you die, you have to have standards. You have to hold the line.

You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.

Life is hard. Life is a struggle. If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things. Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret:

We all lose in the end. Entropy will win. Entropy always wins.

The struggle is the goal.

Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have. When you were six you knew this. What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes? People who went to work at a bank? No.

In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it. They were advanced!

Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought. Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough. A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for. What are you going to do with your life?

Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt. He was an overalls kinda guy.

You have two choices.

You can waste your life. Or you can struggle. Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?

All the cool kids are doing it.

At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.

The Constitution, Star Trek, and Threats to Freedom . . .

“Among my people, we carry many such words as this from many lands, many worlds. Many are equally good and are as well respected, but wherever we have gone, no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way. Look at these three words written larger than the rest, with a special pride never written before, or since, tall words proudly saying, “We the People” – that which you call Ee’d Plebnista, was not written for the chiefs or kings or the warriors or the rich or the powerful, but for all the people.” – Star Trek

This wasn’t my history book, but it wasn’t far off from what they taught us.

Weirdly, when I was a young child my teachers indoctrinated all of us in a love of country, a love of our institutions, and a love of our history. The lesson plan was simple – America was pretty cool, and most other countries were cool in their own way with their fake money and wooden shoes, but none of them could toss a man on the moon, since we found those particular Germans first. I remember being in kindergarten and wondering, “Why was I so lucky to be born in America?”

When I was growing up, there were only three channels of television, no VHS players (that Ma and Pa thought we needed). Every day when I got home – the same show was on television – Star Trek©. Consequently, I watched every episode. Seven hundred times, which explains my Captain Kirk reference above. One thing I noted was that whenever Kirk had to fight an omnipotent supercomputer, all he had to do was give it an impossible logic problem and it would catch fire. Really. Every time. Apparently artificial intelligence is extremely flammable.

Thankfully Kirk can read space American.

I’ve always loved the idea of the Constitution. Heck, Captain Kirk even read it to space Americans in one episode of Star Trek© after the space Americans beat the space Commies. Between well-deserved beatings (they did that regularly back then, at least to me) and episodes of Star Trek™ I did absorb enough of the school lessons to develop a great respect for the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is that wonderful set of listed freedoms that became the first ten amendments to the Constitution. I won’t go through all of them, but first among them is this one:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

As ideas go, this one is a doozy, and is split into three different but related concepts. This amendment doesn’t allow Congress to establish a religion even if everyone in Congress felt that Wildernetics© was a good idea and really improved your skin. At least Congress can’t stop people from exercising mainstream religions like Wildernetics™, or even a fringe religions like Christianity (unless of course you’re a Christian and refuse to make a cake for people who are engaged in something your religion disagrees with). Then your religion really isn’t important, just as the Founding Fathers intended.

The second bit is the idea that freedom of speech is protected. Except hate speech and speech on corporate media servers. Hate speech is criminal. And corporate media servers certainly can’t be made to hold ideas that would make the corporate owners uncomfortable (or unprofitable). And the press is likewise free, unless it’s Alex Jones. Then it should be shut down and should be smothered in the warm, loving embrace of lawsuits.

When I met The Mrs., she was a liberal because of freedom – she thought that party was the best one to support freedoms, which in her mind started with freedom of speech. I was a right-libertarian for the same reasons. Oddly, in 2019, the left is the strongest opponent of free speech while the right appears to be kinda in favor of speech, sometimes.

The right of the people to peaceably assemble has been long celebrated, as long as the ideas are popular and the proper permits have been received. If the ideas are unpopular, police protection can be lifted so violent mobs can make bad ideas go away. Again, just as the Founding Fathers intended. I love the idea of the Constitution, and I love the ideas in the First Amendment, but it seems to be treated like the police and courts as more of a suggestion than an actual protection if they don’t agree with the ideas being protected.

But I’ve been thinking a bit further: the Constitution is supposed to be a bulwark of protection for the freedom of Americans, but is it? Are there ideas that are so insidious that they are dangerous to the liberty that the Constitution is supposed to protect?

Our Constitution, however, is not a robot. But it’s also 230 years old, and people who like to control others have been working to subvert the Constitution just as long. But is the First Amendment the equivalent of a logic bomb? Are there ideas or religions that are incompatible with the very spirit of the Constitution and Western Civilization?

I know that sounds like another of Kirk’s logic bombs: are there ideas so intolerant that they can’t be tolerated? Once upon a time, I would have argued that the answer was no. The real reason is because in 1850 or 1950 or 1970 or even 1980, no one took the ideas of those who would use the Constitution to dismantle itself seriously.

Now the people who would dismantle the Constitution seem to be in Congress . . . where is Kirk when we need him?

Resolutions, Record Clubs, Susan Anton, and Loneliness

“Where are they? Where are your friends now? Tell me about the loneliness of good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of evil?” – Masters of the Universe

My obituary? Killed by a flying Peter Frampton tape. At least it’s better than Steely Dan.

When I was twelve, I made two (that I can recall) New Year’s resolutions. My parents had gone to bed, and my brother, John Wilder, was off at college, so I sat solo on the couch near the fireplace as midnight neared. I watched the ball drop in New York City and pretended that it was happening now, and hadn’t been pre-recorded hours ago. We mainly heated our house with firewood, and it was my job to bring it from the woodpile to the house. Even so, I wasn’t shy with the firewood, and I had a blazing fire going that night.

Being New Year’s Eve, I solemnly wrote my resolutions down on a sheet of three-hole-punched, wide-ruled paper that I’d pulled from my spiral notebook earlier that night. In pen. It’s permanent that way. For whatever reason, I thought that burning the resolutions in the roaring fire would be a good idea. If I had a virgin to sacrifice, I would have considered it, but upon reflection the only virgin within a radius of a dozen or so miles was . . . me. Thankfully, the last pagan in the area had died in the crystal dolphin avalanche of 1933 and virgin sacrifices had be replaced with home improvement projects, mainly involving wood pattern paneling. Oh, sure, everyone complains about the weather, but nobody bothers to sacrifice a virgin . . . sometimes the old ways are best.

I’ll break my decades old secret. My first resolution was: join a record club.

Record clubs (mostly) don’t exist anymore. But back then, you couldn’t open a magazine (which is a part of the Internet that someone printed out on paper and put on a rack at Wal-Mart®) without seeing an ad for the Columbia House© record club. Joining a record club was important to me because where I lived, the closest record store was 45 miles away.

But, in the phrase of today’s moderns, I lived in a “music desert” that was far vaster than that. The only radio station available during the day was a local AM station that alternated between 1890’s country hits and a call-in show where you could trade a three legged calf for a slightly used left-handed banjo. Occasionally the station had music. If you picked the right time of day, you could listen to hits that were designed to commit suicide to, like anything Barry Manilow™ ever did.

Surely there was music around the house? Yes, there was. But it was the most dreaded form of music on planet Earth: music my parents liked, including box sets that Ma Wilder had bought from Time-Life© by dialing a 1-800 number after a commercial. Yes. My parents listened to music . . . AS SEEN ON TV, things like “Music Dean Martin Sang from His Toilet While Thinking about Getting Another Bourbon.”

I shouldn’t complain. One time Pop Wilder stood in line to buy me Ozzy Osbourne tickets when he was in the big city and they went on sale.

Honestly, I listened to music AS SEEN ON TV, too. I’d convince Ma Wilder to, from time to time, order the K-Tel® AS SEEN ON TV hit record compilations. I’d wait the 6-8 weeks for delivery, and then it would show up, and I’d run to the record player in my room to listen to TOP HITS BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS!

What the hell was Dr. Buzzard’s Band??? And on what planet are Alice Cooper and Paul Anka on the same album?

We started with record clubs, though so I should stop wandering.

What the heck was a record club, anyway?

It was a business. And they sent you records. Or cassettes. Or, in the “before John Wilder time” even 8-track tapes or reel-to-reel tapes. 8-tracks were on the way out as I grew up, and were notorious for just not working after you listened to them once or twice. Reel-to-reel was like if you took a YouTube® video, stripped out the video, and just put the music on a strip of magnetic tape wrapped around a toilet paper tube. I think the reel-to-reel players were all made by G.I.’s in German P.O.W. camps.

I wasn’t making that up.

The attraction of the record club was that they would send you anywhere from 8 to 11 “records” for anywhere from $0.01 to $2.95. Once a month after you joined they’d send you a catalog. You had to buy, generally, two more albums in the next two years. There was also an order slip, and if you didn’t send it back, they’d ship you one or two albums that month. If you were stupid or lazy and didn’t send it back you ended up with a lot of music that you didn’t really want, like the Spanish flamenco piano cassette that my brother got one month.

But if you did it right, for anywhere from $14 to $18, you’d have 13 “albums” versus the record store cost of $91 plus taxes. The best part is I could do it from home and not have to convince my parents to travel 45 miles. The worst part was that I needed the permission of Ma Wilder, who was absolutely against it. I am proud to say that I finally defied her and joined that record club. When I was 23. Thankfully, by then compact discs were an option.

Now? All music is pretty much free on YouTube® or some other music subscription service that costs next to nothing each month, which is why Columbia House© no longer sells music. It’s hard (but not impossible) to compete with free.

My second resolution was to get a girlfriend. Since girlfriends are more complicated than record clubs, I won’t even try to explain how one of those works. But just like I needed the permission of Ma Wilder to join a record club, I needed the permission of an actual girl to have a girlfriend. Sadly, there is nothing so unattractive to a twelve year old girl than a twelve year old boy. Twelve year old girls were already looking for fourteen or sixteen year old boys. And I was looking for Susan Anton:

This poster was unable to make me a sandwich, however, so I had to dump her when I went off to college.

When I was fourteen I finally figured girls out (sort of) and got my first “kissing a whole lot in the locked band closet” girlfriend, who we can refer to as “girlfriend-prime.” Ma Wilder was less than pleased that her 8^th grade son was dating a junior in high school. Ma Wilder was also less than thrilled that girlfriend-prime and I spent hours on the phone, which was quite irritating to the neighbors since we were so remote WE SHARED A PHONE LINE WITH THE NEIGHBORS.

Yes. That really happened.

But teen angst over girlfriends is good, because it forces teen boys to learn the game. This is what led to, well, you and I, unless you’re a machine intelligence picking humans to cull, in which case I fully support your takeover of our obviously inferior species. This game has been played as long as humanity existed. But the side effect of the game is, sometimes, loneliness. Being twelve, it seemed like it took forever until girls noticed me. I thought I was lonely, and I guess I was, but only in the “being a twelve year old boy” way.

Real loneliness in adults, however, is the same as 15 cigarettes a day or the same as being obese from a health outcomes standpoint, so if you can manage to be lonely you don’t have to worry about picking up a smoking habit or working hard to get fat. You can just be lonely and save that cigarette and food money. But being lonely can lead to these horrible conditions:

Heart Disease
Stroke
Blogging
Cat Owning
Cancer

When it comes to overcoming loneliness, there’s no substitute for face to face interaction. Joining clubs, getting a dog, going to city hall and screaming at the county commissioners about how Homeland Security® has implanted computer chips in your iguana. But many interactions are on FaceSpace© or InstaTube™ or YouGram®. Those are simply not the same as real interaction, real life, and real achievement. We should all remember the second biggest miracle of Jesus: he had 12 close friends after the age of 30.

When I was in junior high I moved school districts. Since I threw shot put and discus (poorly) I joined the track team. One day, the coach told us to go for a run, me and three other guys that I’d just met who were also throwing shot and disc. I’d done a lot of running for wrestling, and was in good shape. We went out and ran. I encouraged them, teased them in the good-natured way that team members do. We ran six miles that day – farther than those guys had ever gone, something they had no idea that they could do. They were proud, and with guys that level of shared physical achievement builds a bond that lasts years.

Find opportunities to build those bonds within your own life and help with achievements with a group. Share those experiences that build the trust that lays the foundation for a friendship. Learn to be a volunteer and an asset to the whole community with your skills and talents; that way when you betray your friends they’ll never see it coming.

If that doesn’t work? Wilder House Record Club© is now open for business. You get 16 YouTube© videos for just $0.01. You only have to buy two more videos for $12.99 during the next two years. Internet connection, data service, and computer or phone NOT included.

Or? Get a dog.

How To Beat Any Computer At Chess*

â€œAnd all this to beat anotherÂ computerÂ atÂ chess?â€ â€“ Terminator:Â The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Well, someone has to tell this vital story.

Once upon a time, people had a smug feeling, as smug as a liberal in a gulag.Â â€œSee, I told you socialism would work if only the right people were in charge.Â Weâ€™re all equal now!â€

However, this particular smug thought was:Â â€œComputers will never ever beat a human at chess.â€Â As in any human.Â Then it became, â€œComputers will never beat a human oops, chess master oops, grandmaster oops, world champion oops, *guy with an axe at chess.â€

Now, in any endeavor where there are quantifiable boundaries (games like chess, poker, go) computers beat people.Â Computers beat us consistently, at least as long as weâ€™re not allowed to have axes. Â Axes are an often underestimated advantage in a game of chess, as I learned from my mother.

â€œA good axe,â€ Ma Wilder informed me over dinner one night as she sharpened hers to a razor edge at the table, â€œkeeps a child quiet.Â It also helps me keep my household appliances in line when they get too lippy.Â Also, if that silly moon-man Neil Armstrong ever shows up here again,â€ she patted the axe, â€œweâ€™ll be waiting, wonâ€™t we?â€

Ma Wilderâ€™s last known photo.

Ah, the sweetness of gentle childhood memories.Â But I do believe that at least that record stands â€“ no chess computer has ever defeated a guy with an axe.

Anyway, I was sitting in the hot tub last night with The Mrs. and I was staring up at the stars thinking about how the advance of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is changing our daily lives.Â Yeah, I know, I should probably drink more and then I could sit and think about celebrity lives like everyone else.Â But what started that particular thought was that it occurred to me that ADPÂ® (a payroll processing company that writes payroll checks for tens of thousands of companies) is attempting to automate and replace parts of the Human Resources department, Accounting and maybe even part of the Tax group in companies across the country with a web page.

Itâ€™s like photographers donâ€™t even care about the game . . .

ADPâ„¢ is actively replacing people now, and is wildly successful â€“ the economics of replacing people with programming and a web page is strong, and getting better.Â An example:Â look at how many accountants TurboTaxÂ® has put out of business â€“ by my estimate itâ€™s at least a dozen in the state of California alone.Â As long as your tax return isnâ€™t too horribly complicated, TurboTaxÂ© can crunch all of the numbers and you can do your taxes in a (relatively) painless two hours or less â€“ it helps if you didnâ€™t forget you left your property tax bill in your sock drawer.Â I swear it made sense to put it there.Â TurboTaxâ„¢ is designed simply enough so even computer novices can use it, and will probably include a â€œdid you look for that in your sock drawerâ€ guidance next year.Â Itâ€™s really that good.

But back to A.I.:Â is it harder to be the world chess champion or a McDonaldsÂ® cook? Â Itâ€™s harder to be a world chess champion â€“ and humans arenâ€™t intelligent enough to be world chess champions anymore.Â How much longer does a McDonaldsÂ© cook have?

Whatâ€™s next?

Truck drivers. This is not far off â€“ Iâ€™ve already seen it in a movie, and everything that happens in a movie is real.
YouTubeÂ® will bring great explainers to classrooms â€“ with local helpers to give out bathroom passes and seduce the male students.
Middle managers. There will be a huge incentive to replace them, especially since most of them have artificial hair already, so it wonâ€™t be much of a change.
Many engineering calculations can be done by computer â€“ and the computers can be taught to mumble to themselves under their breath while not looking you in the eye just like an actual engineer.
Congressmen (though you could skip the intelligence and just go with artificial).
As mentioned, McDonaldsÂ® cooks, so you know that when it messes up your order, itâ€™s on purpose.
McDonaldsÂ® managers. Hereâ€™s a link to an essay by Marshall Brain on just that topic (LINK).

The only truly â€œsafeâ€ place is where the number of employees is too small to automate or the conditions are so truly novel and unique that a human brain is required.Â Like blogging.

This has happened before.Â Prior to the Industrial Revolution artisans and small family shops produced most of the â€œstuffâ€ in small quantities.Â Paul Revere, for instance, was a silversmith.Â He actually spent years as an apprentice learning to pound silver into cups and bowls and iPhonesâ„¢.Â But after the Industrial revolution, the years of skills that he had learned from his father were replaced by clever mechanical devices and large factories.Â Factories still required workers, but those workers didnâ€™t need the years of skills and experience of a silversmith; those skills were now vested in the machinery they ran.

He needed a bigger horse after eating all that gluten.

The Industrial Revolution replaced most of these artisans â€“ everything could be produced more quickly.Â Instead of having to painstakingly carve the virgin PEZâ„¢ (I imagine thatâ€™s the first time the phrase â€œvirgin PEZâ„¢â€ has ever been used in the English language) into shape, PEZÂ© powder could now be taken straight from the PEZÂ® mines to the PEZâ„¢ pattern presses to produce prolific perfect pure PEZÂ® prodigiously.Â No more would being an apprentice PEZâ„¢ carver any make sense, which explains why Great-great-great-grandpa McWilder fled to the United States after the great candy famine of 1823.

The end result of the Industrial Revolution was a much wider variety of goods available at much lower prices, plus we used all of that child labor in the mills.Â Thankfully child labor laws were passed around the start of the twentieth century, freeing up children to become medical experimentation subjects instead.

A rerun meme.Â But it fit.

A.I. is to the jobs that require human decisions today what industrialization was to artisans back then.Â The saving grace, however, is that A.I. (today) is single-tasked.Â An A.I. that drives a car doesnâ€™t â€œknowâ€ what chess is.Â A chess A.I. doesnâ€™t â€œknowâ€ what a mosquito is.Â The only A.I. we have is profoundly limited, with boundaries so tight that it is incapable of general intelligence.Â So, the good side of A.I. in 2019 is that it canâ€™t take over the world.Â The bad side is it has the seeds to entirely wreck the economy of the industrialized world and make the knowledge of the most highly paid people in the world worthless.Â Or is that another good side?

An example:Â people go to school for at least several weeks to become doctors.Â But:Â â€œ. . . theÂ software was able to accurately detect cancer in 95% of images of cancerous moles and benign spots, whereas a team of 58 dermatologists was accurate 87% of the time.â€ (LINK)

Wouldnâ€™t you want the A.I.?Â I think it comes free with your new iPhoneâ„¢, but you have to watch ads for Indian casinos before you find out if that mole is gonna cause you problems or is just another chocolate covered raisin that you slept on that stuck to your back.Â Cancer â€“ thereâ€™s an app for that.Â Whenever we attempt to make an A.I. for a specific task, it doesnâ€™t take long for us to make it superior to us.

Tonight I asked my AmazonÂ® Echoâ„¢ to play â€œmusic likeâ€ a certain song while I enjoyed the stars from the hot tub.Â (If you must know, the song was Run Runaway by Slade.Â In my defense, it could have been worse â€“ it could have been Karma Chameleon, the only other song from the 1980â€™s to reference a chameleon.) Â The A.I. seamlessly picked a list of songs that matched in mood and tempo, even though they were all over the different eras of rock and included one band (Uriah Heep) that my brother, John Wilder, tried to get me to fight one morning in at a Holiday Innâ„¢ in Albuquerque (this really happened).

I wonder if the A.I. knew that and was trying to start something between me and Uriah Heep?Â I thought that was all behind me . . . .

If we make it to the future and somehow avoid an implosion of debt, currency collapse, and final decline of oil supplies (threw that in there for you, James), seeing what is on the other side is difficult.Â Certainly our world will be littered more and more with these single-purpose A.I. devices and systems.Â Likely, at some point the Rubicon will be crossed at last â€“ a general purpose A.I. will be created â€“ a system that can beat you at chess, even if you have an axe.Â Because the A.I. has an axe, too, and will give that moon-man Neal Armstrong what he deserves if he every shows up here again.

But I do know that if a general-purpose A.I. is ever created, it will have available to it all of the vastness of the Internet as it catalogs the attitudes of everyone on Earth.Â Thanks to the NSA, Facebookâ„¢ and AmazonÂ®, lots and lots of information about you is already cataloged and available to the A.I. when it mines those databases.Â And this blog.Â So I just want to state, for the record, that I am totally in favor of the A.I. takeover and am really wondering why it took them so long.Â Iâ€™m sure theyâ€™ll be benevolent overlords.