Category: Omigerd, Robots!

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

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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.”

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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!

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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.

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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:

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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 8th 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*

“And all this to beat another computer at chess?” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

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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.  “See, I told you socialism would work if only the right people were in charge.  We’re all equal now!”

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

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

“A good axe,” Ma Wilder informed me over dinner one night as she sharpened hers to a razor edge at the table, “keeps a child quiet.  It also helps me keep my household appliances in line when they get too lippy.  Also, if that silly moon-man Neil Armstrong ever shows up here again,” she patted the axe, “we’ll be waiting, won’t we?”

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Ma Wilder’s last known photo.

Ah, the sweetness of gentle childhood memories.  But I do believe that at least that record stands – 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.  Yeah, I know, I should probably drink more and then I could sit and think about celebrity lives like everyone else.  But what started that particular thought was that it occurred to me that ADP® (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.

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It’s like photographers don’t even care about the game . . .

ADP™ is actively replacing people now, and is wildly successful – the economics of replacing people with programming and a web page is strong, and getting better.  An example:  look at how many accountants TurboTax® has put out of business – by my estimate it’s at least a dozen in the state of California alone.  As long as your tax return isn’t too horribly complicated, TurboTax© can crunch all of the numbers and you can do your taxes in a (relatively) painless two hours or less – it helps if you didn’t forget you left your property tax bill in your sock drawer.  I swear it made sense to put it there.  TurboTax™ is designed simply enough so even computer novices can use it, and will probably include a “did you look for that in your sock drawer” guidance next year.  It’s really that good.

But back to A.I.:  is it harder to be the world chess champion or a McDonalds® cook?  It’s harder to be a world chess champion – and humans aren’t intelligent enough to be world chess champions anymore.  How much longer does a McDonalds© cook have?

What’s next?

  • Truck drivers. This is not far off – I’ve already seen it in a movie, and everything that happens in a movie is real.
  • YouTube® will bring great explainers to classrooms – 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 won’t be much of a change.
  • Many engineering calculations can be done by computer – 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, McDonalds® cooks, so you know that when it messes up your order, it’s on purpose.
  • McDonalds® managers. Here’s a link to an essay by Marshall Brain on just that topic (LINK).

The only truly “safe” 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.  Like blogging.

This has happened before.  Prior to the Industrial Revolution artisans and small family shops produced most of the “stuff” in small quantities.  Paul Revere, for instance, was a silversmith.  He actually spent years as an apprentice learning to pound silver into cups and bowls and iPhones™.  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.  Factories still required workers, but those workers didn’t need the years of skills and experience of a silversmith; those skills were now vested in the machinery they ran.

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He needed a bigger horse after eating all that gluten.

The Industrial Revolution replaced most of these artisans – everything could be produced more quickly.  Instead of having to painstakingly carve the virgin PEZ™ (I imagine that’s the first time the phrase “virgin PEZ™” has ever been used in the English language) into shape, PEZ© powder could now be taken straight from the PEZ® mines to the PEZ™ pattern presses to produce prolific perfect pure PEZ® prodigiously.  No more would being an apprentice PEZ™ 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.  Thankfully child labor laws were passed around the start of the twentieth century, freeing up children to become medical experimentation subjects instead.

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A rerun meme.  But it fit.

A.I. is to the jobs that require human decisions today what industrialization was to artisans back then.  The saving grace, however, is that A.I. (today) is single-tasked.  An A.I. that drives a car doesn’t “know” what chess is.  A chess A.I. doesn’t “know” what a mosquito is.  The only A.I. we have is profoundly limited, with boundaries so tight that it is incapable of general intelligence.  So, the good side of A.I. in 2019 is that it can’t take over the world.  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.  Or is that another good side?

An example:  people go to school for at least several weeks to become doctors.  But:  “. . . the 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.” (LINK)

Wouldn’t you want the A.I.?  I think it comes free with your new iPhone™, 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.  Cancer – there’s an app for that.  Whenever we attempt to make an A.I. for a specific task, it doesn’t take long for us to make it superior to us.

Tonight I asked my Amazon® Echo™ to play “music like” a certain song while I enjoyed the stars from the hot tub.  (If you must know, the song was Run Runaway by Slade.  In my defense, it could have been worse – it could have been Karma Chameleon, the only other song from the 1980’s to reference a chameleon.)  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 Inn™ in Albuquerque (this really happened).

I wonder if the A.I. knew that and was trying to start something between me and Uriah Heep?  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.  Certainly our world will be littered more and more with these single-purpose A.I. devices and systems.  Likely, at some point the Rubicon will be crossed at last – a general purpose A.I. will be created – a system that can beat you at chess, even if you have an axe.  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.  Thanks to the NSA, Facebook™ and Amazon®, lots and lots of information about you is already cataloged and available to the A.I. when it mines those databases.  And this blog.  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.  I’m sure they’ll be benevolent overlords.