Great little article that went where I expected, even to Mad Cow disease (caught from female conservative prime ministers). It also revived my thinking about Carlisle, Marinetti and all the wrangling around modernity.
It was - is - an electric (sorry) time in the development of so many things. The art, music and literary worlds swam in a myriad 'isms', that brought us umbrella terms like 'modern art'; while industry found ever more ingenious ways to lighten the human load - whithout stopping to consider individual and community welfare.
It is perhaps not the the little chuff you have going in the shed or the intergalactic infindibulum app on your desktop that is laughing, but the makers and inventors with their cigars and ridiculous incomes. With all our brightness, no-one at the very top has the moral fibre to say that wealth generated from an item or the product it yeilds should be divided equally among the poor. All things being equal, the inventor would get a share of that and AND of everyone else's.
Oh shut the altruist up, you might think. Ah, Trump voter then?
I like the end poem It reflects pretty much what Dickens and others had to say about steambooks and stuff....
I just kept nodding all the way through the article! When you got to BSE, that reminded me of reading how slurry which includes human waste is now sold by the water companies at a discount to farmers for them to use as manure. I find it difficult to understand why things like AI can’t be used selectively for the applications which are useful to humans, and the ones that threaten to destroy what makes us uniquely human left alone, but I know it’s all just about money.
Thanks for this comment Ali. I am heartened by the thought of you nodding through it, and your example of the water companies is very disturbing. Not least because of all the meds that we are on. Ohh crikey. What a mess we're in.
A whistle-stop tour of the beast that is technology Mike, and the pinnacle (or nadir) in the great summarising machine, the LLM.
I read Proust some decades ago, and it took me a whole year. AI might do a good job of summarising Proust, and so much better than the entrants to the Summarising Proust Contest as imagined by Monty Python.
The serious part is this: on the radio this morning was a programme about childrens' neural normality being rapidly rewired by phone and tech, and a serious addiction by what was referred to as 'behavioural cocaine'.
Behavoural Cocaine? - I remember being the proud owner of a Blackberry or - Crackberry as it was named because of its addictive properties. Its shocking how we tie ourselves to these things, but I always try and think of an article from when paperback books first came out (don't know and can't be bothered to look it up at the moment (1920s?) It denounced them as being the cause of lazy indulgence and lack of imagination in young people. Perhaps we just move on in worlds which contain such things despite our misgivings.
Really enjoyed both poems. It is a very frightening world that we are slowly sliding into and too many of us are oblivious of this steepening decline. Sometimes I catch my self thinking "Thank God I won't be around long enough to see how this plays out" and then I think, "What if I live too long?" I suppose I'll be tucked up in my bed by a cyber nurse and read an AI bedtime story.
have you seen those android companions things? I'm not even talking about sex toys. Apparently (unless I dreamed it) some hospitals in Japan they have realised that it is unnerving for people to be in a waiting room alone, so they put some fake fellow patients in there to make the real ones feel less freaked out. I think I would get freaked out even more.
Great little article that went where I expected, even to Mad Cow disease (caught from female conservative prime ministers). It also revived my thinking about Carlisle, Marinetti and all the wrangling around modernity.
It was - is - an electric (sorry) time in the development of so many things. The art, music and literary worlds swam in a myriad 'isms', that brought us umbrella terms like 'modern art'; while industry found ever more ingenious ways to lighten the human load - whithout stopping to consider individual and community welfare.
It is perhaps not the the little chuff you have going in the shed or the intergalactic infindibulum app on your desktop that is laughing, but the makers and inventors with their cigars and ridiculous incomes. With all our brightness, no-one at the very top has the moral fibre to say that wealth generated from an item or the product it yeilds should be divided equally among the poor. All things being equal, the inventor would get a share of that and AND of everyone else's.
Oh shut the altruist up, you might think. Ah, Trump voter then?
I like the end poem It reflects pretty much what Dickens and others had to say about steambooks and stuff....
I was seriously worried that you had found out about the little chuff that I keep in the shed.
I just kept nodding all the way through the article! When you got to BSE, that reminded me of reading how slurry which includes human waste is now sold by the water companies at a discount to farmers for them to use as manure. I find it difficult to understand why things like AI can’t be used selectively for the applications which are useful to humans, and the ones that threaten to destroy what makes us uniquely human left alone, but I know it’s all just about money.
Thanks for this comment Ali. I am heartened by the thought of you nodding through it, and your example of the water companies is very disturbing. Not least because of all the meds that we are on. Ohh crikey. What a mess we're in.
A whistle-stop tour of the beast that is technology Mike, and the pinnacle (or nadir) in the great summarising machine, the LLM.
I read Proust some decades ago, and it took me a whole year. AI might do a good job of summarising Proust, and so much better than the entrants to the Summarising Proust Contest as imagined by Monty Python.
The serious part is this: on the radio this morning was a programme about childrens' neural normality being rapidly rewired by phone and tech, and a serious addiction by what was referred to as 'behavioural cocaine'.
Behavoural Cocaine? - I remember being the proud owner of a Blackberry or - Crackberry as it was named because of its addictive properties. Its shocking how we tie ourselves to these things, but I always try and think of an article from when paperback books first came out (don't know and can't be bothered to look it up at the moment (1920s?) It denounced them as being the cause of lazy indulgence and lack of imagination in young people. Perhaps we just move on in worlds which contain such things despite our misgivings.
The Crackberry, where it all began...
The new device is great! What a brilliant idea and a very good poem
Thank you John. I'm always partial to a bit of technological dystopia.
Really enjoyed both poems. It is a very frightening world that we are slowly sliding into and too many of us are oblivious of this steepening decline. Sometimes I catch my self thinking "Thank God I won't be around long enough to see how this plays out" and then I think, "What if I live too long?" I suppose I'll be tucked up in my bed by a cyber nurse and read an AI bedtime story.
have you seen those android companions things? I'm not even talking about sex toys. Apparently (unless I dreamed it) some hospitals in Japan they have realised that it is unnerving for people to be in a waiting room alone, so they put some fake fellow patients in there to make the real ones feel less freaked out. I think I would get freaked out even more.
We can be assured that won't happen in the NHS where they sit on each other's knees and corridors are wards..
( sorry I 💙 NHS)
Good point.