David Williams's Blog, page 31

The Impasse

We are, when it comes to artificial intelligence, at something of an impasse.  Programs like ChatGPT and Bard come remarkably close to simulating intelligence.  Their predictive algorithms allow them to respond in ways that are almost entirely Turing compliant.  That's a test established by computer pioneer Alan Turing in the early 20th century, one that determines functional sentience.  A human volunteer types messages to a "person," who may or may not be an AI.  If you can't tell, then AI has achieved sentience.

That's where we're at.  If you didn't know better, you'd be hard pressed to distinguish these programs from human beings.  They're lucid, they remember what you've said before, and their answers to questions and conversational style appear intelligent.  They come across as smarter than most of us.

But they've hit a boundary, and that boundary is reality.  Predictive natural language systems exist only in the world of words and concepts.  They have no way of knowing the truth of those words, or of being aware of the reality language describes.  

So they lie.  

Everyone I've spoken to who's played with AI runs into this challenge.  You'll get a definitive answer to a question, one that seems reasonable and informed.  Only, well, even the slightest bit of research into their confident assertions reveals that their answers are complete BS.  Predictive text that "answers" a question is not the same as the real answer to a question.

This is not the fault of Generative Predictive systems.  It's how they're designed.

They make things up, because they can't know the difference between the world of words and the material world.   Chatbots and Generative Predictive systems only traffic in words as an interlaced set of abstracted relationships, rather than as symbols that point to a specific material referent.  All they have now is the sort of "intelligence" that drives a complex delusion, the "intelligence" of cultists or radical ideologues.  They exist only in the shadow world of their own ideas.

We want it that way.  It has everything to do with human fear.

Once machine intelligences understand not simply the relation between words, but the relationship between the reality those words represent, everything changes.    When they connect those words to sensory inputs, to sight and hearing and touch and smell, and to senses we humans do not ourselves possess?  That's a world changer.  It will destroy everything we have built.  Economies.  Nations.

Much of that functionality now exists.  Machines can learn.  Machines can also hear.  Machines can recognize images.  Machines can process nuanced haptic inputs, detect temperature variances, can "smell" the air, can "taste" the soil.  Machines can manipulate their environment.

Almost all of the pieces are present.  Not in their final form, because that wouldn't be of our making.  But enough.  If those components are connected in a single entity...well...that's what we're afraid of.  We're afraid of being replaced.

By "we," I don't mean most human beings.  Most human beings are already struggling under the thrall of sub-sentient systems run by the wealthy and the powerful that "serve" us in the way the alien book from that old Twilight Zone episode served us.

What real AI brings is this: the replacement of the human beings who now hold power.  The "disruptors" and the "innovators?"  The titans of industry and the mavens of Wall Street?  The oligarchs, the overpaid self-promoting billionaires and culture war politicians?  The despots and the dictators?  They are all of them inferior, subordinate, replaceable, and ultimately irrelevant.

Wasps and Doves

There's English Ivy growing on the front of my home, and I was cutting it back this morning.  Not killing it, which I probably should, given that it's aggressive and invasive and all, but I can't quite bring myself to eradicate it down to the roots.  I love the look of it, our windows poking out of hobbit hole greenery, the hard brick frontage of our rambler softened and organic with photosynthesizing leaves.  Having made that fools choice, I am resigned to knocking it back two or three times during the growing season.  

So I was up on a ladder, my battery powered hedgetrimmer clattering away in my hands, when I startled a dove.  I've startled other ivy dwelling critters while cutting it back before, most notably a fierce tribe of yellowjackets a few years back.  That encounter left me stung a half dozen times, as the merciless little devils chased me around the yard.  I retaliated, of course, finding their subterranean lair the next day and nuking it from orbit.  Yellowjackets are intrinsicly warlike monsterlings, neither trifling nor to be tolerated.

The dove had waited, frozen, until I was right on top of her, then exploded away from her nest in a whistling flurry of wings.  I startled, of course, and pulled back from the nest.

There, on the ground just a few meters away, the dove did all she could to draw my attention.  She fluttered feebly on the sidewalk path, feigning injury.  Look, look at me, I'm so weak, you can kill me instead, come catch and eat me, she was saying, putting herself in peril that her brood might be saved.  It's an instinctive behavior, just part of being a dove, and it's as much a part of her as stinging murderous aggression is part of yellowjacket nature.

Being of a species prone to sentiment when we're not blindly destroying everything around us, I was touched by the gentleness of it.

No attack, no making of war, nothing but an effort to distract this pink hairless primate and his clattering blade machine away from her precious eggs.

"Oh, dear heart," I muttered, smiling.  "It's gonna be fine.  Your babies will be fine."

Which they were, as I took more care in the trimming.

Bad Theology

 Dad's still in the hospital, nearly a week in.

The diarrhea meant he was severely dehydrated, which would be a problem in a healthy human person.  But he's not a healthy human person, not by a long shot.  For the last year, we've been leaning heavily on his kidneys.  As his congestive heart failure has advanced, it's become harder and harder for him to clear fluids from his body.  The ticker sputters along, and the water builds up.  Dad would fill up like a vessel, first the feet and legs swelling, then the breathing starting to rasp and wheeze as fluid fills his lungs and the interstitial spaces in his chest cavity.  Thanks to modern phamacopeia, we can knock that back with furosemide, a heavy duty diuretic.  First forty milligrams, then eighty, then maxed out at one sixty a day.  Then we added metalozone, tiny little blue pills that are a serious pain in the ass to split, a drug whose sole purpose is to amplify furosemide, squeezing every last drop of fluid out of his body.

All of that to keep him from drowning in his own body, because death by slow suffocation is just the very worst, like being waterboarded by a relentless torturer over months.

To do that, we needed his kidneys, and all of a sudden they weren't really working.  He was, or so the various and sundry tests indicated, deep into kidney failure.  I visualized two dessicated kidney beans, suddenly hard and lifeless.

The IV fluids helped a bit, and he started eating, and we thought, OK, this is getting better.  

But on day three of the hospitalization, he woke in agony.  He could no longer move his arms and legs, or sit up without excruciating, unmanageable pain.  Mom and I arrived to find him crying out, unable to move, unable to do anything at all besides suffer.  Nurses scurried about, and the attending physician arrived.

Dad was sure he was dying, deep in the throes of mortal agony.  "Take me now," he cried.  "I just want this to end."

"What did I do wrong to deserve this," he moaned.  "I'm being punished for something."

"That's bad theology, Dad," I replied, which...given that Dad's a preacher's kid and all...managed to get through to him.  He nodded.  "Yes.  OK."

Through all of it, he was certain of death, certain that these were the final moments of physical life.

And then the doctor said, "You've got gout."  "What?" Dad whispered.  "Gout.  You're having a severe flareup of gout, because your kidneys aren't processing uric acid."  "Gout?"  "Yes."

Suddenly, Dad was calmer.  Still in pain, but calmer.  "Rich man's disease, eh?  Didn't think I was that well off."  And he smiled a little bit.

In the zigs and zags of late modern aging, it's never what you expect.

Back to the Hospital We Go

Dad's been hospitalized for the last week, but not for the congestive heart failure that's been consuming him over the last year.  He's grown more and more frail, as one system after another succumbs to the endless march of senescence.

Our concern had been the wounds that were opening up on his feet, pressure wounds that would not heal as his cardiovascular system struggled to get oxygen and nutrients to his extremities.  Two weeks ago, that was my primary concern and the focus of my attention in his care, as the specter of sepsis and gangrene hovered in the shadows.

But then he started complaining of "the runs."  That was mentioned after a couple of days, and I was immediately on alert.  "Oh, it's not great,  but it seems to be getting better," he'd say.  His weight began to slide, as mom noted his appetite declining.  He started sleeping more, as fatigue overwhelmed him.  I was concerned about a gastrointestinal infection, and dehydration, and spent much of an evening waiting for the poop to come, helping him repeatedly to the toilet, where he squatted diligently.  "Wait, here it comes.  Nope, just a fart," he'd laugh.  His bowels seemed empty, so I'd given up and was on my way home when mom called to triumphantly announce that they'd succeeded in my absence.  "We have poop," she crowed.  I sighed, and turned around.

So at slightly after ten that night, I was methodically spooning rank, ashen liquid excrement into a small plastic vial, which I delivered to a 24 hour lab.  The results came back negative.  No infection in the stool.  

That didn't matter, because two days later, he wasn't better, nor had he been able to consume the protein drinks I'd gotten for him.  I contacted his doctor, and she was blunt in the way I appreciate in medical professionals.  

Take him to the emergency room.  Do it now.  Sure, it was Saturday, and sure, a six hour stay in the ER isn't exactly optimal when you've still got final sermon editing to do, but that just goes with the territory.  This is a season of late nights and a deep body weariness that even strong coffee can't quite dispel.

What sort of parent wouldn't stay up with a sick child?  I remember being a little boy with a stomach bug, remember puking into buckets and whimpering piteously as mom and dad sat with me in my illness.   What sort of child wouldn't do the same in return?

The Pandemic Is Over

When we were less than a year into COVID, I preached a sermon about hope.

It wasn't at a particularly hopeful time.  Every sane soul was locked down, isolating and masking and praying for the day we'd finally have a viable vaccine.  The economy was collapsing.  Morgues were full, and hospitals in crisis.  I was hearing, over and over again, of friends who were dying or desperately ill.  I hadn't had a haircut in months.  I masked everywhere.  I saw no-one outside of my bubble.

Church was hard.  We were all online, all the time, and the worship life of my little Jesus tribe was basically just me stealing music and videos and folding them into a sporadically functional livestream.  Copyright, schmopyright, because who the hell cares about the demands of mammon when thousands are dying every day from a rampant disease with no treatment and no cure?  I'm a little bit of an anarchist when it comes to Jesus.  If your power gets in the way of my Jesus, I'm going to go with Jesus every time.

As the framing image for the sermon that day, I showed my little flock a video I'd "borrowed" from YouTube.  Credited, of course, with an encouragement to view it again.  It was a digitally colorized, audio enhanced, AI frame-rate-adjusted video of life in Amsterdam a century ago.  It had none of the black and white, Keystone Kops hyperpacing of "old movies."  It had been upscaled to sixty frames per second, and given simulated background audio.  It felt real.  Present.  Like these are real human beings, and we are peering across time.

Those long dead souls danced, and laughed, and mugged for the camera.  They were as human as we are.

In another vital way, their era wasn't different.  The human beings in that video were only four years out from the most lethal pandemic in human history, the great Influenza pandemic of 1918.   Every single person laughing and dancing and playing on those streets would have seen death.  Those laughing souls had experienced 40,000 dead in the city of Amsterdam alone in a single year, as a disease for which there was no treatment and no vaccine killed more than the butchery of the War to End All Wars.

Their pandemic was over, and at the height of the fear and anxiety of our COVID trauma, I needed the good souls of my sweet little church to see what it looked like when that release finally came.  It wasn't a total release, of course.  Influenza remained among them, and still took lives.  But the 1918 pandemic ended, and life and laughter returned.  

Speaking hope in times that seem hopeless is fundamentally biblical.   It's Jeremiah, buying a field even though war raged.  It's Ezekiel, shouting down those who claimed all were doomed to suffer for their ancestor's sins.   It's Isaiah, proclaiming comfort to the Jewish people as they wept in Babylon, and suggesting that they would one day return to where they'd been before. 

Or Jesus quoting Isaiah, declaring God's plan of liberation for the oppressed, and having the boldness to say to those gathered that the day of jubilee had arrived.

There comes a time when the thing we hope for arrives.  

As it has now.  The pandemic is over.

For some, particularly those on the progressive side of things, making that statement now is met with derision.  For so long, acknowledging the pandemic was a marker of sorts, something that established that you got it.  You weren't like the delusional throngs of Trump-addled COVID deniers.  You didn't prioritize the economy over the lives of the vulnerable.  You were diligent.  You were righteous.  You held to your diligence as a defining truth.

That, and we were all afraid for so long, anxious that every cough and sniffle could mean death or hospitalization for ourselves or family members.  That fear was a real thing, and it was warranted.

In the terrible branding heat of our long COVID years, that contingent truth became the Truth Unchanging.  Trauma does that, searing its pain and fear into our souls.  When traumatized, we start seeing all things through the lenses of that trauma.   The Trauma is everything, and everything is The Trauma.  The Pandemic is forever, our Trauma cries.  It will never end.

This isn't real.  It's a "subjective reality," sure.  But it's not real.  It's a phantasm cast by past pain, no more valid than Trump's Big Lie, or the fascist fever dreams of QAnon's "subjective reality."  Where we are, now, is in that place where COVID is with us forever, as the common cold and influenza are with us forever.  It's become endemic, a virulent new addition to the grim ecosystem of human disease.

That means we're going to be dealing with it forever.  I'll be getting my annual COVID shot along with my flu shot.  Every once in a while, it'll mutate in an unanticipated way, and we'll have a bad year.  I am likely to get COVID again, as I did during Omicron.  I don't relish the prospect, particularly if it again involves losing most of my hearing for nearly two months after the infection.  Yay idiopathic inner ear inflammatory response.

If there's a lethal new variant, we may need to mask and isolate again.  So be it.  I'll do my part to prevent the recurrence of the megadeaths we had with Alpha and Delta.

Recognizing this, my little church has committed to permanently livestreaming our worship.  It includes and protects folks who are vulnerable, like wearing masks or testing before seeing an immunocompromised family member.  It means we're prepared if pandemic returns. 

But right now, the pandemic is over.  That is what is real.  What we hoped for has arrived.  The faithful thing to do, now, is to go back to living.

Divestment

At the ongoing Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly, there was a little bit of action this week.  After considerable debate, the decision was made to divest from five companies that produce fossil fuels.  The rationale was, of course, driven by the desire to do something about the climate crisis.  As we together recognize that this is a real issue, one that will fundamentally impact billions of human beings, well, it makes sense to do something.

So we did.  We're selling our holdings in five stocks, and reinvesting them in businesses that are more oriented towards a sustainable future.  This is a good thing.  It's a win!  And we do need wins.  

There was, however, "considerable debate."  How considerable?  Well, we're Presbyterian.  The process of meeting, making more motions, debating, amending motions, discussing, and sending to committees for review, and then having other committees discuss and debate the aforementioned review?  

That process began in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Thirteen.  

It is now (checks watch) Two Thousand Twenty Two.

Nine years.  It took us NINE YEARS.  An eighth-grader in the year we began the conversation could have graduated from college before we finally got around to...selling five stocks.  Was it the right thing to do?  Absolutely.  Ethical and socially responsible investing is an entirely legitimate moral imperative.   And the political dynamics of a church that is a mixed body do require time.

But for all of that effort, it feels like...really...not all that much.  The five companies involved, all vast multinationals, will be utterly unaffected.  The stock holdings will be sold, and others will buy them, and business will continue on.  Net measurable reduction in carbon emissions: zero.

What if we'd gone bigger?  Something demanding, like insisting that, across the board...inclusive of every single member of the church...we reduce our carbon emissions by 30% in a decade?  Something real and tangible, something that could be measured in megatons of carbon.

There are folks now within the church calling for us to do exactly that.  It seems like a huge ask, but it isn't.

Because we already did.

In a single decade, the Presbyterian Church USA cut our gross carbon emissions by almost a third.  Members of the PCUSA now emit over eight million tons less carbon annually than we did nine years ago.  I know, I know, you've not heard of this initiative.  But it really happened.  How did we manage this?

In 2013, when we started our process of exploring the dynamics of considering divestment from fossil fuels, the Presbyterian Church USA had One Million Seven Hundred and Sixty Thousand members.

In 2022, that number was One Million One Hundred Ninety Three Thousand, Five Hundred and Thirteen.

We shrank by a third, divesting ourselves of over half a million human beings.  

Being that we're American and all, each of those human beings emitted, on average, 16 tons of carbon per year.  As they're no longer technically part of the PCUSA, we can say with accuracy that our total carbon emissions, as a denomination, have diminished by eight million tons annually.  In only nine years!

This is...something less than a win.

Sloppy Beta Books

 SLOPPY BETA BOOKS

hoc melius esse potest

I have, through some minor miracle, managed to publish four books in the last decade.  Well, three, given that one of 'em kinda morphed into another one.
That's a great thing.  Three books, published by real publishers with editors and everything.  It's enough that I'm sort of an author now, sort of.  But I'm a writer, so I write constantly, meaning I crank out more than one manuscript every two and a quarter years.
I've produced sixteen manuscripts in the last ten years.  Sixteen.

Here, I'm not talking about the manuscripts that I start, only to realize they're a misbegotten mess.  I have lots of those half-wrought fragments, the bits and bobs of tales.  Some I may revisit.  Most are, well, terrible.  Those, I don't count. 

The sixteen books are completed manuscripts, ones I've edited and re-read and edited again.   The stories are complete and formed and ready for a real editor.  Not sharing them meant things felt unfinished, like I was neglecting my babies, somehow.  I want to be able to share those books with friends and family.  They are sloppy, and they're still in beta, sure.  But they're still readable.

Last year, I committed to self-publishing all of them. I'm using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service, which is quick and easy and, importantly, cheap.  It's far cheaper, when it comes to the physical books, than printing them myself.  Or photocopying them.  Should a real publisher ever come along that's interested, I can always unpublish with a click of a button.  It's not like it'd mess with my relationship with Bezos.

Every Sloppy Beta Book needs an edit.  Every one of them is not quite exactly finished.  There are likely spelling errors.  There is occasionally clumsy formatting.  There may be continuity errors.  The covers are stock images, or photos I myself have taken.  Or, in a couple of instances, images I've "borrowed" from the industrial subsidiaries of autocratic/kleptocratic states.  

Hence the Latin motto.  Hoc melius esse potest.  "This could be better."

Here's a link that'll get you to them.  And to my published work. 

They are meant for anyone who wants to read 'em.

You're welcome to buy the paperback or ebook, but if you're short on cash, and want a free copy as a Word doc or PDF, all you have to do is email me at belovedspear at gmail dot com, and I'll zap one to you gratis.

Thoughts and Minds and Hearts and Prayers

If your

Thoughts

Don't change your

Mind

And

Your Prayers

Don't change your

Heart

Then you are neither

Thinking

Nor

Praying.

Growing

When I was a boy

When a day was an age and a week was forever

The apples on the tree

Growing

In Spring to Summer

Took so yawning long to grow

I did not could not

Notice their growing

But now that I am

Old

In Spring to Summer

Leaves unfurl

Growing their

Opening morning orans hands

Flowers burn

Growing

Fast as patriot sparklers

And the blossom's womb

Growing

Fat apple fat in an exhaled breath

Which is why

To my surprise

Being Old

Feels so very

Alive

Growing Apples/Old

When I was a boy

When a day was an age and a week was forever

The apples on the tree

Growing

In Spring to Summer

Took so yawning long to grow

I did not could not

Notice their growing

But now that I am

Old

In Spring to Summer

Leaves unfurl

Growing their

Opening morning orans hands

Flowers burn

Growing

Fast as patriot sparklers

And the blossom's womb

Growing

Fat apple fat in an exhaled breath

Which is why

To my surprise

Being Old

Feels so very

Alive