Posts Tagged ‘AI’
dithyrambs and dead ends….
So how does the great, yet still prospective, Trumpian dynasty finally establish itself as the ne plus ultra of all dynasties Americanian? How does it rid itself of the pestilence of the other? There is surely much work to be done. The current, almost too-belated and yet still maligned Apollinian leadership must, in its height and depth, ensure that the Dionysian dithyrambs of the soi-disant ‘Democratic’ canaille be rendered down to their most lassitudinous level, a level to which they are all-too naturally inclined. These untermensch have stained the great Americanian nation and threatened its proper and all-too-deserving ubermensch place in the political and all-essential financial world for too long, and their grave must not be risen from.
Voting, I can assure you, does not occur in heaven. What purpose would it serve but to lower standards? And when heaven is created on Earth, there is nothing for it but to celebrate, and fill ourselves with the love of the eternal. But we must have keepers at the gate, and be ever-vigilant regarding the enemies within, for in this soiled world impurities lurk everywhere, even our heavenly corner is not entirely safe, and nothing is forever, though we must strive to maintain our dynasty as thoroughly enriched as it could possibly be, as a haven against the levelling forces of inferiority.
So let’s have no more polling, and no more useless, disruptive, and profoundly unvisionary dissent. We are better than this. The future is already here. We will never dismantle it.
Okay, enough of the bullshit. I’m thinking, if that’s what it’s called, of doing a course in economics, to try and understand how the super-rich get away with paying far far less than their fair share of taxes, and what can be done to change this, and how it is that the US can have a national debt of over $37 trillion and yet be described as the world’s richest nation or biggest economy or whatever. According to AI, which never lies, the US has a projected deficit for the 2025 fiscal year of about $1.9 trillion. A fiscal year is apparently a 12-month annual accounting period, with the dates varying from country to country. In Australia it’s from July 1 to June 30, and I always thought that dating was a global thing, so parochial and untravelled am I.
I recently watched, with some skepticism I must say, a video recounting the fall of empires – that of Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia and – just stay tuned – the USA. It argued, in a rather pat and I should say smug way, that they all followed precisely the same pattern and the USA would inevitably follow suit. Obviously, being a 20-minute video it was a wee bit short on detail, but of course it was broadly correct in that no empires, or dominant nations, last forever. One thing it didn’t mention of course was the USA’s nuclear arsenal – or that of Russia. Both of these countries will remain a massive global threat for as long as those arsenals are maintained, and there’s absolutely no sign of them being dismantled in the foreseeable.
I was told today by a woman in the conversation class I help to facilitate – all the attendees were Japanese, as it happened – that Japan now has its first female Prime Minister. How did I miss that? Does she wear high heels? Anyway, it’s a good sign, But Sanae Takaichi, the new PM, has only 2 women in her 19-member cabinet. Then again, Margaret Thatcher never had a single female in her cabinet in her eleven and a half years as PM. Australia’s current 23-member cabinet under Anthony Albanese features 12 women – the first-ever female dominant cabinet in our history, and likely a world record for Prime Ministerial governments. Can’t wait for it to be the first female-only one. Sigh. But it’s interesting that Japan has a Prime Ministerial system, which I tend to associate with English-speaking, Westminster-based political entities. Clearly the fact that it still has a monarch, or emperor, and feels a strong need to maintain that imperial link as fundamental to its history, would make a constitutional system like that of Australia, and of course Britain, very appealing.
So the emperor plays much the same ceremonial role as the monarch in Britain and the Governor-General in Australia, but I note that Japan hasn’t gotten on board with female succession, unsurprisingly, being one of the most patriarchal nations in the developed world. This could cause problems in the slightly distant future, as current Emperor Naruhito, in his mid-sixties, has no sons. He does have a daughter, Princess Aiko, but it’s claimed that his nephew, the young Prince Hisahito, is being groomed to take the throne when the time comes. Now, I’ve mentioned that Japan is quite patriarchal, but feminism is certainly raising its voice there, and I’m hearing it. A lot of women are not happy that the succession is not going to Princess Aiko, which would create the first Japanese Empress. Modernising to maintain an ancient tradition – sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Continuing on the feminism theme, I wrote recently on wealth-is-power, wondering just how much wealth/power is in the hands of women. My vague guess was 1% female compared to 99% male. AI (never lies) tells me that 86.5% of billionaires are male, 16.5% are female. There are no trillionaires as yet (which is why autocorrect thinks I’ve made a mistake in writing the word), but they’re getting there. Anyway I’m guessing that the 1% figure is still correct, as it’s likely most of the females on the list are thoroughly impoverished compared to the top males. Female empowerment is all very well but let’s not get ridiculous.
Economics is a subject of some interest to me, and I’m wondering if I might do a thorough study of it my old age. Courses are available at the usual institutions, but unfortunately not for the impoverished. Funny that. Meanwhile there’s economics talks on youtube which might be worth commenting on, so that’s a start – but the news is, we don’t have to worry about trying to work out how to make money or regulate our economies, whether we be families, nations or planets, because never-lying AI will be doing it all for us, so effectively that we won’t be needing economists or indeed humans. The BBC World Service, no less, has kindly informed us that artificial intelligence will ‘go rogue’ by 2027, leading to human extinction about ten years later. I’ll be only about 81 or so by then – way too young to die… but then, I’ll be in great company. Maybe that’s what happened to all those dead exoplanets out there….
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c751z23n3n7o
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general/japanese-monarchy-0016250
AI2027: Is this how AI might destroy humanity? – BBC World Service
artificial intelligence – scary, exciting, what?
I don’t know what to think about AI. I did have a brief pub conversation with someone recently, who urged me to stop using Google because – I think something to do with AI and control of the internet, and perhaps global politics, all to do with wealth and power. He seemed to consider it a matter of great urgency. I didn’t know what to think. Do I repeat myself…?
I presume the future of AI is ours to create. Thus, like many others, both expert and inexpert, I’m in two minds about it all. It seems that we’re aiming for an intelligence that’s superior to our own, but we don’t want to be made redundant. And we want it to be under our control, but who is the ‘we’ here? Yes, we want them to be smart enough to power machines that produce stuff, so we don’t have to waste our energy, but then, who owns the AI that produces the machinery that produces the stuff that we must needs buy? Our first trillionaires, perhaps – or do we already have them? In any case, as with technology generally, there are the winners, whose winnings will be massive, and the left behind. And it’s often a generational thing – as an official oldster, I wonder about the world my new-born step-great-grand-daughter will have to negotiate – no doubt more easily than I can negotiate the smartphone world.
There’s also the worry that reliance on artificial intelligence will lead to the dumbing down of our own. It’s a worry I don’t feel for myself. As a kid, I loved encyclopaedias, of which we had two sets in the house. Via these resources and other books I read a lot of British history, sports history, the tragedy of ‘how the west was won’, and biographies of Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Ghenghis Khan. Now of course, the internet makes such information more accessible and comprehensive – self-education has never been easier.
But of course AI is something else. Doesn’t it mean you and I don’t need to know everything, or anything? Knowledge and know-how will be off-loaded onto machinery, which isn’t really machinery. All software without the need for hardware. Which of course leads us to the doomsayers – ‘This is how AI will wipe out humanity’, intones one video, which elaborates via 21 cheery chapters. Must I watch it all? But there are serious concerns of course.
What seems to me most interesting and concerning is the possible development of AI agency. I imagine that the super-rich would love to have their products produced by unpaid, if expensive-to-build, AI bots. That would mean building in as much agency as possible, without, of course, having those bots turn against their trillionaire masters. So what exactly do we mean by agency in this context? (Be careful – when you look up AI agency – agentic AI, in the current jargon -, you’ll get an AI response – don’t believe a single qubit of those gaslighting bastards). It’s difficult to capture it without employing the complex terminology of the field – large language models (LLMs), tool calling, application programming interfaces (APIs), retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and other jargonesque concepts that I’m obviously completely au fait with. When we think of human agency, or any other animal agency, we think of what we do, the decisions we make, to enable us to survive and thrive in our environment, even to dominate it – certainly to control it to our advantage. Apply that to AI and it’s easy to see that there’s a bit of tension there, to put it mildly.
So we don’t want AI to be too autonomous, but want to take maximum advantage of a system that we’re actively trying to make smarter than any human individual, and to make it – well, as autonomous as possible. There’s a contradiction there, methinks. However, I don’t feel too pessimistic about the situation, FWIW. We’ve been able to survive and thrive at the expense of other species for millennia. Surviving our own inventions – first, nuclear weapons, next AI, and who knows what lies beyond the horizon – presents new challenges. I say I’m not too pessimistic, but that’s not to say I feel greatly optimistic. Anyway, whatever happens, I’m sure the super-rich, or most of them, will survive.
References
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-agents
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-02/ai-and-our-technological-future/104305614