Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Hey John, that's the issue isn't it: antropocene or holocene...its
all obscene
  

    
Somehow the one thing that all these topics seem to share is a
failure or misalignment of feedback mechanisms.

The Google program learning chess in four days, and the
"middletarian" idea, remind me of a snippet of a radio show I heard
recently where someone was trying to explain where the
'intelligence' of an ant colony resides.  The answer was that it
isn't anywhere - it's just an emergent property of all the ants
blundering about.  They are in possession of a communication
mechanism (dropping pheromone trails), and over time, they don't
become less blunderous as individuals, it's just that the cumulative
feedback creates patterns and emergent properties.
  

    
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karankawa_people

https://books.google.com/books?id=BmEMbNMfB2MC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=karankawa+and
+mother+earth&source=bl&ots=H2H3mTaCfx&sig=PkVAisadKGFUn2CVMtzGE-QwMfg&hl=en&s
a=X&ved=0ahUKEwiU7cXf-M3YAhWJGZQKHRUACXAQ6AEIaTAO#v=onepage&q=karankawa%20and%
20mother%20earth&f=false

"..it happens because person after person witnesses and  bears
witness to the crimes of the State against people, against the
Earth, against all it oppresses. But there must be those who will
bear this witness, who will speak out, and who will give others
courage to speak out in their wake."

Such as just witnessed at the Golden Globes!!! 

And, we have not talked about 2018 in regards to women coming to
power in America....yeehah!
  

    
The Twitterati have been complaining that there was too much hype in
2017 about certain techno topics. 1.  “Bots” — meaning
conversational systems.  2.  AI or deep learning and 3. Way too much
about crypto coinage.  Meaning that these were the big tech fads of
last year.

Odd that nobody complains that robots are faddish and over-hyped,
even though robots have been radically over-hyped since 1921.  Jeff
Bezos is buying and deploying more and commercial robots to sort and
move his Amazon cargo, but you don’t see that many, every day,
real-deal, non-fad, non-hyped robots, walking about in the street in
2018.  

The robots on YouTube get a lot of viral traction, but they’re
expensive one-offs from the lab.  Robot battles on TV are pretty
popular, but they’re basically destruction-derby for nerds.

It’s like robots are simply too old to be fads.  Robots possess a
get-out-of-hype-jail free card.  People don’t scoff at robots and
their prospects.  They’re respectful of them; afraid of them, even.
 
I’ve been writing about the prospects of robots in  for decades, and
I guess I ought to be more cynical, but for 2018, even I am kind of
bullish on tomorrow’s robot business.  In Europe “Industry 4.0” is
getting traction, and it’s mostly about new platforms and protocols
for automating production.   It’s the “Internet of Things” as
re-imagined by German heavy industry.

If you describe “robots,” not as a smart metal man who can walk and
talk about Asimov’s ethics up on stage, but as “actuated, moving
mechanisms programmable in two or more axes with a degree of
autonomy,” then, well, there’s something to that.   Industrial
robots are getting more accurate, more capable, more durable,
cheaper. 

 I’m a devotee of commercial, consumer robot vacuum cleaners.  As a
guy troubled with hay fever, my Roomba’s ability to sweep up
particulates that I can’t see is a genuine asset to my life.    It’s
even worth the considerable trouble of cleaning and maintaining the
Roomba, which is often a dirtier and more troublesome task than
simply vacuuming the room yourself.  So I expect to have at least
one real-world, non-hyped, everyday robot around for the foreseeable
future.  I wonder what the second will be.
  

    
I guess the overuse of the term "big data" was a complaint a few
years ago. The problems that prompted that overuse haven't gone
away, and AI-based approaches are making them worse.

There were warnings in the margins of the Whole Earth Catalog that
"The map is not the territory!" The art of data analysis is in
choosing items that are available from a data store - a Web user's
click stream, a voter registration database, a credit card's
transaction log - and using those data as proxies for a person's
intent and desires.

This mapping from data to thought is imperfect at best. Too often
people use the map as if it were the territory, with bad results
that Cathy O'Neil illustrated with war stories in her book "Weapons
of Math Destruction". This only gets worse with AI-based data
analysis, because the mappings become more complicated and the logic
through which they are derived is opaque, hidden within the AI
agent. If the proxies aren't understandable and verifiable by human
analysts, we're wrong to trust the mappings they represent.
  

    
*Speaking of the imaginary "FemmeCoin," turns out there's a
crypto-coinage "Women Coin" that has existed since summer of 2017. 
Doesn't seem to be particularly feminist in its orientation, it's
just for women who want to get in on the racket.

https://bitcoingarden.org/forum/index.php?topic=16213.msg168495

*I'm always happy when I've "predicted" something that already
exists.  Nobody can know everything, but when it turns out that the
future is already here and just wasn't distributed where you
yourself could see it, that means that your mode of analysis is
good.  

"This may seem a tad sci-fi, far-fetched, and mind-stretchy, but...
hey look, it's already there.  Swell!"
  

    
my surrogate little bro is behind this 'white allies toolkit', an
empathetic/nonviolent communucation/active listening modality for
dealing with race

https://www.whiteallytoolkit.com/philosophy/

seems to be getting some traction
  

    
http://fortune.com/2018/01/09/2017-fires-hurricanes-natural-disasters-cost/

The USA suffered $306 billion in weather damage in 2017.  

Luckily the USA doesn't border on Greenland, so if glaciers are
melting, the readers of FORTUNE magazine won't have to pick up any
tab for that.

Huge mudslides in California this week, so the bill for 2018 must be
off to a galloping start.
  

    
and oh, wrt #132, shorthand for 'race, what a mess, here's someone
doing something a little bit novel about it'

i do so miss the viridian mailing list when climate disaster moments
like santa barbara (the fires, the floods, the mudslides) happen
  

    
*Here's some Women Coin pics.  Apparently it's entirely possible to
buy some Women Coins right now and put them in your crypto "purse."

https://ello.co/bruces/post/qoxbqgetwzklde6ojjxtqa
  

    
Not doing so hot against US dollar...but, it's early days
  

    
With regard to AI, I think we're still trapped by the image of AI as
being some kind of ego like our own, only massively more
intelligent. (After all, this is ingrained in us ... the other word
for this is "God"). So with this image, we talk about somehow
controlling or at least placating "God."

However the much more likely scenario is that artificial cognition
(not necessarily "consciousness") will be distributed and pervasive,
and that it's already "out of control." The question then isn't
whether we can control "AI" but what kind of intelligence will
emerge and what part our own particular human kind of consciousness
might continue to play in it.
  

    
I agree with that, which is why hearing about the blundering ants
struck me as relevant.  And if you're looking for distributed and
pervasive cognition, not "intelligence," why even limit your search
to machines?
  

    
<The question then isn't
whether we can control "AI" but what kind of intelligence will
emerge and what part our own particular human kind of consciousness
might continue to play in it.

Yup...there are at least two strands to that from the human point of
view....our own co-evolution as well as how we chose to "use" AI as
a tool and how we choose to integrate with it.

And then there is the 'conscious development' of AI
itself...whatever that turns out to be.
  

    
David, great point, do you have some suggestions or examples?
  

    
Well it's such a broad net that it goes way off into other areas,
but I was thinking how a business operates, a corporation, an
economy...
  

    
Or entirely out of the realm of machines or artificial anything, the
body's immune system.

In politics, once the Access Hollywood tape was out, and then Trump
won, you couldn't precisely predict the women's march and pussy
hats, but it was clear that the whole thing had provoked a
distributed response.  As events over the year have proceeded, it's
looked as much to me like an immune response as anything else.  The
depleted toxic strain (sad!) was introduced to the system, and once
the antibodies recognized it, they started responding to multiple
infections everywhere.  Does the Body Politic really need a leader
or intelligence to functionally cognate and act?
  

    
Kewl...a systems/complexity viewpoint...makes sense to me
  

    
(jonl) Platform cooperatism was on your top ten list....could you
talk a bit more about that....has this got the "wobbly potential" of
the early 1900's

https://www.iww.org/history/icons/wobbly
  

    
Alongside the platform movement are the many communities of
practice, doing good work (g)locally...do you hold out much hope for
more and more networks of people of good will connecting around
issues on cooperative platforms that get work done.  Examples???
  

    
One of the fascinating aspects of the cryptocurrencies is that the
move has been to establish the currency first without some grand
economic system....kind of 'plug and play'. I gather the idea is
that the currency will fit and adapt to any model, new or old.
  

    
Which brings up the Blockchain, which starts with "B", which rhymes
with "D", which stands for Data (as well as the mobile programming
language).

Privacy, or the lack thereof, is still a big issue, with an
important vote today in Washington....could the blockchain,
Holochain, or "tangled" be part of the solution to the problem of
"who's data is it anyway?".

I don't mind shipping all my data to NSA, knowingly, or just let
Google and Facebook do it for me at midnight :). Just as long as it
is clear that it is MY data....I will settle for a digital time
stamp.

However, we live in a more robust digital universe than that. I
would like all my data, and my children's and grand children's data
set in 'digital stone' enabling an educational, vocational and
personal porfolio which can be accepted as verified, true and
trustworthy as a representation of my identity and work....my own
personal Wikipedia...with which I can share with others, a true and
accurate portrayal of my digital AND flatland selves.  Is it
possible, doable, and a good path to pursue, or can everything be
spoofed now...

Is Fake more real than REAL??
  

    
re 'women coins', there are also now Press Coins. "PressCoin is a
large, ambitious project to build an alternative global media
ecosystem." Always nice to have a grand vision.

https://www.presscoin.com/whitepaper/
  

    
Via email from Brian Slesinsky:

Speaking of architecture:

"[...] malls often make prime targets for housing developments —
they tend to be located in convenient, transit-accessible areas but
aren’t close enough to residential neighborhoods to stoke NIMBY
complaints, said urban development expert Richard Florida, a
professor at the University of Toronto and author of 'The New Urban
Crisis.'

"A single defunct mall can become host to thousands of new housing
units as part of a mixed-used development, giving residents easy
access to stores and other amenities as well as a feeling of
community. But homes in revamped or brand new malls still are likely
to be out of reach for many workers in the Bay Area. Upscale Santana
Row, for example, offers little for less than about $2,500 a month,
according to Apartment Finder."

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/08/shopping-for-a-home-head-to-the-mall/
  

    
We've talked about AI and deep learning systems and other future
fascinations - but with all the brilliant technology at our
disposal, the flu virus is still kicking our ass every year. This
morning's headline: "Flu rampant in swaths of Texas." 7 adults dead
locally, many more statewide, 2 more months left in our flu season.
I've been sick for the last week myself, but with a different, less
malign virus. We had our influenza vaccinations, but one strain of
this year's virus, H3N2, apparently mutated and isn't responding
well to the vaccine. The flu is widespread nationwide.
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/main.html

Spread of flu would be mitigated somewhat by simple regular
handwashing. We're a nation with dirty hands.