Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
From the interdisciplinary science known as Chaos theory comes the idea
of the 'strange attractor' 

> A strange attractor is a concept in dynamical systems that describes
> a set of points toward which a chaotic system tends to evolve,
> characterized by a fractal structure and sensitive dependence on
> initial conditions. This means that small changes in the starting
> state can lead to vastly different outcomes, making long-term
> predictions difficult.

When prediction is difficult, we tend to get point-clouds that look
like fog, or gray goo -- which may simply reflect our sensible fear of
the unknown (or the unknowable).

A note from reading earlier in this topic:

   "mind control ray" as strange attractor
   
the idea keeps coming up. But in the form of a *ray* ? (Was that really
first a video game reference?)

Perhaps the 'cathode ray' in the form of the CRTs during the old days of
TeleVision might count as a "mind control ray"  ?   (A literal sort of 
"remote viewing"?)

But then there's this image of "characteristic rays seen emanating from 
the solar disk" perhaps representing another form of "mind control" (?)
from around 1350 BC -- humans may have been at this for a long time.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten#/media/File:La_salle_dAkhenaton_(1356-
1340_av_J.C.)_(Mus%C3%A9e_du_Caire)_(2076972086).jpg>
  

    
When I started at TiVo (20-something years ago) there were a number of
conspiracy threads that we had cameras in some units and were
recording people as they watched TV.

Now it's your TV that's "watching" you and collecting far more data
than we ever did (or even could) collect at TiVo and nobody seems to
mind.
  

    
I guess a shoggoth was a proto-glimmung, but smelled worse and
didn't  focus on building its intellect.
  

    
The evolution of unmanned surface vessel fleets is truly on of those
futures become real moments, just at about 100 years remove.

Archibald Low (the father of TV & radio guided bombing and rocket
guidance) wrote in 1923 of his prediction “the war of 2023 will
naturally be a wireless war ….The wireless-controlled torpedo -
equipped with wireless sighted periscope - will be a very useful
factor…”. [1] Now, he had a bit of an edge on that unevenly
distributed future, as he had built a first system in 1917, but the
technology was not yet there when he made the prediction in the
interwar period looking out the century. Adding satellite guidance,
and remote weapons stations, gave us the various Sea Baby iterations
in use in the Black Sea. (As well as the fight over Starlink as a
civil or military infrastructure, thus substitution of Kometa)

The prospect of a carrier platform for sUAS swarms might indeed
prove to be a tipping point in warfare, at least as it was practiced
in that late Cold War offset. One doesn't need to sink an opposing
vessel to ensure mission kill by hitting sensors, mounts, and other
much more vulnerable features. As we have indeed seen in loss of
those various SAM radars and command cabs ashore.

It also becomes a much less difficult problem for military AI, as
silhouette recognition for specific weapons platforms is a much less
difficult trained task than some of the more exotic ideas around
hunter killer targeting. 

At some level of density of autonomous swarming unmanned systems,
kinetic conflict likely takes on characteristics we at present
associate with cyber conflict.

Lethal servitors become tricky things in such environments.
Especially as with any compute, we tend to build in more complexity
by default than we really need, as it is cheaper to use general
purpose processors programmed to task than to develop custom
architectures for single purposes. (As Halvar Flake reminded us).
But that leaves a lot of complexity on the table that can be
maliciously weaponized, or that may evolve to other purpose. 


---
[1] A.M. Low, "How we shall fight in A.D. 2023", The 19th Century
and After, (London: Constable & Company, 1923):354-358
  

    
Switching to one of those moments that totally brings all the absurd
vectors-of-now together: 

"California: Dozers have started to smash through roads filled with
Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches, Teslas, and Bentleys that were abandoned
in the middle of the roads blocking firefighters from responding to
the Palisades Fire. #wildfire #cafire 

Now that the dozers have pushed these vehicles out of the way, they
can now access houses that are on fire."

https://x.com/HotshotWake/status/1876763437792969023

And you can watch it live, right now: https://ktla.com
  

    
Live stream wildfire situational awareness as residents flee one of
the wealthiest neighborhoods on the planet:

https://cameras.alertcalifornia.org/?pos=34.0794_-118.5493_10&id=Axis-Hel6
9B
  

    
Some context on that:

> The blaze quickly jumped across Palisades Drive according to the
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — leaving many
trying to evacuate in a precarious and chaotic situation. Some
jumped out of their stalled cars to run toward the beach, other were
forced to return home and shelter-in-place if they couldn’t get out,
residents told The Times.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-07/life-threatening-and-destr
uctive-wind-storm-to-hit-southern-california-what-to-know
  

    
I wonder if any of these wealthy residents were better prepared for
wildfires?
  

    
From a disaster preparedness point of view, two fundamental
questions to answer are “what if you can’t stay?” and “what if you
can’t leave?”

To that, maybe we should add: “what if you get stuck in traffic?”
  

    
An old commanding officer of mine had a home in Malibu.  He had a
pool and next to it a standard navy fire fighting pump, the type I
had learned to run in fire fighting school.  Years later I heard
that in a big Malibu fire he stayed behind and saved the house using
the pump, fire hoses and the pool water.  Readiness is the greatest
possible economy.  
  

    
There are probably insurance companies that are so glad they pulled
out. The state wants to drag them back in, though:

California will soon require insurers to increase home coverage in
wildfire-prone areas
<https://apnews.com/article/california-increases-home-insurance-wildfires-56486
f80c0f5f5e63b90db06d230f1d1>
  

    
Tesla had remote-controlled watercraft, a "torpedo boat", in what,
1898?  It was also battery propelled, so no combustion engine needed.
  

    
I'm wondering what the endgame is after drones start going after
drone-carriers? Maybe mines, with drone-carriers mixed in that look
exactly like the mines?

Meanwhile, it seems Ukraine is successfully shipping out grain by
routing it through territorial waters:

> Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI)
last July was met with international outcry. Ukraine’s allies and
its food-importing trade partners feared a worst-case scenario for
global food security and for Ukraine’s economy, with its farmers
once again unable to export via Ukraine’s deepwater Black Sea ports.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby stressed that
“there’s no possible way, just mathematically, we’re going to get as
much grain out now as we were going to be able to get out through
the grain deal if it had been extended.”

> These worst-case scenarios have not played out. Global food
prices, including grain prices, maintained a steady decline into
2024, in part due to increased agricultural exports from Ukraine. In
mid-August 2023, following the cessation of the BSGI, Ukraine
announced the Ukrainian corridor, a route passing through the
territorial waters of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s member
states of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, which has enabled Ukraine
to resume high volume shipments of agricultural products since
October 2023.

<https://www.csis.org/analysis/setting-record-straight-ukraines-grain-exports>

So I guess the news from Ukraine isn't *all* bad?
  

    
Slippage some what from a guy named Erik Davis who’s writes on
SubStack:


Out of the Oven
Plus News and Notes
ERIK DAVIS
JAN 2

READ IN APP
 
The other day a friend sent me “The Elite Capture of Substack,” a
post by Cydney Hayes that got a lot of play over the last year. The
piece tracked the enshittification of the platform, principally
through the introduction of Notes and the feedy shift in focus
towards “stacking” and “restacking” and other social media circus
acts. Hayes, deploying her generation’s uncanny appropriation of old
hippie slang, described it as “a vibe shift”: “From quality to
quantity; from recognized intellect to symbolic trophies; from
growth in our collective writing skills to growth in subscribers,
and in turn, growth in users and profit for Substack.” It’s the
sound of the hamster wheel spinning: click, click, click.

I don’t use Notes myself, unlike Hayes, who from all appearances
posts there all the fucking time. My experience of the
enshittification of the platform has more to do with the pressures
put on users of the platform, readers as well as producers, to keep
the flow coming fast and furious. As a reader, I tend to “manage” my
Substack feeds in erratic bursts of feast or famine. Flush with a
new-born fascination with Internet talk, and optimistic about an
expanding universe of essay writing, I might subscribe to dozens of
newsletters all at once, sometimes throwing my cash into the ring to
show my commitment, to myself as much as anyone. Within a few weeks,
the winnowing already begins, until soon enough I am left with only
a couple regular newsletters in my inbox, which I still largely use
rather that the Substack app. This condition persists until,
moonlike, I wax expansive again, an enthusiasm for hot new discourse
mingled with the anxiety that without some new feeds I will sink
into a silo of my own making.

The reality is that there just aren’t that many voices or points of
view I want to hear from that regularly. I don’t read online that
much, or at least I try not to, especially when I want to get some
serious work or play done, not to mention continue my devotion to
reading deep and sometimes difficult, you know, books. Substack
subscriptions pile up like stacks of New Yorkers, except in
cyberspace. I would be happier if more people published essays at
the rate I do here on Burning Shore, but I promise you that is not a
successful strategy, at least by those measures of success that do
not highly weight chillage.”

In more of this post, he then goes on to talk “Western Materialistic
Buddhism”(WMB)and the practice of WMB, as per usual YMMV..I just
found the enshittifaction of SubStack as a synchronicity to our
discussion here..
Now back to your regular scheduled programming 
  

    
Some of us here know Erik, and I appreciate that he avoids
committing too much mindshare to reading short-form online posts.
Erik writes on various subjects, but much of his writing is about
esoteric mysticism and phildickian subjects. 

Unlike Erik, I'm promiscuous with my mindshare. I'm deluged with
newsletters, have thousands of sites bookmarked, use a newsreader
called NewsBlur that tracks dozens of sites. I have accounts on
Facebook, X, Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, Flickr et al. I'm getting a
firehose of data, and I'm looking for the signal in all that noise.
I often wonder what that does to my head.

But I've learned that multitasking isn't a thing, I'm only ever
paying attention to one thing at a time. I devote a lot of time to
conversation on the WELL. I do some reading. I consume stories via
film and television. I listen to music quite a lot while all this
other stuff is happening. And I spend some time just following my
breath, meditating.
  

    
What do my habits have to do with the state of the world? By
exposing myself to so many sources of content, I have an idea of how
much there is right now, and how diverse it is. And I know that any
one person can only attend to so much - and actual work and life
take much of that time and attention. So most people consume a
fraction of the content I consume.

Since there's so much of it, there are many ways to slice it. For a
time, I was watching political channels (incorrectly labled "news"
channels) on cable television, and committing much of my time to
contemporary politics. When I was a youngster, this was pretty
difficult: television networks had news broadcasts that were 15
minutes at the end of the day. Actual news was segregated from
entertainment, and there wasn't much of it.  We didn't have anything
like 24/7 political infotainment, as we do now. People had political
ideas, but their heads generally weren't colonized by propaganda
machines. In fact politics was a necessary evil that was mostly
handled by professional politicians, and that most of us chose to
ignore.
  

    
In the 60s, I felt pressure to do more to understand politics, to be
more engaged and aware. I, and many like me, did that. We learned
that the politics of the USA had dark and ugly aspects, and we
wanted to work against those, so we became more politically active.
I think what this did, over the years, was feed us into a different
kind of political machine, a machine churning various forms of
propaganda to support various initiatives, by now polarizing and
somewhat chaotic. We live in a world where a climate emergency that
endangers the planet is just another source of political
conversation - a few care about it, a few are averse to caring about
it for economic reasons, and many just ignore it because they don't
know what to think. They might "believe" it, but at the same time
ignore it, in the sense that they're not taking action to address
the problem.
  

    
The state of the world is ... flummoxed. Literate people have their
slices of reality and their bundle of concerns, insofar as they have
time to do much thinking, after a day's work, family management,
etc. Politics is no longer professional, it's what you might call
pro-am - professionals mixed with amateurs, all driven by a
diversity of economic interests and cultural beliefs, and most less
concerned with doing the people's work than with sustaining a
popular media and social media presence, getting more money and more
votes. We do have hard-working legislators, but we also have the
likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and for a time, George
Santos, and the volume of their barking drowns out sane and
reasonable attempts at governance. (This is US-centric, but I think
most countries have versions of the same predicament - politics as a
vaudeville act. Though you might not be old enough to remember
vaudeville.)

Meanwhile I found that, when I stopped running the 24/7 background
political yammering of cable news, I felt a bit saner. And I remind
myself that politics done right is just grinding work to make the
right decisions given a rainbow of interests and intentions that all
have to be addressed - it's not show business. There's a whole other
thing I picked up from Ted Gioia, about how the politics du jour is
not left vs right, but up vs down. Maybe I'll get to that later.
  

    
When TV first got going in earnest, Congress made them do news as a
condition of using the public airwaves.  They didn't want to do it
because it wasn't profitable.  I think it only became profitable
when it became a sort of infotainment.  And then, only for some.

I think also that denial of big world events like the climate are
often tied together with one's livelihood.  I have a climate-denying
friend who has a small trucking company that depends on diesel fuel,
as one example.  It seems like the thing so many can't face is the
idea that one has to change habits, attitudes and one's chosen work.
And that doesn't square with the capitalist dream.
  

    
Ideally when there's a world-threatening crisis, the finest
scientific minds would be called together to find a solution. But
with climate change, the crisis has been politicized with
substantial weight given to a denial that any crisis exists.

However the current state of thinking about climate change reflects
an urgent consensus among scientists and many global stakeholders
that it is a critical and accelerating crisis requiring immediate
action, whatever that might be. 

Scientific evidence overwhelmingly confirms that human activities,
particularly the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and
industrial processes, are driving unprecedented global warming and
associated impacts, such as extreme weather events and instability,
rising sea levels, and biodiversity loss. 

We've made some progressin acknowledging the problem (e.g. the Paris
Accord aiming to limit global temperature rise to 1.5degC above
pre-industrial levels), but implementation of these goals ain't
great. Technological innovations, renewable energy adoption, and
climate adaptation strategies are hopeful, but these frustrating
political, economic, and social barriers persist in derailing
meaningful climate action. It's like shooting yourself in the foot
with a thermonuclear bullet.
  

    
The capitalist dream is a delusion. It may collapse from its own
weight rather abruptly. Plenty of other conventions are collapsing
because they are built on unsustainable delusions. Calling a
corporate oligopoly a democracy doesn’t make it work like one, so it
will never deliver what the “electorate” wants. They will eventually
become sufficiently disillusioned to perceive the unreality of the
emperor’s outfit, and then all bets are off. 

The spread of divided democracies struggling to develop functional
coalitions - Germany, France, South Korea, India - is very
concerning. Now our next leader(with tiny congressional margins) is
talking about pulling a Putin move and attempting to annex peaceable
neighbors. 

The MFABT contingent is ascendant. Better prepare to turn pro,
because the going is just getting weirder.
  

    

"Can we replace Cory Doctorow with some more popular, more
user-friendly AI simulacrum  of the cultural functionality of Cory
Doctorow?" 

 I don't much like to pick on Cory on the WELL, although he
volunteered, which was good of him.

It seems to me that the Doctorovian  debate position circa 02025 is
"The platforms get it wrong in writing like me or any writer like
me!  They make big, blundering mistakes that invalidate the
discussion."  Those AIs will not "work better,"  in the sense of
making some nuanced humanistic argument in politics,  literature, or
history, because they  can't.
  

    

I don't  agree with that, any more than I think that an AI graphic
generator will never ever draw proper human hands.  But I'll offer
one entertaining iron-man argument in favor of Cory's position.

Everybody who is reading this agrees that "Computers can play
chess," right?   If there's any arena where computers can kick
human-beings to the curb, and in the full glare of humankind
marveling and fretting about that,  it surely must be the game of
chess.  Chess is the drosophila fruit-fly of AI computer-science.

Chess is a "game" that is  "deterministic" and "fully-defined," am I
right?   So you cannot have, like, a chess pawn in any chess game,
which is somehow a foggy, ill-defined  "literary metaphor of a
pawn," or a "futuristic quadrant-model of a pawn," or a "quantum
Schroedinger-cat pawn" which is on the board while also somehow off
the board.

Not until now, anyway.  Check this out.   

https://youtu.be/FojyYKU58cw?si=d8sB2UGfFS0zdh3a
  

    

Here you've got two big-deal billion-buck contemporary AIs.  This
antic human YouTube chess entertainer inveigles them to play against
each other.  They're  both powerful systems, but they've never been
directly constrained and trained to accurately "play chess". 

Yet they can't frankly admit that they're lousy at chess.  They're
too honest, harmless and helpful for that. So they spontaneously
invent very high-powered "Gray Ooze Chess."  They both
stochastically-parrot some chess-like activities.

So they commit  ludicrous "mistakes."   To lose at chess is easy,
but to lose at chess in this way is beyond merely human capacity. 
You could laugh them off to hell and gone, unless you encountered an
AI which is specialized to play chess.  In which case, it would
crush you into dust at chess, and also an army of a thousand of you,
and also every previous computational form of chess machine ever
made.
  

    
Terrible wildfires in the Los Angeles area of California/USA. If you
look at Greenpeace's global fire map at
<https://maps.greenpeace.org/fire_dashboard/>, you see that those
fires are part of almost 5,000 global hotspots. 

Climate change worsens wildfires globally by creating hotter, drier,
and more volatile conditions that increase the likelihood and
intensity of fire outbreaks. Hotter temperatures dry out vegetation,
which becomes highly flammable fuel. Longer periods of drought
reduce soil moisture and make ecosystems more susceptible to
ignition. And climate change makes extreme weather patterns even
more extreme - like heatwaves and strong winds, which cause
wildfires to spread farther and faster. Regions that were already
prone to wildfires now have longer fire seasons with devastating
impacts on ecosystems, communities, and air quality. 

It's just gonna get worse. So one way to see the state of the world
is HOT, and getting hotter.