"AI" in Tech

I think it's fairly easy to guess how "AI" is going to affect the tech industry even after just a few months of people actually using it to try to do things.

There are basically two categories of tech work: stuff that's already been done and stuff that hasn't been done (much) if at all. The stuff that's already been done is obviously "easy to do", because there's a template for it that exists already. In my experience the tech industry became saturated with available "off the shelf" tools by around 2010, so by now 85% or more of tech work is just "systems integration".

The stuff that hasn't been done before, either by anyone, or by a company, or an individual developer is generally more difficult, but the work tends to be more focused and outcome oriented and I think necessarily better, meaning less buggy and janky.

"AI" does the stuff that's already been done. It can spit out endless reams of things that have already been done, like web GUIs.

"AI" fails horribly at niche, novel, or weird things; it will barf up code that's simply incorrect. An inexperienced person will take the code at face value and will have a hard time even trying to determine why it doesn't work.

The template-like code that's generated by AI will be even more janky than the "developer as integrator" code that tech has been churning out for more than a decade. The "novel" code it spits out just won't work at all.

Both these things are worse outcomes than just slogging along with the status quo methods of software development. To me it seems obvious the world will be better off with less tech/electro-mechanical stuff in general. It seems like the equivalent of tail fins on cars in the 1950s; it's kind of a weird fad and status symbol posturing. However, the tech industry is run by people who chase trends and who believe each other's bullshit.

Some managers in tech will grasp the limitations of "AI". Others will go pedal to the metal because they're lemmings. Their companies will go flying off a cliff and crash and burn hard.

I think all this is part of a bigger picture reshuffling of the economy as well. The totally financialized western economies are reaching their logical conclusion with the lifespan of the boomers who created these fucked up things.

Practicality, pragmatism, reliability and value are going to replace the era of bullshit and scams little by little. That's the next "big wave".

Animism versus Cults

The animist view of the world is everything has a "spirit", whether it's a bird, tree, rock or human. In that worldview places can have a spirit, and things like a cave or a mountain can have a spirit. I think that perspective is the organic/natural spiritual view of the 3D reality world for people. It's an extrapolation of an individual's experience of reality. "If I'm conscious everything else might be as well."

That said, the ability of any human to directly interact with others' consciousness, even another human's consciousness is severely limited/non-existent.

It is challenging to attempt to tune into the world's mind or to even imagine the perspective of something like a tree; it's an act of imagination and subtle intuition. What do the trees want?  Who the fuck knows? The attempt to plug into the world's minds will eventually bring some ideas bubbling up into the well of consciousness and imagination.

It's an interesting thought experiment to ponder how people try to resolve the ambiguity of this animist scenario... if nobody knows what the spirits want or try to say, then how can it ever be decoded? Well, it can't... but a bunch of political mechanisms inevitably fill in those gaps.

Some people can "agree" aka vote on what the spirits want. In another scenario people cede this interpretation to an authority figure like a priest or augur or shaman who will claim to know what the spirits say or want. Another tactic, which is the one at work in the world today is for a central power to essentially never shut up and jam up all channels with pronouncements and claims. Today it's scientism that's on 24/7 full blast with various claims about the nature of reality. Various religions make somewhat outdated claims for a full explanation of the world like people who believe the bible is literally true.

All such noise doesn't really solve the original ambiguity though. It could mainly be categorized as distractions from that central problem.

The claims about "the spirits" or consciousness of the world is really an extension of the ambiguity of one's own mind and consciousness: "Where is the mind? What is it? Where do ideas come from?" etc... 

Cult Leader Concept Formation

The Heaven's Gate cult is the subject of lots of scholarly papers and journalistic investigation because it's very well documented and was a shocking public spectacle case. The cult reached its deadly end in the early days of the world wide web and made videos about their beliefs. Investigators conducted interviews in the wake of their mass suicide and the material is out there in various formats.

It exemplifies the "cult leader"/henchman system. Without the henchman, in this case, there's probably no "Heaven's Gate" cult.

The leader was a guy named Marshall Applewhite. His top henchman was a nurse named Bonnie Nettles. They actually met in a mental hospital where she was working as a nurse and he was a patient, although this part of the story seems to be disputed.

In the version where they met in the loony bin, Applewhite suffered a psychological breakdown in the wake of being fired from his music professor job for having an affair with a male student. She was a "seeker" interested in astrology and the occult. For some reason, the two hit it off, and that gave rise to what became Heaven's Gate.

In fact, it looks more like Nettles was the real creator of Heaven's Gate, but she needed a "leader" to glom onto. It's interesting there's not more information about her life out there on the internet and that most people think Applewhite was the brains of the operation and creator of their mythology.

Their beliefs are an interesting mishmash of biblicisms and sci fi, in other words, classic sci fi and modern sci fi. A few of the cults I've read about created a similar blend of ideas where Jesus is an alien, or will return in a space ship, or whatever.

The "UFO"/aliens/area 51 concept seems to be promoted by the government from day one, maybe as a joke, and continues even to this day. The concept there is "the government" has contact with "aliens", but can't reveal it to the public for some bizarre reason. It follows the pattern of priests who are in contact with god, who lives in a cave, or can only be contacted on a mountain top, or whatever. Select "priests" get to talk to the god. Similarly, Trump gets to talk with Aliens, I guess. Lol.

Anyway, I think it's useful to discuss the "concept formation" of people like Applewhite/Nettles from the point-of-view of human consciousness being "alien to 3D reality world". That is, our consciousness exists in an "information dimension" which arises from, but is distinct from the 3D reality world of physics and matter.

The ego/self/mind, whatever you want to label the consciousness in it's information dimension struggles with the limitations, insults, and trauma of the 3D reality world. I think this is the result of a very specific method of raising children.

It's pretty common for parents to shield their children from the brutality and/or skeezy animalistic aspects of the human and natural world. Children often don't differentiate between their fantasy/inner world and the external 3D reality. When a child is shielded from the ugly parts of life, or never has to reconcile their model of reality with real life, they can enter adulthood and adolescence with that cartoonish model intact.

When that model collides with reality, there's a couple of basic paths for dealing with the trauma of life: adjust the inner world model to match the brutal realities of life, or adjust the model to wish that trauma away. In the case of Applewhite, he was a gay dude, but was outed in humiliating circumstances. There's not enough info on the biography of Nettles, who seems pretty "normal" in her early life, but for some reason she formed a quasi-marriage with Applewhite, who eagerly played into her astrology/new age fantasies.

The ego/self/mind of man often can't accept the "you don't matter and you will die" aspect of 3D reality. In the case of Appliewhite/Nettles they created a mythology where, in version one, they'd be physically raptured to a space ship. (The Church of the Subgenius lampoons this belief in their materials: you get raptured to a UFO and have sex with sexy aliens.) There's a version of this story floating around on youtube about space Nazis. Anyway, this idea didn't work out for Nettles, who died of cancer before being beamed up.

In typical cult leader fashion, after Nettle's death, Applewhite had to adjust the mythology rather than accept the grim fact of Nettle's pre-rapture expiration, to more of the traditional view of "the soul" being from another dimension, so Nettles shed her meat chariot but still existed and participated in the cult. In some of the cult videos on YouTube, Applewhite sits in a lawn chair and talks. There's an empty lawn chair next to him, presumably for the ghost of Nettles.

Anyway to summarize the above: the self/mind can't deal with it's temporality and the traumas of life. Rather than adjust the idealized inner world model to reality, the cult leader adjusts the model to flee reality, essentially--this is the seeming basis for at least Christianity and Judaism. The cult leader looks to create various narratives that negate the aspects of life that contradict the idealized version of reality in their mind model of reality.

Cults and religions tend to "go big" in their narratives to elevate the self/ego  to "cosmic import", so the narratives tend toward comprehensive schemes and stories with a beginning, middle, and end of the world where only the cool people survive and are rewarded and everyone else is killed in a flood, meteor storm, alien invasion or whatever. Those narratives tend to gratify the ego of the believer who of course assumes they will get the golden ticket and end up in the land of the blessed.

The millenarian/doomsday cults tend toward biblical/alien themes while ignoring the realm of middle of the road mythology, which I think is actually pretty interesting and telling. By middle of the road mythology, I mean a whole cast of creatures and characters of earthly proportion are omitted from their themes and narratives, AFAIK. For example, I don't think I ever heard of a cult which focused heavily on vampires, dragons, or monsters like Bigfoot. The Norse and Germanic mythology actually includes stories of that type of creature, plus the "gods" of the Germanic mythology are more human-scale entities than the more abstract characters of the bible stories. (Here is an article about a vampire "cult", but it was more like a gang than a cult)

In fact, the people who "believe" in bigfoot or ghosts seem to be more into LARPing and having fun with their mythological subject matter than to be serious. Having fun and playing is antithetical to the cultish mindset.

The Cult Leader/Henchman System

One of the prevailing hopes/dreams of humanity is the world could be good and just if the current day leadership were removed/killed.

The author Robert Sopolsky (sp?) published a paper on a tribe of baboons (I think) in Africa where the alpha male leadership died off after gorging on tainted food from a trashbin or some similar scenario. The alpha males prevented the lower status apes from eating the goodies, so it only affected them.

He described the resulting dead alpha male ape society as a golden age. The survivors had lower stress levels and lived a more equal, mutually beneficial life at least for a while. That seems to support the notion that wiping out the "leadership" of any given corporate entity, like a country, would result in a similar golden age... I think there's some merit to that concept.

The problem with that theory is it seems like "the problem" isn't solely the alpha leadership, especially for humans, it's all the followers that really make the pyramid system function, so even if the top of the pyramid is lopped off, the lower levels will quickly build another one.

Videos of frat hazing cult behavior sometimes are released to the public. Even though hazing has been banned a number of times over the years, and to non-cult members the behavior seems insane, lots of people still "willingly" engage in it. 

Recently there were bodycam videos from police going into a frat house in Iowa where a bunch of shirtless dudes were standing in a dark room in the basement. The dudes in the basement were so brainwashed into an alternate reality of frat membership "omerta" that they could barely respond to questions from the police.

The pyramid structure seems to be something like:

• Cult Leader Figurehead
• Top Psychopath Henchmen
• Second tier henchmen who tell NPCs what to do
• NPCs

In the cases of Aum Shinrikyo and the Bagwan Sri Rajneesh cults the cult leader and the top psychopath henchmen lived in a sort of co-dependent relationship where the attributes the cult leader lacked were made up for by the psychopathic henchmen, and vice versa. The top level henchmen maybe lack the charisma or desire to interact with the public, or lack the confidence or insanity to try to foist their crazy expansive crazy vision on others. Similarly, the cult leader probably lacks the desire to deal with myriad details to carry out their insane schemes.

I think if the leaders and complete top level henchman layer of society were removed entirely, it would take a long time for a pyramid structure to reconstitute. That pyramidal structure, though, and the cult leader/henchman system is duplicated over and over throughout the entirety of a country like the US.

 

Man Made Mud

This time of year, the late winter/early spring in northeast Ohio is the maple syrup season and the mud season.

One of the more interesting, surprising observations of my 50+ year life is mud is mostly man made; there are exceptions, of course, but mud is generally a product of disturbed nature, that is, where the natural courses of drainage and plant growth are destroyed or disturbed.

My property illustrates this very well. In the spring, some areas of our yard, that is the grassy areas of the property where all the trees were chopped down many years ago can turn into a swamp in February/March. Then if people, or animals like deer, walk through the swamp the soil percolates up through the grass and it turns to soupy mud in spots.

In the wooded areas of the property, where the soil is composed of the same glacial till at the same slopes, there's no mud. There are leaves on the ground this time of year from the fall, plus the forest root system seems to form a ubiquitous drainage network. The tree root systems in a long lived forest like that are everywhere, even coming up just under the leaf mat. There are areas which are natural pools formed by long dead trees that fell over and uprooted... even those drain in a day or two after a heavy rain.

People try to dry out the grassy lawn areas with french drains and similar strategies, but the lifetime of shallow drainage systems is pretty short. If they're not buried below the frost line, eventually they'll break up from frost heave, or get clogged up or collapse, or get ripped up by trees or animals. The previous owner of our house went all-in on such drainage systems and they started failing about 10 years ago. They probably lasted 15-20 years, plus they don't really drain the swampy lawn areas, so they're kind of pointless.

I let some of the muddy areas of the lawn grow wild. After a couple of years they turned back into a meadow. Meadows generally do a good job covering up the mud as well. The taller, thicker weeds like goldenrod or berry bushes will collapse under the heavy snows and form a thick mat after a couple of years. Eventually trees will take over there too and in the distant future that will turn to a nicely drained forest area as well.

In perpetually damp areas that were wrecked by annual mowing and rolling, it's difficult for even a meadow to establish itself, and moss takes over, so even in that case, the mud gets covered. So generally a property manager doesn't really have to "do something" to cover up mud, eventually it takes care of itself. However, eventually might be a really long time.

Matter/Pattern

Sometimes the origin of words yields a surprisingly fresh insight into the nature of things. I was curious about the origin of the word "matter" as in "I matter", meaning, "I am important". The more common meaning of "matter", and maybe the "original" meaning is: undifferentiated stuff. Eventually, I guess that concept morphed into various versions of "stuff", for example "the matter at hand", which is maybe how it turned into the concept of "mattering", as in "I matter" as in "I am stuff as well".

The origin of matter is the Latin word mater, which is mother, as in mother earth. I think "mater" and various version of that word go waaaay back into the mysts of time and the theoretical "proto indoeuropean language". 

The origin of "matter" being "mother" leads to the obvious question what's the "pater" derived word that takes on the same role, and that's "pattern".

The concept that the undifferentiated material world is "feminine" and the plan is "masculine" is an old one apparently. One of the symbols of that is the obelisk, like the Washington monument, which is, of course, a dick. One of the associated ancient concepts in agriculture is "the sun" goes into "the earth" and produces the plants in a crop.

Nothing Lasts and "You" Don't Matter

The mind exists in "an information dimension". Other people with a similar model of the mind think there's "one information dimension" and conceptualize it as a place and think the distinction between individual's minds is an illusion. Who knows? Anyway, there's a sort of strange relationship between this dimension and the 3D reality world. They are attached, but distinct. In fact, the concept of a "space" or "dimension" seems entirely off, but there's no other suitable analogy because ironically enough the mind's representations of such a concept revolve around the body's relationship to other objects in 3D reality.

This scenario gives birth to all sorts of human dramas and delusions. The entirety of these delusions is encompassed in the probably apocryphal, too good to be true story of Alexander "the great" meeting the cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, which is in present day Turkey. The two men offer completely different conclusions about how one should live when the temporality of a mind is the most fundamental human fact.

Not only is "I" temporal but the entirety of human endeavor is also. Diogenes decided to live the simplest possible, most "natural" life. Alexander went and killed a bunch of people and "conquered" territory to establish "hellenic civilization", that is to impose the mental model of his bros on as many people as possible to the extent that's ever possible which is "great". The civilization model is basically a shared delusion.

For some odd reason for many people it's a bitter pill to swallow the notion that nothing at all lasts and you don't "matter" even though this is as obvious as the blue sky, stars, or sunrise. In a world of all change, nothing lasts. Even stones eventually turn to dust. Men and women age. Once firm, supple skin turns wrinkly and dry. The entire world of man will be over in the blink of an eye in geological terms. That is all obvious.

The story of Diogenes and Alexander revolves around the "I matter" concept. Ultimately, mattering can be boiled down to "leaving a mark". I think that terminology betrays the origin of the "I matter" concept. The verbal and symbolic reasoning aspect of the mind is an entity of symbol processing and memory. As long as there's "memory" there's an "I". Another aspect of "mattering" is being able to impose one's own internal model of reality on others. A person can insist "I matter the most". This particular idea is expressed by the tombs of pharaohs of Egypt, or those Chinese emperors buried with terracotta armies, or Viking funerals where the bros of the dead dude sacrificed women, pets, horses and the like.

Modern variations on this theme are greatly attenuated and more playful. For example, the grave of Benjamin Orr, a member of the rock band  "The Cars" has a grave site in Thompson, Ohio. Fans put little trinkets to pay homage to his memory. Similarly, Chef Boyardee's grave in All Soul's cemetery in Chardon is honored with cans of spaghetti and meatballs and the like.

 

Another twist on this scenario is people form narratives with a "god" and order of the world related to the god or gods, where the "I" existed before birth, then continues after death but is blessed or punished according to some cosmic rule book and presumably a life score. This is the mind model of probably billions of people. The concept there is one "matters" as part of a gamified, systemic reality. The particular rules of these games are bizarre and utterly arbitrary.

I think the rules various groups invent betrays some genetic underpinning for belief. Like various sects of jews have hyper-legalistic beliefs about their demon lord's systemic game. Other ethnic groups understand the game is not legalistic at all, because of course it's absurd god has a giant set of rulebooks and have more animistic and ironically more comprehensive views of the information dimension/spirit realm.