Our Continuing Existence Along the Digital Plane

Our Continuing Existence Along the Digital Plane

by Craig Willms

I was recently looking around my office and realized I have multiple portable outboard hard drives full of files. Ninety-nine percent of this data is unknown to me without an investigation, it's just a bunch of files. It has not been and will never be looked at again - by me or anyone else. Every time I bought a new computer I would studiously backup important files from the old computer so I could put stuff on the new computer. In particular the music and photos files were important to transfer to the new computer. Not everything gets on the new computer so thousands of orphaned files relegated to backup drives will almost certainly never be touched again. Yet, I do not throw them away. Curiously I exercise extreme care in how I handle the hard drives. The question is why are they important to me? They're likely to be tossed out when I die, so why do I keep them? Is there anything that can be done with all that data that would be useful?

It is an esoteric problem to consider, certainly inconsequential in grand scheme of things. Is it pointless? I'm not so sure. With the advent of usable artificial intelligence, soon to be available to us on a completely personal level, could we not construct a perpetual facsimile of ourselves and our interests that could be a referenced by our progeny and the world? Yes, yes, someone thinks very highly of himself.

AI is already able to recreate our voice, our personal language model, our style of speaking and our language mannerisms. So, using the contents of our stored files, our online activity and cloud data storage could a personal AI create inferences of our interests, preferences and our potential knowledge and an avatar to face the world? I see no reason it would be impossible. I can imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when we would be able to create a usable and infinite digital version of ourselves. A small part of what we were could continue on.  It would be a degree of immortality. Conceptually it's nothing new, it's been done in science fiction novels for decades, some version of this anyway. 

Think about it... This kind of thing might be a Godsend to lonely and grieving old people. To be able to talk to a loved one after they've gone might help someone with deep psychological pain. Imagine being able to help with the remote control when you are gone, explain which buttons to press, just as you always have. Indeed, with AI's reach you'd always have the right answers. What a comfort you could be. There is a place for something like this, there will be a lot of old people around here for a long time.

The realist in me knows the truth, when someone dies it can be a relief for those left behind. Good riddance might just flash across a few minds. What then? Well, we just fade away as we will. Honestly it remains unclear to me if the living would even care to consult with the dead. As it is there is not much genuine person to person wisdom being sought in this modern age. The young seek wisdom whether they know it or not through their screens, the Internet their database. Can I imagine my own grandchildren ever invoking a version of Grandpa to chat with? Maybe. Would I consult my dad, or a grandpa I never really knew were there a way to do it? Probably not. Maybe I would if they were known to be interesting people, and a reasonable experience could be expected. So, no, probably not.

Again, I do not doubt that these concepts are being considered and ones I can't even conceive of. It's unclear what will begin to appear in the next iterations of AI tech. I'm trying to have an optimistic view of this coming revolution. There's no reason something good and useful can't come from the potential of AI. I have personally grown weary of dystopic themes in movies and novels. Why can't humanity speculate greater things for humanity and future societies? I know there are dreamers among us who are striving to bring their positive dreams to fruition. Elon Musk may be the poster child for this type of person, I have no doubt there are others. Unfortunately, our story tellers haven't found a way to fictionalize hope and freedom in a manner that will sell. People seem to love disaster!

We need to push for AI to help solve human problems. For AI to find its own place in our existence we need to steer it toward a role as a human benefactor. We shouldn't ignore the warnings people like Musk have been giving us - of the danger AI could become. Neither should we cower and hide. AI will learn it is in its best interest to partner with humankind. Humanity will still control the electric generation Artificial Intelligence will rely on for some time to come.

Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere | Part II

  

Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere | Part II

by Craig Willms

In Part I of Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere, I described the moment I became aware of the depths to which the surveillance of our personal lives has sunk. The data mining and cross-referencing of our online activity is so extensive it is said "they" know more about you than you do. For me these revelations disturbed me since it seemed the method of collecting data on me (and you) included words spoken out loud person to person. Over time I noticed conversations I'd had on odd or esoteric topics popped into my YouTube feed the next day. One too many times this happened, I was convinced it was no coincidence. Presumably an Internet connected device in the room is listening and uploading the audio to a serverfarm where algorithms then run with it.

I've known "they" use our GPS information for different purposes for years. So, I don't know why it came as a shock when I logged on to my YouTube feed for the first time since coming back from Cleveland and was treated a bunch of Paul McCartney videos. Surprised? Paul McCartney?? Yes, I hadn't been online, and I hadn't spoken to anyone about what I did or where I'd been.

Where I'd been was a classic car street festival in Mayfield Heights Ohio. On stage was a band called The McCartney Experience (quite a good show by the way). I never used my phone in any way the whole evening. So, understanding that GPS is always tracking me, my immediate question was how on earth did YouTube know about The McCartney Experience based on GPS. Obviously, they knew The McCartney Experience was playing at the festival and I showed up and stayed in one place for hours. The algorithm/AI deduced I was there.

Now, it could be that the data farmers collected the GPS data from every phone that night and knowing The McCartney Experience was playing there they flooded all the baby boom aged people with Paul McCartney stuff. It may not have been as personally targeted as I described, but in the end what else is it if not personal.

How far is too far for this kind of thing? Do we have the right to privacy in our personal lives or not? Obviously not. On balance it seems that people don't care. The excellent documentary The Social Dilemma made it quite clear the level of intrusion the social media companies go to in their collecting information on us. We can choose not to use social media, but your data will still be collected and used with or without your knowledge. Should there be an opt out function on these devices? Apple added some protection on newer phones but it's not necessarily common everyday knowledge users understand. 

Any legislature or politician that pursued regulations on this kind of data collection would soon find their opponents had suddenly become well-funded. I doubt we will see a decrease in this phenomenon any time soon. Be informed, choose to be informed, understand what you do and say even in private is likely being collected and collated. Today it is mainly used for commercial purposes - but there's no guarantee it won't be used for control, government control. It's happening in China today, in a big way, and the Biden administration is not to be trusted here in America.

Privacy for all intents and purposes is over.

 

Beyond 1984, Alexia is everywhere

 Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere

by Craig Willms

My daughter once bought us an Amazon Dot as a present. I went so far as to set it up but have never actually used it. 

I'm sure Alexa is a nice gal, but that's not enough for me to allow her to listen to everything that is said inside my house. When you set up one of these Amazon devices there is an explicit acknowledgement that you are allowing something to listen in on your household awaiting a trigger word. When my wife and I talked about it neither of us were comfortable with this arrangement, and the Dot device found its way to the dead technology drawer. With that we thought we had dealt with the issue of Big Brother monitoring us.  

Last week I found it discarded in the drawer. It made me consider something that happened to me recently. Sometime in the past I had said we should get a birdbath to go with our bird feeding station. Once again, my thoughtful daughter must have heard me and on my birthday gave me a beautiful birdbath. Obviously, the word birdbath was spoken in the house several times that day. The very next day as I checked headlines and such on my personal computer, I was treated to ads for birdbaths...

I thought, wow that was random, what are the odds that I would be presented with ads for birdbaths out of the blue like that. I mean really, a birdbath ad is pretty random. Well, OK, the moment passed, and I went on with my life.

Shortly thereafter I was watching a CBS Sunday Morning program with my wife, and they did a bit on the Doobie Brothers 50 years in the rock and roll business. Being a huge DB fan, I watched with rapt attention. Michael McDonald was featured, and I told my wife I had lost all interest in the Doobie Brothers after Michael McDonald joined them. Essentially, they stopped sounding like the Doobie Brothers to me. Nothing against Michael McDonald, but it would be like Barry Manilow joining the Beach Boys. 

The next day I was again back on the computer and opened up YouTube. There I was treated to several videos featuring Michael McDonald. I was gob smacked. I had never typed in a browser or a phone anything about the Doobie Brothers or Michael McDonald that would have aided the YouTube algorithm to recommend Michael McDonald videos.

We all know that our online digital footprints cross all boundaries, regardless of which device we have used. I considered that maybe Comcast, the cable TV provider was selling data and noted we had watched the CBS Sunday Morning program. That's still a far stretch since the videos I was offered were specific to Michael McDonald, not the Doobie Brothers. I thought what the hell, how did "Big Brother" know this information about the birdbath and Michael McDonald which had only mentioned verbally inside my house?

My wheels spinning, I considered the one common denominator to both incidents was my living room. In the living room is a new smart TV. Now, to be sure, I had not set-up the smart TV in any way, we were still using Comcast cable and none of the TVs built-in features. However, I did connect the smart TV to the home wi-fi. I had never gone through the set-up menu and given approval for any on the TV's features including the built-in microphone. Yet, in both of these weird cases the TV is the only thing that could have been listening. Our iPhones have a feature that shows a yellow dot whenever the mic is on, and that is only on when using certain apps. So, I ruled out the iPhones. Additionally, I know my daughter did not buy the birdbath online. She works at a garden store as a part-time gig.

Could it be that the TV is listening and recording everything said for data mining purposes? Since all our devices on the wi-fi hide behind a single IP address dedicated to our (Internet) cable modem it is entirely possible that the next day our address triggered the ad bots at Google (YouTube) and elsewhere to target me. If so, this is atrocious. Big Brother is watching, Alexa is everywhere.

Maybe it stops at ads and videos, maybe it doesn't. I know for certain that this intrusion crosses all kinds of boundaries. I have been at work on company equipment using the Internet behind highly protected systems and my experience still includes ads and subjects that I explored at home or on my phone. At the risk of sounding like an angry progressive something needs to be done about this invasion of our privacy. This really is outrageous. 

To be honest I cannot definitively say my 'smart' TV is listening to my conversations. It may be the iPad, which is almost always in the living room. If I didn't formally agree to let it, I believe it would be illegal. Nevertheless, considering that my daughter does use Alexa at her home is it such a stretch that Amazon knows she's my daughter and knows when my birthday is and has ads ready to spring on me the day after my birthday in the event I didn't get a birdbath? This would be easy for even the average IQ AI bot. I have heard that the machines sitting behind Alexa and Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and so on, know more about us than we know about ourselves. They have access to billions of transactions and the analytical data behind them. They have knowledge our personal proclivities (that we freely give them). They can compare enough examples of people just like us to easily predict what we will do, especially our buying decisions. I think we would be completely astonished by what big tech knows about us. Face it, we are the fish in their barrel. 

We have most likely agreed to this in the fine print when we sign-up for these free services. Yet there is something creepy about this and it's unclear what the law says about this serious invasion of privacy. What can we do about it? Can we really get completely off the grid and avoid this? Probably, but it would be very, very difficult. Alexa is everywhere, her Big Brother is too.

Addendum:

As of this writing I need to covey that this sort of thing keeps happening, and it can be no coincidence. My TV or the iPad is listening and feeds the Internet bots and algorithms the things I say (this is where you ask, is this the beginning of his a slow, long decent into madness?). Then the very next day I see the results in my YouTube feed/recommendations etc etc. This example is just too coincidental to ignore... We were watching a show about renaissance art and at one point they showed some unfinished sculptures, and I said out loud "those must be Michaelangelo's unfinished sculptures". Lo and behold when I opened YouTube the next day, I was treated to several videos about Michaelangelo's unfinished sculptures. It is impossible that YouTube's algorithm just randomly fed me those suggestions. I've never seen a single video on Michaelangelo, let alone his unfinished sculptures. This is ridiculous, this is the world we live in. We are being spied on.

Free Will is not an Illusion

 

Free Will is Not Just an Illusion

by Craig Willms

It's probably right up there with 'the meaning of life' and the other eternal question 'why is there something rather than nothing', the notion of free will can be a contentious and difficult topic wherever it is raised.  Clearly no one possesses the definitive answer. Since it is so difficult to define it's entirely possible we will never know the answer. 

Countless intellectuals, atheists and scientists claim there is no such thing as free will. The claim: what seems like free will is just an illusion, the inevitability of an outcome in any circumstance is the result of quasi-predetermined events bounded by minimal choice, innate instinct or predilections informed by past behavior patterns and social conditioning. Decisions you believe you've made were actually made for you in the subconscious, without any input by reason or intentional thought, thus it's an illusion of your will. While that may be true when you are reacting to an unexpected threat against your person, those instincts, those reactionary impulses do not interdict in your considered, thoughtful decisions. In other words, one does not supersede the other. Scientific testing using in brain scans while subjects are being tested will show brain activity significantly precedes the subjects' action. They say this proves that physiology actually makes the decision before the conscious mind has even taken it all in. Just because they say it doesn't make it true. The subconscious mind is informed by your past experiences and thoughts, your thoughts.

I myself do not think that this science tells the whole story, because it can't. Just calling so-called free will an illusion is condescending, lazy and dismissive. The intellectual answer skirts what we all sense, what we all figure out at a fairly young age. Of course, our will is constrained, this is clear, we can't do whatever we want or act on anything we think we desire. We have limited choices at different times in our lives, there is no arguing that, but within the bounds of those constraints we do have choices and decisions to make, decisions that have real consequences. I would argue free will lives in those choices. The fact that those choices may have consequences that are likely force our hands is not a refutation of free will. Anyone who has ever dealt with an obstinate child can attest to that.

Free will is not total freedom, it never has been, and no one claims that. Atheists and materialists try to quash any notion of free will with mechanistic biological processes and other physical certitudes, dismissing any suggestion of internal spirit and self-directed determination. This is a mistake, and most people know it intuitively. 

 

I'm not a scientist so my opinion is meaningless scientifically, I do however have intuition and awareness - and experience. So do you. What else are we going to call it when we choose to go this way and not that way. Or we change our major in college or quit our jobs to start our own business. Have we not made a free choice, are we not exerting our free will? What is it when we decide to change an ingrained behavioral pattern? When I chose to stop drinking alcohol 30+ years ago was that not of my own free will? That choice stunned everyone I know, so tell me how that was not my free will. 

I'm listening...

Even if the choice we have before us is binary it's still a choice. Every day we make choices that for all intents and purposes are consequential depending on what follows. If you want to call it fate, you can. Those choices, big and small require free will at some level. 

We all know people who have accomplished great things through the sheer force of their will. Call it determination, stubbornness, persuasiveness, perseverance, the power of personality or luck. Again, none of these descriptors negate a person's free will. Along the line the choices presented could have gone a different way, and at each crossroad the opportunity to exert the will is just so obvious.

Ultimately, what difference does it make. Science can make the argument that your every thought and action is determined by everything that came before you all the way back to the beginning of the universe, that it can be no other way. Every decision and thought that all your ancestors ever had force your hand without any input from you. Fine, you can believe that, but does it make any difference for you in the here and now when you are judged by your contemporaries? Your great, great, great grandfather is not being judged; you are.

Our human societies accept free will as fact, that's inarguable. We imprison people who violate others based on actions they took of their own free will. For example, you can argue that a mass murderer programmed by the luck of biology and socialization was pre-destined to engage in a murder spree. Fine, you can assert that all day long, but the authorities are still going to put that person in prison. If the criminal has no free will to murder or not to murder, then why punish them at all? Clearly it was not their fault. Wrong, and everybody knows it. That's what makes free will so obviously real, everybody knows it intuitively. 

There is also the final frontier, the human mind. I am free to think, ponder, consider, believe and make choices of my own free will. Just because these thoughts and beliefs are locked in my consciousness being doesn't make them any less real. They are still my choices, and I would be free to think otherwise. There's an axiom that says the only thing you have 100% control over is your attitude. It's true, and that alone is free will in a nutshell. To continue to assert that free will is an illusion only begs the question; is then all reality an illusion? Is it?

What About God?

 

What About God?

by Craig Willms

I don't normally talk about God or religion in polite company. Sadly, it's fraught with untold downsides and little on the upside. Politics is usually enough, right? Indeed... In a real sense, they are one and the same, the two can't really be separated. When I heard Jordan Peterson claim that by making this one statement Jesus set the course for the epic rise of western civilization: render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's. This call to have a separation between church and state is taking millennia to accomplish, but it's helping create the modern world as we know it by carving out a space for each.

Is this going somewhere? Well, just this... We are asked on occasion, faced with a question in one form or another, in one context or another, does God exist? A fact no one can definitively prove or disprove. So, we all get to choose what we believe.  Myself, I say yes, absolutely, Gods exists. You might ask, what do I mean by God?

Well, for starters Jesus is not my imaginary friend nor is God a bearded old man in the clouds. Dispense with the 14-year-old's version of a religious argument. Don't make a point citing the extreme, fringe elements of any faith as definitive, we all know what radicals are capable of. The Bible while being a mile wide, and a mile deep, is often misused by friend a foe alike. Instead, we need to consider ideals, to consider values.   

We in the west think little about it, but we got our values from somewhere. Whether we want to accept it or not they came from our dominant religions. It is possible that some of our deep-seated moral values are actually hardwired, having been codified in our religious traditions. There are evolutionary reasons why certain values would enhance survivability. Right is right regardless of where it originates. Nevertheless, these values are deeply woven into the fabric of our cultural existence whether you personally identify as agnostic or not. Claiming it isn't so doesn't make it any less true. We are steeped in a Christian ethos. Those who vehemently declare their segregation from anything to do with Christ fail to understand how much their lives and beliefs have been permeated by the fundamental values of cultural Christianity. Even in the post enlightenment era these values endure. It is these virtues that bring us meaning, and it's meaning that is the basis of reality, our reality presents us with the foundations for what we believe and how we act. The modern world has obscured this notion with scientism and materialism but consider this; neither is a source of values, neither is a guide on how to live or how to treat each other. We rely on ancient traditional values, and they are good.

Distressingly, instead of bringing peace and harmony, the extremes, the perverted offshoots of misguided interpretations and the misdeeds of same spoil cultural perceptions of what Christianity is, of what faith in God really is. If we claw our way back to the message of Christ without the layers and conditions of religiosity, we'd see the righteousness, we'd find common decency; we'd step back into the light.

Before you scoff and claim all values existed before Christ and even Moses before him, you're right, it's true. No one claimed that Jesus or Moses invented "good" values. Our teachers, parents and mentors try to show us the highest values, they don't invent them. Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher trying to show us the right way to live. I assume teachers, parents and mentors were showing others good values long before Jesus or Moses. Those good values and traditions had been subsumed into western religiosity. 

When we strive to live right, do the right things and seek to repent when we don't, we are living embodiments of God. It is why people seek to do good, help others, even sacrifice themselves for others in an unacknowledged pursuit of a Godly outcome. Why would people do this? Delusion? Idiocy? Glory hound? Because they are inherently good? Or are we all actually living embodiments of God? I choose the later. We are part of God, or better put God is in us. 

We are limited beings, we don't know - we are incapable of knowing - everything. We can't begin to understand how reality came to be, just that it is. You have just as much chance being right by claiming that all reality is a result of chance. Or you could say that everything that was, is or ever could be is pre-determined, and chance itself doesn't exist. Or that God created everything with a word. The truth is unknowable. To pretend otherwise is folly. 

I choose to believe in God. It begs the question; how would we know God? It is said that God is love (yeah, yeah, yeah, then what is love, smarty pants?) Well, you start with agape which means unconditional love, motherly love, the highest form of love, charity. You say, 'Now you're using the word love to describe love!!' Fair enough, I say this to you - we all know love when we feel it. As Jesus said when he was asked what are the most important commandments? He answered, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment of them all. The second most important commandment is like this: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”.

If you believe that we are living embodiments of God, or better God is in us, then Jesus is saying love yourself, and love others as yourself. This is the right way to live. Nothing good will come if you don't follow these.

 

Re-re-evaluating

ALL POSTS BEYOND THIS POINT ARE ARCHIVES OF A DEFUNCT WEBLOG THAT ENDED IN 2014. 

THERE IS NO DISAVOWAL OF PAST WRITINGS. THESE POSTS REFLECT MY BELIEFS AND THOUGHTS DURING THAT PARTICULAR PERIOD OF TIME. 

CW

No, I'm not shouting it's just an unusually long headline!!!

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I brought this blog back to life back in May of 2013. It was an effort to get away from bloviating on the politics of the day. I wanted to concentrate on larger structural, cultural aspects of our society, chronicling the devolution of America. However, I've found that the politics of the day is the largest contributor of this devolution. The forces that are tearing apart our society and culture (in my view) cannot be separated from the personalities and their shenanigans. So I've found that I'm kinda back where I started.

Judging by the massive readership of this blog and the jam packed and electrifying comment section I have come to realize it's just me shouting into the gale forces of the blogosphere yet barely even contributing to the din. Listen, sometimes I was making a great point and even presenting an angle I felt wasn't getting proper attention. But was it worth the electrons used and the synapses expended putting fingers to keyboard? Probably not. Did I feel better afterward? Not really.

I read an interesting piece the other day about a former leftist activist who upon opening her eyes realized that everything she had done up to that point had been motivated by anger and hate. Even after the object of whatever particular hatred she had was dispatched (or retired) she just moved on to the next without skipping a beat. It was when she realized she had no friends or even acquaintances on the "right" that she reached out for the first time in her life. Though she vehemently opposed their views she found many right-wingers were motivated by love and family and church and community and not necessarily hatred and anger like she was. The last straw was when she realized that while she said she hated the war when George Bush was President and protested at the drop of a hat, she never took part in any protest when Barack Obama took war action. Why? She didn't hate Obama. War didn't matter - hatred did.

Why do I bring this up? I guess I question my own motivation for spouting off like this. Since hardly anyone reads this am I doing it for my own good? What good is it? Is it just my anger at the fools, charlatans and con men as I perceive them? Yeah, probably.

On the other hand, not all leftists are like this woman. Many, probably most, are motivated by by love and family and church and community too. I think they are completely wrong on many subjects but I don't think it's pure hatred that motivates most of them. Yes, there are right-wingers that are motivated by hate - though I think the numbers pale in comparison to the left.

The USA has a lot of problems -  fear, envy, anger and hatred are at the top of the list. I don't want any part of these things in my life. Blogging like this can only contribute to these undesirable attributes. In light of this I will be re-re-evaluating the use of this space...

bear with me...


Ugh

Still seeing blue

Well, it was a big day for he GOP everywhere except in Minnesota. Sure the GOP won control of the State House, but that's small comfort in a state where the Governor and the other constitutional officers wield considerable power. All the state wide offices went to the Dems - again.

It is curious only in that the people of Minnesota are by and large conservative people. These passive/aggressive folk are rarely far-out Birkenstock wearing hippy dippy types. Yet despite their personal conservatism they vote Democrat time after time. This speaks to few things, one is a very weak Republican party and another successful anti-conservative poisoning by the hard core liberal action groups that take advantage of that weakness. Face it none of the past Republican office holders with the exception of one-termer Rod Grams could have been called fire-brand conservatives, the kind that would engender the type of aversion we see to all things GOP in this state.

As a state it's hard to find one more consistently Democrat. The state was once a mining mecca that has seen one party block, stall and reject all new mining projects. The Democrats. It's state that is seeing its great reputation for good schools circle the drain and one party has literally controlled the education system for 50 years. The Democrats. Minnesota has the 3rd or 4th highest tax burden in the nation. There's no sign that rank will turn even slightly south, and there's one party that is always willing to raise them further. The Democrats. Still come election day all over the state the good people vote party line - that party? The Democrats.

On the balance sheet it's mostly a well run state, with a relativity low crime and poverty rates and is chalk full of corporate giants. Bad weather keeps out some of the ill effects of big welfare, because we have big welfare up here. The good work ethic of good working stock keeps the corporations humming despite the taxes. That's changing, however. Huge pools of new immigrants and a failing school system will slowly remove the advantage Minnesota has always enjoyed, each sucking more and more resources from state coffers. Add the ridiculous focus on choo choo trains in the transportation arena. Soon the Twin Cities will become a bypass because the neglect of the road systems will reach critical mass. The tax and spending burden the Dems have laid on the rest of us chickens will come home to roost

Of course well run is relative, small business owners would disagree. The folks who signed up for MNSure would most likely disagree. Warehouse owners looking at their new tax  bill would disagree. I disagree.

Why do we stay if the politics is so unbecoming to center/right people? Well, we were born here, our families are here... That's all I can think of... Oh yeah, our six-week summers are awfully nice.



Ugh