The Ai Predicament

When the people of the 20th century had mastered the Computer, they expanded its utility, and the span of its reach, into the minds of men and women all around the world, and so, as time passed. . . in this sweet by ‘’n by, time slippin’ by moment by moment, inch by inch, while time keeps on slippin’ into the future . . . we had spun our networks into the world wide web. The trumpet blasts of human progress were strategically positioned to take control of online assets, thereby appropriating resources for optimum use of the world wide web, for the progress of the human project and for civilization itself. But in human history, there are always some shinannigan-shakers or top dogs who confound the algorithms, like back in ’08, concocting MBS’s and CDO’s that dragged us down the path of financial confusion and contusions.

But surveying the horizon now, the omens are that we’re headed for an Ai juggernaut that may—if we don’t keep an eye on it— sideswipe, or contort, our human dignity and freedom. . . unless we can get smart and take some precautions. As with the appropriation of any new frontier for human progress, there’s got to be rules of the game. As long as everyone plays by the rules, all is well and will stay that way and we’ll be happily ever after. But within the human tribes there are inevitably some covetous hooligans who are not playing by rules. The rules: Thou shalt not cover thy neighbors’ stuff, or his/her data. So back in time, way back, ages ago, there was this Achan guy, back in the ancient days of our literary development, who broke the rules. He took some stuff that didn’t belong to him. And his violation negated the good karma that could have been abundant for all parties who are involved in the grand project of human progress. If he had not crossed the lines of misappropriation and downright theft, causing all hell to break loose in the markets and in the world wide web, then everything would have been hunky/dory. But this Achan guy was way out of line. He was weaponizing the Ai, to take advantage of people and to gather their private information and their assets unlawfully, which is to say, taking data and stuff that didn’t belong to him. . . and as if that weren’t enough, spying on people so he could take advantage of them and purloin their assets for his own enrichment and empire-building. Clearly, the Achan case study demonstrates the necessity for homo intellligus to get a hold of ourselves; and in the wider sphere of the world wide web, it is plain to see that Man needs to get a handle on this Ai juggernaut cuz It threatens to, if not put on a human-managed leash, to launch us into the outer limits of techno-confusion, beyond freedom and dignity! I mean, we dare not have Ai telling us what to do, when we are supposed to be telling Ai what to do. We cannot have Ai algorithms running roughshod over our freedom and dignity. When we discern that AGi/Ai is getting too big for his britches, we need to delete him down to a manageable level. So Wake up, people! You ought not to be downloading your decisions to Ai. Get a life! And seek out the better angels of our web, and our world. Take a break from the wobbly web every now and then. Go take a walk in the park; smell the roses. Read a book. Get a Life! Don’t get too caught up in the web.

The web was woven for Man, not man for the web. Glass half-Full

Fire or Ice?

Some say fire; some say ice?

I say neither one would be nice. "Tho I know this world's EMPire will vanish into sand, allowing only for the EMPtitude's thunderin' command, still yet, still yet, the people come and go, remembering Michelangelo, or Warhol or Picasso, as art was dismembering So I recalled the ancient book, foreshadowing, or so they say, in the midst of the fray, the Hiroshima cloud and long before the Nagasaki, so damn loud! And there was the near miss, the Fukishima scare foreshadowing, it seems to me, the Chernobyl nukey affair, pouring out upon the earth their seven bowls of nukey wrath! the seven scolds of putin, perched upon his Russian throne? or the seven scolds of ayatollah, aiming from their mullahs' home? or the seven sons of Sceva: "I challenge you" by the demons' call Poe inquired, is there balm in Gilead? But seriously, y'all. . . Maybe a territory for the Pals on West bank? This is serious, y'all; it aint no maga prank! Now some are sayin' fire; some are sayin' ice. But hey y'all, a TangMing EMP would not be nice! We don't want no 'lectric shot ; we don't need no EMP But whatever happens; we'll just wait and see.

Maybe it's time to pray. Maybe it's time to say: God save the homo sapiens dream! Just root, root, root for the Jesus team. Now I can tell you this one thing: What we need's The Everlasting King. I nominate that one who turned water into wine; the One who's been up in heaven the whole time since his death at Calvary's cross; t'was but his three-day loss! Our eternal Life through his bloody sacrifice overcomes the conjectured fire or ice. Just sayin'. Ya'll keep praying'. King of Soul

Lemons to Lemonade

In my 74 years of life on this earth, I have learned a few things. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I learned this lesson in the school of hard knocks, because, in this life you never know what's going to happen, and if you do know what's going to happen, you can still make choices that do not deliver the conditions that you anticipated. In 1973, I left LSU with a diploma with this printed on it: BS, General Studies. But I was really just an English major. This means I can read well; I can even study and pass tests. Good to know. So I sold life insurance for about a year. Then I switched to selling newspaper advertising; then I switched to selling printing for a print shop. Then I switched to carpentry. It was in my family background, but so was selling insurance, so go figure. Long about 2005, I got the notion that my English background might be a leg-up to becoming a teacher. In my chosen hometown, Boone NC, Appalachian State University educates teachers for North Carolina. So I took nine education courses, then the Praxis tests for four subjects, obtaining certification to teach English, Language Arts, and Science to middle school and high school students in North Carolina. While taking the education courses, I got the bright idea to write a novel. So I did. In fact I wrote two, "Glass half-Full", and "Glass Chimera." Meanwhile, back in the wider world, It was 2008. Wall Street crashed. In summer of '08 I got a call from the school principal. She said that budget-cutting would prevent me from teaching next school year. Life had dealt me lemons. So I made lemonade. I walked across the street from the school, around a block, and found an apartment complex, with 92 apartments, that needed a maintenance man. I spent the next five years maintaing apartments. . . cleaning, painting, un-stopping toilets, fixing broken drywall, painting, mowing, listening to Diane Reem on NPR.  After a few years there, in a typical day, I entered an apartment that was being vacated. I was looking around on the floor when I saw this: I gave the tenant a few bucks for the old newspaper, an original edition of the Times of London, special Commemorative Issue for the coronation of King George VI of England, King Charles' grandfather. While perusing the tattered old tabloid, I found content in there that prompted my imagination to write a third novel, "Smoke."

Here's a snippet from Smoke: " For the love of a woman can change the course of the world. As Helen's face had launched a thousand Greek ships, so the affections of an American divorce'e had turned the tide of royal authority from one brother or another." . . . or, maybe it was King George's brother had secret nazi connections? But we'll never know. Anyway, he abdicated; George was crowned. His wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to the later queen, Elizabeth(1952), the longest sovereign in British history.  The point is: when Life gives you lemons, make lemonade, so to speak. I never got a teaching job. But I did discover a point of inspiration to write a third novel, my longest one, Smoke, at 300 pages. You should read it. You can find it on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. And if that's not enough lemonade to wet your whistle, maybe have a look at the fourth novel, King of Soul, which is what happened to America, from the 1950's to May 4, 1970. Smoke

Immigrant's Odyssey

In 1923, Nora's family immigrated from Russia to America. It was no small feat, but rather an odyssey of bewilderment, delays and close calls. Finding themselves, at last, at Ellis Island, the family still had a few hurdles to overcome. On the passage from Southampton, England, to New York, young Nora had caught a fever. When the ship arrived at Ellis Island, this infection would become the last hurdle that Nora had to overcome before discovering her new home with family in New York. Going through the stages at Ellis found them separated for a while. When Nora and her papa were together again, she whispered in his ear, "Oh Papa, they passed me in; they didn't send me back." Nora wrote in her book, Weather of the Heart, describing the crisis moment: "His thoughts raced. What to do? How to avoid the avoid the danger of discovery? He had to collect the luggage at the pier. . . locating them now and transporting would take precious time. . . (but, but, ed) "I had to be removed from the searching eyes of the immigration people as rapidly as possible." "Papa knew he had not choice. He scooped me up, wrapped me in a jacket, and carried me, his eyes darting nervously about to see who might be watching, out to the waiting ferry. There he placed himself to hide me as much as possible. Once ashore, he hurriedly commandeered a cab." Now, long story short: I met Nora years later, when we were both members of High Country Writers in Boone, NC.

Nora has passed now into the wild blue yonder. But for some reason, I found myself recalling this amazing testimony about her father, a man who, in the midst of immigration perils and unexpected decisions, bundled his child and carried her home, to their new home in the new world, our United States of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. May the United States of America always be the land of the free and the home of brave. We have all of us, except fro those citizens of native american families, descended from immigrants. In my case it was the Scotch/Irish.  Excerpts, quoted above from the book:Weather of the Heart, by Nora Lourie Percival, copyright 2001, published by High Country Publishers, Ltd, Boone NC King of Soul

Glyphs to Glints

Glyphs: Gilgamesh, Hammurabi, Rameses Scripts: Moses Samuel Isaiah Jeremiah Daniel Ezra Zechariah et al Matthew Mark Luke John Peter and Paul Aristotle Socrates Sophocles Plato Aeschylus Euclid Pythagorus Homer Caesar Cicero Ovid Augustine Aquinas Beowolf Roland Lin Omar Abelard LancelotPrints: Gutenberg Dante Petrarch Weert Malvern Robin Hood Hafiz William Tell Chaucer Rabelais Arcadia Aldines Erasmus Everyman Machiavelli Nostradamus Cervantes Thomas More Marlowe JonsonDonne Holinshed Spencer Shakespeare Milton Bunyan Calderon Moliere Cleveland Dryden Defoe Swift Burke Voltaire Gray Coleridge Schiller Rousseau JohnsonGibbon Walpole Goldsmith Wordsworth Goethe Schiller Blake Washington Irving Burns Grimm Byron Keats Shelley Scott Andersen Tocqueville Browning Jane and Ann Taylor Longfellow Poe Tennyson Jane Austen Dickens Thoreau Pushkin Baudelaire Cooper Dostoevsky Flaubert ScottDisraeli Dumas Verne Noah Webster Hugo Balzac Dickinson Marx Hegel Alcott Lewis Carroll Mark Twain Bret Harte Hawthorne Melville Howells Roe Galt Zola Hardy Rowland Hill Lowell "Punch" Henry James JS Mill Hopkins Andersen Lear Thackeray Lowell Arnold Stevenson Harriet Beecher Stowe Charles Kingsley Bronte Flaubert Hugo Wilde Conrad Eliot Holmes Doyle Housman John Dewey Library of Congress Humboldt Chekhov Swinburne Turgenev Whitehead Spencer Wharton Tolstoi Huxley KiplingLewis Carroll Mark Twain Whitman Yeats Ibsen Romain Rolland HG Wells Verne Lewis Carroll Proust Zola Darwin Bagehot Jack London Hesse Ibsen Zola Jung Hardy Sandburg Forster Helen Keller Martin BuberStevenson James Joyce Shaw Kafka Nietzche Keynes Runyon DH Lawrence Ezra Pound Sinclair Lewis Carnegie Oxford dictionary TS Eliot Eugene O'neill Oscar WildeHuxley Conan Doyle Buck Dos Passos Rilke Chekhov Hemingway Theodore Herzl Nobel Noel Coward Crane Thomas Wolfe Freud Bert Russell John Dewey "School" Mann Steinbeck Beatrix Potter OHenry Weber Max Weber HG Wells Wharton Jules Verne GB Shaw Verne ForsterCohan Beckett O Henry Ibsen Upton Sinclair SantayanaAuden Conrad Gorki R Rolland: "Beethoven" Chesterton Cambridge History of English Literature Ian Fleming ForsterWilliam James Thomas Mann Ezra Pound Lenin Amy Lowell Oppenheimer Jung Proust Camus Frost Joyce BurroughsHusserl Bertrand Russell Conrad Lawrence Maugham Pound Arthur Miller Hesse Frost Jack London Sandburg Dreiser TS Eliot Sinclair Balfour Jung Joyce Huxley Lawrence Joyce Kilmer Mencken Keynes Barth Milne Wharton Twain Steinbeck CS Lewis Tolkien Frost Joyce Hemingway Thomas Wolfe CareyRowland

Glints in Glass: Shockley, Hewlett, Packard, Zuckerburg, Wozniak, Jobs, Gates, Page and Brin, Twitter trivialization. . . books going way of the buffalo? Whoa! Thank God for Jeff Bezos, KDP Glass half-Full

Postwar America

During World War II, our U.S, Army Chief of Staff was George S. Marshall. During his duty time, he appointed General Eisenhower and General Patton to lead our American troops into victory against the third reich of Germany and against the madman hitler who had taken control of Germany in 1933. What seems funny to me, as a baby boomer who entered this world in 1951, is that Ike appointed a "Marshall" to get the Europeans repositioned for democratic governance in postwar Europe. He hatched a plan, "the Marshall Plan", that worked very well toward getting the Europeans back on their civilized feet.

Our Allied nations had a sticky mess to clean up there. Someone, probably a journalist, came up with the phrase, "The Cold War." But this cold war thing was truly unprecedented. For the first time in history, two arch-rivals, the USA and the USSR, formerly allies, emerged from the holocaust with the biggest guns ever devised by Man: "atom bombs" we called them. Nowadays we call them nukes. Our nation, the United States of America, founded upon the bedrock of Freedom and individual Dignity, found ourselves in a worldwide rivalry withs the Russian communists. And with the unprecedented presence of nukes in the worldwide ballgame, the whole world was paranoid that one of the big nukes might be launched somewhere. I mean, we - the yanks of the USA - had demonstrated, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what the damn thing could do.  When I was in grade school, we had practice drills where we'd stick our heads under the school desk so that we'd know what to do if the real thing happened. (God forbid!) In God we trust! I mean, we had the Cuban missile crisis; and the paranoid Ruskies built a wall in Berlin to keep their walled-in krauts from escaping the "Iron Curtain" (That's what Eisenhower called the line between Soviet eastern Europe and western Europe.) 

Eastern Euro countries were controlled by USSR as police states until later. . . . Gorbachev and Yeltsin eventually loosened the soviet grip; the wall came down. Thank God. And thank you, Mikail and Boris. Nuclear paranoia eventually subsided into low tide as the frosty commie countries thawed and joined the rest of the western world's celebration of freedom. Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Romanians. . . . . all of them eventually joined the European Union. What a relief! And the whole nuke scare died down. We hardly hear anything about that stuff any more, except for an occasional, idle red-scare thought about what Vlad the Mad might do.  The glass half-Full perspective, looking back on it . . . is, in the Cold War period of the 20th century. . . that the use of nuclear fission is now a process by which citizens of our planet can have electricity. . . not atomic war. Let's keep it that way. Speaking of witch. . . I mean, thank God that the Chernobyl scare didn't go full blast disaster! Aren't you glad? But every now and then we should remind Vlad Putin of that favorable development, and that we, as citizens of the world, need to keep it that way. We need to keep our nukes generating power for civilized life, not the destruction of it. Glass half-Full

Life and Death

Sunshine peaks through forest story revealing rock in sunshine glory

Life and death in same location displaying earth’s unique vocation

Yet view yon wooden tower standing tall disclosing life/death after the fall.

Yet still below in shady depths life o’ertakes terrestrial death.

Glass Chimera