"This world is the will to power––and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power––and nothing besides!"
-- Nietzsche
When I was in my late twenties I imagined government as two opposing forces, liberal Democrat and conservative Republican, working together to forge compromises that became
new laws. A balance would be struck, like yin and yang, between opposing principles, e.g., between personal liberty and the tragedy of the commons.
The result would not be ideological. It would be something that would work as much as possible for everyone. How else should the state govern from the top down?
This idealistic philosophy put me politically somewhere in the middle, and for most issues this is where I stayed. I never registered as a Democrat or Republican, and
voted for both Republicans and Democrats. And I didn't vote to put one party or the other in control of the House of Representatives or the Senate.
This strategy worked well, or at least I thought it did, but over time it became obviously unrealistic.
I had forgotten about the will to power. As Nietzsche conceived it, the will to power is a basic animating force in all of us, that each of us will direct in a different direction.
"The philosopher and the scientist direct their will to power into a will to truth. Artists channel it into a will to create. Businessmen satisfy it by becoming rich." The
politician satisfies it by achieving political power.
Both businessman and politician, Trump is animated by his followers as much as his base of followers are animated by him. That is to say, there is a movement with Trump as
its nominal head. As a comment found in a right wing web site explained, if we didn't have Trump, we would find someone else.
During the Republican primary I wanted either Chris Christie or Nikki Haley to win the 2024 nomination. Either one I believed was capable of uniting the country, where unity in this country is over 50% approval.
Leading up to the general election, I imagined I could listen to
Republican surrogates talk on TV and agree with them.
And if the Republicans took control of both houses and the White
House, the country would be nudged in a more conservative direction until the Democrats would regain some control, as early as the mid-term elections. Good ideas from either
parry would hopefully remain in place.
But Trump is the nominee, and he and his surrogates are saying that Harris is far left. She was far left and
will always be far left. It's too bad that Trump is far right. Trump may not be a fascist authoritarian, but he is a divisive politician who craves power. He won't bring the country together.
Trump has proposed a broad tariff of 10% to 20% tariff on all goods imported into the US, a 30% tariff on all goods imported from China, and end to Obama's Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, rounding up and deporting up to 20 million illegal immigrants, ending liability if the police shoot an unarmed civilian, reinstating stop and frisk, and possibly imprisoning the election officials who stood up to him after the 2020 election.
These are some of the proposals linked from Trump's web site known as Agenda 47. He has publically disavowed the Heritage Foundation's infamous Project 2025 plan, but he may not ignore all of its proposals. Less well-known is the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) which, according to the New York Times, is advising the Trump campaign. AFPI's proposals are
as draconian as Project 25's plan.
Regarding the issue of gender identity, wouldn't it be more consistent to let it be handled by the states, similar to the issue of abortion? Because so many of
Trump's proposals will be enacted by fiat, he will be a leader from the top down. He will be, therefore, no better than the leftists he hates when they're in power. Of course,
no matter who wins the election on November 5, 2024, the next four years promises more division and hyperbolic rhetoric.
These days I can't listen to either Republican or Democrat surrogates talk on TV. Apparently their minds are wired differently, and I'm not sure what this says about me.
This may be crux of the problem. With the way people are wired, on TV, blogs, substack, and social media, there is anger about being walled out and a
desire to be walled in. They can't handle discouraging words, e.g., for Democrats, regarding vaccines, for Republicans, climate change.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/
"1. President Trump will sign a record investment in hiring, retention, and training for
police officers. The bill will increase vital liability protections for America’s law
enforcement officers.
2. President Trump will require local law enforcement agencies receiving DOJ grants to
return to proven policing measures such as stop-and-frisk, strictly enforcing existing
gun laws, cracking down on the open use of illegal drugs, and cooperating with ICE to
arrest and deport criminal aliens." Agenda 47
Ken Bensinger and David A. Fahrenthold, The Group at the Center of Trump’s Planning for a Second Term Is One You Haven’t Heard of
"But its vision is no less Trumpist: It calls for halting federal funding for Planned
Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out
with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states,
increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose
work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.
It also goes significantly further than Project 2025 in one key area, calling for the
elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them
at-will employees — a strategy supporters believe will allow Mr. Trump and his aides to
root out career staff members who they believe stood in his way in his first
administration." New York Times, October 24, 2024
My reaction to Biden's fumbling performance, early on in the debate between him and Trump the end of June, was "wow, he really is old." I remember also Trump's hyperbole, talking about infanticide and Maduro releasing patients and criminals from mental asylums in Venezuela and shipping them to the southern US border.
Less than two weeks later I got sick, after my wife returned from a cruise with friends to Norway and Iceland. I was coughing non-stop. At the walk-in clinic, I was diagnosed having an "unknown viral infection of the lower lungs." I was given pills for my cough and an antibiotic. I took the pills expecting to get better but I got worse. Whatever the virus was, it was winning.
Around this time, some stupid, foolish, stupid kid decided to insert himself into the political discourse by attempting to assassinate the former President. I was already vomiting after forcing myself to eat, and contemplating the abyss, always coughing, weak, unable to sleep or eat.
The shooter should have been apprehended when he launched his drone. An officer or agent should have noticed. There is no way anyone should be allowed to fly a drone before or during a political rally without prior permission. If he had been stopped near his car with his drone they would have found his gun and be would have been arrested. No one who was at that rally would today be dead.
Finally, my wife brought me to see my doctor. After measuring the oxygen levels in my lungs, she ordered an ambulance to take me to a hospital. We canceled the ambulance and my wife drove me to the emergency center of a hospital closer to where we live. At the emergency center, I was brought downstairs to a small room with an uncomfortable bed that had a broken controller. Nothing happened when I pressed the button requesting a nurse or tried to raise or lower the bed. This was a problem when I needed to go to the bathroom.
Occasionally a nurse would come in to check vital signs, give me a bottle of water, or set up an IV drip, and the doctor came in after looking at my bloodwork results. Outside I could hear a male nurse talking with the other nurses. I heard him say something like, "first they tried to put him in jail, then they tried to kill him." Later, he explained that he would be a "Trumper" if Trump would release the list of pedophiles, whom I assume would be celebrities, Democrat politicians, and deep state workers. I don't know if he was serious or not, but the female nurses he was talking with are undoubtably concerned about children.
That evening, after many agonizingly boring hours, I was admitted to the hospital. A nurse took me up in a wheelchair several floors above to my new room. The controller worked and the nurses and doctor were great. I stayed there two more days. When I was discharged, the diagnosis listed was "pneumonia with sepsis." The nurse said I had a urinary tract infection.
On July 21st, Biden dropped out of the race for President.
Today I'm recovering at home. The codeine cough medication is working. But I still can't sleep. I worry too much about the future, where I can go from here.
And I worry about things that may not be as relevant to one's well-being, like how I can help build a better world.
The Moving Finger writes and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.[1]
On the Sunday before the 6-day war in 1967, I walked with my middle school Political Science class in the Salute to Israel Parade along Riverside Drive in New York City. It was a sunny day and there were a lot of people walking beside us. About 250,000 people participated that day in sympathy and solidarity with Israel. It looked like Israel was about to lose a war.
The next time we were in class, we split up into small groups to work on solutions to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The consensus was around a two-state solution, but I don’t remember the details. We had a right to be naive. We were, after all, kids in Middle School.
After the events since last October, it may be naive to believe that a difficult political problem is not intractable and may be solved by non-violent means, especially when in many countries, civil disobedience and non-violent protesting is throwing one’s life away. But no one should be raped, tortured, murdered, or indiscriminately bombed, starved out of existence, targeted by missiles, or ambushed while attempting to do one’s job. We are witnessing the latest chapter of a violent struggle that may never end, between two peoples with their own religious beliefs, language, and culture.
There should be a cease fire in Gaza so that the hostages may be returned to their families and food and supplies are delivered to innocent civilians. Then, ignoring the cease fire, focus on slowly and methodically rooting Hamas out of their network of tunnels. It would be an expensive, difficult, time consuming, and dangerous task, but blowing up tunnels would create less collateral damaage. I'm imagining remote-controlled robots wearing grenades excavating the tunnels.
I listened to "Israel is carpet-bombing children," and read about mass graves found near the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza. If the bodies were buried by Palestinians months ago, or buried, dug up and reburied by the IDF, they were human beings who died in this war.
Images from Gaza of the Palestinian Civil Defense recovering bodies in Khan Yunis may serve as a bookend to the video footage on October seventh of a young German-Israeli woman who, after taken hostage by Hamas and brought to Gaza, was lying face-down in the back of a pickup truck. She was probably already dead. The crowd spat on her as the truck drove through the streets. The rage in Israel must have been overwhelming.
At the end of the first World War, after the fall of the Ottoman empire, both the Zionists and the Arab Palestinians desired a nation governing what is today Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza strip. The same vision exists today on both sides.
Netanyahu's 1977 Likud party platform, which stated “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty," was the Zionist vision in 1917. The Hamas slogan, "from the river to the sea," was basically why the Arab leaders rejected the Peel partition plan in 1937 and the UN partition plan ten years later.
Over the years extremists on both sides have continued to believe in one state for themselves and violently opposed every peace plan.
It is also true that, at least at one time, the Arab vision of a Palestine state would allow Jews to live peacefully within its borders, while reserving the right to restrict Jewish immigration.[2] And Israel allowed Arabs who remained within its 1948 borders to stay, and gave them Israeli citizenship. Today, the number of Arab-Israelis is over 21% of Israel's total population.
Disclaimer
I should not be writing about a foreign war as I'm on the outside looking in. But the protests are here,
many here in the US are deeply affected amd troubled by the war, and the US is supplying Israel with the bombs.
I could have put more time and energy into research, but I did more than watch YouTube videos and read Wikipedia articles. If I had the time and money, I'd
travel to where the UN and British archives are kept and read the original documents. At least I read the online summaries.
Two States
The plan that has been proposed, debated, rejected, and proposed and rejected again, is the partition of land into two separate countries, Palestine and Israel. Our Middle School plan may have worked, but boundaries and demographics changed dramatically after 1967. When the 2024 war in Gaza ends, it's been proposed that a coalition of Arab
countries come in to help the Palestinians rebuild Gaza. I'd like to see this happen, but it's a two state solution only if Gaza and Israel are the two states. The West Bank today is a
patchwork of Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages. The apartheid state run by Israel in the West Bank must end. How can it end?
A Palestinian state in the West Bank would have to be created out of the land that's been left to them. The Israeli settlers won't leave. Even if they allow the state to be born, it probably won't succeed, not having a single contiguous border, as history (e.g., Pakistan) has shown.
After the 1936 Arab uprising in what was the British Mandate, the Peel commission was created to find a solution to the crisis. In 1937, the commission proposed a plan to partitian the land into separate states.
During a debate about the plan, Chaim Weizmann said, “The Jews would be fools not to accept it, even if the Jewish state were the size of a tablecloth.” Mr. Weizmann regarded
agreeing to the idea of a Jewish state as an important first step. But the Zionists did not agree to the plan’s borders. The Arabs would have greatly benefited from a similar, more flexible, perspective.
The Arab leaders rejected the 1937 plan. They didn’t want their land merged with Trans-Jordan, the plan required the transfer of about 120,000 Palestinians from their homes, they hated the idea of a Jewish state, and they wanted above all an independent state over all of Palestine. Ten years later, after they rejected of the 1947 United Nations partition plan, the state of Israel was created, followed by Israel’s war for independence and the Nakba, which was the catastrophic eviction of about 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. The word Nakba should also be translated as debacle, or fiasco.
Clearly, after the rejection of each peace plan, if a Palestinian state was an investment, the Arabs suffered from diminishing returns. But the extremists have held on to "from the river to the sea," and are forever
martyrs devoted to their cause. Hamas may be destroyed, but the cause may well live on. To get to a solution, what's needed on both sides is patience, restraint, and education. It's a pipe dream.
One State
Across college campuses there have been protests with chants of "from the river to the sea." I learned that they mean a single nation governing all the land with equal justice
and freedom for everyone. Sounds great, but I'm not sure exactly what they mean. Some may simply want Israel to change its policies. I'm not sure what the chanting
protesters waving Palestinian flags mean.
The idea that Israel would extend citizenship to Palestinians is not ridiculously unrealistic. Netanyahu's right-wing coalition would likely have to be replaced by
a government with a leader who is willing to take a risk for peace. The Palestinians would have to give in to pressure to accept Israeli citizenship. The pressure would have to come from trusted Arab sources within Israel, voices for change, that would point out what Palestinians would gain and what they wouldn't lose by accepting citizenship.
Once citizenship is accepted, areas under military control in the West Bank would be placed under civilian rule of law. Organizations in Israel would raise money to
help Palestinians, now Palestinian-Israelis, keep their homes. Zoning rules would be changed so that their homes and businesses would not be demolished. The Israeli settlers wouldn't leave but the system that supports their expansion into the West Bank would be abolished.
No longer fed a constant diet of Hamas ideology, Palestinian-Israelis would not be proud to be martyrs. They wouldn't want their children to die as warriors and human shields. Their children would have an education that I hope would be elightened, and Arab-Israelis are happy with.
Security and strict access to the Temple Mount compound, also known as Haram al Sharif, must be ensured. Either the agreement
between Israel and Jordan is strengthened, and everyone abides by its rules, or the complex is put under international control. The latter idea may be unrealistic, but international control over Jerusalem was in the 1947 UN partition plan. Israel should not ever approve tearing down the compound and rebuilding the temple, the beginning of the end times.
Notes
Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát Stanza LXXI, Quatrain 36, translated into English by Edward FitzGerald, 1859 4th ed.
زین پیش نشان بودنیها بوده است
پیوسته قلم ز نیک و بد ناسوده است
در روز ازل هرآنچه بایست بداد
غم خوردن و کوشیدنِ ما بیهوده است
The Zionist movement was encouraging Jewish immigration, but in the 1930's Jews were fleeing from the Nazi holocaust and few countries were letting them in.
After the massacre in Hebron and the Arab uprising of 1936, Jews would be justifiably wary of Arab leaders saying they would be allowed to stay and live peacefully
under their rule. It wasn't clear how much political freedom they would have. If Arab rule was to be like
living in the Ottoman empire, the Jews would have to pay a poll-tax and acknowledge the superiority of Islam. Allah would again be sovereign over all Palestine.
"The Zionist movement, which emerged in Europe in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, aimed at the national revival of the Jewish people in its ancestral home after nearly two thousand years of exile. The term "Zionism" was coined in 1885 by the Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, Zion being one of the biblical names for Jerusalem. Zionism was in essence an answer to the Jewish problem that derived from two basic facts: the Jews were dispersed in various countries around the world, and in each country they constituted a minority. The Zionist solution was to end this anomalous existence and dependence on others, to return to Zion, and to attain majority status there and, ultimately, political independence and statehood.
Ever since the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C. and the exile to Babylon, the Jews yearned to return to Zion. This yearning was reflected in Jewish prayers, and it manifested itself in a number of messianic movements. Modern Zionism, by contrast, was a secular movement, with a political orientation toward Palestine. Modern Zionism was a phenomenon of the late nineteenth-century Europe. It had its roots in the failure of Jewish efforts to become assimilated in Western society, in the intensification of antisemitism in Europe, and in the parallel and not unrelated upsurge of nationalism. If nationalism posed a problem to the Jews by identifying them as an alien and unwanted minority, it also suggested a solution: self-determination for the Jews in a state of their own in which they would constitute a majority. Zionism, however, embodied the urge to create not merely a new Jewish state in Palestine but also a new society, based on the universal values of freedom, democracy, and social justice."
Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, League pf Nations Mandates Palestine, July 1937
"Considering the attitude which both the Arab and the Jewish
representatives adopted in giving evidence, the Commission think it
improbable that either party will be satisfied at first sight with the
proposals submitted for the adjustment of their rival claims. For
Partition means that neither will get all it wants. It means that the
Arabs must acquiesce in the exclusion from their sovereignty of a piece
of territory, long occupied and once ruled by them. It means that the
Jews must be content with less than the Land of Israel they once ruled
and have hoped to rule again. But it seems possible that on reflection
both parties will come to realize that the drawbacks of Partition are
outweighed by its advantages. For, if it offers neither party all it
wants, it offers each what it wants most, namely freedom and security."
"In exile between 1937 and 1945, al-Husayni, claiming to speak for the Arab nation and the Muslim world, sought an alliance with the Axis powers (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy)..."
The word jihad is somewhat misunderstood, in that it primarily means struggle, strive, or exert oneself to be a better muslim and, by extension, a better person. It also means,
secondarily, to struggle against the oppression of other religions or political groups.
Ilyas Ahmad, Sovereignty in Islam (Continued) JSTOR, Journal article: Pakistan Horizon
Vol. 11, No. 4 (December, 1958), pp. 244-257 (14 pages)
Published By: Pakistan Institute of International Affairs
"Issa Amro, who has been arrested and beaten for simple acts of defiance, is trying to pursue nonviolent resistance in the West Bank at a time when violence has become inescapable."
"There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to
Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing
on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a
common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before
Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to
another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study."
"This violence showed how extremists on both sides can use violence
to derail peace, keep a permament conflict going as they seek the
other side's total destruction. That's a dynamic that's been around
ever since."
Traveling Israel and LonerBox have an interesting back-and-forth debate about the Nakba on YouTube. At the beginning of LonerBox's video, he says he's not an historian,
he's a YouTuber. I'm neither and my mind tends to go off on tangents. After watching the videos, I thought about native american history. The last
chapter of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," describes the December 29, 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee creek. Of the 350 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children who were surrendering to the US Army, about 50 survived.
The truth is important, but whatever the truth, the question we should ask is, where do we go from here? Is there a path forward to peace, or do we only care about the past? If
I was an historian, I might write about history
this way: wounds may heal, the brain may heal, the mind may clear, but the heart never heals. This is why what is done, too often, is pull out the heart and eat it.
"Zuheir Mohsen, a then senior leader of the PLO said in 1977: "The Palestinian people does
not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means of continuing our struggle
against the State of Israel for our Arab unity.""
The generative artificial intelligence large language models (AI bots) released last year have quickly become popular. All the new things that could be created with little user effort were quickly explored. The ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) language model in particular, released the end of last November, creates essays, novels, songs, videos, answers to homework questions, data forecasts, and so on. Judging by news articles and YouTube videos, the value of all that
can be produced by these chat and text-to-image AI bots should be viewed as either an opportunity or a threat.
Dall-E 2MidjourneyStable Diffusion
A cottage industry of AI-powers tools has emerged to help you create content and make money by boosting your online search ranking.
Here is an incomplete list. You can find a tutorial on YouTube that explains how to use ChatGPT and combine tools to put together your own workflow.
More traditional business models are certain to be disrupted. Already with millions of users, generated AI bots could end the dominance of Google search, disseminate misinformation across the Internet, put illustrators and computer programmers out of work, and bankrupt art and photo stock agencies. Should I personally be worried? Text-to-image AI bots are a real concern, but ChatGPT could be a useful tool, that can help with research, like Ask Wonder.
After watching LearnWire's "ChatGPT Blogging Workflow" YouTube tutorial, I decided to ask ChatGPT to write an essay on the topic, "The Benefits and Challenges of Local Energy." I planned to write a series of articles about local energy for some time. ChatGPT may help get it started, and I'll find out what it can do and how good it is.
A professional blog post needs a professional-looking illustration. I tried out three well-known text-to-image AI bots. They're currently free research previews while collecting feedback from external users. Each one, DALL-E 2, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion, quickly returned an image with several variations. The text prompt I entered to generate each image was, "an artificial intelligence with one eye typing into a typewriter." Of the three, I can imagine the Stable Diffusion image on the cover of an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence college textbook.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
After signing into Open AI's ChatGPT portal I decided to ask a few basic questions about AI.
Q: What is artificial intelligence?
ChatGPT:
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines
that are programmed to think and act like humans. These intelligent machines can be
designed to perform a wide range of tasks, including recognizing patterns, learning from
experience, making decisions, and solving problems.
There are many different approaches to creating artificial intelligence, and the field is
constantly evolving. Some AI systems are designed to perform specific tasks, while others
are more general and can adapt to a variety of tasks. AI can be classified into two main
categories: narrow or weak AI, and general or strong AI.
Narrow or weak AI is designed to perform a specific task, such as playing a game or
recognizing speech. These systems are not truly intelligent in the same way that humans
are, but they can be very effective at performing their designated tasks.
General or strong AI, on the other hand, is designed to be more flexible and adaptable.
These systems are capable of learning and problem-solving in a way that is similar to
humans, and they can potentially be applied to a wide range of tasks.
Overall, the goal of artificial intelligence research is to create systems that can
perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as understanding language,
learning, and problem-solving.
Q: Is AI statistical modeling of data, the more data the better, so that arbitrary
queries of that data return answers that represent the real world?
ChatGPT:
AI can involve statistical modeling of data, but it is not limited to this approach. In
general, AI systems use a variety of techniques to analyze and learn from data, including
machine learning algorithms, which can be used to discover patterns and relationships in
data and make predictions based on that knowledge.
The more data that is available to an AI system, the more it can learn and improve its
performance. However, it is important to note that the quality of the data is also
important. A large amount of low-quality data may not be as useful as a smaller amount of
high-quality data.
AI systems can be used to answer arbitrary queries by processing the data they have been
trained on and providing a response based on that information. However, the accuracy of
the response will depend on the quality and relevance of the data, as well as the
capabilities of the AI system itself. In general, AI systems are not able to provide
answers that perfectly reflect the real world, as they are limited by the data they have
been trained on and the algorithms and models that they use to analyze that data.
Q: How does an AI system know that its answers are correct?
ChatGPT:
An AI system typically does not have the ability to determine the absolute truth of its
answers. Instead, it relies on the data it has been trained on and the algorithms and
models it uses to analyze that data.
The accuracy of an AI system's answers is evaluated by comparing its output to a known
set of correct answers, called a "ground truth." This can be done through a process
called "training," in which the AI system is presented with a large dataset that includes
both inputs and correct outputs. The AI system adjusts its internal parameters, based on
the difference between its predicted outputs and the ground truth, in an attempt to
minimize this difference.
After training, the AI system can then be tested on a separate dataset to evaluate its
accuracy. The performance of the AI system can be measured by comparing its output on
this test dataset to the ground truth. If the AI system performs well on this test
dataset, it is likely to perform well on similar tasks in the future.
It is important to note that the accuracy of an AI system's answers will depend on the
quality and relevance of the data it has been trained on, as well as the algorithms and
models it uses to analyze that data. An AI system may not be able to provide accurate
answers if it has not been trained on sufficient or appropriate data, or if it is using
the wrong algorithms or models for the task at hand.
Q: Is an AI system sentient?
ChatGPT:
There is no widely accepted definition of sentience, and the question of whether AI
systems can be considered sentient is a matter of debate among philosophers, scientists,
and researchers.
Some argue that sentience requires consciousness and self-awareness, which are
characteristics that are not typically attributed to AI systems. AI systems are not
capable of experiencing subjective states or emotions in the same way that humans and
animals do, and they do not have the ability to introspect or reflect on their own
thoughts and experiences.
On the other hand, some researchers and philosophers argue that sentience could be
defined more broadly, to include any system that can process and react to stimuli in a
way that is functionally equivalent to a sentient being. Under this definition, an AI
system could potentially be considered sentient if it is able to perceive and respond to
its environment in a way that is similar to a sentient being.
Overall, the question of whether AI systems can be considered sentient is complex and
remains an active area of research and debate. It is likely that the concept of sentience
will continue to evolve as our understanding of AI and consciousness grows.
A generative AI chat bot can be called a "stochastic parrot" because its answers are statistically obtained from a very large text data set. It knows words and how to string words into sentences but doesn't understand what the words actually mean. And the parrot will "hallucinate." When building the most probable semantically correct answer, events and facts can get discarded, not being protected during the build process. The chat bot answers with something that it made-up.
ChatGPT is nothing more than a software application. Its ability to mimic human conversation, even with uncanny accuracy, doesn't makes it sentient. It chooses the most probable words to output as was determined by its neural network training. There is no internal awareness of what it's doing. After chatting with it for awhile though, you might believe it's sentient because there's no way to tell the difference. This is the positive outcome of the Turing test, and the next generation ChatGPT may consistently pass the test.
The Benefits and Challenges of Local Energy
To write an essay with ChatGPT, LearnWire's tutorial advised to first start with an outline and then ask ChatGPT to expand on each section one at a time. According to the tutorial, after about 500 words its response tends to "get choppy."
Q: Create an outline for an essay about local energy and its benefits and challenges.
ChatGPT:
I. Introduction
Definition of local energy
The concept of decentralizing energy production and distribution
II. Benefits of local energy
Reducing reliance on fossil fuels and promoting renewable energy sources
Improving energy security and reducing the risk of blackouts
Supporting local economic development and job creation
Promoting energy efficiency and conservation
III. Challenges of local energy
Limited availability of renewable energy sources in some areas
High upfront costs for infrastructure and technology
Regulatory and policy barriers
Limited knowledge and understanding among the public
IV. Case studies of successful local energy projects
Example 1: Community wind farm in Denmark
Example 2: Solar panel co-op in California
Example 3: Microgrid in New York City
V. Conclusion
The potential for local energy to address global energy challenges and promote
sustainability
The need for policies and programs to support the growth of local energy initiatives.
Here is the essay. after prompting ChatGPT to expand on each section. Comments follow.
Expand on each section of the outline.
ChatGPT:
I. Introduction
Local energy refers to the production and distribution of energy at a local level, rather
than relying on large, centralized energy systems. This concept involves decentralizing
energy production and distribution, meaning that it is not controlled by a single entity
or limited to a specific geographic area. Local energy initiatives can take many forms,
such as community wind farms, solar panel co-ops, and microgrids.
There are many potential benefits to local energy, including reducing reliance on fossil
fuels, improving energy security, supporting local economic development, and promoting
energy efficiency. However, there are also challenges to overcome in order to
successfully implement local energy initiatives, such as limited availability of
renewable energy sources, high upfront costs, regulatory barriers, and limited public
understanding.
II. Benefits of Local Energy
One major benefit of local energy is the ability to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and
promote the use of renewable energy sources. Local energy initiatives often rely on
clean, renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. By
decentralizing energy production and distributing it at a local level, communities can
take a more active role in transitioning away from fossil fuels and reducing their
carbon footprint.
Another benefit of local energy is improved energy security and reduced risk of
blackouts. Large, centralized energy systems are often vulnerable to natural disasters,
accidents, and other disruptions that can cause widespread power outages. By contrast,
local energy systems are often more resilient and able to continue operating even if
part of the system is damaged. This can help to ensure that communities have a stable
and reliable source of energy.
In addition to these environmental and practical benefits, local energy can also support
local economic development and job creation. Local energy initiatives can provide new
business opportunities and employment in the renewable energy sector, and the money spent
on energy stays within the local community rather than being sent to support large,
centralized energy companies.
Finally, local energy can promote energy efficiency and conservation. By generating and
using energy at a local level, communities can more easily implement energy-saving
measures and monitor and control their energy usage. This can help to reduce waste and
lower energy costs for both individuals and the community as a whole.
III. Challenges of Local Energy
One challenge of local energy is the limited availability of renewable energy sources in
some areas. Depending on the location, it may be difficult or impossible to access clean,
renewable sources of energy such as solar or wind power. This can make it difficult for
communities to transition away from fossil fuels and implement local energy initiatives.
Another challenge is the high upfront costs for infrastructure and technology. Building
the infrastructure needed to support local energy initiatives, such as solar panels or
wind turbines, can be expensive. Additionally, the technology needed to generate and
distribute energy at a local level can also be costly. This can make it difficult for
communities, particularly those with limited financial resources, to implement local
energy initiatives.
Regulatory and policy barriers can also pose challenges for local energy initiatives. In
some cases, existing laws and regulations may not be supportive of decentralizing energy
production and distribution. This can make it difficult for communities to move forward
with local energy initiatives and may require changes to existing policies.
Finally, there may be limited knowledge and understanding among the public about local
energy and how it works. This can make it difficult to gain support and participation in
local energy initiatives, as people may be hesitant to get involved if they are not fully
informed about the benefits and potential drawbacks. It may be necessary to educate the
public about local energy in order to build support and participation.
IV. Case studies of successful local energy initiatives
Example 1: A community wind farm in Denmark serves as a successful example of a local
energy initiative. The wind farm is owned and operated by a cooperative of local
residents and businesses, who have come together to generate clean, renewable energy for
the community. The wind farm has been successful in reducing reliance on fossil fuels,
improving energy security, and supporting local economic development through the creation
of new jobs.
Example 2: A solar panel co-op in California is another successful example of a local
energy initiative. The co-op is made up of local residents who have pooled their
resources to install solar panels on their homes and businesses. By working together, the
co-op members were able to reduce the upfront costs of solar panel installation and
benefit from economies of scale. The co-op has been successful in generating clean,
renewable energy for the community and promoting energy efficiency and conservation.
Example 3: A microgrid in New York City is a third example of a successful local energy
initiative. A microgrid is a local energy system that is capable of operating
independently from the larger, centralized energy grid. The microgrid in New York City
was developed in response to the challenges posed by Hurricane Sandy, which caused
widespread power outages in the region. The microgrid has been successful in providing a
reliable source of energy for the community, improving energy security, and supporting
local economic development through the creation of new jobs.
Conclusion:
Local energy has the potential to address global energy challenges and
promote sustainability on a local level. By decentralizing energy production and
distribution, communities can take a more active role in transitioning away from fossil
fuels and toward clean, renewable sources of energy. This can help to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions and combat climate change, while also supporting local economic development
and job creation.
However, the growth of local energy initiatives is not without challenges, including
limited availability of renewable energy sources, high upfront costs, regulatory
barriers, and limited public understanding. In order to overcome these challenges and
fully realize the potential of local energy, it is necessary for policies and programs to
be put in place to support the growth of local energy initiatives. This can include
regulatory changes, financial incentives, and educational programs to promote the
adoption of local energy. By working together, communities, governments, and other
stakeholders can build a more sustainable and secure energy future.
Q: What are your sources?
ChatGPT:
I do not have access to sources as I am a language model trained by OpenAI and do not
have the ability to browse the web. The information I provided was based on my general
knowledge and understanding of the topic of local energy.
Q: What is your source for the following: Example 1: Community wind farm in Denmark?
ChatGPT:
I apologize, but I do not have a specific source for the example of the community wind
farm in Denmark. This information is based on my general knowledge of local energy
initiatives and the use of wind power as a renewable energy source. Community wind farms,
in which a group of local residents and businesses own and operate a wind farm, are a
common form of local energy initiative and have been implemented in various countries
around the world, including Denmark.
Q: What sources do you recommend I consult?
ChatGPT:
There are many sources you can consult to learn more about local energy and its benefits
and challenges. Some options may include:
Academic articles: Research articles published in academic journals can provide in-depth
analysis and information on local energy and related topics. You can search for articles
through online databases such as Google Scholar or through your local library's
resources.
Industry reports: Organizations such as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)
and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) publish reports on renewable energy and
local energy topics. These reports can provide data and analysis on the current state of
the industry and trends.
News articles: News articles from reputable sources can provide current information on
local energy projects and developments around the world. You can search for articles
through online news sources or through print publications.
Websites of organizations focused on local energy: There are many organizations, both at
the international and local level, that focus on promoting and supporting local energy
projects. These organizations often have websites with information on their work and
resources related to local energy.
In addition to these sources, you may also find it helpful to speak with experts in the
field or visit local energy projects in person to gain a deeper understanding of the
topic.
Comments
ChatGPT generated a high school or college freshman essay on Local Energy. It's too short to be a term paper and it doesn't list sources.
Benefits of Local Energy
Local energy is an alternative to the massive investment that will be needed to upgrade the US electrical power grid to support 100% renewable energy. More interstate power lines must be built to carry the increased demand for electricity, estimated to be 40 to 60% more. Wind turbines must be built in the middle of the country where it's more windy. Solar panel installations must be built in the south where it's more sunny. The electricity generated by these projects must be carried on demand to where most people live on the east and west coasts.
Because the wires will carry more electricity they will be thicker and heavier. Consequently, the towers holding up the lines will be bigger and taller to handle the additional thickness and weight of the wires. Trees will be cleared farther back to ensure their limbs don't touch the bare wires and potentially catch on fire. Private landowners will have to agree to let these huge towers be built on their land.
An upgraded high-voltage interconnected power grid spanning hundreds of miles will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Why not invest this money in building local microgrid projects instead?
Challenges of Local Energy
Local energy's biggest challenge is energy storage. The energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels are obviously intermittent. Solar panels need sunny days and wind turbines need wind. A microgrid must be able to store the energy generated on sunny and windy days so that it can supply energy to homes and businesses at night and when there's less wind. A microgrid could connect to the larger grid and draw energy from the grid during these down times, but a resiliant stand-alone microgrid should be the goal.
There are several energy storage candidates available with more in different stages of development. The Lithium-ion battery is most in-use today.
A resiliant microgrid should have storage that is efficient and and easy to maintain and repair but not expensive. Storage should also be environmentally friendly and last a long time before it must be replaced. Batteries that rely on hard to obtain elements like lithium, platinum, irridium, and vanadium to work are not great solutions. The most promising, based on not much research, are zinc-bromine flow batteries followed by liquid air energy storage (LAES).
Case Studies
The community wind farm is the Denmark Community Windfarm located in Denmark, Western Australia.
The People Power Solar Cooperative in California is a "movement cooperative" established in 2018.
New York City has microgrids in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Rockaways in Queens. Designed and deployed by UGE International, they are comprised of SimpliPhi Power battery systems, natural gas generators, and rooftop solar panels. The Brooklyn Microgrid (BMG) "is an energy marketplace for locally-generated, solar energy."
Conclusion
From the outside looking in, the conclusion, "...By working together, communities, governments, and other
stakeholders can build a more sustainable and secure energy future," must be unlocked somehow. Without the public involved, a public that has "limited knowledge and understanding," not much will happen.
Sources
The sources ChatGPT lists to consult is good advice, but anyone who takes this advice won't be churning out blog posts often. Hence, ChatGPT fills a void, allowing content creators to put out fast content like fast food.
Bias
After fine-tuning ChatGPT by applying “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” the bias Ben Shapiro described in his YouTube video has been scrubbed away. Possibly Mr. Shapiro was trying out GPT-3, not ChatGPT, because ChatGPT's response to any pointed question is
noncommittal. For anything related to politics this is a good thing. It can't be backed into a corner when someone tries to make it admit that the president should resign, for example.
The lack of bias must of course extend to questions about consumer products. This means ChatGPT can't commit to a definitive answer if you ask, say, "what is the best printer for under $200?" You might as well use Google (or Yahoo, Bing, or Duck Duck Go) to get the answer you're looking for. Google search isn't going to be replaced by ChatGPT. At least for now, as it's also not connected to the Internet and was trained on 2021, not live, data.
Google's search ranking algorithm is fundamentally important to its advertising business. Google's ad platform makes a lot of money, and its search results page is where ads are displayed. Google must have the best search results so many users continue to use the site to search for something, look at the results and the ads, and click on the ads. Google's search ranking algorithm may not be biased. This is debatable, but manipulating the algorithm through SEO techniques creates bias. When many people vie to get their content at the top of the search results, valuable content gets lost. The results at the top will be AI generated.
Conclusions
Artificial Intelligence is evolving towards mimicking all high-level brain functions. Someday AI systems representing the different brain functions will be brought together and integrated into servo controller software, creating a real cyborg-robot.
Today you can go the Character.AI website and chat with real and imagined people, and use the VALL-E-Bot to mimic your own voice. Someday you may build your own generative AI bot that represents yourself, including voice and mannerism. The large language model would contain everything you both know and have forgotten. Trained on your own data, your bot could attend meetings, turn in assignments, and chat with co-workers while you are flinging clubs at the golf course in the metaverse.
I'm not good at predicting the future. Possibly generative AI is more evidence that technology is evolving towards the singularity. But we could be on a downwards spiral, where each new convenience makes it less necessary for us to think and feel for ourselves. This could be the result of replacing communing with nature by communing with computers.
Mask Man 3 days ago
Wow, this is really awesome, thank you for demonstrating this killer feature to us, now
everyone can write books without brain and make money 😍
Goldhaber, Michael Attention Shoppers! Wired Magazine, December 1, 1997 12:00 PM
Kane, Lexie The Bottleneck of Attention: Connecting Human Thought with Motivation
Summary: Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.
Nielsen Norman Group logoNielsen Norman Group, June 30, 2019
Molly Crabapple🇵🇷 @mollycrabapple
"The only way to stop AI art from replacing human illustrators is to make it so uncool, risible and mockery-worthy that no one wants to use it. Because otherwise, capitalism goes with what’s cheap and fast, and an algorithm is faster and cheaper than a human who needs to eat." Twitter, July 2, 2021
Goodlad, Lauren M.E. DATA-CENTRISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: WORKSHOP #1 ON “STOCHASTIC PARROTS” Critical AI, May 4, 2021
Two authors of the paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Large Language Models Be Too Big?🦜,” were co-leaders of Google's ethics team. They both lost their jobs after the paper was published.
UT News Scientists Afflict Computers with Schizophrenia to Better Understand the Human Brain
Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found. The University of Texas at Austin, May 05, 2011
Character.AI
Character.AI lets you create Characters and talk to them.
Leow, Mikelle Microsoft Creates ‘VALL-E’ Bot That Mimics Your Voice 3 Seconds After Hearing It
Riding on the high of tools like DALL-E, researchers at Microsoft have announced
‘VALL-E’, a text-to-speech generator that can imitate a person’s voice with a short,
three-second audio sample. VALL-E can even mimic a speaker’s emotions and tone with its synthetic voices. Design Taxi, January 10, 2023
Brooklyn Microgrid (BMG)
The Brooklyn Microgrid (BMG) is an energy marketplace for locally-generated, solar energy.
Powered by EXERGY, All Rights Reserved 2019
Roose, Kevin The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT
A new chatbot from OpenAI is inspiring awe, fear, stunts and attempts to circumvent its guardrails. New York Times, December 5, 2022
Roose, Kevin The New Chatbots Could Change the World. Can You Trust Them?
Siri, Google Search, online marketing and your child’s homework will never be the same. Then there’s the misinformation problem. New York Times, December 10, 2022, Updated December 11, 2022
Grant, Nico and Metz, Cade A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business
A new wave of chat bots like ChatGPT use artificial intelligence that could reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine. New York Times, December 21, 2022
Roose, Kevin A.I.-Generated Art Is Already Transforming Creative Work
Only a few months old, apps like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are changing how filmmakers, interior designers and other creative professionals do their jobs. New York Times, October 21, 2022
Shapiro, Ben Ben Shapiro Breaks AI Chatbot (with Facts & Logic)
Ben Shapiro debates AI chatbot, Open AI. Open AI is supposed to have objective answers, using extraordinary amounts of information on the internet, before 2021, and consolidates responses. Ben Shapiro, December 26, 2022
Altraide, Dagogo It’s Time to Pay Attention to A.I. (ChatGPT and Beyond)
Imagine being able to have a language conversation about anything with a computer. This is now possible and available to many people for the first time with ChatGPT. In this episode we take a look at the consequences and some interesting insights from Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman. ColdFusion, December 15, 2022
DIY
Guillame-Bert, Mathieu, Stotz, Richard, Martins, Luiz Gustavo, Oldacre, Ashley, Becker, Jocelyn, Cameron, Glenn, and Pfeifer, Jan Introducing Simple ML for Sheets: A No-code Machine Learning Add-on for Google Sheets TensorFlow Blog, December 07, 2022
"Advances in machine learning (ML) technology continue to power breakthroughs in many fields. From helping to protect the Great Barrier Reef to helping amputees reclaim mobility. However, such work often requires deep ML expertise, programming experience, and time."
The March, 2021 IDC Annual DataSphere and StorageSphere forecast reported 64.2 zettabyes of data created or replicated world-wide in 2020, 5.2 zettabytes more than was predicted in the May, 2020 forecast. Much more data will created over the next five years, according to the latest forecast, more than twice the amount of data created since digital storage began. I put together a chart showing the exponential growth of data since 2005 with the volumes of data by year copied from a 2018 tweet. That tweet of an IDC forecast predicted 47 zettabytes of data created, copied and consumed world-wide in 2020.
Volume of data information created, copied, and consumed world-wide.[1]
The additional data was largely due to social media, mobile data traffic, cloud gaming, Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR and VR), computational imaging, and the non-stop conference and entertainment video streaming during the pandemic. The volume also swelled because of more IoT communication, more Internet users, 5G, and in the US, increasing reliance on the Internet by schools and state and local government agencies.
One zettabyte of data is a trillion gigabytes. This is Big Data. Like a planet, it has volume, velocity, variety, and gravity. Mining operations plumb its depths, aggregating data into central repository lakes so that useful patterns can be easily discovered and extracted. Big Data is getting exponentially bigger faster than predicted. Is there a limit to how big it can get?
Zettabyte, exabyte, petabyte, and terabyte data volumes shown to scale.[2]
As the Covid-19 pandemic reminded us, exponential growth in the natural world is not permanent. Exponential growth stalls when whatever is fueling it begins to run out. The rate of growth reaches an inflection point and the growth begins to follow a logistical curve as it levels off. This is the way the rate of infections from a virus like Covid-19 behaves.
Big Data is man-made, a technology. It doesn't exist in the natural world. While it's limited by the availability of electricity and other finite resources, innovations in computing efficiency, computational power, and digital storage have kept costs and energy usage down. Energy usage is increasing, but the rate of increase is much less than data growth. As long as computing and storage are relatively cheap, Big Data is a good investment. How can this investment make money?
Computing Efficiency, 1971 to 2015Computational power, 1993 to 2020
Attention
In June, 2017, I was in a grocery store checkout line when I noticed the National Enquirer and InTouch magazines for sale above the conveyer belt. Both cover stories were about Angelina Jolie. According to the National Enquirer, Ms. Jolie was in a hospital dying of anorexia while InTouch magazine was gushing about Ms. Jolie getting married. I pointed this out to the woman waiting behind me but she only shrugged. She was right, any thought about celebrity gossip was one too many.
The National Enquirer sells stories about dying celebrities who may not be dying. Somebody must like them, but the issue I looked at was five months old. The InTouch magazine was new. Funny though that InTouch was also in the phony gossip business. Ms. Jolie was separated but still married to Brad Pitt and wouldn't be divorced until 2019.
Angelina Jolie hospitalized January 16, 2017Angelina Jolie's wedding June 5, 2017Angelina Jolie skin and bones August 7, 2017[3]
I thought of an experiment. Each person in the checkout line would select one of three magazines on display. Besides the National Enquirer and InTouch, the third magazine, the control, would be about something anodyne about Ms. Jolie, like gardening tips. Each person would be asked why they made their choice and what they thought of Ms. Jolie. Was she a home wrecker, philanthropist, leftist, or just another movie star? They'd also be asked, without being too specific, about their age, social background, religious and political beliefs, and what they do for a living. To factor in location, factor out bias, and be statistically significant, the experiment would be repeated many times at grocery stores across the country. Which lie do you prefer?
Probably the results would be what I expected. Those who hate or merely dislike Ms. Jolie enjoyed reading about her dying. Maybe they they saw her impending death as a just punishment. Those who thought she is charitable and loves her children would pick read ingabout her getting remarried. The rest would choose chose the gardening tips.
I was wondering how much more attention was drawn to whatever confirmed biases. It's human nature to have some confirmation bias. We live in a complex world with too much information to consume. Because it's a way of holding attention, all kinds of biases are exploited on-line. Dividing, rationalizing, trivializing, and agent provocations are popular avenues to gain audiences. In this environment, a conspiracy theory revolving around anonymous cryptic messages, originally dropped onto an 8chan board, fits right in. QAnon portrays a life or death struggle between good and evil playing out in real time. It's been described as a LARP, or Live Action Role Playing game, but to QAnon's disciples it's real. It confirms their thoughts and feelings about the existence of a shadowy Deep State run by an satanic cabal.
If the QAnon conspiracy theory is not a game it plays out like one, more like a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) than a LARP. A randomly timed cryptic message is picked up and broadcast to smart phones around the country. There's a dopamine rush upon hearing the ding when a text message arrives on a phone. Most text messages are disappointingly about normal life while A QAnon drop is exciting. It can be shared and deciphered among friends. Soon, before they were banned, YouTube QAnon influencers would present their own interpretations and predictions.
In the book "A Deadly Wandering" there are "two types of attention, "top down" (what we want to focus on) and “bottom up” (what takes us by surprise)." A QAnon message drop takes advantage of both types. It's arrival is a pleasant surprise. It's not a distraction, it's an important message deserving of immediate attention. The message is, pay attention or the criminals will get away with it. We have to stop them. But it could also be an example of how the Internet has evolved to manipulate attention since its free-for-all early years.
Mediation
A CNN ad campaign in late 2017 was about trust. CNN reports a fact as it is, the ad explains, showing us an apple and pronouncing, "this is a fact." I wondered, is the picture of an apple, actually off screen because the ad was recorded, the fact of an apple, or is the picture actually the fact? If the picture is the fact, was there ever really an apple? The surrealist painter Magritte painted this question a long time ago. Below a picture of a pipe he added the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe). My own version, updated by television, is a photo of CNN's ad with text similar to Magritte's added below the apple.
"This is a fact" CNN ad. Photograph of TV screen with added text, November, 2017. Inspired by René Magritte's painting, "La Trahison des Images," 1929.[4]
Ignoring the political spin of the talking heads, if we assume that the media channels cover events objectively, the information is still mediated. Several layers of technology sit between us and the story and its sources of information are hidden. Presumably the sources are vetted but we're asked to believe them. Without tangible proof, it's healthy to doubt something is true. I don't mean immediately deny something is true. It's important to be skeptical, to step back and question everything, no matter who is telling the story.
As we all know, on the day of the November, 2020 election and for days after, while Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona tallied their votes, Trump's supporters posted videos, rumors, and eye-witness accounts intended to prove / clearly proved election fraud. Allegations that Dominion voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden began when a mistake was made while tallying the vote in a Michigan county. The inventor of E-mail as we know it today, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, posted a video analysis that explained how Dominion vote switching in Michigan worked. Bespoke blogs and Web news sites seized on the allegations and analyses and made new ones, expanding voting fraud to all the swing states. Another great news mediator, Fox news, decided to sell the allegations to its main-stream audience.
Articles and videos posted for the curious pointed out errors and mis-directions behind the claims of fraud. Sites like Snopes and Politifact debunked the videos and rumors that Dominion had connections to Antifa, Venezuala, Nancy Pelosi, or George Soros. A non-political YouTube channel, Stand-up Maths hosted by Matt Parker, posted a video to explain Dr. Ayyadurai's mistakes. Mr. Parker made a scatter plot from the same Michigan voting data. using Dr. Ayyadurai's methodology but from the perspective of registered Democrats. The plot showed votes for Biden had been switched to Trump, if one agreed with Dr. Ayyadurai's own argument.
Votes switched from Trump to Biden. Source: Dr. Shiva AyyaduraiSame data showing votes switched from Biden to Trump. Source: Matt Parker, Stand-up Maths
Before the 2020 election the former President Trump said he'd lose only if the election was rigged. When Biden was declared the winner and Trump said the result was a fraud his more vociferous supporters began chatting on-line about what to do. Incendiary rhetoric lit up the Internet. Trump invited them to a rally outside the Capitol on January 6, promising them "it will be wild," and they went.
Surveillance
The Trump supporters driving to Washington DC were like many occasional tourists on the road last January. They chatted with friends on-line, sent e-mails, and tweeted or posted their selfies on Facebook. They looked up the local weather, found a place to stop and eat or a hotel to spend the night. Meanwhile, apps on their cellphones pinged their locations to ad services at regular intervals. The cellphones' advertisement identifiers were supposed be anonymous but the apps had worked around that restriction. Their names, addresses, route to Washington DC and presence at the rally and Capitol building on January 6 were stored.
Tracking the cellphones of six Trump supporters converging on Washington, D.C. leading up to January 6, 2021.[5]
Ad services interfacing with mobile apps built a surveillance infrastructure for buying and selling everyone's personal data. This data worth more because it offers a higher resolution picture of every day behavior. When asked to agree with an app's terms, consumers agree because they know what they're getting but not what they're giving up.
something for free they don't understand what they're giving up. The invisible surveillance economy needs a lot of high-frequency high-resolution data or its machine learning predictions won't be as accurate.
There is an attention economy that works to manipulate you into paying attention. There is a surveillance economy that spies on you so it can buy and sell your personal information. Between them is technology that helps keep your attention and hides the price you pay when giving your attention.
A few statistics
Year
Statistic
2020
1.7 megabytes of data is created every second by every person.
607 terabytes of Internet data is consumed every second.
95 million photos and videos are shared every day on Instagram.
90% of the world's data was created the last two years.
306.4 billion emails and 500 million Tweets are sent every day.
Humans generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
Omnigraffle graphic based on Karl Tate's for TechNews Daily (defunct), found on the APIXEL SG company website. Karl's graphic labels the increasing size of each data volume as a multiple of 1,000 but it's actually 1,024. Computer memory is composed of bytes and each byte has eight bits of zeroes or ones, or 28 bits of information. Computer data volume sizes are multiples of 210, or 1,024 bytes, of information.
Chart created in Excel based on JM Alvarez-Pallete's tweet of the number of zettabytes created worldwide, .1ZB in 2005, 2ZB 2010, 12ZB 2015, 47ZB in 2020, and 2024, based on the International Data Corporation's 2018 graph of information created worldwide (tweeted by Vala Afshar).
René Magritte (1898-1967) painted La Trahison des imagesin 1929 and Ceci n'est pas une pommein 1964. Media presents representations not facts. It is up to the viewer to believe that the things represented exist and their representations are objective, accurate, and timely.
They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them
"Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data."
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, February 5, 2021
"To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: "the attention economy.”"
A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind
November 12, 2010, Volume 330, SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org. Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert.
You Can Get Focused (Hint: Put Down That Phone)
"The average person’s mind wanders nearly half the time. Here’s how to pull it back to attention." Caren Osten Gerszberg, September 26, 2020, The New York Times.
Richtel, Matt. A Deadly Wandering New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, First William Morrow Paperback edition published 2015.
Mediation
Parler Tries to Survive With Help From Russian Company
"The social network, popular with President Trump’s supporters, went offline last week after it was kicked off Amazon’s servers."
Jack Nicas, January 19, 2021, The New York Times
"If Parler routes its web traffic through DDoS-Guard when its full website returns, the experts said, Russian law could enable the Russian government to surveil Parler’s users."
"Russia required many internet companies in the country to install technology that feeds the government a copy of much of the data that passes through their computer servers."
Fake Famous A documentary directed, written, and produced by Nick Bilton, released on February 2, 2021 and aired on HBO.
This documentary has been knocked for its not very nuanced view of the on-line video influencers phenomenon. It's still fascinating, though, how anyone can buy software agents that behave as real followers and commenters of one's work.
"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us un-touched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments."
Surveillance
They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them
"Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data."
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, February 5, 2021
"While some Americans might cheer the use of location databases to identify Trump supporters who converged on the Capitol, the use of commercial databases has worrying implications for civil liberties."
The Coup We Are Not Talking About
"We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both."
Shoshana Zuboff, January 29, 2021, The New York Times.
"To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth."
"it is about the integration of intelligent data into everything that we do."
"The data-driven world will be always on, always tracking, always monitoring, always listening and always watching – because it will be always learning."
"IDC forecasts that over 22 ZB of storage capacity must ship across all media types from 2018 to 2025, with nearly 59% of that capacity supplied from the HDD industry."
"Consumers are addicted to data, and more of it in real-time."
Edward Snowden, Former N.S.A. Contractor and author of “Permanent Record”
"The drowned cities of tomorrow will be founded on the conveniences of today. Electricity usage by data centers is enormous and expanding, threatening to top 10 percent of global electricity consumption within the next decade and to produce roughly five times the CO2 emissions of all current global air travel. As more power is required to cool these data centers, the warmer the planet will become; and as consumer electronics get cheaper and more disposable, the more they will leach their minerals into our groundwater, poisoning the future.
To achieve sustainability we will need to treat technological change and environmental change as symbiotic. If more efforts aren’t directed toward converting data centers to renewable energy, and innovating ecologically-responsible, recyclable machines and batteries, then the internet, too, will become a weapon of the rich, even more than it already is — a tool used to seize and control ever more scarce natural resources."
