AI is Full of Gorilla Shit

You might think that AI is useful. Maybe you’re right. Or maybe you have already been conditioned to a predisposed assumption, even a conviction, that AI is the solution to some, perhaps even all, of our problems. That it’s just a matter of time and tweaks.

In that case, I’d have to break Rule #1 of my own (revised) list of no-no things to do in blogging: “Don’t Insult Your Own Audience”.

What I’m trying to say is that you’re an idiot.

First off, I’m going to repeat myself: no machine can ever gain self-awareness or magically just have a soul.

It is not possible, however much you wish it, no matter how many movies you’ve seen, no matter what you’ve read, and no matter who says what on YouTube, for truly intelligent and aware machines to ever exist.

Does this upset you, this outlandish absolutist statement from a lowly layperson who once thought a motherboard was a reference to equipment for middle-aged female surfers?

Or perhaps you, like I do, have the advantage of distance and uninvolved perspective, and can see what developers do not? Do we share some measure, you and I, of trepidation, even fear, of what horrors can, and even have already, come from AI usage?

Then you may be even more widely read than myself about the subject.

If so, I offer you this praise: you’re nobody’s fool.

You maintain perspective and cannot be swayed by leading articles which hail artificial intelligence as the greatest invention of all time, humanity’s pinnacle of accomplishment. Because you know that’s not true. And you know, more than most, that like everything else humans have “created” or discovered, it will be used for evil, exploitation, war, greed and the ruin of countries by other countries.

It has already been in development for all of these things, and hackers, traffickers and spies are, and have been, calling for more of this deadly tech.

As it stands right now, I contend that beyond rudimentary applications, AI is useless or worse, especially when it produces anything that is released to the public or a community such as certain science disciplines, most notably without oversight.

Already misinformation has been disseminated by AI, and at present we cannot determine how much material is out there. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic and attendant lockdown, Microsoft and others laid off or fired thousands of workers. Working from home was great, but the articles and testimonials about and by people allowed that luxury eclipsed an ugly truth: millions lost their jobs. Some, we knew, were in the service or hospitality industry: waiters had no one to serve in closed restaurants. Bartenders, line cooks, master chefs, store owners and employees not deemed “critical”, and scores of others watched helplessly their way of life and their careers vanish forever. Businesses failed. Did they know, that last night they locked up and turned out the lights, that it was the end?

In the quiet that followed, late night talk shows broadcast from the host’s homes in a surreal spot of history that too many have already forgotten, so traumatized were they. Buried memories, covered over by whatever was convenient or necessary until now, a mere three years later, it might never have happened at all.

Except it did.

Millions died. A camera facing Times Square showed traffic sawhorses and nothing else, an image of post-apocalyptic, dystopian emptiness none should ever forget.

Empty chairs at the dinner table, in the living room, the nursing homes…and the empty beds to match.

Traffic, non-existent on rural and suburban streets: at night, so quiet that one felt, not peace, but only a creepiness, a sadness, despair: was this the end? Or how the end starts?

No one knew.

In places, the deniers: restaurants remained open. Spring Break in Florida. Reports of outbreaks squelched, or at least padded, by denial specialists and some news outlets who would go on to scoff at or darkly warn against vaccinations. None of it stopped people from dying, or from surviving, but with long-term effects.

Amid this horrific and tragic setting: MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Every day, the death count. Always there, on the right side of the screen. Every morning, a new total. You couldn’t look away. That intrepid crew never was known for pulling punches. Creds for that.

And then there was Trump, who, after screwing up and making psychotic statements, or, more exactly, spewing shit that got people killed because they trusted him, managed a fait accompli:

With most of his damage already done, with enough disinformation and confusion among the people, he “tried to be helpful”, but merely showed his deplorable ignorance and his need to control his team of experts, whom he often contradicted or even berated in press conferences. He actually, without any refinement attempted, suggested that bodies be opened to accommodate UV light devices and, worse, that products like Mr. Clean be used for clearing lung infections. No one in modern history has ever heard a US president say anything quite like that, but no matter. People apparently tried his “cure” suggestions. How many is not known. That even one person tried it is sickening.

And this is exactly where today’s post becomes relevant.

In the midst of Covid-19, Microsoft — MSN– got rid of its reporting staff, or most of it.

What stood in their shoes?

This did. And it isn’t funny. Imagine why; if you’re human, it shouldn’t be hard.

The article in the link is scary, but humans have been replaced by machines for decades, so this is nothing new. In Baltimore at the General Motors plant, there had been steady news reports since at least the 70s of robots on the assembly line. It wasn’t a unique case. Welders, painters, it didn’t matter; one by one, the jobs were no longer for humans. People flooded unemployment offices carrying their pink slips, held as delicately as calloused hands could have done, and another Maryland unemployment rate hike hit the news with ice-cold numbers that could never tell newspaper readers or local TV news viewers what it really meant. Not to those who had once earned a good income and were suddenly facing default on their mortgages. Feeding hungry children who were used to Christmas presents and hot meals faced an abruptly horrible reality of hunger gnawing on stale bread and cut-rate bologna. Marriages ended. There were homicides and suicides. Desperation turned quickly to despair and after despair, there was nothing.

AI is the new assembly line robot. Who dreamed, back in the 60s, that the major changes that happened could even be possible? That then, at the beginning of a career, that Westinghouse, the Bell system, General Electric, General Motors and other giants would fail, automate, or break up?

Jobs were never guaranteed for life unless you were a Supreme Court Justice. But most offered steady, union represented, honorable work. And if that’s been torn down over the decades since, mainly because of politics and its dirty-secret bed companion, the economy, then there is much more to follow. This is compounded by AI, which has its unshakable place cemented in the future like global warming has.

And both are deeply complicated subjects, which works well for tech corporations and politicians, but not for us, whether you once thought motherboards were oceanic wave gliders for MILFs or not. While the rich, powerful owners of this world think we’re still down here dropping simian feces, we’re still the only ones who get the final say, and we’re dangerously close to giving it up. We vote. We pay. We decide which is real, and which is gorilla shit.

When an AI writes about places to visit, and includes an entry on a food bank and suggests visiting it on an empty stomach, that is gorilla shit. It begs the question of how much more gorilla shit is out there, and has been since 2020.

It’s your move.

But know this:

Generations alive now have lived in some kind of terror all our lives.

The Cold War paralyzed us with daily fear that at any second, all that we know and love could be vaporized.

The AIDS epidemic made sexual contact a haunting thing. It could somehow go undetected for years. Nobody knew if they had it or not, despite early perception that it was a “gay” disease only “degenerate men” got. Then the truth was discovered. It was an everyone disease, and it killed.

9/11/01 brought a new kind of terror to the United States: there was no target, no place, no building anywhere that could truly be protected, and the world had become more sinister and dangerous than we ever dreamed.

Mass shootings haven’t let up. Kids who should be worrying about nothing more scary than report cards or being rejected by a crush have to go to school not knowing if they’ll live to see home again.

Covid-19 has shown us true terror of the unknown and the unseen. We lost so much. Grieve so many. There’s PTSD that’s real, damage we cannot repair. We went from using wipes on our groceries to wearing improvised face masks to getting all of the recommended vaccinations and we got rid of Trump. Quietly, President Biden helped us get away from the edge of an abyss. He does not get his due, not even grudgingly.

A call has gone forth from the political right: we don’t deserve a democracy so let’s find a dictator.

A dictator. What a pile of simian feces.

It has all numbed us. Injured us. It’s too much.

And yet, you must hold onto hope that we as a species can overcome. And, Americans, how it all plays out?

That’s entirely up to you.

Donald Trump And His Terrifying Birth Sign

I feel bad for anyone who wants to read about personal survival after serious sexual abuse (“serious”, but really, can there be any other kind?)

What’s more difficult to write about and face right now is the threat Donald Trump is to our country, our government and each of us.

I’m not one to discount research on the grounds that it may be too fantastic for some people to believe. The truth is not subjective and Trump’s astrology chart is too chilling for me not to share.

While it comes as no surprise to me that he’s a Gemini, a Stephen King meme made me wonder what Trump’s chart really says.

I grew up under double standards and practices. Both parents were “Christians” who told us kids that the laws of Moses, or, the horseshit in the Pentateuch, must be taken literally (a misuse of the word) and strictly adhered to.

My father was a Capricorn and my mother a Gemini. I’m capitalizing those names just because I’m not sure if you’re supposed to. Now all that’s cool; not every Gemini or Capricorn fall into a specific mold. As I understand it, specifics apply that make a difference. Birth date and exact time and year as well as place of birth are important for an astrologer to determine your rising sign, descending sign, house and other particular things.

In the link, it’s explained how all of those details combined for our not-quite-esteemed forty fifth president.

With Gemini and the rising sign (very influential) of Leo, even if Trump weren’t a narcissist, he would be a narcissist. He’s disloyal and deceitful and loves being in a spotlight and talking about himself. And he knows the best words because he has a very good brain.

I think he had a stroke. It affected the speech center in the brain. I believe it caused a type of Aphasia which would account for the very unfunny Trumpisms.

I’ve lost count of the lies. And what in perdition are the “serberbs?”

This Is The Song That Doesn’t End

A few months ago, at one of those press conferences Trump held daily until he couldn’t refill his adderall because he probably doubled a few doses, or else was just to fatigued or on edge to do much…

It was all so typical. He never takes responsibility for anything.

Let me repeat:

He never takes responsibility for anything.

What he has gladly done is deflect, dodge and lie with a bold face. Lies that should stagger everyone’s minds, but which seem to be forgotten all too quickly. That’s almost like a strategy if you think about it. Lie so many times that people ignore it. Bury them with bullshit, and they can’t find their way through the pile to get to fresh air; by which I mean, the truth.

That’s months ago. Remember it? I do. Others, not so much. Why did we not have anything in place to fight a virus?

True, we had measures. We had equipment. They just weren’t enough. And you know why?

Trump did away with a pandemic response unit and told a reporter who asked if it was a mistake “That’s a nasty question.”

He said the coronavirus was something “…nobody could have seen coming.”

That’s a lie. As far back as the 109th Congress in 2005-2006, in Senate Bill 1821, a number of warnings by experts were cited, including Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who was thus quoted: “This is a very ominous situation for the globe … the most important threat we are facing now.” This, in regards to avian flu, (SARS).

That quote was from 21 February, 2005. On 23 February, the Asian regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Shigera Omi, said this: “We at WHO believe that the world is now in the gravest possible danger of a pandemic,” this also in respect to Avian flu.

This congressional session contained Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Dick Cheney was Speaker of the House and George W. Bush was president.

The subheader with explicit description of purpose of legislation.

Obama was not president then. Trump can’t blame anyone else for tearing down everything Obama did, just as he continues to fruitlessly claim that Obama spied on his campaign (it never happened). George Bush was president, and this study was clearly embedded in the legislation. There were no riders in the final draft as far as I can see, but anyone who has tracked legislative documentation knows that there are often times when a final bill, to be voted on, isn’t at all what it began as, and may be difficult to follow up on.

The point here is that with a Republican majority in Congress and a Republican president, the subject was clearly viewed as a threat, a scenario not of if, but when.

I’ll skip the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, but feel free to tap the link and refresh your memory. That was a scary thing, but we learned from it. As a novel (new) influenza A virus, it was difficult to defend against and it was a badass, killing as if it were a mad hunter on a spree. We learned from it but still, this wasn’t exactly the avian flu the experts feared so much. That, they knew, was yet to come.

When Trump cut the budget for the CDC, it was unreasonable and reckless. He disbanded the unit for pandemic response of the Obama administration in 2018. Talking heads and editorials pointed out that Trump was obviously on a mission to reverse or obliterate everything Obama had done. Since then, he’s proven them correct. And he wants to continue until his mission is fulfilled.

This vendetta goes way back. For whatever reason, Trump decided to claim that Obama was an illegitimate president because he wasn’t born in the United States. There are tweets going back to Obama’s presidency that prove he not only did this, but criticized everything Obama did, especially when he played golf. He was brutal, as we have come to see this ourselves in frightening years with him as president, with his callousness toward children and families, his surpassing of Obama’s time at golf, his horrible foreign policy and his gross incompetence.

There was bad blood between Trump and Obama, but Trump was the instigator and Obama the better man. If anything stood out as a deepening of Trump’s hatred, it could have been this.

At one point The Donald appeared to chuckle and he gave a little wave, but otherwise you could tell he was seething. Obama had his audience in stitches. These dinners were funny. Even George Bush was funny in his own remarks during his two terms, and believe it or not, he has a wonderful self-deprecating sense of humor. Obama made the press correspondence dinners must-see events. Donald Trump didn’t attend the first one after taking over, and there’ve not been any since. He has a thin skin, does not enjoy any words even in jest against him. He takes everything extremely, seriously, personal. Worse, he never forgets anything he sees as a slight or an insult. He refined his ability to exact revenge decades ago and he’s often bragged about it.

The level of outrage he had following Obama’s remarks can merely be guessed, but one thing was always clear: it was considerable.

So now we have a president who crippled our nation’s ability to quickly respond to a pandemic. He did it. But he takes no responsibly for it and he blames it on Obama. He appeals, in so doing, to the prejudices of his voter base. Those who hated Obama, simply because of his skin color, those who deafened themselves to any and every good thing he accomplished.

First of all he said he didn’t take responsibility. He said he inherited an antiquated system and it worked very well before but wasn’t built (for COVID-19). Then he said no one was to blame. Then, of course, he said, ask the last administration about (the H1N1) pandemic, ask them how they did with that.

Wait. I thought he said the old “system” worked very well. Well which was it?

His lies continued but soon turned to the delusional.

And holy shit, people did try this ludicrous suggestion. There are no concrete numbers, but there were almost immediate calls to poison control centers routed through 911.

But Trump had plausible deniability because he said, “I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.” God forbid he’s ever held accountable for anything he says or does.

Then, Trump turned absolutely, positively, bat shit crazy and promoted the sick ideas of medical treatments that used alien DNA and that astral projection by men raping women caused gynecological issues, along with the semen of demons. Oh, my. God.

But it didn’t end there.

He cut funding for COVID-19 testing, demanded that all schools open as scheduled, and caused new outbreaks in some schools and universities.

That’s one university in the many we have, and it’s terrible. Where we stand right now is 5.97 million confirmed cases, 183, 870 deaths in the United States. I point out that this pair of numbers cannot be accurate, as undetected and undiagnosed cases continue to be unknown and not part of the statistics. The actual number of each must be higher.

Trump is impervious to these numbers. He has not the capacity for empathy. For sympathy toward anyone other than himself. While lamenting a poll, he said, “I guess people don’t love me.”

It was his hideous parents who never loved him, and he’s been chasing that love ever since, even though it is too late for him. He does not respond to the love from another. That’s why he’s on his third marriage. He cannot understand what it is any more than he can feel it for others.

It created a monster. His father strictly tutored him to be strong, to not allow a woman to interfere in his business, to be a ruthless and unflinching thief and double-crosser. He is also, by his own words, a sexual predator with no respect whatsoever for women. It is an understatement to call him a monster.

Questions of his mental health are valid. He has kept children in cages. This article failed to generate the outrage I’d have expected from Americans. Recently it was revealed that Trump officials voted to pull kids from their families to “save democracy.” That’s the worst kind of all the kinds of bullshit I’ve ever heard. Since when did children ever threaten a government? It ended up traumatizing both parents and children. And still, not all children have been accounted for. Where the hell are they? Were they trafficked? Sold?

He keeps lying.

He keeps deflecting.

He is all about himself.

And he will never change.

No matter what bullshit he writes or says, it will always be about the great job he’s done.

About Democrats always on a witch hunt.

About how he wants his face on Mount Rushmore.

About how no president in history has done as much for black Americans.

It is galling. It won’t stop. It won’t ever stop even if he loses the election. He will continue no matter what. It is the song that doesn’t end…