It is 8:27 PM on Thursday April 26th, 2018. We had pizza night and I always regret pizza night right after I’ve eaten too many pieces.
I named this post ‘craziness’ due to a couple of thoughts running through my mind.
- Artificial Intelligence
Recently I’ve started doing the jumble in the mornings in The Columbus Dispatch. This is my hometown newspaper and I used to do the jumble a lot with my study hall teacher Mrs. Hebert. It started out a little slow but over time I can now figure the daily jumble out pretty quickly although I’m only 50% on the Sunday, harder version.
When I simply cannot figure it out we now have the luxury of just typing it in a website and the webpage spits out the answer. This makes me think about how we humans, even though we think of ourselves as intelligent, really are not especially when it comes to the universe as a whole. We’re designing computers which in very short time will be light years ahead of us through AI and reach an intelligence we cannot even fathom. As Michiko Kaku said, if aliens have visited us they probably regard us in the same way we look at forest animals.
This is all very humbling especially when it takes me more than 15 minutes just to unscramble a few words and especially when I fail to do so.
When I was growing up the goal was to try to be the smartest in the class. If you could do that then it was safe to say you were ‘smart.’ Then with the internet the pool became infinitely larger and now you competed with humanity as a whole. You can try to be the smartest with your comments on social media, be the smartest in your forum or the best in your online game but you’ll always be outdone by someone who is smarter than you.
As time passes it won’t even be the internet you’re competing with but AI and AI is something we cannot even try to compete against even though we breathe a sigh of collective relief when a human beats AI in chess. Those days are quickly fading away. We’ve almost come to that realization and the discussion is revolving around if we’ll even survive AI or whatever it decides to do with us. We’re not smart enough to put checks and balances on it so if we’re honest with ourselves we’re simply playing a game of Russian Roulette.
- Fruit/Vegetable Juice
Everyday I drink a mix of vegetable and fruit juice. However, the question has come to mind about how healthy these drinks actually are given the use of pesticides. Yes, there is organic but given the level of chemicals we’re putting into the environment how safe are we really from these chemicals? In the summer I only buy from the farmer’s markets and I trust they do their best to limit the use of chemicals but again, I think it is a forgone conclusion that profits trump safety since the fruits and vegetables have to look appealing so people will buy them and that involves chemicals. So how much poison am I actually drinking?
- How ‘Human” are we?
I read an article that tells me the bacterial cells in my body outnumber my human cells. We’re only beginning to understand the role that bacteria plays in making us who we are. That begs the question how “human” am I really? Could it be that all of humanity is simply a form of bacteria that is growing and multiplying in some organism we know to be the universe? We use religion as a safety blanket to give our existence meaning and what a shock it would be to discover we really are nothing more than spontaneous bacteria. As we do get smarter and through AI I think this question will be answered in the next couple of hundred years and it will certainly be a shock to all of us, if we survive AI that is. AI could decide that we are a plague in this larger organism and take steps to eliminate us. The most we understand at the moment is that we have consciousness and we inhabit a ‘universe,’ which we perceive through our limited senses. What else is there that we do not perceive?
- The chaos kept in check by the military and police
I’ve come to understand that there is a large amount of chaos going on in the world that is kept in check by our police and military. Sometimes I read the police logs in my local town of Pacifica and am shocked to see how much chaos there actually is. It is through the work of the police which keeps this chaos in check and allows us to lead normal lives. That is the meaning of the “thin blue line,” and the amount of chaos is something most people do not perceive as they are not police nor read the logs.
On a national scale I now realize there is a type of low level war going on all the time. Bad things are happening everyday that do not make the news and from which the public is kept completely unaware. Nations are playing a game of chess which involves real power and there is constant competition for leverage. There are the elites which direct this game of chess to consolidate their own power by using governments to move the pieces. Given this realization it is quite obvious that although we think of ourselves as an intelligent species we really are nothing more than “forest animals” for any aliens with the technology to visit and or observe us.
The mainstream thinks this is crazy talk yet even the Pentagon has now released video of flying objects of which we do not know what they are. This is in addition to the CIA files which also describe strange encounters. As someone once said, “90% of that stuff is nonsense, but 10% is credible.” Since we cannot explain these phenomena we simply disregard them and go on with our daily lives. Furthermore, we now have the technology to realize and catalogue individual planets which are circling the innumerable stars in the universe. The Drake Equation tells us that there should be innumerable amounts of planets with life on them. I tried finding the answer to an estimated amount of planets that should have the technology to contact us but none of the websites I visited give a clear answer. All in, we should be visited by thousands of aliens by now and it is my assumption that if they had that type of technology to cross such a vast distance then they would also have the technology to keep hidden.
But getting back to the chaos, we do not live in a peaceful world. We think it is peaceful because we build communities and bubbles in which we choose to reside. Take one step inside a Brazilian favela or in Sinola and you’ll experience the chaos firsthand. Forest animals indeed.
So in the end we’re not even in competition with AI which will be a man made construction but with the universe as a whole.
And it still takes me over 15 minutes to do the jumble.
With that it is time for bed.
