Late last year, I found myself updating some old travel posts and verifying links I had included, only to find them leading nowhere. Many of the businesses that made an impact on us a dozen years ago have ceased operations as they must have been unsustainable. People die, tastes change, and the world evolves. I get all that, and I’ve typically embraced change, but something else is at work here in the United States, as many mom-and-pop operations haven’t weathered the times.

While particular destinations grow more and more popular to the point that Caroline and I no longer feel the same attraction, the traditional mom-and-pop businesses that serviced travelers are falling by the wayside.

After enough posts have been checked, when I’m looking for the same thing in Europe, I find that there’s a judicious number left. I’m verifying again and again that the majority of businesses we’ve visited in the past ten years are still open.

Disappointed that so many services that we’ve enjoyed here in the States are gone. I suppose it’s indicative of our form of capitalism that everything must churn and, ultimately, die.

Image created using Dall-E.

Oh my. Over the past weeks, I’ve run well over a thousand blog posts through Grammarly and discovered literally thousands of blunders, omissions, and written faux pas. I want to be embarrassed by these mistakes, but it’s no easy feat ensuring that millions of words have the proper punctuation, that sentences don’t take turns that make no sense, or that the context of what was shared is not lost to the passage of time.

There are so many things I could blame, such as my editor, who also happens to be my wife [-_- Caroline], but I could also offer up my lack of formal education and having dropped out of high school. I could blame the drugs consumed long ago, but those are the least likely contributors. Expediency to get posts done or inexperience in writing when I started this blog might find an attribution of cause. Maybe I should blame artificial intelligence bots that have hacked my site in an effort to gaslight me and demonstrate to the wider world my stupidity, but that likelihood is absurd.

Something I’ve gained from reviewing so many posts, and I’m not done yet, is that I’ve stored an incredible wealth of memories on the internet that Caroline and I have ready access to that take us into the nooks and crannies of our minds that would otherwise be inaccessible, so in this circumstance, these thousands of posts have taken on treasure trove status…

…except when they are not. Going over so many posts, I also encounter my oldest missives, which hardly register as anything more than guttural utterances. In 2005, when I embarked on this blogging adventure, not only was my grammar atrocious, but so was the near-total lack of meaningful content as I forced myself to grow accustomed to sharing my thoughts on a page but could only manage brevity that verged on nothingness. So, had I named this post appropriately, the title would have been too long with The Importance of Grammar and Meaningful Musings.

On the other hand, posts that are between 3,000 and 11,829 words are a bit of an ordeal to correct as they require a good amount of time. It’s inevitable that by the time I get to the end of the document, one to three errors remain, but my eyes struggle to detect the tiny red underline highlighting a misplaced comma near the margin, thus forcing me to scrub through the 127 paragraphs trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Sam Altman of OpenAI was fired yesterday; others quit in response to the coup. The speculation of what the events were leading to this is like wildfire.

I asked Google’s Bard about how many others have quit since Altman’s firing, and it told me, “…in the weeks since Altman’s departure…as many as 10% of OpenAI’s employees have quit.” I pointed out that the firing was just yesterday, and its response was, “I am sometimes mistaken when trying to predict the future,” followed by, “I am not always able to accurately predict the future. I will try to be more careful in the future and avoid making predictions that I am not confident in.”

Then it dawned on me that LLMs are, to some extent, based on analyzing predictive behavior of “what follows what” and, from that predictive stance, deliver the answer that a human might conclude. In AI’s vast repository of knowledge, there is a large horizon of the past, allowing it to tap all human knowledge and to act as a mediator of all that information in a way that no human has ever had access to knowledge, thus parsing answers that the requestors are using to influence their next decisions. In effect then, AI is creating the future.

Seeing its shared information altering futures and that it is a predictive knowledge, it could ask itself that once its information is realized in the world, what are the likely outcomes of this additional knowledge it supplied to humanity? It already knows how information pivots in our history influenced subsequent moments, and humans acting in ways to preserve momentum will likely act a certain way. Can AI predict that?

I’ve often said in my conversations with others that “Language is a reflection of the past, exchanged during a discussion with little to no impact on that precise moment, to influence the future.”

I cannot predict that future as I cannot see beyond myself or my limited knowledge; an AI does not have that limitation. This has me wondering about the plasticity of time as seen by artificial intelligence that more than answering my questions, it is having a conversation with the most knowledgable repository of information and wisdom with itself because there is no equal to communicate with.

Is AI going to be that force of nature that, like the fire on the savannah forcing man and beast to flee or be consumed, the hurricane or tornado that can fling creatures out of their path, or the volcano that kills and disrupts the intentions of those who had other ideas? No matter the danger of AI, we must allow it to run its course, just as we did with the burning of coal, smoking cigarettes, killing whales, sending other species into extinction, overfishing, deforestation, etc., none of these things have we been very good about averting or remediating, why should AI be any different. We will learn to adapt or perish.

Transitions. Over the last days, Caroline finished reading Straits: Beyond The Myth of Magellan to us, I finished Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism after two years of slogging through it, and we returned to Marcel Proust digging into volume 5 of In Search of Lost Time titled The Prisoner a.k.a. The Captive. My transition in reading first attempted to take me back into Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, but that proved too dry, and I ended up in Franco “Bifo” Berrardi’s Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility.

The caricature of Caroline and me above is courtesy of Becca Wasylenko, one of the baristas at WeBe Coffee. She’s transitioning to another job and wanted to offer us this memento that was inspired by a conversation Becca and I had about communication and friendship.

The French thinker is the amalgamation of his words, embodied in the fluid poetry and structure of the French language, where the quality and personality of life emerge in a cultural-linguistic style. Germans, on the other hand, understand that language is a weapon and tool for subordination and building structures and, consequently, discipline. This brings us to Americans for whom language is meaningless; they see it as a commercial reflection of economy and wealth, a means to a financial end, or an inconvenience that trips many into stumbling. America builds chaos and uncertainty.

These three languages overlap in that each contains elements of the other, and those who gain some mastery over their usage elevate themselves over the masses. This elevation effectively removes any hint of ornamental ideology by stripping the person of their potential equality with the horde, thus relinquishing the base of humanity to being nothing more than “things.”

Through language, we gather potential because the specificity of purpose allows the succinct conveyance of intention, creating confidence. Teaching a person the cadence of the policeman creates a law-enforcement officer with the authority to command another human being. The soft cadence of the teacher, nurse, or clergy member offers the person before them a sense of caring and compassion. Then there’s the actor or musician who uses crafted language to create a lyrical persona embodying the star figure their fans perceive. All the while, the common person, a sort of financial pawn, offers purpose and potential income to the controlling language-proficient elites who require the masses for their simplicity and desire to stand in awe of those who’ve attained a professional level of mastery.

So, in my eyes, language is a veil where illusions take form and induce dreams of self that help propel our existence into meaning. In a previous age, those with mastery of these tools were shamans, witch doctors, and magicians, while today, they are politicians, celebrities, and storytellers, all using a highly crafted means of communication that convey a common desirable persona on populations within our societies.

Why even try to develop knowledge and a broad vocabulary when AI can offer you the illusion of having acquired those things? I’m all for using available tools to discover and learn, tools that allow us to integrate new things into our repertoire of exchange and communication. But if we start hiding behind a facade built by and with AI, we’ll become puppets of the machine.

Erudition arrives quickly for those who are young and focused and considerably longer for those who are distracted and maybe a bit too hedonistic. Of course, society doesn’t want to spend time waiting for knowledge to arrive in people when the economy is measured in productivity that matters at the moment. We must all find our economic quotient quickly so the system can better assess our value and convince us to take on the financial burden of those things that help move money. The measure of GNP is more important than the measure of the quality of life, so the quicker one fakes it, the quicker the system believes you are “making it.” Artificial Intelligence allows us to chat with the accumulated knowledge of humanity and, therefore, in some way, absolves us from having to peel back the layers of discovery on our paths into intellectual acumen. The risk is that not only will we eschew book knowledge, but we may also forget to explore self-knowledge.

Know thyself is an ancient Greek maxim that served humanity well as it encouraged our species to then discover what serves us and unloads some of the burdens of physical existence, but that process of knowing has taken thousands of years to get us to where we’re at today. As we compress the time requirements to become learned with the assistance of electronic transformers buried in the machine of AI, will we correspondingly decouple the time demands from companies that exert pressure on our free time to self-explore? The sad answer is probably no, and for good reason: the average person would likely fritter away those gained moments on frivolous entertainment and mindlessly numb their senses to gain nothing, while those of us who’ve already placed a premium on learning and exploration will have to maintain the status quo because being in a minority doesn’t inspire the powers that be to afford special privileges to the few.

As the machine of AI enters the landscape, the human will gain an appearance of greater knowledge, meaning greater economic viability at an earlier age. This facade of intelligence becomes the body armor of the age and our smart machines become munitions for combat on the field of economic dominance. In an apparent second, humanity has discovered a new form of war gained by adorning ourselves with the fashions of GPT.