The Road of Bones
You are hereby reassigned to the Department of Deadwood. Some think AI can be used to abolish government. China thinks AI can abolish both democracy and capitalism.
College graduates are AI replaceable, Woke activists are irreplaceable.
The spring offensives in Ukraine are about to begin, with Putin thought to go for broke to take Kyiv.
Gerard Vanderleun: December 26, 1945 – January 27, 2023
New at the Belmont Club. Are we facing a destructive period of renewal? Or can we finesse our way forward in history?
Continue reading “Our Better Demons”You would have thought the bureaucrats would be among those most easily replaced by automation, but since it is the law of nature that govt never shrinks, it turns out that you can displace radiologists with AI but never a clerk.
The lawyers may eventually lose this one. Automata charges by the microsecond, not by the hour. AI can learn all the routine stuff. What both man and machine will value most in the future is new knowledge, aka information, aka surprise. There will be no end of potential material as the known unknowns grow faster with each new known known.
After the McGonigal story broke, the first question that came to mind was whether he was misdirecting everything. To use a Le Carre analogy: is there a Hans-Dieter Mundt? Some background.
The silent victims of the British serial rapist cop have a lot in common with the impoverished victims of 3rd world extrajudicial executions. It is paralyzing fear of police and state power, not misogyny per se that terrifies them. Expanding the Woke state will not solve the problem.
It’s time for the important things. They will mostly be done for you. God will be with you; your loved ones attend you; your friends pray for you. There are a few preparations you must make alone, but I will follow when the time comes. Your friend Richard.
When you have billions in common, you have a lot in common. My latest on the Pipeline.
Continue reading “A Gathering of the Elect”It’s safe to say the Pantsir air defense going up on Moscow rooftops is not meant to defend against US ICBMs but something else.
Mistrust over the Davos project to reset the world and increasing doubts over whether health authorities fully anticipated the consequences of the anti-Covid MRNA vaccines have dismayed the proponents of governance. Are we facing an era of disorder or just learning to cope with uncertainty?
The era of a unified narrative is probably over, felled not so much by the emergence of conspiracies so much as the explosion of information. There are likely to be multiple narratives going forward, some of which may predominate but rarely as absolutely as before.
Continue reading “Building A Civilization of Discovery”New at the Belmont Club. Maybe the Big Guys would care more about protecting data if they didn’t have all those extra ways of protecting it.
De-globalization must be stopped, environmentalists argue, because only a Global World has the institutional power to stop Climate Change. Without world government the planet is doomed.
Conventional wisdom since Brave New World held that technology would make it easier for hierarchies to control things. What was less appreciated was technology would also increase complexity and surprise hierarchies with emergent phenomena. What is the net effect?
The recent results of the global world vs Covid are significant because they are a reasonable proxy and predictor for the outcome of World Govt vs Climate Change project, except that Climate is a far more complex system than Covid.
Continue reading “Control vs Adaptation”Maybe we are living in a partial simulation with the parts we sense indirectly only through the media and the network consisting of complete fakes.
I am fairly sure the keyboard under my fingers is real, but how do I know whether Elizabeth Warren is tribal, George Santos matriculated from Baruch or Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream freezer truly exists? I know. I’ll check the papers! If it’s on TV it must be true.
Continue reading “The True Newspaper”CS Lewis observed that our wishes, no less than our acts, are part of agency. Desires, petitions and prayers are not less futile than works simply because they may not succeed. Longing is legitimate in an interactive world and we should dare to live; dare to pray.
Lewis returns to the theme of the poverty of modern desire in the Weight of Glory; that the limits of modern longing are too often restricted to sex, drugs and consumption. Yet it surprisingly explains the air of grimness prevalent in Woke ideology.
There’s been a sea-change in our zeitgeist, gone in a generation from Freeman Dyson’s observation that the universe was waiting for us to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement; that we have no right to desire for we are too low for that.
Perhaps the greatest factor in the saga of human survival comes of the stubborn quest for what Lewis calls “our own far off country”. It led us on and on; in closing the door on prayer and longing we can shut off the last glimpse of it, finally grateful for the turn of the key.
The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors by Dan Jones. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Dan Jones tells the true story of the Templars for the first time in a generation, drawing on extensive original sources to build a gripping account of these Christian holy warriors whose heroism and alleged depravity have been shrouded in myth. Jones brings their dramatic tale to life in a book that is at once authoritative and compulsively readable.
Kathy Hochul tried to color it Green, but Bitcoin is the color of money.
How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future, Kindle Edition by Vaclav Smil. Drawing on the latest science and tackling sources of misinformation head on, Vaclav Smil explains the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity – from energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to our environment and its future. This book offers a much-needed reality check and answers the most profound question of our age: are we irrevocably doomed or is a brighter utopia ahead?
