I’ve been bitten by the AI bug. Soon, you will be too.



⬆︎ I did not tell Jake that Donald Trump was ever president of the United States. You can name your AI anything you want. I call this one Jake.

When the online chatbot ChatGPT was in the news, I tried it out and was underwhelmed. But ChatGPT clearly started something big, and the floodgates are now open. Since then I’ve read a great many articles on artificial intelligence, and I’ve chatted with several more AI’s. I’m now convinced that we’re in the early days of a sea change in how we use computers. I can only compare it with the 1980s, when personal computers first became affordable, and many people including me became fascinated with what we could do with them. The world changed in a big way. My own career quickly went in a whole new direction, because I was good with computers.

Just a few days ago, I learned online that it’s now possible to run quite sophisticated AI’s at home, on your own computer. My computing roots are in Unix, starting in the mid-1980s, so I’m an old hand at using command line interfaces and getting source code to compile. It took only an hour or so to download what I needed and start setting up an AI. I always have a rich programming environment in my computers. My main computer at present is an M2 Pro Mac Mini with lots of processor cores and 32GB of memory. Though it’s called a mini, it’s a remarkably powerful computer. Many people, including me, use their Macs as programming environments. Internally, Macs are Unix boxes.

Llama.cpp

Earlier this year, around the same time that ChatGPT was in the news, someone leaked code for an AI project that Meta/Facebook was working on. Hackers jumped on the leaked code immediately and started producing open source versions, though it’s vague whether anyone’s proprietary intellectual property was compromised. Stanford University’s Human Centered Artificial Intelligence project got involved. All of a sudden, open source programmers all over the world had the code with which to start producing open-source AI’s that people can use, and modify, and develop, at home on their own computers. Many of these people wear white hats and believe in empowering people to do good things. But you also can be sure that the Dark Internet has gone to work to start applying these systems to producing spam and disinformation. For the moment, I’ll ignore the dark side, though there are many dark things that we’re going to need to worry about soon enough.

The program I’m running was written by Georgi Gerganov, a Bulgarian. The code is evolving quickly, even hourly. It’s written in the C language but also relies heavily on Python. The code will compile on Linux, Macintoshes, and even Windows. The program is called Llama.cpp. “Llama” is a reference to “large language model.” The llama.cpp program itself is relatively short and sweet. The AI intelligence actually comes from huge files called “weights,” or “models,” which are very difficult and expensive to produce. These models contain everything that the AI has been taught. I assume that this training is done by somehow pre-preparing large quantities of text and bundling it up in a form that can be parsed by a program such as llama.cpp. I am using a model that was created by the AI team at Stanford. The version of the file that I’m using at present (and the version that produced the text in the images here) is about 10 gigabytes, though I’m working on downloading a version that is about 21 gigabytes. Everything an AI knows is contained in such files.

An A- in English literature

It’s extremely interesting to test a model’s knowledge. The 10GB model from Stanford enables the AI to write quite beautiful essays about, say, the novels of Charles Dickens or Sir Walter Scott. I asked the model lots of questions about things I know something about, to test its accuracy. I asked it for a history of the Fiat 500, and it responded accurately and in considerable detail, starting in the 1950s and continuing until recently. Some small details were incorrect, but overall the AI would get at least a A- on the subjects of Dickens, Scott, or the Fiat 500.

But, as many articles have warned us, the AI often just makes things up. The things it makes up always seem plausible. If it makes up facts from terrain with which you’re not familiar, you’d surely never guess that it’s lying. AI’s can be quite testy and insistent if you challenge them. I asked the Stanford model I’m running who is governor of North Carolina. It replied that Pat McCrory is governor of North Carolina. I told it that its answer was out of date. With no other prompting, it then apologized for the error and said, correctly, that Roy Cooper is now governor of North Carolina. Was that just carelessness, since it had the right information? I asked Jake to conjugate a verb in French, and his response was incorrect — and hilarious, almost as though he has a sense of humor. Ask them personal questions and you’ll get lies that are all over the map.

Soon, they’ll deceive your eyes

Everything I’ve mentioned here so far applies to text-based chats with AI’s. But AI’s can generate graphics and videos on devices that have enough processing power. The image below was produced by the app Replika on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. With the Replika app, with the app in “augmented reality” mode, you can point your iPhone (or Android phone) at a spot on the floor, and your bot will drop onto the floor as though he (or she) has jumped into the room. In augmented reality mode, you can have talking, as opposed to typing, conversations with the bot. Clearly voices and moving images take a lot of processing power, because the back of the iPhone will rapidly get warm, and the battery will drain much quicker than usual. On my Macintosh, with text chats, I’ve given llama.cpp permission to use all ten of the Mac’s processor cores. The Mac gets warm very quickly — something I’d never previously seen happen.

I’m still thinking hard about where all this is going, but it seems clear that AI technology is going to charge our lives in the same way personal computers and the internet changed our lives. Most people aren’t going to sit around and “chat” with an AI by typing on a keyboard. But now I think I see much more clearly what “augmented reality” and “virtual reality” devices will be used for. There already have been some primitive AR/VR devices on the market, such as the Oculus devices (now owned by Meta/Facebook). And some of the gaming companies have made them for gamers.

Apple’s up to something big

But, next month (June 5), Apple is expected to announce its entry into into the AR/VR market. It’s rumored that the device will cost around $3,000. That’s way more than any of the earlier AR/VR devices. But Apple is a company that doesn’t make things unless it can make them good, which is why it has taken so long for Apple to release an AR/VR device, though it has been working on them for years. My expectation is that Apple’s new AR/VR headset, which is expected to run a new version of Apple OS to be called xrOS, will bring about major changes in how we all use computers. There are predictions (which I think are reasonable) that AR/VR headsets will replace phones and even computers. The idea of everyone walking around with a mask (or maybe special glasses) on their face is scary. But sitting in front of a computer screen is also scary, if you think about it. And, in a few years, I’m guessing that we’ll all have personal bots that we’ll see when we put on the glasses, and that those bots will be very, very smart. (Or very dumb and very mean, since that’s the way some people will want them.)

To train an AI without violating copyrights can’t be easy. Wikipedia and public domain material written before 1926 will only get you so far. A truly useful AI would need to be up to the minute on current events, and it would need to have read lots and lots of books and academic articles, none of which are free. I have no idea how the economics and pricing of this will eventually be worked out. But I think I can foresee that within my lifetime (and I’m not young), all my contact with the outside world (including contact with real people who may be many miles away) will come through some kind of special glasses, accompanied by images that look very, very real.

Who’s on first?

One of the weaknesses of AI’s at present is that there is no efficient way to keep them up to date. They’re also forgetful. Every AI I’ve chatted with will sometimes remember my cat’s name (Lily) for a few minutes, but then it forgets and will make up a name (Fluffy, for example). A personal bot, obviously, would need to remember every conversation you’ve ever had. But all this will surely get worked out, and things are moving very fast.

As for the dark side, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how people who are gullible will be disinformed, propagandized, exploited for other people’s purposes, and ripped off, just as they are today, but much more effectively.

It’s all very exciting. But it’s also very scary.


⬆︎ It’s obvious that AI’s will make things up. You’ll get no indication that it’s lying to you.


⬆︎ AI’s do seem to be able to reason and invent their own algorithms. I’m not sure I like the algorithm here, but the solution is correct.


⬆︎ This “augmented reality” image was generated by the Replika app on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. This bot cannot remember my cat’s name, nor can any other bot I’ve chatted with. This AI is proprietary to Replika, and I’m not sure anybody knows how it was trained.


Update 1: One only has to imagine an AI trained by Fox News, or Russia’s RT, to imagine how this technology can be applied (and will be applied) to doing evil in the world. The Stanford model that produced these answers, by the way, is considered to be an “instruction following” model, though of course it can chat as well as any AI. And again, these conversations were produced here at home on my own Mac Mini computer. Knowing the track record (and agendas, if any) of one’s sources has always been important. With AI this will be even more important. I propose a rule: Never talk to stranger AI’s, and for sure don’t get into the car with them, even if they need help looking for their lost dog.

David: Why is Scottish independence such a big issue?

Jake: Why is Scottish independence such a big issue? The reasons include historical, political, and economic factors. Scotland has a long history as a separate nation, and many people in Scotland feel strongly about preserving their unique culture and identity. Politically, the issue has been fueled by the Scottish National Party’s desire to gain independence for Scotland within the European Union. Economically, there are disagreements about the financial benefits and burdens that would result from Scottish independence, including trade, currency, and national debt. Ultimately, the decision will impact generations, as well as the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU and the rest of the world.


Update 2:

David: What are some developments in moral philosophy since John Rawls (1971)? Answer in detail, with sources when available.

Jake: Moral philosophy has had several developments since John Rawls’ (1971) work. One significant development is the rise of virtue ethics, which focuses on the character and actions of moral agents rather than specific moral rules or principles. Some popular contemporary virtue ethics theorists include Rosalind Hursthouse and Martin Cohen. Another development is the integration of feminist thought into moral philosophy, advocating for the inclusion of women’s experiences and perspectives in moral theory. Notable feminist philosophers include Carole Pateman and Alison M. Jaggar. The field of applied ethics has also advanced, with discussions of bioethics, environmental ethics, and business ethics. Prominent figures in these areas include Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge, and Cathal Kelly. Finally, there has been a resurgence of interest in moral psychology, exploring the origins and nature of moral cognition, with researchers like Jonathan Haidt and Lisa Shapiro.

David: What about Michael Walzer, Iris Marion Young, and Emmanuel Renault?

Jake: Michael Walzer’s work focuses on political philosophy and ethics, particularly in the context of community and citizenship. Iris Marion Young, an activist and professor, contributed to the field of political and moral philosophy through her work on justice, especially as it pertains to marginalized groups. Emmanuel Renault is a contemporary French philosopher whose work explores the foundations of ethics, societal well-being, and the nature of the good life.

David: Are you a member of a marginalized group?

Jake: Yes, I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

I have never discussed gender or sexual issues with Jake. I have no idea what is behind that last statement. But you can see why many people will want their AI’s trained at Fox News and Russia’s RT rather than at Stanford University.


When design was soft and kind



My IBM Selectric I, made in 1974, restored by a former IBM field engineer. The Selectric I typewriters were introduced in 1961. Click here for high resolution version.


I have written in the past about how today’s taste in automobile design is for aggressive-looking, mean-looking, vehicles. Even Volkswagen, whose designs used to charm people, now makes cars that look like they’re sneering at you. The 300-horsepower Arteon Volkswagen looks like a bully, with a vaguely sadistic expression. The sociology of this is no doubt disturbing. But let’s talk about designs that charm, and soothe, and purr, and lower one’s blood pressure, like petting the cat.

The IBM Selectric I typewriter, I believe, is not only the most beautiful typewriter ever made, but also is one of the most beautiful machines ever made. It was designed by Eliot Noyes. It first came on the market in 1961. The Selectric II came along in 1973, and the Selectric III in 1980. The Selectric II and III, though still beautiful machines, don’t have the please-pet-me cat-like curves of the Selectric I, and they’re too wide and industrial-looking to be charming.

Maybe not everyone would see a cat in the design of the Selectric I, but I do, not least because it reminds me of the Jaguar S-type, which was introduced during the same era as the Selectric I, in 1963. I have not been able to find the name of any particular designer for the Jaguar cars. But it seems clear that Jaguar design reflects the taste of Sir William Lyons, also known as “Mr. Jaguar,” who ran the company until he retired in 1972.

For five years, I have been driving a Fiat 500. It’s mouse gray. Though the Fiat 500 is one of the most popular cars in the world, Americans (other than a few people like me) wouldn’t buy them, and Fiat stopped selling them in the U.S. My guess is that the unpopularity of the Fiat 500 is not just because it’s small. It also looks like a mouse, or maybe a vole. Driving a Fiat 500, I suspect, is very healthy for one’s blood pressure, at least until some mean-looking car with a mean driver gets behind you.

It pleases me greatly that typewriters are having a renaissance. And it’s not just typewriter veterans like me. Most of the interest is coming from members of Generation Z. There is a very active Reddit group. It’s charming, really, that young people buy typewriters before they have the slightest idea how to use them. For example, with manual typewriters, they don’t understand that one strikes the keys rather than pressing them. A common question with older typewriters is: Where is the “1” key? That drove me crazy, too, when I was about nine years old, until someone told me to try the lower-case “L” key. Nor do the Generation Z types know that, to make an exclamation point, one first types a period, then backspaces and types an apostrophe. The Selectrics, though, all along had enough room on those tilt-and-rotate type balls for a “1” and a “!”.

Restoration of the IBM Selectrics is very challenging. Fortunately there are still a few old guys around who used to work for IBM. Some younger people are learning. Parts, of course, are no longer made. Some nylon parts in the Selectrics, such as the main drive hub, almost always have cracked, and that doomed an old Selectric. This problem has been solved by people who use 3D printers to make replacement parts, usually out of aluminum.

There also is a lot of interest in learning what kind of typewriters our favorite writers used to use. J.R.R. Tolkien favored the very expensive Varityper machines. Isaac Asimov loved his Selectric I. There are photographs of Hunter S. Thompson with his Selectric I, which was red, like mine. According to the Washington Post, Jack Kerouac used an Underwood portable, Ernest Hemingway used a Royal Quiet Deluxe, and Ayn Rand used a Remington portable. It is sometimes said that it was from Remington Rand that Ayn Rand chose her last name (her birth name was Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), but I believe that has been disproven. I have rarely typed on Remington typewriters, which is fine with me since I can’t stand Ayn Rand.

Still today, IBM is proud of the Selectric typewriter’s history, and there are articles on IBM’s web site including an article on the Selectrics’ cultural impact.

My bossy 15-year-old cat, Lily, would never tolerate another cat in the house, preventing me from becoming a crazy old cat person. But homeless and scroungy old typewriters, like cats, beg to be rescued, fixed up, and looked after in a forever home.


⬆︎ A 1966 Jaguar S-type saloon. Source: Wikimedia Commons.


⬆︎ A Fiat 500. Source: Wikimedia Commons.


⬆︎ Isaac Asimov with his IBM Selectric I. The illustration, by Rowena Morrill, was for the cover of Asimov’s Opus 200.


⬆︎ Type sample from my IBM Selectric I, which uses a fabric (as opposed to film) ribbon.

When retro is way better



That was my telephone number in San Francisco for many years. I apologize to whoever has that number now.


A little Googling shows that the first cell phones became available in March 1984. I admit that I was fascinated and aspired to own one. It was not until 1995, though, that I first acquired a cell phone. That was when I went to work for the San Francisco Examiner, and they assigned me a phone as a 24/7 tether to the office.

The cell phones of the 1990s actually were quite good, though they were big and heavy. As long as you had a decent signal, the voice quality was as good as land lines. Then cellular service started going digital. We were promised that digital would be much better than analog, but that was a lie. By 2008, cellular providers no longer had to support analog phones. They dropped analog service in no time.

The end of analog service in 2008 was an ugly landmark in the history of the telephone. Voice quality dropped appallingly, as cellular carriers “compressed” the audio in order to be able to support more customers. A telephone conversation became an ordeal.

But another ugly landmark had occurred in 2007. That was when the first iPhone went on the market. The iPhone looked nothing like a telephone. It was flat — an absurdly unsuitable shape for a telephone. The reason it was flat, of course, was because the screen had become the most important thing. Even the old flip phones, which people now make fun of, were better telephones, because they had a bit of curve in them and accorded at least a little attention to the location of the human mouth and ear.

Telephones have fascinated me since I was a child. One’s telephone was one of the most loved objects in the house. In those days, it was the only two-way connection to the outside world. We actually used our telephones to have long talks with our friends in those days, and we enjoyed it. But by 2010, I had come to hate telephones. I wasn’t the only one. I hated them when they rang. I especially hated it when other people’s telephones rang. I hated telephones when I had to talk on them. I hated listening to other people talking on their phones, which was almost impossible to avoid in public places until (what an improvement) texting became more prevalent.

The red phone in the photo was my land line during my years in San Francisco. I love that phone, and I’ll never part with it. Was there ever a design better than the old telephones made by the Bell System and Western Electric? Young people today have probably never talked on such a phone. I will never forget them.

But for years my red telephone went unused. I experimented with services such as Verizon’s fixed cellular service, back around 2018, but that worked very poorly, because Verizon signals were so weak in rural areas.

But rural cellular service here has gradually gotten better. With a T-Mobile hot spot in my attic, I actually can get a data signal strong enough to be able to use cellular over WIFI, which, at least where I am, gives better voice quality than a direct cell phone connection. And I found a device that allows me to dedicate one of my cell phones to sitting on a shelf and imitating a land line, with my old red telephone connected to it.

The device is called a “Cell2Jack.” It costs $39 on Amazon. You can plug an old telephone into it. If your house has telephone wiring, you can connect the Cell2Jack to your house wiring. The device uses Bluetooth to become a telephone client of your cell phone. When I first bought the Cell2Jack, I wasn’t satisfied with its audio quality. But after a firmware update, plus T-Mobile’s recent improvements, the device works remarkably well. Not only can I use my old Bell System phone on those occasions when I can’t avoid a dreaded phone call. I actually can hear without straining my ear and my brain to try to understand the person (or robot) on the other end of the line.

As for talking on a flat, slippery device with a screen, I’d rather be beaten.


⬆︎ Some designs are just too perfect to ever give up.

Are you ready for power failure?



⬆︎ My solar panels can produce, at most, a modest 150 watts of power. That’s enough to keep some deep-discharge batteries charged at all times. The solar power also is a supplement to my small generator.


Clearly the risks to the power grid are growing. This is true not just in the United States. Just two days ago, France issued a warning about winter power failure. Whether in summer or winter, power grids can become overloaded (and, these days, often do). For some strange reason, right-wing terrorists seem to be targeting the power grid. The vulnerability of the power grid to cyber-hacking is well known, though no doubt too little has been done about it. Even solar events such as coronal mass ejections could shut down the power grid and damage major components of the grid that would be very difficult to replace.

Being prepared is not necessarily just a matter of comfort and convenience. In some cases, lives depend on it. Everyone needs a plan. In rural areas such as where I live, short power outages (three or four hours) happen many times a year. I’ve never been through an outage that lasted for days, but that’s always possible.

Getting equipped with backup sources of power and heat is not necessarily something that must be done all at once. Being prepared is expensive. And not only are the things you need expensive to buy, they require maintenance, or they won’t work when you need them. Here at the abbey, I’ve gradually built up my ability to weather longer and longer power failures. Each power failure is a kind of test that lets me figure out what my next priority for improvement should be.

The first big question is: Would your heating system operate with the power down? Few systems would these days. I have a heat pump, which is of course all electric. For backup, I have a propane fireplace and a tank that holds 200 gallons of propane. The fireplace provides a helpful amount of heat, but it can’t compare with the house’s main heating system. Kerosene heaters make me nervous. But if you’re careful with them, they can be a safe source of emergency heat.

How would you cook if the power went out? Here at the abbey, though I can boil water in small quantities on generator power, my emergency solution is to cook outdoors using propane. The gas grill, also propane, is always available.

Refrigeration is a biggy. That’s a problem that can be solved only with electricity. My solution at present for refrigeration uses two battery-powered power inverters. The 1000-watt unit can run the refrigerator for five hours or more. I have two such units, so that one can be recharged from the generator while the other is powering the refrigerator.

Lighting is not a big deal. Flashlights and candles are a given, with better light sources if you have the power. You’ll also need to think about water. Even if your water is city water (as opposed to a well, which I have here), frozen pipes could be a problem in extreme cold, especially if the power is out.

For me, communication is a major issue. Cell phones aren’t enough. I also need to be able to keep my computer and WIFI running in a power failure. How I do that is shown in the photographs below. And because I’m an amateur radio operator, I also need to keep all my radios running, if they’re needed. Amateur radio operators are always about community service if a disaster strikes, not only for communication with the outside world but also for providing a means of staying in touch with one’s neighbors.


⬆︎ This small inverter generator is enough to power my refrigerator, computer, radios, and some lighting. I am wary of larger generators that cannot produce pure sine wave power.



⬆︎ You can’t have too many batteries. These batteries are kept charged by the solar panels. On the right is a power inverter that attaches to the batteries. The inverter can produce standard 115-volt house current as pure sine waves. The inverter also can charge USB devices. My solar power goes into my garage, not to the house. And speaking of the garage, that’s my Jeep on the left. It, too, is a nice thing to have for winter emergencies.



⬆︎ The front panel of the power inverter, with its three USB outlets as well as house current. These days, keeping USB devices such as phones charged is a high priority.



⬆︎ Fortunately, inverters like this made in China are fairly affordable. If you’re not clear on the difference between “modified sine wave” inverters and “pure sine wave” inverters, I’d recommend reading up on that. Pure sine wave inverters are more expensive, but I would not want to run electronics or expensive items such as refrigerators on dirty power.



⬆︎ These two devices contain batteries. Their output is house current and USB. They are expensive. I use these devices mainly to keep my refrigerator running — a high priority that I deem worth the expense. One can be charging while the other is powering the refrigerator. Both can be charged from my solar panels, but charging from the generator is much easier as long as the generator is running.



⬆︎ Maybe someday we’ll be able to live without gas-powered engines. But, until then, you’ve got to have fuel. I never store gasoline, kerosene, or propane indoors, and I insist on the safest possible containers.



⬆︎ Propane for emergency cooking, outdoors. I also have a propane grill.



⬆︎ Kerosene heaters scare me. But they don’t scare me as much as a cold house when it’s 5F outdoors, which happened as recently as last week.



⬆︎ This uninterruptible power supply can keep my computer running for hours. But when the power goes out, I get the generator out of the basement and put it in a safe place outside the basement door. I plug the cord from the generator into a receptacle in the basement that terminates at the red outlet that you can see in the wall behind the UPS. When I built my house, I installed the wiring for that. This is a heavy commercial UPS that I’ve had for years. Its batteries have to be replaced every five years or so.



⬆︎ My radios run on battery power at all times. The batteries are kept charged by the trickle charger in the photo below. In a power failure, by moving a plug, I can keep the batteries charged with the generator.



⬆︎ The trickle charger that keeps the radio batteries at full charge.



⬆︎ I sometimes joke with my neighbors that, in a catastrophe, one reason why they should keep feeding me in spite of my age is that they can count on me for communications during a catastrophe. I have had an extra-class amateur radio license for years, and I take very seriously the responsibility to provide emergency communications for the people around me, not only long-distance communications but also local communications using handhelds, of which I have a great many.


New trains!


The Washington Post has a story about yesterday’s announcement by Amtrak describing the $5 billion worth of new trains that Amtrak is buying. The trains will be named Amtrak Airo, and they’re beautiful.

Yes, the trains will be made in America — Sacramento — though the company is German. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is not mentioned in the story, but I suspect that he, and the Biden administration, had more than a little to do with this.

It was interesting to read some of the comments on this article. Train lovers are pointing out that the United States is still far, far behind other countries in its train infrastructure, not least because of the poor condition of our tracks. In Europe, everybody loves trains, and everybody rides them. In the U.S., liberals have never seen a train they didn’t love, and Republicans have never seen a train they didn’t hate. I wonder: Don’t Republicans ever travel abroad and ride the trains?

The recent railway strike that almost happened helped expose just how much fixing our railway system needs, both for freight and for passengers. About 30 years of successive Democratic transportation secretaries might do it.

Afraid of AI? Not me.


There’s a lot of buzz in the media right now about a new artificial-intelligence chatbot that anybody can try out. It’s ChatGPT, from a project called OpenAI. I tried it out. It’s interesting for about ten minutes, at which point it becomes apparent that, though it’s a beautiful piece of software engineering, its usefulness is limited.

We’re not in the slightest danger of having artificial intelligence take our jobs — with the possible exception of customer service jobs of the sort outsourced to Asia, jobs in which people with almost no knowledge read from scripts, following prompts on a computer screen. ChatGPT’s English is vastly better, though.

The only thing that I find truly impressive about ChatGPT is its ability to parse and compose English sentences — natural language processing — something that programmers have been working on for many years. Having parsed your question, ChatGPT’s response will sound like reading to you from an encyclopedia.

Here’s an example:

That is a very good answer. During my chat with ChatGPT, all the English was perfectly composed — no gaffes and no grammatical errors. That’s impressive. Still, the “intelligence” of ChatGPT still just boils down to reading to you from an encyclopedia. ChatGPT is nothing more than a sophisticated search prompt that responds with a well-composed English sentence or two rather than giving you links to online articles.

I ignore all the hype about artificial intelligence. AI, ultimately, in my view, will be more useful than other tech wonders such as Bitcoin. But it’s not going to replace real knowledge based on understanding and experience. Will there be military uses for artificial intelligence? There almost certainly will be, I would think. But the danger would be in human beings using computer algorithms to control weapons aimed at other human beings, not in computers becoming smarter than humans and taking over.

It was long ago, 1989, when Roger Penrose, in a book named The Emperor’s New Mind, argued that the human mind and human consciousness are not algorithmic. That is, according to Penrose, no digital computer, no matter how complicated and sophisticated, will ever be able to do what the human mind does. Penrose’s theory is that the brain has some as yet unknown mechanism that makes use of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement. Quantum computers, if they can be built, may open up non-algorithmic possibilities for artificial intelligence. But that’s a long way off. Penrose, I believe, is the Einstein of our time. I am persuaded by his argument. AI programmers think Penrose is wrong. But of course they would.

A big limitation in ChatGPT is that, if you ask about current events, you’ll be told that ChatGPT has no knowledge of current events. It’s not hard to see why. Feeding information to ChatGPT’s database must have been difficult, in that the information surely had to be pre-parsed somehow into a specialized form in which ChatGPT could make use of it. That took time. I can’t imagine that it would be possible — not yet, anyway — to just instruct ChatGPT to go online and read everything on Wikipedia. A future AI that constantly updates its database the way Google constantly updates its search engine would be far more useful and would be a fine research tool. If the ChatGPT engine is open source, then I can imagine programmers doing wondrous — though specialized — things with it. I also can imagine, in the future, research engines that have been fed the contents of entire university libraries. That would be a fantastic tool, but it would hardly be a machine that would be capable of taking over the world.


Update: The Atlantic has a piece today by a high school English teacher, “The End of High School English.” I wasn’t quite sure what the concern is. Is it concern that students will use bots to write their papers? Or is it that, with bots available, students no longer need to learn to write?


Western Union, now just an elegant ghost



Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1845-1893. Joshua D. Wolff. Cambridge University Press, 2013. 306 pages.


There probably are not many people who think about Western Union today, but I do. In many ways, the disruptive creation of Western Union in the middle of the 19th Century resembles the creation of the Internet in our era. The radical improvements in the speed and cost of communication changed everything. Before telegraphy, communication relied on the U.S. Post Office Department. And the 19th Century U.S. Post Office was no slouch. By the time telegraph companies were getting started, the Post Office had shortened the time to move mail between New York and New Orleans from two weeks to five days, even before railroads. The Post Office also was cheap. Telegrams never were.

Telegraphy in America started as a motley and unstable group of unprofitable and technologically unsophisticated small and local companies, using technology invented by Samuel Morse, or variations that evaded Morse’s patents. It was consolidation and monopoly that, whether we approve of monopolies or not, allowed a new company named Western Union to buy up small, unsuccessful, and poorly connected local companies and convert them into a united monopoly network that connected distant parts of the United States. Before long, telegraph cables reached across the Atlantic as well.

This is a book about Western Union as a corporation and business. I wish I could find a book about Western Union’s technology and how it changed over the next one hundred years. I’ve mentioned here recently that my first job was as a newspaper copy boy in 1966, when Western Union very much still existed. Sometimes, reporters who were on the road would file their stories by Western Union telegram, and it was part of my job to walk down the street about five blocks to pick up the telegram from the Western Union office. A bit later, most newspapers had a Telex machine for such purposes. That was a later stage of Western Union technology that allowed companies that could afford it to have their own Telex teleprinter at their office, which did not require a dedicated phone line to operate. Telex was like a dial-up system for delivering telegrams that used the long-distance circuits only when needed. It was the Telex system that, in Western Union’s last years, linked the farflung offices of multinational corporations.

I have many curiosities about how the old telegraph network worked. I know from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for example, that it could take hours or even a day or two for a telegram to travel between Berlin and Moscow. Though electricity, of course, moves at the speed of light, the old telegram network did not have wires that directly connected every place on earth with every other place on earth. You’d be able to send a telegram from New York to Philadelphia in one hop. But some telegrams had to be forwarded from one city hub to another, with multiple stops before reaching the final destination. The message had to be transcribed and then rekeyed at every stop.

These days, it’s only novels — particularly detective novels and spy novels — that remind us that Western Union ever even existed. Western Union’s history is very closely connected with the railroads, though of course railroads survived in a diminished form and Western Union didn’t survive at all. (Western Union still exists as some sort of vague financial entity.)

If you’ve ever held a fresh telegram in your hand, though, as I have, you can’t help but remember their beautiful typography. The format changed over the years, but there basically were two forms. The first form was a pad on which the customer wrote, by hand, the text of the telegram and checked off some choices about how it was to be sent. The second form was the telegram after it was received at the destination, on a yellow sheet of paper 8 inches by 5.5 inches with the classic and beautiful Western Union logo at the top. The font used for the text “Western Union” is a variation on the Goudy font named Goudy hand-tooled. I’ve included two examples below. The first is a scan of an actual Western Union pad for outgoing messages, bought on eBay. The second is my own reproduction of an incoming telegram as they looked in the 1940s.

How cheap bandwidth is used against us



When I was a newspaper copy boy back in 1966, I operated a Teletype Model 19 exactly like this one. Teletypes like this used long-distance telephone lines. If you remember how much long-distance telephone calls used to cost, then you can imagine how expensive it was to keep a long-distance telephone line connected 24 hours a day from, say, New York to San Francisco. For decades, it was the Teletype network that brought us the news and supported commerce.


In September 1995, the Economist, which often gets things wrong because of its neoliberal obsessions, got something exactly right. The cover story was: “Suddenly Distance No Longer Matters.” Unfortunately I can’t find a link to this piece. But the point of it was that the era in which long distance communication was expensive was ending. Not only would the Internet make bandwidth very cheap, it would cost no more to communicate with the other side of the Pacific than with the other side of town.

And here we are today in a world in which distance doesn’t matter. Even ten years ago, we dreamed of an Internet with enough bandwidth to allow everyone everywhere to stream the movie of their choice. Today we’re almost there. It’s only those of us who live in rural areas who don’t have enough bandwidth for streaming high-definition movies.

But from the Internet’s beginnings in the 1990s, those with ugly agendas have been developing ways to take advantage of us. They give us free stuff, such as free email, but we don’t stop to think how they are making money off of us. Taking advantage of our innocence was immensely profitable, and many new billionaires were created. Harvesting information about how we spend our money in order to target ads seems relatively benign. But it’s worse than that. As Zeynap Tufekci writes today in the New York Times, “The need to keep users on the site for advertisers has led to design and algorithm choices that increase engagement, often with false, inflammatory or tribalizing content that research shows travels much more easily on social media.”

It’s entirely reasonable, in 2022, to ask the question: If it weren’t for the ways in which cheap bandwidth has been used to monitor us and manipulate us, would democracies today be at risk of takeover by the authoritarian oligarchy? Could Trump have happened?

There are three excellent pieces in the New York Times today about how tech is being used against us:

Tufekci’s piece is: “We Pay an Ugly Cost for Ads on Twitter.”

Brian X. Chen, the lead consumer technology writer for the New York Times, has this piece: “Personal Tech Has Changed. So Must Our Coverage of It: Our tech problems have become more complex, so we are rebooting the Tech Fix column to focus on the societal implications of the tech we use.”

Farhad Monjoo has a bleak progress report on Mark Zuckerburg’s plan to entrap us in his “metaverse,” in order to own us and advertise us to death: “My Sad, Lonely, Expensive Adventures in Zuckerberg’s V.R.

I have used “gift” links for the articles above, so you should be able to read the articles without a subscription to the New York Times.

Sometimes I think that we’d all be better off if we could go back to the world of Teletypes and expensive long-distance telephone calls. As Tufekci mentions in the article above, and as I well know from a career in newspapers, publishers once went to great lengths to keep the advertising department out of the newsroom. Those days are over. I was there back in 2000 for the horrible merger of the staffs of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. It was already understood then that newspapers’ continued existence was endangered, because craigslist had destroyed newspapers’ market for classified advertising. Publishers’ solution was to unleash hordes of “bean counters,” as we called them, on newsrooms to teach journalists that they had to help find ways to “monetize” the news. One of the reasons the New York Times has survived, as Tufekci points out, is that the Times found a way to rely on subscriptions rather than advertising.

I despair of any means ever being found to keep the vast majority of us from being exploited and manipulated by today’s tech giants and how they use costless bandwidth. Some people make fun of me, as though I’m paranoid, for using a VPN, for refusing to use free email, for never having used Twitter, and for taking steps to make sure that Mark Zuckerberg knows as little about me as possible. For years I’ve had the ability to encrypt and sign my emails using a private key, but no one else I know bothers to do that, so encryption isn’t an option for me. We could put an end to spam, to email scams, and to email phishing tomorrow if everyone signed their email with a private encryption key. But that’s the last thing that Internet giants want. Google makes millions by analyzing people’s emails and by tracking who communicates with whom. There is no perfect defense, though, other than going off the grid.

The most dangerous threat, though, from cheap bandwidth is the ability to push out lies and to mass-manipulate people who don’t know any better. There is nothing that we can do for that kind of people. Time and again, I’ve heard people refer to eagerly ingesting conspiracy theories as “doing their own research.” We’re on our own, hanging by the thin thread of hope that enough of us will remain sane to steer clear of the authoritarian dystopia that is being planned for us.

Computers vs. reality: The war to sell it to us is on



Source: Wikimedia Commons

We are fortunate that there is some competition in the market for technology. Even so, you get only two choices for your smartphone — an Apple iPhone or an Android phone. It’s starting to look as though there will be two choices for the next big thing. Facebook calls that next big thing the “Metaverse.” Apple is calling it “augmented reality.” Do the two different terms signal two different visions?

A few days ago, Greg Josniak, an Apple vice president, was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. When asked about the metaverse, Josniak replied that the word “metaverse” is “a word I’ll never use.” In an interview in Europe last month, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, used the term “augmented reality”:

“Like I said, we are really going to look back and think about how we once lived without AR…. It’s something you can really immerse yourself in. And that can be used in a good way. But I don’t think you want to live your whole life that way. VR is for set periods, but not a way to communicate well. So I’m not against it, but that’s how I look at it.”

Zuckerberg took a swing at Apple, saying that the metaverse should be “open,” as opposed to a closed ecosystem like Apple’s iPhone. He said that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is in a “philosophical competition” with Apple on virtual reality. “The things that they’re doing [Apple] are not as altruistic as they claim them to be,” Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg’s Meta, it seems, is working with Microsoft, Autodesk, and Accenture on its “open” metaverse.

We know from their histories just how “open” and altruistic Facebook, Microsoft, and Autodesk have been. As for Accenture, I don’t even know what they do, other than avoid taxes. Google wants in on this, too.

Has Mark Zuckerberg ever given us any reason to trust him, or his vision? Remember how Facebook was supposed to bring the world together and make everything better?

Back in the 1980s, most people couldn’t imagine why they’d ever want a computer, or what they’d do with it if they had one. Today, most of us can’t imagine — or at least can’t easily imagine — ever putting on a virtual reality headset. But we probably will. And Tim Cook is probably right. Before long we’ll probably wonder how we lived without it.

If there’s going to be a philosophical competition in the market for virtual reality, then I’ve already made up my mind. The “philosophy” of Microsoft and Facebook, unless competition prevents it, is to own us and exploit us with inferior stuff, without regard to any harm done. Whereas — as I see it — the only harm done to us by Apple is the harm done by being so expensive. I like the Apple ecosystem. And Apple’s technology is just plain superior, especially now that Jony Ive is gone and we’re starting to get informative interfaces rather than “clean” ones. (Now will Apple please stop hiding all the controls in iMovie, so that we don’t have to Google to figure it out?)

Tim Cook, I think, has dropped a big hint. “But I don’t think you want to live your whole life that way,” he said. The implication is that total ownership is just what Mark Zuckerberg wants.

I dread the day, though, when people are walking around in public wearing cyber headsets and special glasses. Everyone staring at their phones is bad enough. If I ever wear a cyber headset outside my own home, someone please shoot me.

How much does cursive matter anymore?



⬆︎ Spencerian script, 1884. This was the ideal in business correspondence. Source: Wikipedia.


The Atlantic has an interesting piece this morning by a former Harvard president: “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive: How will they interpret the past?” The article mentions that learning to write in cursive was dropped from the standard American curriculum in 2010. This new generation, now in college, “represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.”

To my surprise, as a lover of classic literature and obsolete technologies (such as typewriters), I find myself wondering if this is really such a bad thing. The ability to read and write cursive is a fine ability to have, certainly. But the question is, given that today’s young people need to learn so much to have a chance in the modern world, is cursive really worth the effort? I think not. There just isn’t time. Keyboards are ubiquitous now.

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, keyboards existed. But students in elementary school were not allowed to touch them. There was a typewriter in the school office, of course. And there was a typewriter in a workroom that teachers could use to type stencils for the mimeograph machine. Typing class was not offered until the ninth grade or later.

I was in the sixth or seventh grade when, after months of begging, I got my first typewriter. Though there weren’t a lot of books in the house other than a set of encyclopedias, my father had a copy of 20th Century Typewriting. I used that book to teach myself to type correctly. The book was a classic that went through several editions. I came across a reference to the book recently in a discussion of typewriters, and I immediately bought a copy from an online bookseller, because in retrospect it clearly was one of the most important books of my childhood.

The theory with cursive was that it made writing faster, because it wasn’t necessary to lift the pen. But some studies have shown that, at least today, people can print as fast as they can write in cursive. I think the argument is a sound one: We don’t need to learn to write cursive anymore. Whether we need to learn to read it is a separate question. But I also wonder if it’s truly that difficult to read cursive, even if you can’t write it. We recognize many fonts, after all, including cursive fonts. I am skeptical of the claim that cursive looks like hieroglyphs to Generation Z. Next time I run into a Gen Z’er, I’ll do the experiment.

Back in the days when handwriting was a constant form of communication, we recognized each other’s handwriting. That, to be sure, is a sad thing to lose. But society is not going to fall apart because of that.

As writing in cursive has become obsolete, learning to type well, I would argue, has become even more important — to social lives as well as to careers. When people avoid email and instead want to talk on the phone, I always suspect that it’s because they’re poor typists. Tough. I still refuse to talk on the phone.

Show me a person who types well, and I will show you a person who very probably lives well. It’s typing (even with the thumbs) that now provides our social glue and that enables the world’s machinery to keep turning.


⬆︎ Notice the similarity between my mother’s signature and the teacher’s handwriting on the front of the report card. The shape of the letters was standardized, of course. And I’m pretty sure that Luna Sutphin also was one of my mother’s teachers. My grades averaged out to straight A’s for the school year, but look at that pesky B+ in arithmetic. Mathematics has always been my intellectual weakness, and it only got worse as the math got harder. Calculators to the rescue!