Friday 19 April 2019


SUPERFICIAL INTELLIGENCE




Dave Randle

Putting a lower case ‘i’ in front of something or labelling it as ‘smart’ doesn’t really denote the presence of actual intelligence.

That commodity isn’t limited to the shuffling of figures and data of which the contraption might be capable. It involves perception, consciousness, evaluation and understanding.

No machine is capable of any of these human attributes. If it ever seems to be, it is because we are endowing it with our own characteristics.

It is generally easier to recognise this in the written word than in voice synthesisers, satnavs, automated telephone messages and the frightful Alexa, in which we anthropomorphise anything that speaks our language.

I was on a car launch on which the route had been fed into satnavs. Although ours was triggered by the various road going stimuli which would normally cause it to say useful satnavvy things such as ‘turn half left,’ ‘follow the road,’ or ‘leave by the exit’, it said total non-sequiturs such as ‘The Quartermaster’s sergeant will accept delivery.’

Our own satnav has been updated a number of times since a new estate was built, but still doesn’t ‘know’ it’s there. A self driving, so called autonomous, car would have to be overridden by anyone living there who wanted to go home.

Such cars are not autonomous of course. The proprietor has merely abandoned his own autonomy to a programmer who has never driven in that place at that specific time.

The nearest analogy would be a headless cockroach, which continues to obey the last command given before it lost its head until it finally runs out of fuel.

In the course of a day’s real world driving, a person can spot when a child, a dog or a deer might run into the road. He or she can make allowances for foreign registered left hand drive lorries and cars, can make way for ambulances and other emergency vehicles, negotiate cyclists and motorcyclists, funeral cortรจges, tractors, buggies, hedge-cutters and roadworks. His or her modern car might be bristling with sensors and processors, but the only awareness or intelligence present resides with the person.

He or she is able to perceive a problem right then in the present and conceive a solution to it. The machine can only respond to exigencies already programmed into it.

The same goes for ‘diagnostic’ machines, which electronically ‘pick a card’ from an available menu, where once a skilled doctor would use his or her experience.

Computers are great at a lot of things. Their main advantage is their variability. Where once Henry Ford had lines of identical black Model Ts coming off the production line, now different models can be programmed to come off the same line, one after the other, left or right hand drive, petrol or diesel, with just-in-time supply chains and stock control all communicating with each other. Robots can be trained by technicians to repeat certain tasks ad infinitum, until the last skilled trainers are gone.

But a lot of the impetus to do away with intelligence and humanity has to do with self-appointed people playing god. All around us are comic books, movies and TV shows showing weakly humans being terrorised by idiot machines, yet we seem to bow down before them and consent to being dumbed further down and made increasingly irrelevant in our own scheme of things.

The size of a brain is not a measure of intelligence. The brain is a router that passes stuff one way or the other, but it doesn’t need to know what it is.

People say things like ‘my brain is telling me’ this, that or the other. What they mean is they are telling themselves what they already know but going around the houses to do it.

So called ‘artificial intelligence’ is nothing more than sleight of hand. There is no intelligence in the true sense of the word. Just a superficial illusion of some other ‘entity’ than can be blamed.


CLIMATE OF FEAR



Dave Randle

Climate Change: The Facts (BBC1)

I’m always suspicious of ‘facts’.

A fact is a sort of congealed opinion; a conclusion designed to prevent further consideration or discussion.

If the purveyor of the fact feels the need to reinforce it with ‘science proves’ or ‘thousands of scientists all over the world say’ there is even more cause for suspicion. All these imagined authoritative entities are summoned to overwhelm and outrank you.

Mr Attenborough has plenty of authority all by himself. He tells people all sorts of stuff and adoring millions of them believe it without question. He’s even convinced half of his audience that there are too many of them and humanity should be culled to save the ‘natural world’
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While we’re being ironic, without climate change, there would be no life on Earth.

The climate was changing long before the arrival of television - a medium specialising in illusion - and also long before there was machinery to monitor and record it.

‘Climate scientists’ didn’t exist until there was machinery to tell them what to find and what to conclude, so their ‘we’re all doomed’ prognostications are based on their subjugation to algorithms and digits, themselves based on little more than a century of records and projected into a future in which a billion possible variables are ignored.

The advent of television means that people all over the world can witness hurricanes, natural disasters, plagues and famines right there on the screen. The absence of mass media in previous eras doesn’t mean they weren’t occurring. Charles Fort’s ‘Book of the Damned’ catalogues numerous examples from previous centuries culled from local newspaper reports, and there was even a time before newspapers.

Tectonic plates have been dispersing across the planet surface for donkeys’ years, and the ice has been freezing and melting in cycles
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Water is unusual in expanding when it turns from liquid to solid state - i.e. freezes. So, by my reckoning, if coastal ice melts, its volume will reduce and the coastline it was forming will recede, so the effect on global sea levels should be minimal. It will have gained some liquid water, but lost the weight of the iceberg. But, of course, I’m not a climate scientist.

Although any mention of the term intelligent design would cause his hair to stand on end, the great puppet master bandies others like ‘eco-system’ and ‘Mother Nature’ about like others of the Darwinian faith.

An eco-system is not merely a combination of scientific nomenclatures, but all life working toward persistence. There are already reported signs of brown areas of the planet ‘greening up’ to take advantage of the ready supply of CO2.

It was notable from this production that most of the climate science types believe that a stick rather than a carrot is the way to herd us cats. Penalise the punter for buying a super economical diesel and get him to stump up for an uncertain electric thing that charges up with power generated from fossil fuels.

The power industry is there to be an industry. That’s why nobody listened to Nikola Tesla.

A science that is ‘settled’ is a dead science or no science at all. When a science becomes an industry, it does so to serve itself, as in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, whose science was ‘settled’ before anyone found out about the immune system. They promised salvation and delivered ‘scientific’ crimes against humanity and life in general.

But the poison industries are already starting to feel it where it hurts and more people are communicating with each other across national and political boundaries than ever before. As this goes forward, the grip of the propagandist mainstream media loosens and peace might even eventually break out.

We must work for more understanding and become better custodians of our planet, but we can certainly achieve that without the doom and gloom and hogwash.


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