AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH

Amusing Ourselves to Death is the title of an incredibly good book by Mr. Neil Postman.  The book is a marvelous look at the differences between Orwell and Huxley and their forecast as to conditions in the early 20^th century.  Now, you may think this book, and consequently the theme of this book, will be completely uninteresting and a bit far-fetched but it actually describes our social condition right now. 

I’m going to do something a little different with this post.  I’m going to present, in bullet form, lines of text and passages from the book so you will get a flavor of what Mr. Postman is trying to say.  Keep in mind, these passages are in the book and do not necessarily represent my opinions—although very close and right on in some cases.  (Please see the quotes about our Presidential elections.)  Here we go.

• What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no one who wanted to read one.
• The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination.  It is, quite precisely, a media event.  We tend to watch fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversations.    Without a medium to create its form, the news of the day does not exist.
• Beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. With the invention of the clock, eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. 
• A great media shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.   Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now—generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shrivelled and absurd.  Even the best things on television are its junk and no one and nothing seems to be seriously threatened by it.
• Since intelligence is primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication.
• Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.
• Epistemology is defined as follows:  the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.  With that being the case, epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and inferior.
• In the “colonies”, literacy rates were notoriously difficult to assess, but there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between eighty-nine (89%) percent and ninety-five (95%) percent. The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as sixty-two (62%) percent.   The Bible was the central reading matter in all households, for these people were primarily Protestants who shared Martin Luther’s belief that printing was God’s highest and most extreme act of Grace.
• The writers of our Constitution assumed that participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the printed word.  Mature citizenship was not conceivable without sophisticated literacy, which is why the voting age in most states was set at twenty-one and why Jefferson saw in universal education America’s best hope.
• Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned.  Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business.
• The Age of Show Business was facilitated by the advent of photography.  The name photography was given by the famous astronomer Sir John F. W. Herschel.  It is an odd name since it literally meant “writing with light”.
• Conversations provided by television promote incoherence and triviality: the phrase “serious television” is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice-the voice of entertainment.
• Television has found a significant free-market audience.  One result has been that American television programs are in demand all over the world.  The total estimate of U.S. television exports is approximately one hundred thousand (100,000) to two hundred thousand (200,000) hours, equally divided among Latin America, Asia and Europe.  All of this has occurred simultaneously with the decline of America’s moral and political prestige, worldwide.
• Politicians in today’s world, are less concerned with giving arguments than with giving off impressions, which is what television does best.  Post-debate commentary largely avoids any evaluation of the candidate’s ideas, since there were none to evaluate. (Does this sound familiar?)
• The results of too much television—Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least-informed people in the Western world.
• The New York Times and the The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass.  There is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth, no truth as lies.  All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and amused into indifference.
• In the world of television, Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.
• We delude ourselves into believing that most everything a teacher normally does can be replicated with greater efficiency by a micro-computer.
• Most believe that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion.  When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether. It has been estimated that the total revenue of the electric church exceeds five hundred million U.S. Dollars. ($500 million).
• The selling of an American president is an astonishing and degrading thing, it is only part of a larger point: in America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.   We are not permitted to know who is the best President, or Governor, or Senator, but whose image is best in toughing and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.  “Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”
• A perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station.
• Television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.

CONCLUSION:

You may agree with some of this, none of this or all of this, but it is Mr. Postman’s opinion after years of research.  He has a more-recent book dealing with social media and the effect it has on our population at large. I wanted to purchase and read this book first to get a feel for his beliefs.

A LITTLE MORE INDEPENDENCE

Are you married to your digital equipment: i.e. e-mail, cell phones, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc.?  OK, you cannot stand to put your cellphone down during dinner or leave it alone when going to sleep.  Right?  Many can say yes and many wish this were not true.  In her book “Trampled by Unicorns”, Maelle Gavet gives us a plan of attack for breaking the habit or at least not being addicted to the habit.  Not only does she mention the addiction but she is very much aware of how these digital giants encroach on our every “click” and know our habits and favorite sites.  She indicates we are recorded every second we are online.  Let’s take a look at her suggestions on how to take action:

• Make DuckDuckGo our default search engine rather than Google. As you know, Google tracks our every move and saves that data for future use.  DuckDuckGo does not.  There may be others that do not track, so investigate.
• Swap out Gmail account(s) to ensure privacy-preserving alternatives like Proton-Mail, Tutanota, Runbox or Postero.
• Explore Fairbnb.coop, Innclusive, Homestay, or Vacasa as alternatives to Airbnb and HomeAway.  Both owned by Expedia.
• Buy new books from a local independent bookstore and not online. Buying online is a great convenience and during this COVID-19 pandemic probably the best way to go but Amazon, Books-A-Million, Barnes and Nobel all keep track of what we purchase as well as the search engine we use to buy through.
• Call restaurants directly when we want to make a reservation and/or do curb-side pickup.  Don’t go online through Grub Hub or another online service.  They track your requests.
• Shop with local retail outlets as opposed to shopping online.  Sorry Amazon. Once again, really tough during this pandemic but desirable when possible.
• Look for ethical online shopping centers such as Green America or Ethical Consumer.
• Vary the use of Uber or Lyft with myriad local ride-sharing possibilities.
• Use alternative messaging apps like Signal, Wire, or Wickr.
• When social distancing rules are relaxed, shop at local brick and mortar stores.
• Escape the tech up-grade cycle by maintaining and repairing hardware as much as possible. You probably do not have to buy the latest and greatest electronic device offered. I-Phone can wait.
• Declutter mailboxes and empty junk e-mail folders to reduce energy consumed.
• Delete or deactivate old e-mail accounts, social network accounts, apps, and shopping accounts.  If you don’t use them-lose them.
• Don’t shop on Black Friday. 
• Promote ethical and responsible digital citizenship with children.
• Actively limit data collection
• Support human-centric technology.
• Fight fake news and unethical digital behaviors.
• Pressure big tech into more empathetic behavior
• Lobby for more and better legislation.

I personally would like to add several others as follows:

• As best you can, monitor what your children access online and prohibit, i.e. block, questionable sites.
• Demand time without digital equipment.  Breakfast, lunch and certainly dinner should be family time and not time spent on looking at e-mail.
• I think Twitter is complete garbage.  It’s equivalent to writing on a bathroom wall, at a third-rate truck stop on Highway 66 between Chicago to San Diageo.  I’m really embarrassed that our President uses Twitter for much of his communication.  Embarrassing!!!!!!
• Be very careful as to information found on Wikipedia.  I have found some of it to be very unreliable and down-right incorrect.
• Use multiple sites when accessing the news.  News outlets tell us what they want us to know and not always factual information comes from their broadcasts. Mix it up.
• Have a specific limit for yourself and certainly your children relative to time spent on digital equipment.  (Tough one here.)

We all can cut back and probably should.  Does anyone read any more?  Give it a try.

SKYBORG DRONE

Mr. Kelly Johnson said: “If it looks like it will fly—it will fly”.  If you recall, Mr. Johnson was the director of the famous Lockheed Aircraft “Skunk Works”.   With that in mind, do you think the aircraft in the picture below will fly?

The following information was taken from the magazine “Military & Aerospace Electronics”, September 2020 edition. 

WASHINGTON — Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Kratos will move forward in the Air Force program to build an AI-enabled drone wingman known as Skyborg.

Each company this past Thursday was awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $400 million, but no seed money was immediately allocated as the firms will have to compete against each other for future orders.   Once under contract, companies will “conduct research to develop, demonstrate, integrate and transition air vehicle, payload and autonomy technologies and systems that will provide affordable, revolutionary capabilities to the warfighter through the Skyborg program,” the Air Force said.

Through the Skyborg program, the Air Force wants to field a family of unmanned aerial systems that use artificial intelligence to adapt to battlefield conditions. The Skyborg drone should be cheap enough where the loss of aircraft in combat could be sustained, yet survivable enough so that it could move into a high-end fight and function as a wingman to manned fighter jets.

“Because autonomous systems can support missions that are too strenuous or dangerous for manned crews, Skyborg can increase capability significantly and be a force multiplier for the Air Force,” said Brig. Gen. Dale White, who leads the Air Force’s program office for fighters and advanced aircraft. “We have the opportunity to transform our warfighting capabilities and change the way we fight and the way we employ air power.”

Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper has said that Skyborg could eventually become smart enough that, like R2-D2 in the Star Wars films, it can autonomously present information and conduct tasks to help decrease fighter pilot workload. The system learns from prior experiences how best to support human pilots.

Skyborg will be attritable, meaning it will have a low-enough cost to sacrifice in combat to attack high-value targets.  It also will be reusable after flying routine missions.  It has autonomy necessary to compose and select independently among different courses of action.  This feature is a significant departure from other existing drones in use today.  It’s AI embedded computing will have modular components and protocols that conform to open-systems standards, which integrate easily with third-party products.  Open systems mitigate risks of technology obsolescence, vender-unique technology, and single sources of supply and maintenance.  From Skyborg, Air Force researchers want the ability to avoid other aircraft, terrain, obstacles, and hazardous weather without human intervention: conduct autonomous takeoffs and landings; have a separate mission-planning software that integrates with next-generation Air Force mission planning tools that emphasize modularity and openness.

The Skyborg program is another great example of AI being used to benefit “hardware” and insure successful accomplishment of the mission.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, AI is the future and we must be prepared to accept that future, train for its inevitability, and accept the fact that, if allowed, can bring great benefits to life itself.  It’s coming.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLENGE (AI) GUIDING PRINCIPELS

I think everyone is probably aware of Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”.  If not, let me present a refresher as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These laws are fairly straightforward with little complexity.  In Ms. Maelle Gavet’s book “Trampled by Unicorns”, she presents what she feels must be the laws of AI.  If I may, let me quote from that book as follows:

• AI must not harm a human being, or indeed humanity in general, nor allow a human being to come to harm through inaction.
• AI must obey orders given by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with Asimov’s First Law.
• AI should not be trained on human data sets where the human source of that data has not given their explicit consent.  Furthermore, those human sources should be able to opt out at any time, and have all of their data permanently deleted.
• Creators of AI (companies and individuals) must be held fully accountable for the effects of their technology.  If the AI component of an autonomous vehicle, for example, makes a decision that ends up killing someone, the buck would stop with, say, Tesla, as the OEM—no ifs, buts, or lame excuses. (You cannot or at least should not blame an individual user of equipment for a programming error.)
• People must be alerted immediately whenever they begin talking to, or otherwise interacting with, AI, where they might reasonably expect to be engaging with other humans. Today’s status quo, in which, say, customer enquiries are handled by bots with human names, is the start of a very slippery slope. (A person must be given the option as to whether or not they might engage when an AI source is announced.)
• Companies behind AI used to determine access to certain services, such as medical care, school admissions, loans, or mortgage applications, or for criminal justice purposes, such as sentencing, must make its source code openly available upon requires.  A bit like Freedom of Information, this would ensure transparency and protect against built-in bias.  There will be exceptions, of course, how the IRS uses AI to identify fraudsters or financial service firms use it to spot fraudulent behavior are examples.  These should be kept to a bare minimum.

CONCLUSIONS:  I’m sure there will be other rules and regulations relative to the use of AI as time goes along, but these represent a good start.  One thing is implied—there will be a great increase in the number of companies using AI in their products and general services.  We have turned the corner and companies will be seeking possible uses for AI to streamline their product offerings and save money.  The point here, individuals on the payroll represent a liability to many CEOs and CFOs.  If a computer program can do it, they will gladly make the change.  It’s just inevitable.

Experts say AI will change one hundred percent (100%) of jobs over the next ten (10) years, but there is a fear that the next generation isn’t prepared for the shift. It’s imperative for teachers to learn how to infuse their content and curriculum with the knowledge, skills, and values driving innovation in AI today so that their students are prepared to be successful in the modern workforce, regardless of their career paths.

According to Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York, “By 2025, artificial intelligence will be built into the algorithmic architecture of countless functions of business and communication, increasing relevance, reducing noise, increasing efficiency, and reducing risk across everything from finding information to making transactions. If robot cars are not yet driving on their own, robotic and intelligent functions will be taking over more of the work of manufacturing and moving.”

Stowe Boyd, lead researcher for GigaOM Research, predicted, “Pizzas will not be delivered by teenagers hoping for a tip. Food will be raised by robotic vehicles, even in small plot urban farms that will become the norm, since so many people will have lost their jobs to ‘bots. Your X-rays will be reviewed by a battery of Watson-grade AIs, and humans will only be pulled in when the machines disagree. Robotic sex partners will be a commonplace, although the source of scorn and division, the way that critics today bemoan selfies as an indicator of all that’s wrong with the world.”

Lillie Coney, a legislative director specializing in technology policy in the U.S. House of Representatives, replied, “It is not the large things that will make AI acceptable it will be the small things—portable devices that can aid a person or organization in accomplishing desired outcomes well. AI embedded into everyday technology that proves to save time, energy, and stress that will push consumer demand for it.”

People who have their ears to the ground all say—AI is coming.  Be ready.