tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post6104796777645002586..comments2024-03-28T15:48:48.514-07:00Comments on CONTRARY BRIN: Honoring the losing majority (redux). And what each of us can do.David Brinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comBlogger153125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-37776083441330207752017-01-07T15:13:59.707-08:002017-01-07T15:13:59.707-08:00Hi donzelion
A very good reason why the big expan...Hi donzelion<br /><br />A very good reason why the big expanding happened - allied I believe with the fact that our "tool kits" had expanded to the take off point<br />The people had tools available that meant that they could change the physical world - make concrete changes, build things to an extent that previous generations simply couldn'tduncan cairncrosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14153725128216947145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-40479571792425601032017-01-07T15:04:33.772-08:002017-01-07T15:04:33.772-08:00Oh, I see Dr Brin did announce...
onward!
onward...Oh, I see Dr Brin did announce...<br /><br />onward!<br /><br />onward!<br />LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-45165191522221084082017-01-07T15:03:56.508-08:002017-01-07T15:03:56.508-08:00Paul451:
The women who swung away. The Latinos wh...Paul451:<br /><i><br />The women who swung away. The Latinos who swung away. The urban workers who swung away. The traditionally Democrat states which were lost.<br /></i><br /><br />The women and Latinos, I honestly don't understand. I can't imagine what they were thinking.<br /><br />The urban workers are the ones who are seen to have swung the election.<br /><br />Some of the explanation for traditionally blue-wall states might be attributable to outright voter suppression. Wisconsin certainly. North Carolina as well, not a blue-wall state, but was in play. Michigan and Ohio, both with Republican state governments, I would suspect as well.<br />LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-47710891967163688872017-01-07T13:49:56.607-08:002017-01-07T13:49:56.607-08:00greg byshenk,
Re: Dark Rigidity
As I said earlier...greg byshenk,<br />Re: Dark Rigidity<br /><br />As I said earlier, the mistake the author makes (which is the mistake so many commentators are making) is trying to explain why the red-neck deep south voted for Trump.<br /><br />But they were <i>always</i> going to vote Republican. No-one expected anything else.<br /><br />They certainly didn't vote for Obama, twice.<br /><br />It achieves nothing to treat the psychology of the small-town Confederate bigot as the explanation for why Clinton lost, except to probably reinforce the sense of liberal contempt for the people who voted against Clinton who <i>don't</i> fit into this category.<br /><br />The people who voted for a black urbane liberal Democratic candidate in 2008 and a black urbane liberal Democratic President in 2012, but didn't vote for Clinton in 2016.<br /><br />The women who swung away. The Latinos who swung away. The urban workers who swung away. The traditionally Democrat states which were lost.Paul451https://www.blogger.com/profile/12119086761190994938noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-48272308469810257562017-01-07T13:47:28.743-08:002017-01-07T13:47:28.743-08:00onward
onwardonward<br /><br />onwardDavid Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-28329353868032635112017-01-07T13:28:47.981-08:002017-01-07T13:28:47.981-08:00Donzelion,
My history days were so long ago, but ...Donzelion,<br /><br />My history days were so long ago, but the picture you paint here passes my smell test. It's more about small changes that ripple through recursive relationships in ways that are rarely very predictable, and almost never have one single cause - however much cultural capital a concept has in the society trying to analyze those changes. In other words, it's complicated - always more complicated than what you can get on a bumper sticker.Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-52529328123392076712017-01-07T13:24:18.003-08:002017-01-07T13:24:18.003-08:00Zepp,
That Enneagram sound like a number of other...Zepp,<br /><br />That Enneagram sound like a number of other schemes to sort people out into personality types, though I haven't seen any that end up with as many as 54. The greater number of types makes it better than most in terms of providing more useful detail, but it runs into the problem of scalar stress - or TMI as most people would say. Too many categories becomes cumbersome and the heuristic stops being useful. The difficulty human brain have with large data sets is exactly why systems with only 3 taxa are so common.<br /><br />Whenever you see something like that, ask yourself exactly what question it is trying to answer, and how is it defining the variables it is using to get at the answers. I'm not dissing this system in particular, just giving a general bit of advice. The social and psychological literature is littered with schemes that try to make taxonomies out of everything (my former field of archaeology is especially bad about this), reifying those taxonomies, only to discover years later that they missed some important thing that invalidates most of the idea. usually it is someone else who shoves it in their faces.<br /><br />It makes me wonder sometimes if any sort of classification is worth all the thunder and does, or if we might be better off attending more to human flexibility and commonalities.Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-25723746956346182482017-01-07T12:59:20.389-08:002017-01-07T12:59:20.389-08:00Alfred/Paul SB: "We invested more in science ...Alfred/Paul SB: <i>"We invested more in science AFTER we started to become wealthy enough to wonder what we were going to do with all this extra capital hanging around."</i><br /><br />My picture is more a series of feedback loops than "capital came first" - or "science."<br /><br />Throughout the Middle Ages, as in ancient eras, we have always had a handful of patronized scientists offering ingenious ponderings. Leonardo of Pisa (aka Fibonacci) in the 12th century, ongoing gunpowder advances (at least from the 13th century), navigation advances, and more.<br /><br />Until the 15th century, the primary investment by feudal leaders would be churches and castles - massive, defensible masonworks. Canals, ditches, aqueducts, roads, etc. - all the stuff that creates prosperity - would simply invite an enemy to attack and strip it from you. Every gold piece invested in infrastructure would not be invested into currying favor with larger lords or paying for military defenses. Large works tend to cost a large amount of money, paid for out of cash-on-hand, effectively disarming you for years until the investment is recouped - during which you would be known to be vulnerable.<br /><br />Once a yeoman force with muskets (possibly bolstered by temporary mercenaries) could withstand a much more expensive fixed military - investments into the means of producing anything could be converted rapidly into weapons. Local lords started investing far more in the infrastructure to obtain/deploy the fruits of science to repulse larger lords.<br /><br />Capital followed, science gradually accrued, to produce more minds that could learn means of using both capital and science. Since literacy was essential to playing either gambit, universities and educational systems added much broader studies to what had been ecclesiastical fixations...and onwards.donzelionhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05991849781932619746noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-5688345460069714992017-01-07T12:35:09.072-08:002017-01-07T12:35:09.072-08:00Paul SB wrote: "Human life is not all genetic...Paul SB wrote: "Human life is not all genetics."<br />True that, and it shows the fundamental problem with trying to sort humans into just three hard and fast categories. <br />I have a friend who teaches the Enneagram. It starts out by sorting humans into three very general groups, but each in turn are subdivided into Types for a total of 9 (thus the name). I'm a type Six; Donald is a type Eight. But it doesn't stop there. Everyone has a "wing", a predilection for adjoining types that pick up some of their traits and characteristics. But I can also either be a paranoid or non-paranoid six, which isn't as bad as it sounds; it just means a paranoid six addresses challenges reactively rather than proactively. There's similar delineations for the eight other types, of course. So you end up with at least 54 subdivisions just to provide personality guidelines. Zepp Jamiesonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16261339498383415026noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-36473074772397060592017-01-07T10:55:40.635-08:002017-01-07T10:55:40.635-08:00@Alfred Differ:
Science in the narrow sense follo...@Alfred Differ:<br /><i><br />Science in the narrow sense follows engineering and technology and improves after the economy improves. It's a matter of investments. We invested more in science AFTER we started to become wealthy enough to wonder what we were going to do with all this extra capital hanging around.<br /></i><br /><br />Are you sure it works that way? I ask because I read a book on entropy 25 years ago which changed my mind about certain historical transitions. The book talked about both the transition from hunter/gatherer to agriculture and the transition in Europe from wood to coal. In both cases, the author argued that humans don't initiate such transitions because of a surplus of wealth, but rather out of necessity once the old method has been exhausted. When the supply of the means of survival fails to meet demand, new methodologies have to be implemented to fill the gap, but those new methods are <b>less</b> efficient, not more. For example, you can burn coal to heat your house when there's no wood, but you can't build your house or a bridge out of coal, and roads that were built to transport wood won't handle the weight of coal.<br />LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-53550185978937379622017-01-07T10:48:18.463-08:002017-01-07T10:48:18.463-08:00Yeah, Paul. Agreeing. Look at the studies where st...Yeah, Paul. Agreeing. Look at the studies where students were split into "superior" and "inferior" groups and told which group they were in, and how they, even knowing it was play-acting, began to take on the roles arbitrarily assigned. Similar to the Milgram experiments with somewhat different parameters measured.Jumperhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11794110173836133321noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-21092282687253492952017-01-07T09:28:34.073-08:002017-01-07T09:28:34.073-08:00Zepp,
If a Type Z is really a Type A that starts ...Zepp, <br />If a Type Z is really a Type A that starts out unrecognized, would that suggest that they really were a Type Z to begin with, but changed to a Type A because of how society threaten them? Human life is not all genetics.Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-9077591987548859982017-01-07T09:25:50.239-08:002017-01-07T09:25:50.239-08:00Jumper,
You don't even need something as seri...Jumper,<br /><br />You don't even need something as serious as meth the totally F up a person's thinking. Around 15% of all adults suffer a major depressive episode at least once in their lives, and chronic depression is epidemic.<br /><br />It also serves a purpose. All the bull about rich people being "smart" and deserving their wealth has the effect of making everyone else look like fools, feel like fools, internalize failure as a feature of their personalities, and depress their self-esteem. This leads to a downward spiral that multiplies human suffering enormously, but it does one glorious, golden thing for the rich - it cuts a majority of people out of the competition. And I don't just mean in business terms. As long as we by the horse pucker that we live in a meritocracy, where people get what they deserve (whether its the older God-based superstition or the more modern, scientistic abomination of Social Darwinism), a majority of people who might have protested or even revolted against them feel too worthless and hopeless to try. <br /><br />That's the function of inferiority. For many people this leads to the bottle, or to meth or other attempts to take the bad feelings away. But the root cause is social inequality, and the crap spewed out by the rich to justify it (to say nothing of tax laws and other ways they monkey the system to screw the rest of us).Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-350040709346416072017-01-07T08:57:11.632-08:002017-01-07T08:57:11.632-08:00If you operate a water-powered mill you don't ...If you operate a water-powered mill you don't need much money or leisure time to start making improvements. Spreading the word may be faster or slower.<br /><br />On all the Trump dissections who is analyzing the meth epidemic and how it affects thinking? Plenty are talking of the opioid epidemic, which likely ties in, but the paranoia, cognitive failures, Dunning-Kruger syndrome, all pushed by intense, babbling enthusiasm of stimulants, has led to what I am starting to think of as "Morgellons politics."<br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons<br /><br />Note how the internet has amplified this (Morgellons) phenomenon.Jumperhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11794110173836133321noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-13964971672815006642017-01-07T08:10:26.031-08:002017-01-07T08:10:26.031-08:00PaulSB wrote: "Type Z humans, at least in Ame...PaulSB wrote: "Type Z humans, at least in American culture, seem to get elevated to hero status."<br /><br />Usually they tend to be unrecognized type As. People with focus, drive and determination who start out as ignored, rather than incapable. <br />About the only true incident of a Type Z becoming a hero is Kubrick's brilliant "Being There." <br />That, and comedies like Dumb and Dumber or Animal House were such types succeed despite themselves, and it works because it defies reality.Zepp Jamiesonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16261339498383415026noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-39808077541716162192017-01-07T07:44:57.197-08:002017-01-07T07:44:57.197-08:00As far as the inevitability of doubling goes, how ...As far as the inevitability of doubling goes, how many times has average income doubled since WW1? Funny you should mention WW1, given what happened afterward. We had the Roaring 20's, when prosperity was growing wildly, followed but he Great Depression, when prosperity tanked, to say the least. And it took another world war to pull us out of the downward spiral. Think about the nature of a positive feedback loop (or deviation amplification loop, if you like the older terminology). While you are in the loop, it looks like you are going to Infinity and Beyond! But these loops invariably hit a limit - some level beyond which the loop cannot go. When they do that, they rarely remain at a stable plateau, what they tend to do is collapse back down to a much lower level. That is exactly what a boom-or-bust cycle is, and that's exactly what we saw with WW1-Roaring 20's-Great Depression-WW2. We are fortunate that the bust of the 1970s wasn't as bad as the bust in the 1930's.<br /><br />But think about what kleptocrats, and economists of all kinds, always try to promote. Growth! Growth! Growth! If the economy isn't growing like it did just before Black Thursday, the regime in charge doesn't get re-elected. Our economists, paid henchmen and-or dupes of our kleptocrats, constantly harangue us about growth, keeping it as high as possible. "It's the economy, stupid!" But while the superstructure promotes growth, which feeds the .001%'s Veblen addictions by skimming most of that growth for themselves, they risk flatlining the whole system. This is why I think things have been pretty good under Obama. The economists complain of tepid economic growth, but what they want will most likely collapse the system entirely, and our whole way of life goes into the dustbin of history.<br /><br />You think too much about jealousy. That's a common right-wing argument, intended to shame the victims of an excessively unequal distribution system. I am thinking about long-term survival. Civilizations collapse, and bad economic management is a key culprit. Following the interests of the .001% is a failure mode<br />Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-91307364590992995572017-01-07T07:44:19.628-08:002017-01-07T07:44:19.628-08:00Alfred,
"Science in the narrow sense follows...Alfred,<br /><br />"Science in the narrow sense follows engineering and technology and improves after the economy improves. It's a matter of investments. We invested more in science AFTER we started to become wealthy enough to wonder what we were going to do with all this extra capital hanging around."<br /><br />That's an argument that does make a lot of sense. The Enlightenment was a pretty much 18th C. phenomenon, and what was happening in the Low Countries certainly played a role. But I don't see this so much as cart-before-horse argument. Rarely does this idea truly apply when you are dealing with human social systems. The dynamics of a social system are so intertwined that changes in one level (structure, infrastructure and superstructure) tend to set up feedbacks in the others. It makes sense that having extra money and time would allow people to invest it in the pursuit of science and technology (progress), but except for a few brief periods, there had always been people who had the time and money, and some of whom did invest in science and technology. Going back to Medieval times, the priesthood considered it their duty to God to try to learn as much as they could about God's Creation. A the time they called this pursuit "Natural Philosophy" but it was essentially science (the word /science/ wasn't actually coined until 1834). <br /><br />You can talk about doubling of income, but income, but income doesn't do you a whole lot of good when you are dead. The mortality rates before the 19th C. were spectacular - and, in fact, were pretty much the same as most animals in the wild, with one major exception. Before the 19th C, which benefitted from the kind of basic, inductive, exploratory research that caught on in the 18th (still mainly among the aristocracy - by this time the Church had turned more of its efforts to staving off heresies) 50% of babies didn't make it to their third birthday. It was advances in chemistry and medicine that started to dramatically reduce the infant mortality rate, as well as transportation technology that helped to distribute high trophic-level foods better than at any previous time. But there is another problem that is pretty much unique to humans that tended to cut lives short - placenta previa. Up until effective anesthetics (starting with ethyl ether in the 1840s), 50% of women died in childbirth. Generally it was not the first birth that killed them, but the fifth or sixth - the more babies a woman has, the more likely she dies in labor. Orphans are such common characters in literature up to and including the Victorian era precisely because they were so common, with so many mothers dying and so many impoverished fathers abandoning their babies. It is very hard for people living the lives we live today to imagine just how different life was like for most of human history, before science and technology began to seriously chip away at so much of human misery.<br /><br />This, along with the switch to an industrial economy, created the Demographic Transition. And this continues to happen in places like the Soviet Union, where a command economy rather than a market economy ruled. Markets are part of the picture, but they are not the whole picture. Maybe they are among the horses drawing the cart, but this cart has more than one horse.<br />Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-48019751682285897042017-01-07T07:12:49.920-08:002017-01-07T07:12:49.920-08:00Paul451:
A morning show was doing a story where a...Paul451:<br /><i><br />A morning show was doing a story where a young girl ordered a dollhouse and four pound of cookies by talking to "Alexa", the Amazon home-AI-thing. One of the hosts said something like "I love how this little girl says, 'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse' "... at which point viewers starting ringing in to complain that the host's own comment caused their Alexas to try to order dollhouses...<br /></i><br /><br />That is thriller material. How about an action/suspense novel in which ISIS performs some outrageous act on video that is sure to be replayed on tv sets around the world. Embedded in the sound is an Arabic (or maybe Russian?) phrase which means "Alexa, shut down the power grid," or "Alexa, bomb China". And assuming a tv is playing in the right location...<br /><br />LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-58360593453755336302017-01-07T07:10:30.196-08:002017-01-07T07:10:30.196-08:00My apologies for the broken "Dark rigidity......My apologies for the broken "Dark rigidity..." link earlier. It seems an extra quote sneaked in. If you follow the link and then remove the quote mark at the end, the proper page will load.<br /><br />Or follow <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/the-dark-rigidity-of-fundamentalist-rural-america-a-view-from-the-inside/" rel="nofollow">this one</a>greg byshenknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-31197669131034397112017-01-07T06:06:22.684-08:002017-01-07T06:06:22.684-08:00Paul SB:
"Dog trainers (and large cat traine...Paul SB:<br /><i><br />"Dog trainers (and large cat trainers) recognize a third type: Type Z, or Zeta. They tend to the at the bottom of the pecking order, and in some species would be outcasts."<br />...<br />Type Z humans, at least in American culture, seem to get elevated to hero status.<br /></i><br /><br />The hero is the "Type Z" who proves to be uniquely indispensable at the crucial moment.<br /><br />The green rox in "Kiln People" comes to mind.LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-91992840030037895532017-01-06T23:30:58.535-08:002017-01-06T23:30:58.535-08:00Regarding Leviathan, Hobbes was reacting to the ho...Regarding Leviathan, Hobbes was reacting to the horrors he saw associated with what the English Civil Wars unleashed. He wasn't alone. Many who started it all regretted it when the truly crazy people started pushing for what THEY wanted. Leveling of the social classes? Heaven forbid!<br /><br />Hobbes's Leviathan doesn't just rob us of our prefrontal lobes. It robs us of what makes us human. Every virtue besides prudence gets sacrificed for the sake of social order.<br /><br />Hobbes approached social theory as an amateur geometer. The thought he could prove in the mathematical sense what our social order should be. His result likely would work if we desired order that much (he most certainly did), but the people in that order wouldn't be human in any sense we would recognize. At least communism is modeled on the social rules of Family. Leviathan would make programmable ants of us all.<br /><br />It is useful to remember that he went to his grave thinking he also had a proof for how to square the circle. All these things came together for him under one intellectual umbrella. Many intellectuals are seduced by the rigor of Geometry and think to design/prove other forms of order. Even the Jesuits fell for it, though they had little else in common with Hobbes.Alfred Differhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01170159981105973192noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-80290062992766470232017-01-06T23:03:59.512-08:002017-01-06T23:03:59.512-08:00Paul451: Caught my eye here:
"Previously, A...Paul451: Caught my eye here: <br /><br /><i>"Previously, Antonym mentioned writing a story where a good (military) AI was at war against a bad (Wall Street) AI."</i><br /><br />Which story?<br /><br />I've actually been working on a story on those lines for years (multiple AIs - evolved from Google, FB, Wall Street, Pentagon, medical, and a few others)...my thought had been that a human civil war (lurking as others discuss the Pacifica v. Confederacy) would run in parallel with an AI struggle (as the AIs calculate which environment is most auspicious for their own devices). I'd pictured a sort of a Coriolanus story as the connecting frame...donzelionhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05991849781932619746noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-10163698583387549602017-01-06T22:43:31.917-08:002017-01-06T22:43:31.917-08:00@Paul SB: This was mostly a result of science and ...@Paul SB: <i>This was mostly a result of science and technology...</i><br /><br />No. The numbers don't support this argument. Science in the narrow sense follows engineering and technology and improves after the economy improves. It's a matter of investments. We invested more in science AFTER we started to become wealthy enough to wonder what we were going to do with all this extra capital hanging around. <br /><br />The average standard of living improved dramatically in the Netherlands in the 17th century and then England (then Scotland) in the 18th. The average person saw their real income double BEFORE the industrial revolution in those regions. Technology followed this. Industry is an effect of an earlier, enriching cause.<br /><br /><i>But the nation keeps vacillating between electing kleptocrats who rob the nation to fill their own pockets, and well-intentioned fools who either can't do anything about them or are allowing themselves to be used by the CEOligarchs.</i><br /><br />You mean us in particular, right? It was worse in the 19th century when the political spoils system was in place. While I'd much rather none of them were robbing us, the economic numbers suggest they couldn't rob us fast enough to prevent two doublings of our real income. In the 20th century, they didn't stand a chance of keeping up. How many doublings have we seen since WWI, hmm? It's hard to state the value today because the quality of what we buy has vastly improved. Without quality adjustments, we are up about 40x, so that is three more doublings. With quality included, we are up at least 100x, so that would be seven more doublings.<br /><br />You all are paying too much attention to the CEO's, I think, and missing what is happening on the ground. It's not just that we have a diamond shape society today instead of a pyramid. It's that the entire pyramid lifted off the ground and went floating away in it's new shape.<br /><br /><i>bastards who perpetuate the myth</i><br /><br />You don't actually believe them, do you? I've never met anyone who did. I've met a few that said they did, but I think they just wanted the money and lifestyle. That is more about envy than belief. Big whoop.<br /><br />On the immune system balance, your example fails with me. I was diagnosed with Wegener's about three years ago. Damn near killed me. Chemo-drugs are terrible things. One of my sisters has a more common one that is simply taking longer to kill her, but it will without a lot of luck. I get your point (and I'm not fishing for sympathy), but both extremes are deadly.<br /><br />As for two kings, I thought two would be enough to show that the concept of balance is an illusion. Both thought they had a God given right to rule. Both died because they pissed off the people they ruled. Many other kings were not killed, but peasant revolts and aristocratic upheavals in Europe are common historical occurrences. Old school liberals know revolts are common even if they fail. We also know they start with asymmetric applications of force and then others decide which way to jump. The failures are usually examples of failures to attract the forces needed.Alfred Differhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01170159981105973192noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-19121770028805026072017-01-06T22:07:54.156-08:002017-01-06T22:07:54.156-08:00@LarryHart: If the condition can't be met, adv...@LarryHart: If the condition can't be met, advocates of government management of the playing field get to have their way en perpetuity. There will never be a tests determining how far we can go without them and to that approach I will object.<br /><br />I too would rather a government of the people than one of kings and mercantilists. There are many variations on the former, though, including those where government is very light-handed. I want lighter variations tried.<br /><br />I suspect there are ways to administer the commons that don't involve princes and priests. My more remote ancestors would have thought that daft. It obviously isn't as we've been proving. I suspect we can go further than we have.Alfred Differhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01170159981105973192noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-86332982036188578132017-01-06T20:26:02.639-08:002017-01-06T20:26:02.639-08:00Previously, Antonym mentioned writing a story wher...Previously, Antonym mentioned writing a story where a good (military) AI was at war against a bad (Wall Street) AI.<br /><br />There may be a third player: <a href="http://www.cw6sandiego.com/news-anchor-sets-off-alexa-devices-around-san-diego-ordering-unwanted-dollhouses/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cw6sandiego.com/news-anchor-sets-off-alexa-devices-around-san-diego-ordering-unwanted-dollhouses/</a><br /><br />A morning show was doing a story where a young girl ordered a dollhouse and four pound of cookies by talking to "Alexa", the Amazon home-AI-thing. One of the hosts said something like "I love how this little girl says, 'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse' "... at which point viewers starting ringing in to complain that the host's own comment caused their Alexas to try to order dollhouses...Paul451https://www.blogger.com/profile/12119086761190994938noreply@blogger.com