Frozen

I long debated if I should write this.

It’s personal. It’s also political.

For seven years in the previous decade, I blogged daily. I wrote about…well…weird shit. Then on February 3rd of 2017 there came the “suspension of operations” of Saint Joseph’s College. On that day, my feelings towards my blogging subjects are best described by Pete Postlewaite from the movie “Brassed Off.” 

I paraphrase: “I thought it mattered. But does it bollocks? Not compared to how people matter.” 

After that, my frequency of blog posts turned spotty at best.

In recent weeks, I was reminded of that turning point in 2017. I admit I run my eyes over CNN’s Top 5 stories every morning. At one point, “UFOs” was listed as one of them, reporting on how the new Pentagon program has had a large volume of sightings submitted to it. “Who cares?” I thought. Quick on the heels of that news blurb, the Times ran an op-ed about what a great time this would be to contact alien life. “Ya gotta be kidding me,” I said.

Truth is, I just can’t think past how scared I am. Of course it doesn’t help that I’m biologically prone to anxiety, either, so the manifestations of these emotions often become physical as well as mental. It’s like an icy hand has reached into my chest and taken hold of me. Were it not for essential responsibilities to fulfill, I could wrap myself in bed and stare at a wall all saturnine for hours. I can’t even read, apart from, as previously mentioned, essential responsibilities. Even eating is optional. I’m Gregor Samsa trapped in bed.

What happens to my job if the Department of Education is, in practicality if not in fact, dissolved? What happens to my family if disability is cut? And we aren’t even the most vulnerable. Many more innocent people are at greater risk in the face of what’s coming.

Hell, what happens if we lose the National Weather Service? How did that prospect even become a thing?

Like I said, I long debated if I should write this. 

Then I realized I’m utterly unable to write anything else.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Chaos

Chaos.

It is a quintessential attribute of life, the universe, and everything.

I don’t handle it very well, though. In fact, it’s my number one source of anxiety. I need to control things. That is not to say that I have dictatorial leanings, but rather, I mean that I need to plan, I need the comfort of routine, and I need a modicum of assurance that if I work hard enough and provide enough due diligence, I can keep myself out of harm’s way.

Life has taught me that ain’t always so.

As is usually the case, a series of unrelated experiences has me dwelling on the reality of chaos and my own unbridled anxiety.

A particularly brilliant student of mine wrote the following: “There, in life, are two instances where a man morphs and never returns to his previous state; the first, where he learns what fear is and finds what frightens him, and the second, where what he fears becomes him.”

Wow. So true. I’ve never been the same since learning what fear is.

Yesterday, I was reading a lit review in the Times about biographies of Joan Didion. It of course featured her famous quote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” However, one writer argued that this isn’t the chipper boost for storytelling that might at first appear. Rather, it means we impose narratives onto our lives, regardless of accuracy, as “bulwark against chaos, against meaninglessness.” 

This then collided with a show I watched on Discovery for mindless diversion. It’s called, of all things, “Lost Monster Files.” In it, a bunch of hip-looking thirtysomethings chase after the case files of the late cryptozoologist, Ivan T. Sanderson. This particular episode featured a search for the legendary thunderbird. They found the nesting area of a large raptor, and scraped the place for DNA. It came back as being most likely an eagle’s nest, but there was something else unknown in the sample.

“So it doesn’t prove that it’s *not* a thunderbird,” the young woman on the show said.

Wow, I thought. She really needs this. For whatever reason, she really needs for there to be an as yet undiscovered species of massive bird, possibly a throwback to the paleo era, flying in the skies of America. She needs that narrative to give her order.

Or is it chaos? The discovery of a thunderbird would upend a good bit of our understanding of the natural world. That would be chaos.

There is an election anon. Many who believe that our current institutions have stopped working seek a similar “creative chaos” (as they see it) in tearing everything down to replace it with something else. What do I think?

I’ve voted. I’ve donated to my chosen candidate. And that is utterly all that I can do. I have no control over what comes next or what people will do. All I can do is try to manage my anxiety for next 24, 48, 72 hours, or God knows how long, because everything is completely out of my hands.

And that’s the part that never sits well with me. 

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

1982: The summer of science fiction

A new book about science fiction dropped last Tuesday.

Obviously, I haven’t had time to read it, but I wanted to give my own riffs off its unique premise, especially in regard to how science fiction ideally asks questions about our current lives.

The book is The Future Was Now by Chris Nashawaty. It examines how somehow eight landmark science fiction films were all released in the summer of 1982: E.T., Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Thing, Tron, Road Warrior, Poltergeist, and Conan the Barbarian. I take great issue with those latter two films being classified as “science fiction” as they clearly aren’t, but maybe the writer addresses this in the book. As I said, I haven’t read it, but I do have thoughts on its subject matter.

By way of comparison to today, these are complicated films. They don’t explain what’s going on right away. You have to work for it, even just a little bit. There’s no vomiting of CGI onto the screen to make you feel you’re watching someone play a video game. I argue that even E.T. is complicated as it is not the “family-friendly, feel good romp” most people seem to remember. It’s downright terrifying and gut-wrenching in places.

Star Trek II is not only the best movie in its franchise, it truly is one of the best science fiction films of the 1980s. It speaks to us now through the character of Khan, his mind warped and narrowed by hatred. I swear Gene Roddenberry must have handed out copies of Moby-Dick to each of his writers as obsessive hatred and the pain it causes is a recurrent theme throughout all of Star Trek. The movie is also a philosophical meditation on loss, life, death, sacrifice, and the reality of the no-win situation we all must one day face.

Mad Max 2: Road Warrior. Barely 11 years old, I read a review of this movie in Time magazine and knew I wanted to see it, but also knew my parents wouldn’t allow it. They were probably right. No, they were definitely right. The film opens with a vague explanation as to why civilization has disintegrated, and why “The Vermin Have Inherited the Earth” as is sprayed on the side of a truck, but we’re ultimately left guessing. Was it nuclear war? Environmental collapse? Exhaustion of resources? All the above? The answer to the question is, sadly, still strongly pertinent today. If anyone wonders why my generation is at home considering the end of all that is, this film is one good place to start.

While I’m no big fan of Tron, it reminds me of one of William Gibson’s inspirations for his groundbreaking novel, Neuromancer. In the early 1980s, he watched kids play games in arcades. They leaned in toward the screen, twisting their bodies in ways to suggest they were actually trying to physically place themselves in the game itself. Thus, the concept of “cyberspace” was born. In our own ways, we’re still trying to get into the machine. Think about it.

Blade Runner. Oh what can I say about this film that I haven’t already? It’s a masterpiece. It’s a true work of art. It’s my second favorite movie of all time (my first is Star Wars: A New Hope. Gotta “dance with who brung ya.”) This film covers nearly every question there is about what it means to be human. What does it mean when the machines in the film are more human than the humans? As AI inexorably advances, these questions grow all the more pertinent. 

The effect this film had on me is incalculable…that is once I was old enough to truly appreciate it. It’s also one of the reasons why a rainy future with ready-access to advanced technologies but a low standard of living comes as no surprise to me. If anyone is ever up for a viewing and discussion of Blade Runner, I’m certainly down for it.

In other news, the James Webb telescope is now going about one of its primary objectives: scan atmospheres of exoplanets for signs of possible life. Evidence is slowing growing that at least one planet has liquid water.

And where there’s water…

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

AI and the "either/or" fallacy

Credit to the artist of the cartoon, whose name is Beancius if I’m reading it correctly.

“There are only two kinds of people when it comes to AI: Those who see it as the future, and Luddites.”

Someone in a college administration said that. They’re a “young gun,” and I remember being like them, excited about every single new technology arriving on the scene and what it can do with “data.” I still can be that way, and I can certainly understand the excitement for artificial intelligence.

But I also know an “either/or” logical fallacy when I see one. Closer scrutiny of the situation is more apt to bring someone to somewhere in the muddy middle of that kid’s assertion…as is so often the case.

See that cartoon? Upon close reading, I’m sure you’ll find it quite clever. It also encapsulates my greatest concern regarding AI, namely that we will come to entirely outsource our thinking. You ask for what you want and it gives it to you, and you take it without thinking. I see a similar behavior all the time with students and others who do a Google search on a given subject, grab the first three entries that bubble to the top, and think they have all they need to know. It will be tough to persuade me people won’t carry out the same behavior with AI only at scale.

Kurzweil’s new book, according reviews in the Times and The Economist anyway, utters the common refrain that AI will free us from mundane tasks. Cool. He goes on to say that millions of workers will be “liberated.”

That’s an odd, Orwellian term for “unemployment.”

Because he also predicts that in five years, AI will be able to write whole books and create art indistinguishable from human work. If so, just what will my family and I to do with all of my newfound “liberation?” Said “liberation” would, in fact, be a loss of self. Libertarians might argue, “Suck it up, buttercup. Market success means changing what you do.” Well, changing what I do is pretty much the same thing as changing who I am.

Ain’t so easy. I don’t think it will be easy for a lot of other people, either, even coders.

There are amazing things in the offing with AI. Medical treatments. Scientific discoveries. Anything that once required humans to take painstaking efforts to see patterns in data can be done in comparatively brief amounts of time. Good stuff. I just don’t think it makes one a “Luddite” to want to take a critical eye to what’s happening, and maybe pump the brakes for a moment.

At least we won’t ever have to worry about an AI being categorized as “alive,” or so a biologist argues from a mechanistic perspective. (see comments)

But hey. We’re getting an AI-generated Al Michaels for the upcoming Olympics. So we got that going for us.

Which is…nice?

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Cryptoterrestrials in the (WHA??) news!

I came across BIG news to me.

It requires a bit of set up, though.

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve spent far too much time researching “the weird.” Not so much recently for various reasons, but it still captivates me, mostly in terms of cultural phenomena and collaborative narrative constructs. Fifteen years ago in my “travels,” I came across the name Mac Tonnies and his blog, Posthuman Blues. I dove deep into his posts, amazed at how much we had in common. He’s an English grad, a writer, a science fiction devotee, a Fortean, and a futurist! And he likes The Cure and The Smiths!

He also, quite sadly, was dead about a year before I knew of him. We would never converse. Just one of those strange twists of fate.

Last Friday though, I saw a post that pretty much rocked my world. Scholars from Harvard University and Montana Technical University published a paper putting forward the concept of “cryptoterrestrials.” As congressional hearings and high profile stories in outlets such as 60 Minutes have kept UFO (or UAP if you prefer) sightings in the zeitgeist, logical questions have once more circulated as to what the things are, and if they are indeed vehicles, do they have pilots? The cryptoterrestrials hypothesis posits that the occupants of the craft are not aliens from another planet, but perhaps beings from right here on Earth that fall into one of the following categories:

-The remains of an ancient, but technologically advanced, civilization.

-A breakaway civilization that branched off from humanity somewhere in the evolutionary process.

-Really bizarre, quasi-mystical entities more akin to angels than aliens.

In the first two cases, these beings would be living underground beneath remote sierras, or on the ocean floor (a place about which we know precious little).

Critically, the academic paper cites Mac Tonnies and his posthumously published book, Cryptoterrestrials. As he termed it, the book is “a meditation on indigenous humanoids and aliens among us.” The “nuts and bolts, spaceships from other planets” explanation really didn’t sit well with him, so Mac began searching for alternative approaches for those few bizarre cases that still defy easy explanation. As one might imagine, Cryptoterrestrials was an obscure book, published by a small publisher. Other than Amazon, you might have found a couple copies of it in the paranormal section of Barnes & Noble. But that slim volume was there first in many ways, even to the point of being cited in an academic paper making major news.

A few important caveats:

-The authors of the published paper acknowledged the lack of any conclusive evidence for cryptoterrestrials at this time. Instead, they tender their hypothesis in hopes of “consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness.”

-Even Mac stood on the shoulders of giants. John Keel, Jacques Vallee, and Ivan T. Sanderson all wrote their own speculations along similar lines. That’s how research is done. One person builds on another’s work. Mac added to and expanded on the idea considerably.

-Don’t call me a “believer in cryptoterrestrials.” I’m not. We clear? Even Mac wasn’t sold on the idea and considered it a thought experiment. Like most skeptics, I see no evidence…yet. I confess the idea is tantalizing, but that’s not the point. That's not what has me excited. 

Mac was a super smart guy and a great writer. This current turn of events demonstrates that you never know how something someone has done might be influential later on, even long after they are gone.

I cannot help but feel an odd stirring of hope at that prospect. So…

Yes! Mac lives!

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

My AI lifeform

I just completed a class on AI.

One of my assignments was to play around with an AI image generator, a first for me. There were about a dozen apps to choose from in the course shell, but I eventually went with Adobe Firefly. After my first few stumbling attempts at creating “art,” I struggled to think of what to try next. It was a sense of “terrible freedom,” staring at the flashing cursor in the prompt, knowing I could, almost, do anything with it. 

Where do I start? 

Out of sheer snark, I asked it to create an image of Batman fighting Michel Foucault. 
I didn't get what I wanted, but I wasn't exactly disappointed, either.

  

Wow.

I was then reminded of a 1999 interview with David Bowie where he so presciently described the internet as, paraphrasing, something that would “crush our concept of mediums” and “show us everything that’s wonderful and terrible about us at the same time.”

The reporter glibly replied, “but it’s just a tool.”

“No, no it’s not,” Bowie said. “It’s an alien life form.”

A “life form” we’ve created. Much like AI.

So I entered “cybernetic life form” into the prompt bar. This is what I got…

Meh. Looks like something my uninspired college kids, half their heads full of anime and the other half full of video games, might’ve come up with. Like any other AI, Firefly is just scraping the web for what it thinks I want, and gave me a mash-up of science fiction in the public consciousness. I tried again with “bioengineered life form.” Firefly spat out a variety of images. Here’s one:

It’s okay. Far more interesting to me is the one that’s at the top of this post. I spent a few minutes just looking at it. The blues and greens are immediately evocative of life, while the presence of purples and aquas say, at least to me anyway, “I’m something different.” It is attached to a seemingly organic lattice work, beneath which are enticingly tortuous and unruly forms like cytoplasm. But it’s the yellow…legs, tentacles, extensions, whatever you want to call them…that captivate me most. They have bulbs on them in places, perhaps like the clitellum on an earthworm. The appendages also look technological, which might make sense given the word “bioengineered” was in my prompt. More than that, their textures immediately remind me of the art of Jack Kirby. So do the colors, for that matter.

I tried to write a flash science fiction piece about it:

“Where does a degree in biology get you?

“Into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it seems. Such a location helps one get around pesky laws and ‘overregulation that stifles innovation.’ At least that’s what our bosses say. Our research ship is testing new biotech. The efforts in human cloning really aren’t getting anywhere, but we do have this little guy I like to visit on the daily.

“We’ve taken to calling it ‘Orby.’ I can’t remember which one of us said it first. It’s no bigger than the tip of my smallest finger, and when I look at it, I expect to smell the brine and salt of phytoplankton and the sea. Of course I don’t. I don’t smell anything except the sterile lab as Orby is secure behind glass in its habitat. 

“Do we have a new lifeform? Time will tell. First we have to see if we can produce another. If they live long enough to reproduce and pass along their DNA, we have a winner.

“Will that make us *more* human? That’s what one of the bosses says. We are a creative species, and what might stand as our ultimate creation would be entirely new life. Or so they say. I don’t know what to think as I watch Orby behind the glass. Everyone once in a while it moves on its spindly appendages. Not far. Just a skitter in a given direction. Sometimes I’ve seen it tilt its body to point that turquoise…thing…in its midsection right at me.

“Does it know I’m there? Watching it? Is Orby aware its existence is, likely, to be confined in totality to this shoebox-sized habitat? Does it hurt? Can Orby be aware of anything? What do we owe it? What’s our responsibility? 

“I don’t like what these questions are making me think. It’s the kind of thinking that really gets in the way of things. I’m reminded of this poem (I know, who the hell needs poetry?) I had to read while trudging through those useless gen ed classes in undergrad. What was it? ‘The Mouse’s Petition’? 

“Right now, I’ve got this urge to let Orby loose over the side of the ship.

“There’s a security camera in the lab.”

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets