The government vs UFOs vs my interest

I glanced at CNN yesterday morning, just as I always do.

Yeah, yeah, I know. But it’s only for a quick rundown. When I read in-depth I go elsewhere.

Anyway, the usual stories of global collapse were there. Israel/Gaza, Ukraine, environmental pollution. There was, however, a new and odd addition.

UFOs.

The new program the Pentagon launched to collect UFO (or UAP as its officially been designated) data has received a windfall of reports. To the possible dismay of the “true believer” crowd, the vast majority of these reports have already been identified as prosaic in origin, such as balloons or civilian drones.

I wonder if I could start a trend of calling them “over-the-counter drones”?

This program stems in part from a Congressional hearing on UFOs last July, where it was basically agreed that if there are these UAP sightings at or near US military airspace, we should probably take the reports seriously regardless of any stigma.

Reasonable.

Said same hearing also featured David Grusch, a former USAF officer and intelligence official who asserted that the government is possession of both “non-human spacecraft” and “biological material” from those supposedly acquired craft. When asked for any concrete evidence to support his assertion, Grusch said that would require the hearing to go to closed session.

Which they did. If any names or files were given up, we don’t know.

I’m not sure I care, either.

That’s a staggering realization to come to considering posts I’ve written, and hopes I’ve held far earlier in life. At this point, I’m too overwhelmed to give the subject any energy. There are too many immediate concerns.

Things have changed considerably for us this year, as they do for most anyone as they age and pivot to care for those who once took care of us. Also, my workload keeps increasing, or so it feels. Conversely, the value of what I do seems to be viewed in an increasingly dim lit by American society as a whole. In turn, I question my own value. If you’ve read my book, then you know how viscerally I’ve come to realize how one good shove in the right place can send all the dominoes tumbling, and your life goes to pieces. What will I do if it all falls out from under me again? Especially at my age?  

I have bills to pay, a wife who needs tacos, and a dog to send to college.

Seriously, I have been on close, personal terms with the Nietzschean abyss the past few months. As turmoil plays out in my microcosm, terrors, both foreign and domestic, burgeon and boil over in the macrocosm, threatening all of us. How do I keep the ones I love safe in such insanity? So unless they’re somehow going to fix my problems, the revelation of an alien presence on Earth wouldn’t mean much to me in the face of the existential. Would it really change much, or would we be too immersed in our own very real problems to even care?

Somewhere, I think I hear 8 year-old Jon wailing. 

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The Jondroid is in

There is a lot of promise in that pic.

At least to me there is…or was…anyway. That picture is of a toy robot I had as a kid. Back then, it wasn’t too hard for me to imagine a future where interaction with robots or other intelligent machines would be commonplace. It was a non-threatening notion. I mean look at the guy. He’s clunky. He’s boxy. He’s cute and inoffensive. He’s here to help. But never once did I contemplate standing before it and saying, “So tell me what I should do next,” or “Write this for me.”

I probably should have. Because that’s where we’re at.

Since I’ve written about artificial intelligence off and on over the past 12 years, a few people have asked me if I know what’s going on, or if I have new predictions for us in this age of ChatGPT, large language models, and the multitudes of other AI applications. I find it helps to assess our situation by stacking it against the idea of “the singularity.”

What’s that? Depends who you ask. But believe it or not, it’s that variability that has help me get an understanding of current AI…or to try to, anyway.

Alan Turing thought the truly revolutionary moment would be when one could no longer confidently know whether they were interacting with a person or a machine. If you’ve played around at all with any of the LLMs, then you know we could probably make a good argument that we’ve already hit that point. Now that we’re here, it feels like that bar might’ve been set a bit low.

Then there’s Ray Kurzweil. In his book, The Singularity is Near, he called the singularity, “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” One of these transformations may be that humans will merge with technology to the point where any difference between human and machine will be meaningless. We could upgrade ourselves from this flawed, ever-decaying “meat” we inhabit. As someone with off and on health problems, I grabbed on to the promise of that new future and became something of a Kurzweil fanboy. I even assigned his books in a few classes, and was ready to extol his virtues to all who would listen.

I now think he was overly optimistic, and…by extension…so was I.

Turns out, to my way of thinking at least, that the most accurate descriptor of our current moment is the original definition of “singularity.”

It comes from 1950s computer scientist John von Neumann. He said, “the ever-accelerating progress of technology will yield some essential singularity in the history of the human race.” Mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge gave the greater depth by calling it a time when “technological progress in the realm of intelligence will reach a point where the future is very difficult to predict.”

That’s it! And viola we’re back in the 50s.

Because in many ways, I’m as intoxicated with the possibilities of AI, especially when coupled with robotics, as the tech mavens. In many other regards though, I’m as terrified as the rest of you when I think about what could go wrong, or especially when I consider my impending obsolescence…and being an English professor in higher education, I’ve had many years to ponder that latter point.

I don’t believe the doomsayers are correct. There will not be a superintelligent HAL 9000 telling us, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” I was fortunate enough to have a colleague in psychology explain to me years ago that the complexities and true nuances of the human brain are unlikely to be replicated by a computer.

Conversely, I don’t believe it’s wise at all to dismiss AI as “just another tool like YouTube or Google.” That analogy doesn’t work. Neither YouTube nor Google can produce work for you. This really is like nothing we’ve seen before.

That’s why nobody knows anything.

I guess that's why I miss those days of playing with that little robot.

In other news, India successfully landed a rover on the south pole of the Moon. This region of our lonely satellite has been particularly enticing as it promises to hold a good deal of water. Elsewhere on the Moon, a "massive structure" (not my words) has been found underneath the Aitken basin. As one astronomer put it: "Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground."

It's all likely from a massive asteroid collision, but I'm hoping for something else.

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