Month: April 2024

A Note To GenZ About Social Media And More.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

I was reading ‘Social Media Companies Are Having a Bad Moment‘, something written by Nick H. Penniman, who I assume is a GenZ based on the call to action, and I smiled a bit. I can never keep the generations below GenX in any form of structure, which is a failing of mine – these are generations that simply came after mine.

I suppose I could dedicate the time to keep track of which generation is doing what, but I think that’s not time well spent for me. After all, I am of GenX, a Third Culture Kid and a latchkey kid, and I was raised by Kermit The Frog.

I’m gonna let everyone in on a secret: The screens aren’t the problem, social media isn’t the problem, the message is. We can go back and forth about the medium being the message, but it’s a bit simpler than that. This is not to dismiss the concerns expressed in the article but to instead to underline the actual issue.

Every advance in communication technology was disruptive because it changed the way we did things. There was a time when reading a newspaper around others was considered anti-social. Before that were other things, like the printing press and literacy removing power from the literate. These things humanity survived.

What is different now is that during all those communication upheavals, messages got more and more sticky because everyone was trying to sell everyone else their shit. Some of it was good shit. Some of it was bad shit. In fact, there was a time when you could tell how bad a product was by how sticky the marketing was – when I grew up, if I ever did, a good product sold itself. A bad product required a lot more marketing.

Being raised by televisions, I saw a lot of advertisements targeted at me for toys that were shitty. I saved up my allowance and bought some pretty shitty toys and figured out pretty early that all that glitters is not gold. This doesn’t mean I didn’t buy crappy products in my lifetime, but at least I knew the risk.

Where things went off the tracks is Web 2.0 – the focus on marketing. Everybody got on the Internet and started selling good shit and bad shit, but the common denominator was that it was shit. If you look at the companies that survived the DotCom boom, you’ll see that those companies didn’t sell shit. They added value – some of it short-lived, some of it longer lived.

You have to be able to figure out what the shit and the value is. That’s why I wrote about the Red Dots of Life, because everyone wants to twist your ear and fill your eyeballs with their product as much as they can. If they could beam that directly into your head while you were sleeping, they would, because it’s about them. It’s not about you at all.

That’s the trick with social media. It’s about the signal to noise ratio, and the first step in that is deciding what is signal and what is noise. There’s trial and error involved. There’s a need for guidance for the younger generations who are impressionable so that they can tell the difference – and the truth is that even those of my generation and before are susceptible to all of this. In fact, politicians use it to great effect.

When you get on social media, there should be a purpose. In the days of Sesame Street’s first decade, the intent of Sesame Street was simple: Teach kids. Guide kids. And it was done by trustworthy people – to this day, nobody talks about the secret lives of Mr. Rogers and Jim Henson, and all that worked with them. Their intent was clear. They wanted to give us sticky things to help us deal with the world and, more importantly, each other. They showed up once a day and did just that for us, and we had the time to interact with our peers and elders to practice what we were taught – and my generation, the ‘Seen but not heard’ generation, didn’t do too bad despite all the problems we faced.

We did face problems, they seemed insurmountable, but somehow we survived and even thrived enough to scatter our genetics to the next generations. Like every generation before, we screwed you guys up a little. It’s what we do. We’re imperfect as a species, particularly when you get large groups of us together.

But now it’s much more dangerous. Social networks collect so much data about people that the social network companies know more about people than they themselves do – and it’s used for marketing because – guess what – they want to sell you shit. Some of it might be good shit, some of it might be bad shit. The trick is to find where the value is, and that has become more and more difficult.

When you’re young, time is cheap. As you grow older and claim more responsibility, time becomes much more expensive. It’s a part of the generation gap.

If, as individuals, we gravitate to value instead of shit, we can create a valuable world instead of a shitty one. Oh, and ease off those social networks mining your habits. There’s plenty of social media that is decentralized where you can find information, and while the social networks allow connection with others, they do not replace actual connection with others. Time away from the screens is good, but cutting them off entirely is not a good plan.

You are competing with people of your own generation to eek out a living. Those of you that win should be the ones who find value and create value, not sell shit. That’s what every generation seems to consistently get wrong.

As you’ll find, the most dangerous people of generations that came before you – dangerous to you – are the ones that are just selling shit instead of creating value.

It’s harder and harder to tell which is which, but the future of the species depends on every generation getting a decent value-to-shit ratio.

Can I tell younger generations what should be of value to them? Nope. I have some ideas, things related to being able to be do things for yourselves and invest in yourselves rather than just spending money. An hour exploring the thoughts and philosophies of others in classic books isn’t a bad place to start. Finding out why things work or don’t work is always a good thing to do.

But if you find yourself just mindlessly being entertained, that’s a symptom of a larger disease.

When your kids come around, GenZ, it’s gonna be worse. AI is already more persuasive than humans because it learned from our time tested and evolved persuasive communicators.

Triage

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I had some land down in the South of Trinidad that, for a while, was a big part of my life. It caused me to stretch myself in new ways, and it almost always spread me thin with dealing with people nearby because some of those people were intent on expanding their own horizons with my land.

The fact is that they already had, for I had come by it through inheritance – an inheritance, strangely, that I did not want. My father was focused on the people in very adversarial ways, which wasn’t my style – people know this now, but they did not know that then. So, whenever I was around, there was some distrust, but I minded my business, dealt with people honestly even when they didn’t deal with me honestly, and accepted that they were smarter than me so that they would teach me. That worked out well, but it was a strain. Every time someone spoke with me, they seemed to want something, or were angling at something, or were trying to get me on their side against someone else.

That was tiresome.

To make matters worse, family members that had land adjoining were more focused on being adversarial with people down in that area which gave me even more headaches. People would come to me for advice once they got to know me – who to talk to, etc, and I guided them as best I could knowing full well that the people they would be dealing with wouldn’t understand them and wouldn’t want to. I would not say that I understood them myself, but I did understand that I didn’t understand them that well and that it was important to do so. People, after all, are pretty much the same everywhere I had found in my travels.

People need food, shelter, and a place to raise their children safely – and maybe leave something behind for their children.

All of that was troublesome to me. I had gotten good at dealing with people, but my true joy was going out beyond where civilization was on my land, just me, my 4×4, and the ground beneath my feet. I would escape there, sometimes moving things around, sometimes planting things, sometimes just sitting on the tailgate with my feet dangling. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was something I could work with.

I made my own trails, then with license from family members to simply tell them what I saw if I saw encroachment, and with that I drove over much land, making paths where maybe there were paths before but overgrown. The people who saw me out there from a distance thought highly of my vehicles, which I did maintain well, but they didn’t realize it wasn’t the vehicles but the driver. The price for getting stuck was a shovel or a long walk to someone with a tractor – a price which I avoided all but 3 times in a decade.

When I got tired of people, I would just drop the pickup in range and go off into the bush. If I got really dirty, I’d go bathe in one of the ponds. People would comment that I came out of the bush cleaner than when I went in, and there were those that did not wish me well that wanted to follow me but could not. I was unpredictable, and those that had vehicles that were 4×4 did not follow my trails, because I pushed the vehicle to do things that they didn’t.

In the later years, after the government ran a highway through the land and screwed up the drainage, I continued this course but found that the highway had screwed up the drainage and parts of the land had become impassable. I would drive to those boundaries, where almost no one could follow, and sit there on the tailgate, looking around and accepting the truth of the matter.

I was there too late. There was much I could have done had I had the land a decade sooner, or two decades sooner. These were not things of industry and commerce, really, but simply making the place nicer. I hadn’t even been told about the land until the turn of the millennium, though it was owned by the family since 1973. Well, at least mortgaged. No one thought to tell me.

It wasn’t something I was angry or sad about. The realization that I could not do the things I wanted to because I was there too late was not something new. In the emergency room, we saw people too late. In the workshop, we saw equipment too late. So many things I saw too late, so many things that had I just been there a little sooner I could have done more.

Sometimes, things are just too late – and we move on. If we don’t, and we linger on what was already too late, we’ll likely be too late for something else. It’s triage. You do what you can and you move on.

Persuasion, Manipulation, Oh My.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

I spent a lot of time writing ‘From Inputs To The Big Picture: An AI Roundup‘ largely because it’s a very big topic, but also because I spent a lot of time considering the persuasive aspect of AI.

GPT-4 is presently considered 82% more persuasive than humans and can now read emotions.

That, friendly reader, scares me, because we do not live in a perfect world where everyone has good intentions.

The key differences between manipulation and persuasion are about intention. An AI by itself has no intention, at least for now, but those that create it do have an intention. They could consciously manipulate an artificial intelligence through training data and algorithms, effectively becoming puppet-masters of a persuasive AI. Do they mean well?

Sure. Everyone means well. But what does ‘well’ mean for them? No villain ever really thinks they have bad intentions, despite what movies and television might have people think. Villains come dressed in good intentions. Good villains are… persuasive, and only those not persuaded might see a manipulation for what it is, even when the villain themself does not.

After all, Darth Vader didn’t go to the dark side for cookies, right?

There’s so much to consider with this. The imagination runs wild. It should. How much of the persuasion regarding AI is manipulation, as an example?

I think we’re in for a bit of trouble, and it’s already begun.

That Which Connects Reality Fragments.

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I found myself communicating with a lawyer yesterday, about information I had that would be of use to their client, and I found the conversation driving me back into memories that I had happily forgotten for some time.

It wasn’t that big of a deal, the questions and answers themselves. It was what they were attached to. There were nuanced emotions from that period of my life, hopes and dreams that were drowned as my faith in those around me was becoming so demonstrable that I could no longer deny the reality.

There wasn’t anything particularly bad or good about it, in retrospect. I did what I generally do, thinking the best of people until they demonstrate otherwise, and I got quite a few people wrong in that regard. Ties were cut, bridges were burned and danced on, and I remembered them from a distance of time and a bit of wisdom.

Sometimes things need time to bake. You don’t just throw the ingredients of a cake together and eat them. No, after you get all the ingredients together in whatever way that you have to, then you have to go stick it in the oven and forget about it for a while. Sure, you might smell it, but if you want the cake you have to do something society frowns upon these days.

You need to wait.

In our lives, we accumulate these fragments of reality, some of which we may even deny – but the reality is there underneath even if we don’t experience it in the moment. Under that reality, there may be a deeper reality, a different perspective of the same reality, or even something that was weaved as reality when it wasn’t. We spend our days trying to make sense of it all.

Little bits of reality and unreality floating around.

Something connects them, though.

We do. We are the common thing that they all attach to, as individuals or as groups.

A Call To Goof Off For Your Own Interests

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Humanity is not the only species that goofs off, but we certainly seem to be the ones who do it most effectively. Tool use is done by many species, communication is done by many species, but we’re the only species that has managed to master the environment to the point where we have the capacity to destroy where we live.

Some say that’s happening, some say that has already happened, most seem to ignore it and continue goofing off.

We’re not that great at goofing off responsibly. As a species, we’re the babysitter that plays loud music and wonders why the baby is crying. A few decades later, we figure out that the noise is making the baby cry, but we’re so happy with the loud angsty music that we deny it. ‘We’re here for the money, not the baby.’ That metaphor certainly makes the ‘cradle of civilization’ angle in books a bit more interesting.

It’s been bogging me down a bit. We have all these complex systems in our civilization that most people can’t understand. Not even one. Most people these days operate devices that they don’t understand even conceptually, from their stoves to cars to the airplanes they ride in. They expect them to simply work, and when they don’t, they get stompy.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, gentle reader, but there’s been plenty of stompy going around these days.

This wears on me. For whatever reason, I have made it a point to understand how things work, and I’ve managed pretty well. I can’t forecast the weather, I can’t tell you off the top of my head when the star we revolve around will super-nova, or when an earthquake will hit – but I understand as best I can about these things because… well, those things seem sort of important. A lot of things seem more important to me than what we humans do to ourselves. We’re an odd bunch that goofs off.

What we can do, though, is goof off working on ways to make things better rather than worse.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller, as quoted in “Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure” (1999), by Daniel Quinn

When we find ourselves in holes that we don’t want to be in is to stop digging. Some people want us to dig holes, and they market that and distract us with their wishes.

We have to allow ourselves time to figure out what we wish, stepping away from the busy world of what other people want so that we get the quiet mind to do just that.

After all, the only intelligence of worth is related to survival, and our survival as individuals and a species could depend on that.

Changing Landscapes.

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In my mind I’m often staring at the horizon on a quiet beach. I haven’t been to a beach in some time, something I always promise to address but never quite do.

You see, that silence on the beach really doesn’t exist but for a few moments, the early moments as the sun rises, as the birds awake. I miss the mornings at New Smyrna Beach for that, using the camera as an excuse for my presence. Fortunately, I have walked so many beaches at those hours that I don’t seem to need to actually go for the experience. I can, at whim, be at a beach in my mind.

It’s still not quite the same. Every sunrise is different, the flotsam on a quiet beach can be different. I remember the simple joy of looking at the trails the turtles left in laying their eggs, and on the walks back watching the volunteers put caution tape around where they had laid those eggs. People respected that on those beaches. People generally kept the beaches clean during the week because they respected the beach. The weekends saw the traffic from Orlando show up, which was a boon for the local businesses but it took a toll on the beach in the form of garbage despite there being garbage cans every 200 feet or so.

The people of New Smyrna Beach would quietly pick up pieces of trash they saw and stick them in the garbage cans. Occasionally, in groups sipping coffee on a bench, we might bitch about the people from Orlando who showed up and made a mess, but it was a balance for the local businesses so we put up with it. The local businesses often were informally involved with the cleanup.

What set New Smyrna Beach apart in this regard was the income level. At that beach, when you walked into a bar, you might be talking to the wealthy and not know it because they dressed very ordinarily, and they would laugh at people who brought their expensive cars to the beach because they themselves drove old cars, sometimes rusty from being at the beach. The community, as a whole, cared about the beach. I was told by one of the wealthy one day that the difference between New Smyrna Beach and Ormond Beach, where I worked at the time, was the difference between old money and new.

I don’t know. I did go to Ormond beach a few times, but not during the early hours – the best hours, the most quiet hours when you can hear the surf rearranging the sand in fits of violence followed by a gentle touch, putting everything fairly close to how it was. Every wave a revolution, every space between a consolidation.

No, I don’t have to go to the beach to see that anymore because when you see it you see it everywhere. What changes is the frequency, the level of violence and the consolidation needed after. The balance kept things the same, and it shifted too much toward the violence, erosion can be seen, and erosion on a beach is always considered a bad thing and yet it’s that very rhythmic violence that creates the beaches themselves.

What disturbs me in the world these days is that it seems we’re reshaping the landscape and we don’t really know what the hell we’re doing, from the planet to society to even our personal lives.

Hungry Ghosts of Technology.

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This morning I was reading up on how tech companies had cut corners to get data to feed their generative AIs, and what really rang out in the article was the incessant need for more stuff to shove into learning models.

As a sidenote, it’s pretty amazing that people can get together, swap bodily fluids and grow another person that spends a life hopefully learning, with so much less of a carbon footprint, but the child is somewhat constrained by costs associated with learning.

So they cut corners. If a parent does that with a child, they generally end up in trouble, but wave the magic letters ‘AI’ around and suddenly it’s dressed different.

Anyway, I got really caught up thinking about it today and it seemed pretty much like the hungry ghosts described in Tibetan Buddhism. There’s a good article by PsychologyToday that connects the concept of hungry ghosts to addiction and other things, but the description of a hungry ghost says it all – small mouths, thin necks that are impossible to pass food through and bloated stomachs.

In fact, in pop culture, Pirates of the Caribbean’s Captain Barbossa pretty much demonstrated what a hungry ghost is.

So these companies are out there looking for data – Sam Altman is even mentioned in the NYT article as using synthetic data (data generated by AIs) to train future models.

Sounds like hungry ghosts to me.

Cooperative Real Time Strategy.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Recently, I started playing Starcraft II again. It’s one of the best real time strategy (RTS) games available, aside from Homeworld and Homeworld II. I really wish Homeworld III would launch.

I’m on Battlenet as Taranis, and you can say ‘hi’ – but be warned: I’m an old guy playing a video game and I won’t say I’m competitive as much as competent. I don’t like the competitive side of the game that much. In more competitive modes, I prefer Free For Alls, but I really like the cooperative gaming because I’m not playing against other people, instead playing towards a common goal. And in cooperative mode, I almost always play Vorazun (pictured) – cloaked units with high damage, the ability to stop time every 4 minutes, and I just really like the sound of the dark templar slashing through things. I could go on.

It’s fun.

As we were discussing in chat today, there are some jerks in cooperative mode, but you can always block them. I’m not sure if that means you can’t play with them, but it certainly means you don’t have to listen to them.

It’s fun for me playing in cooperative mode. Some people are better than you, some aren’t, and sometimes you make a misstep, sometimes they do, and it’s not about who is the better player as much as filling in each other’s gaps and winning the objective. Sometimes you lose. Losing is a learning experience. Don’t lose your temper, raise your game.

Cooperating. There just aren’t enough games that let you do that. Even what I consider to be one of the best rts ever, Homeworld II, didn’t have that.

When I play a game, I don’t like to be around jerks. Most of the time I’m playing games it’s to escape from a world full of jerks. Why would I set myself up to deal with them while I’m supposed to be having fun?

We need more cooperative games against non-players, and AI has reached a point where we could be doing that. I think we should. We don’t need people practicing hating on each other and getting under each other’s skin – there’s plenty of that in the real world.

Who knows? With more cooperative games, maybe being a jerk won’t be seen as an asset in the real world as much.

Subjective Technology Use.

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I’ve been conflicted today in writing about AI and war, mainly because I know it’s been being used in two conflicts that I know of – for Ukraine’s defense, and for Israel’s offense.

When news came of Ukraine using AI, I wasn’t too surprised. The Ukrainians have been surprisingly resilient and adaptive with the Russian invasion, and it’s hard for me not to cheer a little in my heart because I believe the technology is being used for good.

When I found out about Israel’s use of AI and how they are using it, I couldn’t agree with it and found it to be terrible.

In my mind, based on what I know and also what I believe, Ukrainians and Palestinians have much in common with occupied territory, etc, though Russia hasn’t built a wall yet. In the same way, I view Russia and Israel’s actions as very much the same because of occupation and what appears to be wanton disregard for life in very dehumanizing ways. No, I don’t support Hamas, or taking hostages, but if we go down that route I also don’t support Israel’s taking prisoners prior to the hostage taking, for years, and consider that to be hostage taking at the least, unfair persecution at the worst.

Am I right? I allow that I may not be. I don’t have to have a firm opinion, and I don’t have to be angry with people who disagree with me because I am fortunate enough not to be on a side. I believe these things because of what I have observed from afar and make no claim to be an expert. I do support sovereignty, and Ukraine has a centuries long history of problems with Russia. We’re creeping up to a century with Israel and Palestinians, and in that conflict I just think about a few generations knowing only the insides of war.

How I view these wars colors the way I see the AI use. That’s a problem. AI use for picking targets can’t be good for one and not the other. In the story of David vs. Goliath, Goliath was the one at disadvantage but the story talks about how big Goliath was and how great a warrior he was whereas David was just some guy who happened to have new technology. What happens in that story if Goliath had the same technology and ability?

When I put it into that context, it became easier to resolve the internal moral and perhaps philosophical conflict I was having. I cannot say that what I believe is empirically right. I believe I’m right, but I may not be, and understanding that doesn’t mean I’m sitting on a fence.

It means that we, as humans, are very subjective in how we view technology use in war, and we do not truly understand it until it works in a way that works against what we believe.

If this doesn’t resonate with you, maybe it should.

The Sandbox Dilemma: Walled Gardens.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

When I was a boy, maybe around 7, living in suburbia as a latch-key kid, the back yard was an important part of life. I could run, play with the dog, kick a ball around, etc.

My mother wanted a garden, so she took up about 1/4 of the backyard with that, and soon I got the chore of cleaning up the dog’s poop. There was a corner of the yard where it was dropped into a decoratively covered hole by a young version of me. It was some novelty or the other that only a knowing eye would discern that it marked where the poop went. I did this with a ‘pooper scooper’, all the rage in the 1970s for people tasked with picking up poop.

Soon, I wasn’t a big fan of the backyard. It was a place where I picked up poop, and nobody really enjoys that, particularly when they’re 7 and the world is full of far more interesting things. My father decided to get a tractor tire and fill it with sand so that I could have my own sandbox for myself and friends to play in, making the area better to play in.

This seemed like a good idea, and it was pretty fun for a few days.

It was fun until a neighborhood cat found the sandbox. I never actually saw the cat, but when visiting the sandbox, that a cat had been there was readily apparent. Being used to this from the dog, I cleaned it up and tossed it where the dog poop went, but it became a chore just getting the poop out of the sandbox and – since we didn’t have a cat – I didn’t know why that scent of ammonia clung to the tire even though all visible traces of poop were gone.

I was 7 and completely unaware of magical litter boxes that cats used. In fact, I didn’t even know that it was a cat. I just knew there was poop that needed to go away.

In time, it became unmanageable because apparently that cat told it’s friends, and I ended up seeing cats come into the yard, flinging sand all over as they covered their sandbox surprises. They were being cats, their owners were being owners of inside-outside cats with no care for where their cats took their potent poops, and there I was at 7 watching how uncaring people had cats that, as long as they pooped somewhere else, it wasn’t their problem.

On Mastodon yesterday this all came to mind when someone equated walled gardens and ‘enshitification’. It’s pretty much how it works, it seems, at least in the broad strokes.

You might have a walled garden, but your neighbors with cats don’t care about their cats taking dumps in your sandbox. If you build it, they will come.