human

Being Human in 2024

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There has been a lot going through my mind these past few weeks as I attempted to get the pitter-patter of the fingerprints across the keyboard.

I gave up for a while and decided to just be a human being for a while, not someone who has been writing books that became other books that sat while other books have started and others are just waiting for that magical ending that has not coalesced.

One of the things that haunted me was trying to figure out what’s next in a world where anything I write might be in a training model for an AI. I wonder if people who have been using Grammarly realized they were training AI. I doubt it, but WordPress.com is not immune and is something I’ll be writing about today on KnowProSE.com.

I’ve lived a bit over half a century. I grew up with 8 track tapes, vinyl records and reel-to-reel, only to have that upended by cassettes, only to have that upended by CDs, only to have that upended by MP3s and FLAC (the latter being better). At each turn I bought the music again not because I didn’t have it but because I didn’t have it in the format that my stereos could play it in. The music industry alone leeched probably tens of thousands of dollars from my income because I like my music. This shift in technology is something newer generations bypassed, but my generation did not have the opportunity. We bore the financial weight of such changes in technology.

With video, we went from VHS and Betamax to laserdiscs to bluray to… well, I’m not that much into movies. Computer use in my time went from actual floppy discs that were 10″ across to the USB sticks we have now that have exponentially more memory than the computers we once had.

Phones went from per minute charges on landlines to mobile phones with rates for text messages (SMS) and voice calls by the minute that we have now.

A lot has happened. I have a 53″ flat screen television that wouldn’t have worked in the 1970s because my mother couldn’t put stuff on top of it.

All I wanted to do at this age was sit around and write books and this new AI technology has distracted me from it, as well as made me wonder if it’s still a good plan. Amazon gets flooded with book summaries that rip off what others have spent years researching.

This was all sufficient enough to take some time to consider because that’s a lot to consider. The self-inflicted leaders of technology don’t really give a shit about my existence other than as a revenue stream. I don’t matter to them. This I know. Should I matter to them? Should you?

I wondered for a while if I had become a Luddite because it does bother me that what I have spent a lifetime learning is what I write about, each sentence and paragraph a distillation of decades of being a human being. Generative AI spitting out text for people who ask it questions is competition now, in a world where genuine human content is as surreal as the best written fiction. Is it dystopian? Is it utopian? That really depends on how we view the world, and how others in the world view us.

It is important that we keep being human, I think. I’m just not very certain what that is supposed to be. Fortunately, I just have to be myself, but I do have to know where the boundary is between who I am and what people do with what I create.

To Flow.

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A good friend of mine1 recently bought a sailing ship after years of sailing on other people’s ships. This is a guy whose name has become synonymous for ‘he who fixes’, and while I’d love to use his name to continue propagating that, I’ll just call him ‘Fixer’.

Fixer loves motorcycles, sailing, and good company. That he did purchase the sailing ship didn’t surprise me, it was a matter of time because Fixer had been going out to sea and paying to do so.

Why would someone do that? To get experience. Why would they want that experience? To buy a ship of one’s own. It all makes sense – so why did he buy the ship?

He wanted it. But why did he want it? Fixer would have to answer that himself, yet I think at least part of it is the challenge. When you’re on a ship, you have what you have and you make do. You have to be prepared, you have to know what to do when things go sideways, and as a reward you get to have the wind through your hair, the smell of sea air2 , and the physicality of it at times.

I’ve always found large expanses of water to be therapeutic. On a crowded planet, the oceans are our last refuges.

The Coffee Thoughts.

I thought of this while having breakfast and coffee at one of my new haunts. I was sitting, as I normally do, by myself at the bar, and this morning the barista had my order in my spot before I got to the door – she’d seen me in the parking lot and had not planned for me to talk to a guy in the parking lot a while, and her countenance showed a bit of disappointment that I was tardy. It was still hot, it was still good, and somehow I felt I had robbed her of something she had worked hard for.

I ate and drank as I tried puzzling this out, as well as how well she did and did not seem to be handling it. I’m always suspicious of a woman who says, “It’s fine”, and she had said that. This delves into deeper and deeper questions which are well beyond the scope of this. I was deep in thought, as I like to be since to have a brain and to not use it seems like a waste of a brain.

Out of the blue, this guy pulls up and sits on a stool next to me, despite there being other stools further away, and he’s jabbering on the phone. This is like the guy who comes into the men’s room and despite having other options, picks the urinal right next to yours.

This guy was effectively urinating on my shoes.

Here I was, just minding my own business, when an annoying human wanders next to me, sits down, and has complete conversations with someone who isn’t even there. A few hundred years ago they would have dragged him to a sanitarium.

I hate mobile phones and the manners they have produced. I’m sure that at least his mother thought he was a nice person, but to me he was simply an irritant, a fly buzzing in a way that I understood and saying nothing I wanted to hear. This, to me, is a large swathe of society, and I pulled up Facebook and started looking over the ship in the pictures Fixer had posted.

That’s when I decided to write this.

Getting Lost.

There’s a wonderful thing about getting lost in something – sometimes you do need to wander to see where you are. More importantly, fully engaging your brain in an enterprise that is both mentally and physically tiring allows an escape from the burdens of everything else you have to deal with in life.

Fixer likes motorcycles and sailboats, a good merging of physical and mental engagement with the universe, where the two become one and the one is most definitely human.

If you haven’t experienced it in life, you have not yet lived, that feeling of state of flow.

These days, it seems like people are wandering around with cowbells, tambourines and harmonicas to disrupt flow, intruding into our lives like sexually transmitted diseases – yet there was no consent. Maybe this is a product of getting older, a temperament refined over half a century of interruptions and annoyances with sparse periods of ‘time at sea’.

I know plenty of people with boats. Some like going really fast. Some like line fishing, which done right is a meditation. Fixer, though, does it for different reasons.

Fixer grows. He does things to grow, and the boat is no different, and all the while I imagine it’s a therapy unto itself.

We all need more of that, and less people peeing on our feet.

Where do you find your flow? When is the last time you did it? Isn’t it time you did it again?

Of course it is.

  1. There was a time when ‘good friend’ would have been considered more redundant than it is now. Social networks have diluted what a friend is, I think, but how does one measure that? ↩︎
  2. It’s dimethyl sulfide, released by microbes, which gives the smell. Ozone has nothing to do with it, that’s a myth from the Victorian era. ↩︎

Human Aspects.

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I was having a hard time writing about this idea some technology folks have been jabbering about – it will link back here below when I’m done with it – and I could not figure out why I was having a had time.

I felt like a part of me was shearing away from other parts of me, the friction of aspects of me rubbing against themselves uncomfortable. So I grabbed pen, paper and clipboard and sat outside until the orange winged parrots did their ritual noise to go fly somewhere else.

They do that, you know. Tens of couples, maybe even a hundred, squawking in all their inelegant glory with flight that matched. They peel off the trees of this side of the valley to another part of the valley every day around the same time and make it a point to let everyone know.

Peeling off aspects of the ecosystem of this side of the valley to become aspects on the other side of the valley.

Aspects.

I think back to younger years, where the aspect of me most in tune with technology was overtly dominant, only because of opportunity and circumstance. Had I had my way in secondary school, I would have done Literature and Computer Science, but that was not a possibility. It was one or the other. The path was picked for me, and even though I had a say I did not go against it.

In retrospect, Literature with the other languages was not something I would have done well with. Damned one way or the other, I suppose.

The world was defining the choices I had as a young adult, if there is such a thing. Childhood is largely multiple choice, while the adult world is about the essays we write – and nobody asks to see our working, only our results. Then if you have the results to easily, they want to see your working, an audit sometimes not based on your capability but the lack of others.

It wasn’t until much later in life that I had the time and inclination to grow beyond that. Certainly, there are the wonderful works of literature in Gutenberg.org, but the real growth was from breathing different air. Taking the time to spend away from flat screens and 2 dimensional pages, for the puzzle of life is not 2 dimensional.

Representations of people, too, are not people – they’re just characters, masks that people wear like Instagram posts, more often than not advertising that they’re living their best lives when in fact they really want to be thought of having better lives. ‘Better’ is subjective.

Stay away from the Tide Pods, kids.

So many times people get locked into a way of thinking, of living, and therefore of perspective. This becomes more rigid over time, for better and worse. It happens to all of us, we become baked like bricks into people with granite perspectives, their point of view barely able to turn a few degrees without breaking something.

This is not me. I float back and forth, exploring things from different perspectives, twisting them and sometimes even torturing them if I’ve had one cup of coffee too many. I think that this is needed in our species more than we consider, it allows us to understand our world better by allowing us to understand ourselves better – because everyone we see, we see as a reflection of our own perceptions.

Technology doesn’t do that by itself. It can be used to that end, but all too often the ends of technology are not used that way at all. It is not the fault of technology. It is the fault of we humans, as we stand on one side of the moat or the other.

It’s worth taking the time to peel off our human aspects and look at them now and then to evaluate them. Each journey doesn’t begin with a destination, it begins with knowing where you are.

algorithms

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Broken down, we’re just algorithms, we humans. Complex algorithms, algorithms so complex that we’re still only scraping the surface.

‘The wall between machines and humans, between computer science and biology, is collapsing and I think the next century and probably the future of life itself will be shaped by this algorithmic view of the world.’

“Historian: When Computers and Biology Converge, Organisms Become Algorithms“,Yuval Noah Harari, quoted by Daniel A. Bell, May 18, 2016.

Harari said that 7 years ago, and it doesn’t appear wrong – not just from the artificial intelligence side, but from biotechnology, genetics, psychology, medicine…

We’ve mapped the human genome, starting in 1990 and ending in 2003. And what is DNA? It’s pretty much an algorithm that gets replicated with some alterations as they get passed down. We haven’t figured it all out, but it’s a matter of time. That’s just the biological side.

Language, religion, culture, family – these instill frameworks for the algorithms to work within. Parameters which get bent more than we like, if we’re honest. “Be nice to other people” doesn’t seem to fit the way we really do things, but still, we stay within the framework even where we bend it – aside from those who just don’t care. Those who just don’t care generally end up in a jail of some sort or in charge of a sovereign nation, and every step in between.

We have an education system which provides a further framework, and so on. We’re not all good algorithms, and we’re all certainly not good at everything, but together we tend to survive. Maybe it’s just a game of numbers. Maybe someone is rolling dice. If there ever was a Plan A, I’m certain we’re out of alphabet by now.

Where this gets interesting is that if we consider the bonsai I wrote about yesterday, we can see how we alter our own algorithms… and most importantly, how education is a small part of being human.

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this in entirety, but this is where I went.

Being Human.

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One of the key things about trying to figure out our own humanity while standing on the shoulders of technology we create is that we all don’t agree on what being human is.

In this bit of writing I’m going to express some opinions, hopefully in a sensible way, and I’ll be getting into some controversial subject matter because being human is controversial subject matter. I’ll add a disclaimer I shouldn’t have to: these are opinions at this point of time that will be revised as I continue being human. I’m imperfect, after all, and I suspect you are too.

Homo Sapiens, as a species, have been around 300,000 years or so as far as we know. There are people who don’t believe this. There are people who do. As far as evidence goes, the science is for the 300,000 years.

The reality is that while we have these scientific knowledge, there are people who disagree. I’m not going to debate it here. The point is that when it comes to how long humanity has been around, we can’t seem to get people to agree on when we started being human.

The ‘how’ of being human is another annoying discussion that goes nowhere, and is linked to when we started passing stone tablets around. Well, stone tablets were a technological advancement in that they were more mobile than cave walls. There was nothing like taking your stone tablet out on a nice long walk with friends so you could read it to them in a lovely setting.

Our ability to write, and by extension read, is only about 5,500 years old. This fact doesn’t seem to be disputed as much, largely because of religious texts. We have had written communication for roughly 1.83% of our species time on the planet. For those of you bad with math, that’s not very long.

That’s just the basic historical stuff. During our recorded history, we’ve demonstrated great qualities and terrible qualities. Both are human. Some we deny or ignore out of convenience. We tend to think of ourselves in a very positive light because to do otherwise would be depressing, and nobody wants to be depressed.

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

Douglas Adams, Last Chance To See (1990)

There’s more history to go through that has filled books that very few people read and less people understand. To read all of our short written history and understand it would likely take a lifetime.

We just can’t agree on what being human is. That’s a problem when we are talking about anything, much less technology than reflects it all back at us with biases we still don’t completely understand. We haven’t agreed on what it is to be human beyond some human rights stuff that even though we sort of agree on, we have people violating anyway.

Civilization gave us rules. Laws. While the Code of Hammurabi is often cited as one of the earliest legal codes written, the Code of Ur-Nammu predates it by a good 600 years and is fairly intact. The Code of Urukagina predates that. It’s likely not a mistake that some people believe that the Earth is around as old as written history like this – we who claim to be part of literate civilizations would find it difficult to understand a world without writing.

The laws are interesting because nobody just makes up a law arbitrarily. Before it became illegal to kill someone, someone got killed and someone said, “This is bad. We need a Law.” It’s pretty clear that Laws don’t stop people from getting killed, or assure that murder is prosecuted. When we look back at these laws, we gain some insight into some of the issues that were prominent at the time.

One thing that stands out in the Code of Hammurabi is the implicit hierarchy, which reinforced the hierarchy:

  • If one finds a slave who has run away, and he brings the slave back to his owner, the owner will pay two shekels…
  • If one is in debt, and cannot pay, he can sell himself, his wife, his son and his daughter to work; after three years they shall be set free…
  • If anyone strikes a man whose rank is higher than his, the man shall be whipped sixty times with an ox-whip in public.
  • If someone strikes another man equally ranked, he shall pay one gold mina.
  • If a slave strikes its owner, his ear will be cut off.
  • If a man strikes a pregnant woman, and she therefore loses her child, he shall pay ten shekels for her.
Examples from the Laws of Hammurabi.

For the hierarchy to be codified, the hierarchy would have had to exist before the Laws existed. Where there are such hierarchies, some people have more value than others. There was no equality except within tiers of the hierarchy, and even then we can assume there was a pecking order. Equality or equity wasn’t something that was considered. There were no human rights except what the laws allowed for.

When we look at society today, we’re not too different. We aspire to be, or so we say, but we’re not very different at all.

And we’re talking about AI and it’s impacts on society.

Being Social.

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web Craft Beer Lives HereI’ve taken to taking weekends ‘off’ to a degree, which is likely a bit odd for many people who read this since the majority of people already do that, and have done it for some time.

Growing up, these days were days when I worked one way or another. Family businesses, and some companies I worked for, were service businesses to service businesses, where being on call 24/7 wasn’t a job, it was just life. So, even if I worked for a company that gave weekends and holidays off, I would keep myself busy somehow.

Hobbies. Rebuilding RX7s, taking Pine64s and making neural nets from them, hanging shelves, writing, experimenting with new hardware and software (and libraries).
Maybe because of this, over the years that part of me atrophied from lack of use. Maybe I just was implicitly part of a hacker ethic, or maybe, just maybe, I loved avoiding the drama associated with other people from being misunderstood, from getting into a pissing contest, or listening to someone blather on about things that I didn’t care about (a staple of many relationships).
Maybe I’m just not a people person. People I interact with feel otherwise, generally, but that’s part of the load of doing it.

If I have to interact with someone, I want it to be positive, thoughtful, and as painless as possible while being as honest as possible. This is not an easy task with most people. ‘Painless’ is a matter of someone’s sensitivity and the ability to apply soft enough words to make a point without getting a person in pain, or defensive (which is a reaction to previous pains).

It’s easier to sit down and write these things after some thought rather than to do it in person, because you can just sit and think about what you write, but in a tense human conversation it’s all about improv, and when people run out of improv, bad things happen. Sometimes bad things just happen, but with a bit of experience, these can be avoided if one pays attention.

In all, it’s a lot of work. For some, it’s all very easy, but for me I see it as a lot of work. And that’s how I tricked myself into doing it on weekends and on holidays.

Being Human

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Human Being, Not Human DoingI found myself thinking over the last few days about how I’ve grown in different ways and what I need to continue growing. And, as luck would happen, a few people brought to my attention something I had written about how people categorize.

We’re all seen in different ways, and how we see ourselves evolves. How we see ourselves feeds how we are seen, how we are seen affects how we see ourselves, and so on and so forth.

tenorIf you were to ask my friends, you’d probably hear about my irreverent humor, my above average cooking (I’m no chef), or the parallels between myself and a certain Lannister of short stature.

Ask some people I deal with, and you’ll likely hear that I’m honest, straightforward and authentic. Ask others, and I have no idea what they’ll say. I have a close circle, I try to treat everyone as well as I would like to be treated and while I am critical I tend to be critical of actions instead of people. Just because someone does something dumb doesn’t mean that they are dumb.

Of course, after you tell them it’s dumb and they keep doing it…

So all of this made me think of how we classify people, how we classify ourselves, and how it may hold us back from being who we are. When I was growing up – some say I haven’t yet – the recipe was to do well in school in subjects (split up between arts, science and business), do things outside of school, and to not get caught doing things that are wrong and to be seen doing things that are right.

But isn’t it all simply about being human? Don’t we forget that somehow in all these different goals we set out? For a while, all I did was technology because it was my way out of a bad place and bad time – but then, I grew beyond that and despite the world’s culture of specialization. Why must I devote all my time and energy to one facet of my life?

That’s stupid. But I did it for a while, and it catapulted me into more than one glass ceiling. A few broke, not all, but it’s hard to remember the ones broken through – it’s easy to remember the ones that bruised us as we crashed against it.

So I’ve come to a new conclusion over the last few days; being human is about the discovery of what it takes to be whole, and being whole is a dynamic thing.

That’s my rationalization until I come up with a better one.

Reboot Stages

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ReBoot SpriteIt’s happening again.

At times in life, things change so much that a re-evaluation happens – or should. I suppose for people considered normal in society, such times might be when they are getting married, or when they’re having a child. For me, it almost always  seems to have to do with supporting myself or some new knowledge that requires a re-evaluation of everything that has happened since.

References

It’s a minefield. We remember things sometimes not as they happened but as we want to remember how they happened – a fact that keeps lawyers and psychologists gainfully employed, where objectivity is as subjective as our memory. This is where objective notes can be of worth, disciplined writing that requires one to report to a piece of paper or other medium what happened in sometimes annoying detail. Writing logs in the Navy and with the Marine Corps prepared me for that, from security logs to SOAP notes in medical records.

Writing notes is important. Recently, someone griped to me about how their manager required full reports from them and, 2 days later, would ask them again. This has been happening for years, and he reported to me a conversation where the manager said, “I don’t remember 90% of what you tell me.” My thought was – think it with me, don’t say it out loud – “Write that shit down!“.

I have found in writing things down I do remember things in detail without referring to my notes; though admittedly if I write things for other people they read through a filter of their own reading comprehension if they cross the threshold of their willingness to read. You can’t document for people who don’t RTFM. Or, on the internet, follow hyperlinks or actually read the posts you share. Fair notice: I mock people who don’t do the latter 2 things openly, viciously, and with a great deal of annoyance.

So I have notes, scribbled into Moleskine notebooks, documents in manila folders, documents on computer systems (no cloud; it’s insecure, silly)… and I find myself perusing  these things and looking not at the way I wanted my life to go but how it actually went, from the sources of meals to friendships that lasted to those that did not, from ideas that are now rejected to ideas that have survived decades. I’ll gratuitously link Moleskine notebooks I use on Amazon.com because they have survived decades. 

Well written notes from other people can be awesome. Poorly written notes from other people should be printed on toilet paper and used appropriately. Must I draw it for you? 

Re-evaluation

Meditation in the Deer-ParkIf you have good notes, the hardest part is re-evaluating… everything,

Everything that happened. Everything affected. How it affected you. How it affected others. How everything was affected between then and the now. Everything.

This requires the hardest thing of all: Honest reflection. Being hard on one’s self, being realistic about results, and being able top hold multiple conflicting ideas in one’s head at the same time. It is, by no stretch, easy. It takes time, energy, time, introspection, time, questioning the introspection, time and… did I mention time?

Growing is hard, painful and has no patience for ego or dishonesty to one’s self. Being dishonest means atrophy or stasis – really one and the same – and dooming one’s self to the failures of one’s own history. Doors will remain disguised as walls, walls may be disguised as doors like a cartoon.

This part gets harder every time, I’ve found. The volume of what you have to process increases with time, and, if you have learned anything from previous re-evaluations, means a more assiduous process every time. Worse, as we get older our opinions can become more hardened and more difficult to change, making the introspection more difficult. Sure, someone out there might write a book about how it gets easier – maybe they know something I don’t – but it’s harder and harder every time for me, but more and more necessary as I grow.

Paths open, paths close, plans are experimented with… some make it through this process, some don’t. Which leads us to…

Decisions, Decisions

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

– Laurence J. Peter

“Whee do I want to be next? What do I want to do? What’s the next set of goals?”

Such questions were easier when I was a child, even as a teenager when I knew everything and felt the confidence people seek in politicians. More experienced, having put my hands on the stove burners of life a few times, it’s harder every time – and easier at the same time. As we grow older, we’re supposed to have more questions than answers but we’re supposed to be better at asking the right questions.

Or, at the least, we think so. In talking with people who seem to have their lives together, I’ve found that when they are honest they don’t feel that way. Life is a floor of banana peels, plans are order we try to push onto a canvas of uncertainty – misunderstood order we learn about as we grow, or we break. There are skeletons against the walls of Life, broken bones apparent – we see them in life as those that we somehow outgrew.

The rare ones we know are like us, figuring stuff out, maybe even leaning on each other. Statistically, I think that it’s fair to say that as we progress there are fewer and fewer people in these Halls of Life still navigating their way – some ahead, some off to the side.

We don’t really know what we’re doing. We just know what we’ve done and tried to learn from it – some better than others. Some have been afraid to get bruised and fall, they stand in place or even dare sit down in life as we trundle by. Some even grab our feet, drowning in their stagnation they try to hold us. The angry kick them, the strong pull away easily, the fearful slap at them and attempt to run away. Some might spend the time to convince them to get back up and face life.

Yet we must move on, and even undecided, we make our decisions with the best of intentions and hopefully with the best information and sincere re-evaluation, or as close to them as possible.

Slide.

In time, you will realized that’s all anyone is doing, no matter how far ahead or behind you think they are.

Compromised Betrayals

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Nightmare of Judah

Some say compromise is noble
But “not at the cost of betrayal”
Remains unsaid…
Lost to those captive in books.

The water compromises, seeking
Paths of least resistance –
Yet it never betrays itself.
To be water is to be understood.

People compromise, seeking
Paths of least resistance
And betray themselves –
To be human is to be misunderstood.

Odie

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Away from Ohio,
Wearing a uniform that stinks of
Mothballs, sweat
And burned starch.
The work-shoes sparkle as
Stray light glances
Through the glass door.
Images flicker on these black screens.
Gurneys flash to one from the other as
The sounds from well-oiled wheels filter in
(The audience is listening)
The clock stops
Little hand on 2, long past 3,
A voice echoes.
“Time of Death:
2:17 a.m.”
Motion stops as the clock moves again,
And in the background, a near whisper:
‘And his dog’s name was Odie.’