weird

Weirdness.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Something new and interesting happened, and I just don’t know what to do with it. A reader here, who would message me a lot on Facebook, sent me a peculiar message, and in keeping with their request for privacy identifying information about them has been removed.

Honestly, I thought not to write about it at all, but I’m low on writing thoughts this morning and couldn’t think of anything better.

We’ll just stick with the message for now. No single thing is weird about it. Wanting privacy, something I understand quite well, is nothing new.

The prayer part is something that I think we all get inundated with. When someone sends prayers, or something along those lines, it’s pretty harmless. As an atheist who is not anti-theist, it doesn’t hurt me, but it does soak up a lot of bandwidth when everyone is sending the 1s and 0s around the world that I think could be more useful otherwise. But then, I like videos of animals doing cool stuff, so we all have our entertainment.

Prophecy. Well, we all have our prophets, I suppose. We have Kurzweil The Prophet talking about the technological singularity, we have Musk the Prophet strangling companies til their breathing improves, we have Trump the Prophet saying he’ll make America Great Again, and we have Biden the Prophet saying – well, I’m not sure what he’s saying, but he’s saying something. We have Putin the Prophet saying that the ‘Special Operation in Ukraine’ will be over in 3 months over 500 days later… The Crypto prophets, etc.

prophecy (n.)

c. 1200, prophecie, prophesie, “the function of a prophet; inspired utterance; the prediction of future events,” from Old French profecie (12c. Modern French prophétie) and directly from Late Latin prophetia, in Medieval Latin also prophecia (source also of Spanish profecia, Italian profezia), from Greek prophēteia “gift of interpreting the will of the gods,” from prophētēs (see prophet). Meaning “thing spoken or written by a prophet” is from late 13c.Related entries & more 

‘prophecy‘, Etymonline.com, accessed 24 July 2023.

Where did Nostradamus go? He was popular for a while.

Such a loose term.

What’s peculiar about the message is that everything taken together is… well, it seems strange to me. Going back and forth in somewhat normal conversation for months, a name change to something religious (you’ll have to trust me), prophecy and privacy…

I dunno. It’s just weird.

I’m going to drink more coffee.

Trapped In Our Own Weirdness.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

When I wrote about expanding our prisons, implicitly it’s about the removal of biases through education. For example, how can one who has even a passing understanding of the human genome still consider ‘race’ an issue? Here we are, having mapped the human genome, and we continue acting out over skin tones that have little to no correlation to genetics.

You can’t tell ‘race’ by a genetic test. Race is a label, and a poor one, and one we perpetuate despite knowing this.

It’s about history, like I pointed out over here when I mentioned the history of photographic film. It is a troublesome issue and one that we largely have reinforced by our own works that pass on from generation to generation.

At first it was just images, from the earliest cave drawings, then more formal writing and more elegant art, then recordings of all sorts. In today’s world we have so much that we record, and there’s a bit of wonder at how much maybe we shouldn’t be recording. These things get burned into the memory of our civilization through the power of databases, are propagated by the largest communication network ever built, and viewed by billions of people around the world independent of ‘race’ or culture but potentially interpreted at each point of the globe, by each individual, in different ways.

In an age of just oral tradition, it would just be a matter of changing something and waiting for living memory to forget it. Instead, we suffer the tyranny of our own history written by people who have their own perspectives. No one seems to go to the bathroom in history books or, for that matter, religious texts. An AI trained on religious texts alone would not understand why toilet paper has a market in some parts of the world, with a market for bidets in others.

Now we have the black boxes of artificial intelligence regurgitating things based on our history, biases and all, and it’s not just about what is put in, but the volume of what is put in.

The next few decades are going to be very, very weird.