Controlling Computer Knowledge

Sep 24, 2023

I usually write and break up posts and schedule them to be posted on subsequent days. For some reason this article failed to be scheduled. My

error and my apologies.

Essentially the issue of AI, and any danger that it could entail, is the reason for AI. If the purpose of AI is to convince people they don’t need to control the knowledge that the computer can present them with all of the knowledge necessary then it could become dangerous if they are able to lead people to understand that the computer is smarter than they are. Then yes, as suggested by some programmers that have been working on the issue, AI could become dangerous and could loose itself from the control of the programmers.

But if we ignore the very term “AI” and prevent computer knowledge as a tool to promote UI (user intelligence) then the computer remains a tool in control of the user. But if it does not, if the computer becomes enmeshed with a design to control the user, and the user is led to believe his knowledge is inferior to the “intelligence” of the computer then all hell is possible to create a dystopic inferiority to the computer. It becomes an issue of silverware deciding what food you can use the silverware for rather than a tool to bring food you choose to your mouth. That might sound silly but similarly if you let a tool feed your mind with what it chooses to feed it, rather than what you are interested in learning. If that is allowed to occur, then the computer is not a brilliant tool that feeds your mind, but a tool that is used against you to subject your mind to being controlled.

I began this series last week with the comment that I had been engaged in a “brainfight with my computer.” Since I ignore all computer suggestions on what to read or view next (if the subject attracts me, I write it down, and type it in later). The computer algorithm eventually despaired of making selections for me and began only referring to me to previous articles or subjects, sometimes trying to jump me ahead (back) before I even completed my search. Then last week it became unbearable and I was being prevented from even entering a new search, so I had to go into my lennox program and make some search alterations. Since it was something I had never done before it did take some tutorials to determine the commands necessary to do a bit of reorganizing.

Now I did learn two computer languages back in the bygone days and did have to write a simple program in each. But I never learned to code and algorithms are built into computer codes. I suppose if I really needed to design a code I could determine how to do it but I’ve never really needed that binary coding talent. And I think it does take a lot of talent to teach a computer to behave and respond and coding is very intense. But creating programs, well that is just a matter of following command prompts someone else has designed. And I began utilizing a computer sometime around the later 80’s by typing in commands to maintain records, etc. I kind of missed the explosion of desktop usage that began to boom around ‘95 with the windows 9x series, and especially windows 95 that really required no commands to be initiated, and software could be bought already programmed to operate without the need for the user to tell the computer what the user wanted it to do. But everyone I knew that was purchasing these computers was to play games or communicate with others in a manner I really had no use for. I didn’t at that time think much of the computer other than as a tood devised to keep and access records at a speed I was not capable of doing. Granting that my first computers needed to have information entered into the computer on punch cards and those days were long passed, the computers I still utilized needed to be programmed through basic+ commands that could be time consuming until the computer knew to do what the user told it to do. So accessing information for research was done the old fashioned, finding the physical sources, often by developing a relationship with librarians to get material from all parts of the world, or really other libraries where old manuscripts I wanted were being kept. Sometimes those facsimiles were nearly unreadable.

But as far as I knew none of that was becoming widely available on the burgeoning worldwide internet. So it was probably close to fifteen years later, and way beyond any windows 9x program that I first started using windows and “updated” myself. At first it was a marvelous brave new world but I had no idea I had anything to do on the computer or realized there was not some magical ability beyond me that even operated the thing. It was all ethereal ghostliness that let me know whatever I ever typed into the search bar seeking. I didn’t know about the control panel, I didn’t know how to remove ads from my search, or how to affect the outcome of the search beyond what was presented to me. I had recently gotten married and it was actually my wife who first taught me the elementary usages I was capable of accomplishing. And quite frankly a lot of information I needed for the research projects I contracted to undertake still needed the legwork in locating the physical material. My kids thought I was pretty dumb and had never even seen a computer before. And then a couple of years later the best friends of my stepson mother abandoned her kids and we took him in. Though not yet a teen the boy was pretty computer savvy, was teaching himself to code and he helped me do some things on the computer and I would watch him go back and forth from his computer to mine and it dawned on me that he was actually reading the steps on his computer to tell him how to enter programs into my computer and it dawned on me that the modern computer was not so magical and I actually had the ability to register some control over it.

Well I had been continuing to do contract research for people who didn’t want to do their own research and the internet seemed to offer opportunities. But I was having difficulties in communicating with the clients. I knew them only through the middlemen companies and many of them, having given me an assignment, had no further seeming need to communicate until the project was completed. Sometimes I had no idea what kind of result they wanted, what the research I was doing was going to be used for or what perspective they wished me to pursue. It was not going swimmingly, with delays for rewrites etc. and work became more hard to find as I began to get low ratings. So after an absence of no work for a couple of months I opened the door to possible work beyond my usual historical research of China and medieval Europe. So I was asked to write a review of a research paper on a study from an abstract he would provide me. I read the abstract which was about a study of a particular smoking program and its effectiveness in inducing a secession of the smoking habits. Upon giving him my “draft” he complained he was not going to pay me because I had written that the program had not been effective. He said he wanted me to write that it had been effective.I replied to him I would be paid because he had sent me an abstract to a paper that had negative outcomes to the purpose of the study. Well, it’s not what I wanted, he said. Then you need to find a program with a positive outcome and I’ll be happy to write that paper. No, I don’t have time for that, you were supposed to show this study had a positive outcome. But this paper on this program didn’t come to that conclusion.So if I made him pay he would give me an absolute bottom rating and sothe company dropped me from any future work.

I was looking for another job and went through two scams that I had to turn over to law enforcement but finally was able to get a contact job for some at-home work. They gave me a test on-line of my computer skills and I looked up the answers and submitted the work. I was hired by the contractor who had a contract with microsoft, but told in no uncertain terms I was not employed by microsoft and could never claim I worked for microsoft and so I make no such claim. Nevertheless, I was sent a work computer with access to microsoft programs (the ones I was permitted to have access to) and trained in the details of microsoft programs and then began not working for microsoft on microsoft programming and all of the mystique of the modern computer was gone.

Now the issue becomes are we going to be deluded into believing we are inferior to a tool, that the tool can replace us, or we going to wipe the burrs from our eyes and maintain the computer as an instrument we control. Are we going to demand algorithms that expand and enhance our knowledge or are we going to be made to believe we are inferior to the computer and allow our minds to be only directed by what the computer dictates. That is the danger of AI.

If we lose control, then the conspiracy of AI from my perspective is that we will be eliminated by AI. If we are subdued enough to the computer by those in charge–the Musks,the Zuckerman’s, microsoft, apple, etc–-then we have lost control to a handful of tyrants who intend to destroy our ability to “fight back.” We become controlled.

For more on how we can become valueless see my article from July 4th of this year, reposted below:

Black Lives Matter, White Lives Matter, All Lives Matter

Do any lives matter?

ShareIt is the 4th of July. There are many, can I suggest, anti-patriotic posts this year. There are a lot of posts on misguided patriotism, on how America has failed to live up to its promise. This article that I’m posting today, in common with my norm, suggests that our American government fails as much because it has always favored the lives of the few as being the only important lives in existence and that the lives of the many do not matter. I think American democracy, or any principle of democracy, is a step above autocratic government that out-and-out denies the existence of fairness. But like the slave who knows he has no freedom, the democratic community casts a pale of

deluded superiority to the wage earner over the slave, democracy likewise casts a delusion upon all who are not equally allowed self-actualization. A democracy cannot exist if it grants more importance to some than others. The delusion only exists by the continual need to choose teams of combat against each other , the farmer against the laborer, the protestant against the catholic, the white against the black—all of which allows masters to rule in the name of democracy by enlisting their team to fight battles against the opposing team to defend what is called democracy against the other team. In this sense, then, I am patriotic to the idea, but have never found myself drawn to being patriotic to the practice that appears to me to be essentially contrary to the idea.

Of course if you examine the plot of the historical narrative, irregardless if in any particular chapter seems to present a happily ever after, in the next episode the story continues the pathos of the past chapter. And in every chapter, whether it is the British mowing down non-violent protesters at the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, or Bull Connor in Birmingham. Whether it is the treatment of the natives to enrich Leopold of Belgium, or Khan’s march eastward to regain his own lost freedom, or black Americans who fought in WWI to gain more freedom in America only to face massacres of their own when returning in Tulsa, Washington D.C, Norfolk and across many other cities. It is not really very funny to compare “black crime waves” being statistically mostly directed against blacks just standing still until attacked by others. Certainly Medgar Evars called for his freedom, but the only violence he participated in was being murdered on his front lawn.

American democracy has done nothing to make lives of the exploited matter. It is not only white against the black.Look at how white property was seized by Alonzo Cornell in New York to give to the railroad that then was never built. And look at how the residents fought and were massacred just to defend their homes. Look at the coal wars in Colorado that went on for four decades and see how many lives did not matter to the Coal kings. Or had not mattered before they attempted a rebellion as the workers were forced into mines and only lived long enough to have children to replace them (on average a 30 year lifespan).

Mining itself probably started with the discovery of iron and the superior weaponry it could wield. Yes iron made stronger tools, but once again, the need for it would not have been that advantageous if weapons made from it couldn’t take more lives in battle. Children from 5 to ten, ripped from their homes and marched to mine for iron only to be replaced by more children who would not even live to have children of their own. But the mothers and fathers in the villages were subdued with promises of wealth their children’s labor would bring them, a wealth that never came because none of the children’s lives mattered, use them until they died and steal more. How about the women who were working in a windowless building in 1911 and burned to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Well it mattered long enough to get windows put into buildings and safety measures to protect workers, right? Well who of the younger class were most likely to die in the Covid epidemic? Those who had to continue to work in slaughterhouses so their owners could have their steak dinner. And really does anyone know of a rich owner or national leader who caught covid and died? Maybe some, I haven’t heard of any, so even before the vaccine, whether you believe in vaccines or not, if you had enough wealth or enough money there were remedies to keep you alive. But not too much remedy for the poor crowded together in nursing homes whose lives do not matter, do they?

What do you mean Black Lives Matter, no All Lives Matter?; what do you mean when you say better access to health care and expanding medicaid to more?; what do you mean? You certainly don’t mean the poor deserve to have the same health care as the rich—if you mean that, you are deceiving those you say it to. Medicaid is subsistence medicine. If you go to many an area in this country to a doctor who treats medicaid patients, tells them he can only treat one symptom per visit, but what if two symptoms are related? It may matter to the doctor, he may be interested in his patient’s care, but just as the legal aide lawyer has too many clients and too few resources, so the medicaid doctor does as well. and he has to plea your symptoms down to serve others. Fifteen minutes and the doctor is gone. Sometimes that 15 minutes includes the nurse taking the patient’s vitals.

What do you mean that any lives matter? Show me the day in history when lives mattered. Show me the day. The whole unfunny satire is that Emmitt’s Till’s killers lives didn’t matter one whit more to the people who sent them, or trained them to be the lap dogs to take Emmitt’s life.

Show me the day in history, in civilized history, where lives matter. Find me a day in history when bossman didn’t think lives were interchangeable as long as it was not his. Show me one day in recorded history where the master risked his life to save the servant he himself had endangered. Show me the day Scrooge thought Bob Cratchit’s life mattered? So of course Scrooge’s change of heart did not extend past Christmas day. In my nearly eighty years of life I haven’t witnessed a day when someone wasn’t willingly sacrificed to grant prosperity to a still-existing (uncrowned) king. I haven’t turned the pages of any history book and found the heartwarming story of All Lives Matter and no lives being exploited to their death on such a wonderful day.

The human life only matters to the community that is that individual’s community. It does not matter to the exploiter of human life who limits the resources needed for human life to thrive.

Did anyone really expect George Floyd’s life to matter? So said the bossman, “let’s send in the military and show them how little their lives matter.” Well it’s happened. But not this time . But it didn’t matter enough for Kyle Rittenhouse to become a hero by insuring we knew lives of those proclaiming Black Lives Mattered didn’t really matter, and just as with the killers of Medgar Evers, the taker of lives was exonerated for carrying out the bossman’s will. Just as the lives of Russian soldiers don’t matter to the Russian bossman sending them to kill the matterless lives of Ukranians, unaware, or maybe aware, that their own lives are as matterless to their own bossman as are the Ukrainians they are being sent to kill.

Don’t kid yourself. The owner of the resources who thinks the resources are his to exploit thinks lives are his to exploit as well. The man who will control and desecrate the resources of the world has little concern for those he uses to do his exploiting. And merely changing the name of the exploiter does not end the exploitation.

All we have are these songs of freedom, but the sheriff doesn’t care about our lives. Don’t ask why Greg Abbot doesn’t abolish the gun that kills children. Don’t ask why the Tennessee legislator asks the students what weapon they wish to be killed with. The answer is obvious. Lives do not matter.

Or show me the day in history when they did.

But to the exploited alone lives matter and there are days in history that do show us that when others are imperiled they will arise to assist there fellow imperilees. And from that we can move forward and away from this angry missive. Because the exploited do rally around George Floyd and his meaningless death matters. The lives of those who were too poor to flee Ian mattered a lot to each other and they risked their own to save each other. But those who escaped the storm’s onslaught were more concerned about getting their businesses and homes rebuilt, weren’t they?

So we can seek the human quest for freedom and return him to a place of importance in the community and deny the importance of the bossman-king-owner to his authority and control of our lives and our resources. We can do that. We can make him not matter. But we can do it not through rebellion. Rebellions strengthen his hand. We can do it not through revolting and changing the bossman. The way we do it, well we must leave history and return to prehistory and to what people in a common crisis still illustrate. Human nature is a communal nature. And human nature responds poorly and becomes inhumane when he is controlled. Hobbes had it reversed I believe. Humans are not savages by birth that need to be controlled to become civil in order to live together. They are civil by nature and become savage under control.

The UnUtopian Optimist

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