Observations from a Hill

Following on from last night's mention of the post-mid-terms market fall in AI - which was always going to happen sooner or later, it being in the nature of red-hot stocks threatening to go ape in the market to implode at some point on their inflationary curve - I have to caveat rather than cavil about the threat, real or imagined, that AI poses to the human race. AI, as it is not in the strictest sense of the word intelligent, has no sense of self or society, is in fact not sentient in any way humanly recognisable, is only a threat by proxy; the directors of that proxy being the human actors who deploy/employ the technology. The AI 'gold rush' of the last very few years has seen money following money with the aim of capitalising once again on a unicorn technology: in short, the mythologising of yet another evanescent tech beast in pursuit of wealth. As always - think tulips, ostrich feathers, pineapples dot-coms and sub-prime mortgages - these Ponzi schemes disguised as te...

Well: three things in the news this weekend that aren't about Russell Brand or Donald Trump: first off the bat in this weekend's Guardian, the revelation that Apple iPhones operate a company 'grey list' of 100,000 words and phrases that the device will not auto-predict and suggest when texting, or typing generally, which is hard-coded into the phone's operating system, forcing the user to manually peck out the offending words and phrases manually. This begs a fundamental question: which comes first, the thought or the action? Methinks simply slowing someones typing down is hardly likely to stem their thought processes and delay their actions by more than a few seconds: necessary? I think not. Secondly, what's with the current wave of empty bomb threats against airlines? This strikes me as simple economic terrorism, and would seem to me to be a far more effective method of disrupting the status quo than the deployment of any amount of lethal ordnance. But why now...

All languages have words that in a single lexical entity embody a whole philosophical idea untranslatable directly to other languages. Welsh, for instance has the word hiraeth to describe a whole raft of emotions that accompany separation from one's homeland. French has ennui to embody languor and listlessness born of a perceived existential loss of purpose. Then there is the wonderful German word  schadenfreude: the taking of pleasure at witnessing someone else's discomfort or misfortune. Not nice, one might argue, but sometimes one just can't help it. I think pretty much all right thinking people must currently be experiencing a profound schadenfreude over the recent castration of the Trump hegemony in the mid-terms: many thousands or millions of his erstwhile supporters are probably this weekend feeling a slight twinge of it at least. But in this weekend's FT, there is a piece of news that really spikes my schadenfreude. DeBeers Diamonds has it would seem, shot its...

OK - so I was watching a discussion on some political TV channel - BBC Politics, I think - about the Russell Brand case. Dame Helena Kennedy KC, a person for whom I have a good deal of respect, made a comment about Brand that made me wince as soon as she uttered the words, and I paraphrase: '... he's intelligent but he's an autodidact...'. This was meant I think to explain Brand's egotistical need to impress and impose his assumed superiority over others. Yes, the man exhibits a high degree of narcissism and of control of others through his charismatic persona, fame and wealth. But I fundamentally disagree with the notion that being an autodidact somehow de facto renders a person liable to such inferiority-based narcissistic delusion and controlling behaviour, which I took Kennedy's comment to imply. Brand, like so many of his kind, operate by guile and native intelligence in the service of their desires; but being self-taught is not a necessary concomitant of t...

... starts with but a single step... I've waited for the initial dust to settle and the reality check to kick in to prove the mid-term results were not just a fever dream. It would seem they're not, and the world can once again breathe after what seems a lifetime of mayhem and stone-cold idiocy in world politics. With the silencing - almost - of the UK Tory party and Trump - almost - in the States, we can start to think about rebuilding some trust in the political process and begin redefining how economies can work to the benefit of the people they're actually supposed to be for and about: the sustenance of the majority of us. The fact that Trump's geo-politics have forced the world economy into possibly its most unstable state, not just since the last global neoliberal disaster, but since the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression, goes I think, without saying. His second term has been an unmitigated disaster for the world at large, and the USA most pointedly and perti...

I was watching an episode of 'The Rest is Science' on YouTube this afternoon where they were playing a game of guess the origin of this or that noise from a selection of almost abstract and quite spooky-sounding samples. As one might imagine, given the click-bait-y style of this little scientific parlour game, the origins of these noises were all from normal and explicable sources, either natural or man-made in origin, and spanning some 150 years or so in their making. Various whale sounds - not the more familiar ones - icebergs calving and glaciers grinding the earth below the sea made up the bulk of the samples reviewed, but the earliest recording was that which surfaced a few years ago [2008] of the earliest known mechanical recording of a human voice, dating to 1860, of someone born in 1817: Édouard-Léon Scott De Martinville, who captured his own singing voice in a waveform drawn on paper by his own invention, the Phonautograph, which he built and was patented in 1857. His...