MARCH 15 2015
Man becoming the ultimate Machine
I was surprised to read that news now can be algorithmically generated without our brains being involved or our fingers doing the typing. Don’t ask me how that works. I imagine that some newsworthy item out there is fed into a computer which then will consider all possibilities, predict a likely outcome, and let the machine ‘scientifically’ determine the final result. Long live the Magic Machine: death to the human touch, no longer needed.
What this means is that we’ve gone far beyond the words of Psalm 115. There it says that: “Their idols are silver and gold…They have ears that cannot hear, eyes that cannot see…. Their makers will become like them and so will all who trust in them.”
Ah, those are so yesterday’s idols. Today our idols are machines, tools so clever that the idols can speak, can hear and can see. All of which makes them much more dangerous and lethal because machines have no conscience, no heart, no feelings. The slippery slope has just started to slant significantly more steeply. Imagine software stealthily replacing us as communicators, algorithmic content rapidly permeating the nooks and crannies of our culture, from government gobbledegook to fantasy financial phenomena, to fake information on the future. Of course some human brain writes the parameters but from there the machine assumes control following certain ‘environmentally’-friendly guidelines. Just imagine: bad news no longer condoned. It does not sell, so we simply eliminate it. Just imagine: computers programmed to delete anything to do with Climate Change, anything to do with unemployment, anything to do with accelerating cancer rates, and, please no reports on Pope Francis because he is saying some disturbing things.
Automated Insights (A.I. also the acronym for Artificial Intelligence) states that its software created one billion stories last year, many with no human intervention; its home page displays logos of customers all of us would recognize: Samsung, Comcast, The A.P., Edmunds.com and Yahoo. What are the chances that you haven’t consumed such content without realizing it?
Here is a concrete example. While I am writing this, I read that “Officials responsible for making sure Florida is prepared to respond to the earth’s changing climate are barred from using the terms “global warming” and “climate change” in official communications, emails and reports. We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” said Kristina Trotta, a former Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee. Another former employee added, “We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it.” Apparently when we don’t mention it, this human-induced catastrophe will disappear. Fat chance, as Florida is one of the most vulnerable states.
Welcome to the new world of Man as the ultimate Machine. This is happening in an era where nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed: it basically signals the End of Humanity.
I hardly ever watched Television, get my news from newspapers and alternative sources. I have been my own boss since 1952, a year after I emigrated from the Netherlands. Since then I’ve been dealing with people all the time, gaining a bit of insight into human nature, and still learning, gaining some self-knowledge too, I hope. My observations tell me that society at large and government bureaucracy in particular are trying to paint a picture that does not at all portray reality.
What is the current reality?
Fact is that deflation is exactly what the word implies: a bubble losing air or a human losing humanity. It applies to money whose value actually increases with deflation because as goods go down in price, a dollar buys more. It applies to humanity at large where the vast majority has no clue where we are, thanks to deflated understanding. It also applies to our precious planet, in a state of perilous depletion, another lethal form of deflation. Algorithmically generated news, Man the Magic Machine, simply ignores reality. Newspapers already reflect that trend so independent sources, such as hielema.ca/blog, become more valuable because it not only represents a more sober and genuine point of view, but does this from a unique Christian – Biblical – End-Time perspective. If we do not know where we are going then we wander in the dark. And that is the aim of Big Business. The harsh truth is that this world has an expiry date and it is approaching fast. It is from that perspective that we have to plan the future.
Yes, we live in a Near Term Human Extinction situation. On a clock it would signal a minute or two before Twelve. The algorithmically generated news is just one of the signs. Stock markets rely on this as well, with the result that stock values go up with bad news and go down with good news, because good news means that interest rates go up, and that in a world drowning in debt. A fraction of increase in the cost of debt can tumble the entire house of cards which is the current economy.
Last week the US Bureau of Labor Statistics issued an optimistic report in the labor market as jobs for waiters increased and the health industry saw gains, as more and more people got sick, now claiming 18 % of the Gross National Product in the US of A: good for the doctors and nurses, bad for the patients. The largest percentage of bankruptcies in the USA is money owed to hospitals and doctors. Wal-Mart increased wages for its workers, but reduced their hours, meaning that it is not responsible for health benefits.
What somehow was not reflected in the Labor Statistics was the job bloodbath in the oil industry, thanks to the surplus of oil – due to reduced economic activity. The never imagined happened: the world halved the price of oil with economic activity down, especially in Europe and China. Last week saw a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — all deep into the oil services sector: Calgary, Fort McMurray, Alberta in general, all in the same boat.
It reminds me of 1984, where Truth is Lies and Lies are Truth. The more our leaders lie about misbehavior in banking the worse will be the instability in currencies. In the end the truth will emerge and with it the realization that – to translate a Dutch saying – Even though the Lie is fast, in a race with Truth it comes in last. After this cruel winter – not yet over – and the high heating bills all over North America, except in California where drought has the same effect – money will be hard to come by, promising pinching of pennies, more savings, but fewer goods bought.
Externalities
Take the matter of “externalities”, the so-called free natural elements: water, air, soil. Here is a truth that burned deep into my consciousness. There was an article in Grist Magazine that stated that none of the twenty biggest industries in today’s world could break even, much less make a profit, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the environment.
That is the awful truth we are faced with. That’s why the stock market reflects only fraud. The Alberta Tar Sand oil should fetch some $200- $300 per barrel if the true price of natural restoration was taken into account. It now struggles with $50. A McDonald’s hamburger should cost as high as $100 if the rainforest clearing, the methane caused by the cattle emitting lots of Green House Gases, the poor wages and the disposal of the garbage were taken into account, never mind the after effects of eating meat and its impact on future medical costs.
Fracking is the prime example of utter folly. It needs clean water – now more scarce than oil – generating waste that will work their way up the food chain and start producing cancer clusters, but algorithmically generated news will not pick that up.
The Laws of Ecology are still in force
Yet all these costs come back to haunt us. Nothing is more certain. The laws of Ecology state that:
(1) Everything is connected to everything else;
(2) There is no waste;
(3) Nature knows best;
(4) Nothing comes free.
The free air we pollute, the water we discharge full of toxins, the soil we contaminate don’t just go away; one way or another, they’re going to be paid, and costs that don’t appear on a company’s balance sheet still affect the economy. That’s the argument of The Limits to Growth, a book that set me on the path to reality, together with the insight that the Heaven Heresy is trouncing the relevance of the church by neglecting the New Earth reality.
Here is rude reality
Here is the Truth that is staring us in the face: on a finite planet, once an inflection point is passed, the costs of economic growth – now robbing the earth of its vital ingredients, air, water, soil – rise faster than growth does then this forces the global economy to collapse: it is costs $1.01 to produce $1.00 of goods, the systems stalls. That is the truth behind the stagnation we now experience, but which the brains of this world refuse to see because it has never happened before and we, as a society, are too stupid, too brain-washed by the aspect of Infinite Growth to be able to detect something that is plain to the smallest child.
The most important cause of the lack of growth we now experience is the increasing impact of the overall pollution we now experience.
Here is my assessment: wages will decline, costs will go up, weather related incidents will increase heating and cooling bills, droughts and floods will harm food supplies, famines will occur more frequently, wars will result because Climate Change will force people to migrate to the ever smaller greener pastures. That is the kind of future algorithmically generated news will refuse to show on your TV screen or your New York Times or your Globe and Mail.
Opt out where possible, however insignificant.
I always bake my own bread. I buy the organic whole wheat kernels in 10 kg lots, I grind it into fine flour in my electric flour mill operating on my solar power. I sweeten my bread with my own maple syrup, and exercise my hands kneading the dough. People have done that for thousands of years.
That bread is simple and delicious: no additives, except some milk powder, a touch of salt, some yeast. No packing, no wrappings, no transportation, no use of the so-called externalities. That’s real bread. I do the same with yogurt. If I can do that, so can you.
A long time ago Ivan Illich pointed out in Energy and Equity that buying from a bakery is only faster if you don’t count the time you have to spend earning the money needed to pay for it. Also buying ready-made bread involves a long series of actions such as a 200 km trip from factory to store. Another example: every day I see scores of cars racing past our house en route to Belleville, some 45 km away to work 8 hours in a store or small shop. There they earn a little better than minimum wage, grossing perhaps $100 or netting $75 at best, while the cost of driving there is 90 km at 50 cents per km or $45.00 not counting air pollution. The net gain of 10 hours away is $30.00, or $3.00 per hour, not including expense for lunch and clothing. That time is better spent baking bread, preparing meals from scratch, visiting people, improving one’s mind.
The same is true for television, the boob tube, just another instrument to dumb us down so that we will not see the truth out there. Apple with its new watch and Facebook and all Internet related matters make us into robots, slaves to some stupid machine: society is now so vulnerable that it will cease to function when the Internet falls down.
We have become enslaved to the Industrial Machine. Only when we liberate ourselves from The Machine in whatever form, and assert again our humanity, as images of God, loving his holy creation, will we be able to fight the future that stands and falls with the Machine.