Friday, August 9, 2013

thinking machines and their pitfalls

Declaring an End to the Decade of Fear
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post did D.C. residents a big favor earlier this week when he courageously acknowledged the service Edward Snowden did for the United States ... and for the global debate on rights and privacy in the big data era. I have myself been too slow to recognize that the benefits we have derived from Snowden's revelations substantially outweigh the costs associated with the breach. It is time we move from the kind of Patriot Act thinking that overstates security threats to such a degree that we subordinate our basic freedoms to something more consistent with our historical systems of checks and balances. 

Edward Snowden.  One thousand opinions, one thousand crazy nights.  My opinion?  Snowden is a MacGuffin.  He serves to move the plot along.  He is not the plot, and the extent to which my government is interested in his person is embarrassing and juvenile.  It's like watching a blasé kid look for a butterfly to entomb in a jar.

In my own personal narrative, I have little interest in politics, it being obvious in the abstract that corporate interests currently instruct both parties rather stagnantly in the United States. The military industrial complex is indivisible from corporate interests, or the nation from which it stands on.

Yet as someone who supports a strong national defense - for any sovereign nation, but first my own, I quickly run into difficulties.  I wish for the NSA to have the strongest and best signal intelligence on the globe. It is a goal of those running the NSA to achieve this.  I think this clip sums it up.  Perhaps there are some built in contradictions here and there.

Two things.  One, certainly those running the NSA auger to have the best capabilities for signals intelligence around, which is sensible in a world that includes China and Russia and so on.  That is the job.

Countervailing all this is the fear that in 2020 some random pimp running an arbitrary program will ask for the metaphoric 1980's "database readout" of all the shits taken (sent to the mothership by sophisticated internet toilets manufactured by Sony) from racial subgroup X in San Francisco who went to political convention Y on January 9th, 2017.  Those showing an excess of Slurm in their diet will have their citizenship revoked and the orbital lasers will warm up and then KERZAAAAPP!  And a twinkling of ash and gristle shall scatter thusly onto the ground.

Sure, it is funny.  Until it happens to you.  Just like that. This could lead to most people conducting their normal business at renaissance faires with their mobiles turned off.

But ye gods, what a tragedy.  Dodging wenches and the like, drenched in warm beer and fake frocks.

There's got to be a better way.  Maybe we should all give up computers?  And by that, I mean, completely.

Cheers.

   "The target [...] was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."[4]