Our focus is on the human dimension — the psychological and spiritual conditions created by the A.I. environment. Not the technology itself, and a little about the economic and environmental issues. This is about people and what the atomic bomb of computers does to us. We’re studying the invisible and the easily overlooked effects.
Dear Friend and Reader:
Back in the spring, an astrology client who is an A.I. exec kinda threw down and said, if you want to understand what’s going on you have to mount a full-scale operation like you did with covid.
She is involved, but also quietly seething with rage at the insanity of it all and the grotesque bonfire of money, land, water and human pain and blood that it’s taking to create this monster and how it’s close to swallowing the economy whole.
So with the help of Elizabeth Shepherd and Shawn Boyle, and my client, and some brain power from covid MVP, the eminent non-journalist Spencer Stevens who actually cracked the covid case, we dug in. (In case you find yourself consumed with the Total Covid Itch, here is that full body of work.)
This process has included five months of daily publishing, much reading including the essential Empire of A.I. by Karen Hao, and my thought experiment that finally broke the thing: Could A.I. herd sheep? Meaning, if you could make the perfect replicant of a border collie, could A.I. train it to do something so simple as to get the sheep from there to there?
If you think about how a sheepdog gets to do this, you would see, no way. They are following the sheep around at 12 weeks old, instructed by hundreds of generations of predecessors. The sheep also respond to the dog, who understands them instinctively and who has four paws on the ground. They really don’t need to be taught, just trained for a couple of years, participating with other dogs. A Large Language Model could not instruct this or model it or anything.
We have developed a real understanding of the issues, which we trace back to the 1950s and before, to the advent of electrical communication technology. We are among the only journalists covering the human transformation instigated by A.I. I’m available for interviews on these and related topics. Reach me via the Planet Waves FM website.
So if it’s so damned intelligent, why can’t it learn how to get the sheep into their pen? Is it less “intelligent” than a dog, or less “intelligent” than a lamb? Oh wait, A.I. is not intelligent at all, it cannot think, it cannot write, it does not have instincts, it cannot see or hear, it definitely cannot smell or feel the ground, it has no feelings, and it would never be able to train a sheepdog. In fact the mouse that is currently foraging on my kitchen counter is infinitely more intelligent than that heap of code.
On that merry canine (or murine) note, I present to you the total of the work of our investigative team, and my modest portfolio, so far.
Thanks for tuning in. Please send this around to people who might benefit, and don’t forget to tap on that Ice Nine News banner because it takes you someplace good that some friendly humans who love sheepdogs work on every day. They deserve all the credit; it was merely my idea. Notably, paid for by donors to our nonprofit newsroom Chiron Return. Please “buy us a coffee”! Thank you…
You faithful astrolover,
