Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 05/09/18> When the light bulb finally goes on… and it’s too late.

We have all seen the cartoons, well those of us who are old enough to remember what cartoons are, where the person is in the middle of doing something and the next panel of the cartoon has the three little circles that look like smoke signals that leads up to the cloud above their head. Right, you’re with me so far? Good. In the cloud is a light bulb and it has the little lines emanating from it to depict the light bulb is lit up. You know exactly what I’m talking about; the light bulb represents that an idea has been sparked in the person’s mind.

Well, if you can, picture me in that exact scenario Tuesday afternoon as I was driving across Interstate 10 heading west to one of my favorite cities, San Antonio. I had just past one of those real nice rest stops I have featured in one of my daily dose columns earlier and the light bulb came on in my mind about artificial intelligence, A.I., one of the things everybody who is involved with computing is so excited about.

Now, as most of you know, I’m not involved in computer hardware development so I didn’t come up with an idea for some miniature circuit or chip that would speed up the development of A.I. I also am not a programmer so I didn’t have a brain storm idea that would rewrite or improve any of the algorithms that are involved in making A.I. work. My mathematical skills are pretty much confined to the basic functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, percentages and a little geometry to boot. So an algorithm is way beyond my current capabilities.

None the less, that light bulb had gone on, and I had figured something out when it comes to A.I., my idea won’t explain A.I. , it won’t improve A.I., it won’t speed up the implementation of A.I. but it will tell us why people are so excited about it and why the young millennial and gen Xer’s can’t wait for it to take over. As a member of the baby boomer generation I am kind of saddened that I actually figured it out, because while most people would look at A.I. as some kind of great achievement I have come to the realization that it is the culmination of our failures.

We need look no further than the name itself for the clues, because it is right there that pretty much tells the whole story, the two words, “artificial” and “intelligence”. Those two words shouldn’t probably ever be used in the same sentence let alone the same name, yet as a society we are as excited as can be at the prospects of what we think it is and what it can do.

This is usually the point in my stories where I will go to the trusted Merriam Webster dictionary and pull up the definition of the word and give it to you to help make my point. Not this time though, and I also have determined that I can no longer use the adjective “trusted” when referring to the Merriam Webster dictionary. I pretty sure that the three founders, George Merriam, Charles Edward Merriam, and Charles Merriam would not be pleased that sultnpapper has decided to abandon the use of the dictionary that they founded. The reason is they keep changing the definitions of words, and it is not just the M W dictionary, but all dictionaries, are changing the definitions. It is almost like these people who print the dictionaries have gotten together in some type of conspiracy to dumb down the public.

If it wasn’t like there were not enough conspiracies as it is and I have to uncover what might be the second biggest conspiracy of all time, the first being the dumbing down of the people in the United States through the public education system. Let me not digress any further.

And okay, I will share the definition begrudgingly, just to make my point.

A R T I F I C I A L, as defined by the M W dictionary : 1) humanly contrived often on a natural model 2. A) having existence in legal, economic, or political theory 2.B) caused or produced by a human and especially social or political agency 3.A) lacking in natural or spontaneous quality 3.B) Imitation , Sham 4.) based on differential morphological characters not necessarily indicative of natural relationships 5.) " deemed obsolete" / ARTFUL , CUNNING

So, what the M W dictionary has done it has softened the harshness and reality of the word “artificial” by using the words “humanly” and “natural model” and letting us know it has “existence” like it belongs, like it should be there and that it is produced by us good old humans. So, while the reality of the definition is hidden way down at “3.B) Imitation, Sham”, most people never get that far when looking up definitions.

Let’s move on to synonyms of “ARTIFICIAL” those would be words like; affected, assumed, bogus, contrived, fake and false. Now, I think you got the better picture by looking at the synonyms, especially the last two; FAKE and FALSE.

I find it kind of ironic that the # 5.) definition is “obsolete” because it is actually a true representation of how we have been lead down the road to accept all the artificial crap we have in our everyday lives now, you can’t tell me that these people selling us all this “artificial “ stuff weren’t “ARTFUL and CUNNING.”

Whatever happened to people wanting real and natural products? It has become so bad now that even the food we eat is artificial, repeat after me, G M O , G M O. Just how did all this artificial stuff come to be in the first place?

The first know time that an artificial product came about was way back in 1851 in France. Perfume manufacturers used artificial fragrances instead of natural fragrances in the perfumes and they took those to London, England and displayed and sampled them at the Crystal Palace exhibition. That started humanities trek down the yellow brick road of fake crap that has ultimately lead us to where we are today, where we are begging for the day when computers can make all the decisions for us. It will be where we won’t have to use our brains at all, oh wait, we’ve already been there and done that.

I would go look up the word “intelligence” and give you that definition but there is a pretty good chance that it doesn’t mean today what it meant years ago and I would hate to ruin my evening any more than I all ready have. I’m just going to hope that it means to you, what it means to me; having acquired knowledge. A computer can’t acquire knowledge; at best it can be programmed with data and algorithms.

A lot happened between 1851 and today but I lay the blame of where we are now squarely on the shoulders of my own generation since the computer really come about on our watch. We really have no one else to blame on how the generations that came after us think and act because it was up to us to keep “it real” and we failed. We were too quick to let television and electronic devices raise the children, we allowed everything around them to be artificial or fake, even their reality.

We got use to hearing and seeing the word “artificial” everywhere we turned; hair color, fabrics, food flavorings, finger nails, hearts, legs, teeth and arms, you name and you can find it in an artificial equivalent to the natural form, except intelligence, and now they want us to believe that exists artificially.

It isn’t intelligence people; its formulas and algorithms and those same formulas and algorithms will be programmed into the robots that will be taking care of us when we are too old to take care of ourselves, that is, if our kids decide we are worth writing those for us, maybe if we had only spent a little more time being real and demanding real…..

Until next time,
@sultnpapper

https://sola.ai/sultnpapper