The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

 

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

A Good Evening

A good pizza evening on Monday although I didn’t buy a pizza; I had food at home that needed eating. I find Roberto’s pizzas quite acceptable but I’ve had pizzas in Italy far superior. The main difference is in the pastry; it has to be freshly made. I’ve been told that an oven at 400 degrees is essential and a wood fire is preferable and those conditions are met in pizza van vendors here. But the result is not the same and so I think the main difference comes down to the freshness of the pastry. For a one-man pizza van making the pastry as the orders come in is not practical so the pastry is made in advance and frozen. I think the pastry has to be freshly made.. Lively conversation and another book sold made for a convivial evening. Book sales are still sluggish and I don’t want to be giving paltry cheques to the school so I’m waiting for sales that amount to at least 100 euros to add to the 130 already given.

The Other Visit

I plan to go to the UK for my 85^th birthday, on the 14^th of October. The goal is to meet with family and friends there. The bookings and formalities are all in place, all I have to do is get there and enjoy the time. The “big” questions are only what I should take and bring back for friends on both sides of the Channel, I can deal with that.

What Drives Me

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Dylan Thomas’s poem is what drives me. I know that I have to die in however number of years but I want to be dragged kicking and screaming into my last hours. Then peacefully-? Yes, hopefully but only when all is irretrievably lost. I do not want a gradual, calm slide into that last goodnight; and will resist it as long as I can; but who knows?

The Death of Intelligence

There’s a joke going around that the reason for the high interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is that real intelligence is disappearing. And it’s not just a joke; it’s reality and the reason is cost: Employing people generally costs less than buying a software program, usually a so-called wizard, as much of a wizard as the wizard of Oz. And educating people costs more than leaving them ignorant and stupid. But there is a cost in driving down cost in this way and that cost is the neglect of intelligence.

The cost of neglecting intelligence is not obvious but neither is it that difficult to see. Innovation and creativity have been important factors in the past in driving down cost and both require intelligence. And solving problems of any sort requires intelligence.

So why this focus on cost rather than on value? At root of course is money and the former is generally more easily quantifiable in monetary terms than the latter. And quantity of money, at a personal level is an important factor in quality of life. The wealthiest have no financial concerns except how to keep and increase their wealth, the poorest have to struggle just to survive.

So where is the dynamic in all this? I believe it is in right wing politics and, particularly in extreme right wing politics. For the wealthy to achieve their goals there must be low taxes and a cheap pool of labour to create large profit margins. Quality, and quality of life for others, is not a factor. Their only problem in a democracy is how to get a majority to vote for their aims. False information and downright lies can only work if people are ignorant or stupid enough to believe they are true. So intelligence must be denied. Then there can be a society that serves the purposes of the rich and ensures that the poor stay poor.

The best counter to this, and my hope, is the EU with its capacity to blur nationalism.

In the past great civilisations, based on using intelligence, have always met their downfall when confronted by brute force, armies of barbarians. I think the world today is facing the same confrontation, albeit in less dramatic fashion: Intelligence and civilisation versus ignorance and barbarity.

On a personal level, old, half deaf and half blind, I find it increasingly difficult to have to deal with organisations that eschew intelligence in favour of robots and scripts that lack any ELSE clause. When programming I always knew that an ElSE clause was essential. Having thought, and being sure of having thought, of all possibilities, I still needed an Else clause because I wasn’t God, I was fallible. But the problem with an ELSE clause is that it is like a wild card, outside prescribed procedures; it can be useful only if intelligence is applied to it. And intelligence costs in the short term, reducing profits in the short term.

Structures

In trying to understand the universe and everything we search for structures which we assume must be there; in DNA for instance. In order to understand things we need them to have a structure, which we endeavour to discover, and we need them to conform to certain laws, which we also endeavour to discover. But what if some phenomena have no such predetermined state nor necessarily follow predetermined laws. How will we understand them?