The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Haven’t you ever wished you could go back and ask the guy who invented the spinning jenny if he had foreseen where that small invention would lead? Did he figure all those weavers’ lives would be made easier with the advent of a machine that would take the drudgery out of their lives of spinning? That the world would be a better place if he could automate those tasks and have those folks run the machines that would ultimately do their jobs? If he could imagine a future of industrial factories and cities teeming with assembly lines, clogged with workers and choking on pollution?
Maybe ask Galileo or Newton or Einstein or Crick and Watson if they envisioned the future their discoveries would eventually create? Could Crick and Watson imagine cloning? Imagine gene therapy ? Imagine Frankenstein? I don’t know, but I always figured Steve Jobs and Bill Gates changed the world because they could see the world they would change it to, visionaries who imagined the future they would whelp into existence.

So when Gates was interviewed recently regarding his views on Artificial Intelligence, I was all ears. What would the guy who brought us the Digital Age think about his Revolution? Had he imagined computers we carried with us every waking hour of the day? Could he have imagined our social media? Did he ask himself if androids dream of electric sheep? Where did he think Artificial Intelligence would take us?

Well, he thought probably it would be a benefit to mankind. For example, he posited, robots on the warehouse floor would be able to see spills that humans might miss. They would also, he said, notice if flesh and blood workers had on their hardhats, thereby preventing potential OSHA violations and industrial accidents. He went on to list a couple more banal benefits of Artificial Intelligence and I guess maybe he hadn’t given this a whole lot of thought, probably busy with his Foundation work, but Holy Hal, what it seemed like was this dude missed the last bus that was going to the 21st Century. I was hoping his bubbly interviewer might ask him a few probing questions, but no, the world was in good hands if our super intelligent cyborg pals could mop up a floor before someone human slipped on a spill.

So much for the crystal balls of visionaries. Henry Ford probably just wanted to sell automobiles. He could have cared less about future automation and humans becoming cogs themselves in an industrial machine. Gates figured out how to market a computer, make it smaller and smaller, more and more ubiquitous, keep the software proprietary and cut the legs out from under his competitors. The future is mostly unintended consequences, judging by Bill’s astute commentary. The bad news is we’re going to be slipping on all those spills he missed.

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Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center Benefit Concert
Making Artists Great Again — No More Faux Muse!!!
South End String Band

Once again, despite popular demand, the South End String Band is bringing its authentic, definitely NOT fake, Camano backwash roots music to the Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center in Stanwood’s Historic District Saturday, Feb. 3rd, 2018 from 7-9 pm with a 6-7 pm social hour with snacks provided and wine and beer for sale. Their aim, of course, besides helping bring culture to the great washed masses of the Stanwoodopolis area, is to Make Artists Great Again. So great you’ll get tired of greatness. Not that the Band has ever really been great before, but … well, they liked the slogan and in these provocative prevaricating times, they decided to wag the dog. No more Fake Muse!

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Happy Days! Amazon just opened its first grocery store that functions with basically no humans. Other than the shoppers. You just use the handy dandy app for your cellphone, let them know who you are, then a few hundred cameras track your every move from aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, vegetables to fruits, meat counter to bathroom, noting what you pick up, what goes in your cart, what you put back, then bills you for what goes out the door. Let history note that this is where retailing started to lay off its human workforce completely. Let it also note that this is where we humans gave free rein to total and constant surveillance. If you’re okay with absolute monitoring in the grocery aisles, count on cameras pretty much everywhere.

Anonymity, thy name is mud. Stamp a number on my forehead and share my digital information, why not? We are a willing populace, I’ll say that. If it makes life easier to shop, what a small price to pay, this loss of privacy. You might even argue those checkout people who will soon be laid off can now look for more meaningful employment. Fat chance. They’ll be in the unemployment line with the taxi drivers, bank tellers, truck drivers, surgeons, CPA’s, fast food workers, half the present workforce. But hey, I won’t have to put down my cellphone and interrupt my conversations at the checkout line to some cheerful clerk who wants me to say hello or asks how my day is going. A little busy here….

The one glitch in Amazon’s master plan toward world hegemony is this: you still need to show your I.D. to a human being if you purchase alcoholic beverages. Yes!! Bubble gum in the gears, Bezos!!

So fellow humans, those of you who haven’t abdicated your gene pool, you may yet save our species from the robots, the Artificial Intelligence advocates, the corporate Big Brothers, the Damn Government. Buy Beer! Everyone buy beer and wine!!! The future of Homo Sapiens is at stake here. So what if the result is epidemic alcoholism? To paraphrase Patrick Henry, Give me beer or give me death. Fight for Humanity. Amazon … go away.

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Killing Tarantulas with a Machete

Things go bump in the night. Iguanas are scrabbling on the roof and geckos scream intermittently all night long. The howlers don’t wait for daylight to announce dawn and a lot of birds and insects apparently never sleep. I guess they don’t expect us to sleep either. There’s no shutting the windows — we use screens to cool down at night so the nocturnal cacophony is ours to share.

Last night a rhinoceros beetle the size of a VW hit our bamboo shade in the dark wings beating the slats like a drummer OD’ing. Trust me, you come out of your dreamy slumbers ready for combat. Only to turn on the light to find a 3 inch bug catatonic on the shade. I found him next morning where I tossed him, dead, I thought, but no, just resting up.

I would hate to wander the trails here in the dark. Odds are good you’d run into something poisonous, toxic, dangerous or malevolent. Trust me, nettles seem rather benign from my vantage here, compared to a fer-de-lance or a scorpion or a crocodile or a tarantula. Let’s don’t even mention ocelots, jaguars, snapping turtles or coral snakes, poison toads, boa constrictors, boar peccaries or the well named vampire bat. Back home I don’t fear much of anything unless it’s on two legs — down here I feel like food, no doubt why we clear jungle, drain swamp, clearcut the wilderness. The denizens give us the creeps.

I think we’ll emerge fairly unscathed, maybe even make a truce with our unseen predators. I’m told the ‘Ticos’, the Costa Rican natives, kill any snake on sight. When I asked why, I was told they were deathly afraid of them. A gringo here at Costa Rica Larry’s was helping clear trail by machete when a tarantula fell down his shirt front. In his terror he took the machete to the armpit the spider had crawled into, carving himself up like a Turkey dinner. Fear is primal. Nature, to most of us, is terrifying. I suggest we all put down the machetes before we hurt ourselves needlessly. Course, I don’t want my armpit to be the home of a tarantula family either. The chiggers there already are bad enough.

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