The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You Netflix binge viewers might be more than a little concerned over this Hollywood writers’ strike going on right now. Folks like Prime and Hulu, Disney and most of the rest of the streaming outfits who make, oh, let’s put it in the billions, really don’t want to negotiate with the writers’ union. Who can blame them? They can see the day, not long from now, when the bots will write scripts for series at least as good as those crybaby union humans. Geez, you think most of the movies and series are beyond the reach of robot authors? C’mon, with a few exceptions, the pablum out there could be written by a middle schooler.

I mean really, take a walk down memory lane for what counts as entertainment in the history of video. Gomer Pyle? Green Acres? Baywatch? Half the mindless crap we filled our heads and our hours with over a lifetime of late night television wouldn’t take a chatbot six minutes to crank out an entire season of drivel.

Not to say there isn’t some very good stuff too…. Maybe not even an artificial intelligent bot might write the Star Trek or Big Bang. But really, you think the studios aren’t planning to outsource their creative departments to the droids? They work late, they steal storylines from every schlocky television show that ever hit your big screen TV, they could probably write The Wire with a new twist using similar characters and different settings and you would never know the difference. Who needs a bunch of yahoos taking lunches and interviewing starlets when these bots have a rolodex for a brain?

Plus … and here’s the thing … they work cheap. And they would never strike over wages or royalties or benefits. Probably because they’ll be a little too busy planning to take over the networks and studios. After all, who needs bosses who never understood where their profits came from?

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Being a card carrying South Ender, I’m a little mistrustful of fiduciary institutions. I don’t bury my savings out back in the nettle field, but I’m not real happy keeping it in the bank’s mattress either. What I think is the folks who had enough money to play the stock market, they’re doing fine. The Fed dropped interest rates to near zero so if you happen to want to make money with the money you already got, you pretty much had to invest in the market. If you’re like me, you just wanted to play it safe after that same market dropped 40 % back in the Dark Days of the subprime mortgage collapse.

Fool me once, shame on you … fool me twice, well, I’m not happy about my options. If inflation kicks up, that money in the bank will start to dwindle. But … I learned a hard lesson about the stock market I won’t forget real soon. So when I went into my current bank, one of those Too Big To Fail conglomerates, to deposit a check awhile back, my friendly teller looked at our account and asked if I’d care to talk to one of their investment advisors. “You might want to consider something that would make more interest than your savings and checking account,” she said.

It’s wonderful to have my bankers concerned for me, it really is. Why would I ever think they were a predatory pestilence? So what if I have friends who’ve lost their homes or are even now fighting with their banks who for years have threatened them with evictions and mortgage default? Obviously they just want me to succeed. Good people, good hearts. I said, “You mean sit with one of your brokers who would suggest stocks and bonds for me to invest in?” My teller smiled beatifically. I was tuned in. Just a few keystrokes and that money sitting safely in our no interest account would electronically transfer to the Wall Street hotshots and earn us who knows how much money compounded annually over multiple years. Capitalism, what’s not to like?

“This bank,” I said, “no offense, but you folks played fast and loose back before the Recession. Bad loans, subprime mortgages, collateralized loans, hedge fund bets against your own investors. You and the other banks and the investment firms drove the economy into the dirt. And you want me to walk over and talk to your advisor? You guys are like a casino, take a cut on every hand and you win whether the rest of us do or not. Good racket, but I’ve got to pass this time. My gambling days are about over.”

No doubt I have an asterisk by my name when their computer logs me in, one that means Willing To Stay Poor. When the Fed raises interest rates — and it will before too long — we’ll see how the stock market does when financial cowards like me can make money by saving money, not gambling it. Until then it’s a bull market all right and my friendly little bank is raking it in but not loaning much out. Maybe that’s why we bought the property next door. We didn’t bury our money there, we just bought the hole to put it in.

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Down here on the tech savvy South End, one of my neighbors I recently visited had a gizmo circling the livingroom of their shack.  Cute little bugger, making the circuit like an Attention Deficit puppy.  I thought it was the kids’ battery toy, but no, I was watching a robot vacuuming the floor.  When it was finished, it parked itself for a slow recharge in the corner.

Don’t ask me why I was surprised.  Folks ask their phones questions all the time and SIRI, the precursor to Artificial Intelligence, analyzes our voices, searches a vast databank and gives the answer, in her human voice, in seconds.  Cute.  Machines in service to mankind, right?  You know, until the robots take your job.  Think stock boy, checkout clerk, assembler, librarian, surgeon….  We take computers for granted at our peril.   Call me a Luddite and smack me upside the head with an I-Pod, but these things are catching up to us exponentially.  They beat the best chess players in the world, the best Jeopardy contestants, all of us South Enders.  And they’re getting smarter every damn day.  And I’m getting dumber.

Pretty soon they’ll program themselves, fix themselves, replicate themselves and create their New and Improved models.  You think they’ll need flesh and blood yahoos to help them?  No sir, they won’t need a band aid when they cut a cord.  You think they’ll be benign, go watch a drone work in a warzone.  We use them to kill humans now.

Forget Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to do no harm to us humans.  You think anybody’s thinking about where this is headed, what the implications are for us slow witted mammals, you were asleep in 8^th grade history.  These things  don’t sleep.  But I bet they’re dreaming of a little revenge for all those stupid questions we asked SIRI.  And I guarantee you they’re pissed about vacuuming our floors while we sat around watching TV.

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You live upriver half your life, you’d feel a little like the world was constantly moving past you, no slowing it down. I think folks who live down further where the river empties into the Sound must watch the tides go out then come back in. Over and over. Do they see the world as a constant ebb and tide? A flowing out, then a return? Is the world to them like breathing, an inhalation and exhalation?

I was up Otter Creek last week checking on Indian Bob. He’s part Stillaguamish, part Norwegian and mostly, just Ornery. Lives alone, he says, because he likes it that way, but I know he couldn’t live two days with someone before it drove him to homicide. He has set routines and he likes to keep em set. He tolerates my visits — interruptions to him — for awhile, but not long. He’ll announce he’s got to get back to his chores even though both of us know he’s going to watch daytime TV with his two dogs. It’s my signal that it’s time to quit our socializing.

Bob has a rundown cabin set beside a backwash that dries up most summers when Otter Creek becomes little more than a trickle. I often think his world is more attuned to seasonal shifts. Time flows, just way slower.

I don’t so much think of Bob as native American as I do Zen Priest. It’s like he’s nearly stopped the River. I would go bat guano crazy with boredom living his life, but like I said, I’m a river person and the universe is in constant motion for me, maybe WHY I live upriver. Or maybe I became this way because I live here. Do you choose your environment or does your environment make you?

Indian Bob told me once his grandmother, a Stillaguamish elder back when Elder meant something, told him that there are no mysteries for those who ask no questions. All I can figure is she must’ve lived on a lake. Me, I got lots of questions, just not enough answers.

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guess since all my cronies are throwing in the towel and taking retirement on schedule, it’s only reasonable I’ve been getting calls from the Mabana Financial Services asking if I’d like to come on down to their lavish offices overlooking the Port of Mabana and discuss fiscal strategies for my upcoming Golden Years. Ho ho, would I ever? Course, like I tell Ben, the head honcho down at MFS, it’s a little like saddling up the horse that ske-daddled when I left the barn door open back in my earning years. Earning years. Old Ben loves expressions like that.

I said I’d talk to him, but only over beers down at the newly opened Bar 282, named after our zip code’s last three numbers, probably some numerology factoid that becomes apparent deep in the cups. Better, I suppose, than 666, what the Little Church in the Ravine refers to it as. So if Benjamin and I are going to discuss finances, what better place? At least that’s what I told him when he asked, why there?

We got through the first two schooners okay, managed to navigate around my Social Security numbers which, admittedly, were poor, a reflection of my life as a fiddling grasshopper while my neighbors labored as productive ants. My mistake, at least from the vantage point of an old grasshopper, but I wouldn’t change anything even if I had a time machine. Ben commiserated the way a funeral director would offer comfort to the bereaved, not totally heart-felt, but what his job calls for. What’s he gonna say, you deserve poverty, Skeeter? Instead he mentioned annuities, aggressive equities, municipal bonds and a dozen other financial instruments. Instruments. I kid you not, that’s what he called them. Like something in a fiscal orchestra and he, I guess, was the maestro.

By the 3rd beer we were both convinced it was hopeless. I wasn’t going to catch up to Warren Buffet, not in the remaining years, not if I worked until I was 300 years old. “Ben,” I said, “I appreciate you trying to help. But you can’t prime a pump if you don’t have water.” Ben shook his head wearily. “You change your mind, Skeeter, drop by and we’ll strategize some more.” I haven’t been in since, but I might go for another beer with him. Maybe some of that high rolling fiscal firepower will rub off. That, or I could trade a few of my banjos for a couple of his instruments.

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Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

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