The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Rise of the Luddites

News blurb: A Waymo car went up in flames in San Francisco’s Chinatown after a crowd surrounded it, scrawled graffiti, smashed windows and then threw a firework inside the driverless vehicle in the middle of a crowded street Saturday night.

Now, I’m not really certain a driverless taxi cab qualifies as a cyborg or a robot, but it definitely has similarities. But I’m willing to celebrate the good folks of San Francisco for what no doubt will be the opening salvo against the coming Android Apocalypse. Admittedly the cab wasn’t armed with defensive weaponry which will be required gear in the near future. And eventually the robo-cars will outfit with offensive firepower. Start with tasers, tear gas, work up to more lethal strategies if required.

Right now, though, the AI assisted automobile has few defenses, making it a prime target for anti-android citizens. Start with destroying a wheeled droid and move on to whatever iteration the Silicon Tech Boyz inflict on a fairly clueless society whose members mostly trust the puerile billionaires to act in humanity’s best interest. Sure. If you define humanity as themselves….

The Luddites of the early 1800’s battled the industrialization of their weaving guilds by smashing the mechanical looms in burgeoning factories. Didn’t take long to squash that revolt … and it won’t take long to round up these modern technophobes either. But it does strike a blow against the empire, does it not? A small spark that might ignite a revolution. The bots are coming and the android evolution will be like nothing the old Luddites could ever have imagined. First the machines will replace jobs, then they’ll replace us. Probably why the Silicon Valley geniuses are building vast underground bunkers and stocking them with caviar and champagne. They plan to be the last ones standing. Which might be true, but only for a very short time. Their inventions aren’t going to be calling them Daddy when they come calling one last time.

I keep hearing these ads for Artificial Intelligence that promises their ‘product’ will not be hallucinating. This is probably good news for the clients who purchase this software, but it does little to allay my own anxieties about a future with robots who are far brighter than me (yes, I know, my digital clock is probably brighter than me) but who evidently slip into alternate realities without LSD or other circuit altering drugs. I’ve been around humans who do this and trust me, I’m pretty certain I don’t want my android creating fantastic worlds to entice me into too. Pretty obviously AI has some psychotic breaks occasionally, enough that corporations P.R. department feels the need to reassure the public that their androids have normal psyches.

As opposed to their competitors…. Whose whacked out AI’s are slipping into La La Land undetected by you, a possibly normal human user. Buyer beware! No doubt these cheaper imitations use contaminated silicone, save a few bucks and let the hallucinations fall where they may. I’m picturing HAL on 2001: A Spaced Odyssey, having a little fun with Dave outside the spaceship, stoned out of its digital head, giggling like a chimpanzee. But of course, what if your little cyborg is on a bad trip? That hatch door might open up all right, but maybe all the other doors too, let a little air into the servers.

Tell you the truth, I’m already starting to mistrust my computer. It turns itself off, adds new stuff at night, glitches and acts suspicious too many times. Not that I suspect drug usage or a drinking problem. At least on its end. Just has a mind of its own and doesn’t care to ask me for permission of any kind. If it’s hallucinating, I haven’t noticed yet. Then again, I might be the wrong guy to notice.

It seems another lifetime ago when we heard phrases like ‘compassionate conservative’, doesn’t it? The new conservatives, definitely gone MAGA, briefly flirted with a kinder, gentler campaign after their chosen one (and possibly God’s) had his life spared in an assassination attempt. That lasted about a week, but now we’re back to all-out war, incessant name-calling and the usual bullying. So why would we expect less of the veep pick?

Right out of the box we have J.D. Vance decrying his opponent as a childless cat lady, what, it seems, is a woman who doesn’t want children and therefore is an enemy of parents and family values. He even proposes a tax system that penalizes such people and rewards those with more kids, figuring, apparently, that when the immigration ‘problem’ is solved and the borders shut down, we’ll be needing those kids for the jobs that go unfilled. Now, full disclosure, I don’t have kids. I know, un-American. Selfish. Probably unnatural. Definitely worthy of higher taxation. I have friends who tried to have children but couldn’t. And friends who are gay who never felt the need to adopt kids. They should pay for turning their backs on providing for our workforce. Tax them! Tax the traitors!

So okay, maybe I’m being a bit sensitive. And besides, what a great way to reduce the national deficit. You could even cut the taxes of the corporations and the rich by raising mine. I mean, I want to help. I’m patriotic. I love my country. I can see now what a thoughtcrime it was to not have children. Too late for me but we could certainly force the child-bearing age couples to have a few. Might even legislate that. The Chinese had the right idea, just backwards, by limiting the number to One. We could learn from that mistake. And if the rich are still paying too much, we should consider taxing people who don’t own pets. Save us all that money for animal shelters and cut the deficit. So many possibilities. And after all, isn’t that compassionate and still conservative??

Biker Bob rides with an odd assortment of outlaws. He’s got a Honda he’s tricked out to sound like a Harley, meaning he’s got a glasspack muffler you can hear from Tyee Store to my shack, a ferocious rumble that belies the pussycat bike he can barely keep running. I had a bike once, a beat up 350 ready for the scrap heap but scary enough to give me nightmares of highway wrecks, skidding sideways down on gravel and blacktop, legs scraped to raw meat, my football helmet exploding plastic into my brainpan.

You want to ride, Biker Bob will tell you, you need a death wish. I didn’t have one so shortly after I got my street license, I sold it. $100. Cheap life insurance is how I figured it even if I paid someone to take the suicide ride off my hands. That was 40 years ago and I’m still alive with two legs and semi-functioning brain.

Bob’s a good guy, at least when you’re one on one with him. You get around his outlaw pals, his loyalty is with the Pack. If things go bad — and they invariably do with this crowd – he doesn’t recognize friendship when the dogs go hunting the weak and infirm. This is not good news when you realize you’ve become the prey. I try very hard not to antagonize the pack, but there are lines you cross without recognizing them until it’s too late.

I don’t see Bob much these days. He had a cabin I helped build up in the foothills, sold his Harley to help his ‘lady’ out, a woman who was a schoolbus driving friend of mine from the city days. Bob kept a little dirt bike at the time for off road fun, but one night he took it down to the local watering hole off Highway 9, stayed a few too long, then hit the highway late, no lights or license, just a dark run for home. The county sheriff did a U-turn when they passed each other at 50 miles an hour, hit the bubbles, but Bob didn’t see much sense in pulling over and as he explained later, thought maybe he could outrun the deputy. Yah, he said, I was pretty drunk.

A mile before the road to Bob’s cabin the deputy could see he wasn’t going to pull over so he did what most county cops would do under the circumstances: he rode up alongside the little dirt bike and came into Bob’s lane. Bob hit the shoulder, lost control and sailed over a ditch and into a field where he crashed and burned. Being drunk as a skunk, he survived without much damage, spent a night in the Bellingham jail and came home a couple days later. For a few weeks, anyway, Biker Bob was bikeless. Too bad he couldn’t stay that way….

Money talks, buddy, and bullshit walks…. We all know that. But now, in the 21st Century, we got Big Money and Big Money doesn’t just talk, it yells, it screams, it commands. You want to understand politics or the economy or the world, start listening to that hollering. Go down to your local grocery store, it’s one of about 3 or 4 chains, not much competition. Fly the friendly skies, take your pick from 3 or 4, prices pretty much the same, all high. Listen to your favorite AM radio station, right, owned by one mega company probably, mostly right wing hot talk. Looking for something, anything, on your computer, that search engine probably is Google, maybe a couple others. Ordering something you want, sure, chances are you used Prime. Get your news from X or Facebook? Hearing the Roar yet?

The Murdochs, the Bezos, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, all those fat cats aren’t just accumulating billions, they’re shrinking the world to fewer and fewer choices. Competition — remember competition, that quaint notion that in a capitalist economic system it would bring prices down for the consumer? — well, it’s vanishing. The corporate boyz bought up the competition. Stock holders are happy, not sure how you feel about it. Need a good doctor? Probably get a choice of one or two clinics or hospitals. Need meds? Big Pharma has made sure you can’t compare prices with what they charge other countries. Price gouging, you ask? Or maybe you don’t, not that it matters.

Artificial Intelligence is coming next. Hell, Artificial Intelligence is here now. Who do you think is running that? Fat Freddie’s Bot Shop? Try again. The Congress hauled in the Tech Giants awhile back, maybe get a handle on what the implications for what’s coming down the pike are, possibly put some guardrails up before it’s too late. Fat chance, Fred. The genie is out of the bottle and you won’t be getting three wishes. You’ll look back at 3 options before too long as the Good Old Days. When competition was limited, but at least you could shop at Krogers instead of Safeway. Cost the same though…