AI IN EDEN...

IS 'THIS' VIRTUAL EVOLUTION...?

The number of people who could tell you what a keypunch card is/was ranks right up there with the number of people who can read The Dead Sea Scrolls—regardless I’m going to press on anyway…

In the beginning, from the single cell amoeba EVOLUTION in Eden/Earth has been so wonderous it can almost take our breath away - and - yet - so puzzling it can leave us entirely disoriented. Somewhere along the ‘evolution’ of what electricity can support we humans have created a techno-missing-link by multiple leaps from reality to virtual.

While taking geology classes [a few decades ago] I first learned to write computer code on a sheet of paper 15inchesX22inches summarily transferred onto a blank card [3x7] whereby the spaces, symbols & slashes became strategically placed holes punched into the card by a keyboard on a machine the size of a Mini-Cooper. That single card added to a large tray of other cards were fed into a computer the size of 3bd-room house. Via light coming through those holes that computer ‘read’ copious amounts of numbers then printed out, on even more paper [12x18] all of the gathered data we needed for the total coal reserves in Canada, broken down by region. It was a miracle! But only partial one. All we could do in 1974 was produce line charts and bar graphs. Creating a map was still 10 years away!

However, while I was ‘away’ [spending time with my young kids, Mr. Dressup and Sesame Street] between 1975 and 1985 computer programing [metaphorically] jumped from the Stoneage to the Industrial Age. Before I could return from my domestic-world to a paycheck-world I had to return to school. Even then the leaping technology wasn’t just change for the sake of change - there was labor and time saving elements that enhanced productivity.

I kept my portable blue, Sears Catalogue typewriter for sentimental reasons but there wasn’t a writer on this planet who didn’t see their will-to-live return thanks to Spellcheck and the ability to copy and paste. The fax machine revolutionized businesses to meet tight deadline dates then the cell phone made getting stranded with a flat tire far less traumatic.

And then from a techno-renaissance came something else developed by those who truly don’t innovate to help - they innovate to control - cleverly disguised as advancement.

Beginning 2015, I collected multiple articles about Bitcoin as it popped up in the Wall Street Journal newspaper and magazines like Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, Time… And the more I researched the more alarmed I became.

From silver and gold coins that humans could see and touch to printed/paper currency [basically an IOU, easily counterfeited] money deteriorated as a form of value through the centuries as it was—but crypto-algorithms are -?-. Well, fellow travelers, besides a twenty-four-hour appetite for vast amounts of electricity, crypto is like a: pyramid scheme, fraudulent business model that seeks to funnel revenue from recruited members to the scheme’s organizers. The word pyramid reflects the model’s structure—a leader or small group of organizers at the top of the scheme with an increasingly broad base of members below them. [Sue Baugh for Encyclopedia Britanica]

And just when I thought our highly educated population of humans couldn’t be led any further afield - along came another inane trend. People with more money than good sense started buying virtual art! Not anything that actually existed, not even a cheap print copy to hang over the sofa, but essentially a hologram! [If the power went out so did your ‘art’.]

But wait! That insanity didn’t end there! Amazingly, people bought virtual real estate [with thousands of real dollars] but not with crypto. People were buying mansions, castles and lake front vacation homes—however they needed special goggles to wear in order to ‘walk’ through their rooms. [I noticed no one was offering any gourmet meals at high-end restaurants though—cause a ‘virtual-meal’ still leaves patrons on the hungry side.]

Now - we come to yet another techno evolution—AI [Artificial Intelligence].

For medical purposes the accumulation of trillions of tiny bits of botany and biology data could be a literal boon to saving countless lives and discovering cures for rare conditions that might not otherwise even be diagnosed. AI, calculations for the safer construction roads and bridges depending on the seasons in regions that have extreme winters or summers. AI, for more efficient recycling programs reusing paper and plastic. AI for safer homes built in flood prone or hurricane or tornado prone regions. AI - from big to just tiny obscure enhancements for engineering, and/or architecture, this we can look forward to.

However, for truly creative people who write, paint, sculpt, carve, draw—AI looms on our horizon as a smug thief operating out in the open with complete liberty….