May 30ths

5/30/1886

3 weeks since Haymarket. German anarchist near Lincoln Park distributing pamphlets with revival fervor. His story—displacement, awakening, revolution—mirrors thousands of others.

On the telephone exchange on LaSalle: Voices traveling instantly, yet we fragment into distinct clusters. Connection breeds isolation.

We preserve the essentially human while embracing the inevitably mechanical. The question shapes not just policy, but daily texture itself. 

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a9bb552b-48db-4b53-9f19-47172983af3a

5/30/2011

Film: Transcendent Man. Takeaways: Immortality to deal with the death of his father; Instead of writing music he designed a machine to do it; Driven by generations (re: The Fourth Turning); Merge with machines or die; Will only be for the wealthy or controlled by them. It won’t be democratic. Relies on exponents, continuous growth. Evolutionary metaphors; How can the planet handle populations never dying? We are fundamentally information with obsolete software; Hugo De Garis: “We’re building Gods”; Ultimately the singularity will spawn a world war of machines around 2112, the Terminator scenario. (Rush will become high art); Kurzweil wants to resurrect a digitized version of his father, possibly the impetus for inventing the flat bed scanner; Kevin Kelly has it right: “He’s a modern day prophet who's wrong”; How much energy will AIs require? It might not be a factor if our energy source is almost all solar.; Interesting: The ‘Artilect’ war (De Garis); Dr. Ben Goertzel—AI Engineer; Convert and upload electric impulses in the human nervous system to the internet, essentially an analog-digital converter; Interesting: Computation represented in the motion of the ocean; He’s essentially attempting to describe time differently. Chronological time (actual age) is separated from generation. (Perpetual boomer); Will nanobots be made in China, Japan, US? What about rare earth minerals, lithium, other natural resources that will be required by AIs?; Phil Glass wrote the score.

[5/30/2025: How can we stop letting life imitate art and just make the art? One has to wonder if our current fascination with AI, and technology in general arises from the films and documentaries we've made over the last century. This is why music is an interesting diversion: it doesn't suggest anything about what the future should be. It can be futuristic, but it isn't telling us how the future should be. Phil Glass’s score doesn’t. It's interesting and ironic to contrast it with 1886, when electricity was just starting to replace gaslighting--and perhaps suggest a film about gaslighting].

5/30/2021

Even if you don’t have the fundamentals you can have a foundation. Take for example people who never studied music or they never studied art: They also have a foundation if it’s something they’ve been doing for a long time.         

5/30/2024

A Songday based on "World war of machines" line.