Notes From Beyond The Planet of the Apps 2028:

Road Revisit (summer 2016)
Coastal Empire

California Route 46 in Paso Robles region

W, her son and I rode motorcycles through Silicon Valley and Monterey today en route the boy’s 33rd birthday celebration in Vegas. The valley is where, almost forty years earlier while at a Navy post graduate school, I first came upon the ARPANET and the initial halting steps that led to today’s onrushing artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.

It had been a long curvy road since the 1970s with lots of cul de sacs, failures, false starts and bridges to nowhere.

We motorcyclists ate up the road monster that is the Pacific Coast Highway all day along with a stop at Nepenthe Inn for a lunch alongside its magnificent view and a day ending jaunt along California Highway 46 through the Paso Robles wine region.

View from Nepenthe Inn

Those super carnivore, software powered, big data fed AI machines were already well on their way to taking power, I silently thought. Sadly, no one wants to be educated and warned about what is occurring. Very serious, costly things are already happening to the innocents. Or perhaps not, since many of those lives who have been affected don’t give a rip about their data or their privacy.

Will my sin be greater in comparison because I, with greater experience and history with AI, will die knowing that I did not warn folks of the sweetly fragrant but deadly poisonous flowers of this technology?

Regardless of where one comes down on this, I’m no longer certain that we can confront these machines, their builders and proponents with raised clenched fists and tense jaws, hating and struggling against these new and everlasting lords and masters. We don’t know enough to be successful. Perhaps, we should follow what Mao Tse-tung did with the Red Army and run away to fight another day, when we know what we’re up against,.

How will we upset the machines’ steely spirit of the beehive? Will others see the machines’ teeth and the cheeky grins which foretell of what’s to come? Man never reacts based on projections, symbols, emojis or memes, but only to genuine flesh and blood threats.

“Power to the people” will only come back with more knowledge — a lot more than we have now.

— thoughts on my 2016 journal notes, typed in 2025

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