Questioning the universe

There is a great philosophical question: Why do we create? Now anybody can answer this question any way they like. I create so I can spread my wisdom across the ages. My uncle says he doesn’t care why, because he only creates havoc. My brother answered the question this way, “Duh, uh, what’s create?” Sorry, but the Ohh! family tree doesn’t have the sharpest thorns in the forest.

There’re millions of reasons to create, but frankly some of us need to stop. I went to a museum of modern art and was baffled. Yea, someone too time to create that art, but I’m still asking; Why? I was told, “It’s okay not to understand the art, it’s not there to be understood. The art is supposed to evoke an emotion.” Unfortunately, the only emotion I had was get me the heck out of here. But to each his own.

Quetsioning art

It’s not just visual art, it’s also writing. The worst part of all that is the piggy-backing on other great writers. Margaret Mead wrote, Gone With the Wind in 1936. Then in 1991 Alexandra Ripley wrote the sequel, Scarlet. I don’t know what it’s about. I didn’t read either one of them.  But don’t you think if Margaret wanted a sequel, she would have written one, and not have someone steal her characters, and try to cash in on them. Write your own stuff, Alexandra.

I was in a bookstore the other day and there is a series of books giving the back stories to all the Disney villains, so we can understand their motivations. I don’t want to know their motivations. They’re villains. End of story. I don’t want to be empathetic to their situation. I want them to be punched in the nose. That’s what makes them great.

Questioning computers

Then there’s the new fad that’s all over the news, Artificial Intelligence. What makes us think we can create artificial intelligence when we haven’t mastered natural intelligence yet. It’s not that I’m afraid of computers taking over. Frankly were so stupid that we’re only feeding the AI dumb information and they’ll never figure us out. I can imagine the computers linking up and then trying to figure out relationships. They’d blow all their micro-chips just wondering how teenagers operated.

There is AI test which has a fifteen-year-old human talking to a computer. If an outsider can’t tell which is which, then the computer wins. Maybe I’m super-human, but I listened to three of these winning conversations and picked out the computer every time. The human will inevitably say something silly, and the computer will ask them to clarify it. Intelligence has nothing to do with humans.

Questioning my cat

If you want intelligence, you should look at my cat. She sleeps all day, eats whenever she wants, goes in and out at her whim, and never uses a dating app or even has a phone. She even has her own personal pincushion, ME! That’s intelligence. I’d like to see a computer do that.

A computer can’t even use the litter box. You have to manually empty its waste. Even then, it asks you twice if you’re sure you want to do it. When I look at the cat box there is no question. Also, even when you throw something away from a computer there are programs to get it back. When a cat eliminates something, you know you don’t want it.

Questioning my friends

I was talking about all this to a computer-geek friend of mine. He informed me that I was missing the point. AI is not animal intelligence. It is the ability of the computer to learn. What could be so important, that a machine needs to learn it. We have Google. Google knows everything. Google is run by computers. So logically, the computers know everything. No need for AI here.

I was also told computers can learn repetitive tasks. I got one for them. Every day I turn on my computer for work. Every day it takes fifteen minutes to start up. It’s the same task every day, it should learn how to do it quicker.

Questioning my Job

It should also learn that I talk on the phone for my job. If I don’t touch it for three minutes it goes to sleep. Then the person I’m talking to needs some information, and I have to turn it back on. That’s more like cat intelligence, or computer stupidity. You decide.

The worst thing about AI is it’s already here, and they are shoving it down our throats. I listen to a music service, and it’s supposed to learn my likes and play them. Now, I listen to a wide array of music, from classical, to jazz, to pop, to Weird Al Yankovic. I have several playlists for all these types, depending on my mood.

Questioning music

Once my son asked me to listen to a showtunes list, to check out a song. Suddenly, every one of my playlists contain showtunes. I can’t get them out. According to my computer, it doesn’t matter what I selected, it knows I like showtunes. I may or may not, but I’d like to have a choice.

Of course, if I pay money to the streaming service, I’m allowed to play any song I want at any time. This makes sense. It has been my observation that once you give money to someone, their intelligence goes right out the window. The problem is I don’t have enough cash to get rid of all the computer intelligence in my life.

Questioning myself

When I write these posts there’s an AI program which tells me everything, I did wrong. It can’t seem to understand the way I think. I actually asked it to write a post for me. Supposedly it looked at all my previous posts, and came up with a topic. Here’s an example:

My pets are very friendly, but they are not the type to take up gardening with my neighbor. Shopping is good for them to have a good Christmas, while eating cookies.

I have mentioned all these things in my posts, but not all at the same time.

The thing is, I write anecdotes a lot. This may have been an attempt at a joke. If that’s the case, I don’t get it. In all my years of traveling this country, I’ve seen good and bad comedians, but none so bad as the computer trying to emulate me. A lessor man would say this reflects on my comedy. But I’d rather take the old-fashioned approach, and just blame the computer. We’ve been doing it for years, and it’s worked so far.

Then there’s the AI for business. I don’t even want to think about that. Computers were supposed to give us more free time with less paper. None of that worked out so far. Since the computer came, we still have to do our jobs. Then we have to input it all in the computer and hope it works. Three out of ten work days, I have to call IT to have them fix something on my desktop. I admit I may be the cause of some of this.

Having the answer

And I didn’t need AI to figure that out. So there!