War, Drugs, And Aesthetics

The older I get the more I want calm to be what drives me.

Wars seems to be what drives the world forward,
and the 'peace dividends' they eventually give
are goods with no further use for creating the future.

It is less easily understood that wars are started by junkies
and modern jihadists follow the pattern of The Futurists
of a century ago. As adrenalin addicts driven by speed,
whilst filming the victims of their fetishistic killing means,
they seek the end of any consensus independent of them.
Thus it started in Fascist Italy and has now gone into Islam,
which is catching up with the most violent century in history.

Time outside of time, through some deed quietly achieved,
is the calmest way, and still creates the most valued of spaces.

Futile Questions

One of the sillier questions
popular media likes to fritter away
the public's attention span with
is 'What is Artificial Intelligence?'
usually setting up the question
without definitions of  'natural',
'artificial', or indeed 'intelligence',
the better to avoid all conclusions.

The short answer to this question
is that artificial intelligence does exist
but it needs natural intelligence to set it up.
Where it is recognized for what it is
it does fewer tasks than its makers intend.
Technology is always sold to us with the strap-line
'It will make the future work better'.
Where A.I. works well now its achievements
mostly go unrecognized by natural intelligence.

This is because natural intelligence
prefers to avoids the proof of redundancy.

Stephen Hawking

need not be afraid of humans
creating an intelligent technology
which will outsmart them
without us knowing how it did it.
Look at life on Planet Earth,
is the most complex and complete
functioning mechanism we know,
complete to the point where
it is much more complex
than we know how to discern
and accept. The best we can do
is diligently test it to destruction
through our stupidity.