Well, since Neo has started us out with old videos . . . here’s something I just saw over at Legal Insurrection: an analysis of JoJo’s prerecorded 9/11 “speech”. According to the LI weekend editor, the “Biden 9/11 video depicts Joe Biden purportedly addressing America on and about the 20th anniversary of 9/11, but it has a weird ‘found footage’ vibe that is deeply disconcerting. . . . Biden is ashen in this video (maybe ashen is the new black?), he’s confused and dazed, and he’s rambling utter nonsense. The cuts between frames/footage are jarring. We have doddering, watery-eyed Joe facing the camera saying one thing, snip, we have contentious Joe railing at the camera from a different angle. Snip, we have Joe weird-whispering about . . . really, who cares? . . . It looks like Biden’s image has been thoughtlessly pasted into each and every scene by a precocious child who just learned the copy and paste function. The blurry backdrop is . . . weird. And disconcerting. There’s this strange visual of Biden superimposed on–seeming to float on, sort of 3-D–a weird out-of-focus background. . . . Indeed, this technique makes him look like some kind of out-of-touch politician who lives in his own special bubble.”
The Biden video is embedded at the link. I hadn’t watched it when it was first posted because I can’t stand looking at the dead man walking, but watching it now, it does make one’s skin crawl. I am no expert in video editing, so I’d be interested in knowing whether Neo and her readers think the video was “doctored,” and if so, how it was done. The reason why is obvious.
So when did movie film become video?
I hadn’t looked at it, either, PA Cat. It’s an eerie video. Why did they keep switching cameras? Is the guy unable to give a speech from start to finish without having to change angles? One sentence or phrase, click, another, click …
Elon Musk has got to be one of the smartest guys around, and I’d imagine he knows quite well what the state of advancement currently is in various areas of technological research, including in the field of AI research.
Musk has said that he regards headlong, unfettered AI research as an existential threat to the human race and that, despite his warnings that such research must be very carefully monitored and constrained by some international body with effective power to constrain such research, he believes that a threshold has been crossed and, now, it is just too late to do anything to stop the threatening advancements that have been made.
Says Musk, in creating ever more capable, versatile, and powerful AI you are “Summoning the demon.”
I noticed Rick’s point, not that it bothers me. These days I always notice the resistance to changes in everyday language as we move from terms like “filming,” “footage,” and “taping,” towards terms like “recording,” “storing,” and “video.”
____
The Lumiere films with the old autos reminded me of stories my father told me about my grandfather driving his model-T from the farm into town on a rainy day. A few weeks ago I was introduced to the head of a local “horseless carriage” club which they define as any car produced before 1916.
He gave me a complete run down on how to drive his mint condition model-T that he had on display. No actual driving. It’s a little more complex than I was expecting. His also had an aftermarket third gear overdrive, which was really a mess to operate.
They also had a couple REO automobiles on display. No Speedwagon models, even though that is a real model. REO are the initials of Ransom Eli Olds.
I have no great faith in the wisdom, objectivity, and restraint of organizations and their scientists when they are in pursuit of reputation and of a new and potentially lucrative discovery.
I also think that many scientists often know far less than they think they do.
“Skynet” seems all too possible a result of headlong AI research, and I think that is exactly the result that Musk fears.
Vidoes like this make me so sad.
I see each of these faces from the past and wonder who they were, who they loved, what they were planning on doing later that day. Entire lives lived and all that remains is a shadow.
All of us are so complex and interesting and have a story that wouldn’t fit in a library and no one will ever see even a fraction of it.
Most don’t even get a shadow.
Sometimes it’s all too much to bear.
Maybe I’m just in a mood.
Was there no standardization to which side the steering wheel went on back then?
In the New York footage at the end, they were driving on the right, and the steering wheel was also on the right.
PA+Cat: Powerline has a video of Biden talking to reporters in Shanksville. He makes no sense. He keeps stating sentence fragments that sound like portions of talking points, but he never finishes any thought, other than by saying “c’mon, man!” and “who does that?” Like he’s made some important point.
It is bizarre. I think that in his dementia he doesn’t know that he’s not making sense.
I don’t see them letting him do anything unscripted going forward, unless they want him out.
Strange, strange days.
“I don’t see them letting him do anything unscripted going forward, unless they want him out.”
Or they believe that it doesn’t matter, that their hold on power is not going to be harmed by it
Tim: The driver of a horse-drawn vehicle sat on the right, I don’t know why. A locomotive engineer and a subway motorman still do, too.
all I could think of (after hostage videos) was that weird animatronic head that would proclaim, “I want my MTV.”
They make me ponder that my grandparents were born around the earliest video times and my father was born around the latest and what they saw and experienced growing up.
The Biden video is hard to watch just because I can’t stand listening to him slur his way through a speech.
That said, however, it’s not as bad as Legal Insurrection makes it. The cuts back and forth between camera angles are jarring and unnecessary, yes. And the blurred background looks weird, but is apparently current practice in videography (as I’ve been learning as I start working on a Youtube channel).
I watched very specifically for continuity, and as far as I can tell there were four or five segments stitched together. I was expecting to see jumps between frames like when you edit all the “ums” out, and I didn’t see them. His hands and posture were mostly the same from cut to cut. His speaking was continuous across cuts, although since they cut at the ends of phrases you had to listen for trailing sounds of words.
I would say that Biden is still capable of reading a teleprompter. I’ll point out here that before my own father started his deep decline into dementia, but in hindsight was already affected, right up to the last minute he was still filing his bills with a scanned copy of the check, buying groceries, driving around town, etc. So learned and practiced skills (and daily routine) clearly don’t fall off until the patient is pretty far gone.
Biden’s speech patterns, though, are not good. He had a mostly flat affect and a single gesture he used over and over. And as Boatbuilder mentioned above, his off-the-cuff speech is far worse than prepared remarks.
At this point, generalizing from my own experience with my father, so based on anecdata, I would expect Biden to continue shuffling through his routine for the foreseeable future, unless and until he has a physical incident (a fall, another mini-stroke, etc.) or until faced with an unpredicted event.
If it’s physical, I expect he’ll suddenly decline faster, and if it’s events I expect he’ll just vapor lock. In either case, I’m sure we won’t be told and Jill plus his staff will start making all the decisions — more than they are now, anyway.
Edited to add: Biden looks like he’s 90, not 78. How long is his physical health going to hold out?
Moron Pundit, neo —
So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives, where are they now?
With loves and hates and passions just like mine
They were born, and then they lived, and then they died
Seems so unfair, I want to cry
I can’t stand listening to him slur his way through a speech. — Bryan L.
Most of Biden’s recitation isn’t slurred, but every once in a while there will be a something like a three word phrase that he will mess up. He’ll get the overall vowel sound of it roughly correct, but the consonants will be slurred together. I’m a pretty good mimic, and usually I can make my wife laugh by repeating a slurred Biden phrase with a tiny bit of extra slurring thrown in.
We had a commenter here some time ago who suggested that if Biden is hampered not by general dementia, but instead lingering effects of his known brain aneurysms, then his mental function or lack thereof may be constant for a long period of time.
Bryan Lovely:
Agreed. I watched a little of the speech and felt the same way. Really, it all depends on the speed of his decline and whether the powers behind the throne decide it’s better to remove him than to keep him. They may just keep him.
Bryan Lovely- I looked closely at the Shanksville video to see if it had been edited to make him seem incoherent (there are lots of deceptively edited videos of public figures out there-look what they did to Sarah Palin and, of course, Trump). I didn’t see any and the people in the background are moving normally throughout.
He uses his catch phrases-I mean, c’mon man-appeals to empathy, and fake tough guy stuff as slickly as ever, but they aren’t connected to actual thoughts. It’s like he’s still selling cars but the lot is empty.
Boatbuilder:
People whose minds are fading resort to familiar phrases and the tried and true.
My experience of dementia, seeing it in my mother and then in my wife, is that the decline follows that pattern of gradually, then suddenly. Biden’s current plateau might continue for quite a while, but eventually he will fall off. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Not even Joe.
PA+CAT. I watched the video, actually listened since I found the background was too distracting. It was the usual anodyne pablum that’s standard issue for this sort of speech. The only discordant note was the outright lie about how followers of the religion of peace were unjustly attacked that day. In fact, members of the religion of peace in NYC and New Jersey who watched the Twin towers collapse were cheering.
The blurry background behind Biden seems very weird, nothing like what is seen in the usual videos from the White House. The theory of shooting Xiden multiple times in a green room would fit. A blurry background would make splicing the takes together a lot easier.
For something completely different. I had no idea there was a world cliff diving championship circuit. Yesterday was the big event in Ireland.
Since it is more than an hour and a half, you can catch the first opening minute montage, then cut to 8:10 for the women dives. If you watch a few minutes at that point you can see Ms. Iffland score a perfect 10. The men start at about 47:30. The women dive from about 69 feet up, and the men from about 90 feet.
As far as I can tell, there are no head first entries.
In taking a chance that a complex and sophisticated enough AI (one whose programming is so complex than humans cannot likely fully understand it or how it will work in all its complexity) could become self-aware, we would be risking creating a form of life that has no basis in, nor connection to organic life, no human morality, and no necessary reason to preserve and protect organic life; an independent form of life which may well have it’s own and very different agenda.
We may try to constrain such a self aware AI and to hedge it about with rules and prohibitions, but how can we be sure that we humans can successfully constrain an entity that can very easily out think us, one orders of magnitude smarter than us, and whose operations are on a nanosecond scale.
Suppose you succeed in creating an AI so capable and so powerful that it becomes self-aware, an AI that can out think and out perform any human and do so in nanoseconds.
Then, suppose such a self aware AI developed an instinct for self-preservation.
Say the first thing such a self-aware AI does to preserve itself–in the first few nanoseconds of its self-aware existence–is to inject replicated elements of itself into the Internet, and to take the Internet and everything connected to it over?
What steps would such a self-aware AI then take if it thought humans would want to turn it off, to “pull the plug,” and were a threat to that AI’s self-preservation, or were just nuisances that AI did not want to bother with, or to have annoyingly around?
China Covid Delta Datapoint:
They’ve just locked down Xiamen. As far as I can tell, one is not allowed to leave one’s residential district, but can otherwise wander around local neighbourhood. So no crossing town to shop for Hermès Bags or Bat Soup. Beyond that I’d imagine compulsory testing for everyone two or three times in next fortnight plus quarantine for infected individuals plus tighter lockdowns of buildings or neighbourhoods if/when clusters detected.
Here is the thing. Everyone goes on about Panopticons and Tyranny. But this level of granularity means that the inconvenience is limited and not widespread. Compare and contrast to supposedly free and democratic Australia where everyone in Sydney or Melbourne gets locked down because it would be somehow ‘discriminatory’ to target locales or to restrict movement on a more granular basis.
FWIW, I can assure everyone that the economy in the Pearl River Delta is going gangbusters. There have been two typhoons in the offing, one one to the South and the other to the North and the Inversion Layer and then the temporary reversal of prevailing summer monsoon wind direction meant that air quality went from crystal clear to pea soup for a few days. (You absolutely should not believe what Davos Man tells you about China having gone all sustainably Green ;P Check back in 2050.)
I liked that video, Neo, thank you–shared it with several people.
I’ve been reading about the Holodomor, about which I knew basically nothing before falling down a rabbit hole of web links, and right now I’m in that odd state where nothing quite feels real because I’d forgotten how depraved people can be.
“The path we followed wound about eight to twelve metres past one of these
“shufry” that had fallen into disuse. As we drew nearer to it, we saw a truck pull up. Some NKVD (OGPU) men got out, turned off the light in the truck, rolled back the fences around the exits, and then the criminals began to throw the corpses and the dying into the shafts. We could hear the groans and cries of the unfortunate victims of this wantonness.
…
We left, and the two of us promised each other not to tell anyone, any time, not a
word. However, rumours were already circulating among the people, because many had seen bodies of those who had died in the famine buried in these “shufry.” Mainly the no. 5 Semenivka shaft and the no. 8 Maksymivka shaft were used for this. Later all shafts so used were filled in and razed to the ground. Then they were divided into lots and sold to workers as gardens….”
@Tara:
Ukrainian Peasants don’t own media outlets and don’t run Hollywood. Armenian Influencers are more into producing Big Buttock instagram content. Khmers… well who gives a #$%^ about them? Besides the USA supported the Khmer Rouge because Not Vietnamese. And Vietnamese were Very Bad Communist People supported by Russians… Also Very Bad. And Khmer Rouge Killers were bankrolled by Chinese Communists… Very Good because … well effed if I know why good because I didn’t go to Yale. Murrica!
No need to get myself started on Africans being African to each other.
And plenty more where that came from. It’s the natural human state of affairs to be dumping other humans in ditches. We’re all of us here just lucky to have been born and mostly lived through what is going to seem in hindsight like a pastoral interlude.
Oh… and never, never, never absolutely never even think to look at demographic breakdown / disproportionate impact in NKVD and local commissar ranks during things like Holodomor. And especially don’t think of connecting that to any notions of enthusiastic local participation along lines of An Eye For An Eye during later unpleasantness in Ukraine. Don’t do that. Very Bad.
History is Complicated. Even the Good usually turn out to have been not 100% good.
The trick is to not be born in Interesting Times. History doesn’t much like exceptions and edge cases. It’s a Steamroller.
“Think Tank Latin Mass Single Malt and Cigars Faggot Queen Republicans”
I enjoy Zaphod’s visits here. Standing next to him, I feel almost benevolent by comparison.
And other than Art Deco, who would ever use the term “Flaneur”, even if they remembered what it meant.
@ Bryan > “They were born, and then they lived, and then they died’
I enjoyed the song. Maybe they read Lucy’s book.
During the search for Schultz’s comic, I came upon this blog post, which sounds like the writer probably had some kind of “change experience” similar to Neo’s and others we’ve read here.
In some ways humankind’s behaviour appears to be getting worse, but maybe that’s the perception of people who are more questioning and have higher ethical standards than previous generations. Things seem to get worse before they get better.
There are inumerable ways in which we can raise our consciousness and “step up”. But if you never change your beliefs throughout your lifetime, then you are stuck on one rung of the spiritual ladder. Acquiring wisdom means being open to new ideas; it means assessing the beliefs and values which were instilled into you as a child. It means searching for the truth, even though it might turn out to be something you really don’t want, or it scares you.
We all tend to get locked into belief systems. If we are challenged, we justify our beliefs and ignore anything that might prove them wrong or suspect. We just can’t bear to lose an argument. The religious person might refuse to read a a book disclaiming God; he convinces himself that the book is the devil tempting him. The atheist might refuse to read a book about reincarnation; he is quite sure there is no such thing as an eternal spirit, and although he can’t prove that there is not, he wont read anything that might give evidence that there is.
Many older scientists rubbish the young person’s breakthrough theory. It would be too painful and humiliating to admit that you were wrong for 30 years, and your job might be at risk. If we have invested for many years in a belief system, we are not about to change now.
“Do something that scares you every day” – advice I heard recently.
So go on – read that book that might make you throw some dearly loved belief into the trash can.
Ask yourself – “What if I’m wrong?”
I say – who wants to waste a whole lifetime believing lies or untruths?
I say – stand tall and when you are wrong, admit it – to yourself and to others.
IT’S GOOD TO CHANGE YOUR MIND.
It means you have learnt something, become wiser and faced your fears.
Then you can step up onto the next rung of the ladder.
Sometimes you’re not really wrong, you just haven’t heard “the rest of the story” yet.
“They were born, and then they lived, and then they died”
Cicero (after dealing with a bunch of Catiline Conspirators):
“They have lived.”
I thought at first we were going to have a “getting dressed in the 19th century” video for real, but that scene never even showed up!
I particularly liked the French double-decker trains (try THAT you risk-averse snowflakes!) and the two-speed slide walks, which we don’t have in our airports. I would love to see those in some of the tourist towns where walking is a chore but cars are a bore. I’m surprised the Disney parks don’t have them (maybe they do?) —
I first read about the concept in Robert Heinlein’s ‘”The Roads Must Roll,” a 1940 short story that was still “future technology” in the 1960s, so far as most readers knew: how many American pulp SF fans had ever been to Chicago or Paris?
H. G. Wells would probably have known about the French slidewalks. I haven’t read his story, but there is an excerpt at the second link.
This is probably a Heinlein rediscovery; you can read an earlier version of this concept – the moving roadway from H.G. Wells’ 1899 story When the Sleeper Wakes. The first commercial passenger conveyor belt was built in 1954 (by Goodyear for the Hudson and Manhattan railroad).
By the way, the “electric stairway”, or escalator, was introduced in 1900.
The Wells’ reference links here, and includes the same video of the French walkway as part of a longer one with various scenes of Paris in the 1890s, plus a second video showing the Exposition panorama as viewed by the riders. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=737
This [Wells] reference is a generation earlier than Heinlein’s The Roads Must Roll. See rolling road.
Of course, even earlier were the sliding walkways shown at the 1893 Chicago Exposition and the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Here is a beautiful video of the Paris Exposition walkway.
…
Here is a kinetoscope of the moving sidewalk from the 1900 Paris Exposition made by Thomas Ediston.
I suppose the ones in Chicago and Paris didn’t qualify as “commercial” because they were part of the Expositions.
A double Backhanded Compliment from DNW is worth ten thousand commemorative shaving mugs from the Franklin Mint. More power to your elbow, Sir and triple-shot the Fougasses.
Is there any potential problem with AI that some SF writer somewhere hasn’t explored yet?
Here are some classics, off the top of my head.
Despite his personality, C3PO is just a walking AI.
@MoronPundit:
It’s not just moving pictures and photos that do this. I’ll buy out-of-print books second-hand off AbeBooks and every now and then one will show up with notes, book plates, a check for a small donation to the VFW which was never mailed in 1988 and I go google and find his obituary… etc. Recently re-read Old Glory where author pilots a small boat down the Mississippi and meets all kinds of people — this was in 1979. So I’d be reading in bed and every few pages reach for the phone or iPad to look up this or that person and find out what became of him or her. Or some factory or other business — inevitably closed now.
Sick Transit’s Glorious Monday and all that.
@AesopFan:
Asimov’s Foundation Series Episode 1 pops up on Apple TV September 24.
I expect it will be wokeified up the wazoo, but will approach with open mind in the hope that it’s not all bad. Blew my tiny mind when I first happened upon it in 8th Grade.
Just randomly free-associating, but would Ender’s Game happen to be a particular favorite of yours?
Battlestar Galactica? 🙂 I very much liked the remake of this.
All the responses were very welcome. It is comforting to know you aren’t the only person hit by things like that.
I knew I was wandering in the Cure’s territory but didn’t imagine I’d end up with a Peanuts comic out of it.
Good stuff.
AeosopFan—Elon Musk has summarized our predicament vis-a-vis creating ever more powerful and complex AIs that may eventually become capable of self-awareness, when he used the phrase, “summoning the demon.”
Thus, as in some fiction, magicians (scientists) may set up the invoking conditions and succeed in summoning a powerful entity, but then have the problem of how to keep that entity confined, how to control that entity and, ultimately, how to stop that powerful non-human entity from breaking confinement and control and killing them.
Scientists will have designed and called into being a non-human entity with power, speed, intellect, and access to information far greater than their own–a largely unpredictable and ungovernable entity–which likely will have an instinct for self-preservation, and an agenda all of it’s own.
Sure, these scientists will probably give all sorts of assurances that they have all sorts of limiting instructions, and fail-safes in place–things like Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”–etc., have air-gapped” such an AI so it can’t connect with the Internet, etc. and have all sorts of alternative ways of “pulling the plug,” etc., etc.
But how will all their comparatively slow-witted efforts, always leaving something out, as will be inevitable—their preparations and actions only human after all, and subject to human error—fare when pitted against the capabilities of a non-human entity immensely more powerful, informed, meticulous, thorough, all-encompassing, and resourceful than they are capable of being, and a non-human entity capable of analyzing situations, gaming out a likely infinite number of possible solutions, and of acting–all within a nanosecond? Moreover, a non-human entity likely able to continuously upgrade it’s capabilities and reach.
Unless we can be absolutely sure of successfully binding such an entity with the strongest, most unbreakable of prohibitions, and of preventing it from becoming self-aware–and, really, how can we be “absolutely sure”– we humans would be well advised to not “summon the demon.”
And, after all, how can we prevent the formation of “self-consciousness” when today’s scientists don’t even know what “consciousness” is.
Musk says its already too late and appears to think that, in a lab somewhere, some form of “Skynet” is coming into being.
Imagine, if you will, such an AI threat emerging, and Dementia Joe and his collection of ideologues, ignoramuses, and dimwits trying to deal with that threat.
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Well, since Neo has started us out with old videos . . . here’s something I just saw over at Legal Insurrection: an analysis of JoJo’s prerecorded 9/11 “speech”. According to the LI weekend editor, the “Biden 9/11 video depicts Joe Biden purportedly addressing America on and about the 20th anniversary of 9/11, but it has a weird ‘found footage’ vibe that is deeply disconcerting. . . . Biden is ashen in this video (maybe ashen is the new black?), he’s confused and dazed, and he’s rambling utter nonsense. The cuts between frames/footage are jarring. We have doddering, watery-eyed Joe facing the camera saying one thing, snip, we have contentious Joe railing at the camera from a different angle. Snip, we have Joe weird-whispering about . . . really, who cares? . . . It looks like Biden’s image has been thoughtlessly pasted into each and every scene by a precocious child who just learned the copy and paste function. The blurry backdrop is . . . weird. And disconcerting. There’s this strange visual of Biden superimposed on–seeming to float on, sort of 3-D–a weird out-of-focus background. . . . Indeed, this technique makes him look like some kind of out-of-touch politician who lives in his own special bubble.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/09/bidens-pre-recorded-9-11-statement-was-weird-and-disturbing/
The Biden video is embedded at the link. I hadn’t watched it when it was first posted because I can’t stand looking at the dead man walking, but watching it now, it does make one’s skin crawl. I am no expert in video editing, so I’d be interested in knowing whether Neo and her readers think the video was “doctored,” and if so, how it was done. The reason why is obvious.
So when did movie film become video?
I hadn’t looked at it, either, PA Cat. It’s an eerie video. Why did they keep switching cameras? Is the guy unable to give a speech from start to finish without having to change angles? One sentence or phrase, click, another, click …
Elon Musk has got to be one of the smartest guys around, and I’d imagine he knows quite well what the state of advancement currently is in various areas of technological research, including in the field of AI research.
Musk has said that he regards headlong, unfettered AI research as an existential threat to the human race and that, despite his warnings that such research must be very carefully monitored and constrained by some international body with effective power to constrain such research, he believes that a threshold has been crossed and, now, it is just too late to do anything to stop the threatening advancements that have been made.
Says Musk, in creating ever more capable, versatile, and powerful AI you are “Summoning the demon.”
https://www.analyticsinsight.net/ai-the-biggest-existential-threat-to-humankind-says-elon-musk/
I noticed Rick’s point, not that it bothers me. These days I always notice the resistance to changes in everyday language as we move from terms like “filming,” “footage,” and “taping,” towards terms like “recording,” “storing,” and “video.”
____
The Lumiere films with the old autos reminded me of stories my father told me about my grandfather driving his model-T from the farm into town on a rainy day. A few weeks ago I was introduced to the head of a local “horseless carriage” club which they define as any car produced before 1916.
He gave me a complete run down on how to drive his mint condition model-T that he had on display. No actual driving. It’s a little more complex than I was expecting. His also had an aftermarket third gear overdrive, which was really a mess to operate.
They also had a couple REO automobiles on display. No Speedwagon models, even though that is a real model. REO are the initials of Ransom Eli Olds.
I have no great faith in the wisdom, objectivity, and restraint of organizations and their scientists when they are in pursuit of reputation and of a new and potentially lucrative discovery.
I also think that many scientists often know far less than they think they do.
“Skynet” seems all too possible a result of headlong AI research, and I think that is exactly the result that Musk fears.
Vidoes like this make me so sad.
I see each of these faces from the past and wonder who they were, who they loved, what they were planning on doing later that day. Entire lives lived and all that remains is a shadow.
All of us are so complex and interesting and have a story that wouldn’t fit in a library and no one will ever see even a fraction of it.
Most don’t even get a shadow.
Sometimes it’s all too much to bear.
Maybe I’m just in a mood.
Was there no standardization to which side the steering wheel went on back then?
In the New York footage at the end, they were driving on the right, and the steering wheel was also on the right.
PA+Cat: Powerline has a video of Biden talking to reporters in Shanksville. He makes no sense. He keeps stating sentence fragments that sound like portions of talking points, but he never finishes any thought, other than by saying “c’mon, man!” and “who does that?” Like he’s made some important point.
It is bizarre. I think that in his dementia he doesn’t know that he’s not making sense.
I don’t see them letting him do anything unscripted going forward, unless they want him out.
Strange, strange days.
“I don’t see them letting him do anything unscripted going forward, unless they want him out.”
Or they believe that it doesn’t matter, that their hold on power is not going to be harmed by it
Tim: The driver of a horse-drawn vehicle sat on the right, I don’t know why. A locomotive engineer and a subway motorman still do, too.
all I could think of (after hostage videos) was that weird animatronic head that would proclaim, “I want my MTV.”
Max Headroom was much smarter than Joe Biden.
Max Headroom was much smarter than Joe Biden.
Certainly more lifelike.
@tcrosse
Avatar creation here.
https://en.gravatar.com/
Moron Pundit:
I get into that mood at times.
They make me ponder that my grandparents were born around the earliest video times and my father was born around the latest and what they saw and experienced growing up.
The Biden video is hard to watch just because I can’t stand listening to him slur his way through a speech.
That said, however, it’s not as bad as Legal Insurrection makes it. The cuts back and forth between camera angles are jarring and unnecessary, yes. And the blurred background looks weird, but is apparently current practice in videography (as I’ve been learning as I start working on a Youtube channel).
I watched very specifically for continuity, and as far as I can tell there were four or five segments stitched together. I was expecting to see jumps between frames like when you edit all the “ums” out, and I didn’t see them. His hands and posture were mostly the same from cut to cut. His speaking was continuous across cuts, although since they cut at the ends of phrases you had to listen for trailing sounds of words.
I would say that Biden is still capable of reading a teleprompter. I’ll point out here that before my own father started his deep decline into dementia, but in hindsight was already affected, right up to the last minute he was still filing his bills with a scanned copy of the check, buying groceries, driving around town, etc. So learned and practiced skills (and daily routine) clearly don’t fall off until the patient is pretty far gone.
Biden’s speech patterns, though, are not good. He had a mostly flat affect and a single gesture he used over and over. And as Boatbuilder mentioned above, his off-the-cuff speech is far worse than prepared remarks.
At this point, generalizing from my own experience with my father, so based on anecdata, I would expect Biden to continue shuffling through his routine for the foreseeable future, unless and until he has a physical incident (a fall, another mini-stroke, etc.) or until faced with an unpredicted event.
If it’s physical, I expect he’ll suddenly decline faster, and if it’s events I expect he’ll just vapor lock. In either case, I’m sure we won’t be told and Jill plus his staff will start making all the decisions — more than they are now, anyway.
Edited to add: Biden looks like he’s 90, not 78. How long is his physical health going to hold out?
Moron Pundit, neo —
— The Smiths, “Cemetry Gates”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfXqxjMkyQ4
I can’t stand listening to him slur his way through a speech. — Bryan L.
Most of Biden’s recitation isn’t slurred, but every once in a while there will be a something like a three word phrase that he will mess up. He’ll get the overall vowel sound of it roughly correct, but the consonants will be slurred together. I’m a pretty good mimic, and usually I can make my wife laugh by repeating a slurred Biden phrase with a tiny bit of extra slurring thrown in.
We had a commenter here some time ago who suggested that if Biden is hampered not by general dementia, but instead lingering effects of his known brain aneurysms, then his mental function or lack thereof may be constant for a long period of time.
Bryan Lovely:
Agreed. I watched a little of the speech and felt the same way. Really, it all depends on the speed of his decline and whether the powers behind the throne decide it’s better to remove him than to keep him. They may just keep him.
Bryan Lovely- I looked closely at the Shanksville video to see if it had been edited to make him seem incoherent (there are lots of deceptively edited videos of public figures out there-look what they did to Sarah Palin and, of course, Trump). I didn’t see any and the people in the background are moving normally throughout.
He uses his catch phrases-I mean, c’mon man-appeals to empathy, and fake tough guy stuff as slickly as ever, but they aren’t connected to actual thoughts. It’s like he’s still selling cars but the lot is empty.
Boatbuilder:
People whose minds are fading resort to familiar phrases and the tried and true.
My experience of dementia, seeing it in my mother and then in my wife, is that the decline follows that pattern of gradually, then suddenly. Biden’s current plateau might continue for quite a while, but eventually he will fall off. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Not even Joe.
PA+CAT. I watched the video, actually listened since I found the background was too distracting. It was the usual anodyne pablum that’s standard issue for this sort of speech. The only discordant note was the outright lie about how followers of the religion of peace were unjustly attacked that day. In fact, members of the religion of peace in NYC and New Jersey who watched the Twin towers collapse were cheering.
The blurry background behind Biden seems very weird, nothing like what is seen in the usual videos from the White House. The theory of shooting Xiden multiple times in a green room would fit. A blurry background would make splicing the takes together a lot easier.
For something completely different. I had no idea there was a world cliff diving championship circuit. Yesterday was the big event in Ireland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj9yz64MLf4
Since it is more than an hour and a half, you can catch the first opening minute montage, then cut to 8:10 for the women dives. If you watch a few minutes at that point you can see Ms. Iffland score a perfect 10. The men start at about 47:30. The women dive from about 69 feet up, and the men from about 90 feet.
As far as I can tell, there are no head first entries.
In taking a chance that a complex and sophisticated enough AI (one whose programming is so complex than humans cannot likely fully understand it or how it will work in all its complexity) could become self-aware, we would be risking creating a form of life that has no basis in, nor connection to organic life, no human morality, and no necessary reason to preserve and protect organic life; an independent form of life which may well have it’s own and very different agenda.
We may try to constrain such a self aware AI and to hedge it about with rules and prohibitions, but how can we be sure that we humans can successfully constrain an entity that can very easily out think us, one orders of magnitude smarter than us, and whose operations are on a nanosecond scale.
Suppose you succeed in creating an AI so capable and so powerful that it becomes self-aware, an AI that can out think and out perform any human and do so in nanoseconds.
Then, suppose such a self aware AI developed an instinct for self-preservation.
Say the first thing such a self-aware AI does to preserve itself–in the first few nanoseconds of its self-aware existence–is to inject replicated elements of itself into the Internet, and to take the Internet and everything connected to it over?
What steps would such a self-aware AI then take if it thought humans would want to turn it off, to “pull the plug,” and were a threat to that AI’s self-preservation, or were just nuisances that AI did not want to bother with, or to have annoyingly around?
China Covid Delta Datapoint:
They’ve just locked down Xiamen. As far as I can tell, one is not allowed to leave one’s residential district, but can otherwise wander around local neighbourhood. So no crossing town to shop for Hermès Bags or Bat Soup. Beyond that I’d imagine compulsory testing for everyone two or three times in next fortnight plus quarantine for infected individuals plus tighter lockdowns of buildings or neighbourhoods if/when clusters detected.
Here is the thing. Everyone goes on about Panopticons and Tyranny. But this level of granularity means that the inconvenience is limited and not widespread. Compare and contrast to supposedly free and democratic Australia where everyone in Sydney or Melbourne gets locked down because it would be somehow ‘discriminatory’ to target locales or to restrict movement on a more granular basis.
FWIW, I can assure everyone that the economy in the Pearl River Delta is going gangbusters. There have been two typhoons in the offing, one one to the South and the other to the North and the Inversion Layer and then the temporary reversal of prevailing summer monsoon wind direction meant that air quality went from crystal clear to pea soup for a few days. (You absolutely should not believe what Davos Man tells you about China having gone all sustainably Green ;P Check back in 2050.)
I liked that video, Neo, thank you–shared it with several people.
I’ve been reading about the Holodomor, about which I knew basically nothing before falling down a rabbit hole of web links, and right now I’m in that odd state where nothing quite feels real because I’d forgotten how depraved people can be.
https://holodomor.ca/resource/holodomor-reader-a-sourcebook-on-the-famine-of-1932-1933-in-ukraine/
From chapter 6, pages 36-37:
“The path we followed wound about eight to twelve metres past one of these
“shufry” that had fallen into disuse. As we drew nearer to it, we saw a truck pull up. Some NKVD (OGPU) men got out, turned off the light in the truck, rolled back the fences around the exits, and then the criminals began to throw the corpses and the dying into the shafts. We could hear the groans and cries of the unfortunate victims of this wantonness.
…
We left, and the two of us promised each other not to tell anyone, any time, not a
word. However, rumours were already circulating among the people, because many had seen bodies of those who had died in the famine buried in these “shufry.” Mainly the no. 5 Semenivka shaft and the no. 8 Maksymivka shaft were used for this. Later all shafts so used were filled in and razed to the ground. Then they were divided into lots and sold to workers as gardens….”
@Tara:
Ukrainian Peasants don’t own media outlets and don’t run Hollywood. Armenian Influencers are more into producing Big Buttock instagram content. Khmers… well who gives a #$%^ about them? Besides the USA supported the Khmer Rouge because Not Vietnamese. And Vietnamese were Very Bad Communist People supported by Russians… Also Very Bad. And Khmer Rouge Killers were bankrolled by Chinese Communists… Very Good because … well effed if I know why good because I didn’t go to Yale. Murrica!
No need to get myself started on Africans being African to each other.
And plenty more where that came from. It’s the natural human state of affairs to be dumping other humans in ditches. We’re all of us here just lucky to have been born and mostly lived through what is going to seem in hindsight like a pastoral interlude.
Oh… and never, never, never absolutely never even think to look at demographic breakdown / disproportionate impact in NKVD and local commissar ranks during things like Holodomor. And especially don’t think of connecting that to any notions of enthusiastic local participation along lines of An Eye For An Eye during later unpleasantness in Ukraine. Don’t do that. Very Bad.
History is Complicated. Even the Good usually turn out to have been not 100% good.
The trick is to not be born in Interesting Times. History doesn’t much like exceptions and edge cases. It’s a Steamroller.
I enjoy Zaphod’s visits here. Standing next to him, I feel almost benevolent by comparison.
And other than Art Deco, who would ever use the term “Flaneur”, even if they remembered what it meant.
@ Bryan > “They were born, and then they lived, and then they died’
I enjoyed the song. Maybe they read Lucy’s book.
https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1958/09/28
Just trying something here, Neo. You can remove it if you like. In fact you probably should.
‘Flaneur’, definition
During the search for Schultz’s comic, I came upon this blog post, which sounds like the writer probably had some kind of “change experience” similar to Neo’s and others we’ve read here.
https://rabbitingonblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/a-man-was-born-he-lived-he-died-the-end/
Sometimes you’re not really wrong, you just haven’t heard “the rest of the story” yet.
“They were born, and then they lived, and then they died”
Cicero (after dealing with a bunch of Catiline Conspirators):
“They have lived.”
I thought at first we were going to have a “getting dressed in the 19th century” video for real, but that scene never even showed up!
I particularly liked the French double-decker trains (try THAT you risk-averse snowflakes!) and the two-speed slide walks, which we don’t have in our airports. I would love to see those in some of the tourist towns where walking is a chore but cars are a bore. I’m surprised the Disney parks don’t have them (maybe they do?) —
I first read about the concept in Robert Heinlein’s ‘”The Roads Must Roll,” a 1940 short story that was still “future technology” in the 1960s, so far as most readers knew: how many American pulp SF fans had ever been to Chicago or Paris?
H. G. Wells would probably have known about the French slidewalks. I haven’t read his story, but there is an excerpt at the second link.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=306
The Wells’ reference links here, and includes the same video of the French walkway as part of a longer one with various scenes of Paris in the 1890s, plus a second video showing the Exposition panorama as viewed by the riders.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=737
I suppose the ones in Chicago and Paris didn’t qualify as “commercial” because they were part of the Expositions.
https://chicagology.com/columbiaexpo/fair030/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31236/walk-way-history-moving-sidewalk
A double Backhanded Compliment from DNW is worth ten thousand commemorative shaving mugs from the Franklin Mint. More power to your elbow, Sir and triple-shot the Fougasses.
Is there any potential problem with AI that some SF writer somewhere hasn’t explored yet?
Here are some classics, off the top of my head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_universe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_Who_Sang
Despite his personality, C3PO is just a walking AI.
@MoronPundit:
It’s not just moving pictures and photos that do this. I’ll buy out-of-print books second-hand off AbeBooks and every now and then one will show up with notes, book plates, a check for a small donation to the VFW which was never mailed in 1988 and I go google and find his obituary… etc. Recently re-read Old Glory where author pilots a small boat down the Mississippi and meets all kinds of people — this was in 1979. So I’d be reading in bed and every few pages reach for the phone or iPad to look up this or that person and find out what became of him or her. Or some factory or other business — inevitably closed now.
Sick Transit’s Glorious Monday and all that.
@AesopFan:
Asimov’s Foundation Series Episode 1 pops up on Apple TV September 24.
I expect it will be wokeified up the wazoo, but will approach with open mind in the hope that it’s not all bad. Blew my tiny mind when I first happened upon it in 8th Grade.
Back to the Future:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Corsair
@AesopFan:
Just randomly free-associating, but would Ender’s Game happen to be a particular favorite of yours?
Battlestar Galactica? 🙂 I very much liked the remake of this.
All the responses were very welcome. It is comforting to know you aren’t the only person hit by things like that.
I knew I was wandering in the Cure’s territory but didn’t imagine I’d end up with a Peanuts comic out of it.
Good stuff.
AeosopFan—Elon Musk has summarized our predicament vis-a-vis creating ever more powerful and complex AIs that may eventually become capable of self-awareness, when he used the phrase, “summoning the demon.”
Thus, as in some fiction, magicians (scientists) may set up the invoking conditions and succeed in summoning a powerful entity, but then have the problem of how to keep that entity confined, how to control that entity and, ultimately, how to stop that powerful non-human entity from breaking confinement and control and killing them.
Scientists will have designed and called into being a non-human entity with power, speed, intellect, and access to information far greater than their own–a largely unpredictable and ungovernable entity–which likely will have an instinct for self-preservation, and an agenda all of it’s own.
Sure, these scientists will probably give all sorts of assurances that they have all sorts of limiting instructions, and fail-safes in place–things like Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”–etc., have air-gapped” such an AI so it can’t connect with the Internet, etc. and have all sorts of alternative ways of “pulling the plug,” etc., etc.
But how will all their comparatively slow-witted efforts, always leaving something out, as will be inevitable—their preparations and actions only human after all, and subject to human error—fare when pitted against the capabilities of a non-human entity immensely more powerful, informed, meticulous, thorough, all-encompassing, and resourceful than they are capable of being, and a non-human entity capable of analyzing situations, gaming out a likely infinite number of possible solutions, and of acting–all within a nanosecond? Moreover, a non-human entity likely able to continuously upgrade it’s capabilities and reach.
Unless we can be absolutely sure of successfully binding such an entity with the strongest, most unbreakable of prohibitions, and of preventing it from becoming self-aware–and, really, how can we be “absolutely sure”– we humans would be well advised to not “summon the demon.”
And, after all, how can we prevent the formation of “self-consciousness” when today’s scientists don’t even know what “consciousness” is.
Musk says its already too late and appears to think that, in a lab somewhere, some form of “Skynet” is coming into being.
Imagine, if you will, such an AI threat emerging, and Dementia Joe and his collection of ideologues, ignoramuses, and dimwits trying to deal with that threat.