First Blog

  Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a new religion? I wouldn't go so fare as envisioning AI as a religion, but I would support a massive advance toward intellectual dependency, much like an addictive drug. Knowledge workers will be replaced; Medical diagnoses will first be within the "circuits" of machine learning (cf. ELIZA*). Teaching will become an AI learning App. And many more. Here is a litmus test for AI addiction, and in particular for tools like ChatGPT. When the colleges begin offering courses on how to use these tools, the dependency becomes revealed as firmly entrenched. *   ELIZA  is an early  natural language processing  computer program  created from 1964 to 1966  at the  MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by  Joseph Weizenbaum . It was amazingly successful. Patients were convinced they were talking to a real person. And that was 60 years ago.

China cheats.   This is a fundamental fact all have learned.  In the trade talks they are loath to give up all their forms of cheating, from assuming foreign corporate ownership, to hacking for information and innovation, to lying about economic data, to usurious borrowing to corrupt countries.  China not only cheats, but they love to cheat and need to cheat.   They cheat even when they don’t have to. For their leaders, cheating is akin to an addiction. It’s virtually genetic. I believe the power brokers in China, especially Xi Jinping, will be unable to agree to any deal that stops cheating altogether. One approach the US trade negotiations could do is make an agreement with that allows them some cheating, but subtly controls it efficacy.   This is an update to my previous blog at https://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2019/01/pig-latin-and-chinese-checkers.html

Do you like pizza?  Of course, you do.  I do too. But did you know cheese contains casomorphins, which have an opioid-like effect? Indeed,  concentrated dairy products, like cheese, have especially high levels of opiates, even morphine.* The argument is you get hooked on cheese because of these opioid-like chemicals.  Naturally, this means most humans over all of time were addicted in this way.   Strange but so claimed.  The next thing we will see is a push to eliminate pizza. California will be first. "Keep the aliens; deport the pizza."  Let's have pizza tonight - double the cheese, please. :) I can see it now, the Mexican drug cartels opening pizza parlors offering "special pizza" delivered, though delivery may take a month or two.  *Just Google "cheese and opioids"