Short-term vs. Long-term Memory: Competing Against Our Technological Brethren

In the debate about debt restructuring and causes for male social infertility, let alone actual male sperm count decline, we face a longterm dilemma —

The advancement of technology past the ability of our short-term and long-term memory capabilities to keep up.

Do you compete against others?

Of course you do.

You competed with the distractions of the environment around your parent(s)/caregiver(s) for their attention to feed you, did you not?

You competed for the opportunity cost of baby clothes, baby food, toys and housing versus other items the money for your baby stuff could have bought.

You competed against life itself to live, from the very beginning of your existence — one specific sperm finding its way to an egg — at one time, a birth control device such as an spermicidal cream, a viral infection or mix of toxic chemicals in your mother’s womb could have wiped you out easily.

You still compete against the billions of nonsymbiotic cells that live on/in you for their/your existence.

We are sets of states of energy in constant competition.

That never changes.

History has a way of repeating itself.

Civilisations grow technologically, eventually creating an insurmountable gap in the echelons of civilisation complexity, usually between geographical regions, where competition between peoples is competition for the creation and use of better technology/tools.

When a global civilisation forms, there are no longer any barbaric civilisations with more brute force than clever technology to threaten any one highly-civilised population.

Instead, the barbarism grows from within.

Technology becomes a threat, rather than a benefit, to subgroups.

On a side note, hucksters can coerce unsuspecting customers into buying complex products for only so long until the customers start realising they’re giving the shirts off their backs for a set of the emperour’s new clothes?  How do the customers educate themselves enough to know they’re getting ripped off?

Technological automation improves productivity past the ability of basic tool-using skills so that large groups of workers with low skills are no longer needed.

Eventually, the threat of complex technology you can’t grasp, let alone compete against, is like a bully you can’t escape, beating you down at every opportunity to better yourself.

You’re trapped by your memory/cognition skills into a feeling of worthlessness.

The once proud, dominant male in lower/middle class society becomes a shadow.

But low skills are gender-neutral, despite current trends.

Not every woman is seeking more/higher education.

Where along the path of competition from birth does a person start losing touch with society because technology is too complex?

Technology refers to many things, such as language, cultural memes, shirt buttons, hammers, wheels, looms, chainsaws, and computers.

Is there a tipping point where this becomes a vicious, downward spiraling unraveling of our social fabric, regardless of attempts to turn the un[der]employed into entities dependent on the Mother State?

When does technology advance of civilisation become a threat to itself?

How do we determine where technology has failed to keep a person socially engaged?

How do we reconnect the unengaged both emotionally and intellectually?

What if every child was fitted with a device that automatically notified someone when the child’s behaviours and the environment were threats to the child’s long-term future?

What if that someone who was notified was a computer program that slowly nurtured the child into a useful place in a technologically complex civilisation?

When do the rights of a child to be functionally literate in a modern society override the rights of parents to raise their children to be whatever they want them to be — social misfits, creative geniuses or average, middle-of-the-road compliant citizens — the “rights” of the civilisation to grow and nourish unimportant to the parents?

First, Do No More Harm Than Is Absolutely Necessary To Do No Harm

The men sat back in their leather chairs, cigar smoke gathering in layers below the ceiling.

“Boys, this is the way I see it.  We gave the women the right to vote.  A few decades later, we paid some kids to crash planes on 9/11.  From my point of view, we’re right on schedule.  Any objections?”

“Why are you so certain this will work?”

“Why?  Because it always has.  We enfranchise and disenfranchise various portions of the population to keep them off-guard and forever picketing city hall for the same rights they’ve lost and gained so many times they can’t remember.”

“If only this next one happened in my lifetime…”

“Anyone else with a question?”

“Yes.  So let me get this straight.  Your schedule shows us implementing Sharia law in Western countries within 100 years of 9/11/2001, thereby reinstating the role of men as supreme leaders…?”

“Uh-huh…”

“But it doesn’t bother you that our religion is pushed off to the side?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t Sharia law the antithesis of ours?”

“How so?”

“Well, our religions are not exactly best friends…”

“Abrahamic, Ibrahamic, call it what you will.  At the end of the day, it’s patriarchical and that’s all that matters to us men.  Right, boys?!”

The yellow-orange glow of burning tobacco sticks bobbed up and down.

“Next item on the agenda — determining which families get first dibs on occupying the initial Martian colonies.  Any suggestions?”

“Well, hadn’t we better make sure the women we send with those families are self-sufficient if need be but ultimately dependent on men?”

“Of course, of course.  As you can see from the list I gave you, the men and women from which you will choose the best candidates have been sequestered into isolated subcultures for three generations, allowing us to control their thought patterns, dietary preferences and genetic tendencies with 99.99966 percent accuracy.”

“I don’t know.  Six sigma sure leaves a lot of room for error.  I’d feel a lot more secure if we had a 10-sigma process in place.”

“You get what you pay for.  Gentlemen, anyone want to raise the stakes to ten sigma?”

“I’ll put a wager on seven.”

“Eight for me!”

“Okay, anyone for nine?  No?  Okay, going once, twice, sold!  Eight sigma.  By my calculations we need an additional half a billion dollars for seed money to get this started.”

“I’d still feel more comfortable with ten.”

“And if you can cough up 100 billion dollars, we’ll give you ten sigma.”

“Let me think about it…”

“Sure thing.  We’ll table it until next week’s Committee meeting.  Now, looking at the list, are there any objections to the list of potential candidates?”

Mass Hypnosis as a Hobby

Training microorganisms to travel between hosts was the easy part.

Getting them to work their way into position, waiting for messages that told the little buddies where to act when…well, that was the safety pin in the flypaper ointment remover.

Kathryn stood in front of the mirror, spinning on point, her skirt twirling in the air like a whirling dervish.

“What are you writing?”

“Our manifesto.”

“Better than the last?”

“Yes.”

She continued her dance practice, an imaginary partner held in her arms.

“You know, this would be a lot more fun if you joined me in the dance sphere.”

I looked up at the wall between us, a one-way mirror.

“Indeed. But it’s easier for me to concentrate here on my writing, sitting in a low-gravity field, than in the zero-gravity sphere.”

She sighed.

“I wish we’d’ve paid for the thought concentrator upgrade for you.  Do you know how many of my friends have more fun dancing with their partners, who are working fulltime in their thoughts while preparing for the Inner Solar System Dance-off?”

“Hmm…let me see.  A new dance sphere or a thought upgrade?  Didn’t we agree the sphere was a better investment?”

“Sure.  IF YOU EVER JOINED ME IN HERE!”

Her voice echoed, carried through the wall without need for a sound amplification system.

At first, we programmed microorganisms to attach “naturally,” using atomic interfaces like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

But we wanted a more advanced method of rewiring neural pathways, a means of largescale reconfiguration.

An amateur scientist, working in collaboration with several online amateurs, made the discovery that we bought before it hit the lowlevel interests of bored dilettantes looking for the latest gizmos to brag they had invented but hadn’t introduced to the public yet.

We should have seen it ourselves but, if you can’t outinvent ’em, then outbid the competition!

We can send a batch of microorganisms into a crowd, direct the little buddies toward specific people to “infect” and, like precise surgery, remotely move the microorganisms into place for later activation, completely avoiding overt, obvious, subliminal messaging that can be recorded and analysed by our enemies.

“Darling, is this another one of those manifestos that’s meant to divert the attention of our opponents?”

“Yes, dear.  I figure if I can fill up the thoughts of the other dance teams, they won’t be able to concentrate on their dancing, despite their latest, upgraded versions of thought concentrators.  There’s more than one way to skin a cat in freefall!”

Abandoned Ship

Rumour has it, based on the blood pouring from my scrotum, that the flooding of Venice released an ancient terror.  I am almost too tired to continue writing.

My wife and I included the city of canals on our tour of Italy.

We were there when the latest floods hit.

Being avid swimmers, we decided to join other tourists who dived into the waters of a local plaza and jumped out of a gondola into the floodwaters.

Several days later, we all feel a little sick.

I sit here, soaking up blood that I can’t stop.

Most of us have wounds that won’t heal.

One tourist reported that the doctor he brought with him reported seeing unusually large multicellular organisms in his bloodstream that seem to like eating through skin and blood vessels.

We are weak.

I don’t know if I can write another blog entry.

The priest in our hotel offered us last rites, saying, apologetically, that we looked like hell.

With the countrywide strikes in progress, I don’t think we’ll be able to get out of here alive.

…if you can call what’s been happening to us, the last few days, living!

…yet they still don’t know how to drive a car!

Using a few ballpark figures, I calculated that in the years we’ve had our two Cornish Rex cats (14 years for the first and 13 years for the second), we’ve spent at least $20,000 (I underestimated, I’m sure).

Wet food, dry food, cat litter, toys, treats, food/water bowls, litter boxes (plastic pans, covered boxes, electromechanical “automatic cleaning” boxes and plain cardboard boxes with plastic liners), cat carriers and medical care combined.

Not to mention developing/storing photographs, washing/drying bedcovers, shampooing the carpet and the cost of tapwater for all of the above, including for drinking.

In cat years, our feline companions are in their senior/elderly phase.

One is covered with “liver spots,” displaying two crooked ears from cat fights.

The other teeters and totters after his latest bout of vestibular disease, he, too, with a crooked ear (from an ear infection).

A couple of mouse-munching, cricket-crunching warriors.

They are unaware of our wars and national elections.

They warm up to us on cool days like this one.

They, like the redbud tree outside, teach me that the obsessions and vivid imaginations of our species are minor in comparison to the actions of the grander universe.

Yet they exist because of our species…

…our desire for change within our comfortable sameness.

A thought to remember again and again when members of our species get out-of-hand and seem out-of-control.

 

Countdown to infinity by halves

Dr. G. Brottel bent his knees and leaned back.

Neill, his dance instructor nodded.  “Yes, young man.  That’s exactly how you do it — chin up, look past your partner’s right ear and slightly point your right shoulder to hers, your hips straight.”

Galdous followed the instructions, just as he had followed instructions during his years at university, culminating in his dissertation, “Applying The Lamaze Method Aboard An L5 Society Geostationary Observation Station Boosted To An Earth-Moon Lagrange Point.”

This, of course, fed his interest in leading his partner, Yui, around the dance floor.

Mimicry circuitry in his central nervous system sped up his learning.

At night, he and Yui watched each other watch a 3D video which enhanced their sympathy learning of the moves in a weightless acrobatic encounter combining waltz, tango, Lindy hop, Balboa and East/West Coast swing.

By the end of their work shift the next day, their supplemental brain systems had worked out the coordinated muscle movements needed for smooth swaying on the spherical dance surface.

Yui, assigned to him and he assigned to her at birth, along with several alternative matches based on known genetic symmetry, melted into his arms as they spun “in the air” while holding the formal dance frames required for interplanetary competitions they planned to win.

Having grown up in adjoining educational centres but, not allowed to constantly interact like siblings, which tended to discourage the compatibility of their genetic material for later replication needs of the space colony, they had just enough similar phys-ed workout routines that meant they could anticipate each other’s moves without thinking.

Guinevere, a theoretical science university student and specialty dance instructor from Moon Base Amber Road, made mental notes about Galdous and Yui’s trajectories.

Her mental notes were sent to a supercomputer which adjusted the subroutines that would generate the next dance video for Galdous and Yui to watch that evening.

Guinevere, working on her PhD, the dissertation preliminarily titled, “Recalibrating Rocket Propulsion Guidance Systems Using Realtime Algorithm Remodeling of Neural Network Flow Diagrams,” general enough to give her flexibility with her university sponsor, had found that teaching others the dance steps she had learned during physical rehab not only helped her repair skeletomuscular damage from a bad spaceship smashup but also reinforced the pathways of her upgraded organic wireless circuitry.

In other words, practice what you preach, do what you say and say what you do, be a do bee, and go with the flow, as her therapist liked to say in mock repetition.

Guinevere held out her arms and Neill kicked off the floor toward her.

“Here’s what I mean, Galdous.”  Neill cupped his palm and placed it in the small of Guinevere’s back.  “Lift your left arm and gently push Yui forward.  Yui, bend your knees to your chest, balling yourself up, and spin around Galdous’ waist.”

As Guinevere spun around Neill’s waist, she remembered a mistake in her recent classroom experiment calculations, which meant that the student satellite they had launched yesterday was going to miss its target.

She closed her eyes and focused on correcting her mistake.

If she could work out the logic in the next few seconds, she just had time to send the new algorithm to the Moon for automatic coding, then routed to the satellite for reprogramming.

Later, while Galdous and Yui watched their evening dance instruction video, a student satellite performed a series of maneuvers in space that oddly resembled the steps in the instructional video.

Only Guinevere knew what was going on, silently laughing to herself as she explained to her fellow students recording the satellite’s path that she had invented a new method of optimising a satellite’s stress test by putting strong centripetal forces into effect that pushed the physical limits of the satellite, including triaxial shear test methods employing all six degrees of freedom at once.

Lee Colline managed the lives of everyone on the space station.

He paid attention to all communication between the station and bases throughout the solar system.  A pattern matching program alerted him to the accidental conjoining of Guinevere’s dance instructions and satellite reprogramming.

Lee ordered a review of future upgrades to all persons working and/or living on the station.

Although Guinevere’s “accident” had caused no harm and, in fact, may have led to a new discovery, he had to make sure that the next accident didn’t adversely affect the station.

The immediate application of basic science to practical living had long bothered Lee, who thought that some amount of peer review should separate the two after the Great Cataclysm had demonstrated the fallacy of shortterm economic subsystem profits over the longterm needs of the whole ecosystem.

Who, though, understood that socioeconomic systems rarely used peer review as a safety measure the way that scientists had long agreed peer review was necessary for protection against false claims and inaccurate conclusions?

He mentally wrote an emergency measure that would be reviewed by the Committee for implementation across the Solar System Space Station Network: “All student experiments must align their policies with the Post-Great Cataclysm Procedures for Protection Against Instant Gratification.”

See fungi lunge at lungs in the fun guy!

When I was a kid in public school, competing with my peers for getting anointed by the class sage (i.e., the teacher), I discussed “grownup” issues with my friends.

Politics, business, healthcare, family finances, etc.

Yet, discussing is not the same as knowing, just like when I and a fellow Boy Scout, in our midteens, taught archery for a Cub Scout day camp one summer.

Wed overheard two Cub Scouts and a pre-Cub Scout (what they call Tiger Cub Scouts now) talk about a “birds and bees” discussion between parents and an older sibling of one of the Scouts.

They were so thrilled to use grownup words that few of them had heard before to describe sexual contact but had no idea what they meant.

As archery instructor, I chose to steer the boys’ conversation to the use of a bow and arrow, a practical conversation with immediate results.

They were too young to understand the words they used, except that the words had importance amongst their more knowledgeable siblings and must mean something.

Almost 40 years later, I ask myself when is a word or idea relegated (and regulated) to the “age appropriate” standard?

In the news lately have been revelations about sexual predators in the ranks of Boy Scout leaders.

I consider myself fortunate by comparison.

Our Cub/Boy/Explorer Scout leaders made any references to sexual activity off-limits.

To be sure, some Scouts would ask each other questions about girlfriends as they got older but there was never, for lack of a better word, any impropriety between leader and youth during my Scouting days, which included local (weekend campouts), regional (Boy Scout camp) and [inter]national (Jamboree) events.

In fact, my fellow camper at the National Scout Jamboree in 1977 was Robert Lincoln, a General Sessions Court Judge w/ Juvenile Court Jurisdiction, who cared for special needs children even when we were Boy Scouts, helping in the summer during the week devoted to special needs children at Camp Davy Crockett.

When I look around at the personalities of our seven billion members of our species, I know that no single form of upbringing is perfect for every personality.

Our genes have an influence upon us that become more and more apparent as DNA genome analysis becomes cheaper and more readily available, making us aware of our foetus’ future even decades later, let alone at birth.

Right now and up to the 6th of November, I’m going to keep hearing about appeals to get my vote for political candidates who make promises that we all know they can’t keep, but they influence my thought patterns with their empty promises, anyway, as I encounter mass media in daily activity, where political adverts, op-ed analysis columns and news stories are promoted.

Based on our genes, our upbringing and our subsequent, slightly-changing personalities as we get older, who are the “grownups” in the room during the rest of this election season or perennially, for that matter?

Who amongst us is wiser than the fungi growing on the dead tree limb outside the window in the chilly autumn air this morning?

Do we have enough information about adults in their socioeconomic roles to say that, like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” we can look at their genes and determine how to assign newborns to training programs based solely on their DNA profiles?

Would I have known 25 years ago whether an adult person today would find this story about stadium-sized religious worship or this opinion about public “get out the vote” behaviour more interesting?

What about identifying sexual predators at birth?  If we can accomplish that, and keep them away from healthy activities like Scouting, how do we make them viable members of society the rest of their lives, knowing their propensity for unacceptable/antisocial behaviour?  What if parents were told with 99.999% accuracy that their child would be a psychopath or sociopath causing irreparable damage to the society they know and love?  What decisions are they allowed to make then?

I’ll carry this thought to the next subject currently in the news: if government mandated abortion purely for socioeconomic purposes, would a person’s life finally only have a socioeconomic value that is quantified, bought and sold from conception?

Doctor: “I’m sorry, future parents, but we’ve already exceeded our limit of the socioeconomic quota for your subculture and its propensity for a specific religious preference.  We have ordered a mandatory abortion for your foetus, effective immediately.  Guards, take them away.  Nurse, please place a sterilisation order for the couple to prevent any ‘unplanned’ pregnancies by them off the grid.”

Nurse: “Yes, doctor.  Like our global economic leader proudly proclaims…”

Together: “‘We control the balance of power from conception to death by preserving the well-maintained path of our officially-designated pursuit of happiness.‘”

“The laser’s red glare/The bombs bursting in air…”

In this post-nationalist, one-global-economy world, we still talk about the brand effects of nations.

We expect that powerful lasers will protect our ships and our borders, slicing bullets in half and cutting planes/drones/UAVs to pieces.

“Look out for the hazardous debris falling from the sky!” cried Chicken Little presciently, paraphrasing.

Speaking of borders, our crackpot scheming pseudoscientists devised a method to protect borders from tunnels — causing pinpoint earthquakes that unsettle the ground several hundred metres in any direction, shifting the soil around reinforced smuggling tunnels, hopefully collapsing them without knowing they’re there.

Are we ever in as much danger as we hear security companies try to sell us that we are?

What is the percentage chance that your home will be broken into?

Have you or anyone you know ever been robbed or mugged?

Has anything been stolen from you?

Have you stolen anything (including office material and work hours from your employer)?

As we create the next generation of our species, we take these questions into consideration.

Can we genetically encompass a moral compass?

What about a lack of fear of others?

It’s easy to create a new species of spider which has no moral compass.

Like we’ve discussed, “eat and/or be eaten” rules Earth, a moral compass unnecessary.

How much of a civil society do we need when our DNA is significantly modified to handle new offworld environments?

How does one carve a niche when one’s genetic code designates one’s predilected destiny?

How much education can we cram into our genes?

What is the ideal citizen in 2037, 25 years from now, not far from an imaginary moment in Unix history?

Adaptable, of course.

What else…?

Who is Felicia Day and why have I never heard of her before today?

Subjects and Objects

In domestic news lately, political candidates have, in the course of speaking, in the cause of getting elected, voiced personal opinions about rape.

Most of the time, men rape women.

Some of the time, women rape men.

But, for the sake of this blog entry, let us consider only the first case.

I have a personal stake in this discussion.

Quite possibly, I exist because my grandmother was raped by my biological grandfather.

Certainly, family lore says that my biological grandfather abused both my grandmother and my father before he abandoned them (or was forced to leave them).

Every day on this planet, without a doubt, a man forces himself upon a woman for sexual pleasure.

He may pay for the privilege or take his pleasure for free.

Men, for the most part, are physically stronger than women and rarely sexually engage a woman stronger than them.

I agree that rape is a terrible injustice for the raped as well as for the institute of marriage and against the joys of consensual sex.

But, in the eyes of an omniscient being (or Being), am I a gift of/to God because of rape?

Am I, instead, merely the lucky offspring of a man who was the unfortunate result of a rape?

I do not exist in the public eye as a celebrity who feels driven to share opinions constantly or an expert authority who must answer questions about the validity of abortion.

However, I have an opinion about myself.

I like me, for the most part.

I have enjoyed my life.

I can understand my father wanted nothing to do with his father and all but forbid me to contact his father’s family until after my father was dead and buried, especially if he was the result of a rape and subsequently abused physically/mentally.

It’s tough for me to believe my grandmother could have aborted my father if she was raped.

Being a staunch member of the main (Central) Baptist Church in her community, she probably never considered abortion, but I have no way of knowing her thoughts/opinions on the matter, other than through her general opinions/actions in relation to her Christian faith.

I only know I exist.

I like existing.

I suppose most of us do.

Those who were aborted or will be aborted never get to know if they do or do not like existing.

Those who choose abortion have made and make that decision for their offspring.

A mighty BIG decision I never have to make.

I exist.

I hope you like existing.

If you don’t like existing, I can understand why you wouldn’t want the fertilised egg in your womb to exist.

If you do like existing, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want the fertilised egg in your womb to exist.

We exist and choose to accept the legal/moral/social/religious issues surrounding our decisions.

To say one wants the freedom to abort a fetus is as grave a desire as there is in this world, more important than any words that can be assembled together in one blog entry.

I can’t change the circumstances of my father’s conception but I’m just glad my grandmother didn’t abort my father, no matter whether she was raped or abused before/during/after sexual intercourse.

The Feeling is Mutual

Dust and skin oil collect in the rounded corners of the touchpad.

Tiredness fights for the right to take this body to bed and slumberland.

One brief moment, where a sole statistic, the number of teen/young adult suicides, helps decide an election.

A prime minister clicks her heels and ends up sprawled in front of the Gandhi memorial — she’s not in Kansas, that’s certain — why does she wear high(er) heels to walk on grass?

A tree faces the wind without a face.

How does schooling teach teamwork rather than individual test score achievement?

A nephew has a private discussion with a Supreme Court Associate Justice (Scalia), (con)firming his decision to pursue a law(ful) career, setting political beliefs/opinions aside.

Sleep is a stronger attraction than sighting/siting/citing the future.

The next chapter races dreams for a place in this blog…