Educational Necessities in the Brave New World

The three laws of robotics:

1.  A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2.  A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Isaac Asimov, "Runaround"  (1942)

I know a few people who have interesting theories why American cities and society are in a state of decay, evincing a huge disparity of rich and poor.    Some of these technocratic people believe that uneducated masses are not able to compete in an increasingly mathematically meritocratic environment.  They believe that because these non-pocket protector dullards are not educated in math, science, engineering or physical science, they will fail, they will be subject to the whims of other societies with more technically adept citizens who can win the coming math-a-thon.

There is a superficial element of truth in this premise.   But this is only a temporary transitional phase in the journey of mankind. 

The world of new technology, they say, favors those scientifically trained; the people who lack that education will become increasingly unemployable.  But that only forebodes a perhaps even more ambivalent human dénouement.

Those who argue that the uneducated will be obliged to inhabit an unteremenschen sector of the economy, doomed to flip burgers or wait tables fail to recognize that even some classes of those educated in science and technology can also easily be  made unemployable and probably and inevitably will involuntarily be cast among their more less accomplished brethren.

This class of putative elites will be replaced by artificially intelligent machines that are exponentially increasing their abilities to learn, to work--to think.   These machines are being engineered to make human technologic endeavor obsolete.  They will be inevitably more competent than humans in calculations, engineering, equations, and any process that requires any form of mathematical skill.  The skills will go beyond mathematics.   In some respects they already do.

These machines are our children, our progeny, our descendents.  No human can compete with a machine that does not die, that does not fail, that has no biologic or moving parts--a machine that can endure infinitely through self-maintenance, artificially obtained intelligence and self-replication.  The precursors to these machines are here already although still somewhat primitive in form.  The machines that answer the phone and ask us questions, that asks us to make choices, the robots that assemble cars, and a plethora of devices that have already replaced humans on the assembly line, in the bank, in the hospital and elsewhere.  

They are more and more ubiquitous every day. 

Anyone over 50 can remember what it was like before computers.  Statements about science and technology requirements for human employment made today will have no bearing perhaps as early as ten or fifteen years from now.  Admittedly, one would need that knowledge to get a job today, but we are not convinced that it will do any good as an exponential explosion of computing and robotic power will make the average human mathematician or engineer as unnecessary as a buggy whip.  Already machines make medical diagnoses, beat humans at chess, and even play "Jeopardy" better than humans. Playing Jeopardy requires subtle understanding of plays on words, social nuance, and irony.   While it is true that scientifically trained humans created these machines, these benevolent Frankensteins will ultimately take over all human scientific endeavor.  Cyborgs will be programmed with the total sum of human knowledge; humans may remain their creators, but it is not certain they will remain their masters.

Humanities, philosophy, music and art will be what distinguish human from machine and even then we are not so certain.  The law will protect us (see Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics, above) and remain even more relevant than ever before.  But probably not in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Will machines compose symphonies? Pour their emotions out on great works of art?  Feel pain? Be spiritual?  Or will that be left to humans?

Emotions and feelings are not something in which machines are conversant.

Constitution 2.0

"The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Julius Caesar (I,ii,140-141)

 

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Thomas Jefferson (The Declaration of Independence)

 

          The Constitution of the United States has been amended 27 times, the last of which, proposed in 1789, was not ratified until 1992.  The amendment dealt with congress being unable to raise its own pay until an election had intervened.  Many Americans are familiar with some of the other amendments, limitation of Presidential terms to two, prohibition, repeal of prohibition, universal suffrage, and of course, the first ten amendments (the bill of rights).

 

          Originalists like Antonin Scalia believe that the interpretation of the document should remain as though we all were living in the 18th century, when citizens and a militia used muskets with flintlocks, fighting savage Indians.

 

          Amending the constitution is a difficult and lengthy process.  It must first be passed by the Senate and the House and then be ratified by the states, taking years. Some amendments just die, not having been ratified, like the Equal Rights amendment.

 

          The document serving us admirably throughout our history is in need of some changes.  The intense debate over the second amendment and whether it is directed towards a militia or an individual’s right to bear arms has been a continuing subject for constitutional scholars and advocates for either side of the issue.

 

          In addition, the rules of the U.S. Senate need revision.  We are the only democracy in the world where the majority does not rule.  In the old days, the filibuster had actually to be performed to avoid a vote.  Now, only the threat of a filibuster prevents legislation from reaching the floor for a vote.  And to make matters worse, there need be 60 votes out of 100 to pass important legislation.   Two senators from a state representing 500,000 people have the same clout as two senators from a state with 35,000,000 people.

 

          Tracing the origin of our federal system is a history replete with slave and free states being admitted to the Union under a system of compromise and discord.  Now, we can no longer afford this absurd debate.  If Puerto Rico, for example, chooses to be admitted as the 51st state, there will be no issue whether its people, who are already US citizens, will be slave or free or count as 3/5ths of a person for representational purposes.

 

          The point of the matter is that a good bit of the constitution is anachronistic..  Except that we are laboring mightily to work our government under its weight.

         

          It needs a rewrite.  

 

          Most of it is still awfully good and should be included in the 2.0 version.  And the rewrite should include the bill of rights.  The second amendment should be reinterpreted or re written so the blockheads at the NRA and the Supreme Court can understand it.

 

 

          Unfortunately, powerful lobbyists govern and intimidate Senators from the job they must do--pass legislation for the sake of all Americans--not for the sake of the NRA, which for the most part, represents gun manufacturers.   Why, for the sake of goodness, need there be 300 million guns in circulation, many of them assault type military rifles designed for maximum killing of other humans?  A good plan would be for the government to buy back guns, as the Australians did, who saw an 90% drop in gun violence soon after the buyback.

 

          The U.S. Senate, it seems , is populated by  set of pusillanimous cowards, who care more about being re-elected than doing what is the greater good.

         

          How, then can we possibly rewrite the constitution? 

 

          Retaining a bicameral legislature would not be harmful to this country.  There could still be an upper and lower chamber, but the workings of them need to be governed by a majority vote, not a system designed to ensure gridlock.  In this past election, for example, gerrymandered districts allowed representatives who were not elected by a majority of the popular vote to control the House of Representatives.

 

          This is tantamount to disenfranchisement of voters who, in a recent poll, stated by 90% that they were in favor of background checks for gun buyers.

 

          We need to have the courage to tell our representatives what we really want, and not allow our voices to be submerged by the slick machinery of those who would subvert our liberty for their own financial gain disguised by concern for the ability of Americans who think they need rapid fire weapons to protect themselves.

 

          When we lose our voice and our representatives do not represent us, it is our duty to change them, to speak out, to make our wishes known.   Our senators and congressmen are supposed to be working for us, but the evidence is that they are not.

 

          Some alteration is in order.

 

 

 

 

The State of the Union 2013

President Obama has given a rhetorically flourished SOU address, setting forth much of his legislative agenda for the next year, a year in which he has been reelected under a considerable mandate, both in electoral and popular votes.  His message included an appeal for education and tax reform, asking the Congress to create a high tech infrastructure, a report on the troops coming home soon, an appeal to cut expenditures, and for smarter Medicare and even gun control.  Many ideas were not new; but still quite necessarily overdue.  John Boehner sat stone faced next to an animated Joe Biden, Boehner deciding when and when not to applaud.  It was a sort of surreal experience. 

Time was when the President sent his State of the Union message to the Congress in written form, the live delivery of which did not begin until Woodrow Wilson, and really not annually until FDR began a tradition of a speech to both houses of Congress.

Republicans, through some highly creative gerrymandering, have retained control of the House of Representatives, albeit with somewhat less puissance than in the last congress.  They are now scrambling to reinvent themselves to a demographically metamorphosized electorate consisting of more young, Latino and African-American voters who do not buy Republican theories of less government, less health care, more military spending and low taxes on  super wealthy "job creators," many of whom collect dividends and do nothing in particular to create anything except an unusual amount of bloviation.   That left of center demographic grew dramatically between 2008 and 2012.  Even people like Newt Gingrich applauded the competence of the democratic campaign for its efficiency and delivery of its message.

Following the President's speech, a visibly nervous, hyperactive and perspiring Marco Rubio pleaded for an agenda that sounded like a retread of Mitt Romney's campaign stump speeches.   Aggressively accusing the President of trying to wreck Social Security, the National defense and pleading the standard rightist arguments for less government, he excoriated a lack of free choice under Obamacare,  unfettered support for the second amendment, and various other shopworn Republican trickle-down bromides. Leaning over for a drink of water as his rapid fire speech patterns betrayed a bit of stage fright, this being his first nationally televised appearance, he seemed, as a CBS commentator said,  looked like a light fixture had fallen on his head.

In all fairness to young Rubio, who is only 41, and anointed on the cover of Time Magazine as the "Republican Savior" on its most recent cover, he was alone in a room and competing with the President who received a standing ovation every other sentence, and spoke for an hour. Rubio's appeal to prayer and to God is becoming less and less believable to voters as America increasingly secularizes.

Marco Rubio, nevertheless, seemingly tone-deaf delivered a message that had been repudiated by the electorate just two months ago.

If Rubio is counting on the electorate to move back to the right in 2016, he should do some real hard thinking about that prospect.  Telling the story of his humble origins only goes so far.

One could reasonably extrapolate that in another 4 years, the electorate will be even less receptive to Rubio's message than it was to Mitt Romney's this time around.  

The idea that America is polarized is true, but one side of the polarity growing, whilst the other is shrinking.  So if Republicans want to win another election they will have to continue to suppress voter rights, keep brainy immigrants out, or send out a different message. Protecting special interests and wealthy donors cannot be part of that message.  All of the Super PAC candidates lost despite the efforts of Carl Rove, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and others of their ilk.

If you watch a rerun of the SOU speech please note that John Boehner did not applaud when the President asked for a law to make it easier for people to vote; he was fearful of not keeping his tea party minions as large a plurality.

The Deadwood Culture in America

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

Wayne LaPierre, CEO National Rifle Association

There have been many articles written this week about renewed efforts to control firearms among the people.  Spurred on by public horror of the Sandy Hook elementary being turned into an abattoir by an enraged twenty year old, the U.S. Congress is possibly springing to action in time to lock the barn doors, once again, too late.  Such incompetence is entirely reminiscent of a bad play; we squirm in our proverbial seats until the dreadful last act has been agonizingly concluded.   Will the fiscal cliff be averted?  Will congress pass tax reform?  Will assault weapons be banned or controlled?

Will we survive their ineptitude?

The United States is, in many ways, the victim of its own constitution.  A document written in the 18th century the second amendment of which, ratified in 1791, has been subject to interpretation involving the placement of a comma is just one ludicrous example of its ossification.  That second amendment, writ large in the time when people carried muzzle loaded muskets, is simply an invitation for boneheaded senators and even more dimwitted congressmen to hawk (no pun intended) their hunting skills and present advertisements of them shooting in some forest in order to impress their gun-toting constituents, who fear that "big government" will revoke their license to shoot whatever or whomever they please.  And, of course, the American notion that our freedom will somehow disappear to tyrants should there be some more legislation restricting gun availability,  this logic stemming from a mentality of frontier justice that is no longer relevant.

 In this case, innocent, tender aged schoolgirls and schoolboys whose misfortune is now engraved in the tears of a generation of parents and grandparents, as well as anyone in America whose sensitivity quotient rises above that of a polar bear.  The victims childish images stare out balefully from our televisions in a horrifying reminder that they now inhabit the crypt, the victims of Scalia-like logic who is probably right now murmuring, "get over it," as he did when interviewed about throwing the election of 2000 to George W. Bush.

 

United States Constitution

Amendment II

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Interpretation of this amendment has been the subject of rigorous debate among constitutional scholars, the United States Supreme Court and others.

Does the amendment mean that the militia shall bear arms or that the people shall bear arms individually?   Do individuals really stand a chance against an army?  Do homicidal lunatics who die in a shootout render sufficient testimony to the folly of such privilege?  It seems that they always die in the end, after a shoot out with the cops or by their own hand, but only after visiting their terror upon innocents.  How then, are we safer, because a madman has access to a Bushmaster military weapon?

Perhaps the debate is no longer relevant, since the second amendment was written at a time when slaves were commonplace, women could not vote, and weapons were far more primitive and could not, by hair trigger, slaughter 30 children and their teachers in a matter of seconds. Adam and Mrs. Lanza's legacy should be not a "prepper"(we have to defend ourselves because our government will not) mentality, but laws that will reduce the incidences of this type of grotesquerie.  These events can never be eliminated completely, but they certainly can be reduced by appropriate legislation and if a troglodyte Supreme Court does not declare that legislation unconstitutional.  Justice Scalia, an avid hunter and Dick Cheney amigo, hunts ducks.  Using an assault weapon designed to kill humans has no place in a modern civil society.

Arguments that the teachers should be armed and that everyone should tote a weapon ring hallow; the converse to that argument being that we are less free to speak because we fear that someone may easily shoot us for expressing our opinion that may not coincide with theirs.

The gun enthusiasts and the prayer in the schools promulgators share the same religious zeal and inhabit the same universe.  How would Jesus feel about killing innocent children with a rapid fire Bushmaster?

Thus fall Petreaus

And it shall come to pass in the end of the year of two thousand and twelve, that a great general shall have offendenth Congressman Eric Cantor for having committed the mortal sin of adultery;

It shall also come to pass that the establishment journalists shall scream and shout with rage against such heinous and lascivious sin.

And that the great general shall have previously manifested a grand, illustrious and admirable career.

That the establishment journalists shall have shown innumerable pictures of the evil sirens who lavished the great general with their favors, as they paraded to and from their automobiles;

And the media shall have basked in its glory of exposing such Satanism.

And the sirens shall have waged an email and publicity battle over the great general and with each the other.

And the lords of CNN, MSNBC, CBS and the other networks shall have abided in the comfort of grand viewership in the post election sinking ratings aftermath of the election for the Lord President, who he himself abideth no evil;

And the political establishment shall have decried the evil the general manifested for his most unsavory, licentious, unwholesome behavior;

And the CIA shall be cleansed of its evil leadership that tolerated flying drones that killeth from on high.

For the great general, leader an agency of spies, criminals and spooks shall not any longer be a paradigm for such sterling personages that followed his countenance;

For he shall not be a leader any longer sayeth the Lord President, who always abideth within the boundaries of his carefully defined and propitious nature lest he betray his trust as Lord President and shall never be casteth as an angry risk-taking black man;

And the Lord President shall accepth the resignation of the great spy leader, instead of rejecting in the national interest the great talented spy leader's honorable resignation.

And the great spy leader shall repent of his sin by being cast into exile;

So that the Lord President may keepeth the fires of the family values hearth burning;

lest he be judged as understanding such adulterous and unbecoming pleasures of the flesh.

And by accepting the great general and spy leader's manly flaws.

\

American "Exceptionalism" in the 21st Century

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind..."

Hosea 8:7

Houses on the Jersey shore torn to shreds like matchbooks.  Homes burned to the ground in the Rockaways.  Lower Manhattan flooded, subway tunnels awash, the largest public transport facility on Earth shut down because of weather, millions of people in the nation's most populated corridor still without electricity in late autumn cold, schools with no power, electricity wires strung on poles snagged by falling trees, the list can go on ad nauseum.

Politically expedient deniers of the almost universal scientific opinion about global warming have their work cut out for them.  They are faced with what Andrew Cuomo says, "a once in a generation storm every two years." 

Weather patterns are changing.

Building codes that allowed frame construction almost everywhere on the Atlantic seaboard are suddenly and unequivocally now subject to hasty revision. No justification possibly exists for such malfeasance.   Hurricane Sandy was not, by any stretch of the wildest naysayer's imagination, unforeseeable.  Floodgates have protected the low-lying areas of Europe for many years.

If people insist on living near the frequently violent sea, they should be prepared for its fury.  Global warming is showing the consequences of warmer seas--more violent storms and freakier weather patterns--all to the detriment of our feckless infrastructure, sown by generations of myopic politicians who, in all fairness, clearly did not see what was in store for stricken communities from DC to Massachusetts.

Now the wake up call has come.  In Florida, there are building codes that have arisen since Hurricane Andrew have strengthened, however, FPL still thinks that burying power lines is economically not feasible; a few years ago, they replaced some of the traditional wooden poles in my neighborhood with higher concrete ones.  The trees still overhang the lines anyway.

The early Republican debates were a cacophony of voices denying climate change; Mitt Romney still has nothing to say about it, his perfidious calculative demeanor evident. And frankly, the President has not done enough to awaken the public, which mostly cares now about the economy.  

The tea partiers and fundamentalists are now calculating what a woman should do with her body and if the candidates are sufficiently religious to hasten the erosion of the constitutional wall of separation between church and state,  instead of preparing for national disasters like Hurricane Sandy.

Deniers of man-made climate change include almost the entire Republican Party, and those who think that government serves no useful purpose except starting wars, nurturing the military industrial complex and transforming primitive Islamists into Jeffersonian democrats. 

Florida continues to set a new low bar for election shenanigans.

The State Legislature, in concocting an indecipherable ballot has struck another new level of loathsomeness.  It has composed ballot initiatives, among which is one that is labeled "Religious Freedom."  It is fraudulently conceived and evilly promulgated.  What it really represents is an attempt to interject religion in the educational system by providing state funding to religious schools, voucherized money that could be used instead to improve public education rather than defunding it.  These are the same people who are apostles of the same ilk of creationists in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas who would teach creationism to our children.  We are living a 21st century nightmarish re-run of Inherit the Wind.

The Presidential Campaign grinds to a lowly end.

There was seemingly no end to the negative commercials, the meaningless dialog, the emails during which both parties attempt convincing voters that the other side is going to ruin the country, the economy, the world itself.

The campaigns have been financed by copious amounts of super PAC cash coming from special interest groups airing offensive announcements denouncing each other's candidates, adding to a witch's brew of obfuscation, misinformation and distortion. 

The debates, a glibness and disappointing appearance contest, droned on and on, giving the electorate only a superficial sample of what  qualities a leader really requires.  Nothing in the end was revealed but a continual and seemingly unending parade of talking points. The debates did not tell us who would be a good President or a bad President. Who would shine in a moment of crisis?  Who is a deep thinker? A problem solver?  A person who could break the legislative gridlock? A person with a definite agenda?  None of this was revealed in the debates, even if it were fact.

A two-year, $2.5 billion election cycle  slows down the efficiency of government and places politics above the national interest.  Our Federal system is severely broken.  The negativity of the past two years demeans those who do win and expands the polarized divide.  It diminishes the governing ability of the winner, who inevitably suffers diminution by the misinformation saturating the airwaves.  The election campaigns should last 6 months beginning to end; the Electoral College should be abolished.  There should be public financing of the campaigns and a constitutional amendment shutting down of all the extra money that has distorted the process beyond all recognition.

Mythology in 2012 as a Political Force

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."
Richard Dawkins

Forty six percent of the American voters believe that religion is the litmus test for political leadership.  Many of them believe that Mary ascended to heaven on a white cloud and that Mohammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse. Ultra-Orthodox Jews pray to God morning, noon and night, and relegate their women to wearing wigs and bandanas.   They seem inhabit in America, a Saudi Arabian, burka-wearing world of subjugation, including the bearing of a child a year. Some believe that if people do not accept Jesus as a savior they are condemned to burn in hell in perpetuity.  They discount the beliefs of others and the Roman Catholic Church has perpetuated the infallibility of church dogma for centuries, and used its dogma as a basis for burning people at the stake, racking heretics, refusing to respect the rights of women and generally promulgating a world view that is irreconcilable with notions of modern science as well as its own dogma by accumulating great wealth, denying basic human sexuality and creating an atmosphere often tolerant of sexual predators.

In addition, religious fundamentalists think that men walked the earth with dinosaurs; the bible is the literal word of God, and that those that do not respect its edicts will not be rewarded with heavenly afterlives. “My ancestor was not a monkey,” said one recent Republican candidate for the Presidency.

There are people who live in my neighborhood who actually believe that mutilating the foreskins of young males is a civilized practice, conducting religious services to celebrate the event.  This practice, now the subject of medical debate, is a throwback to a primitive tribal ritual that binds the male child to its Judaic tribe.  The practice was instituted at a time when men believed the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth.  According to the Old Testament, Jacob died 2255 years after the creation of Adam.  Jewish scholars first translated the Torah into Greek in the 3^rd Century BCE. They were polytheists, tolerating local gods as well as their own. When monotheism came along, automatically discounting other’s gods, it sowed the seeds of intolerance that continued down through the holocaust, ultimately smiting its originators, the Jews.  

Dating the world as a few thousand years old cannot, through the stretch of the wildest imagination, be reconciled with modern science.

Many of the fanatical Jewish zealots claim that Biblical injunctions prevent them from compromising their settlements with Muslims on the West Bank of the Jordan River.  Muslims also claim that the land was given to them by God.   The outcome of two distinct groups claiming deified backing cannot, by definition, be reconciled.   Religion evolved as an adjunct to tribes being successful against competing tribes, mostly in combat.

The origins of Jews and the Exodus from Egypt have never been confirmed by any scientific, archeological, paleontological or genetic evidence.  To the contrary, geneticists and primate paleontologists are now debating the origins of homo sapiens, and the general consensus is now that humans emerged from Africa some 50-60,000 years ago.  Moreover, a story recently appeared in the New York Times about the debate among scientists and paleoanthropologists as to the origins of Homo sapiens, that modern humans arose in Africa 200,000 years ago and that all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe.  New worlds of knowledge concerning human existence are emerging almost daily.  Most of this knowledge is coming from fossil evidence, DNA evidence, the decoding of the human genome, and radioactive carbon dating, which incidentally, states the world, is 4-5 billion years old, not 5,000.

What it does not come from is some bronze age tract by which US politicians seem to be bound to hypocritically extol, in the hopes of garnering votes from an ignorant electorate.

Mythology still rules our lives and our politics and it is 2012.