Tag: Rebecca Solnit

Walking After Midnight

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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When I was a teenager, I wanted to go hang out in the pool hall like the “bad boys” did. I wanted to learn to shoot pool – and I also wanted to just be in that kind of space – but it was made pretty clear that girls weren’t allowed.

I didn’t want to hang out in the pool hall because I was sexually attracted to bad boys. I wasn’t. It wasn’t sex I was after; it was the freedom to do something like hanging out and shooting pool.

(Learning some years later that my father was something of a pool shark and could have taught me to play well made this fantasy more poignant. I could have worked my way through school shooting pool instead of making pizzas and loading trucks.)

In the chapter “Walking After Midnight” in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust,  she quotes Sylvia Plath writing in her journal at 19:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, synonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

That sums up exactly how I felt. While I read Plath back in the day, I don’t remember stumbling across this observation or realizing that she, too, understood this need, but I suspect this explains some of the tragedy of her life.

We didn’t want a romance with the likes of Jack Kerouac. We wanted to have adventures like he had. Of course, those adventures were all like the boys’ clubs in the funnies – “no girls allowed,” except, of course, as sex objects. Continue reading “Walking After Midnight”…

Walking and “AI”

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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These days my morning book is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. It’s a particularly appropriate book for me, since I do a lot of walking.

My neighbors frequently comment on my walking, though most of what I do is walk around the neighborhood or to some stores. It’s not exciting most of the time, though I do see little things in people’s yards – there’s someone on Emerald making miniature houses and putting them at the edge of their yard. They even have addresses.

My walking is a combination of exercise and mind-clearing and errand-running, but it is an important part of my life. There are days when getting my steps in is my biggest accomplishment.

Walking and reading about walking demonstrate one of the biggest flaws in the large language models and other machine learning software that’s being marketed as “AI”: it can’t walk. All it “knows” about walking comes from ingesting books like Solnit’s, which means it can probably associate walking with pilgrimages and Wordsworth and desert hikes.

But it has no idea what any of that actually means. I can read about Solnit joining a pilgrimage in northern New Mexico and think about that region – which I’ve visited – and what it feels like if you don’t have the right shoes for a hike.

And I can also follow her sidetrack about the man who has painted the stations of the cross on his old Cadilac and go off on a tangent in my mind about low riders and guys with well-kept old cars who play booming music and the boys I went to high school with who souped up ‘57 Chevys and cruised around the drive-in.

In one section discussing promenades in Mexico and other Spanish-influenced places, she connects the walking version with car cruising, because walking begats other things, even if people like me do a lot of walking because we are so damn tired of car culture.

“AI” gets none of that, because it can’t walk and it can’t smell and it can’t see and it can’t hear and it can’t touch and actually it can’t even read; it just sorts words and images.

It may be useful for some things – though not enough things to be worth all the money being thrown at it – but it is never going to be an intelligence. Continue reading “Walking and “AI””…

Stumbling Toward a Path Forward

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I just saw an email with the subject line “Gutting the Student Loan Program” and realized that I’m tired of seeing reports about another outrageous thing done by the grifter’s regime that comes with that breathless feeling of “do you believe they’re doing this?”

Of course I believe they’re doing this. They’re out to destroy everything good about our government. They’re gutting everything you ever thought was worth having, not to mention things you didn’t realize existed or realize you needed.

None of the attacks surprise me anymore and I don’t need breathless reports about the latest one. (I think this email is about firing people at the Department of Education, which the Supreme Court just permitted by overturning a stay even though it’s pretty clear that the underlying litigation should be successful.)

Much more useful is what the people at Unbreaking are doing, which is detailed reporting about the ways in which the regime is breaking the government.  Looking thoroughly at each bit of destruction is much more useful than spinning outrage, especially since it can provide a way to fight back.

We’re constantly faced with “which one of these things is worse” calls every time an issue comes up. But they’re all bad.

Right now I tend to think the fact that the government employs people they claim are law enforcement agents and lets them go out with their faces covered (not for health reasons) and without badges to kidnap people off the street, coupled with the building of concentration camps and the mocking of the people they lock up in them, is the worst thing that’s going on.

But the overall destruction of good government programs – from civil rights protections to the National Weather Service – is probably just as important, if not as immediately terrifying.

We do need to know about all the different things being done, but pretending to be outraged about the latest one as if we didn’t see it coming is driving me crazy. Continue reading “Stumbling Toward a Path Forward”…

A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The latest scandal to hit the science fiction community is the revelation that the people putting on WorldCon in Seattle are using ChatGPT to vet proposed panelists. Given that a large number of people who want to be on panels are published authors who are part of the class actions against the companies making these over-hyped LLM products, the amount of outrage was completely predictable.

A number of us also pointed out that the information produced by these programs is very often wrong, since they make things up because they are basically word prediction devices. As a person who is not famous and who has a common Anglo name, I shudder to think what so-called “AI” would produce about me.

But the biggest problem I see with “AI” – outside of the environmental costs, the error rate, and the use of materials without permission to create it – is that they keep trying to sell it to do things it doesn’t do well, instead of keeping it for the few things it actually can do. Of course, there’s not a lot of money to be made from those few things, especially when you factor in the costs.

We’re at the point in tech where new things are not going to change the product that much, no matter what the hype says. Exponential growth cannot last forever. If you don’t believe me, look up the grains of rice on a chessboard story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways people are trying to use “AI” or even older forms of tech to get rid of workers and the more I think about it, the more disastrous it looks.

We don’t need more tech doing stuff; we need more people doing stuff.

It’s not just “AI”. Just try to call your bank or your doctor, or, god help us all, Social Security or the IRS (now made worse by the Dodgy Minions). When we have issues, we need people – real people, who understand what we’re calling about and can solve our problems.

The “chat” feature on a website doesn’t cut it and an “AI” enabled chat feature is probably worse in that it might well make up an answer instead of just not knowing what to do.

I’ve been thinking of health care in particular. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how LLMs can read radiology films better than radiologists, in that they don’t get bored or distracted, so they can point to any things that look out of the ordinary in reference to the kind of films they were trained on.

But of course, what they’re really doing is flagging the problems for a radiologist to look at. They don’t replace the expert; they help them do their job. It’s probably useful, but it isn’t going to make radiology any cheaper, because you still need the person to look carefully at the films.

I don’t believe for a moment that LLMs will be better at diagnosing patients. Continue reading “A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again”…

Real Problems and the Stupid Coup

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I finished reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they’re doing clear to the rest of us.

But it left me with — once again — the understanding that we have real problems to address on this planet and instead we’re forced to deal with what Rebecca Solnit has taken to calling the “Stupid Coup,” a name that becomes more apt with each day.

In the last pages of the book, Yong talks about the problems posed by light pollution — which affects the senses of many insects, birds, and bats, not to mention human beings. But he also mentions such things as ships crossing the ocean affecting whales, the damage to the Great Coral Reef, and how such things create a cascade of damage.

About ten years ago, my partner and I backpacked in the Ventana Wilderness, in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest here in California. I tell many stories about that trip — how we waded the Carmel River 25 times (not an exaggeration), how bad the trail was in spots — but one of the real glories of it was that, with the exception of a airplane or two overhead, we didn’t hear any human noises for three days except the ones we made.

And we could see the stars (through the trees and clouds, at least) because we were surrounded by enough mountains and trees to block light from the nearby cities. One of those nights — the one where we collapsed into our sleeping bags, completely exhausted — we heard frogs and crickets for hours. Nothing else.

Do you know how rare that is?

I doubt that humans, who have only been living in this overlit and noisy state for about a hundred years – somewhat longer for noise – have adapted, even though we know what’s going on. You can be damn sure that the other creatures on the planet have not.

Fortunately, a whole lot of scientists have ideas on what to do about that for the benefit of both people and all the other creatures.

Unfortunately, what they recommend will not even get discussed these days because of the Stupid Coup. People who aren’t willing to consider the effects of air pollution on human beings (“drill, baby, drill”) are certainly not going to worry about light pollution reducing the insect population. Continue reading “Real Problems and the Stupid Coup”…

Some Thoughts on Education

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I went through 19 years of formal education, not counting the one-semester half-day of kindergarten I got – the price of hitting the age of five at the height of the post World War II baby boom.

That’s 12 years of public school, four years of college, and three years of law school.

The only part of that I remember fondly is college. I got my degree in Plan II, which was (and is) the liberal arts honors program at the University of Texas (of course I mean the one in Austin). I was not required to have a major, so I didn’t.

There were classes and teachers I didn’t like, but on the whole my undergraduate education was a wonderful experience of being exposed to things I hadn’t thought about before.

It was a welcome change from high school. It occurs to me that the essay I wrote for my application to Plan II was a very negative critique of my high school experience. For my senior thesis, I also wrote on education, having been influenced by the thinking of my most excellent political science professor, Elliot Zashin, about whom I have written before.

I got to thinking about all this because I read an essay Rebecca Solnit posted on Facebook about how she skipped most of high school. She took the GED at 15, headed off to community college, and then ended up at a four-year school where she at last found the kind of educational experience she was looking for.

It never occurred to me that I could do something like that.

Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Education”…