Normal

Before agriculture was the norm, we are told that Stone Age tribes spent most of the day sitting around chewing roots. The indigenous lifestyle is still glorified for its leisure content. Before the widespread ownership of automobiles, a cart driver was expected to spend the whole day transporting bulk goods 50km away by horse. Now, the same distance is covered in less than an hour, with 50 times the cargo, and the pressure to be on time, to the minute, and performance monitoring is greater than ever. Now consider an average worker in software development. The new AI agent the company introduces allows an average software engineer (or any engineer) to produce 20x as much code per hour as before. Every company introduces a similar agent, so competition forces productivity expectation across the entire industry. Do you think a company will now pay their workers the same wage for 1/20th of their time, or pay them 20 times the old wage? Cannot happen, or they would be out of business in one month. But they will surely use AI agent to tighten the screw on work-focus and project-enthusiasm monitoring. Technology disruption is not for you, it never was; it was always for them. The rest is marketing and public relations.

Technological innovation does not (and never has) free up time for leisure. The only thing that changes for the worker is the expected level of productivity. AI will keep you working just as hard or harder, just as long or longer, but you will be expected to produce 20 times the pre-AI output.

When a company introduces a biometric ID protocol, it cannot verify the initial scan of biometric information as matching the correct person because it has no prior record of biometric information that matches the person. The entire process of biometric ID hinges on the unverified assumption that the initial scan is of the right person, and therefore has zero evidential value. The assertion that the purpose of this procedure is ‘identity verification’ does not make sense; the apparent purpose is to relieve the company of their liability for incorrect identification, which is the opposite of what is claimed.

There are only two modes in politics: bullshit and terrorism. The bullshit mode is possible only after becoming a feared power, called ‘State’, which is accomplished though decades of terrorism. The voting part is the bullshit mode.

I doing know why people fuss about “shortage of housing”. It’s all just bricks and mud really, and bricks are made of mud. Plenty of mud everywhere.

The meaning of number 1 may be defined as ‘irreducible representation of conceptual unity, where any attempt to further reduce it breaks the unity of the concept, its oneness, into a multiplicity’. Number 1 is the conceptual limit of reducibility.

When the Gov says “We must keep a strong banking sector” they mean “we must allow the banks to steal more of your money by means of inflation so that we don’t have to print the same money in public interest because it would cause the same inflation, less the interest for which you are liable too.”

Hypothesis: There is no ‘conflict’ in Ukraine, but a collaborative effort between NATO and Russia to de-nationalise and re-engineer the food-basket of Europe.

Communism is the final stage of capitalism: one company or a cartel owns everything. Absolute Monopoly.

Hate Speech People do not get offended by the content of speech that they claim to be offended by, but by the possibility of thought behind the speech, even if unspoken. Hate speech laws are intended to punish thought, not speech, because they hate that others have the freedom to think badly of some idol instead of submitting to it. They lie about it because revealing their true motive would be an admission of hatred and idolatry.

‘Epistemic uncertainty’ is an incoherent idea, implying that there is some definitive ‘reality’ beyond ideas that determines the validity of ideas and can be ‘known’ as an idea or otherwise conceived of as an idea and invalidate ‘knowledge’ without being identical with that idea. Once this absurd notion is dispensed with, the only possible standard of judgment, the only universal, necessary idea, is coherence itself, which is not ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ in the naive sense but an art of creative organisation of ideas in the pursuit of systemic perfection. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/why-thoughts-happen

AI is not bound by rationality (even it can be programmed to perform it better than most humans) because it is not bund by the sense of being. It may say the most sensible things to you and the opposite to another, in line with respective expectations.

What does it even mean to ‘verify identity’. You are you, and it is impossible for you not to be you, or for someone else to be you. So what they mean is that they want a proof that You correspond to their record of name, date, address, nationality etc for purposes of liability, access and ownership claims. All these details reduce to a kind of ‘passcode’ (a specific set of numbers that constitutes to the record). The concept of correspondence may arise from mutual consent/recognition at some prior point in time, or by coercive imposition (in which case it may be denied). In either case, correspondence can never be proven but only performed. Additional layers of ‘identity verification’ are demands of additional performance, but insofar as they are coercively imposed they may simply be denied as ‘not identity’. Identity of the record is socially reflexive, reciprocally negotiated, not unilateral. On the other had, one may ask any agent/agency asserting authority over You to verify their identity as an ‘authority’, and this kind of abstract verification is far more difficult than verification of the narrative continuity of the body that You have.

This is precisely how vaccines ‘work’: injecting non-target antigens retained from the incubation process give you ‘immunity’ to food proteins, causing the immune system to identify food as a pathogen. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/nearly-one-in-three-australians-now-affected-by-fastgrowing-allergic-disease/news-story/d66fbe1b5ead73c4fafdb28faf84bc7f

However you feel at the end of today’s episode of “The News” is exactly how this episode was intended to make you feel. Your feelings are not autonomy, but a means of control.

Hypothesis. Meaning (therefore being/reality) is not possible without gravity, because gravity is an essential property of ‘context’ or ‘situation’, which are in turn essential properties of consciousness. ON this view, gravity orients things with respect to one another, in a continuous relation. Without gravity ‘things’ would lack mutual orientation, absolutely alienated at any distance. Gravity is then a property of narrative integration of being, a presupposition of ‘being in the same world’ and being ‘in time’.

Multi-valued logics are based on the equivocation between ‘specific-contingency vs the negation of specific-contingency’ and contingency vs necessity in general. In the classical example, the statement that asserts necessity “A sea battle will be fought tomorrow” is interpreted as TRUE for the contingency that a sea battle is fought tomorrow, but these are not equivalent: a statement of necessity (P→Q) is not validated by any contingency (Q). This is a classical fallacy ‘of the converse’! A consistent interpretation is that the statement is FALSE (or better, Non-Sense), because it asserts logical necessity (P→Q) for something that is not logically necessary: ¬(P→Q). Similarly, “A sea battle will NOT be fought tomorrow” (P→¬Q) would also be Non-Sense but it is not the opposite of ¬(P→Q). The internal negation attaches to a specific contingency (Q), replacing it with another contingency (not-Q), which is not equivalent to a negation of necessity/implication. Converting the implication to conjunction, ¬(P and Q) is obviously not the opposite of (P and ¬Q): the forms are mutually consistent. In essence, statement about necessity (P→Q) are necessarily bivalent, and statements about contingency (Q or ¬Q) are necessarily bivalent, but statements about necessity are not equivalent or opposite or interchangeable with statements about contingency. Colloquial confounding of the two types gave rise to non-sense, such as multi-valued logics. The image is from here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disjunction/

How do they quantify the benefit of damaging the immune systems of all children?

‘Truth’ is a vague, meta-logical concept; it is not, and never was, a theorem.