Mimsy Were the Borogoves

How out-of-touch do you need to be to see this as an uplifting, inspiring end to an ad featuring the destruction of human-like dolls and faces?

I didn’t mean to do two AI-related posts practically back-to-back like this, but Apple’s very dystopian iPad Pro ad brought up some other thoughts partly due to my having almost finished posting my series on Alan Moore’s dystopian V stories.

Now, I’d recommend not reading too much into this “interesting” choice of visuals. Part of the problem with the ad is nothing more than the age-old development of silence culture in any large and entrenched business. Apple is far from the brotherhood of pirates portrayed in Andy Hertzfeld’s Revolution in the Valley. I suspect a lot of people saw how painfully bad the ad was and simply chose not to stick their necks out.

My first encounter with this culture, in a very similar situation, was tangentially, by way of a Radio Shack toy called “Galactic Man”. I could have sworn I’ve mentioned this on the site before but I can’t find it now. When I was a young guitarist in Hollywood, I worked part-time at a Radio Shack near Hollywood and Vine. It was a fascinating view of the Hollywood industry from the borderline: desperate property masters would occasionally come in searching for some thing they suddenly realized they needed, like a giant gold-plated telephone or a boxful of D-cell batteries they’d run out of on set.

The store’s manager kept a box of unsaleable items in the back room. As an employee, you were free to take anything you wanted out of it. That’s where I found Galactic Man. Galactic Man was a transformer knock-off. He was a laser gun that transformed into a robot. It was actually kind of cool, except for one possibly insurmountable problem: where does the laser gun’s trigger go when the toy transforms into a robot?

Late last year I had something called “ChatGPt2001” comment on a YouTube post of mine. It reads exactly like ChatGPt, so I’m assuming it was in fact an AI and not a parody of it.

The post the AI commented on is a seventeen-second clip from Tex Avery’s 1949 House of the Future cartoon. I joked that Avery was making fun of social media—long before social media existed. Alone among my handful of obscure YouTube postings, that clip probably attracted the attention of SkyNet because it is by far the most popular video I’ve put up. As I write this it has garnered 1,753 comments and “1M views” where my nearest runner up—a ten-second Lord of the Rings clip¹—has 26 comments and “66K views”. Both are small potatoes in the video world, but the Tex Avery clip’s advantage is a literal order-of-magnitude difference in my subset of that world.

I titled the clip “The Internet predicted in 1949 by Tex Avery”, with the description:

From the Tex Avery cartoon, “The Home of Tomorrow”, the television not only answers questions, it tells questioners to shut up already, and bullies them to stop asking such questions.

The comment from “ChatGPt2001” was fascinating for its ability to completely miss the point:

There is no evidence to suggest that Tex Avery, the famous animator and cartoonist, predicted the internet in 1949. Tex Avery was primarily known for his work in the animation industry, creating iconic characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Droopy.

The concept of the internet as we know it today started to take shape in the 1960s with the development of ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. It wasn't until the 1990s that the internet became widely accessible to the public.

While science fiction writers and futurists like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov made some accurate predictions about technology, there is no indication that Tex Avery made specific predictions about the internet in 1949. It's essential to be cautious about attributing future technological developments to individuals without proper evidence.

Enjoying the fruits of their Frigidaire.

Since writing Refrigerator Revolution I’ve picked up two other refrigerator cookbook/manuals, and I’ve written a script to scan cookbooks into PDFs. So besides covering three refrigerator manuals (1928, 1942, and 1947) in this series, I’ll also provide searchable downloads of them, so that you can see my sources for yourself.

1. Frigidaire, 1928
2. Cold Cooking, 1942
3. Norge Cold Cookery, 1947

The oldest refrigerator manual in my collection, and the inspiration for this series, is the 1928 Frigidaire Recipes (PDF File, 15.5 MB). Like all three of these books, It’s both a manual and a recipe collection. It goes over the basic functions of the refrigerator, such as its dial for adjusting how quickly things freeze and how to defrost.

The Frigidaire book’s subtitle was “Prepared especially for Frigidaire Automatic Refrigerators equipped with the Frigidaire Cold Control.” That’s a very dry description of something you had to see to believe:

The primary purpose of Frigidaire Automatic Refrigeration is to preserve food. In this capacity it is today preventing needless food spoilage and safeguarding health in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the world. But there are many other services which Frigidaire offers.

The delicious frozen desserts and salads which may be prepared with the aid of Frigidaire, represent an entirely new application of the household refrigerator. To understand thoroughly how easily these frozen dishes may be prepared is to value Frigidaire above all other household utilities.

The language reminds me of early home computer manuals, promising a revolutionary appliance that will change the way you live. Like Andy Hertzfeld in Revolution in The Valley, the refrigerator is referred to as a subject without an article. Frigidaire, like Macintosh, is a person, not a thing.

In my last post, I wrote about the problems with current battery technology. Today’s batteries make owning a battery-powered vehicle a huge hassle and limit travel options to nearby destinations—or enforce artificially long travel times. In both cases, they require that the destination be one where electricity is available in sufficient quantities for charging a battery-powered vehicle. Trips to out-of-the-way places become very difficult when you can’t just store extra bottles of your power source in the trunk. Battery-powered vehicles already maximize every spare location as battery space.

Any unforeseen problem—temperature, traffic jam, etc.—runs the risk of draining the battery, leaving the driver stranded, even during daily trips. And there is no obvious way forward: the future of battery-powered vehicles requires a completely new battery technology, and we not only don’t have that technology we don’t even know where it will come from.

I’ve sometimes said that electric cars are basically daily beaters at the cost of a sports car, but that oversells them. As a daily beater they’ve got issues as well; I’ve known several people who have bought electric cars thinking they’d use them to get back and forth to work, do their shopping, all their local driving. All but one of those vehicles have since been replaced with gasoline vehicles. That one is owned by a friend who has a habit of buying cars that need constant attention.

I think, at best, today’s battery-powered vehicles are little more than Sunday drive vehicles. You don’t have to worry about filling up with gas or checking the oil; you don’t have to worry about rush hour, or temperature extremes. It’s a wonderful day, so get in, drive around the countryside for an hour or two, and come home.

When you do have to worry about losing power during a traffic jam, or having less of a charge than you thought you did because it’s too hot or too cold, or the parking lot’s charger is already occupied and you’re late for work, they make a lot less sense. It is absolutely insane that some states are mandating battery-powered vehicles today. They do not make traveling easier when that travel has the purpose of getting to a specific place at a specific time.

But that brings up a not-so-obvious question. Are electric cars really meant to make traveling easier? Let’s, as Lazlo Hollyfeld might say, look at the features of the modern all-electric power source, that is, the modern battery:

This is a beautiful car. EVs are an amazing feat of technology. But they’re currently a lot like Samuel Johnson’s walking dog. It’s amazing it walks, but it’s not done well. That’s mostly because battery technology isn’t up to the needs of motorists.

Electric cars that work are potential game-changers for personal transportation. Never having to worry about hitting the gas station in the morning—because your vehicle’s “tank” automatically refills overnight. Using the same system to power accessories as is used to power the vehicle’s motion. Redundancy for the electrically powered accessories so that one dead battery doesn’t shut down the vehicle—as currently happens when a modern gas vehicle’s one battery dies.

All-electric vehicles even today have advantages. Acceleration is immediate: the direct link between power source and motive force makes changes in speed happen faster, making electric cars more maneuverable and thus potentially safer. This advantage, however, is held back by the mass requirements of both modern battery packs and current safety regulations. Heavier vehicles are less maneuverable.

One big problem is that what we call an electric vehicle is a misnomer. Our “electric” vehicles run off of chemical batteries. Our current battery technology is designed for far less strenuous tasks than the special needs of transporting large masses over long distances. I am increasingly of the opinion that when we finally get useful batteries for cars, their technology will be so different from current technology that we won’t even call them batteries.

Gasoline, after all, is a battery. It stores energy for later use, and in a very concentrated form.¹ Gasoline is far more powerful and efficient for moving vehicles than our current electro-chemical batteries. Even in my giant old American car, a full tank of gas weighs a little over a hundred pounds, and this amount drops as the gas provides energy. Battery packs in cars weigh a thousand pounds or more, a thousand pounds that not only can’t go as far as my hundred pounds, but does not weigh less as it produces energy.

If I tricked out my trunk to hold a thousand pounds of gasoline in my car, I could go well over 3,000 miles without a refill. And it would probably still take less time to refill for another 3,000 miles than it does to refill an EV for another 300. That’s how efficient gasoline is compared to modern batteries.

An antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria, from the already-existing (and probably valid) scare campaign against the overuse of antibiotics.

I saw a very strange and telling rant by a friend on the left about a year ago, comparing COVID vaccines to antibiotics. There are a lot of very clueless things on the internet not worth commenting on because they’re little more than gibberish, and I kept putting this post off because separating the gibberish from the interesting parts was painful.¹

But his rant about antibiotics highlights three very important facets of how the left works, how they treat science, politics, and the new hate.

My friend’s post suggests that we need to start a campaign to make those hesitant to take the COVID vaccine also hesitate to take antibiotics.

I’m all about aiming an anti-antibiotic campaign tailored straight for the anti-vaxers. Use their words, make them imagine themselves heroes set upon in an egregious age, and let them die of a routine infection. Not so much murder as assisted suicide, and for the greater good.

He wants the unvaccinated to die. The arguments that he suggests would make the COVID vaccine hesitant also stop taking antibiotics include:

Antibiotics are Anti-Life

It’s right there in the name! And that’s only ONE of the reasons people should avoid antibiotics:

2. You need to be careful what you put in your body.

7. People give cows antibiotics, and just look at them. Fuckin’ herd animals.

The most obviously fascinating aspect of his plan is that I’ve seen all of these arguments before. These points are already used by the medical community. He doesn’t seem cognizant of the already-existing campaign against the use of antibiotics by doctors and health professionals. Do a search on “antibiotic overuse” and you’ll find just what he’s suggesting—but against everyone, not just those hesitant to take the COVID vaccine. That is, many in the medical community already think we are abusing antibiotics.

When I was growing up, a standard response taught by parents to young children was “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

I doubt parents still teach that. There are a lot of assumptions in that advice that are no longer safe, notably that it won’t be taken as a challenge. The assumption then was that verbal exchanges remained verbal exchanges. Nowadays the assumption is that knifing a fellow student in the back is merely standard schoolyard play.

That was seriously said by the West Side Left, back in 2021.

Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers.

Their logic in letting kids knife kids would be perfectly understandable to Norbert Wiener. Yes, young teenagers have engaged in deadly fights for eons. It was hard work bringing our culture out of the barbarism of child violence. But there is a growing contingent today that doesn’t just want to ignore that without work we get barbarism, they welcome the slide backward into barbarism, even to the point of supporting kids knifing kids.

Without work, entropy always wins.

In part one, I highlighted John G. Kemeny’s argument that the proper relationship between man and machine in the age of the computer is a collaborative one with man in control. In part two I examined Vannevar Bush’s prescient vision of a networked future in which scientific discoveries would be readily available to all, ensuring that science and technology would always advance to the benefit of mankind rather than being lost in dusty libraries. And in part three I added Norbert Wiener’s warnings that entropy applies to communications—especially networked communications—just as it applies to physics.

What can we learn from these three visionaries more than half a century on?

Having dealt with someone at the far cusp of the personal computer revolution, and someone at its conception, I’d like to look at someone in between. Like Vannevar Bush¹, Norbert Wiener^• did not use personal computers. They didn’t exist. Nor was there anything remotely like the Internet. But it was the Internet’s potential for degrading human communication that frightened him. Or, more generally, the vast speed-up of the coming communications technology divorced from any acknowledgment that communication is always subject to degradation and that progress is not natural.

Norbert Wiener feared a faster and faster world with less and less content, because of a culture that more and more denies the existence of entropy. Entropy originated as a term from physics, for the level of disorder and randomness in a system. It’s the second law of thermodynamics, which, in simpler terms, means that everything tends toward disorder. Order requires that some form of work be added to the system. You can think of entropy as a measure of how jumbled up a jigsaw puzzle is. But the universe is not just a jigsaw puzzle that must be put back together—applying work to reduce the entropy in the puzzle. The universe is a jigsaw puzzle that continually falls apart, as if it were on a glass table in an earthquake. Work is required not just to keep it from getting more disordered, but to keep it from mixing up with the table, too.

Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society in 1954. What Wiener wanted to bring to public attention was the meaning of life, communication, and being human in a world where communications and computers were speeding up just as Vannevar Bush had promised us they would. New forms of communication would soon connect far more people for far more uses than previously imaginable.

Norbert Wiener was one of the founders, if not the founder, of the field of Cybernetics. He defined Cybernetics as: