American Strange

By John Woolright

This is a collection of thoughts and research that are weirdly strange and provoking about American life that you probably never learned in all your years of schooling and interaction with others, or learned but accepted as "that's the way it is" without question.

 

We grow up with certain knowledge, ideas, rules, and understandings. But have we really thought this through, or are we simply accepting things as we see them, read about them, and hear them from others?

 

I find that few people really dig for the truth—the facts. Simply because many of the facts upset the "facts" of what we think we know or were taught. So, enjoy, and above all think, discover, and explore the truth.

 

An easy read in one sitting, but you'll read it more than once...

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Woolright
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224730568

Book preview

This is a collection of thoughts and research that are weirdly strange and provoking about American life that you probably never learned in all your years of schooling and interaction with others, or learned but accepted as that’s the way it is without question. We grow up with certain knowledge, ideas, rules, and understandings. But have we really thought this through, or are we simply accepting things as we see them, read about them, and hear them from others? I find that few people really dig for the truth—the facts. Simply because many of the facts upset the facts of what we think we know or were taught. So, enjoy, and above all think, discover, and explore the truth.

1: Artificial Intelligence-AI

Let’s start with the biggest worry in the world. We don’t have many classes about this in schools yet except in Computer Science. We should, it’s everywhere on the internet, in media, on TV, advertising, fake news, politics and on and on. Every person needs to understand its capabilities, short-comings and issues or become subservient to it—the present danger to human thought and control. All the search engines on the Internet have AI components now. Try them for yourself. Ask them serious and stupid questions, but don’t expect serious or stupid answers. It can’t tell the difference unless someone gave it information about what to think is stupid or serious. Ahh, but what if that someone doesn’t know the difference. That is one big problem. And what if the person feeding AI with intelligent information is really feeding it with slanted or slightly untrue intelligent information?

AI must learn from all the information fed into it and make assumptions and judgements based on that. In a sense, then, it is only as smart as what is fed into it. It must then be told how to think and make hypotheses from what it is fed to get smarter, like humans do. But humans have emotions, morality, experiences, successes, and failures that AI doesn’t have.

Can AI invent things—yes. Good examples of that are art based on all the art that is fed into it, stories based on all the stories that have been fed into it, website creation based on all the website code fed into it, and so on.

But if given sets of music compositions, can it tell what is going to be a hit and what people will really like, probably not unless the music sounds like all the hits fed into it.

That is where AI can start to invade our copyright space. Similar art, similar websites, similar stories, similar music. These are some threats. AI is now starting to compete with human artistic content. Already in advertising and commercial art, AI is making big inroads and replacing peoples’ jobs. But it’s not AI as you think, it is people feeding AI with text to tell it how to paint, how to write the music, how to create the stories. It’s a combined effort between humans and AI software. AI by itself just sits in the computer as software programs waiting to be told what to do and how to do it.

It's just like the auto industry using computers, robotics, and other machinery to build cars. It’s not doing it all on its own. It must be told and trained