AI, Paranoia, French

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AI is the latest innovation that will make Americans paranoid, an invention that knows everything and that you can’t trust to tell it to you. I love it but I don’t trust that it will outsmart us by telling us the truth since so many powerful entities hide behind lies and are strongly tempted to subvert what is honest. At least for the moment AI isn’t trying to deceive us but rather is sometimes supporting us in our delusions. The third and latest South Park episode dealt with that along with the national guard milling around the nation’s capital to keep the most delusional president we’ve ever had happy.

There was a story in the NYTimes I think about how Americans have fed at the trough of paranoia for a long time. It showed a century old painting of what looked like important people colluding over a business or political scheme like a olden time Donald Trump. I didn’t read it but suspicion has ruled since the time of George Washington who joined the other leaders of the Revolution in an early version of the VFW or GAR thus making everyone not a member worry that they were insiders who couldn’t be trusted. The word handed down us was “illuminati.” Today it is the Deep State. Does it exist?

Near the end of our Universal Vacation Claudia and I were told that the “Bourne Stuntacular” was worth seeing and we got in line as did our family for a second viewing. I’ve never watched any of the Matt Damon Bourne movies but we rented it out today and watched it in the comfort of our own living room. Here is how AI described it in a flash:

“The Bourne Stuntacular is an innovative, live-action stunt show at Universal Studios Florida that blends cutting-edge technology with a thrilling narrative based on the Bourne film franchise. It features advanced LED screens, digital projection mapping, and physical set pieces to immerse the audience in a high-stakes pursuit of Jason Bourne across real-world locations like Washington D.C., Dubai, and Tangier. The show uses a technology called Enhanced Virtual Surveillance (EVS) to make viewers feel like they are part of the action, observing Bourne’s encounters with danger, car chases, and fight sequences.”

It was just as AI described it no doubt borrowing sentences and phrases from real humans sifted together from elsewhere on the Internet. It would be so easy for us to let AI fill up a blog avoiding all the typos and awkward mistakes like mine that I am too busy to edit.

Bourne Identity is one of thousands of movies that make people certain that someone is out to get us and as an old school board buddy of mine once told me…..many times actually…..its a running gag “Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you!”

I am remarkably free from paranoia in large part because like AI (only without the God like perfect memory and ability to read ten billion books in a second) I have spent my life learning a little bit about everything. For instance I know enough about how big space is to know…..and I mean know not suspect…..that the first sentient visitors to Earth are probably tens of millions of years in the future. Even if we began picking up faint signals that were obviously the work of sentient creatures their ability to travel at one tenth of the speed of light would require that they travel for thousands of years to reach us and they would have to be so far advanced that they could take immense quantities of their own planets materials with them to keep them alive on the journey. And its only conceivable that creatures could make the trip if they evolved on a planet in our Milky Way galaxy. If they have only reached the evolutionary level of dinosaurs they won’t hop in space craft for another 65 million years. And despite the billions of planets that exist finding one like Earth that could produce sentience like ours after 3 billion years of evolution will without radio signals be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Will we have human like descendants that we could recognize a few million years from now? After all the movies we’ve seen about aliens its no wonder this doubting extraterrestrial life is shrugged off. Ditto years of hearing how Franklin Roosevelt colluded with the Japanese to have them attach Pearl Harbor or the CIA assassinated JFK or any of a million other unlikely conspiracies. And yet the very Trump voters who elected him can’t see how he is creating a vast web of corruption in one of the most honest nations in history.

We believe what we want to believe.

And I put French in that title……Learning the language is yet another way for me to fight off paranoia…..like the paranoia that convinced my demented mother that terrible people were doing terrible things outside the first memory care unit we had to place her in….. I’ve been told learning a new language is a way to postpone memory loss. I’ve spent about five hours on French this Saturday. I got a hearing test for hearing aids which I hope will also help me stay engaged this afternoon. I’ll leave you with the screen shot of my Duolingo page. I am not abandoning it after one day short of a 2500 day streak although now my daily Duolingo only lasts about five minutes per day.

I’m tired so I’ll leave it there for now.

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty