Author: admin

Continuing from yesterday…

The pattern of technology creating new opportunities for transcription of presence continued onward with the invention of motion pictures. Before moving pictures, you could look at a photo of a deceased person to know what somebody looked like, but you couldn’t get a sense of their presence — how they moved, how it might have felt to share a room with them.

Note that there is a common theme running through all of these examples. Each new recording technology is immediately useful, but many years later it takes on an added significance.

For example, the first photographers were not taking pictures of people because they were thinking that those people would one day be dead. Everyone might have understood that intellectually, but it wasn’t quite an emotional reality.

Similarly, early motion pictures did not, when they were new, possess the haunting quality that they have now. We look in astonishment at early film reels of people walking around New York City or Paris in the 1890s, and we realize that these people look young and vibrant, and that they are not thinking at all about their own eventual mortality.

Let’s focus in on this split between the immediate long term impacts of any new technology that transcribes presence. When it first shows up, any such technology focuses on the here and now.

But eventually, the value of the same technology comes to be seen as partly forensic. It opens a powerful new window into our past, one that had never before been possible.

To put it another way: Important aspects of recorded history begin with the invention of new recording technologies. But what might this mean for future technologies?

More tomorrow.

Photographs must have seemed astonishing when they first arrived on the scene. The idea that you could continue to see exactly what someone looked like, even after they were dead, must have felt quite radical.

Sure, you could look at a painting, but it’s not the same. A painting is someone’s interpretation of someone else’s physical likeness, not the likeness itself.

When I think back through history, I see parallels with other technologies. Take writing for example. Before the written word, you could learn of the thoughts of a person even after they were dead, through oral tales that had been handed down through the generations.

But, like a painting, these were necessarily filtered through others. The story that you heard was merely an interpretation by somebody else of that person’s thoughts and beliefs, and you had no way to know what had been altered in the transmission.

So there is this idea of any new recording technology as a kind of “transcription of presence”. Suppose we project this idea into the future. Where will it eventually lead us?

More tomorrow.

The president of Brazil wrote a rational, highly intelligent and well reasoned opinion piece, which was published in today’s New York Times. Everything Lula says is not only true, but easy to see once he steps you through the logic of it.

He makes it clear that the primary target audience for his piece is the president of the United States. If the piece has one failing, it is in the implicit assumption that the president of the United States is actually capable of hearing intelligent and well reasoned arguments.

Sadly, the citizens of the U.S. have quickly learned otherwise, with tragic consequences. As my brother once told me “It’s difficult to have a rational discussion when there is nobody on the other side of the conversation.”

Have you noticed that the larger the distance you need to travel, the more annoying is the process?

Walking is easy. Bicycling is a little more difficult. Driving a car is more of a hassle, as well as being more expensive and more dangerous.

And don’t even get me started on airplane flights.

I read today that Americans on the political right are going after anyone who is glorifying the murder of Charlie Kirk. They are publicly shaming such people on social media and encouraging their employers to fire them.

There are many parts of these events that I don’t understand. But to me, the greatest mystery of all is why anyone would think of murder as something to be celebrated, let alone say so publicly.

Sure, I and many others did not agree with things that Kirk said. But when someone is murdered in cold blood because they have said something that you disagree with, free speech itself is also being murdered.

Today, like every September 11, is a day of mourning for Americans. But mourning should be accompanied by reflection.

I am reflecting on the assassination yesterday of Charlie Kirk. Of course that was an evil and tragic act. But there are other deaths to consider as well on this day of mourning, and other tragic acts.

The recent gutting of USAID is projected, by one careful study, to result in nearly three million preventable deaths per year over the next five years. That figure includes about one million preventable deaths of children under five every year.

Is it not fair to ask whether that is also tragic?

As I understand it, the blowing up of a ship by the U.S. military when it was thousands of miles out at sea was justified by saying that those eleven people on board might have been transporting drugs to America, and were therefore attacking the United States. That was the reason given, even though the ship was actually trying to flee at the time.

One takeaway here is that if you invoke the rules of war in any situation, then you have no need to worry about niceties such as due process. Therefore you never need to think about the possibility that you may have just sent 11 innocent people to the bottom of the sea.

A certain U.S. president once said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”. Now I realize that under the current rules of engagement, this might actually happen.

He could simply shoot you, and claim that he did it because you were running drugs, and were therefore a wartime enemy of the United States. Afterward, who would people believe? The president of the United States, or a dead person who is no longer around to defend themself.

From now on I would like a heads up whenever that man is scheduled to visit New York City. Just so I know to stay away from Fifth Avenue.

There is something both terrifying and wonderful about a looming proposal deadline. Terrifying because the stakes are high, and because the possibility of failure is quite large. Wonderful for those very same reasons.

As the deadline approaches, all thoughts of procrastination go out the window. You no longer have the convenient excuse of trying to make it perfect.

As Montesquieu wrote: “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien.” And he was right.

If you’ll excuse me, now I need to get back to my deadline.

If you were given the option to be able to read peoples’ minds, would you say yes? To me, it’s a difficult question.

Of course it would be an enormous superpower. You would be assured of great success, both social and financial

And yet, you would also be able to look into the souls of everyone you meet. You would know them not from what they say, but from how they truly feel.

Would you really want to spend the rest of your life living with that?

I had thought there was a rule on Wikipedia that they only report the birthdays of real people. But today one of the birthdays listed was of Walter White, the fictional protagonist of the TV show Breaking Bad.

For the record, the fictional Walter White was born on September 7, 1958. And the fact that his birthday was duly reported alongside the birthdays of real people opens a door to strange possibilities.

I suppose this is only to be expected in our current age of A.I. After all, some virtual on-line influencers these days have more followers than real influencers do.

But are we going down a slippery slope? Will we soon come to a time when the line between a real person and a fictional person becomes increasingly blurred, and eventually disappears altogether?

Maybe at some point fictional people will win the right to vote. I’m not sure I want to be around when that happens.