Self-evident truths

By | | Out My Writer's Window
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Democrats need to quit pointing out hardships faced by so many ordinary people. They act as if hardship and despair is a byproduct of greed. It’s not. Hardship is itself a goal of the Republican Party, the means to an end.

Oh, I hear the snarls and howls of outrage coming from the right. “Class warfare!” they exhale with feigned shock and dismay. Yes. And they started the war. But for a very good reason.

The GOP believes if they make life frightening, lonely, famished and cold for those not in the top one percent, society will return to a holy, … Read more… →

Lawyer bots

By | | Out My Writer's Window
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A friend, a lawyer and a judge, sent a link about a company in San Francisco trying to replace lawyers with robots. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said artificial intelligence couldn’t tackle more than 10 percent of legal issues with today’s technology.

I wrote back saying that I didn’t think the law would be that difficult, since law was encoded in words with rules applied that resulted in patterns of outcome. I envisioned case studies and decisions, the history of law in the U.S. going back to the Constitution, being fed to the machines which … Read more… →

Puppy Love

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A month ago, Irish let slip that she’d been looking at puppies. Australian Shepherds. I cocked an eyebrow. That’s all. Loving a puppy is soul food, and after the last three weeks, Irish is close to starving. But the thought made me take a long, deep breath. Again.

Irish is afraid, and I don’t blame her. There are hundreds of what she calls “starlings,” aka “floaters,” in the field of vision in her remaining eye. There is also a cloudiness. Something is not right. Irish pushed up by a full month an appointment with her doctor in Portland because … Read more… →

Winding it up

By | | It's Never Enough
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Whew! The new / old Jessica book is finished!

It’s new because it went from 50,000 words to 80,000 words, which is insane for the genre. Which genre is a key question. The book may fall flat because it breaks all sorts of rules and bends into different genres, and readers really like to know what they’re getting after they’ve judged a book by its cover.

Where to start…?

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Dawn in my Treehouse feels warm, secure, and surreal. A mile away, wind generators roar with the pulsing beat of helicopter blades from a neighbor’s marijuana field fending off frost. I hear the fridge humming and the coffee pot clicking with heat while sending a fat burbling steaming stream into the glass carafe.

My ears also ring from damage by 427 inch motors howling too close, or the squall of a 4-cylinder diesel engine inches from my head in the confined space beneath the cockpit of the boat. Or maybe from chainsaws while cutting up firewood decades ago. Or rock concerts from decades before … Read more… →

IT’s here.

By | | Outer Limits
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Let’s dispense with some hair-splitting right up front. What follows lumps “machine learning” and “cognitive computing” and “artificial intelligence” and “advanced robotics” into one box that from here on shall be referred to as “Intelligent Technology,” or “IT.”

IT includes self-driving cars, robots building those cars, computerized doctors, advanced game-playing algorithms, Amazon or Google or Apple or Facebook centers that parse “big data … all of it. All of IT.

Soon smarter than us

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Three articles in the last couple of weeks didn’t shine quite enough attention on Artificial Intelligence.

Sandisk announced a 400 gigbit microsd memory card for your phone. Huawei announced a new processor chip for phones that features a “neural processing unit,” or NPU. The Economist newspaper has a couple of stories, one about AI being able to determine sexual orientation (straight or gay) from photographs, another about AI’s ability to determine not just who you are, but your mood, even your politics.