Tag Archives: futurism

Boricua Futuristics Part 2

3 Jul

OK mi gente,

Here is my strategic suggestion… Boricua activists out there have their hedge fund hit list….

• Fir Tree partners
• Appaloosa Management
• Paulson & Company
• Blue Mountain Capital
• Fundamental Advisors.
• Whoever Paulson sold to
• Charles Blitzer a former IMF official is advising the hedge funds

We find out all we can about them. Find out if there are Boricuas/Latinos,as in every level from partner to janitor. See if we can get intelligence about them. We can reach out to our Occupy Wall Street friends to get intel on how to do the corporate protests.

Then we have Teach ins about the Puerto Rican situation and about debt, municipal, state and national in general. There is the Greece, Argentina, Detroit, Naomi Klein forum.

Get our congressmen and women to hold hearings on these guys to get them into the light of day. Get our city council representatives to hold hearings on them to get them into the light of day.

Same time, start fleshing out the future. For example, get a congressional agenda together of all the measures that would benefit Puerto Rico in dealing with the crisis.

Then you get the presidential candidates starting with the Dems to come out publicly with their positions re the congressional actions and what they would do vis a vis executive orders.

Remember, this is really about the 1%!!

Then the butt activists target each of these Hedge Fund villains and hold demonstrations against them. Protest them in the hearings as well.

Then we get our sustainability friends & allies (WEACT, Rocky Mountain Institute etc.) to come up with alternative energy plans for Puerto Rico to replace in the market place the fucked up power authority with distributed wind and solar alternatives.

What do ya’ll think?
J

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Boricua Futuristics…. Part 1

3 Jul

Hello all,

I have didn’t write new posts for my blog for some time. I haven’t gotten back to flowers in a while due to the exigencies of my work life. HOWEVER, I feel compelled to put out some thinking on what I am calling Boricua Futuristics or how to think about the future of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. I am compelled because of the dire situation that Puerto Rico is in.

In a “Back to the Future” kind of way, I reflect upon this, thinking of some young man and some woman who, because of economic hardship, are or are planning to leave Borinquen. They may come to meet here in the USA and they may have children. Those children may come to have children. Amongst those children of children, there may be a boy who grows up and dreams.

I am speaking as that boy. A person that is the child of a child of a migrant. My abuelos came to this country 91 years ago because of an economic crisis in those days. An economic crisis that happened 26 years after the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States in 1898 and 8 years after the USA legislated that all Puerto Ricans were US citizens. A child that was born in the year 1898 and a citizen in 1917 could have been the parent of my grand parents and probably were. There was very few opportunities for them in those days because of a vast economic transformation grinding poverty was rampant and they came to NYC to make a better life. Their child was born about 17 years before another upheaval caused the big wave of Boricuas to come to NYC and other destinations.

91 years later I am observing a similar situation. A vast economic transformation is causing migration. People are leaving in droves. The economics calls upon us to contemplate the politics and sociology and indeed the future. This is what I’m going to do.

One future I can imagine is a Puerto Rican dystopia where the island is depopulated and non-Puerto Ricans become the majority. You might see it as transnational gentrification, the whites move in to the neighborhood the original residents can’t afford anymore.

This would be the beginning of the end of Puerto Ricans…with no cultural anchor…the culture will disintegrate and pass into the dustbin of history. Kind of a cultural extinction event. Cultures, like species can become extinct.

There are other peoples that have been driven off their land. Just ask Palestinians and Native folks. The continuance of their cultures is a real issue. We are talking about glacially slow, but inexorable processes.

This is all happening in the era of the meteoric rise of the 1%…the “Masters of the Universe” that are in control of many more planetary resources than ever before. The city, state and national bankruptcies are just the footprints of the behemoths striding across the globe. The various cities in the USA (in Detroit and other small municipalities, Stockton CA) States such as Illinois and nations such as Puerto Rico and Greece. We have to think, not just about how we got here, but where are we going.

I’m going to try to do a little bit of that.

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Part 5: My AI Overlord

10 Jul

Single

So here I am trying to tie together all the threads of my latest thoughts.

I want humanity to survive and thrive. I want the earth, my world to be the thriving organism-like place in the universe that supports my species. I want me and mine and all others to go on enjoying the bounty that this planet has to offer. I want human kind to find a way to create a just and peaceful and fair society where no people are systematically crushed in any way. Its the dream many have dreamt.

However, I know how things are. Our species may or may not have the time to evolve culturally or biologically to a state where those beings, be they enlightened culturally or a post homo sapiens species will supersede us. That we will pass is the way of things. The only question is will we give our species time to evolve.

We are running out of time because our civilization has created conditions with climate change, degradation of our oceans, loss of biodiversity etc. that are undermining the natural systems upon which our survival as a species is predicated. We are LOUSY custodians of the earth.

One direction is that we evolve culturally to this more enlightened state. However, Chris Hedges contends that…

“Human beings are frequently irrational. They are governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive. This understanding of innate human corruptibility and human limitations, whether explained by the theologian Augustine or the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been humankind’s most potent check on utopian visions. It has forced human beings to accept their own myopia and irrationality, to acknowledge that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is free from the taint of self-interest and corruption. We are bound by our animal natures.”

Hedges, Chris (2009-02-20). When Atheism Becomes Religion (pp. 14-15). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

He puts forward the idea that utopian ideals, like the ones that I have laid out, will always be undermined by our human limitations. Presumably, a better society would not destroy the earth and ourselves with such vigor as ours currently does.

However, he contends that the road to a better society has detours off the cliffs of human irrationality. For a second, lets say this is true. Then, given the state of the global environment, does this damn us to global environmental catastrophe? Are we looking at possible extinction of humans and many other species basically because we can’t get it together in time given our “animal natures”? If we assume that what Hedges contends is true, then unless we change, we are likely doomed.

This is where “Transcendence”, and the ideas of the singularity come in. A true hard AI would develop the capacity to improve itself. Then, there would be an exponential curve of intelligence and capability that would increase till “normal” humans would not be able to comprehend this being any longer.

That is what prompts my thoughts down the path of “Transcendence”. Perhaps if we somehow before that fateful time develop a real, hard AI, with supra-human intelligence and capabilities, it would be best for us and indeed for all species, to turn over the reins of human society to a being with truly superior intelligence and that lacks our “human limitations”. Would such a being be benevolent? Would such a being even be concerned? I feel it highly likely that it would be able to model our brains and understand emotions for what they are down to the molecular and atomic levels. After all, they evolved so solve problems for us and other organisms. They are a trait like any other.

This asks the question, would allowing such non-human being to guide us be a loss of our precious humanity? This leads to the question ….is our basic humanity so important that we would be willing to commit collective suicide to protect it?

I am asking myself the question. Maybe our successor “homo superior”, an AI — in an advanced nano -biological machine form, can do a better job than we have as custodians of the earth and be in solidarity with us as “fallen creatures”. At least we might have a chance at existing. Better that in my book than ending up like Mars.

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Part 3: My AI Overlord — I just watched the movie “Transcendence”

4 Jul

So I just finished the movie “Transcendence”! I found it thought provoking, fairly accurate, but ultimately it didn’t go far enough. It did not present what an intelligence on an exponential curve of self-improvement would ultimately lead to in terms of capabilities.

An intelligence like that, with quantum computing, would be able to run every possible simulation imaginable and many we could not. Humans could not even come close to challenging it. In the movie, it had limitations that I think would be preposterous if it was exponentially I erasing its intelligence.

Once it had ability to interact with the physical world, forget it. The nano, pico and femto- machines would re- organize the world.

However, it is Hollywood, so they had to give the public part of the diet it has been fed for a long time. You need for humans to win in the end. Love beats all etc. The movie could’ve contemplate “losing” a conflict. That was so unrealistic, the AI would have re-written its code so long ago, it wouldn’t resemble at all what it started like. Plus, wouldn’t it would’ve guessed they’d try a virus and have defenses?!?!

The movie had to scale back what it tried to do. Otherwise, people would have to eat a new food and that would NOT go down well.

HW has bred a fan base on a certain diet of stories. The viewers come to expect it. That is all they have ever eaten. Simple example . They can’t have the AI “win”. That is against the diet of happy endings. This movie leaned more on the humans win side, with a hint of otherwise. Couldn’t be the reverse.

They couldn’t have envisioned a world where the human species has evolved beyond now. They could have even pictured a scenario where “normal” humans have been preserved if they want to be, but they would be handicapped so to speak. They’d be like a person with Down’s syndrome now. That would be a negative message for viewers, a downer and hence not in the diet. Even if it was speculation. The spec can’t stray too far from humans now! Iron rule!!

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