Smart Cities Are Dumb Cities
Our ideas of 'super-intelligence' are like a crayon drawing made by a distracted four-year-old compared to
what might actually be. What a waste of resources and our humanity. A world divided may not withstand.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries
claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history.
It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a
metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as
within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Step into the world almost anywhere, even a densely packed city of concrete and steel, and if you are observant
you’ll witness the extraordinary phenomenon of life. The world is pulsing and quivering with the animated cascade
of molecular machinery that constitutes living systems.
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks
and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us
build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves;
otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” -Genesis 11:1,3-4
Dumb Cities : .[Spoiler (click to open)].What lies behind the global new cities plandemic?
Toronto Canada : .There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs, to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans “frustratingly abstract”; in turn US tech investor Roger McNamee warned Google can’t be trusted with such data, calling the project “surveillance capitalism”.
There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs, to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans “frustratingly abstract”; in turn US tech investor Roger McNamee warned Google can’t be trusted with such data, calling the project “surveillance capitalism”.
Sidewalk Labs of their proposed smart city development in Toronto
Songdo South Korea : .From their living room window at the top of one of the city’s new residential towers, a panorama of downtown Songdo unfolds. Across an eight-lane highway lies Central Park, a broad swath of trees surrounding an ornamental lake, flanked by rows of glass towers with vaguely jaunty silhouettes. Armies of identikit concrete apartment blocks march into the hazy distance beyond, terminating at a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. It looks a lot like many other modern Asian cities, a place of generic towers rising above a car-dominated grid. Public life is mostly confined to the air-conditioned environments of malls and private leisure clubs.
Songdo’s Central Park is modeled on the Manhattan original in Songdo South Korea -Did they finally get it right?
It is a place where the garbage is automatically sucked away through underground pipes, where lampposts are always watching you, and where your apartment block knows to send the elevator down to greet you when it detects the arrival of your car. Sensors in every street track traffic flow and send alerts to your phone when it’s going to snow, while you can monitor the children’s playground on TV from the comfort of your sofa. A small touchscreen display on the kitchen wall that allows one to keep track of his and his wife’s consumption of electricity, water and gas and, most important, compare it against the average statistics for the building or take pride in "being more energy-efficient than all their neighbours." (Like that's a noble achievement in exchange for choices and freedoms)
The impossible world of MC Escher | Art and design
In the allegory of Plato's Cave how does humanity create wholesome unity between imagination, illusion and reality? Some think we just wish these things into being, while we mostly fail at everything.
To place all of our trust in the dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such critical thinking altogether. Companies made their money by inserting themselves into every aspect of everyday life, including the most personal and creative areas of our lives: our secret passions, our private conversations, our likenesses and our dreams. Instead, they are selling us back our dreams repackaged as the products of machines, with the only promise being that they’ll make even more money advertising on the back of them. To place all of our trust in the dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such critical thinking altogether.
Day and Night, 1938, by MC Escher. Images courtesy of Collection Gemeentemuseum Den Haag/the MC Escher Company
Whose dreams are being drawn upon here? What composite of human culture, what perspective on it, are producing this nightmare?
The Stupidity of Artificial Intelligence :
The belief in this kind of AI as actually knowledgeable or meaningful is actively dangerous. It risks poisoning the well of collective thought, and of our ability to think at all. If, as is being proposed by technology companies, the results of ChatGPT queries will be provided as answers to those seeking knowledge online, and if, as has been proposed by some commentators, ChatGPT is used in the classroom as a teaching aide, then its hallucinations will enter the permanent record, effectively coming between us and more legitimate, testable sources of information, until the line between the two is so blurred as to be invisible.
It’s because it’s inherently stupid. It has read most of the internet, and it knows what human language is supposed to sound like, but it has no relation to reality whatsoever. It is dreaming sentences that sound about right, and listening to it talk is frankly about as interesting as listening to someone’s dreams. It is very good at producing what sounds like sense, and best of all at producing cliche and banality, which has composed the majority of its diet, but it remains incapable of relating meaningfully to the world as it actually is.
Training a single AI model - according to research published in 2019 - might emit the equivalent of more than 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is nearly five times as much as the entire lifetime of the average American car, including its manufacture. These emissions are expected to grow by nearly 50% over the next five years, all while the planet continues to heat up, acidifying the oceans, igniting wildfires, throwing up superstorms and driving species to extinction. It’s hard to think of anything more utterly stupid than artificial intelligence, as it is practised in the current era.
Email making professors and students equally stupid as ChatGPT assimilates and simulates cliché (and you thought dogma was bad..) Good in equals Good out
Is Google Making Us Stupid? It certainly seems like it. What the Internet is doing to our brains...
How politics makes us stupid
American Capitalism Is Brutal. You can trace that back to the plantations. Military world domination and slavery, both gave rise to the modern Industrial Military Complex.
Many capitalist systems around the world take care of their citizens and work to mitigate these ills via social democracies like the one that powers Germany. But Americans put up with brutal conditions in part because they were indoctrinated by the feudal plantation culture that grew the nation.
Washington is the capital of dirty money, laundering capital through the Capitol
Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth - purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn’t put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side.
Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.
The Stupidity of So Called Intelligence Agencies And What Our Institutions Have to Offer
A fine example of American architectural "Brutalism" is Washington, DC's FBI J. Edgar Hoover Building. The FBI website states that the structure heavily "[contrasts] with the traditional marble, granite, or limestone government buildings, ...Greek revival monuments or courthouse style buildings..." making this shining example a "dead weight" of institutional totalitarian state.
Washington, DC's FBI J. Edgar Hoover Building as visually unappealing, "cold," "unwelcoming," and "dystopian."
And yet.
Do we seize this remarkable and unexpected opportunity that the cosmos has unintentionally thrown to us? We make too many humans, we don’t feed each other properly, we bicker, we argue, we wage war, and we willfully deny so much of reality - we make ignorance into a vocation.
Reference:
https://www.insider.com/the-ugliest-most-hated-buildings-in-the-world#a-washingtonian-critic-described-washington-dcs-j-edgar-hoover-building-as-visually-unappealing-cold-unwelcoming-and-dystopian-3
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/man-made-star-new-zealand-night-sky-humanity-space-bright-rocket-lab-a8180061.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/16/the-stupidity-of-ai-artificial-intelligence-dall-e-chatgpt
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/20/the-impossible-world-of-mc-escher
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid
https://medium.com/fourth-wave/why-u-s-capitalism-is-so-brutal-beec240c0d1e
https://www.insider.com/the-ugliest-most-hated-buildings-in-the-world
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2011&version=NIV
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-email-making-professors-stupid/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/stupid-humans/
Truly, I don't know how to wrap my mind around this collective hive that we have become...
Drawing by a distracted 4 year-old ...happiness of hope and family and they lived happily ever after...
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” -Genesis 11:5-7
. And where to find them..
Nicolás Ortega. Source: "Turris Babel," Coenraet Decker, 1679 -Tall Tale of Tower of Babel
Languages divided among themselves...
dr. π (pi)
.
what might actually be. What a waste of resources and our humanity. A world divided may not withstand.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries
claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history.
It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a
metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as
within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Step into the world almost anywhere, even a densely packed city of concrete and steel, and if you are observant
you’ll witness the extraordinary phenomenon of life. The world is pulsing and quivering with the animated cascade
of molecular machinery that constitutes living systems.
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks
and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us
build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves;
otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” -Genesis 11:1,3-4
Dumb Cities : .[Spoiler (click to open)].What lies behind the global new cities plandemic?
Toronto Canada : .There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs, to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans “frustratingly abstract”; in turn US tech investor Roger McNamee warned Google can’t be trusted with such data, calling the project “surveillance capitalism”.
There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs, to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans “frustratingly abstract”; in turn US tech investor Roger McNamee warned Google can’t be trusted with such data, calling the project “surveillance capitalism”.
Sidewalk Labs of their proposed smart city development in Toronto
Songdo South Korea : .From their living room window at the top of one of the city’s new residential towers, a panorama of downtown Songdo unfolds. Across an eight-lane highway lies Central Park, a broad swath of trees surrounding an ornamental lake, flanked by rows of glass towers with vaguely jaunty silhouettes. Armies of identikit concrete apartment blocks march into the hazy distance beyond, terminating at a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. It looks a lot like many other modern Asian cities, a place of generic towers rising above a car-dominated grid. Public life is mostly confined to the air-conditioned environments of malls and private leisure clubs.
Songdo’s Central Park is modeled on the Manhattan original in Songdo South Korea -Did they finally get it right?
It is a place where the garbage is automatically sucked away through underground pipes, where lampposts are always watching you, and where your apartment block knows to send the elevator down to greet you when it detects the arrival of your car. Sensors in every street track traffic flow and send alerts to your phone when it’s going to snow, while you can monitor the children’s playground on TV from the comfort of your sofa. A small touchscreen display on the kitchen wall that allows one to keep track of his and his wife’s consumption of electricity, water and gas and, most important, compare it against the average statistics for the building or take pride in "being more energy-efficient than all their neighbours." (Like that's a noble achievement in exchange for choices and freedoms)
The impossible world of MC Escher | Art and design
In the allegory of Plato's Cave how does humanity create wholesome unity between imagination, illusion and reality? Some think we just wish these things into being, while we mostly fail at everything.
To place all of our trust in the dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such critical thinking altogether. Companies made their money by inserting themselves into every aspect of everyday life, including the most personal and creative areas of our lives: our secret passions, our private conversations, our likenesses and our dreams. Instead, they are selling us back our dreams repackaged as the products of machines, with the only promise being that they’ll make even more money advertising on the back of them. To place all of our trust in the dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such critical thinking altogether.
Day and Night, 1938, by MC Escher. Images courtesy of Collection Gemeentemuseum Den Haag/the MC Escher Company
Whose dreams are being drawn upon here? What composite of human culture, what perspective on it, are producing this nightmare?
The Stupidity of Artificial Intelligence :
The belief in this kind of AI as actually knowledgeable or meaningful is actively dangerous. It risks poisoning the well of collective thought, and of our ability to think at all. If, as is being proposed by technology companies, the results of ChatGPT queries will be provided as answers to those seeking knowledge online, and if, as has been proposed by some commentators, ChatGPT is used in the classroom as a teaching aide, then its hallucinations will enter the permanent record, effectively coming between us and more legitimate, testable sources of information, until the line between the two is so blurred as to be invisible.
It’s because it’s inherently stupid. It has read most of the internet, and it knows what human language is supposed to sound like, but it has no relation to reality whatsoever. It is dreaming sentences that sound about right, and listening to it talk is frankly about as interesting as listening to someone’s dreams. It is very good at producing what sounds like sense, and best of all at producing cliche and banality, which has composed the majority of its diet, but it remains incapable of relating meaningfully to the world as it actually is.
Training a single AI model - according to research published in 2019 - might emit the equivalent of more than 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is nearly five times as much as the entire lifetime of the average American car, including its manufacture. These emissions are expected to grow by nearly 50% over the next five years, all while the planet continues to heat up, acidifying the oceans, igniting wildfires, throwing up superstorms and driving species to extinction. It’s hard to think of anything more utterly stupid than artificial intelligence, as it is practised in the current era.
Email making professors and students equally stupid as ChatGPT assimilates and simulates cliché (and you thought dogma was bad..) Good in equals Good out
Is Google Making Us Stupid? It certainly seems like it. What the Internet is doing to our brains...
How politics makes us stupid
American Capitalism Is Brutal. You can trace that back to the plantations. Military world domination and slavery, both gave rise to the modern Industrial Military Complex.
Many capitalist systems around the world take care of their citizens and work to mitigate these ills via social democracies like the one that powers Germany. But Americans put up with brutal conditions in part because they were indoctrinated by the feudal plantation culture that grew the nation.
Washington is the capital of dirty money, laundering capital through the Capitol
Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth - purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn’t put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side.
Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.
The Stupidity of So Called Intelligence Agencies And What Our Institutions Have to Offer
A fine example of American architectural "Brutalism" is Washington, DC's FBI J. Edgar Hoover Building. The FBI website states that the structure heavily "[contrasts] with the traditional marble, granite, or limestone government buildings, ...Greek revival monuments or courthouse style buildings..." making this shining example a "dead weight" of institutional totalitarian state.
Washington, DC's FBI J. Edgar Hoover Building as visually unappealing, "cold," "unwelcoming," and "dystopian."
And yet.
Do we seize this remarkable and unexpected opportunity that the cosmos has unintentionally thrown to us? We make too many humans, we don’t feed each other properly, we bicker, we argue, we wage war, and we willfully deny so much of reality - we make ignorance into a vocation.
Reference:
https://www.insider.com/the-ugliest-most-hated-buildings-in-the-world#a-washingtonian-critic-described-washington-dcs-j-edgar-hoover-building-as-visually-unappealing-cold-unwelcoming-and-dystopian-3
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/man-made-star-new-zealand-night-sky-humanity-space-bright-rocket-lab-a8180061.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/16/the-stupidity-of-ai-artificial-intelligence-dall-e-chatgpt
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/20/the-impossible-world-of-mc-escher
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid
https://medium.com/fourth-wave/why-u-s-capitalism-is-so-brutal-beec240c0d1e
https://www.insider.com/the-ugliest-most-hated-buildings-in-the-world
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2011&version=NIV
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-email-making-professors-stupid/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/stupid-humans/
Truly, I don't know how to wrap my mind around this collective hive that we have become...
Drawing by a distracted 4 year-old ...happiness of hope and family and they lived happily ever after...
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” -Genesis 11:5-7
. And where to find them..
Nicolás Ortega. Source: "Turris Babel," Coenraet Decker, 1679 -Tall Tale of Tower of Babel
Languages divided among themselves...
dr. π (pi)
.