Short Announcement

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Nothing this week, I just wanted to say that I'm planning to take from now through to the end of July off to recover from some burnout. By August, I should be back and ready to go, though, so don't go too far!

Intelligent Life

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Today, I'd like to explore the possibility of other intelligent life, and I'm not referring to monkeys that can peel and sort bananas. I'm talking about alien life. The whole time I've been alive, I've been thinking about the possibility of other intelligent beings out there in the cosmos, but if I try to bring up the topic, there's so much stigma attached to the topic that it's not unlikely that I'd be dismissed as a crazy person. Sure, I'll concede the point that we haven't found any intelligent life yet, but Voyager I (launched in September 1977) only exited the solar system in August 2012 and averages a speed of 38,210 mph (17 km/s, if you use the sensible system). The version of the Andromeda that we see at night, from Earth, is 2.5 million years in the past. Put short and sweet, space is vast. Traveling at the speed of light (known to some as c), it would take eight minutes to make it from the Earth to the Sun (and vice-versa). The first radio transmission was two days before Christmas in 1900, and transmitted human speech for almost a mile, and the Taldom transmitter [Передатчик Талдом] in Taldom, Moscow, RF is (at the time of my writing, supposedly), the most powerful (longwave) radio transmitter in the world, transmitting on 153 kHz @ 300 kW and 261 kHz @ 2500 kW. To put it in perspective, if you want to hear Sputnik [Спутник] (Formerly Voice of Russia [Голос России] (post Soviet-era)/Radio Moscow [Pадио Москва] (Soviet-era)) on the moon, best of luck to you! You'd need an absolutely massive antenna and a way of filtering out background noise; as far as I can tell, you can pick up the signal at 4/3 the distance of Earth's circumference away from Taldom, but the moon is roughly 28/3 the circumference of the Earth away (assuming I haven't trailed off too far, English isn't a good language).

Put simply, again, good luck.

Still, that brings us back to the topic of the lack of communication from other space-faring civilizations- we don't know the frequencies they're broadcasting on, they might be too far away to pick up with the background radiation, and we don't know what equipment they're using, if they're using what we call radio waves at all. Before I go any further, though, yes, I know we use high-power dishes to listen into space for any signals, but I wasn't about to go through an amount of research that would sate NASA for the sole purpose of one of my articles, plus I know most of you have listened to a radio in a car and know how it sounds when the signal of a station fades out on a car trip. Still, though, I would like to put it out there that I do consider myself arrogant enough to believe that there are aliens out there, but we can't detect them for a number of reasons (looking in the wrong places with nowhere-near-enough-powerful equipment), so, assuming the Drake Equation is correct, it's entirely likely that there's another planetary civilization out there, not unlike us, with its people looking up at the night sky with the same questions. In short, do I consider the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations to be evidence against them? Obviously not, primarily because I live by the statement "Correlation doesn't equal Causation". We're still looking, we have SETI, so unless there is a sign that, without reasonable doubt, proves we are alone, I'll believe otherwise.

After all, when you played Hide-and-Seek as kids, you wouldn't assume a very-good hider had stopped playing, just because they hid in the closet next to the front door, would you?

AI: My Thoughts

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I want to preface this week’s article with an apology. Usually, I try to find what I consider to be a fitting graphic to go along with my article, but I couldn’t find something this time that I felt truly fits the context of this page. That being said, the content is still the same as I usually make.

My thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are quite simple: while it could be a good tool for the world to have, it could also be easily abused. The reason for this is simply because of how capable some of the free chatbot models [to me] are, but mostly, I don’t want to see people relying on what is essentially a dolled-up supercomputer with programming that “learns” how to be better humans than humans. To my mind, at least, this is the start of a pathway to the singularity. While, yes, computers and technology are a big hobby of mine, I still think that there are things that could be done better without the use of modern technology. Take Windows, for instance. The UI remained largely the same from Windows 95 (or NT 4.0, if you've had to deal with that), all the way up through to Windows 8.x, when it got a tablet overhaul and was, in a word, infuriating without a touch screen. We managed to get advertising in Windows 10 (I don't know if it’s still in Windows 11 because I’m using the Pro version for more than a few reasons which probably has most of that cut out) and good lord… Still, I don’t feel like an idiot for taking a laptop that was, extensively, 10/+ years older than I was (and even ran Windows 1 from a floppy disk for a time) to take notes in chemistry class in Grade 10, but that’s neither here nor there. It had a word processor and didn’t need the internet… though I guess that’s in part because the internet wasn’t even in its current form until five years after the software had come onto market. Still, it worked… loudly. No internet connection required.

Anyway, back to what I was originally going to talk about, and that was my personal opinions about AI. Sure, I’ll admit to using it, but primarily as a last resort (and even then, I make notes from it and have it fact-checked by people I trust) when using a standard search engine yields no [clear] results, trust me. Really, AI, in my personal tests, isn’t convincing enough to use if there are decent alternatives. For my first two books, yes, I used AI to create the cover, but at the time, the most affordable artist I could find was well out of my price range… I’m not exactly rich, but I’m not going to throw a pity party about having nothing because that’s not true either. At the time, AI was the best option I had for a single task to use in the end product of something I was working on. However (and this is a big however), when I ask AI for writing prompts (I don’t generally follow them beyond writing a few sentences, overanalyzing, and coming up with something so far into left-field… It’s great! [he said, sarcastically]), I do get some pretty interesting things, both from the computer program and my own creativity, when it starts firing on all cylinders again. For me, though, I see AI the same as what ISDN was designed as: an interim solution. ISDN wasn’t the end-all-be-all for high speed internet (barring things like satellite, but you factor that in if you want). Simply, ISDN was a stepping stone to DSL and other wired, broadband technologies, and AI is [at least part of] an interim solution for whatever is coming next. No, I don’t think that it’s capable of ending my writing career before it begins, it isn’t going to put every artist out of business in time (some even boast about not using the technology, actually), and it isn’t capable of being human. AI can be thought of as how some autistic people function: the observe, learn, and imitate. I have firsthand experience with that and I’m not ashamed of it. I just suck at public speaking. And singing in front of a crowd. And crowds in general.

Anyway, AI has a place, I’ll admit, but its place isn’t a substitute for the things we humans are capable of. Personally, I'd like to see it used as the tool that it is, not as a replacement for humanity. Call me old-fashioned in that regard, but to me (even though I can’t stand it and actively avoid it sometimes), there’s something about the human touch that AI just can’t replicate. At least not in the near future.