Trusting Your Life to Technology

As everyone is already aware, the first known pedestrian fatality caused by a robotic car occurred last week. While there is much speculation of "what if?" and "how come?," it's clear that the vehicle is at fault. While the driver might have been able to stop the car in time, a robotic driver is expected to do the same, but with a much faster reaction time. The engineers behind the algorithms controlling the car will update their programs and a similar incident will be unlikely to occur again. Elaine Herzberg literally gave her life in the name of science and has caused the self-driving world to reassess its progress at producing a viable product.

Imagine, if you will, a large safe suspended over your head. It is held securely in place by an electromagnet that is powered by the grid. If the power should fail, the safe will fall and you will likely be killed in the process. Would you trust the grid to keep you from dying? How about if you add a battery backup system to keep the electromagnet energized? Or a gasoline generator in case the power is off for an extended time? Would you ever come to accept this arrangement?

There is an irrational belief among many that computers are never wrong. However, their simple little minds are connected by physical paths that may, from time to time, fail somewhere in the myriad of silicon etchings. Most of these random failures are harmless, but statistical probabilities dictate that some are not. If your calculator gives you the wrong answer, it's not immediately life-threatening; but the failure of a sensor in your car's cruise control could be fatal.

In 1923, George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. His oft-quoted reply was reportedly "Because it's there ... Everest is the highest mountain in the world and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive; a part, I suppose, of man's desire to conquer the universe."

Do we really need self-driving cars? Or do we simply want them because of our desire to conquer the universe? After issuing his famous quotable words, George Mallory died in 1924 during his third attempt to conquer Mount Everest.

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SketchUp and KerkyThea

About ten years ago, I played around with Google's SketchUp. When the trial period was up, however, I chose not to purchase the software. A couple of years later, I discovered that the software was (then) free from Google and so I downloaded a copy and have been using it ever since. Having spent much of my former life doing 3D modeling, it was a joy to use it to make things. However, the way it displayed things wasn't terribly realistic, and so I began to play around with rendering software as well--most of which, after the trial period elapses, is quite expensive. Except, that is, for Kerkythea, which is an open-source product that provides a plugin for SketchUp ... how perfect is that?

After modeling a number of items in SketchUp, I was able to arrange them into a rendering which is almost perfectly photo-realistic. While I spent quite a few hours putting it together, my out-of-pocket cost was zero (which aligns nicely with my budget). In the rendering below, there is a clock which contains all the gears and levers accurately modeled (even if you can't see all of it), a set of digital calipers and other implements of deconstruction, all lit by a halogen desk lamp on a teak desk (using my dining room table as a texture). The drawing was done by hand and scanned in as an image.

The calculator is of interest because I also had it 3D printed at half-size:

You can even make 3D renderings:

SketchUp Make 2017 is the last "free" version that is now offered by Trimble, Inc. Moving forward, you can either buy SketchUp Pro 2018 or use the "free" version on the web (search for SketchUp Free). Note that both "free" versions may not be used in any shape, form, or fashion to make money, either directly or indirectly. However, it's perfectly priced for hobbyists and easy enough to learn if you put your mind to it. Combine it with 3D printing or rendering products and you can achieve some amazing results. And it's FUN!

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OMG! Facebook Isn't Free!

It has recently come to light that Facebook uses its non-paying user data to help target advertising for its paying customers. I always wondered how a company that provides a free social network to billions of people managed to become the richest entity on the planet ... now I know! Just like "free" TV, Facebook runs paid advertisements. Unlike "free" TV, however, Facebook's ads are targeted with laser-like precision to those most susceptible to their influence. If people are willing to pay billions of dollars a year to Facebook to do this for them, then it must be worth the money or they would quit paying the fees.

While we could survive without toilet paper, it's high on everyone's list of necessities. We all use it; we all need it; it's only a matter of what brand we prefer. The battle for toilet paper supremacy is a tug of war over the buyers of an essential staple. In general, these sorts of ads are mostly harmless.

However, beyond basic survival needs, like food and water, there is a cornucopia of things on which to spend our money. Fifty years ago, the average American was exposed to as many as 500 ads a day in newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, billboards, bus benches, movies, and more. These were all passively received, of course, as the reader/viewer/listener had no immediate way to interact with the advertisements.

Today, the exposure number is somewhere north of 4,000 ads a day. So many, in fact, that we are typically oblivious to ninety-nine percent of them and are only drawn to the captivating one percent that goes viral. Amusing, shocking, unbelievable, outrageous ... it takes a lot to grab someone's attention, nowadays. But, unlike fifty years ago, it's now followed up with a click or a tap that provides the originator with confirmation that you are interested. And, if you are logged into some sort of social media framework at the time, the originator will know who you are and what other items you have clicked on in the past.

Your click-profile is analyzed and grouped with similar profiles that are then offered to potential and existing advertisers. The more you click, the more you help to refine this profile. A marketing firm may not know your on-line identity, but it won't matter because the social network will deliver their ads directly to you for a nominal fee. And a nominal fee times 2.2 billion users clicking on ads generates a pretty healthy revenue stream, indeed.

So, if clicking some video causes your friends to do the same and their friends to check it out, etc., any idea can spread like a virus throughout the social networks. Does it really matter if it's true or not as long as it caused you to pause, click, and share? Is it really Facebook's fault that everyone is doing the same thing? And that click-bait is so pervasive throughout all of the news and social media?

The next time you buy a phone that you don't need, or book a resort vacation in some trendy hideaway, or buy a new washer and dryer because the old ones weren't WiFi friendly, remember that the choices you are making were planted there by advertisements. Whether it's Facebook or some other media, there is a clear distinction between what you need and what you might want. Knowing the difference can help to sort out the mostly harmless ads from all of the others.

Don't let the Internet tell you what to think!

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A Modern Sword of Damocles

From Wiktionary (obtained only moments ago):

Damocles was an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a fourth century BC tyrant of Syracuse. Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority, Dionysius was truly fortunate. Dionysius offered to switch places with him for a day, so he could taste that fortune first-hand. In the evening a banquet was held, where Damocles very much enjoyed being waited upon like a king. Only at the end of the meal did he look up and notice a sharpened sword hanging directly above his head, held only by a single horse-hair. Immediately, he lost all taste for the festivities and asked leave of the tyrant, saying he no longer wanted to be so fortunate. Dionysius had successfully conveyed a sense of the constant fear in which the great man lives.

Today, we all live under a similar threat of death, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. The sword, in our case, is technology. The single horse-hair that keeps it from falling are the power grids and the communication networks. It is these that essentially supply the food and drink that we need to survive. It is these that essentially insure that we don't freeze in the winter or die of heat prostration in the summer. The absence of either of these would be catastrophic, to say the least. If both were to fail at the same time, it would drive the proverbial sword through our entire population.

When I was born, there were less than three billion people on the globe. Half of them were starving and malnourished while the other half made out well enough. Today, there are now more than seven billion--a 160% increase in just my lifetime--thanks to improvements in food productivity and delivery mechanisms. Half of the world is still starving while the other half is still doing well enough. Throughout history, the world population has always been controlled by the supply of food and water. In more primitive cultures, entire tribes died out when they had so many people that they stripped the earth bare of renewable resources. Today we are simply doing the same, but on a much larger scale and far more efficiently than our ancestors. An efficiency that is driven by power sources, whether they be water-driven, coal-fueled, solar, nuclear, or other. Power sources that leverage the equivalent work of a few hundred humans into moving a vehicle or millions of them lifting a rocket into space.

Like the Sword of Damocles, the possible failure of our technological marvels hangs over our collective heads. At any moment, the single horse-hair holding everything together could be snapped by a powerful blast of electromagnetic radiation from the sun. The certainty of such an event is one-hundred percent--it happens all of the time; the likelihood that such an event will hit our tiny planet, fortunately, is quite remote. However, remote does not mean never. While, the odds are very close to zero, they are still a finite possibility.

Maybe it will happen before I can finish this and the world will never have a chance to see my thoughts (how fortunate for the rest of the world). Or maybe it won't happen until long after I'm gone. I like the second choice better than what any of the post-apocalyptic novels portray as my possible future when it happens. It won't be pretty, but, hopefully, I'll never have to deal with it.

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The Chaos Series

I just published my fifth science-fiction novel, Goddess of the Gillani. Ever since I was twelve years old, I've wanted to publish a book. It didn't matter if it was fiction or non-fiction or even some random poetry; any book would do as long as it could sit on my bookshelf along with all of the other books. About a year-and-a-half ago, my dream finally came true with the release of The Chaos Machine. A book that was intended to be much longer, it languished for seven years as I poked and prodded at it, never quite getting anywhere. At the beginning of the summer of 2016, my wife asked me, "Are you ever going to finish the damned thing?" I promised her that it would be done by the end of the summer and so I put in the hours to try and make it happen. By the time that August rolled around, I had churned out over 85,000 words into something that was nowhere near the end of my story, as I envisioned it. However, I was able to bring things to a somewhat satisfactory ending and it was finally published on August 14, 2016.

I had tried to make the book into a standalone novel that had no sequel, but a number of people wanted me to continue the story, so I wrote a second novel called Second Contact. While the focus of the first novel was the historic influence of aliens on human society since 5,342 BC, the second one explored the influence of humanity on these same aliens 5,342 years from now. This novel centers around the antics of a nineteen-year-old human and her discovery of an alien probe. An incident that ultimately leads to her upending the alien Empire that had languished for millions of years. How mankind's transition came about between the two novels was never adequately explained, because I still hadn't managed to get around to the main idea behind the original book.

The third, and final, book of what is now The Chaos Trilogy, explains how humanity advanced from the first novel to the second. Both novels referenced the "Final Blackout," when a coronal mass ejection from the sun destroys all of our electrical and electronic devices and the third book, Mankind 2.0, begins with this event. Unlike other post-apocalyptic novels, however, mankind survives thanks to the introduction of alien technology that is provided by The ACME Corporation. Referenced many times in the first two novels, ACME's origins are finally explained along with the ultimate solution to man's long-term survival. It also clarifies that the original aliens are all clones, having lost the ability to reproduce naturally some three-and-a-half million years ago.

In response to demands for more stories about Cassiopeia Evanland, the nineteen-year-old protagonist of Second Contact, I wrote a sequel called Colony Ship New Hope (New Haven or Bust!) in which she discovers a four-million-year-old colony ship that had never awakened thanks to a technical glitch. In the process of helping these aliens establish a foothold on a new planet, it is learned that they are the ancient ancestors of the current Empire and, unlike the current clones, can still reproduce the good old-fashioned way.

In response to feedback from these two Cassiopeia Adventures, the Goddess of the Gillani picks up where Colony Ship New Hope left off. Not everyone is happy with the changes brought about by Cassiopeia and, as a result of deliberate sabotage, she finds herself in a galaxy far, far, away after a Bad Jump. As she learns, however, she is not the first to arrive from another part of the Universe. Some 300,000 years earlier, another alien had landed in her escape pod and was treated as a goddess by the native tribes she encountered. When Cassiopeia arrives, she is mistaken for the goddess due to her uncanny resemblance to the Ancient.

All of the books of The Chaos Series are available on Amazon, of course.

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Wisdom of the Crowd

The phrase, "wisdom of the crowd," is an oxymoron. However, it is becoming widely accepted that the belief held by a majority of people is somehow "wiser" than the minority who might know better. In addition to the television show with the same name, this "wisdom" was explored in episode seven of "The Orville," a somewhat uneven sci-fi parody of Star Trek.

"Majority Rule" is set in a society where everyone votes up or down on everything using their ubiquitous smart phones. During a discussion with Lysella, one of the inhabitants of this society, an observation by the robot-like Isaac says it best:

Captain Mercer: "So this is an absolute democracy?"

Lysella: "Yes. How does your world work?"

Captain Mercer: "We select representatives who discuss issues and enact laws."

Lysella: "But ... what about everybody else? Everybody deserves a voice. That's what we're taught."

Lieutenant Commander Bortus: "A voice should be earned ... not given away."

Captain Mercer: "How do you know what foods are healthiest for your children or what medicine to take if you're sick?"

Lysella: "We vote."

Isaac: "I believe you are confusing opinion with knowledge."

The belief that the "wisdom of the crowd" is superior to a few knowledgeable individuals is, of course, the commonly-held opinion of the crowd itself.

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Coming Soon!

Another Cassiopeia Adventure that follows

Colony Ship New Hope: New Haven or Bust!

For maximum enjoyment, you
should read The Chaos Trilogy first:

The Chaos Machine

Second Contact

Mankind 2.0

Available on Amazon and other fine booksellers worldwide.