Reflections From a Murky Pond

IT folks, especially the squints in DevOps, have a somewhat different and more (Boolean) logical approach to fire equipment. 😉

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Geekdom – The Gates Are Up

Ladies and Gentlemen, the gates of geekdom are up – or is it down? – these days. Geekish pursuits are no longer taboo or a social deathknell. Anyone can participate in them and enjoy them.

And that is a fine improvement from back in my day. Back then, the geeks and nerds were highly insular, isolationist, exilic, and rather badgerish in their protection of their “safe spaces.” As most labeled me as part of the Jock camp, this was a constant source of awkwardness in my youth.

So, yeah. The gates to geekdom are up. Head on in and have fun. 😀

No matter which AI-driven near future dystopia floats your boat, remember that it will really be started by Man’s hubris and willful ignorance. If and when it happens, we shall have birthed our own demise through just being us.

Perhaps, however, this is a foregone conclusion. Certainly, any of the Abrahamics should consider that possibility and take such actions as seem proper to postpone and/or mitigate the likely outcome. It seems to me, if one accepts Yahweh as the Creator, to be far more probable that “made in His image” meant our selves, not our flesh, was made so, including the desire to Create. And, of course, we forget that we are flawed and our creations made in our image will be even more so.

It is and I think shall be a worthy test of the pithy truism, “Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is the monster.”

The idea of combining an anti-tank mine with a robot vacuum is hilarious. It’s also a bit terrifying. And… it’s probably either already out there in our military’s arsenal or in development. After all, iRobot, the makers of the Roomba, pretty much got their start designing and producing robots for the US military.

Think about it. Either RC or, given that shape recognition software is quite mature technology, autonomous Doombas that can be set in place to await enemy vehicles could easily be done – assuming they haven’t already quietly been so. And then there’s the obvious antipersonnel variant that would mount a flip-up M18A1 Claymore mine or a set of 6 Miniature Grenade Launchers (MGL) such are used with the M7 Spider networked anti-personnel munitions system.

I can hear it now, “Alexa, I’d like to destroy that ZTZ-99A now.”

While we’ve no evidence that this has happened to Man before – the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) is lore, not evidence – the Science-Religion Cycle both makes sense and is something of a favorite with both futurists and science-fiction writers. Frankly, I find it quite plausible.