Artificial Intelligence—The End of the Life As We Know It? Part one

I will begin by answering the question: There is no way we can know. Artificial intelligence (AI) is neither good nor evil. It is an advanced computer method for analyzing streams of data and looking for patterns, then using those patterns to fill in gaps in our knowledge. Computers have been doing this for decades, and humans have been doing it for centuries with pen and paper and abacus. The difference is that we are surrendering our decision-making prerogatives to AI.

It would be very useful to have, if we do not already, an AI program to detect unusual patterns in our cells that may signal the onset of cancer, far earlier than a human observer could detect it. Then the program could alert a doctor, who would talk with the patient. This could save a life. But AI programs do more than this. They decide if the patient will, in fact, get cancer. They then alert insurance companies, which will then deny insurance coverage even if the cancer is a decade or more in the future. Insurance companies do not like to cover “pre-existing conditions” (in France, they have no choice), but what about future conditions? Too bad, buddy.

It is also useful to have AI programs that can detect possible clusters of terrorists or criminals. Law enforcement or military personnel could then take precautions. But what if a “terrorist cell” turns out to be a wedding in Gaza? Too bad, buddy. You get bombed. I wonder how many billions of dollars have been spent bombing what a human observer could easily have seen was the wrong place. We end up killing thousands of innocent people and creating enemies around the world.

Or an AI program identifies you as a criminal, and you get arrested. Eventually, you might be exonerated, but probably not for a long time, since, law enforcement assumes, computers are never wrong.

An AI program might identify the ideal investment for you to make with your huge stockpile of money. It could go ahead and invest it for you, since the opportunity might be lost otherwise.

In all of these cases, the human prerogative of making the decision was surrendered to the AI program itself.

An AI program can be racist, for example, if it is designed to be, or even allowed to be. Or it can use any metric of human appearance as a basis for discrimination. AI is designed to not let you know the basis of its decisions, because that basis will be a mathematical algorithm that would seem like gibberish to almost everyone. Facial recognition programs, for example, have a higher rate of misidentification among people of color than among whites. This is a problem that can be corrected, if someone wants to. You can bet that if Nazis had had AI, they would have built racism into it.

There is a fundamental delusion here, as explained by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. That delusion is: The more information you have, the closer you will come to understanding the truth. The problem is that much or most of the information that you have is going to be wrong, leading you in a random direction or even the wrong one. AI analyzes the information, and leads you, at best, in a random direction.

Harari’s books, this one and Sapiens and Homo Deus, are widely recognized as being the wisest and deepest books on human history. If you only read three books about human history, it should be his three books.

We all have our own AI horror stories. Mine is, fortunately, more funny than tragic. I publish books online through Kindle. One day, without warning, Kindle Publishing blocked one of my uploaded books. An AI program made the decision, a decision that was never explained to me. I tried solving the problem, and my account reappeared and disappeared over and over. Finally a human being (an underpaid staffer in India) got involved and reinstated my account and all my books. I never did find out what the problem was. Only the AI software knows. Maybe it scanned the cover image of my grandfather and decided that it was, in fact, a photo of Kim Kardashian. Is there a close resemblance? You be the judge.

Never heard of Yuval Noah Harari? His own book will explain why. The human brain is not designed by evolution to pay much attention to reams of data, no matter how important they may be. It is also not designed to pay much attention to big, overarching ideas, which is what he writes about. The human brain, evolving over millions of years in tribes, cares almost only about specific stories. We are good at remembering even complex story lines so long as they do not have too many complex ideas or too many characters. At most, the average person can remember just a part of the history of his or her own family or country. That is certainly the case with me; I know a lot about Cherokee history, especially my own family, but other aspects of history? Not so much.

If you have a racist AI program that picks out books for you to read, perhaps it would identify Yuval Noah Harari as African and that, therefore, he is biased or even stupid. Actually, he is Israeli. But by the time you have figured this out, you have already passed up reading his books.

Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell: A Novel by Stan Rice, part four. Even in Hell, They Know Racism is Stupid

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

In the Billy Stormfield novel, the only people who were in Heaven were the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, who spent all day every day killing each other, and then they would resurrect and do it again the next day. War is the ultimate good and pleasure for godly people at least according to the fundamentalists of these two monotheistic religions. And the Christian fundamentalists were racists, who required that schools teach that Black slavery was a good thing for everyone, including the Black slaves themselves. (This is not too different from the history requirements that almost got adopted in Oklahoma in 2025.)

In Rice’s novel, one racist (Stonewall) got tired of this and slipped off to find some peace and quiet. He found it in Hell. He also found a former history teacher from Oklahoma, a Black woman named Philomena. As is nearly inevitable in novels (Rice’s novel is clever but is more of a fable than a novel), they realize how stupid it is for the white (and Black) leaders to teach that they should hate the other race, and they fall in love. The climax of the novel is when they get married.

Given what Twain thought about slavery, he could have put a similar scene into his book about the original Captain Stormfield. For whatever reason, he did not.

Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell: A Novel by Stan Rice, part three. What Would Pete Hegseth Say to Douglas McArthur?

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

 

Pete Hegseth is the American Secretary of Defense or, as he would insist, Secretary of War. To his way of thinking, the Department of Defense is not doing its job unless it is prosecuting a war somewhere. I don’t suppose the war has to have a good reason. One can only imagine that Trump and Hegseth started the Iran War because, well, we need to have a war somewhere. The reasons they gave were either untrue (to open up the Strait of Hormuz, which was already open, but is now intermittently closed) or vague. Well, Pete got his war. Where does the money come from? The answer is, who cares, we will find the money. He spent a billion dollars the first day on bombs. The deficit (on what should be called the Donald J. Trump Federal Deficit Clock) now exceeds forty trillion dollars. The interest on this debt eats up about half of the money the federal government takes in by taxes and other means.

Pete Hegseth is a fundamentalist Christian. This means that he really, really believes that God ordered the Israelites to slaughter entire cities of Canaanite people—every man, woman, child, and animal. Hegseth further believes that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). He further believes, without Biblical foundation, that America is God’s Holy Nation. Therefore, if God wanted the Israelites to slaughter all of the Canaanites (presumably, this would include any Canaanites who attempted to surrender), He must want us, today, to slaughter our enemies, even the noncombatants, women, and children. By being Iranian, doctors and nurses deserve death. Bloody, gory death, not quiet executions. At least, he should believe these things, to be consistent with his other fundamentalist beliefs.

One of the most famous military leaders in American history was General Douglas McArthur, who oversaw the Pacific theater of operations in World War II. He gave the order (passed on from President Truman) to use atomic bombs on Japan. So far, Hegseth would make a good McArthur.

But then, McArthur ordered Allied troops to occupy Japan but to do so nondestructively. They were not to rape, pillage, or destroy whatever was left (that is, whatever the Japanese dictatorship had not already destroyed). He even shut down the American-sponsored whorehouses. The self-interest was clear: America wanted Japan to be an economically-strong ally, something that would be extremely expensive if American troops razed Japan to the ground.

The Japanese were astonished that American troops did not kill them all, as Japanese troops had done to their victims in Korea and China. They even began to love the Americans. There is a famous photo of a storefront in Japan that, in response to the announcement that McArthur was considering a presidential bid, “We play for your erection.” (Actually, this is not quite what the sign said.) In contrast, Hegseth would have felt obligated to tell American troops to kill all the Japanese. American history classes should therefore teach that Americans failed to carry out God’s complete will in World War II.

And, according to Rice’s novel, this is why General Douglas McArthur was in Hell.

 

General Douglas McArthur and Japanese Emperor Hirohito in 1945.

Billy Stormfield's Visit to Hell, a novel by Stan Rice, part two. Noah the Environmentalist

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven.

 

Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

Fundamentalists do not necessarily believe that all environmentalists will go to hell. But certainly any “greenies” who would want to spend a lot of money to save endangered species are damned in the eyes of their God.

One of those was Noah. He built an ark (probably subcontracted the work out) that was big enough to hold all of the animal species in the world. The ark was not quite as big as you might suppose, since when the Old Testament was written most of the world, and its biodiversity, was unknown. (See Stan Rice’s article on this subject for Skeptical Inquirer). But the dimensions described in Genesis were huge and required a lot of wood to build. No explanation is given in the Bible for how so much wood could be obtained or who would pay for it.

However you look at it, the ark was probably the biggest financial undertaking the world had ever known and, relative to the poor economy of the ancient world, it might still rank number one in human history by that measure. It certainly cost more than any modern environmental expenditure. A waste of the resources that God has given to His servants? No wonder Noah ended up in hell.

Many of the animal species were economically important. But most of them were not. I can imagine Noah’s wife saying, “Why are you bringing all those snakes?” Maybe Noah was wondering also. But God did not say, just bring the species that you like. So you don’t like skunks? God told Noah to bring them anyway.

As usual, Mark Twain took this further than anyone else. In Twain’s writing, the ark was safely on its way when it had to turn around and pick up a species that had been left behind: the smallpox virus. How can you reconstruct a post-Flood world without smallpox?

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part fourteen. Dreamscapes

When we walk, we each see our world in a different way, and differently at each stage of our lives. Let me tell you a personal example of this.

I grew up at the base of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. I could see the snow-covered peaks of the mountains in the clear air of winter, and I occasionally visited the magnificent forests of giant sequoia trees. But what I saw every day was the foothills. They were covered with grass. The only trees were oaks that grew amidst granite boulders on some of the hills. I am still not sure why the trees grew only amidst the boulders. Perhaps it was fire, or perhaps it was cattle, both of which could kill trees on smooth ground. But even on the smooth ground, there were occasional boulders, some of them large and craggy. They reminded my childish mind of menhirs and dolmans and other works of human art.

Boulders on smooth hills made me feel like I was looking at a heavenly landscape. Even today I have occasional dreams of entering an enchanted realm of boulders and grass. These are almost the only really beautiful dreams I have. Thankfully, I don’t have many nightmares. Most of my dreams are busy and stupid and quickly and thankfully forgotten.

The magical landscape of boulders and grass is not the real landscape. The weeds amidst the grass, such as fiddlehead Amsinckia, and even the grass itself, especially the wild oats Avena barbata, left prickles in my socks. Most of the year, all the plants had died back to the ground. Everywhere was the scent of cow dung. That is the reality. But that is not what I dream.

To get to the biological field station where I taught botany one summer, I drove through northeastern Kansas. There are interesting parts of Kansas, but this was not one of them. It was absolutely flat and often nothing but wheat fields was visible. Fortunately I had not passed judgment on this land, for it is where one of my students was from. “It is the most beautiful place on Earth,” she said. And she was right, about her dreamscape.

This sort of dreamscape is not reality, nor is it illusion. It is a transformed reality. I wonder if any other species of animal has this kind of imagination. And I wonder how much it is the product of our long history, and much longer prehistory, of long distance walking, of tribal leaders imagining themselves on the top of a distant mountain.

Billy Stormfield's Visit to Hell, a novel by Stan Rice, part one. Communists in Hell

 

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

Well, of course, fundamentalists would think that all communists go to hell. But this novel has some surprises: There are souls in hell that you would never have guessed were communists in human life.

Of course, Karl Marx was there.

But also, it turns out that all traditional Native Americans were communists. There were at least five hundred tribes, different from one another in many ways. One of the few things they all had in common was that they held their tribal lands in common, rather than private, ownership. They individually owned tools and houses, but the land belonged to the tribe. This caused a lot of problems when the American government took away tribal lands (for example, the Cherokees, as described in some of Rice’s other novels) and tried to allot acreages to each individual or family. Besides the fact that this gave the whites an excuse to steal unallotted tribal land for themselves, it was also inconceivable to the Natives. That’s how Joe the Cherokee ended up in Hell.

But the Apostle Andrew? In what way was he a communist? You may recall that, at the beginning of the book of Acts, all the Christians were living together “in an upper room,” and they held all things in common (Acts 4:32). This was the pattern that Jesus had established among his followers. As a matter of fact, a couple of the Christians got in big trouble (God killed them) when they held some of their possessions back from common ownership. That’s how Andrew ended up in Hell.

And Pope Francis. He believed the rich should be required to share their wealth (not necessarily all of it) with the poor. I guess that made him a communist.

This is just the beginning of the surprises you will encounter in this novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell.

Edd’s Land: A Novel of Four Cherokee Brothers in Early Oklahoma, a novel by Stan Rice, part five. William and Tuberculosis

Author Stan Rice has just published the third of three novels (Edd’s Land) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This third novel is about four Cherokee brothers in early Oklahoma.

Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

Four mixed-blood Cherokee brothers, and the white swindler who steals their land and oil allotments, greet Oklahoma statehood in different ways. Edd Hicks loses not just his land but his fiancée to Averd Hargrove, a Claremore banker. Edd remains confident and upright, and brings order to his farmland and family. Frank Hicks learns confidence as he plots his dramatic revenge against Hargrove. Lon Hicks leaves his past behind in pursuit of a failed Hollywood career. William Hicks is ill with tuberculosis when he meets the great Oklahoma socialist crusader Kate Barnard. Frank, to the disapproval of his racist family and friends, falls in love and moves in with Bert Hicks, a black woman descended from slaves owned by Frank’s ancestors. Frank nearly gives up on his plan to scalp Hargrove until he sees Hargrove leading a lynch mob against Bert’s brother. The net effect of the vast wealth of the former Cherokee Nation is that Edd’s daughter Nina finally gets enough money back from the United States government to buy a new pair of shoes.

This part of the book tells the story of a forgotten portion of American history. William Hicks was highly refined and educated, having especially fine handwriting. But somehow he got tuberculosis. This was during a half century of American history when people knew all about bacteria but not what to do about them, the half century before antibiotics. If you got TB, your death was almost inevitable, though slow; and it was dangerous to let you circulate in society.  You would be sent to a sanatorium, where you would rest in dry, cool air until you expired. And this is what happened to William.

As a reader, I wonder if there might have been more to the story. How can you prove that someone has TB? A white government official could declare that a Cherokee, with a minor respiratory ailment, had TB and this would make him forfeit his allotment. This story is told through the eyes of William, who apparently does not suspect this possibility.

The Great White Plague is now almost forgotten, but it killed millions of people. So many that, in fact, Europeans decided to make the best of it. They called it “consumption” and praised the delicate pink features and frailty of the victims, featuring them in operas such as La Traviata and La Bohème in which the divine consumptive soprano sings an aria and falls over dead. It is central to several stories by Andrea Barrett.

Another aspect of history that is almost forgotten is that, when it first became a state, Oklahoma was almost socialist. Today, while most states have become a little more progressive, Oklahoma is as red as a state can get. The test of a true Oklahoma politician is how beloved he or she is of Donald Trump. But one of the great Oklahoma heroes of the early decades of the twentieth century is Kate Barnard (see A Life on Fire by Connie Cronley), openly socialist. She would absolutely not fit into any conceivable modern Oklahoma administration.

What is left today in Oklahoma of the lives and deaths of people, like the four brothers in Rice’s novel? We get some idea of this from the epilogue, written in the voice of the author’s mother Nina Rice. All that remains in Oklahoma is a legacy of corrupt politicians, such as the congressman who takes a bribe to give a postmaster position to an unqualified person. And what remains of all the strife and blood experienced by the Cherokees? The federal government paid the Cherokee tribe for its expropriation of Cherokee Strip land (mostly the panhandle of the state). Nina says that the money she got from this, which was all that remained for her from her tribe’s strife and blood, was just enough money to buy a new pair of shoes.