Plastic Dignity

Plastic Dignity
#myworld

Food is culture. Language is culture. The sitcoms we watch on TV is culture. We now share the culture we grow up in with an increasing number of people from different races. Why should race define culture - and indeed why should culture define race?

True fact. When someone says that maybe it's suppose to mean "it is a well-known/little-known fact that ... is true", playing on the idea that no logical statement is a fact, until it is actually known.

Understanding grammar is immensely useful, but that's what machines are good at. Reading what people mean is what you need for the next decade.

On AI

Can capitalism sustainably support a large human population in a post AI world?

If we choose to stick with capitalism, I've been thinking what activities/jobs we perform are enjoyed specifically for the fact that it is done by a human being - things like expression (not to be confused with creativity), performance (not to be confused with dexterity), political representation (not to be confused with fairness).

But this is probably the extreme end since we're still a long way before we can get quantum computers to do AI, so for the time being the energy consumption to take away complex R&D jobs will help them stay for a while.

On the other hand, if we took capital ownership away, we would remove the idea of "employment" as we know it - if automation can provide for humanity and free humanity to do their human things - like learning about each other, fixing poverty, imagining new ways of living and interacting, finding new systems of government that make life meaningful in a post-work era, challenging yourself for the sole purpose of understanding what a human being is capable of etc - why is AI a bad thing?

But this would profoundly change how humans experience the reality of life, and we have to collectively imagine what life can look like. Problem is, we have a lot of baggage that puts a lot of value in "making an honest living" - that fact that it takes effort to stay alive is woven into our biology.

Oops sorry for the verbal diarrhea!

Checklist : Can AI replace you?

Checklist : Can AI replace you?

Process stability
How easy is it to create a KPI that can be calculated without human intervention?

Probabilistic complexity
How many human beings are able to affect that KPI directly?

Human touch
How easy it it to quantitatively express the difference between the experience of having a need met through receiving the product or service, as opposed to a customer creating the product or performing the service directly.

Third Generation

(Beat: http://youtu.be/Z9gVvxa2sgQ start on the 22nd second)

Education
Language assimilation
Report cards trading for toys
Concentration - no girls for boys
No distractions
No unscreened friends
No unaccounted time
No unclean hands
This is the life of the third generation
Migrant in my blood
Survival in my hands
They taught me how to live
But I'm dead from my core
I can travel the world
But I'm always abroad
I have no language I have no home
I have no culture I call my own
I'm living on borrowed time
Rented apartments constructed lives
I'm whatever I imagine myself to be
My mileage is my history
I'm done with the metaphors of traditions
Of ideologies and of religions
I see the worlds I leave behind and can no longer understand it's what's and why's
Sometimes I dream what it'd be like
If I grew up hokkien or penangnite
Would reality be an unbroken line
Would I sing the same song in different rhymes?
But I'm still rocking it and I still have plans
And retrospection ain't one of them
I wanna see I wanna be
Everything that isn't me
Migrant in my blood
Survival in my hands
They taught me how to live
My Jekyll and my Hyde
I love the day I love the night
And maybe someday I'd love my life
I don't care what my skin may say
I don't care if my accent gives me away
This is what I paid for with sleepless nights
This is my crack, my meth, my ice.

I see visions... Visions
I see visions...

My mind is ever restless
I can't wait to get breathless

Visions...

I don't know where I'm going
But my feet are on the move
I just know it'll be a trip
And there's nothing left to lose
I'll just have to learn to be more laid back
Believe in myself believe in my bet
This is the life of the third generation
I'm free to write a story different than Dad's
Push myself nearer my imagination
My heaven my hell my life my death

Living in Japan made me realize there are two ways to run any organization - you keep your stockholders satisfied by acknowledging the inevitable sacrifice needed to realize a noble ideal, or you keep your stakeholders alive because every rent counts.

The problem with "nerds" is that we make them think what they do is not extraordinary, and then blame them for not understanding what the ordinary person is capable of understanding - because we cannot begin to comprehend the brilliance of their achievements. For those whose work we understand but whose means are beyond our imagination, we call them talented, so we need not go on the journey of questioning why we are incapable of something so beautifully obvious.