Techno Turmoil

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Revisiting Human Crimes And Their Living Environments

A recurring theme in this column has been concerning how the nature of the configuration of crime changes according to the configuration of living environments. More specifically, we humans start out in more natural traditional living environments with some people being stimulated by all the organic stimuli that surround them to feel a welling up of uncontrollably intense emotion for which abrasive situations in the external world can act as the match to activate it and channel it into violent action. This is what I have called a crime of passion and I use this term in a much broader sense than say a man who kills his woman or her lover, because she or he has been cheating on him. In preliterate societies where abrasive situations out of the ordinary are frequently ascribed to witchcraft on the part of certain individuals, such individuals can be the target of explosive aggression on the part of a supposed victim of witchcraft. This does not mean that visible triggers for these violent outbursts don’t exist. But a revenge for the alienation of affection of one’s lover is only one of a vast list of potential triggers. In traditional societies, people have to protect their honor against many real and supposed grievances. All the organic stimulation in more traditional natural environments tends to give people the feeling that they are being swallowed up by their living environments. A strong sense of self-definition based on a strong sense of honor tends to give people a sense of protection against a feeling of undifferentiation that comes from the sense of being swallowed up by a more natural living environment. Perceived slights from others provide a means of focusing one’s sense of self to protect against undifferentiation. These perceived slights can lead to the acts of aggression against others I call crimes of passion. These perceived slights become a vehicle for channeling all the organic stimuli that well up within a person as a result of the influence of all the organic stimuli to be found in a more natural field of experience.

Over time, as modern technology has displaced and even replaced the natural traditional components found in human living environments, the impact of these organic stimuli in the external world on humans diminishes. The organic stimuli, which are flowing blendable continual stimuli, are replaced by technological stimuli, which consist of defined discrete stimuli for the actual different steps of technological processes and the different machine figures involved as well as infinite vacuum stimuli for the pauses between the discrete steps of technological processes as well as the sharply defined physical spaces that exist between machines and between machine products. Technological living environments have very different configurations of stimuli from the more traditional natural living environments that have vast masses of grounded organic stimuli with imperfectly formed figures that are still grounded in the organic backdrop of the field of experience. In contrast today we have vast vacuum spaces filled with the free floating fully formed figures of modern machines and the products they create. These free floating figures may create clutter in the vacuum spaces they occupy, but they don’t create bonded connections as they would in a more grounded natural environment.

The transformation in the human living environment created by modern technology does not occur overnight. It has occurred over centuries. And this means that the transformation in the nature of crime has also occurred gradually. It’s not like one day criminals were committing crimes of passion and the next day, they were committing crimes of numbness. As a matter of fact, we can say that there were transitional stages leading from one to the other. Diffuse killings led to more focused family feuds, led to more refined individualized duels, many times with what at that time represented modern technology, namely pistols. But there is something very mediated and numbing about walking away from someone and then potentially killing him from a distance with a pistol.

Duels were not truly a crime. After all, they were an institutionalized form of violence during certain periods of history. A true crime of passion would be to sneak up on someone and shoot them, or stab them without giving them a chance to respond. But a duel does represent a focused expression of passionate aggression, a shrinking of the channels of expression of passionate emotion and perhaps of the amount of internalized angry passion on the path of evolution towards the loss of passion in today’s world as a prime factor in the expression of violent behavior. The situation is complicated, because certainly today, particularly in some 3^rd World countries, there are, because of strong cultural predilections, still expressions of highly emotive violence. But particularly in much of the industrialized world – United States, Canada, Europe, among others – crimes of numbness have become a dominant form of violent expression.

And as technology becomes more and more pervasive in human living environments, there the expression of crime will continue to evolve. Unless something changes dramatically, there will be a greater and greater frecuency of crimes of numbness. Already people are becoming inured to a steady diet of more shootings appearing in their newspapers and even in their lives.

In today’s world, the crimes of physical injury are increasingly not so much channeling uncontrollable emotion towards someone so that the emotion can be released as much as they are trying to jolt the perpetrator out of his numbness by artificially stimulating emotion that isn’t there, so that the perpetrator can feel alive. And as technology attempts to take on more and more aspects of life so that life can supposedly become more frictionless and generally easier, people are going to sink into deeper and deeper states of numbness. And as the numbness settles in, a greater and greater percentage of these people are going to disrupt society with their crimes of numbness, leading, of course, to more and more tragic results. That is unless people start to consciously limit their participation in consumer technology and start trying to increase their living in primary experience and external world reality. Trying to restore some more traditional natural patches of living environments would also help. It would certainly be a part of a positive start.

Losing One’s Touch With A Blackboard

When I was a little boy, one of the most dramatic moments in my classroom life was when the teacher, in order to either highlight a particular point or else to put the knowledge she was imparting to us on that day in some kind of visual order, would momentarily turn her back on her students in order to write something on the blackboard. She would pick up the chalk and start making broad strokes on the board. The teacher, with all the experience she had, was able to write without making that terrible screeching noise that sounded a little like people scraping window glass with their fingernails. Instead, because she knew what she was doing, she would make a deeper smoother hissing sound with her chalk writing, a sound that represented a certain amount of friction, but not an intolerable abrasive friction like the friction associated with the screeching sound. The deep smooth hissing sound of chalk, used properly, was an indication of one of the more important physical tasks that young people in modern society witnessed as they grew up. Given the fact that most young people in modern society are kept apart from the main work processes that sustain society, and certainly the main physical work processes, writing on a blackboard with chalk represented one physical work activity that was available to them, that was an integral part of the daily job of one category of workers and therefore that represented a work activity with economic importance. Students could see and hear the chalk moving and, on some occasions, feel the chalk moving with its attendant friction, as they wrote with it themselves. It certainly required generating more physical friction than either writing as in taking notes or coloring with crayons. That extra friction of the chalk being moved across a blackboard generated a little extra immediate drama in an educational experience that, for the most part was fairly mediated as an external world experience.

One more thought with regard to blackboards. A teacher writing on a blackboard is a shared public experience which makes it like an event. Coloring and writing notes tend to be more private experiences and, therefore, don’t have the same kind of impact on children.

As is true with other patterns of technological innovation, some people just had to find a way of making more frictionless the act of writing on a public surface in order to teach students. Not only in terms of the actual writing, but also in terms of cleaning up the markings when the teacher was done with them. These are the reasons that whiteboards became so popular towards the latter part of the twentieth century. Writing with a marker on a whiteboard is much more effortless than writing with a piece of chalk on a blackboard. There is no significant sound that comes from passing a marker over a white board, no deep smooth hiss, because there is less friction. And cleaning a whiteboard, particularly the better models, is so much more complete than cleaning a blackboard, although some of the cheaper models can be stained.

Because of the convenience in using a whiteboard, it has practically entirely replaced blackboards in most schools, workplaces and homes. Convenience in this circumstance means less pressing, less energy require to apply the writing instrument to the writing surface. One might also say less skill. There was an art to applying just enough pressure to a piece of chalk so that it could effectively write without squeaking or breaking apart. A marker requires much less pressure to use, makes practically no noise, and there’s no danger in breaking it while writing. And I think that because it is a relatively more frictionless process, the writer is not as bonded, as connected to the words as they come out. A marker does not make as strong of an imprint in the mind of the teacher who is utilizing it, nor does it preserve as strong an imprint in the minds of all the people who are experiencing it.

One other thought just occurred to me. Maybe there is something to be said for the chalk residue that remained as a result of the imperfection of the cleaning that came from a blackboard eraser. It provided a kind of externalized mental grounding representing the layers of thought that had been built up and that led to the thoughts that were then on the blackboard at the final moment of use for a given classroom period of time. These residue were a sign of the interconnectedness of all the ideas that had been presented during a particular class room period. Dispersed chalk dust represented the flow of a teacher’s cerebration. And when students were asked to participate, of the intertwining of teacher and student thinking.

But now there are innovators who hope to replace the conventional whiteboard. Microsoft, Google and Dell all have different versions of a touchscreen whiteboard with a very big television screen. Dell has the newest, and its version is the one that is most oriented towards education. Its screen is 75 inches and allows for many users for purposes both of collaboration and of interactive learning. Dell calls its version a Blackboard, although it obviously operates very differently than a traditional blackboard. Obviously, there is practically no friction in writing on a Dell Blackboard. One can use either one’s hand or a stylus, but either way, just as with a smartphone, one glides across the screen with so little friction that one barely feels anything. There is almost no pressure, so one barely becomes aware that he is leaving an imprint. It is truly an experience that, whatever the actual context, one feels like he is operating in a vacuum. One does not actually experience oneself making or preserving an imprint. In other words, it represents one more area of life where one no longer experiences one of the fundamental routines of human beings.

And not experiencing the act of leaving an imprint is certainly going to affect the quality of the imprint. In a frictionless vacuum, one becomes a frictionless robot or avatar with more pat shallow formulaic thoughts. Interacting with a touchscreen Blackboard, if used generally in educational institutions, is going to have very harmful effects on our students. This becomes one more area where making life easier is going to have unforeseen consequences. There really were some very positive aspects of an old-fashioned blackboard.

The Dangerous Oasis of Consumer Technology

Up until now, there have been certain assumptions made in this column about how humans become robots. People experience sensory distortion living in modern technological environments. This sensory distortion is created by the vacuum and tension pocket fields of experience in which they live. Vast expanses of understimulating vacuum filled with overstimulating pockets of bundles of abrasive disconnected clashing figures. In modern technological environments, the grounding created by nature and traditional living environments was gradually lost as were the organic stimuli that people were built to absorb. In the human march to control nature in order to fight back against organic perishability, people increasingly lost the opportunity to commune with nature. Initially creating vacuum environments was synonymous with creating safe environments: modern architecture and sterile minimalistic interiors and frictionless machine operations. Increasingly, as people have started to feel more and more numb in vacuum environments, they have tried to purposely create certain overstimulating tension pocket experiences to pull out of the numbness: venues with loud abrasive electric guitar music and strobe lights, motorcycles and racing cars as well as free love and certain recreational drugs like coke,speed and heroin. And when people have felt too overstimulated they would always bounce back to a vacuum experience of their own creation: white noise machines, yoga, meditation and other drugs like pot and downers. People could bounce back and forth between these two extremes in a vain attempt to achieve some kind of greater stimulus balance of the kind that humans had when they were still living closer to nature and in more traditional living environments.

Another major way that a person could achieve that balance of stimulation was to use technology to directly create an experience with more of a sensory balance: namely the screen reality experiences of movies, television, video games, computers, smartphones and tablets. Also, the experience of robots. A robot was able to survive the sensory extremes of the modern technology external world reality in which it existed by living off of the technological stimulation that surrounded it. By absorbing both the defined discrete stimuli of the electricity upon which it operated and the seeming lack of stimuli which, in truth, is the infinity vacuum stimuli from when the electricity turns off. And the robot expresses itself with defined discrete angular activity when it’s moving, alternating with vacuum pauses, sometimes just micropauses, when it switches direction, intensity or activity.

Again there was an assumption in my model that people started to unconsciously imitate robots as a way of dealing with the sensory distortion that came from overstimulating tension pockets and/or an understimulating vacuum. But recently I have come to realize that not all modern technological living environments are plagued by sensory extremes. They have enough of a balance between vacuum spaces and free-floating figures to provide an intensity of stimulation that approximates the intensity to be found in most traditional more natural living environments.

In particular, in talking about these more sensorily balanced modern technological living environments, I am not talking about a living environment where people physically immerse themselves in an external world reality living environment. Instead, I am talking about technological living environments in which people immerse themselves mentally. In other words, I am talking about screen reality living environments: movie theaters, televisions, video games, computers, smartphones and tablets. With computers, smartphones and tablets, we have the numbing vacuum effects of the mediating screen balanced out by the abrasive stimulation of the large bundles of data and information, the violence web sites and the pornography. The screen in the screen reality provides a constant base (I can’t really call it a grounding that bonds). The content that appears on the screen provides a vacuumized narrative of free-floating figures interacting and clashing with one another and unfolding and transforming sometimes by themselves and sometimes as a result of the interaction with the viewer/participant human. But because the combination of the screen and the content provides an intensity level of stimulation that is comfortable and somewhat more easily absorbable than the patterns of stimuli normally found in the technological external world, people become addicted to their screens.

The major problem with these more advanced modern technological living microenvironments provided by screen reality equipment is to be found not in the intensity of stimulation that they provide, but rather in the quality of stimulation they provide. The problem is that there is a paucity of the flowing blendable continual stimuli, organic stimuli, necessary to keep people functioning properly as animals. Without these flowing blendable continual stimuli from natural sources, people absorb the balance of defined discrete stimuli and infinite vacuum stimuli in their technological living environments and gradually start to mold themselves after the technological complex behavioral entities that surround them – the computers and the robots.

Again, this is the result of feeling a need to escape the sensory extremes of the modern technological external world and cling to the oasis of a balanced technological model, leading to a gradual imitation of the complex behavioral entities – the computers and the robots – that humans today see as a solution to the problem of the sensory distortion provided by the modern technological external living environments.

However, escaping sensory distortion is only one of the reasons that humans today model themselves after computers and robots. Another is that there are few if any positive sources of organic stimuli, of flowing blendable continual stimuli to move towards. So people simply gravitate towards the one category of sensorily balance experience that is available: the sources of screen reality.

If we want to fight robotization, we have to find a way for people to be able to experience more different sources of organic stimuli. So they can gradually start to pull away more from the negative influences of all the different sources of screen reality.

Robots Who Are Masters Of Love

A new robot was introduced this holiday season with a different focus than that which we would normally associate with robots. This new robot has not been created primarily with what we normally would think of as a work or task purpose. Rather, it has been created to elicit love from humans who are evidently incapable of eliciting love from among each other anymore. The robot is called a lovot, short for a love robot. It has been created by Groove X, a Japanese company, and its short-term purpose is to create an intimate relationship between humans and the lovot. Supposedly, once the lovot elicits the capacity for love from the human, the human will then be more capable of loving all the people around him.

The lovot has flippers rather than arms, so it can’t lift anything. It moves around on wheels. It does have a camera on its head, so it can monitor children, other loved ones and whoever enters the house. It looks a little like a Teletubby. It’s operated with among other sources something called Emotional Robotics ™. There are touch sensors throughout its body. The eyes have a six-layered construction to create a sense of depth. It’s a furry pseudo creature, about one and a half feet tall. The product is sold in units of two, and as love grows between the two lovots, it can act as a model for the humans around them to love one another.

In all the years of doing this column, I think that this is one of the most misguided inventions that I have ever heard about. The notion that just because an entity is furry and warm, moves around like a creature (on wheels) and, because of sensors, seems to respond to touch and to seek attention, that such an entity is some kind of mammal-like creature deserving our love is demeaning to humans. Humans are supposed to love entities with an organic coherent sense of self. This includes many vertebrates as well as other people.

The simple fact is that lovots are robots, and like all robots, they have sensors that pick up only defined discrete stimuli and infinite vacuum stimuli (the pauses between the crisp programmed defined discrete stimuli) and these are the only kinds of stimuli that they process internally. And although it may seem otherwise, the only kinds of stimulation that they are emitting to the humans that they want to love them are also defined discrete stimuli and infinite vacuum stimuli. There is none of the flowing blendable continual more mushy stimuli that we associate with organisms that are trying to bond with one another.

So how is a machine going to teach humans how to love? To be open to the sustained stimulation that a lovot has to offer, one has to be open to the mirroring and modeling that a lovot can potentially give. And, of course, as we submit to this mirroring and modeling, we gradually become more and more like this modern complex behavioral entity. And this means we become more and more robotic. Our sense of self becomes reduced more to bundles of defined discrete data floating without grounding in an experiential vacuum and less to the organic cohesion that is so uniquely characteristic of higher vertebrates. In other words, we have some self-definition, but we lack the internal cohesion to hold it all together. We end up blurring together with this machine that is supposed to teach us all about love.

The real question is that, at this juncture of human history, why do we need non-humans, non-vertebrates to teach us how to love? It certainly seems contrary to common sense. The answer resides in the fact that we have already become so reconfigured by all the modern technology with which we have engaged, that we are having difficulties organically connecting directly with other human beings. So now there are some of us who feel that an entity that is a type of the very technology that has hurt our capacity to bond with other people should be configured in such a way as to act as a mediator somehow to connect us again with other people. Of course, rather than teach us how to bond with humans, all that will happen is that we will become more and more immersed in our robotic tendencies as we start to treat a robot as if it were a human. In truth, it is a little like pouring salt on a wound.

What is needed is to pull away from those aspects of modern technology that are more optional in our lives such as recreational consumer uses of screen reality, and forcing ourselves to spend more time in the external world in primary experience. It is a difficult proposition, because we have grown so addicted to screen reality. And as more uses develop for virtual reality, an even more numbing experiential modality because it totally surrounds us, it will compete even more directly with external world reality as an experiential field in which to live. By contrast, a tangible warm furry robot that has mass, matter and substance will almost seem like a source of organic experience.

This is why it is important that we start pulling back from mediated technological experience now before the reconfiguration of our minds by technology becomes so thorough and so fixed in place that we become totally robotized. And, of course, warm furry robots like lovots make it more difficult to pull back, because they blur so effectively the distinction between humans and robots. Which is why we should completely avoid getting involved with the lovots and not embrace them.

Returning To The Land With Robots

A topic that was discussed a while back in my column was why people living in rural communities exhibited the same pathological effects from modern technology as people living in modern urban environments. The explanation that was given was that people everywhere today immersed themselves in the fields of experience of their screen realities: in their movie screens, televisions, video games, computers, smartphones and tablets. In rural communities, this meant that people were constantly experiencing the sensory distortion both from the understimulation of the numbing screen that separated the viewer from the content behind the screen, as well as the overstimulation from the tension pockets of the content on the screen: the bombardment from the streams of data, the sites dealing with membership in extreme social and political groups, and pornographic sites. So rural people like urban people had their minds reconfigured by the overwhelming presence of this new screen reality such that they could more effectively absorb the stimuli emanating from this new screen reality. Finally, the rural people like the urban people lost their capacity to effectively absorb the organic stimuli from more natural environments, even though they were living in more natural environments than urban people. This explains why so many people in rural communities in places like Ohio and West Virginia have gotten addicted to opioids. Like the abrasive streams of data, violent web sites and pornography on the Internet, opioids present an abrasive tension pocket stimulation that can pull modern rural residents out of their deep numbness.

This disconnect from nature offers us an explanation for why so many rural residents, or people in general for that matter, are no longer interested in doing farm work. Why so many farms have difficulty finding the people they need to do many of the tasks that have to be done on farms. And this explains why people are looking at robot farmers with such great interest.

So now we have the development of robot farmers that are being created to plant crops, prune crops, attack weeds, harvest crops, and transport large quantities of crops. Many observers embrace this technology and feel that this is the only effective way to deal with the world’s growing population. Maybe this is so. But work is not only a vehicle for producing products and services. It is also a vehicle for producing validating vibrant life experiences in which we make, receive and preserve organic imprints, create meaningful life narratives and prepare for death by developing personal surrogate immortalities. And farming provides a vehicle for connecting to the original template that allowed humans to make organic imprints – a natural environment, one that in this case has been reshaped by humans in order to provide a predictable supply of sustenance. If we all can’t live on the farm anymore, it is at least nice to live vicariously through some human beings who do. It becomes a vicarious model for more natural behavior. What kind of model is going to be left, if robots gradually take over more and more of the work functions on a farm? For a young person, it will be one more example of the idea that if a person wants to get significant labor or management, for that matter, work today, he very likely has to model himself after a machine.

The people who make these robots have indicated that there will always be a place for humans in farm work. Perhaps, but what percentage of workers are we talking about? The trend in situations like these is to permit modern technology to take over more and more segments of the operations. And as this happens, it is not only the rural folks, who are still predisposed to farm work, who lose the opportunity to engage in it, who are affected by this technology takeover. It is also everybody else who loses the opportunity to vicariously engage in these more organic farm activities through observing these workers on visits to farms, or on television programs, or in articles that discuss them. Simply being aware of human farm workers gives everybody else a sense of the possibilities that still exist, even if the possibilities are presented in a somewhat indirect truncated form.

Perhaps what we can say is that there are two categories of behavioral models. There are those behavioral models that we consciously or unconsciously directly try to imitate and that have a direct focused impact on who we become and what we do in our lives. And then there are those models that remain in the background of fields of experience as potential sources of imitation and that, nevertheless, add an atmosphere, an influence, a flair to those activities that we do focus on. So that even if our work is in information technology, we can still maintain a somewhat organic flavor to our lives, dreaming sometimes of professions where people are more organically connected to the world. And there are some people who do give up engineering or other more conventional professions in order to go back to the land. But with robot farmers encroaching on more and more of the farm work, what is there left to dream about, to fantasize about in terms of connecting to nature?

But you say, the whole reason that farms are turning to robot farmers is that there aren’t enough humans to do all the farm work. Modern technology has gradually reprogrammed people to be less capable of absorbing organic stimulation and thus engaging in more organic work. And now that same technology is replacing the people that it has reprogrammed. And as I have pointed out, this is an unfortunate situation not only for potential rural farm workers, but for all of us who like to fantasize about the natural connection provided indirectly by these farm workers.

Monday, December 24, 2018

Creating Friction-filled Problems To Feel Alive

We have all learned at one time or another that sometimes it is important to postpone gratification if we want to achieve the greatest rewards in life. But sometimes it goes further than that. Sometimes not postponing gratification can lead to negative unintended consequences. If a child eats his desert before his main meal, he loses his appetite for the truly nutritious part of the meal. If Congress cuts taxes without cutting expenditures, the national debt can rise dramatically. If a couple decides to make love before they can have access to protection, an unwanted pregnancy or the transmission of disease can result.

What we are talking about here is thinking in the short term vs. thinking in the long term. In many areas of life today, people are focused on short term desires rather than long term desires. One can simply write this off as hedonism, but hedonism is a descriptive moral term rather than an explanatory term. If we are concerned about the effects of these attitudes, then we have to try and understand the causes behind them.

I think that there are two approaches that we can take to this situation. First of all, there is the idea that as life becomes more and more frictionless, as a result of more and more labor-saving devices in the external world and as a result of living more and more in screen reality, both of which create a vacuum-filled alternate field of experience, that we simply become used to a life that gets easier and more frictionless. And this totally distorts the way we sense things in our lives. So short-term cravings fill our minds, fill the numbness in which we increasingly live, in order to reconnect to the external world, even if only for brief moments. People in the American Congress can pass a tax bill that doles out a lot of benefits in the form of tax relief particularly to wealthy people. This is thinking in the short term. In the long term, the deficit explodes. But obviously the people who passed this bill weren’t thinking in the long term. In order to get some temporary financial grounding in the present, the people in the American Congress have created a big tension-pocket for their children’s generation. Some incredibly abrasive friction in the form of an enormous addition to the national debt. On the surface, on the one hand, that will certainly pull the children’s generation out of experiential numbness. But the experience of dealing with paying off even a part of the debt could be so painful, as in the government having to cut many benefits particularly for the middle class and the poor, that the debt could drive the average citizen into the internal numbness of a deep depression.

Another angle is to start more from the flavor of the experience within the person rather than on the interactions between the person and modern technology. As a person today sinks into numbness, he becomes increasingly a free-floating figure in a vacuum. In order to pull himself out of his numbness, he intermittently takes jabs at solutions within the situation where he finds himself, in order to generate enough friction during isolated moments and in order to relieve himself from his numbness and in order to feel more fully alive during these moments.

When one is numb, one is in great psychological discomfort. The discomfort is in itself a defense, although not a healthy one, to help one feel more alive within the numbness. A terrible tension pocket of abrasive overstimulation to help a person fight the numbing understimulation of a vacuum. The only defense against the discomfort is to push the causes of the pain into the external world.

So we can say that thinking in terms of the short term is a way to simultaneously ground oneself intermittently by landing on short term solutions to different abrasive irritations, both real and imagined, as well as a way to create stimulation through the process of generating organic friction in order to get rid of perceived abrasive friction. The only problem is that short-term solutions to abrasive friction, are, in the long run, just temporary solutions to secondary problems. The real problem is the experiential numbness that underlies a lot of human life in the modern world. Yes, tension-pockets of overstimulation – the waste products and unintended consequences of the technology we use to make life easier and more frictionless – are not forms of abrasive friction we purposely search out. But other forms of abrasive friction are forms of stimulation that we do search out to pull us out of the fundamental numbness that is the experiential foundation of modern technological society. Most obviously motorcycles, hot rods, motorboats, and modern electric guitars among other sources. But also there are those situations that we call self-destructive where we do things to defeat our ostensive goals and then have to live with the ongoing abrasive emotional stimulation of disappointment as well as the uncomfortable external world situations that result. Big chronic problems can result, which, on one level we welcome to fight the numbness from a perfectly frictionless life. On another level, these chronic problems not only offer a defense against numbness, but they offer opportunities to find short-term solutions through generating organic friction to temporarily eliminate the effects of abrasive friction.

It is sad that people need to find ways to self-destruct in order to dedicate themselves to find solutions to the problems they have created for themselves and then, using the combination of self-created problems and self-created solutions to pull themselves out of their numbness and feel alive. Maybe what this tells us is that a certain amount of healthy organic friction from grounded more traditional more natural environments is necessary in order to live psychologically more healthy lives. The search for a perfectly frictionless life is one that can only lead to continuing major problems for people.

Spouting News From A Fake News Anchor

In a previous article, I discussed the use of virtual reality to recreate people, both dead and living, for different screen performances. It was pointed out that in the process of creating the representations of these people, not only did the distinction between these vacuumized representations and the real people that corresponded to them tend to blur, but, more particularly, the vacuumized representations tended to impart a sense of ghostliness and evanescence to the real people. And this, in the long run, is going to affect how ordinary people end up treating one another. If people in daily life start to appear ghostly and evanescent to us, then it really doesn’t matter to us, doesn’t concern us, if we then use them to pull out of our own sense of ghostliness and evanescence, our own numbness, through making them targets for angry aggressive behavior, even violent behavior.

Now come the Chinese who have created an artificial news anchor on television. It has been created through a combination of virtual reality and Artificial Intelligence. The Chinese supposedly created it, because it is more efficient than a human and more economical as well. Whatever their ostensive reasons for creating this entity, there will certainly be some unintended consequences as well.

One of them is the manner in which the Chinese will absorb the presence of the artificial news anchor. Unlike the virtual representations of Michael Jackson and other famous people, the artificial news anchor is not meant to represent any known human being. So the artificial news anchor does not entirely partake of any specific mass, matter and substance of a human being who lived at any one time. There may have been a human model for the news anchor, but the connection between the model and the anchor would be much more tenuous than that of a famous human with his virtual representation. So the artificial news anchor has a much greater lightness of being than a virtual representation of a famous person. It is much more like an avatar, except without an actual known human being referent point. It is a highly vacuumized complex behavioral entity. The complexity makes it believable as a human-like screen reality creature. So the Chinese will be drawn to it and will commune with it, to the extent that one can actually commune with a machine. And in communing with it, the distinction will blur between the real human and the artificial human in the fields of experience of these Chinese. And the highly vacuumized artificial news anchor will contribute to vacuumizing the viewers watching it. And the viewers will be watching it much more than they would be watching virtual representations of famous people. Such an experience will touch the Chinese viewers with ghostliness and evanescence on a regular basis.

There is a sense in which the news anchor is a kind of trusted authority figure. First and foremost, he is supposed to be someone who is dispensing the truth about the people and events that are appearing in the news. And in a world as vast, complex and overpopulated as ours, it gives us a sense of control over things if we have true knowledge about what is going on. But the fact is that the presenter of the news in Chinas is soon going to be something (not someone) that is not what it appears to be. It is not an actual human being but rather a vacuumized representation of a human being. A representation that can be manipulated to say, without any problems of conscience, whatever the Chinese government wants it to say. Unlike a human being, a vacuumized representation is incapable of forming its own opinions about a political situation. It is incapable of betraying any subtle unconscious disagreement with the opinion that it is given to express on air.

So, in the end, the fact that the entity is pretending to be something that it isn’t, leaches into the perception of veracity of the content of what it is saying. An untrustworthy presentation of what it actually is leads to a loss of trust in the content of its message. In other words, the Chinese will develop a skepticism with regard to believing him. And this will be contrary to what an authoritarian government like the Chinese government is trying to achieve. A vacuumized entity like an artificial news anchor just does not have the gravity to make and prepare meaningful imprints on its viewers. And, therefore, the news it conveys does not make and preserve meaningful imprints on its viewers.

Not only will the vacuumized quality of the news anchor rub off on the viewers, but also the vacuumized quality of the communications themselves will rub off as well. The numbness will spread to the communication between the Chinese. As people become more and more numb in their skepticism as to what they are hearing from the artificial news anchors, it will make meaningful communication among those Chinese who view it more difficult. It will make them feel more disconnected from the external world.

And then, of course, as a reaction to enveloping numbness, many Chinese will become more and more aggressive both towards themselves and towards one another: one person explosive tension-pockets. It is not good to try to subtly fool masses of people by creating a vacuumized entity for screen reality that pretends to be a human. The ripple effects will be far reaching, and the upshot is that viewers won’t be able to trust reality anymore. This will lead to severe psychopathology. And it’s all being done to cut costs and create a frictionless efficiency. The problem with frictionless efficiency is that what seems frictionless and efficient today, can seem very abrasive and very inefficient in comparison to what later inventions can do, as humans become increasingly intolerant of any form of friction. Who knows what some day might replace artificial news anchors, but something will. And this invention will push the Chinese and perhaps others into deeper layers of a vacuum, disconnecting people more and more from one another. And such a trend threatens the very survival of the human race.