I subscribe to the MIT Review of Technology. A recent issue has an article about how Google's Deep Mind is playing Goat Simulator 3, an AI tool designed to enhance game play in a number of ways articulated in the piece. What caught my eye, though, was the graphic that featured AI-created comic goats dressed up with helmets and shoes and powerpacks, and all of them sticking out their tongues, ready to play. Funny. And uncanny, too. (For a moment the goat lads recalled the January 6 rebels. A frisson swept through me. Could freedom be at stake?) AI art sometimes gives me the willies -- like they're making fun of us mere mortals.
In this article, we're told that "An AI that can play Goat Simulator is a step toward more useful machines." We're told the AI is the same code-mind that beat Lee Sedol at the game Go in 2016, and broke his heart. AlphaGo (2017) was a documentary that cautioned that Google's AI had crossed a threshold and essentially warned us that AGI was not far away. It drew this conclusion because for the first time a machine had shown signs of spontaneity and creativity, and used those skills to defeat a human. Now you get the sensation that the creation of "more useful machines" might refer to humans.
I smoked a doobie and pondered on this like the old days in the 70s when hallucinations were still fun and useful.
Goats. Well, I hadn't seen many goats in the 70s. Unless you count Jimmy Carter. I mean, Reagan, behind Jimmy's back, convinced the Iranians to hold on to the hostages a little longer for a better deal, which ruined Jimmy's reelection campaign. Of course, Jimmy stupidly agreed to that Playboy interview and made it his October Surprise, like some common knucklehead. What was he thinking? That all the rightwingers would have peanut envy when they saw Jimmy's confession to having "lust in the heart" surrounded by naked beautifully photographed women in the pages all around him. And he listened to Dylan. But was he insane? What did Betty Friedan think, I wondered. But then I recalled that Gloria Steinem had gone undercover as a bunny, shaking her bushy tail for feminism. Was she in that collection surrounding Jimmy?
And also -- hold it in! -- Dan Ellsberg wrote in his Doomsday memoir that Jimmy almost got us killed in a nuclear confrontation with the Russkies at the Iranian border that was worse than Cuba. Where'd I put my El Cid? Remember how Billy Jean King kicked Bobby Fischer's ass and jumped the net and women started smoking their own brand, Virginia Slims, which became a sponsor for the tennis? Bong. Bobby Riggs, I mean. It just gets my goat.
Goats. Goes back a ways to horse racing, I've read, unless that was just a fake story planted by a scheming AI appster to undermine the authority of two decades of education. Yeah, supposedly, to keep the horses calm before a race they'd companion a horse with a goat, and some shyster figured out if you stole ("got") the goat night before the race the horse would run jittery and lose and end up like Boxer on his way to the glue factory ob, say, Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor. When you hear them say, "That ol' Boxer was the glue of society," now you know what Orwell meant. You could say that Boxer was scapegoated. Bong.
Course Nietzsche was the first one to bring goats to my attention with his first oeuvre, The Birth of Tragedy. The 'tragedy' has its roots in goats. He says, It derives from Classical Greek ????????, contracted from trag(o)-aoidi? = "goat song", which comes from tragos = "he-goat" and aeidein = "to sing" (cf. "ode"). It would sound like this, Nietzsche said. And if you had empathy, then you would have a catharsis movement and your rain of tears would bring on a deus ex machina. Nietzsche never finished his doctoral dissertation and when this book came out the academics around him laughed so hard. Goats! Pass the bong.
But you know, he might have been on (to) something. In 1993, when I began my odyssey overseas, wishing to revel in my freedom, only to come across the siren's schweinhunden time after time, snorkel porking, ruining "reputations," real half-living, halfwit mud flaps. It was in Istanbul, at Eid, when, riding on a cramped minibus, I saw my first goat throat slashing -- right there on the bus route. They didn't care. Bong. Me, all judgmental, then I went to Taksim, on the European side of the Bosphorus, and had a kebab. I recall these slaughters whenever I eat feta cheese. Real sensitive. And there, later, at a baked potato joint (really dress it up, too, mmm), I saw a goat dressed to the nines with, you know, sacrifice written all over it. Maaaa. Tethered. Waiting. Doomed. Jesus, what would Salman Rushdie say? Speaking of scapegoats.
Sarasota FLA 9/11 goat
Speaking of scapegoats, how about that gift we got with GW Bush reading The Pet Goat (the MSM mistakenly referred to it as My Pet Goat: see what I mean about the distortion of the press?) to those little school kids in Sarasota, Florida on 9 Eleven . I mean, the goat story was (who knew?) a prelude to that infamous trag(o)-aoidi? that befell us all that day. Remember? Yeah, and it turns out that other sequels to the story were found. But GW Bush wouldn't have read them to the children. GW Bush used the 9 Eleven trag(o)-aoidi? to invade Iraq under the guidance of his vice president, Dick Cheney, who was CEO of Halliburton just before he became Veep. He had plans for that red can. Iraq was a scapegoat. Afghanistan became a scapegoat. And 20 years went by, and the biggest polluter in the world -- the Pentagon -- helped accelerate Climate Change, while at the same time denying it. On the anniversary of 9 Eleven GW Bush and his crew reprised their roles on that day in 9/11: Inside the President's War Room, a documentary so flippant in its purpose that you wanted to scream. He wasn't in charge that day (Cheney was) because Air Force One had major league communication problems and the news on TV was scrambled; he even conveniently had video of the scrambled images. And they said that at the bunker of the White House responders were falling asleep because something was interfering with the oxygen level. And they had, somehow, video of people falling asleep. And then Aryan Flusher, the president's chief propagandist, claimed that the half dozen members of the inner circle on the plane were terrified that one of their lot might hijack the plane and bring it home to the White House. Imagine that! he said. Why, that makes Air Force One a scapegoat! Bong.
Joseph Kony, Goat
No doubt, Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony was a bad man. He had an army of children. Children! The children killed. We all hated Joseph Kony for that. Children! Then a 'good' man put together an internet campaign, called Kony 2012, which led to millions of mostly American children going after Kony online like a Saudi swarm team after a Twitter target. Then next thing we know the cries of these poor outraged white American kids, appalled at the treatment of their peers in Africa, demanded that Congress take action immediately. and action was taken, and by jolly golly good beans boots were soon on the ground looking for Mr. Goodbar or something. Problem was Kony had not been seen in the country for three years. Then it turned out that the American kid soldiers had been used by the US military and IC establishment. No sign of Kony today. And also, did he start Covid-19? Somewhere came the smell of fetid feta cheese that reeked of goat. Scapegoat cheese. Crackers love it.
Julian Assange, Goat
JA is a huge scapegoat. JA wrote a book several years ago telling us to seek out cryptography to protect our privacy, but few in the mainstream did so. Some of us tried to use Tor, the open system that protected by encrypting the entire network of end users using Tor, but didn't account for those users already targeted by deep forces and routinely slapped with a rootkit on their PCs allowing a view to everything they do online and access to their hard drives. Some of us tried relying on VPNs, only to discover most of them kept trace records of who you were (esp. through IP address storage and credit card details). Databases full of dissident names have long been established. Anyone of any consequence on the Left is now accounted for, along with their families (collateral).
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