Replacement Holiday

A lot of the stories that I recall about Christopher Columbus from when I was child were Hero stories. The brave and intelligent Columbus making a perilous journey, and in so doing, demonstrating how wrong about the world the benighted and backwards other Europeans were. After all, most of them thought the world was flat. And if someone pointed out that the Greeks had be able to demonstrate the Earth was round, Renaissance Europe looked even worse; they'd somehow managed to forget what had already been established about the planet.

This story is, of course, false. The reason many people felt that the Columbus expedition wouldn't work was they they knew the Earth was spherical, and they knew roughly how large a sphere it was. If the whole distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of China had been open ocean, no-one would have heard from Columbus or his men ever again. But "Columbus lucked out that there happened to continental land masses within range of his ships" isn't as inspiring a story.

In any event, Columbus Day was basically instantiated as a celebration of Italian Americans. (Although now there is a theory that says that Columbus was a Spanish Jew.)

But that's changing now, with the push to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Which, of course, has a Hero story of it own. The brave and upstanding Native Americans, dealing with oppressive colonialists from across the ocean, and in so doing, demonstrating how morally bankrupt the benighted and backwards Europeans were (I'm sensing a theme here). Having been enabled by Christopher Columbus (who didn't "discover" anything, since people already lived here), they brought diseases, forced migrations and involuntary religious conversion to the Americas.

In any event, Indigenous Peoples Day is basically being instantiated as a celebration of Native Americans.

As I've noted before I'm somewhat cynical about the whole push for Indigenous Peoples Day. It throws Cristoforo Colombo under the bus but doesn't otherwise do anything... as some Native American activists have pointed out.

But in the end, holidays like Saint Patrick's Day, Juneteenth, Cinco de Mayo and Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day don't come across as celebrations of the various peoples that make up the United States. They're days to go shopping and/or to have a party, but other than that, who cares? I don't see any of this as creating a nation that celebrates the different people that make it up. But maybe that's too much to have ever expected.

Linked Together

Some years ago, it was evident that LinkedIn was changing. In part, because the system is flexible enough for people to approach it from a number of different directions.

The problem isn't that traditional LinkedIn also has to make room for Linktagram, FacedIn, SnapLink, WhatsIn and LinkTok. It's that these might not be equally valuable to everyone, but there's no way to focus on the experience one wants. For me, LinkedIn takes all of these different ways of interacting, puts them through a paint shaker and dumps them out on me as an undifferentiated mess. So I have to do the work to sort through my feed to find what might be of value to me, when some really simple features would make that much, much, easier.

As it is now, they compete. And as more people move to one mode or another, that mode can come to dominate people's feeds, even if it not that useful for them. I had been able to stem the tide somewhat with aggressive use of the Mute feature, but since that was deprecated, I've had to start unfollowing people to manage things. Which is an unsatisfactory solution.

The late, lamented, Google+ (well, I lament its passing) had, for a time, a nice functionality called Circles. Circles allowed user to group their contacts into buckets, and then send posts to those individual buckets. So I could create a Gaming circle, for instance, and my posts about Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games could be aimed to those people I knew would be interested. Here on LinkedIn, when I look at my Activity, it's broken down into Posts, Comments, Images and Reactions. While LinkedIn has created an algorithmic recommendation engine of posts it thinks I might light, I find it difficult to keep up with posts from my connections. Being able to see, for instance, just the posts of my first-level contacts from time to time would make the platform more useful in that regard

This won't solve everything. There are always going to be people who feel that they're doing me (and themselves) a favor by manipulating things to get something in front of me in spite of my active disinterest in it. But if LinkedIn can find a way to make it easier for people to experience the site on their own terms, they'll be on to something.

Counter Signed

 

With the elections being in less than a month, campaign yard signs are still common in the area, and that means that sign vandalism is also common. The general pattern is simple: When a Republican campaign worker is putting up signs (such as those in the background), they uproot any signs for democrats in the area, as has happened to these signs for Representative DelBene in the foreground.

Larger signs, that can't be easily pulled up or knocked over, are simply destroyed. It's gotten to the point where large campaign signs simply aren't put up anymore, given their expense and the certainty that they'll be cut to pieces. It's a tit-for-tat game where each side blames the other. But the small signs still abound; even if they spend about half their time lying on the ground.

Grinding

The current conflict between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas) turned one the other day, and currently shows signs that it has a long and healthy life ahead of it, with Hezbollah and Iran having joined in the fighting. This is, as always, bad news for the residents of the Palestinian Territories. Gaza has received the worst of it thus far, with more than half of the buildings in the territory damaged or destroyed, and just over 42,700 people killed since the fighting began.

And this is always the way of things. While it's led some people to speculate that Hamas cares more for attacking Israel than it does for protecting Gaza, I have a sinking feeling that the reality may be worse, and the dead and injured in Gaza are seen as literal martyrs to Israeli aggression, people whose suffering is tallied as proof of the enemy's evil.

Given that Gaza's population is somewhat greater than two million people, even the current level of casualties could be maintained for decades without depopulating the place. And if tens of thousands of deaths, plus many more injuries and displacements aren't enough to push the belligerents to make some sort of accord, one can see this dragging on and/or recurring again and again.

The restoration of the Mandate of Palestine is simply not an option for any sort of foreseeable future. Even a return to the 1967 borders seems to be a pipe dream at this point. The current population is Israel isn't going anywhere, and since Israel is more populous (by about a factor of three) than the whole of the Palestinian Territories and there are always more Palestinians killed or injured in the fighting than Israelis, Hamas' actions are never going to have the desired outcome. The Palestinians are always going to come out on the short end of a war of attrition.

But that's the thing about religiously-driven conflicts, I think. There is always an understanding that a power greater than military capability (or simple mathematics) will decide things. Even if a demonstrated track record of a divine thumb on the scale of conflict is lacking.

The whole thing feels like a large-scale feud, marked not by progress to a conclusion, but an interminable series of outrages and reprisals, as each side seeks to prove that it has the greater stomach for the conflict. Grudges can last a very long time; some have continued on for centuries, perhaps even stretching into a millennium. I suspect that this one will, in the end, be a viable candidate for that kind of longevity.

Cascading

A statue with a fountain in it.

It was a nice day out today, so I went out with my camera to take some pictures. I'm not sure that this statue/fountain was the most interesting thing that I encountered, but it found it striking, so here it is.

One Drop

The problem isn't that no one raindrop feels responsible for the flood; it's that no one raindrop believes that its absence would have made things better.

I understand the idea that the choices that individual people make aren't particularly important, and that social systems need to change in order for certain segments of the population to experience justice. But I think that this attitude, while well-intentioned, leads people to think that their own contributions to how the world works are too small to be at all important. But what is a system other than the actions of a group of people over time?

Haunted

Character.AI allows people to create, well, generative "AI" characters (who could have guessed). And. earlier this week, a user created one of Jennifer Anne Crecente, who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2006, when she was 18. The family was not happy.

But what's up in the air at this point is what can be done about it. While people are angry with the company on the family's behalf and calls for lawsuits have already started, as is common in such things, no-one has yet pointed to any laws or regulations that have been broken. And while the American legal system is convoluted enough that it's generally possible to find something that can be grounds for a civil tort or criminal charge, that's not a good use of the law.

What's going to be put in place to deal with this will, more than likely be driven by emotion, rather than sound legal doctrine. While it's possible that it will turn out that the creation of large language model-based character chatbots will be limited to the person that the character is a likeness of, that strikes me as unlikely. There is going to be a market for representations of people who have already died; Hollywood will see to that, and they're unlikely to settle for always needing to deal with all of the heirs and other relations of an actor they would like to resurrect for a movie. Let alone historical figures, whose extant families might easily number into the hundreds or thousands of people. Even making exceptions for people killed by violence seems unlikely to fly, in that circumstance.

Still, something will likely have to be done. Society will demand it, and it's difficult to say that anything should go.

The technology ethos of "move fast and break things" means that it's always going to be ahead of the regulatory state, which moves quickly only when Congress is overreacting to something. And even then it can't match the speed of innovation. The resources to allow government agencies to actually attempt to get out ahead of things like this are not forthcoming, and even if they were, businesses have a tendency to keep secrets in the name of competitiveness.

It would, I think, be better if a public consensus could be reached on what limits and prohibitions should be placed in technology, but that would require a level of cooperation that's unlikely to come into being any time soon.

Don't Wait

One of the technologies that the advance of generative automated systems (otherwise known as "generative artificial intelligence") has created some enthusiasm about, at least in parts of the technology sphere is "Autonomous Agents." Put simply, an autonomous agent is a system that can act to achieve one or more goals set for it without needing continuous supervision from a person, and has a certain ability to learn from its actions and feedback; adjusting its subsequent actions accordingly. These may not rise to the level of artificial general intelligence, but one could imagine them as expert systems.

I was reading an article on the expected future benefits of such systems and I noted that any discussion of the effects on employment were conspicuously absent. And this is something that's only going to become more important over time, considering that dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts are looking for "absolute airtight language that there will be no automation or semi-automation," at the ports. In any event, during the ensuing conversation, my interlocutor sought to tie this back to earlier periods of technological change saying: "The individuals who understood and prepared for the changes were the ones who adapted and thrived. This will be a challenge that, as a society, we’ll need to address, and hopefully, we can learn from past experiences to improve our approach moving forward."

Hope, however, is not a strategy. And neither is asking individuals to correctly guess what the future is going to look like, even a year from now. Technology corporations often consider the exact details of their progress towards goals to be business secrets, and to expect people to understand which jobs will be viable going forward and which ones will wither and die is unrealistic.

One of the enduring problems that the United States labors under is the general lack of unity of the populace. It's valid to make the point that American Individualism has lead to quite a bit of progress and invention, but it's also lead to people who fall behind being, as often as not, left out to dry by fellow Americans who attitude might best be summed up as "better them than me." As the ability of technology to do work that currently requires people advances, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem. Waiting to find out if it's going to depress the overall need for labor is not a workable plan; that threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The last thing that we need is to be in a position where companies are rushing to implement widespread automation in order to slash their labor costs before large sections of their customer bases find themselves unemployed and without viable prospects. A situation where it takes literal generations for labor demand to rebound will not be pretty.

So the time to start looking at the future of labor is now. Someone has to get started on this. And, as I well understand, when one looks in the mirror, "someone" is looking back at them. I have no idea what needs to be done. But I guess I'd better start finding out. I don't know when or even if genuine autonomous agents are going to arrive. But society needs to be ready before they do.