Friday, 9 January 2026

Scaling down, incredible beards and the increasingly likely end of humankind.


The Wide Boundary Impacts of AI with Daniel Schmachtenberger - podcast with Nate Hagens.

I've been steadily weaning myself off from the internet, bit by bit, not that I was ever utterly glued to my phone but I began to feel uneasy at that slight fear rising up when I didn't know where it was in the house. I'd got into a rut of listening to stuff at night in order to sleep but I've managed to stop that and have replaced it by breath-work - nothing complicated and needing an app, just slow deep intakes of breath and slower out breaths; after a while the thoughts and angst disappear replaced by a warm feeling of security and sleepiness - produced by chemicals in the brain that I forget the name of.
Social media . . . basically it makes me feel depressed, even though I am very grateful to be able to access it occasionally to post a piece of art or something, or to check how someone's doing. I was super relieved that our son has come to the same conclusion and got rid of it all. He's back on track with writing and illustrating, something that had got replaced temporarily by easier scrolling and checking.

As a writer of speculative novels I feel like future-proofing myself with regard to perhaps there not being a 'net' at all - see Londonia's main premise. Therefore relying rather on human face to face communication, reading and creating real hands-on stuff seems a better plan. In the meantime - before the collapse - I'm using the phone still for checking the weather, texting, photos and yes, Youtube. Dear old Youtube. Fond memories of the earlier stages, the fishcake video - sadly taken down, the Alsatian dog being told about treats being given to the cat, Ultimate Dog Tease - still makes me laugh, and it's fourteen years old! 
Fast forward to the massive over stuffed behemoth that it is now. And it certainly has given me an incredible amount of useful information, laughter and things to mull over: health, philosophy, history, geography, politics, permaculture, music, et al. But I'm still trying to narrow it down so that I can do the washing up with just looking out at the birds or without needing anything other than me in silence for a while.
So within the narrower spectrum I now watch or listen to are about five channels: The functional melancholic - posted about before, the Daily Beast/Rest is Politics for a catch up on the mad state of the political world, and quite a lot of science podcasts about AI, AGI and 'super intelligence' as I'm attempting to write a novel which encompasses some of this ever changing vast subject. Actually impossible to write really but fun and brain-stretching.
The above podcast was one of the incredibly interesting and frankly, utterly terrifying descriptions of what is actually going on, and probably will be going on which will change everything for humans, and everything else that shares this maligned and still utterly beautiful sphere we have the fortune to live on.
And . . . for admirers of beards, this has to be the most extraordinary one I've seen for a while. 
Great exchange, and I think I'll need to listen to several times to glean even a fraction of the information.

And then, to lift the gloom, I do allow myself a glimpse into the world of Glenn DeVar's 'Country Drag' - welcome back to country drag, y'all.'



No comments:

Post a Comment