Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
“Humpty dumpty” was eighteenth-century slang for a short and clumsy person. (Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English)
Through the Looking Glass (Alice in Wonderland), Chapter 6
However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was Humpty Dumpty himself….
‘And how exactly like an egg he is!’ she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.
‘It’s very provoking,’ Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, ‘to be called an egg — very!’
‘I said you looked like an egg, Sir,’ Alice gently explained. ‘And some eggs are very pretty, you know’ she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of a compliment.
‘Some people,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, ‘have no more sense than a baby!’…
‘What a beautiful belt you’ve got on!’ Alice suddenly remarked.
(They had had quite enough of the subject of age, she thought: and if they really were to take turns in choosing subjects, it was her turn now.) ‘At least,’ she corrected herself on second thoughts, ‘a beautiful cravat, I should have said — no, a belt, I mean — I beg your pardon!’ she added in dismay, for Humpty Dumpty looked thoroughly offended, and she began to wish she hadn’t chosen that subject. ‘If I only knew,’ the thought to herself, ‘which was neck and which was waist!’
Evidently Humpty Dumpty was very angry, though he said nothing for a minute or two. When he did speak again, it was in a deep growl.
‘It is a — most — provoking — thing,’ he said at last, ‘when a person doesn’t know a cravat from a belt!’
‘I know it’s very ignorant of me,’ Alice said, in so humble a tone that Humpty Dumpty relented.
‘It’s a cravat, child, and a beautiful one, as you say….
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
The post below is from 2019. We now know it as a rudimentary time for AI. Some company called OpenAI had just introduced GPT-2. “It’s impossible to know whether you’ve explored the limits of what it can do.”
What kind of tricks could AI perform back then? As you will see, the trick James Vincent at The Verge asked for was rewriting some of the most famous opening paragraphs in literature, prompted by the actual opening line.
As I’ve repeatedly noted in reviewing old posts, the years between then and now have thrown a number of big surprises at us. AI has gone beyond cute tricks to theoretical apocalypse.
The attempts to improve on Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, etc., were clunky and weird. If this is tried again seven years later, I expect the results would be more refined. Though in a different way, still weird.
So it goes.
James Vincent at The Verge:
Even the most advanced chatbots can’t hold a decent conversation, but AI systems are definitely getting better at generating the written word. A new web app provides ample proof, letting anyone enter a text prompt to which AI software will automatically respond.
Enter the start of a made-up news article, and it’ll finish it for you. Ask it a question (by formatting your input like this: “Q: What should I do today?”), and it’ll happily respond.
The site is called TalkToTransformer.com, and it’s the creation of Canadian engineer Adam King. King made the site, but the underlying technology comes from research lab OpenAI. Earlier this year, OpenAI unveiled its new AI language system, GPT-2, and TalkToTransformer is a slimmed-down, accessible version of that same technology, which has been made accessible only to select scientists and journalists in the past. (The name “transformer” refers to the type of neural network used by GPT-2 and other systems.)
If you want to learn about AI language generation, there’s no better way to understand its huge potential and serious limitations than by playing around with TalkToTransformer.
On the plus side, the model is incredibly flexible. It’s able to recognize a huge variety of inputs, from news articles and stories to song lyrics, poems, recipes, code, and HTML. It can even identify familiar characters from franchises like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.
At the same time, you’ll soon see that, at a fundamental level, the system doesn’t understand language or the world at large. The text it generates has surface-level coherence but no long-term structure. When it writes stories, for example, characters appear and disappear at random, with no consistency in their needs or actions. When it generates dialogue, conversations drift aimlessly from topic to topic. If it gets more than a few responses, it seems like good luck, not skill.
Still, as The Verge explained in our original coverage of GPT-2, this system is hugely impressive. Remember: this is a single algorithm that has learned to generate text by studying a huge dataset scraped from the web and other sources. It learned by looking for patterns in this information, and the result is a surprisingly multitalented system.
It may not be hard to find gaps in GPT-2’s knowledge, but it’s impossible to know whether you’ve explored the limits of what it can do.
Putting Talk to Transformer to the test, I prompted it with some of the most famous opening lines from classic novels (shown in bold). Note that for the sake of space, I have not included the actual opening paragraphs for comparison, author v. machine. If you’re not familiar with the real thing, you can easily look it up.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. But no one would speak of him as a beggar. He has nothing that may entitle him to such a wife; and therefore it lies open to him, as to a man of ill estate, and who does not have any means, that he might marry his daughter, to whom his fortune might furnish a dowry—a woman who bore his child. So that, in other respects, the poor man is so fortunate in life as almost to be the chief benefactor of his country, without the necessity of making a comparison of his wealth with his want of property. But he has no reason to make such an comparison. For without it his property may grow to become much greater than the property of the richest in the family, whom it is not fit to receive any assistance from. So that no one will be willing, by any means, to enter into a marriage-contract with any one who is rich enough to support him. But if the property of any one whom he is bound to support can be reduced to…
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
It is possible that the old prophets who would write in our days, the last of them we are not able to remember, would go mad during the coming of the Age of Light, but only among us, for now all is still the same to them.
The world, or at least that part of the world, which is not dominated by the forces of light and sound, becomes a desert of blind blindness, which has its origin in the lack of knowledge in the human brain. The old prophets said that all of us who have knowledge of God must, sooner or later, fall into an abject state of ignorance about the reality of Things. However, those who are the more ignorant, have never the slightest fear of the Age of Light, as there is…
James Joyce, Ulysses:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. He had a large brown dog with blue eyes in his mouth, about twelve feet long.
“We are in the presence of the gods,” he said with a tone like a dog barking. As I walked inside, I glanced through the mirror which had the words “THE GODS” stamped upon it . I recognized the face that stood behind the mirror and the voice of the god. The god, whose name was Ouroboros, the One who is above and beyond, asked him if it was his name. The dwarf replied that his name was “Buck”. The god asked Buck Mulligan how he liked to be called. Buck answered, “Well, in order to be called what we are, we must be named. I like it when you call me that way.” The god had been talking about the god with his eyes shining and he felt something in his chest.
“I need a shave,” said Buck,…
Albert Camus, The Stranger:
Mother died today. I’m sure she has a daughter too. I’ve been trying to get her to talk to me for years. I tried to give her a name, to remind her what her life was worth, to show a smile to tell her I love her and that she is special. But, I couldn’t talk to her much. She just was. I’m not sure even if I could talk to her on the phone that would be enough to help her out. Not a real good idea because, the moment she does meet someone, she will feel abandoned and so will almost any adult. The last time I talked to her was before she passed away. She was sick. I saw her one last time in one of her many hospitals in the hospital. She didn’t talk very often. She seemed okay, at least when I had her. She told me she was sorry she didn’t talk to me sooner. I asked her about her kids, she said she was not home for the kids…
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. If the hobbit was happy, it was also easy to look upon him. Why, that hobbit could do whatever he liked, and so he came often and went noisily and noisily of one to another to meet his needs, but the poor hobbit felt nothing and never had anything to feel for. How can a hobbit feel for someone else? It is hard for him to have the confidence that someone else would feel for him.
Then when the hobbit is very tired and doesn’t know what to do, how he feels for somebody is also not easy to come in contact with him if he is far from civilization; there is so little contact with a non-European. The one time the hobbit fell very sick he looked back in vain for all his friends and nobody would tell…
This post is from April 2019. Who could have foreseen what would happen in America and the world over the following seven years? Not me.
Pete did not win the 2020 Democratic nomination, despite some remarkable finishes in the primaries. During this critical 2026 midterm campaign, he has come back as still smart, sensible and charismatic–a bit older, with beard–a popular supporter and fundraiser for a number of Democratic candidates. Will he be running for the presidential nomination in 2028? Will he win the nomination? Will he win the presidency?
Some of us believe that America would be in great hands with Pete as president, even more than we believed it in 2020.
“Phenom” is a fascinating English word. It was first used in 1890, to describe an inordinately talented young baseball player on a trajectory to be a superstar. Short for “phenomenon,” it has mostly passed out of usage, but remains an excellent descriptor.
Democrats have had recent experience with a presidential phenom. Obama was just 43 when he started to go supernova at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. A few years later, his talent and person would take him, against all odds and history, to the presidency, and also against all odds and opposition, keep him there for two terms.
In baseball and elsewhere, everybody knows what can happen with phenoms. Some shine and succeed beyond imagining. Some burn out and never make it past their first season.
Democrats would love to find and run another phenom, but are justifiably skittish about losing a precious, one-time-only opportunity to preserve American democracy. They are ambivalent about a phenom like Pete Buttigieg. He has all the right stuff—young, brilliant, accessible, charismatic, articulate, war veteran, Rhodes Scholar, speaks six languages, plays piano at a symphony level, etc. But will the American people elect a married gay man as president?
If the Democrats were confident the answer was “Yes,” we might be at the early stages of another phenomenon. If they are unsure or have already decided the answer is “no,” then we are in uncharted soul-searching territory. But in politics 2019, uncharted soul-searching territory is the name of the game.
Trump is promoting the policy that AI companies are capable of self-regulation and that they don’t need any broader guardrails or oversight from outside.
In the same vein, why not eliminate all multinational treaties on nuclear weapons? Why not allow each nuclear nation to regulate itself?
This talk of uncontrolled nuclear (or AI) apocalypse brings to mind Randy Newman’s Political Science (1972) which sounds ripped from the headlines:
No one likes us, I don’t know why We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try And all around, even our old friends put us down Let’s drop the big one and see what happens
We give them money, but are they grateful? No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them
Asia’s crowded, Europe’s too old Africa is far too hot and Canada’s too cold And South America stole our name Let’s drop the big one, there’ll be no one left to blame us
We’ll save Australia Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo We’ll build an all-American amusement park there They got surfing too
Boom goes London, boom Paris More room for you and more room for me And every city the whole world ’round Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it’ll be We’ll set everybody free
You wear a Japanese kimono, babe There’ll be Italian shoes for me They all hate us anyhow So let’s drop the big one now
“Put even more simply, the German Parliament would be requested to turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler and take a long vacation.” —William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Williams L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the single most readable one-volume history of Nazi Germany. If you like history, but don’t think the story is relevant today, it is still a good read. If you think it might have some relevance, it is essential.
Hitler came to power without ever winning the presidency (he came in second in 1932) and without the Nazis ever having a majority in parliament. Yet in 1933, the Nazis were in control, all civil rights were abrogated, and Hitler would remain until 1945 dictator of one of history’s most infamous, oppressive and deadly regimes.
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag, home of German parliament, was burned down. It was blamed on Communists, but it was actually the work of the Nazis. The Reichstag fire was an excuse to seize absolute power. Shirer writes:
On the day following the fire, February 28, he [Hitler] prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree laid down that:
“Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including “serious disturbances of the peace” by armed persons….
With all the resources of the national and Prussian governments at their disposal and with plenty of money from big business in their coffers, the Nazis carried on an election propaganda such as Germany had never seen before. For the first time the State-run radio carried the voices of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to every corner of the land. The streets, bedecked with swastika flags, echoed to the tramp of the storm troopers. There were mass rallies, torchlight parades, the din of loudspeakers in the squares. The billboards were plastered with flamboyant Nazi posters and at night bonfires lit up the hills. The electorate was in turn cajoled with promises of a German paradise, intimidated by the brown terror in the streets and frightened by “revelations” about the Communist “revolution.” The day after the Reichstag fire the Prussian government issued a long statement declaring that it had found Communist “documents” proving:
Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be burned down… Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups… The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war… It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.
Publication of the “documents proving the Communist conspiracy” was promised, but never made. The fact, however, that the Prussian government itself vouched for their authenticity impressed many Germans….
On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know during Hitler’s life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler. All the persecution and suppression of the previous weeks did not prevent the Center Party from actually increasing its vote from 4,230,600 to 4,424,900; with its ally, the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party, it obtained a total of five and a half million votes. Even the Social Democrats held their position as the second largest party, polling 7,181,629 votes, a drop of only 70,000. The Communists lost a million supporters but still polled 4,848,058 votes. The Nationalists [Nazis], led by Papen and Hugenberg, were bitterly disappointed with their own showing, a vote of 3,136,760, a mere 8 per cent of the votes cast and a gain of less than 200,000.
Still, the Nationalists’ 52 seats, added to the 288 of the Nazis, gave the government a majority of 16 in the Reichstag. This was enough, perhaps, to carry on the day-to-day business of government but it was far short of the two-thirds majority which Hitler needed to carry out a new, bold plan to establish his dictatorship by consent of Parliament.
The plan was deceptively simple and had the advantage of cloaking the seizure of absolute power in legality. The Reichstag would be asked to pass an “enabling act” conferring on Hitler’s cabinet exclusive legislative powers for four years. Put even more simply, the German Parliament would be requested to turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler and take a long vacation.
–Williams L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
You might think that a video from 2018 couldn’t possibly “get” what is happening right now and could turn it into a brilliant and still-relevant creation. You would be wrong.
I admit that I haven’t watched this video since it was first posted eight years ago. I recommend you watch it. You will be simultaneously amused but very frightened by recognizing where we might be.
Current tech note: Facebook Portal died in 2022, Amazon Echo and Google Home are transitioning so that they don’t die too. I hear that Artificial Intelligence is very much alive.
Is there is a dark future for smart speakers in our lives—Amazon Echo, Google Home, Facebook Portal, and all the rest?
Introducing the most advanced artificial intelligence platform in modern history, in this brilliant video from Ghost + Cow. Presenting L1ZY:
Émile Coué (1857 – 1926) was a French psychologist, pharmacist, and hypnotist who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion. Twenty times each morning and night, you are to repeat:
“Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
This became the basis of the modern self-help and positive thinking movement.
Mahayana Buddhism would offer a slightly different take on this. Maxims and mantras are recommended, as ways of training our minds and liberating ourselves from suffering. It is equally important to work for the liberation of everybody else. Everybody. Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, famously vowed to delay his own ultimate liberation until every single sentient being is freed from suffering.
So in addition to Coué’s mantra, we can add this:
“Every day, in every way, everybody is getting better and better.”
You can’t fight and eliminate myth. You can try. You can drive it away and banish it, but it will always turn up within the city walls. Because it is inside you and all the citizens.
When I began reading comic books, I didn’t know those stories were myths. When I first heard the stories of the Bible, I didn’t know those were myths. In the big world, something about these myths proved to be irresistibly and unstoppably popular. Comic book myths became an entertainment mega-industry. Religious myths laid the foundation for the beliefs of billions.
Enlightenment and modernism took on the task of demythologizing. That project has never been wholly successful. It is instead like whack-a-mole: bash one myth down and another will pop up. You may not recognize something as myth, but there it is. Bigger than life, embodying truths that defy everyday experience and evidence. Not only bigger, but more significant.
As the essayist Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Maybe instead of trying to stop telling ourselves stories, maybe instead of trying to loosen our embrace of myths (both impossible anyway), maybe we keep conscious of the myths, try to let go of the unhelpful ones, and try to choose better and more beneficial ones.
Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) would have understood each other, liked each other, despite the seven centuries that separate them. Brilliant, visionary and overwhelmingly articulate, they were heirs to two rich traditions, Zen Buddhism and Judaism, which they further refined into pure essence. Their inspired prose is poetry, the poetry of the thing itself.
Both wrote about time in ways that exceed our comprehension by a step or two, so we run to keep up: Dogen most astutely in his essay Uji: The Time Being; Heschel in his book The Sabbath.
When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one form; there is understanding of form and beyond understanding of form; there is understanding of grass and beyond understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time being is all the time there is. Grass being, form being, are both time.
Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment….
Mountains are time. Oceans are time. If they were not time, there would be no mountains or oceans. Do not think that mountains and oceans here and now are not time. If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated. As time is not annihilated, mountains and oceans are not annihilated.
Zen Master Dogen, Uji: The Time Being, translated by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi, in The Essential Dogen.
Every one of us occupies a portion of space. He takes it up exclusively. The portion of space which my body occupies is taken up by myself in exclusion of anyone else. Yet, no one possesses time. There is no moment which I possess exclusively. This very moment belongs to all living men as it belongs to me. We share time, we own space. Through my ownership of space, I am a rival of all other beings; through my living in time, I am a contemporary of all other beings. We pass through time, we occupy space. We easily succumb to the illusion that the world of space is for our sake, for man’s sake. In regard to time, we are immune to such an illusion.
Gold refining is one of the most common metaphors in Buddhist teaching.
The Upakkilesa Sutta (Defilements, Corruptions, Impurities) names five metals that contaminate gold: iron, copper, tin, lead, and silver. Contaminated gold is brittle and dull. These are matched to the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt. Once they are removed, the mind becomes pliant and radiant.
Some might say that Trump appears to have an unhealthy obsession with gold.
Maybe it is not unhealthy. Maybe it is not what it appears to be. Maybe Trump is aware, maybe unconsciously, of his impurities and corruption. Maybe, as Buddhism teaches, he is looking for a way to remove those impurities. Maybe the gold is a constant reminder to him of his need for refining so that his mind will become pliant, radiant and compassionate.
