It is Memorial Day, and I am given a full run of war movies for every generation, those who lived it and those who are curious about how others lived it.
As I watched “The Red Badge of Courage” to “Full Metal Jacket,” I was reminded of how war has changed and how, as I tap on this device, that progress just might make all our remembrances too neat.
Where once having to wear “hand me downs,” a norm in cash strapped families, I might hear “I was forced to deal with a four-year-old computer,” as a lament from the modern form of a publicly educated high school graduate.
As I watched these episodes unfold, on my large flat screen TV fully comforted by my new HVAC, I remembered my youth.
However, this is not about me or my youth, but about what we now deal with and must continually deal with; what we have inherited and what we are going to do about it.
We receive “progress” from entrepreneurship, from those who want to sweat less, make more money for less work and from those who want people to continue to live, as their lives are too full of people dying.
Our progress transcends my TV and the “spell check” that helps me in tapping out this missive. We are now, all of us, nothing more than data points, that keep making more data that tells the entrepreneurs who we are and what we want and more, what “they” want and need.
All this “going forward” is to satisfy wants and needs. With war being much more than “hell” in wars being fought today, it says that maybe wars should not be fought for many reasons, rather than “for” a single reason.
No nation “needs” a nuclear device and with that said, as I go forward, a “war” for the ending of Iran as a nuclear armed nation is unfolding.
Hopefully – I say hopefully – an understanding will be reached that will be the beginning of “you can’t get there from here” being the new method of settling all disputes as a negotiating method.
All that we now enjoy and will continue to be enjoying going forward, will be at the behest of AI. This is not subjective, but accurate. And before we all cry out “enough,” we will all benefit from AI in some form and at some point in our lives.
This little writing machine was invented by the “what if” people who had to invent the machine to make the machine and so forth.
Millions of mind-numbing jobs will be lost and that is a good thing. In Florida, billions of dollars in revenue (tax revenue) is lost to “Greening” – a disease of citrus that seems impossible to cure.
It will be cured, hopefully, before the trees are killed and the industry is as well. AI will be part of the cure, a major part.
We are all a sum of our parts and with everything we do being collected and categorized, we become a string of numbers, with only a few different from millions of others.
It is those differences, the “data” that has either made you a winner or a loser. This does not mean you are in jail, but less than you could have been.
You cannot be too rich or too thin. Either way, you can cure both “ills” and while one costs more than the other, you do get what you pay for.
“Data Centers” are big, noisy, use a lot of water (and other forms) to cool, require a lot of energy to run and are now a necessary part of the landscape.
To believe, they will continue to cost billions to build and run, without improvement belies their need. The footprint will get smaller, the energy use will be lower, the noise less and so forth.
This is the nature of progress and no, I will not be getting a bigger flat screen TV. Others, who never seem to be able to afford anything, will finally be satisfied when 65” TV’s cost $300 or less.
I will be happy for them until they demand the government pay for their entertainment because AI put them out of a job.
Going forward, the public will be forced to pay more attention to what is going on in the world. And while that is a good thing, those who complain will continue in the same vein.
Dr, Richard Pitz, Blog Contributor