President Elon Musk

 and his Celebrity Apprentice understudy Donald Trump.

 

LOL... 

 

A picture really does speak louder than words, and yesterday’s Oval Office briefing by President Elon Musk proved it in spades. There he was, in the most exclusive office in D.C., simultaneously manhandling the press while having one of his 11 spawn babysat by some poor subordinate. If Michelangelo were around, this tableau would be on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—commissioned by a Medici who wanted to show off his power over the Pope.

Meanwhile, a slumped Donald Trump sat nearby, wearing the bored, empty stare of a man who wants nothing more than his afternoon pudding. You don’t need a body-language guru to see he’s thoroughly checked out: drooping shoulders, slack jaw, glazed eyes. His single moment of real engagement was with Musk’s kid, Glorbax_Rocketchild42069.

Musk—who has apparently given up even the faintest nod toward business casual—rocked a MAGA trucker hat, jeans, boots, and a T-shirt.

Imagine the howls of fury from Fox if an Obama (remember Tan Suitgate?) or Biden advisor tried that look in the Oval. I can say from personal experience that any self-respecting political hack of yesteryear would rather die than step foot in that room without a jacket and tie. In my day, you marched to Brooks Brothers and bought a dark suit, crisp shirt, and red tie. That was the uniform. 

Musk, however, treats the office—and the man whose name is still on the door—with a sartorial contempt that fairly crackles.

But it’s not just contempt for Trump that Musk is serving up. 

By extension, it’s a giant middle finger to the Presidency itself. Musk’s destructive spree across agencies and programs and his roving disregard for the law, Constitution, institutional knowledge, and history—everything but “shareholder value”—are Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality taken to its final, hellish conclusion.

So there sat Trump, reduced to a prop in Elon’s alpha preening. It was a public notice to every White House staffer and every Trump factotum—Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, and the rest of the bootlicking coterie — that Musk is running the show. Speaking of Susie Wiles, she’s been leaking stories for weeks now that she’s got Elon on a leash, that she’s in control, and that the White House knows everything DOGE and Elon are doing. Her Chief of Staff chops were a comfort to many Wall Street types, and now its revealed that she too is one of the NPCs in Elon’s virtual insanity. 

The media was on notice, too. Trump won’t call Elon to account for any of it; he’s too busy enjoying the illusions and distractions dangled by his staff, like a map of the “Gulf of America.”…

RICK WILSON (ABOVE & BELOW) MINCES NO WORDS

Bad indeed.

 

UPDATE: NEW BOOK COMING, MARCH 18TH

 

Who works for the government and why does their work matter? An urgent and absorbing civics lesson from an all-star team of writers and storytellers.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them in a special in-depth series for the Washington Post. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these public servants are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. Expanding on the Washington Post series, the vivid profiles in Who Is Government? blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.

Timely, in light of the Musk/Trump hypervelocity brute force effort to eviscerate the federal government.

 

More of my Michael Lewis.

_________

  

Follow-up on "The First Buddy"

I finished Faiz's excellent, disturbing book on Elon Musk. Supremely curious in this time of hyper-aggressive Trumpian mass deportations is the following:

 

 

Below, the original WaPo lengthy reporting headline. I seriously doubt that they'd libel the wealthiest man on the planet.

 

Given that Elon and his DOGE bros have gained more than 3 months of pretty much unmonitored access to large swaths of federal data across a breadth of agencies, one would hardly be surprised to learn that his fake U.S. "student visa" details have by now conveniently hit "the bit bucket."

PALO ALTO, Calif. [WaPo, Updated October 27, 2024]— Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Musk in recent months has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that “open borders” and undocumented immigrants are destroying America, broadcasting those views to more than 200 million followers on the site formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and later renamed X.

What Musk has not publicly disclosed is that he did not have the legal right to work while building the company that became Zip2, which sold for about $300 million in 1999. It was Musk’s steppingstone to Tesla and the other ventures that have made him the world’s wealthiest person — and arguably America’s most successful immigrant.

Musk and his brother, Kimbal, have often described their immigrant journey in romantic terms, as a time of personal austerity, undeterred ambition and a willingness to flout conventions. Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up.

Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to legal experts... 

The Dystopian Duo of Donald "I-Now-Run-The-World" Trump and Elon "Alexander-the-Great-Reincarnate" Musk are nothing less than The WWE Bruise Brothers of democracy. Minimally.

 

They both regard themselves as Visionary Geniuses, irascibly tolerating the rest of us and our outdated, ineffective socioeconomic norms.

___

 

While I really like Hubris Maximus and recommend it without reservation (acutely timely), I confess to being a bit perplexed and disappointed by the author's failing to cite Kara Swisher.

 

to wit:

The world’s richest man and most famous living tech entrepreneur had to be fucking kidding. But Elon Musk was not joking when he emailed me on October 17, 2022, with the subject line: “You’re an asshole.”

Just a week earlier, Musk had been friendly toward me, as was typical. In fact, he’d asked me for my thoughts about Twitter, the beleaguered service he was forced to buy after pretending that an ironclad contract was not made of iron. And despite engaging in the business equivalent of a toddler tantrum after agreeing to overpay for the company without contingencies, Musk had won the prize. Well, to be more accurate, the booby prize. While hugely popular and addictive to politicians, the media, and promiscuous id-brains like Musk, Twitter had long been the little tech engine that couldn’t.

What was so weird about Musk labeling me “an asshole” was that—unlike many critics—I had taken a fair wait-and-see attitude about his purchase of Twitter. I had covered many deals that had some element of bullshit introduced in the midst of the battle, such as Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo, and this seemed no different. Musk filed a lawsuit in Delaware’s Court of Chancery to challenge the deal he’d agreed to, but just before his deposition, he balked. In the end, Musk had to fork over $44 billion for Twitter and no amount of rage tweeting was going to change that.

So, it’s true: I welcomed Musk’s takeover. I’d covered Twitter since it debuted in 2006, and for most of its history it had been a woefully underperforming business. A lot of the blame for this falls on the bony shoulders of cofounder Jack Dorsey. At the time of Musk’s offer, Dorsey was a part-time CEO whose attention was divided by his work at the innovative payments company Square (later called Block). A genuine visionary, Dorsey had started to foist his personal habits on his employees, like opening a company meeting with a community meditation. He also decided that he was so smart he could run two companies at once. Narrator: He could not run two companies at once.

While heads nodded publicly about how amazing he was to pull it off, privately most people decried his tone-deaf arrogance to me. I agreed. Typically, one or both businesses suffered, and only tech CEOs of a certain type considered themselves so important as to be irreplaceable. But, as my grandmother correctly noted, the graveyards are full of once-busy people.

And whistling past the cemetery is where Twitter always seemed to be, barely making it as a business, with its stock mainly hovering around its IPO offering. Still, it had created a splash well beyond its small size. Despite a tiny $5 billion in annual revenue, Twitter’s influence was often compared to Meta’s, which pulled in $116 billion in 2022. Twitter dominated the zeitgeist, populated by a coterie of celebrities, politicians, and media heavyweights all vying to be the dunk master of the platform. That title, eventually, went hands down to @realDonaldTrump, who used Twitter as a megaphone to become the world’s biggest troll.

But the real story of Twitter was not in the noisy heat it generated, but in colder and harder math. The premise of Twitter was dead simple: A registered user logs in via the Internet or a mobile phone and answers the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or fewer. It was immediately clear when I signed on in 2007 that its lightweight design and newsy bent would soon make it the buzziest product in Silicon Valley. It was also the glitchiest. Its revenue, user growth, and most important of all, stock price all remained in the doldrums. The basic product remained stuck, too. Early Twitter looked an awful lot like current Twitter, where doubling the number of allowed characters counted as innovation. These drags combined with a persistent drama among its founders meant the company never realized its potential. Actually, it was a minor miracle that the bird stayed aloft. While Twitter had received acquisition interest over the years, negotiations always ended in tears once potential buyers realized the company was a hot mess from both a tech and product perspective...

Swisher, Kara. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Ch 13, pp. 215-217). (Function). Kindle Edition

I began citing Faiz's book on Elon a couple of posts ago.

 

Lots more shortly. Stay tuned.

 

MAYDAY UPDATE

 

Too much going on. Elon Musk-Donald Trump summary: They each regard themselves as Existential Visionary Genius Leaders exempt from any sort of frictional process norms that bind us lesser mortals (up to and inclusive of law).

Per Elon et al:

Recall "Effective Altruism," anyone?

Elon Musk wants humans to migrate to the moon & Mars.

For galactic starters. And, he wants YOU—the predominantly uninvited—to foot the bill.

 

SpaceX

 

 

There are a raft of difficult, relevant questions going to the migration of homo sapiens to "Exoplanetary Life."

 

Click

Also of interest,

"EARTH IS NOT WELL. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no doomscrolling—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space businesses are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered... [click cover]"

And let us not foregt Neil de Grasse Tyson.

2026 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

 

The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic work in exploring the history of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has amassed so much power, he’s like a character in a Marvel comic book. A short recap of his handiwork: Tesla popularized electric vehicles; Starlink expanded the reach of the internet; Twitter bowed to his takeover; and DOGE radically transformed the US government. Musk has been at the centre of AI development and this past summer, the IPO for SpaceX made him the richest man in the world. His influence arguably touches everyone on the planet. Surely this is worth fresh scrutiny.

After nearly four years of work, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic documentary, seeking to understand the history and motivations of the ultimate tech bro. When this film was first announced, Musk immediately denounced it on Twitter and refused to participate. But that didn’t impede Gibney, who draws upon countless hours of interviews that Musk has given over the years. Even more revealingly, Gibney conducts new interviews with figures who have known Musk up close and personal, including the mogul’s father, Errol Musk...

I have no idea whether Elon's Mars gambit will be examined. Hope so.
 

PER THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

...Gibney spends the first half of the film coming at Musk for various alleged sins, including stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA; pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (the latter of which Gibney also alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths); and turning a light on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy groups say suffered needlessly. Not nearly as adept at all the substantive tasks of running a company as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels mainly at selling tall tales.

Even these multiple levels of alleged villainy, however, seem narrow compared to what the director argues in the second half is the real game: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk convert his satellite internet system Starlink into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; to see NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; to watch Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with growing dread as the data collected by DOGE potentially becomes a sleeper cell for campaign research and political retaliation — to observe all of this is to gaze upon a man interested not only in wealth and status but in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump may have spent six years bringing the branches of government to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting Musk is in the process of pulling off something far more menacing: rendering government obsolete altogether... 

UPDATE:

BREAKING, OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

[USA Today] Surprise! Elizabeth Holmes is the subject of a top-secret documentary from A24, which promises to be a "mind-bending" experience.

The studio on Sept. 6 revealed a previously unannounced film featuring the Theranos founder who was convicted of defrauding investors, titled "You Can See Everything." The project was made in secret and is set to be released in theaters in October...

Wow. Not my favorite person (apologies for the link rot).

 

More ASAP...

Empathy, according to Elon

Elon Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is the empathy exploit

"There's a guy who posts on the internet who's great, Gad Saad, and he talks about basically suicidal empathy. There's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.

I believe in empathy. I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. Its weaponized empathy is the issue."

From an Elon Musk podcast interaction with Joe Rogan in 2025 (@1:33:00). CNN news article on the topic here.

 

One scarcely knows where to begin in light of this level of ignorance. I randomly ran across this news item:

 

 

Below, a tweet by an equally clueless Elon-Bro' 

 

SMH...

Pedantically: "Empathy" is NOT s synonym for "sympathy." It refers to one's relative ability to accurately and precisely perceive the world as others do. There are 3 recognized sorta venn-diagram-overlapping clinical substrates: [1] cognitive, [2] affective, and [3] somatic.

 

More ASAP. Spent the entire day on Regime Change. Almost done.

 

UPDATE: OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

The dual earthquakes in Venezuela are so horrifically, tragically sad. The death toll is sure to go well into 5 figures. Nearly 1,000 confirmed dead already, with 51,000 people reported as still missing.

 

Exoplanetary life?

K2-18b?

 

Interesting, in light of my recent prior readings on astrophysics and exobiology. Also timely given a new book I was just made aware of. Elon Musk:

 

A sobering read.

 

One potentially existentially dangerous guy. Let's begin with the end in mind:

AFTERWORD

Back in the mid-1990s, Elon Musk was a start-up founder in his twenties, working illegally under a student visa to bring a phone book–style directory online with his company, Zip2. One day, Derek Proudian, a partner with one of the start-up’s key investors, stopped by Zip2’s Cambridge Avenue offices to grab lunch with its precocious founder, who’d already blown away his eventual financial backers with his unrelenting drive to be successful, Proudian recalled to me nearly thirty years later.

Walking to lunch that afternoon, Proudian was preoccupied with the company’s priorities: bringing in engineers to scale the product, conducting a search for a chief executive, capitalizing on what he thought might be a $10 billion industry.

Musk was thinking bigger. “It’s going to be global,” he said, in Proudian’s recollection. Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever.” “Well, maybe it’ll be the biggest company ever,” Proudian said. “Right now, we’re focused on the Yellow Pages. We’re not getting a whole lot of traction with these small businesses.”

Musk’s mind was elsewhere.

“I have bigger visions,” he said.

Proudian tried to interject, hoping to redirect the conversation.

“No—you don’t understand,” Musk cut in. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.”

What?

Proudian had to bring him back to earth. “What if you swing for the fences and you strike out?”

“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” Musk declared. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.”

That day, Musk saw the roadblock as a peer’s limited thinking, his realism. Today, his thinking seems to suggest, incompetence at the federal level—the abandonment of meritocracy, in favor of mediocrity—is the obstacle between him and his ultimate goal.

The presidential campaign of 2024 was a Musk gamble of galactic proportions, perhaps the only pivot that could have landed him with responsibility bigger than his business empire could afford him. By the time of the election, Musk had become convinced that this new foe stood in the way of his ambition to propel humanity to Mars, the same pursuit that motivated his bet on his massive pay package from Tesla, that had evidently driven his acquisition of Twitter in his effort to defeat the “woke mind virus,” the one that represented SpaceX’s north star.

“Unless we stop the slow strangulation by overregulation happening in America, we will never become a multiplanetary civilization,” he said, before adding, “Unless something is done about strangulation by overregulation, humanity will never reach Mars.”

And when the dust settled, Musk had sided with the winning party and become “first buddy” to the incoming president.

At the time of this writing in December 2024, Elon Musk appears to have secured the power necessary to challenge the bureaucrats and oppressive regulations that have been holding him back. In appointing Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration appears to have given him the opportunity to reshape the government while perhaps putting Musk’s own ambitions for autonomous vehicles on a glide path. And while there are questions about how much authority Musk’s quasi-agency will actually have, his influence on Trump—after pouring more than $275 million toward seeing him and other Republicans elected through a super-PAC, the America PAC—is clear.

Days before the official announcement of the role, Musk had elevated a call for “defanging” agencies that had investigated him and his businesses, including the SEC and FTC. Now he had the blessing of the most powerful person in the world, who outlined a vision to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies,” and believes he has a mandate to carry it out.

Musk’s entrance into politics—and governance—is a predictable outcome. At any time in Musk’s history, given the scale of the gambles he has made with his fortune and power, he has variously seemed to be utterly in command or on the verge of total destruction. But one thing remains: he is inevitable.

However, now that he has reached a new plateau of power, the stakes have shifted. He is no longer limited to recklessly gambling with one of his companies’ bottom lines, or the livelihoods of his workers. He is poised to apply his existential thinking to our society as a whole, exerting his influence on the foundational rules and regulations—such as norms around conflicts of interest—that hold us together. Protecting those conventions and the order they are intended to bring is hardly Musk’s concern—as evidenced by the chapters of this book—especially if upholding them results in the continuation of the slow march to humanity’s destruction that he believes has already begun.

Musk and his acolytes have made clear that they are comfortable with imposing a short-term “hardship” on Americans, including an economic and market downturn, in pursuit of their ultimate goal. One of Musk’s closest allies said the DOGE would require a “collective sacrifice.”

That only leaves the question—to what end? What is the collective sacrifice for, if not Musk’s clearly stated goal of putting humans on Mars? And what has Musk done for the public at large to earn that kind of loyalty from the millions he is asking to take the plunge with him? Some may argue that his business achievements merit that sort of leap of faith, but it is an immense amount of power to give someone who is unaccountable to the public, by any measure.

And what if this publicly stated goal—the noble ambition to extend the reach of humanity—masked another worry?

Going into the election, Musk had seemed to sense danger. He felt he had everything on the line. Musk made no secret of how he saw the stakes—both for the country and for himself personally.

“I view this election as a turning point, like a fork in the road of destiny that is incredibly important. You know I’ve not been politically active until this election,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan. “And the reason I’ve been politically active this election is because I think if we don’t elect Trump, I think we will lose democracy in this country. We will lose the two-party system,” Musk said, while explaining his unfounded theory that the Democrats in power were “importing vast numbers of” undocumented migrants into swing states as part of an elaborate conspiracy to hold the Electoral College in perpetuity.

But as with all his political activism, Musk cheekily hinted he had a personal stake as well.

“If he loses, man, you’re fucked, dude,” Tucker Carlson told him during an October 2024 interview.

“If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk agreed. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Will I see my children? I don’t know.”

It was meant to be a light-hearted moment, but it hinted at what Musk felt he had on the line. At the time, Musk’s companies—and in certain cases, Musk himself—faced scrutiny from the Department of Justice, the SEC, the FTC, federal transportation regulators, and the Federal Communications Commission, just to name a few, and his PAC’s unconventional methods of voter outreach were raising some early eyebrows as well.

But as he often did, he was projecting those personal worries onto humanity itself, suggesting that the endless labyrinth of regulatory intervention stifled human potential as a whole, by slow-rolling and interfering with matters that were ultimately existential.

Indeed, “survival,” as we laid out in the introduction, “is the organism’s ultimate value, the ‘final goal or end to which all [its] lesser goals are the means,’ and the standard of all its other values: ‘that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil,’” according to the     , outlining a core tenet of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

When Musk declared himself Alexander the Great around thirty-odd years ago, it felt like a one-off from a brash founder like any other in Silicon Valley. But as the election loomed, Proudian, one of the first Silicon Valley power brokers to recognize Musk’s spirit but also his stubbornness, suddenly thought: “Oh, shit,” he told me.

Now he had begun to see his experiences with Elon Musk through a new lens. Strange outbursts and spontaneous, one-off utterances—that he had brushed off as hubris or the brashness of maladjusted youth—started to take on a new meaning.

“I thought the market forces would control Elon,” Proudian said, adding later that he “didn’t take it that seriously when he was a twenty-three-year-old entrepreneur who didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

“I am really concerned because I know how smart this guy is and I know how much money he has and I know how ruthless he is and it’s playing out in front of my eyes.”

We should all heed that concern. It’s unfashionable to admit now—but Musk’s record of firings and his zealous deletion of once-normal business principles has emanated far beyond his business empire.

So many who have worked closely with Musk have emerged with the same sort of impression as Proudian, as Hubris Maximus demonstrates time and again: that Musk, however misguided he may be at times, is unyielding.

Some have lost sleep in connection with Musk’s hubris; others have lost their lives believing in his company’s promise. Whatever the harm in connection to something bigger, it matters greatly. People have lost their lives believing in his technological promises; others have seen their lives upended or careers destroyed; still others have faced potential financial ruin from believing in him.

Whether Musk’s latest forays into the political realm ultimately achieve their stated goals, or his relationship with the Trump administration deteriorates at some point along the way, he has consistently shown a taste for opportunist behavior and a disregard for limiting collateral damage in the pursuit of his goals, and the stakes have never been higher.

Even if DOGE is a big success—by his own standards—history has shown that he’s unlikely to be satisfied; the pattern shows he’ll continue to seek more power and responsibility, to go all-in on the next moon shot. And if it isn’t, and his “samurai spirit” calls him to commit seppuku rather than admit failure, he very well might take a lot of us with him next, before dusting himself off and trying again.

Siddiqui, Faiz. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (pp. 264-268). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Let that simmer just a bit.

 

See also my citations of recent works on astrophysics and exxbiology, "The Edge of Chaos."

 

apropos.

 

OK, LET'S BACK UP ABOUT A HALF CENTURY

 

In 1976 Cheryl and I were living in Homewood, Alabama (B'ham area). I read a fascinating book I'd checked out of the Homewood Public Library. It has subsequently gone "out of print." But, you can still find random hardcopies via Amazon 3rd party sellers. Got a copy.

 

 

Wonderful reading.

 

 

I transcribed some excerpts via voice input on my iPad.

Chapter 1, Where Speculation Begins, pp 7-9

One of these days, our descendants, near or distant, are going to find life in some form on other planets, either in the solar system, in other parts of our galaxy, or in other galaxies.

The very fact that life has arisen on our earth is evidence enough that it must exist in other parts of the universe, for the elements of which the entire universe is composed are remarkably uniform. If some of these elements have combined in ways that produce life here in our solar system, they must, by the laws of chance and probability, have combined in an analogous ways elsewhere. Even in our galaxy, there must be some thousands of other planets, sustaining life, in some form, and all the forces of reason would suggest that it cannot be otherwise in other galaxies.

What miracles of chance and combinations of chances made it possible for life to evolve here on earth?

For life to arise on any planet, certain factors have to be present in certain combinations. The solar system of which the planet is part must have formed in a way that some or one of its evolving planets takes shape at a suitable distance from the blazing inferno of its central sun – neither so near that its surface temperatures inhibit life by intense heat, nor so far that life cannot arise because of insufficient solar radiation. The masses into which the swirling gases originally solidify must be within the range that permits a force of gravity, sufficient to hold and retain an atmosphere, since without a protective atmosphere, solar radiation would be too intense for life forms to be sustained, even if all the other elements of life were present.

The chance that these two factors alone – distance from the center, and the degree of mass that governs gravity occur together in just the right circumstance, puts a preliminary limitation on the possibility for life. Even after this has occurred, there must be a further series of chances following and working upon chances – and again interlocking with other chance happenings – so that atmosphere, water, rocks, and some soil come into being in states that conform a basis for the evolution of life. Of course there is a possibility, remote as it seems, that some form of life might arise on a lightless planet. should that planet be capable of generating heat of its own within a life sustaining range.

The information we have been able to gather from our own solar system suggests that ours is the only planet around our sun that sustained life. It could be that other suns, even thousands or tens of thousands of other suns, sustain no life at all on the planets that circle them. Given the myriad suns in our galaxy and the multiple myriads in the universe, it is impossible to believe that chances similar to those that occurred on earth have not also occurred on many other planets.

Once these miraculous chances have come about, however, the prerequisites for life are rather minimal: An element capable of forming self-replicating chains, like carbon, and another capable of combustion, like oxygen these, together with hydrogen and nitrogen, form and matrix that may merge with other elements to create all the varied, complex, and wonderful forms of life on earth – from amoeba and bacteria to plants and spiders and fishes and man.

What shapes may life have taken in other worlds? Have they developed into intelligent creatures, and, if they have, what sort of intelligences have evolved? Have other kinds of life developed high orders of intelligence capable of developing technologies, and, if so, what sort of technology has arisen from their special kinds of being? Shall we ever be able to communicate with these beings, if they exist, in any meaningful way?

One thing is certain: we have no reason to assume that evolutionary forces on other planets will produce forms or intelligence that are the same as ours, even though the basic raw materials must be similar. Whatever chance factors combined to produce any form of life, infinitely more, must combine to produce an advanced form.

Genetic inheritance is only a beginning. Two offspring of the same parents by chance born in different environments will produce eventual descendants so markedly different that after many generations, it will hardly be possible to realize that the ancestors of each line had parents in common.

The variables of habitat, the chance of availability of mates, natural selection, and sexual selection among the offspring will all have combined and recombined to produce members of the same species as buried as a pygmy, a Watusi, a Swede, a Chinese, or a magnesian, and eventually to divide into species, such as man, apes, and monkeys have separately descended from the same stem.

Our own earth provides an illustration of the almost incredible number of living forms that can possibly be derived from a single celled organisms that were once the triumph of evolution on our planet. All the species now extinct, and all those still flourishing form only apart of the total possibilities, for who knows how many new species will yet take shape?

Ch 11, Beyond Human Intelligence, pp 212-217

Intelligence begins with the sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of biological accumulation and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a current culmination in the complexity of the human brain. In the same way, the first chipped flint, by a process of cultural accumulation of knowledge passed on verbally and subjected to the selection of experience, reaches a current combination in spacecraft, cyclotron, and satellite relayed television. At the same time, the natural and necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it explores its environment and learns how to live in it, overtime, and also by a cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in the high cultures and great arts.

For the comparatively weak creature who must cope with an environment and rise to any situation or perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first to the most urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is devoted to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.

The kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to be available, be they leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presents or absence of minerals. Thus an interaction exists between the environment and creatures that affects the development of tools and cultures, as well as of census and intelligence.

In ancient Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence of flax made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens. In central America, the presence of lava led to cutting edge tools of obsidian. Once a cultural habit becomes established, however, it remains impossible to predict either the route it will follow or its ultimate outcome. Who could have told that the sweet-potato washing habit established among the members of the famous Japanese Macau colony, and the subsequent shifting of sand from the grain in the sea, would so accustomed these forest animals playing in the water that they would eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what the newfound ability to swim might lead?

Yet strangely enough—or perhaps, not so surprisingly, in view of the basic uniformity of mankind’s cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically, nor when, over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed into advanced civilization, we find that man’s greatest thoughts, as epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity. Some views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and intelligence propounded by the wise men of China, so distant from us in place in time, are stunning in their modernities and still current validity.

In the misty beginnings of China’s long, cultural history, Lao the, expanding his concept of Tao, the way (of nature and wise living), is reported to have insisted that knowledge is not virtue, and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is so far from it a sage as in “intellectual.“ The worst government would be one of philosophers, he has said to have averred, they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their in capacity for action!

At a later period the philosopher, Chuang the, who lived about 370 BC, showed the sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those in early times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; that is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradiction.

He spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has become gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the grounds of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, said Chuang tze, can never avail to understand, ultimate things, for any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. In order to understand the Tao, one must “sternly suppress one’s knowledge“: we have to suppress our theories and feel fact. Education is of no help towards such an understanding: submission in the flow of nature is all important.

And Wang Yang Ming, who lived from 1472 to 1528, practically summarized our present thesis when he wrote: “the mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?“

Experts feel certain that the human brain has not undergone any significant biological change since the time of the Neanderthals, as evidenced in the excavations at the Shandiar caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, built fires, cared for their sick, conducted funeral rights, and put flowers with the bodies of their dead. In the last 20 to 30,000 years, we know from archaeological findings of both historic and prehistoric periods, a high degree of intellectual accomplishment that has been formally present in all the branches of our species throughout his existence. The brief excerpts we have given of an ancient Chinese thought about thought would certainly seem to bear out this opinion.

There is, however, an outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must not overlook. Increasingly, as intelligence adapt a living creature to its environment by the use of artifacts, and through the cultural transmission of knowledge, the creature and the environment, modify each other at an exponential rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants for the termites, which has existed in a balance between being and have unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, is not possible for mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural habitat, presents a perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all, to mental adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain to device accommodation, and then the process speeds both the rate of change and the need for new changes.

And so, although we recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the technological advances of western men might indicate new departures from the human brains’ capacities, yet we have also to recognize that the technology is rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species this new Environment may well ultimately affect our species future development; precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point through which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward homo neocorticus

There are, of course, far too many imponderables  Involved to feel confident in predicting the future course of our species. Among these are the course of technology itself, and how far from natural processes it can carry us before it becomes subject to its own limitations. There is the matter of human population density, and whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to the biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the question of the medical preservation of the “unfit“ and whether we can remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive dilution of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological interference may ultimately make mankind’s existence untenable.

Our evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for biological, if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined to discount this. We believe subtle biological factors to be operating that are not yet clearly discernible, but which may be recognizable in retrospect. Another factor as simple and probable as the advent of another Ice Age, for instance, would effectively alter and recalibrate the balance between men and nature, and must also be kept in mind as a possibility.

We believe that the possibility, and even the likelihood remain for a true evolutionary progression in the anatomical and physiological configuration of the brain, much like the progression that occurred between apes and man. In that case, the departure would be just as radical, and it would have as a consequence new behavioral response patterns that at this point we cannot visualize and about which we can only speculate.

To assume that this new superintelligence would occupy itself with creating a new, weird, and wonderful technology is a naïve exercise in human fantasy. Ultimately technology exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus, were such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary systems, we might be confronted with something totally alien to our understanding, and even to our imagination…

'eh?

From Pythagoras to petabytes

A few days back, I was surfing through a number of news articles recounting Elon Musk's latest freakout over The Existential Menace of AI. See, e.g., "AI is highly likely to destroy humans, Elon Musk warns."

A commenter beneath one of the articles (TechCrunch's "WTF is AI?") briefly cited this book.

OK, Elon's pearl-clutching will have to wait.

Garth's book is merely $4.61 Kindle price (and worth every penny). A must-read, IMO. Spanning, well, "Pythagoras to petabytes." (I'd have chosen "yottabytes," but it didn't have the cutesy alliterative post title ring.)

IT’S EASY TO FORGET that the digital age, and so the existence of computer programmers, still only spans a single working life, and one of those lives is mine. In my career as a commercial computer programmer I’ve experienced most of the changes that have occurred in the programming world in all their frequent craziness. This is my attempt to preserve that odyssey for the historical record...

For myself and many others, commercial computer programming has been a rewarding career since at least the late 1960s and during that time programming has seen massive changes in the way programmers work. The evolution of many different programming models and methodologies, the involvement of many extraordinary characters, endless ‘religious wars’ about the correct way to program and which standards to use. It would be a great shame if a new generation of programmers were unaware of the fascinating history of their profession, or hobby, and so I came to write this book...

Four of the overall themes in the book can be identified by searching for #UI (User Interface), #AI (Artificial Intelligence), #SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and #PZ (Program componenti-Zation) and the Table of Contents is detailed enough to guide dipping in/ dipping out…

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In Years BC (Before Computers)
Sometimes it seems like computers and the digital revolution sprang out of nowhere but of course they didn’t. They were the result of at least two and a half millennia of evolutionary development which can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras. When I graduated from university in 1968 I had a degree in philosophy but I somehow managed to be awarded it without having absorbed much ancient Greek philosophy or the history and philosophy of science. There were just too many well documented distractions in the sixties. It was only later that I came to realise how critical they were in creating the context for digital computers and with them the new career of commercial computer programmer.

So we need to briefly cover some history in order to set the scene for my account though only the necessary facts will be covered. We’ll only be scratching the surface so don’t panic but if you prefer to skip this Prologue that’s OK. By the way I use BC and AD for dates and not BCE and CE, there is no particular reason, it’s just habit.

550 – 500 BC
During this period Pythagoras the ancient Greek philosopher was active in a Greek colony in southern Italy. No written record of his thinking survives from the time but he is known to have influenced Plato and Aristotle and through them all of Western thinking. He is rumored to have been the first person to ever call himself a philosopher…

Eaglesfield, Garth . The Programmer's Odyssey: A Journey Through The Digital Age (Kindle Locations 94-129). Pronoun. Kindle Edition.

Garth and I are roughly the same age (both born in 1946). He came to computing about 12 years before I did. My initiation came tangentially in my 30's amid the course of my undergrad research (I was studying Psychology and Statistics at Tennessee; we were investigating "math anxiety" among college students taking stats courses). We wrote SAS and SPSS code via primitive line editors (e.g., edlin and vi), with laboriously entered inline research results data, and prefaced with JCL headers (Job Control Language), all submitted to the DEC/VAX over a 300 baud dialup modem (after which we'd schlep over to the computer room to fetch the 132-column greenbar printouts once available).

My, my, how times have changed.

After graduation in 1985, I got my first white collar gig in January 1986, writing code in a radiation laboratory in Oak Ridge (pdf). After those years, my time was spent principally as an analyst, using mostly SAS and Stata, in health care (pdf) and bank risk management.

I found this particularly interesting in Garth's book:

On The Road To Bell Labs
I felt that I needed to get Unix and C on to my CV and where better to do that than at its birthplace where it all started? Bell Labs was in New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson river and would involve some travel but I knew that other contractors from Manhattan worked there so I reasoned that there must be some way of coping. The Holy Grail of the various Bell Labs, which were scattered around New Jersey, was the Murray Hills lab, it was the real Unix/ C holy of holies. But it was hard to get into and so I eventually got a contract at the Whippany lab. It was closer to Manhattan and was more of a traditional telephone company engineering lab but they used Unix and C so that would get it on to my CV. The project I worked on was the software for a diagnostic device used in network line testing…

At the Labs I was given a copy of the now legendary ‘White Book’ written by Kernighan and Ritchie accompanied by a Unix manual and I set about absorbing them both.

Entering your C source code for a program was done with the ubiquitous Unix editor vi from a dumb terminal. When vi was developed at Bell Labs the quest for portability had been continued by using ordinary characters for edit commands so that it could be used with any dumb terminal’s keyboard. Those keyboards of course did not have all the control keys that modern keyboards come with such as arrow keys, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, and so on. As with everything in the Unix world the vi key combinations ranged from simple and intuitive to complex and barely comprehensible. It operated in 2 modes, insert and command modes, and in command mode, for instance, it used the normal keyboard characters ‘h’ ‘l’ ‘k’ and ‘j’ as substitutes for the absent left, right, up and down arrow keys.

Compared to the VMS operating system and to high level programming languages like COBOL, Coral 66 and Pascal, Unix and C certainly represented a much lower level, closer to the hardware and more like assembler coding. There were relatively few reserved words in the C language with the main ones being for, data classes (int, char, double, float), data types (signed, unsigned, short, long), looping verbs (for, while, continue, break), decision verbs (if, else, switch, case) and control verbs (goto, return). C took the componentization of computer programs several steps further through the use of functions, a specific form of subroutine. Functions, returned a single value that might then be part of an equation... (ibid, Kindle Locations 1677-1706).

My late Dad came back from WWII (minus a leg), mustered out of the military, and went to work for Bell Labs, first at Murray Hill, and subsequently at the Whippany location. He worked in semiconductor R&D his entire career at Bell Labs (the only civilian job he ever had, until he took his tax-free early VA disability pension in 1972 and dragged my Ma off to the humid swamps of Palm Bay, Florida so he could play golf all the time.

Looks like Garth came to Bell Labs a few years after Pop had retired.

"The Programmer's Odyssey" covers a ton of ground, weaving great historical and technical detail into a fun read of a personal story. I give it an enthusiastic 5 stars.

"It would be a great shame if a new generation of programmers were unaware of the fascinating history of their profession, or hobby, and so I came to write this book."

Yeah. I am reminded of my prior post "12 weeks, 1,200 hours, and $12,000, and you're a "Software Engineer"? Really?"

In closing,

Postscript
We have reached the end of the odyssey. But where have we arrived?

Well in some ways, like Odysseus himself, we have finally come home, right back to where we started. Some things have changed, we now have a massive multi-layered global network of increasingly smart devices, including the ultimate smart device the human being. Yet ultimately it’s all based on the same old Von Neuman computer architecture and on the two digits 0 and 1, the binary system. The whole extraordinary software edifice rests on that foundation, which is really mindboggling.

Have we learned anything on our odyssey that suggests this is likely to change? Perhaps a new computer hardware architecture will finally emerge? Articles regularly appear about quantum computing devices and IBM have announced a project to research cognitive SyNAPSE chips but so far these are still very much research projects. It is also being said that the minituarisation of silicon chips by Intel and others will reach its limit by 2020 and Moore’s Law will finally come to an end.

On our odyssey we, like Odysseus, have encountered dangerous and worrying phenomena, in particular whether any conceivable developments in computer technology will put the human race in danger. It’s hard to believe that based on existing system components a self-conscious sentient being will come into existence like HAL in 2001 and threaten our own survival. Throughout history major technological advances have tended to become models for explaining human beings, always incorrectly. In the digital age this has meant starting to see human beings as just computing machines. Will this prove to be true or false? The jury is still out.

But if we are in danger from our technology perhaps it’s most likely to come from an artificial living creature/ cyborg/ replicant enhanced with implanted computer chips and interfaces that we have created? Created perhaps by using advanced tools such as the already being discussed DNA editors? The recent TV series ‘Humans’ is an interesting attempt to confront some of these issues and two recent books have added significantly to the debate; Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics; Thomas Rid; Scribe Publications and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari, Harvill Secker.

Questions, questions. As the philosophically inclined outlaw replicant Roy Batty so presciently remarked in Blade Runner… (ibid, Kindle Locations 2646-2666)

'eh?

Kudos, Mr. Eaglesfield. I'd make this book required reading at "software engineer boot camp." (BTW, Garth's website is here.)

Also, Garth turned me on to this resource where he blogs:

Check out in particular the "History of Computing and Programming" page.
___

Other prior posts of mine of relevance here?

• Future jobs: robots, nerds, and nurses?
• 6 weekly online sessions, $2,600, and you're a "Transformational #AI Leader"?
• Clinical cognition in the digital age
• Artificial Intelligence and Ethics
• AI vs IA: at the cutting edge of IT R&D
• The Great AI Awakening? Health Care Implications? 

Then there are my posts on "NLP" (Natural Language Processing).

NEXT UP

Got a new Twitter follower.

The Web's Best Content Extractor
Diffbot works without rules or training. There's no better way to extract data from web pages. See how Diffbot stacks up to other content extraction methods:

Pretty interesting. Stay tuned. We'll see.

SAVE THE DATE

They just approved my press pass. Follow hashtag #health2con and Twitter handle @Health2con.

Details

UPDATE

From "history" to "futurism" predictions. I saw this infographic on Pinterest, and chopped it up into 4 segments for viewability.

 See also "Types of AI."

UPDATE

Garth just reciprocated my foregoing tout with the kindest mention of me. See "Cometh the hour, cometh the man."

Again, not kidding about how cool his book is.
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More to come...