Can’t help but wonder about the seeming coincidence of news about A-I being used to resurrect one last tune by the Beatles coming out at about the same time the country was embroiled in a a conversation about the hazards it might pose to the human race? With visions of A-I turning into a Terminator-like monster appearing to stomp us all into oblivion on one side and a new White Album on the other, what were we to do? Who doesn’t love the Beatles?
Coincidence or not, it did seem to kill the discussion about all the bad things A-I might do to us in the future. Probably just coincidental. I’m probably just paranoid. Read too many books by Huxley and Orwell and others I can no longer even recall. Hesse, wrote some really good stuff. Anyway, I wouldn’t wanna do anything to screw up a new tune from John, Paul, George, Ringo and Arnold.
Since we’re resurrecting the Beatles, I have to wonder if it’s occurred to anyone other than me – yes, this is the kind of stuff I think about – that these “new” electric bikes are just the latest iteration of mopeds? Mopeds, with tiny gas engines were all over the place in the 50’s and 60’s. And now comes the electric bike, a moped with an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine and no exhaust, which is a good thing. Still, they’re really nothing but mopeds. Again.
There was little electricity in Miami, as thousands of wild-eyed red cap wearing supporters failed to show up at the courthouse, a big no-show that could signal the beginning of the end for the Donald and what has been described as his psychological “co-morbidity” by his niece, Dr. Mary Trump, who holds a PhD in clinical psychology. The lousy turnout may be a sign that his base is either in jail, doesn’t want to go to jail, or has finally figured out that it was all a big con. Or maybe they couldn’t get there because of the limited range of their electric vehicles?
That said, the biggest threat to our species could be the explosion of social media as legit journalism takes a dive. Yahoo News! is reporting out a study by The Reuters Institute, reading in part that “…55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users and 52 percent of Instagram users get their news from “personalities” — compared to 33-42 percent who get it from mainstream media and journalists on those platforms, which are most popular among the young.”
Not to worry, but at the same time, it’s also being reported that the world’s oldest surviving daily newspaper, Wiener Zeitung, in Vienna, is mostly going out of business. The Austrian government has decided to cut its funding by pulling their ads from the paper, which has been published since 1703 and reported out stories about a young Wolfgang Motzart and the fall of the Hapsburgh Empire.
The Weiner Zeitung, will still publish a printed copy once a month and will do what so many other papers have done by going with a stripped down digital edition on the Internet. So there will still be that. And we’ll still be able to get all we need to know from our favorite influencers on TikTok and Snapchat and whatever.
It’ll all work out, or not, as our elected leaders continue to follow their chosen path of negligence, ignoring the crying need to support legitimate journalism and doing something to regulate all the digital social media crap that’s passing for news with increasing numbers of young people who will decide our future – while wearing red caps, which they will insist upon calling “hats” and riding mopeds which they call “electric bikes” – because words will no longer matter and we won’t be able to talk to one another truthfully anyway.
The truth will have died a slow death with the death of journalism and the rise of the machines. But I’m probably just paranoid, thinking a professional journalism filter is necessary for the Republic’s survival, and that government support may be necessary to keep it going.