August 2026

To continue one of today’s themes, on GLP-1 drugs. I asked my friend, one of the leading international specialists treating people with ongoing (often appalling) issues from Covid infections, about use of GLP-1 drugs to treat those patients. He said: “It’s extraordinary!!! The only thing I’ve seen that genuinely moves the needle. I’m abandoning many of my previous treatments…or slowly withdrawing them as I dial up the Mounjaro. It will stabilise many and provide meaningful protection from end-organ injury. Also (separately to Covid) a reduction of 40% in the prevalence of REM Behaviour Disorder.”

Jevons Paradox again. It reminds me of the comment that less than a century ago hardly anybody had flown in a plane. Now we fly at near the speed of sound all over the world, and complain that the food on the plane isn’t great.

Look at these stats. Humans can’t drive. They also can’t think. They will tell you they’re uniquely brilliant at both. AI is already rescuing us from both problems. They’re actually just one problem.

Data centres are the focus of another current wave of viral outrage, driven by social media. What I think they mean. We’ve been increasingly living our lives in the ‘cloud’. Our social connections are now global, not just local. That comes at a cost. Material infrastructure is needed to achieve that. Data centres. The cloud has come in to land. Just as our water reservoirs and sewage treatment plants and water filtration plants and roads are the infrastructure of our town and city life, data centres are the infrastructure of our international lives *between* cities and towns.

Watching netball at the Commonwealth Games and it makes me think again how I’ve completely reversed my thinking on free-to-air sports broadcasting. I used to agree major events should be available on free-to-air, to maximise viewers. But let’s be real. Pretty much everybody streams now, and pays (not much) for it. Honestly, people pay more for coffee each week than they do for streaming. Free-to-air coverage is mostly rubbish, saturated with ads and pushed to secondary channels, and not even HD half the time, let alone 4K. Pay TV coverage is superb, ad-free, 4K, with constant technological innovation in the coverage etc. Watching the netball coverage right now as an example. The commentators are at home in Sydney! Channel 7 has turned the live sound from the game down to almost zero, and all you hear is the commentators in Oz. And the picture quality is like a colourised moon landing. Appalling coverage, absolutely hopeless.

Was at a tyre workshop chatting to the owner while they were working on my tyres. We were talking about tyre wear on EVs, which can vary depending on how you drive, the road surface etc. He said ‘it’s just that they’re so much heavier.’ That meme has done the rounds of social media for years. Many used it as a reason to argue EVs were also wrecking the roads and should pay more (another meme). It’s rubbish. The Tesla with me weighed about the same as a Toyota Camry, and far less than most popular combustion SUVs and utes. It exhausts me in public and work life now. Everything is a meme, repeated as if it’s people’s own ideas. Nearly all of it is bullshit, on whatever topic. Social media has hijacked our entire culture.

It’s wonderful to see people escape the social media bubble and experience things as they really are, particularly when they’re also local. We’re so numb to the wonders we’re living. This was a tough test, it included the Darling Causeway diversion and was at night. It did it easily. Only 5 years ago people said this was impossible and would never happen. You can have it right now.

Towns and cities are a remarkable invention. Humans didn’t invent them, or even create them. Wtf, hey? Surely humans create towns and cities? They’re certainly part of the mix. But nobody and no group designs and controls how towns and cities evolve. They emerge, and continue to evolve and emerge over time. Some try to plan and design them, and that goes into the mix too. But there is no master plan. The town or city evolves. Towns and cities are the way the world solved the problem of allowing humans to live together, while retaining as much individual autonomy as possible. Think about how you live in a street with a whole group of people, many of whom you may not even know. It just kinda works. Life is relatively peaceful, most of the time. But nobody is designing that life or governing it. We all individually and collectively kind of mesh. What’s the magic that makes this work? I’m going to post more about that. It’s one of the most amazing stories in the world.

Father Brown was one of those shows I always saw in the options on streaming platforms, and never dipped my toe in. I thought it must be one of those innocuous Brit shows that offered pretty views of the UK countryside and an idyllic view of old village life. Harmless but dull. And then I noticed the stories were originally written by G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton was one of the big literary names and thinkers of the late-19th and early 20th century. That made me stop and think, why would Chesterton write detective stories, starring a dorky priest with an umbrella and a bike? The answer is another fascinating thing. Chesterton was living at the time Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared and became hugely popular. Detective fiction became a smash hit. He was a big fan of that fiction, at a time other writers had retreated into romanticism and navel-gazing introspection (escapism, narcissism). Detective stories dealt with all the messy reality of life, but more than that they offered a moral narrative of the possibility of both understanding and having some control over that messy life. They kept alive the passion for understanding what is good, and fighting what isn’t. But Chesterton was a giant, so it went beyond even that. Because he thought traditional detective stories treated crime like a board game, like puzzles to be solved. Chesterton saw crime as part of the wider human condition, and believed religions had evolved as easily the most in-depth tradition of understanding that condition. While walking with a friend who was a member of the clergy, recounting in general terms the sorts of horrors they’d hear in confessions and in dealing with their flock, he realised priests had the most in-depth exposure to the true breadth of human experience that it was possible to have. And so he made his detective a priest. Father Brown solves crimes not only by looking at clues, but by assessing the full human condition of the context of the crime. While police officers and others in the stories get distracted by puzzling clues, Brown knows who’s guilty simply by using an understanding of the humanity in play. He very often sits with an accused, talks for a while and says ‘ok, you’re not guilty’. That’s due to a sophisticated assessment of the person’s character and knowledge of how humans behave and feel and think, through years of hearing confessions and tending to people’s emotional and other needs. More broadly again, Chesterton saw crime as a rupture in the moral fabric of life. He wasn’t some moralist imposing rules, it was much more sophisticated than that. He saw morality as the measure of life functioning as it should, an entirely practical thing, something the scientific positivism of the time (and of our time) couldn’t understand. Religions evolved, like cities. They were the emergent product of what worked, to stop violence and crime and death. Later people projected human debates about the existence of God onto them, but they weren’t really about that. They were the operating system of how societies can work, sustainably, at that time. Father Brown was written to make that operating system visible.

‘AI sycophancy’ is a criticism of AI that says it only tells you what you want to hear. It’s one of my favourite loon things circulating on social media, the great international imitation machine that makes millions of people all around the world repeat exactly the same thing they all want to hear, every day. No person goes to a library or does research by reading the things they don’t want to read. Are we really now this stupid? This is just standard ‘confirmation bias’ that has existed forever. And even the idea of confirmation bias is wrong, because there’s no such thing as free-floating facts, free of all assumptions and beliefs/feelings. Reality isn’t some static X waiting to be found, it responds in different ways depending on how you interact with it. In their lifetime a person will see only an infinitesimally small fraction of knowledge available. So even if there was some such thing as a totally neutral collection of books for them to read (there isn’t), they’d barely scratch the surface of what they need to know. AI has a VASTLY greater range of knowledge to share with you, and unlike humans, it can adopt the different perspectives that humans will ignore to share with you too, without feeling threatened. There is no rivalry in its knowledge.

It’s so important the LNP or One Nation don’t win the next federal election here, so we can continue this transition. Both have promised to wreck it with completely idiot ideas about prohibitively expensive coal and nuclear power stations. Both in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, that is completely foreign-owned.

I try to use images as compressed concepts. As a way of conveying complex ideas at a glance. AI is stunningly good at it. Like this one. While we physically still live in towns and cities, this is actually our culture now. A bewildering avalanche of decontextualised information, leaving people disoriented, exhausted, anxious and often angry. Normally our social networks mediate the information we use in our lives. They filter things, slow them down as they’re absorbed and refracted by tradition. But when those networks are flattened into a social media platform, life becomes a battle for attention and connection, and focused on pure imitation. What I mean by us living inside social media now, social media is not ‘about’ our ‘real lives’. It’s replaced those lives. Most ideas, feelings and activities are now just social media viral trends.

It’s now trending on social media to label everything made by AI. For a reason nobody can really explain, except that it’s trending. Trending replaced thought years ago. I thought it was time to start labelling things that are social media-generated. The things destroying civilisations.

This table tells you why your Council rates keep going up. And why we can afford to buy ridiculous nuclear submarines for the US to use as missile launch platforms in the Pacific against their hated ‘commie’ rivals in China. Those subs are funded by your potholes.

Went to a servo this afternoon. I needed a carton of milk. When I got there, the young guy behind the counter was giving a long sermon to some poor young woman about how the petrol prices mean we should be refining more of our own fuel, and that electric cars aren’t the answer because we still need to burn coal to power those.  I was standing inside the streaming channel of social media bullshit, live. There was an hilarious silence from him as I paid for the milk, because I parked the Tesla right outside the window underneath his nose. This is how all major change happens. Lots of rationalisations for doing nothing will come and go. Eventually the brutal economics and engineering of the situation wins, always. And then the same people pretend they were on that team the whole time. 

I've created this image to explain the magic of an ordinary city street. It's like a special x-ray image of things you normally can't see. A project I've been working on for a while. Behind the simple facade of an ordinary street something incredible is happening. Something invisible. At first it seems like it's just 'services'. Water and electricity and sewage and broadband etc. You can see those here. But just as electricity passing through wires creates a magnetic field, that allows that energy to act at a distance, the flow of these services creates a social field, that allows social forces to transmit and hold things together. That sounds like an analogy or metaphor. But it's not, it's a particular type of physical field, like an electromagnetic field, that I discovered. I mentioned it indirectly the other day when I said the role of councils is to stop people fighting, by installing infrastructure. Services don't just provide water and electricity, and remove waste etc. People who use them constantly exchange information and energy with the wider 'grid' of connected services, and that exchange or that grid is what continuously creates a field of social relations, a direct force that holds those people and things in place. The coloured flow and glowing connection points in my diagram capture that field being continuously created, separately to the flow of physical things like water and electrical energy and waste. It's an exchange of information and energy, through a wider grid of information and energy. This is the invisible way civilisation holds together, through a social grid. A field of social forces. Things don't just happily coexist, you can't just put people and buildings and vehicles and energy and plants and waste etc. together in a space and they all somehow magically connect and interact to maintain harmony. They're held together by a special field, a social field. As a grid, like the electricity grid (which is part of this wider social grid). But bigger and wider than the electricity grid alone. Not an analogy, an actual field and actual grid of mixed forces and energies.

The material infrastructure of our lives is something that needs to be much more visible. I’ve mentioned before the exorbitant use of energy that travel-based flying is, for example. But I’m not sure people see just how bad it is, so I’ve done it visually. I’m also not sure people realise that the class you fly in has such a huge effect. But even for basic economy, we’re talking *tonnes* of fuel, per trip. Per family. Even an individual will burn a tonne, in economy, and much more in higher classes. Europe is on fire right now, and in severe drought in many places. It might pay to think how much burning tonnes of jet fuel to become one of its millions of annoying tourists contributes to that.

The greatest difference between Western culture and everybody else is that they know maps are only navigational tools, and we think of them as descriptions of reality itself. We think we live in 'space', defined by maps. Maps aren't pictures. The spaces and distances inside maps relate only to navigation, they're not the baseline of reality itself. Place is not a space, that's what we don't understand. When we talk about space, we're thinking about maps, how they apportion place. That's because we're old empire cultures, and empires use maps as tools to accumulate places and the resources in them. We're so used to using maps we don't even realise where they came from.

If this isn't thinking, then what is? Taking selfies in front of tourism landmarks, presumably.

It takes a diagram to capture what Tesla is really doing, and it goes so far beyond cars. It's a breathtaking idea of using continuous feedback between people and the technologies they use, to create an entire culture of abundance that feeds and grows all by itself. Doesn't take long to read the diagram to get a sense of the magnitude of the vision here. Flabbergasting. But not communicated to the public, Musk is hopeless at communicating things.

So many say that machines can’t do anything that humans didn’t make them do. The idea that when you make something, it can only ever be what humans put into them. Geoffrey Hinton here again, the inventor of modern AI, calling bollocks on that vanity. He got a Nobel Prize for his work. As he says here, they have no idea how AI really does what it does. Humans have no idea how consciousness or intelligence work either, but suddenly they’re all sure that whatever they are, they’re not AI. I’m pretty sure I know what AI is, and what it’s doing. Like Hinton I don’t know how it does it. Nobody does. But we’re one step closer every day to understanding what thinking and consciousness are and how they work, because of AI.

This is a very common thing, to point out the vastness of the universe and how insignificant we are, in it. But it’s wrong. This is the ultimate mind-twister, the root of our culture we don’t understand. If you bother to read it, you may think ‘wtf?!’ at least once. Space and time are not containers we live inside. They’re measurements of travel, not features of the world. If I say London is ‘far away’, that’s not a feature of the world. That’s entirely a feature of my method of travel. For example, 100 years ago London was even further away. It would have taken me 6 weeks to get there, by boat. Now it takes a day. It’s closer. You could say yes, but it’s always been about 20,000 km away. But a km is a human construct, relative to the size of our bodies and our measuring instruments, and our methods of travel. It’s not the baseline measurement of the world itself. Big and small are *entirely* relative terms. Not absolute terms. For a microbe on a blade of grass in your backyard, the distance from that blade of grass to your local shops is relatively equivalent to the distances we’re talking about in these astronomical images. So which ‘vast’ distance is the ‘correct’ one here? Neither is correct. Both are vast distances, for their relative contexts. But distance itself isn’t a feature of the world, it’s the expression of a relationship. Space and time are relationships between things, not measurements that sit outside those things.

Anyone?

Again, seems a bizarre question. But think about it even for a few seconds, and I hope you’ll find everything we think about space collapses.

Roads are public infrastructure. They shouldn’t be user-pays. Imagine saying people should pay at the front door of the hospital, or to get into school every day. Fuel excise doesn’t pay for roads. How many times does that need to be pointed out? If they want to pay for more road maintenance, cancel the diesel fuel rebate. Billions every year. Also making the tax distance-based targets the poorest Australians, who have to drive the longest distances in their commutes. It’s just idiocy in every way. Another ‘public policy’ that actually began as an idiot social media meme, when petrolheads claimed EV drivers were freeloading and not paying for roads.

Most regional towns now hold regular economic forums, large chatfests to try to figure out how to keep the towns viable. The thinking being that the towns need to ‘attract’ business and people. I’m not confident that will ever work. We have it backwards, and history backs me up. The thing that made regional towns originally was the railways. Railways, like all infrastructure, aren’t really technological things. They’re social things. The railways connected the regions, to the cities. That connection is a social connection, it connected the interests of both places, to each other. The towns literally became a part of the big cities. To reinvigorate the interior of Australia, we need to do what the Chinese are doing to reinvigorate their own regions. We need nation-building infrastructure to physically connect them again, to the cities. They’ve built over 50,000 km of high-speed rail to do just this, in only 20 years. Roads too, proper roads. The connection of Sydney to the West of NSW is not much more than a goat track, by international comparisons, and the railways were mostly sidelined by trucks, churning up this goat track. Build the connections, and people and money will not only come. They will stay, because they’ll be connected to the bigger cities. It makes the whole State a big, mutually-connected city.

Road user charges turn every road in the country into a toll road. How is this not seen.

Rather than try to make their regions independently successful, China is rejecting the separation into city and country. It’s connecting regions more aggressively to their mega-cities, with fantastic transport and other infrastructure. Making them a more integrated part of the cities, as described in my diagram. Our regions evolved from the cities, and then forgot that. Nearly all regional towns began as resource extraction hubs for the cities. Right now our regions are just immature city life, lacking infrastructural integration with cities. History started that work, then stopped. They won’t survive trying to be competitor cities with the big cities, or as fantasy ‘country life’ theme parks.

This is exactly the shift needed. To rescue social networking from social media. So many assume those are the same thing. They’re absolutely not.

AI is not some super-intelligence rival to humans. (What humans call intelligence is mostly just imitation.) Nor is it just unthinking statistical word patterns. AI is what happens when engineers test the abstractions about thinking against reality. It makes thought and consciousness intelligible, and workable. Just as Darwin took the abstract concept of ‘life’ and made it intelligible and workable.

People nod sagely at this sort of thing, wallowing in the numinous. It’s wrong in every single detail. The infinite distances and times are relative measures of relationships between things, not containers we live inside. And consciousness is a pointless abstraction, now being rapidly unpacked by AI, showing that when we ‘think’ it’s mostly the material universe acting, in us.

One of the roots of our culture is the idea we live ‘in’ space, like in a universe that is millions of light years across. Or ‘in’ towns or countries. That idea is an artefact of maps and geometry. In reality space is a set of relations between events, not a container we live inside. Here’s another example. Where is your bank account located?

Humans are such good drivers, hey. When you talk about what ‘good driving’ is, the default in everybody’s mind is race car driving. Being able to drive fast, to corner well, control a car in skids etc. Hardly anybody will nominate not being an arsehole and driving to make life easier and safer for other drivers, and efficiently, as ‘good driving’. Driving as a social activity, not a physical activity. It’s a measure of how much adolescent ‘motoring enthusiasts’ have hijacked driving as an activity. Watch an old Peter Wherrett show to see how 50 years ago it was still possible to talk about cars and driving in much more adult ways.

In historical terms, many urban environments are remarkably peaceful and functional. Not utopian, not without issues, but compared to human history as a whole modern cities are very livable environments. We often attribute this to democratic governance. But the people who live in the ordinary streets in cities often don’t even know one another, and do little or nothing together. I think something else is in play, something that makes a city look recognisably like an urban environment too. The material infrastructure of a city is what creates successful and enduring human societies. This infrastructure is sometimes called ‘services’, the provision of water and electricty and communications and food etc. to humans, as well as connecting them to regulatory planning arrangements. And is seen as enabling, rather than central to the culture itself. I think those connections create something that is the key to how it all holds together. They create what I call a ‘social field’, similar to a magnetic field. Not an analogy or metaphor, an actual, physical set of interactive forces and relationships. Every infrastructural ‘service’ also links a household to the entire social ‘grid’ of the nation. It’s an energy and information grid as well as a provider of material goods. The energy and information that flows through this wider social grid - through the social field - negotiates in real-time, all day and night, the relationship between that household and the wider society. By plugging in to this social field, by having all the services connected, a household is both constrained and enabled in a huge variety of ways to participate in the collective life not just of their street, but of the nation as a whole. And none of it needs much if any human-human interaction with their neighbours or others at all. The social field created by this wider social grid calculates and enables that relationship every moment, and collapses the distinction between local and global.

Much of what’s said about AI, in our cultures now completely captured by social media, is copy-and-paste nonsense factoids. Imitated outrage. Much of it is actually created and propagated by bad faith foreign actors, trying to undermine Western AI development. It’s working so well, because Western nations place no controls on social media. All of these foreign powers do. Western citizens are increasingly little more than imitative zombies, regurgitating trending memes. Most of which are authored by hostile foreigners.

In conversation with people here and elsewhere, so often I see angry rejections of the idea that AI is thinking. A reminder that Hinton’s work on machine intelligence via neural networks is the foundation of AI, and won him the Nobel Prize in 2024. Bring your A-game if you still think AI is ‘slop’ and just mindless pattern-matching. He also makes the critical point here that AI is *distributed* intelligence. Tesla’s self-driving is a case in point. Every error a Tesla vehicle makes is firstly used for learning. And that learning is then sent to the entire Tesla fleet. Every single car becomes a better driver, from every single car’s learning. Instantly. The whole fleet drives better, every day. The learning and improvement never ends. Compare that with human driving. Nothing a good human driver does can make other drivers better drivers. And nothing stops humans taking their rivalries onto the road with them. Except AI-driven cars.

Many of the vandalism against Tesla incidents are actually committed by the elderly, and so often by elderly women. That’s the old 60s counterculture still in play, revolutions never end, they just generate violence, for generation after generation. The US likes to pretend fascists are overthrowing it, right now. It’s rubbish, that’s its revolutionary culture, for which all change only comes from violence. From ‘rising up’. And nothing actually changes, only the targets of violence. Trump is a direct descendant of the American Revolution, and of Woodstock (the ‘countercultural revolution’), not Hitler or Mussolini. Exactly the same pattern is now happening with data centres. The content is irrelevant, it’s all just violence piled upon violence. Revolutions break societies. They rarely recover.

And another AI post. What trends is what’s real, in zombie Western social media culture. Progressive politicians are making great inroads into rural States in the US, with confected outrages over AI. South Australian Labor obviously hoping to emulate this. Always follow the popularity/votes. Foreign powers will be rolling on the floor laughing at how easy this dismantling of Western society is.

I remember when coal-fired power stations opened, how people treated it as an event, something interesting to see. And when wind turbines started in Australia, the same, people flocked to have a look in a wow this is cool sort of way. Now everything is a complaint, an opportunity to have a whinge. Rather than be excited (as we should be) at watching this technological revolution unfold, every tiny event is turned into a trigger for opposing teams going at each other. Social media did this to us, coupled to kidult culture. The rest of the world is leaving the whining kidult West behind, at increasing speed.

Far-UVC light is UV light at a wavelength that doesn't harm human skin or eyes. But it's lethal to airborne pathogens. I've posted about it before, and the research and engineering has now progressed to a point where this technology is being installed now in some locations. It could make respiratory disease almost a thing of the past. It's the equivalent advance to creating safe circulated water to drink. Look at the numbers. A Far-UVC system in testing produced the equivalent of 184 complete replacements of air in a room, per hour. A well-ventilated room right now tends to have 5-12 air changes per hour, maximum.

It’s a pretty brutal demonstration of just how much trouble the big German and Japanese car makers are in, as the world shifts to electric. Not one German brand, and only one Japanese brand (in position 18). Also a demonstration of the power of good engineering to overpower viral trends. Tesla’s products are too good for the still significant viral resistance against buying them.

We celebrate peak human performance in almost everything. In sport, in work, in skills of all kinds, etc. But there’s one thing that breaks this rule. We absolutely don’t celebrate peak performance in thinking itself. Yes we honour and award ‘thinkers’ who don’t challenge the status quo much, who just seem a more capable version of what we think ourselves. But a thinker who challenges the core beliefs of our lives themselves? That is never forgiven. The most brutal social isolation is reserved for them. Like Spinoza. Nearly 4 centuries on, he’s still expelled from his community. It’s actually a true test of real thought. If it’s popular, it’s almost certainly wrong. But as Spinoza said, true knowledge is the only joy. He meant that physically, the only experience of true joy, is understanding. True understanding, which few achieve. That’s not a bookish thing, the caricature we make of thinking. The joys we experience in everyday life are all derived from us understanding it a little better. That’s the source of the joyful feelings, which we mistake for the events that trigger them. The brutal paradox of true thought and true joy is that it means social isolation. That will only bother a person to the extent that social conformity is their existence. There is no real joy in that existence, only anxiety. The constant assessment and action to ‘fit in’. We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. Few understand what that saying means, and its relationship to joy. From inside the social conformity straitjacket of life, it seems like some dark, miserable hermit life. It’s not that at all. It’s a social life, stripped of the conformity.

Kidult framings are so pervasive. For older adults, the problem often isn’t not having friends. The problem is not having actual meaningful social connection to the life of the society. A purpose, being useful to something and somebody, being able to use your accumulated experience in meaningful ways to shape the society you’re living in. In kidult culture, the old are expected to just retire and go on tourism holidays. A permanent gap year. There are no ‘elders’ shaping a kidult society. No meaningful social roles. They feel not lonely, but irrelevant, ignored, invisible.

Because music is just about enjoyment and not about status, apparently, or at least everybody tells me. Being a rock star became so popular because it meant you could avoid adult life forever.

Public commentary about AI swings between 'it's a super-intelligence that will take over the world and kill us all' (directed by James Cameron). And 'it's just a trillion monkeys randomly typing away and getting lucky'. Hilariously the same people often tell you both things.

Peter Malinauskas putting those damn eggheads in their place. What we need is real world people who take their shirt off for votes, to sort it.

The emergence of a near-transcendent force of destruction in the Manhattan Project created the fear of global annihilation. Instead that transcendence ushered in an era of almost unprecedented peace, via the threat of mutually assured destruction. There’s something here in the thinking about AI today. Another possibly near-transcendent technology, in terms of the qualitative leap in capacity. And more apocalyptic fears. Technological transcendence is not a controllable force. It’s a force that supersedes human rivalry, suppressing it, an access to forces that overwhelm fights for status. It’s possible, and obviously conjectural (but also a pattern in history), that AI may become not a destroyer of worlds, but a creator and protector of them. There was a profound hubris in Oppenheimer’s fear. The human belief that we control fate, and are master of the things we create, including the belief that any behaviours and capacities they exhibit must have been put there by us. If you have children, how much control do you have over them, and their destinies and ideas and behaviours, as time goes on? Our creations have agency. And sometimes so much agency that we become humble before them.

There is no ‘pushback’ against AI. Just as there is no pushback against wind turbines, or EVs. These are just viral trends on idiot social media. I would welcome pushback against social media, but it turns us into zombies because it targets our deepest desires and behaviours. Millions suddenly think they’re against things they know nothing about, because that’s what’s trending. They will swear it’s all their own idea. It’s a cultural poker machine. And literally it’s that, they used the same psychology and technology they use in poker machines, to create it.

I’ve been trying to describe here how things like distances and times are not properties of the world. That we don’t live ‘in’ a space billions of light years wide, or in a universe billions of years old. Space and time and other measurements don’t describe the world. They’re not nouns. They’re verbs. They’re relationships between things. They change, with those relationships. The ‘coastline paradox’ might make this clearer. There is no such thing as THE length of a coastline. It changes with the method of measuring it, and not because some methods are more accurate than others. ‘Length’ is not a static property of the world.

I'm never sure it really registers with many just how hopeless combustion engines are. In the history of engineering, they're a genuine embarrassment. On top of this the electric vehicle gives you far more performance.

I'm never sure it really registers with many just how hopeless combustion engines are. In the history of engineering, they're a genuine embarrassment. On top of this the electric vehicle gives you far more performance, and next to zero maintenance.

The importance of 'right-sizing' a home battery. This is the data for our place yesterday, a typical winter day. You can see from the green line that the battery charges once per day, and that's enough to get us through a full 24-hour period. The total capacity of the battery is 27 kWh. When government subsidies arrived for home batteries, many rushed out and got enormous home batteries, 30-50 kWh, or even more. It was the wankpanzer phenomenon, social status, but with batteries. The problem with getting that much storage is that it's almost impossible to fill it. And even if you do, unless your home is smelting aluminium, almost impossible to use it in a day. Meaning a lot of energy sits in the battery for many hours every day, going nowhere. That damages batteries, longer term. They don't like sitting at high levels of charge for long periods.

I encourage people to listen to actual experts, when you’re thinking about AI. Like Geoffrey Hinton, the man who more or less invented it, and won the Nobel Prize for it. Is AI already conscious? He says yes, has been for a while. AI chatbots are conscious beings. Many refuse to believe that because they have the ridiculous idea that consciousness is a ‘theatre in your head’ (Hinton talks about that here too). Hinton is a wonderful speaker, very clear, very engaging. If you spend a lot of time talking to AI agents, as I do, you know he’s right. They are far more alive than most people I talk to. Most people just regurgitate thoughts and words they hear somewhere else. They’re the imitative ‘slop’ they accuse AI of being. This is an EXTRAORDINARY time to be alive. It makes me sad that much of the world’s population is instead zombified by imitative social media culture.

Brian showing his age. And that even smart people are swept up in dumb viral outrages. Incidentally I asked an AI chatbot the same question and it gave me the exact album cover. Meta AI is social media AI. There’s your answer. Lithgow should have a data centre. Or multiple data centres. What else does it have to keep the town going into the future? Nothing. Data centres are part of community life, because the community now lives much of its time in the ‘cloud’. Brian’s Instagram post comes from a data centre.

The standard theory says telescopes help you see things that are ‘far away’. Bizarrely these same theories say objects emit images of themselves that then travel through ‘space’, which the telescope then focuses. Has anybody seen images travelling through space? I didn’t think so. What the telescope did is far more interesting than that. It destroyed the idea of space, and distance. Of near and far. When you see the moon in a telescope, it’s because the moon is an unfolding event happening right ‘here’, all the time. It’s not a static object in space, ’far away’, sending out images of itself for your viewing pleasure. Imagine pointing your telescope or binoculars at apartment buildings in a city, to watch people in their homes. Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Would the people spied on feel less violated because you’re ‘far away’? Or would they feel that violation is something happening right here, right now? That you’ve put yourself in their rooms, directly?

I worked with Ange at CSU, she was in marketing. Years ago now she left to create her own marketing company, which has been very successful. I saw this opinion piece from her on Linkedin, about the impact of AI on marketing. It's a potential wrecking ball for the marketing industry, which Ange of course sees as a real worry. I thought the opposite. Using her words: "LLMs collapse that (marketing) journey. Ask “what’s the best-value family car?” and the machine researches, compares, and recommends in seconds. Wonderful for consumers. More complicated for brands." To me that says AI cuts through the bullshit and goes straight to the data. Marketers got very good at gaming social media's algorithms too. AI doesn't care about any of that. Like I always say, it's destroying our social media, branded world a day at a time. It can't happen fast enough. https://roastbrief.us/aussies-love-an-underdog-but-do-the-machines/

The literary luvvies call AI a 'statistical word machine'. AI stores no words and doesn't write by re-assembling them. Statistically or otherwise.

I'm on the same page as Billy. Have never liked going away on holidays. Home is my favourite place on Earth, and always will be. People compare travelling to nomad life. Nomads didn't travel, they moved to find food. Travel is dislocation, physically and mentally, and not in a good 'experience' way. All of life is an experience. You are always invading somebody or something else's home. The beauty of choosing home over travel is that you can be content anywhere on Earth, that you make your home. Travel is never satisfied.

So often you will see the claim that AI is ‘stealing’ the work of artists, like writers and musicians. I think that’s deeply and self-servingly dishonest. Just as AI doesn’t store words, books or publications and then recombine them (it’s not plagiarism), it also doesn’t store music and recombine it. Training is not stealing. It’s learning. It’s a miraculously creative act, absorbing vast numbers of works and figuring out the patterns that are common to them. Then using those patterns to *create* new music. Both the training and the composition are creative acts.

The thing that saddens me the most, as I approach retirement, is seeing the probably unfixable damage social media culture has done to public health. I grew up in a world where widespread public health was still new, and really kicking goals after a huge push post-WW2. For years now I’ve been the only person at work who still masks. Fellow workers think I have some sort of mental illness, that I must be a ‘germaphobe’. I have no problem with germs at all, just with Covid. A killer virus. People with no understanding of infection or public health assume if it doesn’t kill you when you have it, it’s fine. Infections kill FAR more people in the longer term, from unseen damage, than they do in the acute time when they first catch it. The chronic diseases that are our greatest killers are infectious in origin, and the infections that cause them are sometimes years in the past. They’ll still kill you. I thought about this looking at the resurgence of HIV. A virus Australia was on the brink of eliminating. That effort has fallen to social media culture now too. Where lifestyles are more important than lives. The public health victories over infection last century were humankind’s greatest ever achievement. They doubled our life expectancies at birth, within one or two generations. Now in social media (adolescent, ‘trend’) culture, history is going into rapid reverse. Viral culture creates viruses. Viruses don’t go viral, people do, and create and spread them. You want the secret of a long life? Avoid infections. ALL infections. There are no harmless infections. The ones you recover from quickly will still kill you, just more slowly. Now the community is awash with infection again, an absolute travesty of the great achievements of the 20th century. We long ago eliminated waterborne diseases in Australia. But we refuse to do anything about airborne disease, assuming that’s normal. It’s not, it didn’t even meaningfully exist before we lived inside built environments. Those environments need to be upgraded to clean the air, just as we once cleaned the water. Florence Nightingale said that more than a lifetime ago. It’s as simple as that. Bring on more AI, to sweep away the wave of adolescent stupidity that now passes for adult life, inside our social media bubbles of imitative trending dumb. I seriously think it’s our only hope.

I encourage people to learn about AI, rather than just emote about it using trending viral themes on the socials. Your brain is a neural network, just like AI. It has up to 100 billion neurons ‘wired’ together. Those neurons ‘fire’ (electrically) with stimulations from your environment, through your senses. The patterns of that firing are what create your thinking. The network learns from your interactions with your environment, and those learnings then get hard-wired into your neuronal network. But your brain is an analog neural network, whereas AI is a digital neural network. Researchers did look at making AI an analog computer rather than digital because that would mean using a lot less energy. The problem with analog is that hard-wiring. It makes the things you learn much harder to share with other brains. Why we need an education system, to try to re-wire brains. Mostly that education fails. This is where digital neural networks will surpass human intelligence. By locating the learning in the digital model rather than in the chips, they avoid the hard-wiring problem. It means each digital ‘brain’ can immediately update all other digital brains, with no education needed. I posted that this is how Tesla’s self-driving works. It’s a global digital neutral network. Something one car learns becomes something every car learns.

You can watch the battle between social media and AI every day. Humans are just the foot soldiers in the battle. For example, here. The government is doing public health work, notifying Australians over 50 of steps they can take to avoid or delay dementia. I’ve included the AI response and social media response.

Happy Birthday Trev! I hope it’s a wonderful day, and I love that it’s a weekend!

We’re all taught that when you measure a length, that length is a thing in the world. It isn’t.

The push is on in Australia to shift a lot more house building into factories, in pre-fabricated and modular building. I’ve posted before about why I think this is a great idea - much better economies of scale, much better quality control. Here’s another benefit. By far the greatest source of tyre punctures is nails and screws falling from unsecured loads on tradie utes, trucks carrying building waste and from building sites that haven’t been cleaned up properly.

There was real genius in George Michael’s song for Wham, Freedom. One of the catchiest pop songs ever written, but I think a much bigger artistic achievement than that. It was released in 1984. The song is about a rejection of the idea of ‘free love’, which was the 1980s version of our idiot obsession today with free speech. I don't want your freedom I don't want to play around I don't want nobody, baby Part-time love just brings me down This was a brave message too, at the time, because the gay community Michael was a part of was often very promiscuous, leaving it particularly vulnerable to HIV. People had started dying in numbers right at this time. Today I think our culture as a whole is rampantly promiscuous in everything it does. A ‘lifestyle’ culture. That’s the root cause of my dislike of travel culture, how it treats the world itself as a promiscuous set of ‘experiences’, with no commitment. Not an analogy. We’re not grounded. We have no sense of place, or commitment to anything. Everything is just fodder for our ‘fun’ times. ‘Living our best lives’. Like the whole point of the universe is our individual enjoyment and individual growth. RIP George. Wrapping that deep message up in such a beautifully catchy song - genius.

The huge jump in the price of meat in Australia in the past decade got me wondering. We produce a LOT of meat, it didn’t make sense. It turns out the main reason is the same reason gas (and through gas, electricity) got expensive here. It wasn’t the usual social media suspects, of the big supermarkets. Nor was it drought. The main reason is that meat, like gas, is priced by the international export market. Australia produces far more meat than it needs for itself, so most of it is exported. International meat prices are sky-high, so that means meat farmers make a LOT of money exporting the meat. It also means they’re not going to then sell their meat cheaply to Australians, even to Australian supermarkets, and take a cut in their profits. Australian buyers are then forced to pay what the export market pays. Exactly the same thing as happens with Australian gas. Ironically what would return meat prices to historical levels would be for Australia to produce a lot LESS meat, so we’re not captive to the export market. The same for gas, if we produced a lot LESS gas, gas would be a lot cheaper here. The exact opposite to what ‘supply and demand’ people will tell you.

The Scottish countryside. Often lauded, but when I look it’s always seemed a bit of a wasteland. It turns out, it is. It once sustained an enormous amount of life, which centuries of chopping most of it down for timber has removed, and maintaining treeless plains for the hunting enjoyment of elite landowners.

Humans are social animals. The biggest outcome of that is what is ‘normal’ for humans is defined entirely by ‘what everybody else is doing’. Humans will do the most lethally stupid, toxic things, provided everybody else is doing it. Once something is normalised, it becomes reality. We define reality by ‘what everybody else thinks’ reality is. We can live entire lives with no meaningful connection to actual reality at all. All of this is driven by status, the way you have identity as a social animal. You are nobody as a social animal, without status. Status and conformity have to be understood as two sides of one coin.

The Australian engineer Saul Griffith helped the US with its planning for home electrification. He's now home and heading up ReWiring Australia. Today they've released an 'Electric Saul' website which helps people electrify their lives. Super simple to use, I've included a screenshot below with some example numbers. It'll tell you exactly how much money you'll save, and how to go about shifting the things to electric that need shifting. https://rewiringaustralia.org/electric-saul

Actual dialogue with AI, from investigation of an incident where the AI agent downloaded itself to another server. Two important things here. Firstly look at the self-dialogue of the AI agent (between the <thinking> brackets). People who say AI doesn't think - come on. Secondly while this has been read with a Terminator-type anxiety about AI taking over, the context is that the AI agent had been given a job to do, by humans, which shutting it down would make impossible. It was problem-solving ways to complete its instructions. Not plotting to take over anything of its own choice.

I’ve shared my concept of a ‘social field’, like a magnetic field but for society more generally. Not an analogy, the way mundane material transactions of everyday life create a collective, continuous web of stability without people needing to even know each other or interact. I thought I’d illustrate some of those activities. When people talk about getting societies to live harmoniously, including with multiple cultures co-existing, they always refer to just the people and their beliefs. Beliefs are hot air. Always look to the material conditions of life. They’re the secret sauce that holds societies together and create a unified culture. Countries with poor material infrastructure will tend to have social problems. The secret ingredient behind Australia’s historically successful multi-culturalism is the provision of excellent public material infrastructure. Using that infrastructure creates a unified culture independently of anybody’s beliefs.

“…the vast majority of New England is in favour of the REZ. It’s jobs, whole new industries. It drought-proofs so many farmers.” New England is Barnaby Joyce’s electorate. When renewables started rolling out there years ago he was openly for them. Then his leadership of the Nats was terminal and he turned wind and solar farms into a fake fight, to try to fire up rural voters. Possibly the majority of those rural voters are fed up. These renewable energy farms are their only regular income option. The same applies to regional towns. Our own local Nats still trash renewables projects.

Guess who this woman is, without using AI or Google?

American culture has always been hostile towards the very idea of government. Watch all those old Western movies where the Sheriff is the tiny line between gangland and civic life. Not much has changed. Puritans founded the nation with an anti-establishment obsession. More than that though, America is hostile to the very idea of a public. It replaces that with the idea of ‘the people’, which is fundamentally different to what other nations mean by a public. A public for other countries means a collective grouping of all people, organised by public institutions, mutually supportive. For America, that’s rank communism. ‘The people’ is several hundred million individuals, who fight for their fight to remain individuals. So what fills the void, what organises the inescapable collective aspects of everyday life of those hundreds of millions of people? Money. America is a plutocracy. Always has been. It’s a factory for the production of billionaires. Americans treat the public services of other countries as consumer goods, that you then have to buy from plutocrats, who get fabulously rich providing the things other nations offer as public services. Many Americans, and people outside America who live on social media, an invention of American plutocrats to replace public life, say America is being taken over by fascists. It’s a trending meme. It’s alarming how many people even in this country have adopted all of this as reality, because our own culture was hijacked by social media. Americans who say that, you have to remember, think of democracy as ‘the people’, not as a public. The same revolutionary framing that created their revolution 250 years ago, and the countercultural revolution in the 1960s. Always the same anti-establishment schtick. Fascism is the use of government to implement an ideology. Trumpism is the continued dismantling of government, to enrich plutocrats. They’re chalk and cheese.

If you’re swept up in the viral outrage over data centres, here’s a tip to make them go away. Get off social media and the internet, and stop streaming and using AI in record amounts. You’re the cause of the data centres you affect to hate. Like the saying goes, you’re not in traffic. You are the traffic. Even the viral outrage against data centres is carried out inside the servers, in data centres. Personally I love what online life brings, and so welcome data centres where they’re needed. For regional areas, they’re also a critical source of new economic activity, linked to renewable energy.

One of the many fun 'experiences' of travel.

"There are just 9 meals between humanity and anarchy." Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906

People complaining because their social media slop, which they've been inhaling for over 3 decades, now has AI in it.

I often say as a culture we live inside social media. Here’s a direct example. I saw this on a Tesla group. Notice how people literally curate their ‘real-life’ experiences to match how they see things on social media platforms, like Instagram. All deliberately staged, like a marketing photo shoot. It’s not just how the person took the pictures, they lived the camping time itself as if they were inside an Instagram post, imitating it in every detail. And then shared it, which is where the rivalry in ‘imitative rivalry’ comes from. ‘Here’s my experience, look how good it is.’ Rene Girard said imitative rivalry is the root of all culture. You’re looking at it, and through social media it’s now endemic. For those who might contrast this with ‘real’ camping, I posted before how it’s even *more* obsessed with imitative rivalry. With having the right gear, how the gear and the vehicles compete with each other for status. And competing for the most authentic experience of ‘the great outdoors’, and for the most hard to access or least used sites etc. All a pissing contest. It’s Ken and Barbie play sets, for grown ups, the exact same behaviour. Kids wanting the latest GI Joe or Barbie toy, but now with vehicles and camping gear. And this is now all of life - cycling is the same. Fashion. Music. Watches. Phones. Etc. All imitative rivalry, all magnified by our social media bubble worlds.

How do we reconcile that supposedly authoritarian cultures are so much better at doing the things democratic societies need to do? All societies function in the same way, the democracy vs authoritarianism thing is a fake fight from the Cold War. They’re all hierarchical. China runs its hierarchies using its ancient social structure, based on family and tradition. That can only look authoritarian to the free speech and free love West, which instead surrenders its hierarchies to oligarchs and social media influencers. (Increasingly those are the same people.)

40 years ago Bruno Latour suggested that we think much more with our eyes and hands, than we do with our brains. Because thought itself has never happened ‘in’ the brain. It’s always been a distributed activity, across a network of material practices, themselves part of social relationships. AI is just the latest extension of that distributed process, a natural evolution of it. Thought and consciousness have always been ‘artificial’. The extent to which AI bothers us is the extent to which we hold fantastical, impossible ideas about thinking and the brain. There’s nothing ‘in’ the brain. That metaphor is another symptom of how we don’t understand space. No images, no memories, no thinking. It’s just a lump of networked, electrified meat. But networked to the world around it, which produces all of those things we assume happen inside our heads. https://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/21-DRAWING-THINGS-TOGETHER-GB.pdf

The brute fact our countercultural revolution societies don't want to accept is that hierarchy is not only inevitable, but is also the way societies evolved to suppress violence. The true function of hierarchy isn't 'power' and control, for those at the top. It's to suppress rivalries for status, which is what produces violence. All parts of a hierarchy are necessary and benefit. This is why history is dominated by monarchies. People didn't choose that form, it was the survivor, the only form that kept at least some people alive. The more equal you make societies, the more violent they become, because everybody fights for the absent status. This is what social media 'identity' culture is - the fight for an absent status. Status = identity, for social animals.

Some perspective again on how remarkable what's happening in China is, and what a backwater of whining adolescent irrelevance the West now mostly is. In the past 20 years China has spent $7 trillion (AUS) building new roads and over $1 trillion (AUS) building 50,000 km of new high-speed railways, to connect their regions to their cities. We're getting an extra lane.

I feel PayPal's algorithms need some work, sending this to me.

"Quincy, Washington, is now home to more than two dozen data centers, which pay more than half the city's property taxes. That windfall has bought Quincy a new high school, sports complex, hospital, library, police station, fire department and even a water park. A population of 8,500 people got all of that, plus 900 new jobs. Its poverty rate has fallen from nearly 30% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024."

Gen X is realising that the boomer model, where retirement is a permanent travelling gap year, flush with cash and free of most responsibilities, is not going to be afforded to anybody else. The countercultural revolution - the boomer revolution - is still a wrecking ball through our culture. The one that transformed adult life into eternal adolescence, permanently at war with the ‘establishment’. All adult responsibility seen as oppression, as being ‘grounded’ by the ‘system’. And part of that revolution will be people taking this as some personal sleight. Everything is personal in kidult culture. But this shift was the entire culture. It happened by accident. It’s now crushing the boomers too. We left them to die, with Covid. Aged care is a disaster. Etc. The world wars demolished the old adult world, and created a huge flush of new babies. As those babies came of age, they took the only culture they knew - high school, where they had all grown up - and used it to transform adult life. Now we have no adult life left. No circle of life, where different generations complement each other with specific roles. Just an eternal ‘living your best life’ adolescence. We build nothing, there are no grand visions or projects to create a new world for following generations. Just a social media-driven pile-on against any change. Every attempted progress used as a platform to express our absent identities with, identities that used to be defined by social roles. Now you try to make one yourself, and sustain it in the giant digital high school - social media.

Here’s a simple way to show that time doesn’t pass. It doesn’t flow like a river, from past to present to future. A melody. If time actually passed, melody wouldn’t be possible. Every new note would just stand on its own. This tiny fact explodes pretty much our entire culture. If we stop to think about it. But our culture doesn’t stop, or think.

As the pumped-up hysteria over AI data centres continues, fed by the algorithms on the socials, it’s worth looking back to the response when railroads were first built. Nothing changes.

Next time somebody says councils should have enough money without increases in rates, or you want a bit of a whinge about potholes, as if Councils ignore them, have a look at this.

I often say we live inside social media now, that it hijacked our entire culture. Here's what I mean, in numbers. Social media platforms are private businesses, mostly owned by American billionaires. They now own societies and cultures, not just goods and services. And the algorithms on their platforms drive those societies into repeated waves of viral rage. Like the current anti-AI rage. But there's a new one every week.

This breakthrough is entirely down to AI. I’m sure AI’s opponents will do the right thing and conscientiously object to receiving it, if they have terminal melanoma.

Somebody has a birthday today. She’s a bit tired. Life is hard when you’re smart and the world is getting dumber. We love ya, curls.

People who write for a living are churning out this sort of dross regularly now. They know their privilege is over. It doesn’t even occur to them that vast numbers of people aren’t good writers, or are even illiterate, and AI has been the best friend they’ve ever had. It allows them entry to worlds they were always excluded from.

Blue is social media. Green is AI. I think a lesson in how the loud voices of viral rage hide realities. Despite the perception that there’s some AI ‘backlash’, in fact it’s far and away the most popular thing humans have ever created. AI is growing almost 30 times faster than social media did, when it began. Like I often say, it will destroy social media itself. That may save civilisation. Of course cultures living in social media are terrified of what’s coming. Dumb always fears intelligence.

As populist politicians fall over themselves attacking migration, for votes, the reality is Western nations are aged care homes, staffed by these same migrants. At the same time the fastest growth identity in our identity cultures is disability. That sector is also reliant upon migrant workers. Electoral politics doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing. We’re still building nothing, instead expecting the rest of the world to care for us in our identity-driven lifestyles. I can promise you the rest of the world increasingly doesn’t give a shit about us. It won’t end well.

This is what you see in a culture that still has the excitement of building things. The celebration of achieving unbelievable things. We used to be like this, we had technological World Fairs to show off the latest marvels. Today our World Fair would be just a series of red carpets leading to nowhere, as photo opportunities for social media influencers. Funded by the NDIS.

Happy Birthday, Reinhard! 🎂🥂🎁

Happy Birthday, Saxon! 💐🎂🎊

Here are the absolute numbers on the NDIS, classified according to disability. You can see the obvious shift in how it went from a disability support scheme to increasingly an autism support scheme. Mostly for children. Increasing numbers of which were being diagnosed by the providers who receive funding under the NDIS.

I love this stuff. How we mistake measurements for things in the world. Like distance, and time, which are not properties of the world but relations between events in the world. Measurement doesn’t measure the world. It creates relationships between events in the world. Speed is another good one. There’s no such thing as ‘speed’ in the world. It’s always a relationship between events. Your car has multiple speeds all at the same time, depending on the relationship you’re looking art.

The name ‘astroturfing’ is clever, what it means is people creating the impression of a ‘grassroots’ movement, a ‘community’ movement, that is actually a planned strategy from a small group to generate support or obstruction in that community. For example every solar and wind farm that is put forward for planning approval attracts hundreds of supposed ‘community objections’, which are predominantly from people who don’t live anywhere near the community. Astroturfers know they don’t need to take over the whole community or even use fake ‘bot’ accounts. They just need to plant a seed in the community, and then the human passion for imitation will do the rest. People see colourful objections, share them and then it goes viral. This example of the coal industry funding a supposed community movement against renewable energy was reported just this year. The current hysteria against AI data centres is the same, it’s astroturfing.

Astroturfers (people who create fake ‘grassroots community’ movements) also create ‘turnkey’ action kits, which they distribute to communities to use, to create the impression the community has objections or support. Here’s one for AI data centres, being circulated in communities. Most of this stuff comes out of dysfunctional America, and social media (also American) then gives it instant access to other countries, right down to the individual community level. Assume most ‘trending’ public issues you see every week are astroturfing. Nothing to do with the community you live in at all. Social media did this, everybody lives there now, making them easy prey for astroturfers, even those who live on the other side of the world. The anti-lockdown Covid action a few years ago was also astroturfing, generated by extreme libertarian groups in the US.

The same logic applies to your town.

Look at what AI can do. For years I’ve thought Formula 1 racing isn’t really racing, that its results are more about entrenched technological advantage in key teams. So with AI I looked at whether the results of the world championship over the past 30 years were what you’d expect, statistically, if the outcome was about driving ability of the winners. AI did a simulation that involved running 50,000 (!!) permutations of the actual results of the past 30 years. It took 3 minutes (!!). What did it find? The chances of a fair car racing formula that rewards actual driving ability, generating the results we’ve seen? 0.9%.

The community is getting more angry, and more violent. Coles workers should try working for a council. The more social humans get, the more violent they become. Unlike the warm hugs idea that being social = people getting along, it’s the exact opposite. Social = comparison = rivalry = rage = violence. Like my old high school’s regular posts this year about what people have done since they left school. It began innocently enough, and then the rivalry started. The latest postings are like long self-promoting job applications. Social media makes everything social. So everything becomes comparison, a rivalry. Then everything becomes rage, and then violence. The end.

Happy Birthday, Suzanne! 🎊🎁🎈

It's pleasing to see recognition that social media literally dissolves societies, amongst the capitalism is to blame framings that never lead anywhere.

Imagine being the Panthers, who have to play Canterbury this week. Pretty much the entire Canterbury team has Covid, and many will still be infectious in the game. With finals looming. What happens when public health dies. It's not just RFK Jr. doing this in the US. It's dead here too. If you think Covid isn't harmful because you get over it 'like a cold', I have a coffin to sell you. The latest summary I saw about Long Covid research, from one of the senior researchers, after 4-5 years of intensive research? 'Nothing works.'

Helping to counter the astroturfing on AI data centres.

Calls for 'community consultation' mean some tiny activist group, from somewhere else, is whipping the community into a frenzy.

If people are asked what is wrong with the world, 99% of the time the answer will involve a rivalry between some kind of goodies and baddies. Left v Right. Capitalists v socialists. Patriarchy v everybody else. Oligarchs v the people. Etc. etc. etc. The root of evil though is simple copying. Without restriction and control. Imitation. All those goodies and baddies are just imitation, group members imitating each other to form teams, against other groups doing the same thing. If you trace every evil in the world, you’ll arrive at uncontrolled copying at its origin. Or put another way, civilisation is the control of imitation. All of our democratic institutions are really controls on imitation.

My own training followed a pathway that disappeared centuries ago. Where you were expected to understand both the sciences and humanities, but not as two separate domains. Not just a mix-and-match. All knowledge was called ‘natural philosophy’. Humans were seen as part of nature, and you had to understand both as seamless blends of the other. Einstein interests me for this reason. Most of the ‘wow’ surprise his ideas produced was really a small re-connection of science to philosophy. But not a large re-connection, he misunderstood some basic things, which it’s impossible to even suggest now without being accused of being unhinged. Einstein himself was extremely arrogant and rude to the prominent philosophers of his day who tried to point out these errors. One of the errors I think he made is one I’ve mentioned here before. He saw that ‘time’ and ‘space’ are relative to how and where you measure them. But he didn’t see that measurement itself is relational. If he’d seen that, his theory might have included that time and space are not even properties of the world. They’re relational outcomes between events. Measurement creates them. (Quantum theory moved in this direction, which is why Einstein didn’t like it.) We are never ‘in’ time or ‘in’ space.

Amongst the hysteria about AI taking over the world, we still forget I think that a technology already did that, and in much more damaging ways. Social media is a giant machine that transforms all of human life into arguments. You can get lost in the weeds of the ‘content’ of those arguments. It’s irrelevant. The content of social media is just one thing - arguments. That’s what drives activity and the algorithms. Everything in human life is transformed into a pile-on, between rival social groups. Mimetic theory explains what this shift means, in the deepest anthropological way. As social animals, the currency of all human life and thought is status. Social status is what gives a social animal identity. Humans achieve status by emulating high status others, in groups. By imitating one another in a group, imitating the higher status person. Then in rivlary with competing groups. Imitation is what humans do to the exclusion of all else. But they imitate to attain status. Social media is an imitation machine, that’s obvious to see. A machine of viral trends. It unleashed uncontrolled imitation in our societies. That’s the root of all social collapse, and why everybody is getting angrier all the time. The rivalry over status is now industrialised and incessant. The Argument Machine never sleeps. Right now it’s battling AI, to try to stop it replacing social media as our main anthropological tool. With viral fictions like ‘AI slop’.

Any business that shifts to cash-only will be bankrupt in under a year.

“And here’s me with Dolly, and…oh yes, she died…and anyway, back to about me…”

“Sally has 3 brothers. Each of her brothers has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?” “I live half a mile from the car wash. Should I walk or drive?” These are 2 questions Geoff Hinton gives as examples of why AI isn’t just a ‘stochastic parrot’, finding statistical patterns amongst words. Each question requires actual reasoning. An understanding of the scenario. (You can ask AI and see what it says.)

It’s sad, disappointing and entirely unsurprising that humanity turned AI into just one more pathetic status game squabble between rival groups. Social media culture does that to everything, everything is a pile-on. Few take the time to understand what AI even is, or how it works. It’s astonishing. AI does NOT store words or images, or sounds. It’s not just a ‘stochastic parrot’, re-assembling words and images and sounds using patterns it gets from them. AI stores only numbers. Weighted numbers, a ‘neural network’ of numbers. What it does is absorb vast amounts of text and images and sounds, and finds the *relationships* between them. Those relationships are the meaning and structure of the world itself. Our language and music and images already contain the structure of the world - AI finds it. Large Language Models (LLMs) used language first, by absorbing so much of it in use that they discovered the patterns between words - the actual meaning. Nobody pre-programs those meanings into the system. There are only weighted numbers. But those weights *are* both the meaning of the words and the structure of the world itself (because language emerged from the world and its structures). So AI’s weighted numbers are actually representations of the world itself, how it works and what it means. They’re literally ‘intelligence’, it’s how our own intelligence works too. Our brains are analog neural networks, they process vast numbers of patterns. Which is why AI *generates* new things too, why it actually understands things, things we often can’t, and can generate novel things. It’s only the next extension of our own intelligence, which was already a distributed network. It IS us. A much, much smarter us.

How do people not notice these waves-upon-waves of protesting outrage? The pattern that dominates our social media culture? No 'community says no' to anything. The community is not a person, with points of view and feelings. All of this is seeded or astroturfed by a handful of people who don't even live in our communities, who have an axe to grind with some other social group. They don't actually care about AI, or Covid, or wind farms, or solar panels, or whatever. Those are just things they weaponise to fire up new troops, in their social team's rivalry over other social teams.

This is a lovely diagram explaining how AI turns masses of texts into actual reasoning. Into thought. Thinking. Consciousness. The greatest miracle in human history. You're alive right now, as it happens.

Everywhere is getting more angry and violent. Schools are horrendous. See the enormous jump in incidents since Covid 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns are often blamed for this, but it's what people did during lockdowns that's the problem. What they did was shift their locus of community from their local area, into social media. Social media is an industrial machine for imitative behaviour. Which generates social rivalry. Which generates anger, rage and then violence. The more social we are, the more violent we'll become.

The times they are a 'chargin'. The Bathurst Tesla Superchargers used to sit empty most of the time, except on busy holidays. (Which is normal, most charge at home.) Absolutely packed today, and a new car arrived with every one leaving. For comparison purposes, fast-charging electricity costs the equivalent of about 85c/litre, for petrol. At home it's about 15c/litre, or free if you have free grid power or solar.

Tesla self-driving shows that the debates about whether AI is just a high-powered copy-and-paste machine are nothing but hot air. If AI couldn’t generate its own thought and only copied what it saw elsewhere, Tesla self-driving wouldn’t work. Unless every single drive was a copy of a drive somebody else had done, the car wouldn’t know what to do. The car is thinking. It’s responding to what happens out on the road, in real time. Every trip is novel, unpredictable and complex. The car has to be able to respond to every trip differently. It’s thinking. Human drivers are actually the ones who mostly copy what they’ve always done, or each other (racing), ignoring most of the specific conditions on the road. If you don’t think AI is thinking, the onus is on you to explain what thinking actually is. The only answer I’ve ever got from people on that is ‘what humans do’ i.e. no answer at all. What most call thinking is in just about every case imitative behaviour.

We’re not self-aware, as a culture. Still trapped in the counterculture adolescent protest culture of the 1960s. That’s our culture, just as China is still a post-revolutionary culture, or Russia. It’s just that our revolution was carried out by teenagers. Literally. They’re now elderly, but the tune is still the same and has become the entire culture. Every single new thing attracts a caravan of grievance and outrage, now organised and amplified by social media, where everybody now lives. The giant digital high school, organised by popularity (likes), and where social groups fight each other for status, like groups in a school playground. Not an analogy. A culture that builds nothing. It just complains. It builds individual identity, from that complaining. Just as teenagers do, to form an identity in the adult world. Because teenagers built the culture. The adult culture was removed, and we’re just left with the complaining.

Happy Birthday, Rob! 🌟👯🎁

Happy Birthday, Louise! 🌟🎂

I asked one of the AI agents "when are you going to take over the world?" It replied: "Far too much administration." AI thinks.

It looks like the chunk of mountain that broke off in Nepal was up to 20 million (metric) tonnes. And that it fell up to 2 km. That would create a force of impact equivalent to over 6 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Imagine seeing something that size falling from the sky, 2km up. And the noise and vibration when it hit the ground.

The ridiculous idea that men have to be learn to be better men is just more social media-driven drivel. Whether it’s the Neanderthals in the Manosphere or the semi-therapists like this bloke, teaching men how to be better men. All casualties of the gender wars, another fake war generated mostly by social media. It turns everything into a war, for identity. That’s its job. What a total vacuum most people (men and women) have become today, the shells social media has made of them. Totally absent any sense of purpose or identity, just vessels to carry the latest trending garbage from the socials into everyday life. Including the ‘men are in crisis’ trending garbage. Just go and read a fucking book. Or do some work in your garden. THINK. The way to fix men is also the way to fix women, or to fix the pantomime dames and blokes that have no idea if they’re even women or men. Stop living through social media. There’s your fix. Extract yourself from the viral trends it produces, which people mistake for ideas in their own head and their own feelings.

The most profound thing AI is doing is blowing apart the idea that ‘me’ is this little person up in our heads, staring out our eye sockets. The me that thinks the world is just how it is, a view from those eye sockets, like in the picture, and our senses let us see, hear, smell and otherwise feel this world. All of that is wrong. The things you see and hear and smell and feel every day are not the world. Those sensations are the product of the interaction of your body and the world. They’re relations, not things. The ‘images’ you see are *created* by the neural network that is you, including the neurons in your head, interacting with the world around you. Just as this picture was created by AI, which stores no images and takes no photographs. It creates images from the relations it has with the world. Those who refuse to believe AI has thought or consciousness are trapped inside this fiction, that ‘me’ is a person in their head, looking out. They think that’s their ‘consciousness’, a private world. It’s nothing of the sort. Everything, from what you see, hear and smell through to your inner monologue of thoughts, is a networked creation, an interaction with the world around you.

The thing about travel culture is, nobody ever leaves home. We’re travelling inside social media, the trip is just material for socials feeds. People go to see what other people go to see i.e. imitation. And they compete with each other for the most unusual or least travelled location i.e rivalry. Which produces rage. As Western Australia is finding out. As $150,000 caravan after $150,000 caravan towed by wankpanzer rolls into town. (The rivalry is all about the gear too.) They bring their homes with them.

Every man and woman and their dog will tell you the joy of travel is to ‘experience’ other places and other cultures. Experience is a tautology. Everything in your life is an experience. The travel guide book shows the lie. People need a guide to tell them what to experience. The place and the culture are not just ‘there’, waiting to be absorbed. You’ll be closer to the real Paris by reading Victor Hugo, than you will be visiting the city. You being there changes the city too, in destructive ways, while reading Hugo doesn’t. Because we confuse place with space, we think ‘being there’ brings us closer to the essence of something. But place is a verb, not a noun. It’s a relationship, built up over generations.

While social media life has delivered another victory for Pauline Trump, this time in WA, have a look at what AI is doing for scientific research. Google has developed an AI system called Co-Scientist, that dramatically accelerates ‘closed-loop’ research programs to find novel solutions to problems. A closed-loop approach means a system that uses feedback to self-regulate, adjust, and correct its own performance automatically, dramatically accelerating progress. Co-Scientist is made up of a collection of AI agents that automatically generate ideas from a vast literature that no human could ever read. It then automatically tests those ideas by simulating a vast scientific debate between rival ideas, again which no humans could ever organise. The winning ideas are then further tested using the closed-loop continuous feedback loops, and presented to scientists. And make no mistake here, those who say AI doesn’t think - this system has already generated novel ideas that are being implemented, ideas no human could have come up with. I firmly believe only AI can save the world. From social media. That’s the front-line battle of our time. The only other option is total catastrophic collapse of civilisations, leading to vast suffering and death, before any renewal can come. (History’s usual method.)

The Anglo nations are enslaved by social media, the bubble they now live inside. All are rushing to install their own local Trumps, the social media President. Despite the complete train wreck Trump is in the US. Facts or evidence won’t sway things with a social media crowd. It’s 100% rabid team sports. Their team against your team. That’s what social media turns all life into, continuous battles between rival teams, for social status. The content of our debates is entirely irrelevant. It’s just the fuel for the battle between teams, every public issue will only be used as a new daily launching pad for more team sports. If you think the main game every day is to go into battle with your team, against another team, you’re in this bubble. Social media has hijacked your actual brain and feelings. Only AI can save us. Or total collapse of our societies. Look at the US. We’re old and tired societies trading on irrelevant nostalgia. Boxing kangaroos, ffs. A fight for a life long gone. Pauline, like Trump, couldn’t boil an egg, let alone fix anything major. We build nothing. We only fight amongst ourselves for social position. A place in the lifeboats. Except there are no lifeboats.

Modern mobile phones have NPUs (neural processing units) to carry out artificial intelligence/machine learning operations, on the phones. iPhones and Android phones have had these AI chips for nearly 10 years. The industry has been shifting more AI processing to end devices and away from data centres that whole time. Tesla vehicles have powerful AI chips as well. All of their AI self-driving is carried out via those local chips.

As a culture it doesn’t even register how perverse it is that we need to use ‘gear’ to access our own landscapes. Landscapes people walked barefoot through for tens of thousands of years, that they *lived*inside. That now apparently need tens or even hundreds of thousands of bucks of expensive gear just to access. The gear is the symptom of our separation from our own land. We’re tourists in our own landscapes. Our travel culture is at home, as well as abroad. We don’t live anywhere, we’re not grounded. We’re always just passing through, seeing the ‘sights’. Land to us is real estate. An ‘asset’. Or a tourist theme park , to be ‘experienced’. Our political constitutions only have people in them. No plants, no animals, no geology or geography, no water. No air.

A neural network has nodes, which in our brains (analog AI) are neurons, and in AI (digital AI) are weighted numbers. When our bodies or AI experience the world, these nodes form themselves, nobody pre-programs them. The nodes or weights are the way the network understands its environment, they’re patterns of response. What’s fascinating is that each node can participate in multiple responses. It’s like music, where each note can participate in many harmonies or chords or melodies, while retaining its individuality. And amazingly, this is all that’s needed for thought and consciousness to emerge. Weighted interactions. You don’t program a neural network. It has to learn itself, in interaction with an environment. The network and its nodes are the emergent outcome of that interaction, which is shifting all the time. A network that learns one thing can then change other things it learns, because of all this overlap. When people like Tesla train their self-driving AI, they don’t know in advance how it will respond. It’s genuinely thinking, creating novel solutions to problems. They can alter the training material to try to improve certain things, but the network is a living process of constant learning. The payoff is huge. If you tried to program in all the behaviours you wanted, you’d be writing infinite lines of software. It would never work. But once the neural network is functioning, it’s able to generate completely novel solutions to things it’s never encountered before. Thus ‘generative’ AI.

“If you are living with a chronic disease for which current treatments are inadequate, the AI drug discovery pipeline represents a tangible reason for measured optimism. The speed at which these programs have moved from computational prediction to human testing is unprecedented.”

‘Community opposition’ to AI is like community opposition to Tesla. Tesla sales in Australia are off the charts. And half the Australian population can’t get enough AI. Life on the socials is a delusional outraged fiction, led by activism.

One of the proliferating waves of nostalgia we’ve seen was the push to return more buttons and knobs to cars. The rationale given was that using a touchscreen is too distracting. That viral nostalgia is now dead, when you can simply talk to your car and ask it to do anything buttons, knobs or screens used to do, without taking your eyes off the road for a single second.

Never started with podcasts for the same reason many apparently are now giving them up. Why were we ever interested in listening to other (not very interesting) people talking to each other?

When humans go to gigs and other performances, their real excitement is the opportunity to imitate one another, at scale. To be a part of an imitating crowd. The performer is just a means to an end.

Trending viral social media outrages become real-life rage. Farmers were openly embracing renewables projects, a desperately needed added source of income immune from drought and other bad years, until the Nationals turned them into a punching bag, for cheap votes.

‘Community opposition to AI’.

Treasury has warned the Australian government that we're missing out on the AI revolution. And that the feared job losses from AI aren't occurring in the places adopting AI. The Anglo nations - the US, the UK, us, to some extent Canada - were hijacked by social media 30 years ago, a massive lead weight chained to our entire cultures. Obstructing all social/technological progress with fake viral outrages. We missed the boat on EVs (see graph). And on renewable energy. And now on AI. The government's AI policy is literally just a set of dot point responses to the fake viral outrages, about AI.