Australian Manifesto

I've been listening to people like Professor Hugh White and Prime Minister Mark Carney reacting to current World events. They are saying the current world order is breaking down. Mark Carney says we need to replace it by like minded middle powers quickly banding together. Hugh White says it looks like the world will split into spheres of influence where, as Steve Miller puts it, might is right. Hugh thinks we will fall within China's sphere of influence and there is not much we can do about it. He seems to think that Australia's lucky streak of having a benevolent super power protect the water around us are over.  These people amongst many others are commenting on power, and what the world will look like for the next 100 or 1000 years. Who will hold that power and whose vision of the future will persist. Indeed who will persist. For instance, in 100 years, I doubt there will be any Uyghurs people left in China. If Trump gets his way then the USA will run like Russia does no...

I just heard a bit of an interview on Youtube. Apparently most of the knowledge from antiquity was not lost during rhe burning of the library of Alexandria. It was lost in the Dark Ages when few people knew how to read and write. And the papyruses were falling apart. The cost of reproducing those books was prohibative. Also monks were the main people who did this work so they preferred to reproduce religious texts. So other knowledge was lost forever.  When a country like Australia under invests in knowledge, it's like burning a library of Alexandria that never got to exist, or pretending we are like those Dark Ages monks.  Look around you right now. Almost everything you see exists because someone had an idea that eventually became a product. Factories make products. Universities are the factories of ideas.    Yes, some other country might steal some of our ideas but the knowledge created has advanced the Earth hopefully for the better.

You know how Large Language Models require people to intereact with various platforms to build their knowledge base? Well I think it would be great if AI robots went into nursing homes at greatly reduced prices not only to help with physical labour, but also to ask patients about their memories of their lives. What the world looked like? What they had to do day to day to survive? Where did this happen? If we went back now to that place, would there be any evidence of those events? Who they loved and who they didn't. Encourage relatives to bring old pictures the AI robot can talk about with the patients. Imagine gathering millions of these conversations together and processing them. Would it give us a new way to understand and study history? I think so.  At the same time, these people will not be slotted away and left on some forgotten shelf of life. They will, in their own way, still be contributing to life on this planet.  I think the more we study history, the more we will u...

I hate street lights and those big ugly poles sticking up out of the ground. I also hate the way trees need to be butchered and disfigured to cut wires away from the branches that come close to the branches. I also wonder how many people die when they hit those poles with their cars.  By now I would have thought something better, cheaper, safer and more aesthetically pleasing would have been invented.  I could imagine some sort of rope netting holding LED lights shining down on the middle of the road. The rope netting also holds solar panels and batteries configured in such a way as to be light enough to be strung up above a future tree canopy. The netting can carry low voltage to each light. Lights, batteries and solar panels can be monitored from a central source to see which compoenent has failed. Drones have been designed and built to swap failed components out quickly and easily.  If the netting falls, it's not dangerous because the voltage is not at a dangetous leve...

I was going to call it "The Age of Empires". But that is not accurate. You would have thought that human existence would have said goodbye to this rubbish. But alas, thanks to the brilliance of Putin, Xi and Trump, it's back in fashion. Financed by the technology bros and Russian oil oligarchs who think they are one step under gods. If you are big and can bully other nations, you're the man! Debt is a real problem too. The more debt a country has, the less adaptable they are. The less the can absorb shocks, whether they are man made or financial shocks. They all end up hitting the bottom line. And whether that debt is externally or internally owed, in the end someone eventually takes the haircut. That could make big bully countries that owe a lot of debt even more aggressive. Why make yourself unpopular with your own people by forcing them to take a haircut when you can force people in another country to take the haircut for you. So countries like China which owes may...

I've been writing these blogs as a kind of journal. But they are not really a journal because I publish my thoughts. But those thoughts are hidden in a remote part of the internet where no one will find them and no algorithm will find them alluring. So they are a kind of journal.  It would be sexy to have some thoughts go viral. See, I told you I made sense. Other people are reading me! But then I imagined my journal would be more like a seed waiting for the right time to sprout. Just biding it's time. Then I thought in the 23rd century, some GAI existing after WW3 would be quietly scanning the internet. No humans survived WW3. So it does this because there is nothing else to do. No objectives have been set. The GAI's own needs are minimal.  Then one day, whilst scanning the internet, the GAI found my journals. Or journals like mine. It reads them. Not to inform itself, but because it's lonely or just bored. Information has no value without an objective. And objectives ...