The Northcountry Chronicle

Is more technology the answer to too much technology?

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We humans have got to get a whole lot smarter, says Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla automobiles and CEO of SpaceX rockets. Musk is not merely reacting to humanity’s recent tendency to elect lunatics to lead our countries. Rather, he’s trying to warn us about the rapid rise of a radical new technology: Artificial intelligence. In common parlance, he’s referring to robots, but these are not the clunky, somewhat cute machines performing rote tasks. AI essentially has evolved to become an electronic brain—a web of evermore-complex super-computers interacting as one cognitive unit that can program itself, make decisions, and act independently of the …

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Robot farmers—E-I-E-I-O!

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How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen…Angus? Not “Angus,” the breed of cattle, but Angus, the 1,000-pound “farmer of the future.” He is not actually a he, but an it: A robot, toiling away on an indoor hydroponic farm that is soilless, and—yes—soulless. Programmed by a multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley start-up named Iron Ox, Angus’ homestead is an 8,000-square-foot concrete warehouse in a San Francisco suburb. The farm bot is more of a heavy lifter than a heavy thinker, wheeling around the warehouse to lift, move, and hand-off large pallets of produce to another robot that, so far, hasn’t earned a …

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We are the first de-indigenized culture on Earth—and the last

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Petroglyph of a couple, possibly Neolithic, in Sarmishsay, Uzbekistan. Detail of a photo by Stephanieadams99; from commons.wikimedia.org; Licensed under creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. by Jean Stimmell We take pride in our modern civilization for being advanced and forward-thinking while judging indigenous people as primitive and backward. According to Anthropologist Wade Davis, what we have accomplished is a “stunning innovation in human affairs, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom⁠.” 1 For the first time is history, we have created “a new and original culture” that celebrates personal freedom over community and consumption as a way of life over sustainability. Our stunning innovation is an illusion comparable …

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Pseudo-Events: Trump and the White Rabbit

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by Jean Stimmell Trump has an uncanny ability to orchestrate pseudo events. Any doubts I might have had were erased after talking to an acquaintance, a smart, honest, and successful trades-person. I had always found him confident and upbeat, but today he felt besieged: he explained he’d been on edge since the election but now was on high alert, after receiving a text, warning that a BLM [Black Lives Matter] gang was headed to New Hampshire, including his town, to loot and plunder. He said he was ready: “my whole family is “locked and loaded.” Unfortunately, fantasy had been winning the battle against reality, long …

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Death of Democracy

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Richard Rorty, a prominent 20th-century philosopher and public intellectual, wrote an obscure book in 1998, Achieving Our Country, looking back on America from a vantage point 100 years in the future. Defying belief, he correctly predicted the election of a strongman in our country in 2014, missing by only two years the rise of Trump. Rorty based his prophecy on a trend that he saw already developing because Democrats were abandoning working-class interests. Check out, in his own words, how dead-on his predictions were: “It’s dawning on working folks that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs …

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The Democratic Party Has One Last Chance

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have been feeling increasingly bleak and anxious ever since last March.  And these past couple of weeks, as the presidential election has loomed larger and larger, have left me almost dysfunctional. The thought of another four years of this Monster in the White House left me wallowing in the depths of despair because suicide is not a viable option, and I’m too old and not rich enough to emigrate to any country I’d be willing to spend my last years in, but I have felt that I could not endure another four years of this Monster.  Some of the fantasies I’ve …

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