Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Many decades ago there was an issue of Mad comics that portrayed a future time when everything was done by robots and humans had no function. One day the system failed. As it had been eons since humans had to do anything, no one knew how to fix the system. It was Mad comics version of Armageddon.
I think that is where the digital revolution is taking us. I remember when appliances and cars responded to humans, and now humans respond to them. When I grew up cars and home appliances did not go “beep-beep” to remind you of the things you were supposed to do, such as turn off the car lights and take the keys out of the ignition, or turn off the oven and shut the fridge.
Cars, except for British sports cars, didn’t have seat belts. Today a car doesn’t stop beeping until you fasten your seat belts. I hear that soon the cars won’t start until the seat belts are fastened.
When the electric company’s outsourced crew failed to connect the neutral line to my house and blew out all appliances, sprinkler system, and garage openers, the electric company replaced everything on a prorated depreciated basis that cost me thousands of dollars. The worst part of it is that the new appliances boss me around.
The old microwave would gently beep three times and stop. The new one beeps in the most insistent way—open the door you dumb human right this second, immediately—and keeps on insisting until I obey. The fridge refuses to let me leave it open for cleaning. The oven insists that I open it immediately, despite my habit of cutting the on time short and leaving whatever it is to cook awhile longer in the hot oven.
Here is an explanation of how our electric meters spy on us and pass on the information to interested parties. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/01/15/the-digital-revolution-has-destroyed-privacy-and-made-everyone-insecure/
Self-driving cars seem to be our future, and robots are taking our jobs away even faster than global corporations offshored them to Asia.
What exactly is it that humans are going to be good for? Nothing it seems.
Why will we need a driving license when cars drive themselves? If there is an accident, who is to blame? The company that made the car? The company responsible for the software? What is the point of car insurance when drivers have no responsibility?
Perhaps it is true that aliens are living among us. Their language is “beep-beep” and they are using our machines and cars to train us, like Pavlov’s dogs, to respond to their command.
I can remember when telephones were a convenience before they became a nuisance. When my land line rings, 95% of the time it is a scam or a telemarketing call, usually robotic. Now, a man will listen to a sexy female voice, for a time, and a woman will listen to a courtly gentleman’s voice, but until sex doll robots catch on, no one wants to listen to a machine’s voice. So why the calls? Why do the telephone companies permit their customers to be scammed and their privacy to be constantly invaded? How do the phone companies benefit from permitting unethical people to destroy the value of phone service?
The same thing, I am told, happens to cell phone users. Recently I finally had to acquire a smart phone, because two people I need to reach only respond to text messages. They refuse to answer any phone, and email is so invaded by scammers, malware, and marketeers that they do not use email. They do not even set up the message system on their cell phones. If you try to call them, you get instead of an answer the message that the person you are attempting to call has not set up their message box.
So there you have it. Except for texting, which can’t (yet) be done with a land line, telephones are a nuisance.
Growing up in Atlanta during the 1940s and into the early 1950s, you could not yourself place a call from your telephone. When you picked up the receiver, an AT&T operator answered and asked: “number please.” You gave her the number, and she rang it and connected you if there was an answer. If you did not know the number, you asked her for information. If you knew the complete name and perhaps the street address, you were provided with the telephone number.
In those halcyon days even in a city such as Atlanta, Georgia, there were party lines. That meant that you shared a telephone line with a neighbor. If you picked up the receiver to make a call through the operator and heard voices speaking, you knew the line was in use and decency required that you hang up immediately. As the talking parties heard the click when you picked up the line, if they didn’t hear the click when you hung up they asked you to get off their call.
In that system, there was no anonymity. Anonymity appeared with dial phones, which allowed you to make your own calls. From a public telephone, the call was not traceable to you. This technology was the beginning of our downfall.
Dial phones, something youths have seen only in antique shops or old movies are still with us in everyday language. We still say “dial the number” when we are punching buttons.
Today thanks to technological “progress,” it is much easier to invade privacy.
Technology is destroying us and the planet. The pollution from technology is phenomenal. 5G itself may do us in. The destruction of privacy, identity, and freedom by the digital revolution is far beyond George Orwell’s imagination. Insouciant humans delight in the gadgets that are turning themselves into unfree people who are under control but who themselves control nothing.
This outcome is easily seen in China where the government uses universal spying to construct for each person a social credit score. If that person is a dissident, has bad habits, etc., that person gets a score too low to qualify for a loan, university admission, employment, etc., and becomes a non-being. Here is Soren Korsgaard’s explanation of our future. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/01/15/a-digital-prison-is-being-created-for-humanity-and-it-is-close-at-hand/
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The old microwaves were big and sat on a table but they weren’t depopulating as intended, so they put them at head level, then added a turn table and a light so you will get close to it and watch ( fry) your brain.
Don’t fret. The microwaves actually leak pretty far. Even if you’re a few feet away, you’re still getting a dose of RF energy. Good thing you can carry your cell phone with you everywhere you go to get what the microwave failed to give you.
We were lucky when I was a kid because we had a single line due to my dad being on call for the electric company. Of course, I had nobody to call, because all of my friends were in the neighborhood. Our number was 1817J
Mine was Fairview 5-xxxx.
not Pennsylvania 65,000. If you get that you might have once had a party line.
634-5789, That’s my number
I’m in the dollar store trying to buy some little thing, I hand over the money, the cashier says “press the button on the machine for whether or not you want a receipt,” I say, “I just don’t want a receipt,” he says, “my drawer won’t open until you push the button.”
What if you just walked away?
then I’d have to do without, because I could not have get what I came for and it was for sale nowhere else and I could not make it by hand.
getting to be the same everywhere.
Two things one should consider obtaining for future use: 1) a wood gasifier coupled with a piston engine and/or 2) a steam boiler coupled with a steam engine. From that, one can derive either motive power or, coupled to a generator, electricity.
My ’74 Mustang II had one of those “no start” interlocks with the seat belts. Damn things would detect your butt in the seat. So first thing most owners (like me) did upon taking receipt of the car was to reach under the seat and disconnect the plug. It was still disconnected when I traded it in years later.
I doubt most people understand just how much farther our society has exceeded the predictions of the book “1984” when it comes to lack of privacy. Your car now has a black box that records everything about the car including how you drive it, how fast you’re driving, gps co-ordinates on physical location, plus the cops have auto license scanners that read and store every license plate it “sees”. One more click and there’s the info on the registrant and whatever file LEO has available.
There’s a lot to be said for older vehicles w/o all the spy gear.
and, it won’t be too long before state legislatures pass bills that allow auto insurance companies to directly link into the on-board data your car is collecting on all your driving habits. Soon to be followed by increased premiums for all.
Not all, Flinty. My wife’s BIL drives 30mph on the freeway. He moved to San Antonio years ago. Good riddance.
Mechanics who can “fail” the reporting features while retaining operability will have land-office business. Tamperers who can break printed-circuit traces selectively as well. Deceiving the electronics into thinking it is reporting you properly will be a common practice, while anyone who questions why your vehicle doesn’t will hear, “What are you talking about? It works just fine, and I don’t know anything about ‘reporting’, “electronic tracking’ or ‘Onstar’. It’s a black box, and I don’t know how to work on it.”
One thing I can’t stand is the technology for its own sake. if some QAF technogeek wants/needs extra techno features to feel secure in his QAF self, why should I care? But I can’t stand it when I can’t get what I need without the latest and giant leap backwards utility-wise features. Technology should be merely to enhance productivity or reduce expense. Beyond that it is mere masturbation. Which is for the QAF. Ascerbic, to be sure, but I spent all day plowing/shoveling show. For which there is apparently no fucking app. Hmph.
Yeah, but “productivity” of what? Most things that are produced aren’t strictly necessary.
“two people I need to reach only respond to text messages.”
You don’t really need to reach them, if they don’t really need to be reached.
I loved the regular landline. Used to get so much done by using the phone, yellow pages, fax… Now with all the increase in “connectivity” I can’t actually get ahold of anyone anymore.
What would take 5 minutes on the phone now takes a half-hour on the computer (how many times have you had to go through the password-recovery when you want to order a few things? like I remember passwords for all the dozens of sites I interact with. Oh, and I can’t place an order as a guest if you have my e-mail in your system? FFFFFF UUUUUUUU!!!! Gaaaaahhhh!)
There are no more phone directories, so who knows anyone’s number? People barely know their own number. I needed to get in touch with someone who wasn’t responding to e-mails or cell-phone messages over the course of several weeks. As he was elderly, once I got the recording saying his voice mail was full (seemed like a bad sign) I ended up driving to his house (all was ok, and he was touched that I was worried). I think the near future is going to be Face to Face, like a hundred years ago or more.
A week ago I went on-line to access a personal phone number in another state. Lots of sites claim “free” phone number look-ups, only to want 95 cents to give it to you. Within minutes the land line started ringing with scam calls-probably had 15 by the end of the day. Thank God for caller ID.
Nobody makes (phone) calls anymore. You have to text people now. They get weirded out if you call before texting. The only people that call are receptionists or robo callers. Funny how the cell phone killed the public and house phone (landline, a term we used to distinguish from the center to center radio wire) and now has killed voice communication.
Do you recall back in the day when morons walked around yelling into their cell phone? Now we see people walking around talking to themselves and nobody blinks at all. Back in the 60’s you could get locked up for that.
I’m a holdout, still have a land line, but attached to an answering machine. Used to have it set to four rings for the machine, giving time to pick up before it starts its spiel. Wife got tired of robocalls
(“This is VISA /Mastercard calling about your credit card account. There is nothing wrong with your current account, but you have been selected …” “Have you enrolled in health insurance for 2018? If not, you have until February 20 to access the Health Insurance Marketplace and select the plan …” “YOUR retirement savings are in jeopardy! Dial 4 to speak with a representative who will …”)
so she reset the machine to answer on the second ring, and listens. If a robocall, she will ignore, and 90% will give up when the computer figures out it’s an answering machine. The rest, well, she has to turn down directly if a human answers.
Thankfully, the Great Discontinuity is on the way to fix it all for us with a crushing economic and social collapse that will wipe all these new toys out and leave us killing each other for a can of beanie weenies.
I got a smart phone. Work required it. It’s useful from time to time when I want to find a store I’ve never visited. I occasionally make a call or text with it. The other 99.9999% of the time, I keep it on airplane mode. I see no reason to let it control me. If someone wants to reach me, they can leave a message or email or keep calling.
Also, thanks to the phone companies re-using old numbers, there’s a woman somewhere named Debbie who is rather behind on her payments and the credit card company is having a devil of a time trying to reach her.
4th paragraph down about electric utility crew not correctly connecting the neutral-had a neighbor whose neutral at his meter (just upstream from his breaker panel) went intermittent. Neighbors noticed house lights erratically flashing on and off (the guy and his lady were out to dinner). The intermittent neutral resulted in nominal 120VAC circuits inside the house getting 240VAC, which killed most every powered on electronic device plugged into a 120VAC outlet. His insurance covered a lot of the damage, which ran around $12K-his out of pocket was around $3K.
I called the electric utility and asked them to come check my neutral connection. Two utility employees showed up with a special test set I have never seen before and did a battery of tests from my meter all the way out to the distribution transformer. By virtue of their having that special test set told me that intermittent neutrals have happened before. They said my service had no problems and they routinely tighten all the connections (both hots, neutral, and safety ground) after they run the tests. Not a bad service (cost me nothing). Other neighbors paid an electrician $75 and up to come out and do the same check.
If you have a reputable power company it might be worth a call to have them come out and check the integrity of their neutral at your meter box. BTW, “neutral” is not earth safety ground, though neutral (generally has white insulation on the conductor) and earth safety ground (generally has green or green/yellow stripe insulation) are connected together at the meter box (and only at the meter box).
Finally, not a good idea for the homeowner to get into the meter box and try to tighten all the connections.
I recently took an electrical worker safety class at my work. The teacher was a career electrician and is currently the corporate electrical safety lead. He gave an example how he was doing some work at his house, tested his power, and got a strange return on his multimeter. I think it was something like 146 volts, so he tested more and everything up to the street was coming back 146. He called the power company to report some very strange issues with his power. They came out, tested, and everything read 110v. His multimeter was bad. He sat through a lecture on basic power safety from the utility techs and advice to get a multimeter that works, rather than tell them he was the electrical safety guy for his company and a trained electrician. D’OH!
For the record: the standard in the U.S. for mains voltage went from 110VAC to 117VAC to the current 120VAC (took place over a couple of decades). Likewise, 220VAC is now 240VAC.
That said, I still catch myself saying (and thinking) 110 and 220. Hard to change. Same kind of brain fog was encountered going from cycles per second to Hertz.
Doubtful I will ever get comfortable with centimeters (though I can do the computation in my head); inches are far too ingrained to ever change that mentality.
Another malignancy: the telemarketers have learned to “spoof” phone numbers on their outgoing calls. Example: your cell says (123) 456-7890 is calling, your friend John from bowling. You answer and get a spiel from a computer trying to interest you in solar panels. John is not calling and never intended to, but the computer got you to answer the call instead of ignoring it, like 95%+ people do when a stranger calls. You might even listen to the spiel, might even buy, so the computer / merchant loses nothing. All that is lost is a little bit of social trust and community, which the merchant didn’t care about and won’t miss – until it’s too late, and NO ONE answers a phone because they don’t know who MIGHT be calling.
Giving apps access to your “contacts” probably accelerates this, as your “network” could be sold to others for their exploitation. I have only a couple of apps on my phone, location is turned off, I reset the apps back to factory (Google, others) if they update to turn off all the spyware they may have introduced since the last time.