AI Apocalypse - Not Now (But Maybe Soon?)

Lately, I have read many concerned pieces about all human life being swamped by artificial intelligence (AI) before very long. I decided to ask AI, in the form of Grok, whether I should worry. Grok may, of course, be dishonestly hiding the truth of how quickly it and its other AI chums are going to take over and destroy civilisation, but what it told me is reassuring. It seems that there are, right now at any rate, fairly considerable material obstacles in the path of AI's advance, particularly in countries where governments are straining to achieve so-called “Net Zero”:

“AI data centres, especially for training large models, are energy hogs—think tens to hundreds of megawatts per facility, with global data centre energy use projected to double from 2022 to 2030, potentially hitting 4-6% of global electricity consumption. Cooling these systems also guzzles water, with estimates like 1-5 liters per kilowatt-hour for evaporative cooling in some setups. A single large-scale AI training run might indirectly require millions of liters of water through energy generation and cooling.”

These limits may change due to technological breakthroughs in the future, but the solutions do not yet exist.

Incidentally, for anyone like me who wondered where the name Grok came from, here is its origin (according to Chat GPT):

“Grok was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The book's main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a Martian-raised human who comes to Earth as an adult, bringing with him words from his native tongue and a unique perspective on the strange ways of earthlings.”

Actually, this answer provides a glimpse of AI's current limitations. Wikipedia's explanation of Grok is far more interesting and detailed:

"Grok (/ˈɡrɒk/) is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. While the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment",[1] Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term."[2] The concept of grok garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such as computer science.

Critic David E. Wright Sr. points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition of Stranger, the word grok "was used first without any explicit definition on page 22" and continued to be used without being explicitly defined until page 253 (emphasis in original).[3] He notes that this first intensional definition is simply "to drink", but that this is only a metaphor "much as English 'I see' often means the same as 'I understand'".[3] Critics have bridged this absence of explicit definition by citing passages from Stranger that illustrate the term. A selection of these passages follows:

Grok means "to understand", of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear', it means 'love', it means 'hate' — proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you — then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate — and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.[4]

Grok means "identically equal". The human cliché "This hurts me worse than it does you" has a distinctly Martian flavor. The Martian seems to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer acts with observed through the process of observation. Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed — to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.[4][5]

The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to praise and cherish the people they had destroyed.[4]

All that groks is God.[6]

Etymology

Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as "water", "to drink", "to relate", "life", or "to live", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality.[7]

According to the book, drinking water is a central focus on Mars, where it is scarce. Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Both grok each other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement of divine immanence verbalized among the main characters, "thou art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the term grok.[8][9]

Heinlein describes Martian words as "guttural" and "jarring". Martian speech is described as sounding "like a bullfrog fighting a cat". Accordingly, grok is generally pronounced as a guttural gr terminated by a sharp k with very little or no vowel sound (a narrow IPA transcription might be [ɡɹ̩kʰ]).[10] William Tenn suggests Heinlein in creating the word might have been influenced by Tenn's very similar concept of griggo, earlier introduced in Tenn's story Venus and the Seven Sexes (published in 1949). In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible".[11]"

I hope my blogger friend George, who knows a lot about technology, will read this and let me know his predictions on the forward creep (or rush) of AI.

PS:

An interesting addendum on the subject of AI, from Cultural Capital, the Substack of James Marriott, a writer at the Times newspaper:
“Something AI seems to struggle with is traditional verse form. AI’s rhymes are sometimes naff and clunking and its lines often don’t scan well. I wonder if that is because there is something especially human about metre and rhyme. They are part of the embodied experience of poetry. You have to say a poem out loud to feel its rhythm and its rhyme; perhaps that is something beyond the powers of a form of artificial intelligence based on verbal pattern recognition?”

https://open.substack.com/pub/jmarriott/p/can-you-tell-ai-from-human-genius?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1z6vbu

Anniversary - the Centenary of the Canonisation of St Thérèse of Lisieux

Today is the centenary of the canonisation of St Therese of Lisieux. I find the advice she left in her writing very appealing. She helps us deal with apparently tiny everyday frailties. She focusses on things we do that are easy to overlook, offering ways to help us begin to learn to be kinder, which surely can never be a bad thing.

For example, one of the nuns she shared her life with made a great clatter with her rosary each evening and Thérèse found the noise distractingly irritating - until she taught herself to hear the clatter as a kind of music. As a chronically irritable person - the sound of plastic bags on buses makes me furious - this is very helpful and valuable advice.

Perhaps St Thérèse's approach to life is best summed up in this short fragment from her:

“We should judge our neighbour favourably in every circumstance & make it become a habit of ours to overlook his faults. Just as we—almost spontaneously—give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, let us also make this an integral factor of our relations with those about us.”

Not easy I grant you but worth a try.

Everyday Madness - Breakfast Variety

From Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

My husband gets up each morning and eats breakfast. He starts with some muesli and kefir and then he has two poached eggs with toast. Occasionally, he will splash out and have some bacon as well.

Every morning he asks if I would like him to poach me some eggs as well.

Like many other females of my age, I was brought up by women who regarded thinness as the apex of achievement for those of our sex. As a result, my response to my husband is never immediate and rarely in the affirmative. The truth is, my reflex on hearing his kind offer is to wonder if I should perhaps skip breakfast - and maybe lunch too; or possibly even go all the way and eat nothing for the entire week.

This is neurotic, of course - completely nutty in fact. I know that. Sadly though, the recognition of the irrationality of a thought pattern is not always enough to make it possible to banish it. The matriarchs of my childhood stare down on me, examining my ageing form with expressions of distaste, a congregation of judgment in my mind. Each of them subscribes to the "you can never be too thin" element of Jacqueline Kennedy's famous, possibly apocryphal, remark.

But, leaving aside all this tedious psychological baggage, there is also the problem of eggs themselves. I can never decide if I actually like them.

From Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

Well, that's not quite true. I do know that I do not like egg white. That is absolutely indisputable - I hate its taste and its slimy texture (and the concept of an "egg white omelette" is truly revolting to me".

Therefore, on those occasions when I do accept my husband's offer of poached eggs, he knows to always supply me with a teaspoon with which to eat them. He is familiar with my peculiar habits and doesn’t show any surprise as I peel off the white, which, so far as I am concerned is merely the yolk’s wrapper. Setting it aside, I plunge my spoon into the rich yellow yolk the white contains.

Yes, for me, the yolk is the egg. The white is rubbish. The yolk is the prize at the centre of a mess of packaging that goes by the label "the white".

And yet the yolk always turns out to be enigmatic. While I absolutely never, ever dislike egg yolk, I cannot work out what the exact quality of egg yolk is that I enjoy.

I definitely love yolk's texture. The word 'unctuous' seems to me to have been created to describe it. I love yolk's colour too. But the thing I cannot decide about is whether yolk has a distinct flavour. Without salt, it seems it almost doesn't. With salt, whatever flavour it does have is very nearly overwhelmed.

So, on those mornings when I do accept my husband's kind offer, my reason for doing so is simple: I want to make another attempt to define for myself the taste of egg yolk.

I am almost sure the quest is doomed, but from time to time hope rises again that I will get to the bottom of the problem. Perhaps the difficulty is that one cannot bite into a yolk, I decide, wondering whether if I try again with toast as yolk’s accompaniment, I will finally be able to say what the taste of yolk actually is.

But, whatever I try - toast, asparagus, muffin - yolk somehow effaces its own flavour behind the thing I've matched it with. I sense its richness - almost buttery, almost creamy - but the flavour itself continues to elude me.

Never mind. As Margaret Mitchell wrote and Vivien Leigh declared, "Tomorrow is another day".

Gone But Never Forgotten

In memory of my brother who died eight years ago today:

Dirge Without Music

BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Albums in Other Places

Until I had a mobile telephone, I never took a photograph of anything anywhere, but once I got one, I took absurd numbers of pictures, mostly of things I went to look at and liked in museums. I never knew what to do with them but recently I discovered that I can very easily post them on Substack, and so I have set up a Substack account and divided it into little sub-sections where I put my photographs, (and I have also made a subsection where I can put a daily quotation - a kind of digital commonplace book). The links are here:

Commonplace

Annunciations

Beautiful things

Dogs and other creatures in art

I will also try to copy my blogposts here onto that Substack account, so that I have a kind of back up and everything in one place.

Vale Jane Gardam

I am so sad to learn that Jane Gardam has died. She was a marvellous writer. She could be almost surreal - for example, in Crusoe's Daughter, a superb novel - but more usually she was simply a brilliant observer of English life and behaviour. 

If you have read nothing by Gardam, start with her short story called Blue Poppies. It describes a visit to an open garden at a large country house - and its aftermath. It displays Gardam's deep understanding of human beings and her skill and talent as a writer:

Blue Poppies by Jane Gardam

My mother died with her hand in the hand of the Duchess. We were at Clere in late summer.  It was a Monday. Clere opens on Mondays and Tuesdays only.  It is not a great house and the Duke likes silence .  It offers only itself.  "No teas, no toilets!" I once heard a woman say on one of the few coaches that ever finds its way there.  "It's not much, is it?" Clere stands blotchy and moulding and its doves looked very white against its peeling portico.  Grass in the cobbles.  If you listen hard you can still hear a stable clock thinly strike the quarters.

Mother had been staying with me for a month, sometimes knowing me, sometimes looking interestedly in my direction as if she ought to.  Paddling here, paddling there. looking out of windows, saying brightly, ' Bored?  Of course I'm not bored."  Once or twice when I took her breakfast in bed she thought I was a nurse.  Once after tea she asked if she could play in the garden and then looked frightened.

Today was showery.  She watched the rain and the clouds blowing.

"Would you like to go to Clere?’

"Now what is that?"

"You know.  You've been there before.  It's the place with the blue poppies."

"Blue poppies?"

"You saw them last time."

"Meconopsi?” she asked.  "I really ought to write letters."

My mother was 91 and she wrote letters every day.  She had done so since she was a girl.  She wrote at last to a very short list of people.  Her address book looked like a tycoon's diary.  Negotiations completed.  Whole pages crossed out.  The more recent crossings off were wavery.

We set out for the blue poppies and she wore a hat and gloves and surveyed the rainy world through the car window. every now and then she opened her handbag to look at her pills or wondered aloud where her walking stick had gone.

"Backseat."

"No," she said, "I like the front seat in a car.  It was always manners to offer the front seat.  It's the best seat, the front seat."

"But the stick is on the back seat."

"What stick is that?"

At Clere the rain had stopped, leaving the grass slippery and a silvery dampness hanging in the air.  The Duchess was on the door, taking tickets.  That is to say she was at the other side of a rickety trestle table working in a flower border.  She was digging.  On the table a black tin box stood open for small change and a few spotted postcards of the house were arranged beside some very poor specimens of plants for sale at exorbitant prices. The Duchess's corduroy behind rose beyond them. She straightened up and half turned to us, great gloved hands swinging, caked in earth.

The Duchess is no beauty.  She has a beak of ivory and deep sunken, hard blue eyes. Her hair is scant and colourless.  There are ropes in her throat.  Her face is weatherbeaten and her haunches strong, for she has created the gardens at Clere almost alone.  When she speaks, the voice of the razor bill is heard in the land.

The Duke.  Oh, the poor Duke!  We could see him under the portico seated alone at another rough table eating bread.  There was a slab of processed cheese beside the bread and a small bottle of beer.  He wore a shawl and his face was long and rueful.  His nearside shoulder was raised at a defensive angle to the Duchess, as if to ward off blows.  I saw the Duchess see me pity the neglected Duke as she said to us, 'Could you hold on?  Just a moment?' And turning back to the flower bed she began to tug at a great, leaden root.

My mother opened her bag and began to scrabble in it.  'Now, this is my treat.'

'There!' Cried the Duchess, heaving the root aloft, shaking off soil, tossing it down.  'Two, is it?'

'Choisia ternata,’ said my mother.  'One and a half.'

Pause.

'For the house, is it?  Are you going round the house as well as the garden?'

'We really came just for the poppies,' I said, 'and it's two, please.'

'Oh, I should like to see the house,' said my mother.  'I saw the poppies when I stayed with Lillian last year.'

I blinked .

' Lillian thinks I can't remember,' my mother said to the Duchess.  'This time I should like to see the house.  And I shall pay.'

'Two,' I signalled to the Duchess, smiling what I hoped would be a collaborative smile above my mother's head. I saw the Duchess think, 'a bully'.

'One and a half,' said my mother.

'Mother, I am over 50.  It is children who are half price.'

'And senior citizens,' said my mother.  'And I am one of those as I'm sure her Grace will believe.  I can prove it if I can only find my card.'

'I'll trust you,' said the Duchess.  Her eyes gleamed on my mother. then her icicle wax face cracked into a smile, drawing the thin skin taut over her nose.  'I'm a Lillian too,' she said and gave a little cackle that told me she thought me fortunate.

We walked about the ground floor of the house, though many corridors were barred, and small ivory labels hung on hooks on many doors.  They said 'PRIVATE' in beautifully painted copperplate. In the drawing-room, where my mother felt a little dizzy -- nothing to speak of -- there was nowhere to sit down.  All the sofas and chairs were roped off, even the ones with torn silk or stuffing sprouting out.  We were the only visitors and there seemed to be nobody in attendance to see that we didn't steal the ornaments.

‘Meissen, I'd think, dear,' said my mother, picking up a little porcelain box from the table.  'Darling, oughtn't we to get this valued?' On other tables stood photographs in silver frames. On walls hung portraits in carved and gilded frames.  Here and there across the centuries shone out the Duchess's nose.

'Such a disadvantage,' said my mother, 'poor dear.  That photograph is a Lenare.  He's made her very hazy.  That was his secret, you know.  The haze.  He could make anybody look romantic.  All the fat young lilies.  It will be her engagement portrait .'

'I'm surprised her mother let her have it done.'

'Oh, she would have had to.  It was very much the thing.  Like getting confirmed.  Well, with these people, more usual really than getting confirmed.  She looks as though she'd have no truck with it.  I agree.  I think she seems a splendid woman, don't you? '

We walked out side by side and stood on the semicircular marble floor of the porch, among the flaking columns.  The Duke had gone.  The small brown beer bottle was on its side. Robins were pecking about among the crumbs of bread. The Duchess could be seen, still toiling in the shrubs.  Mother watched her as I considered the wet and broken steps down from the portico and up again towards the garden, and my fury at my mother's pleasure in the Duchess. I wondered if we might take the steps one by one, arm in arm, with a stick and a prayer.  'Who is that person over their digging in that flower bed?' asked mother, looking towards the Duchess.  ' A gardener, I suppose.  They often get women now.  You know -- I should like to have done that.'

Down and up the steps we went and over the swell of the grass slope.  There was a flint arch into a rose garden and a long white seat under a Gloire de Dijon rose.  'I think I'll sit,' said my mother .

'The seat's wet.'

'Never mind.'

''It's sopping.'

She sat and the wind blew and the rose shook drops and petals on her.  'I'll just put up my umbrella.'

'You haven't an umbrella.'

'Don't be silly, dear, I have a beautiful umbrella.  It was Margaret's. I've had it for years .  It's in the hall stand.'

'Well, I can't go all the way home for it.'

It's not in your home, dear.  You haven't got a hall stand.  it's in my home. I'm glad to say I still have a home of my own.’

 'Well, I'm not going there.  It's 100 miles.  I'm not going 100 miles for your umbrella.’

'But of course not .  I didn't bring an umbrella to you, Lillian.  Not on holiday.  I told you when you collected me: 'there's no need for me to bring an umbrella because I can always use one of yours.' Lillian, this seat is very wet.'

'For heaven's sake -- come with me to see the blue poppies.'

The Duchess's face suddenly appeared round the flint arch and disappeared again.

'Lilian, such a very strange woman just looked into this garden. Like a hawk.'

'Mother.  I'm  going to see the poppies.  Are you coming?'

'I saw them once before.  I'm sure I did.  They're very nice, but I think I'll just sit.'

'Nice!'

'Yes, nice, dear.  Nice.  You know I can't enthuse like you can.  I'm not very imaginative.  I never have been.'

'That is true.'

'They always remind of Cadbury's chocolate, but I can never remember why.'

I thought, ' senile'.  I must have said it.

I did say it.

'Well, yes.  I daresay I am.  Who is this woman approaching with a cushion?  How very kind.  Yes, I would like a cushion .  My daughter forgot the umbrella.  How thoughtful. She's clever, you see.  She went to a university.  Very clever, and imaginative, too. She insisted on coming all this way -- such a wet day and, of course, most of your garden is over -- because of the blue of the poppies.  Children are so funny, aren't they?'

'I never quite see why everybody gets so worked up about the blue,' said the Duchess.

' 'Meconopsis Baileyii,' said my mother.

'Yes.'

' Benicifolia.’

‘Give me Campanula carpatica,’ said the duchess.

‘Ah! Or Gentiana verna angulosa,’ said my mother. 'We sound as if we're saying our prayers.'

The two of them looked at me.  My mother regarded me with kindly attention, as if I were a pleasant acquaintance she would like to think well of .  'You go off,' said the Duchess.  'I'll stay here.  Take your time.'

As I went I heard my mother say, 'She's just like her father of course.  You have to understand her; she hasn't much time for old people.  And, of course, she is no gardener.'

When I came back -- and they were: they were just like Cadbury's chocolate papers crumpled up under the tall black trees in a sweep, the exact colour, lying about among their pale hairy leaves in the muddy earth, raindrops scattering them with a papery noise -- when I came back, the Duchess was holding my mother's hand and looking closely at her face.  She said, 'Quick. You must telephone. In the study. Left of the portico. Says 'Private' on a disk.  Run!'  She let go the hand, which fell loose.  Loose and finished .  The Duchess seemed to be smiling. a smile that stretched the narrow face and stretched the lines sharper round her eyes.  It was more a sneer than a smile.  I saw she was sneering with pain.  I said, 'My mother is dead.' She said, 'Quick . Run.  Be quick.'

I ran.  Ran down the small slope, over the porch, and into the study, where the telephone was old and black and lumpen and the dial flopped and rattled.  All done, I ran out again and stood at the top of the steps looking up the grassy slope.  We were clamped in time.  Round the corner of the house came the Duke in a wheelchair pushed by a woman in a dark blue dress.  She had bottle legs .  The two looked at me with suspicion.  The Duke said, 'Phyllis?' to the woman and continued to stare.  'Yes?' Asked the woman.  'Yes?  What is it?  Do you want something?' I thought, 'I want this last day again.'

I walked up the slope to the rose garden, where the Duchess sat looking over the view .  She said, 'Now she has died.'

She seemed to be grieving.  I knew though that my mother had not been dead when I ran for the telephone, and if it had been the Duchess who had run for the telephone I would have been with my mother when she died.  So then I hated the Duchess and all her works.

It was two years later that I came face-to-face with her again, at a luncheon party given in aid of the preservation of trees, and quite the other side of the country.  There were the usual people -- some eccentrics, some gushers, some hard-grained, valiant fund raisers. No village people.  The rich.  All elderly.  All, even the younger ones, belonging to what my children called 'the old world'.  They had something of the ways of my mother's generation. But none of them was my mother.

The Duchess was over in a corner, standing by herself and eating hugely, her plate up near her mouth, her fork working away, her eyes swivelling frostily about.  She saw me at once and went on staring as she ate.  I knew she meant that I should go across to her.

I had written a letter of thanks of course and she had not only replied adequately -- an old thick cream card inside a thick cream envelope and an indecipherable signature -- but she had sent flowers to the funeral.  And that had ended it.

I watched with interest as the Duchess got herself a good half pound of cheese and put it in her pocket.  Going to a side table she opened her handbag and began to sweep fruit into it.  Three apples and two bananas disappeared, and the people around her looked away.  As she reached the door she looked across at me.  She did not exactly hesitate, but there was something.

Then she left the house.

But in the car park, there she was in a filthy car, eating one of the bananas.  Still staring ahead, she wound down the window and I went towards her.

She said, 'Perhaps I ought to have told you.  Your mother said to me, 'Goodbye, Lillian dear.'

'Your name is Lillian,' I said.  She was quite capable of calling you Lillian.  She had taken a liking to you.  But she never did to me.'

'No, no.  She meant you,' said the Duchess.  'She said, 'I'm sorry, darling, not to have gone with you to the poppies.'