Travels With Charlie
That’s it! I’m done. No more traveling for me. I am settling down in my comfortable home in New England and staying put with my lovely wife of forty years.
I am paraphrasing a story presented by a very capable Medium.com writer. He wrote eloquently of his past world travels with his wife and how they concluded that they had seen enough. It was time to settle down in their comfortable Connecticut home where they will happily live out their remaining days reading and gardening. No more crowded airports, missed connections, shady airport touts and overpriced tourists traps for them. The gentleman writer’s prose was beguiling. I could feel his contentment. Lovely.
Not Me!
Five weeks ago, 8 May 19, I landed in San Francisco. About four months ago I discovered an attractive discount for a Philippine Airline’s business class flight from my home in Bangkok to San Francisco. New York City was my intended destination. So I planned a six thousand mile compilation of regional flights, railroads, bus connections and Turo.com car rentals taking me to Mountain View, CA; Santa Fe, MN; Colorado Springs. CO; Cheyenne, WY; Sheridan, WY; Bozeman, MT; Bethlehem, PA; and Brooklyn, NY. What a trip!
They’ve all come to look for America… (Paul Simon).
In On The Road Jack Kerouac idealized an American zeitgeist that was shifting from the fifties beat poets to an emerging hippie counter-culture. Kerouac and his buddies rumbled, stoned and aimless, between New York and San Francisco on pre-interstate roads in a beat up Cadillac. Likewise, in Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck loaded his pick-up mounted RV with booze, and his French poodle Charley, before setting out on a nation wide journey around the states. Nomads and explorers from indigenous plains Indians; to French trappers; to wagon trains of prospectors; to depression era hobos roamed North America long before nihilistic beatnik and hippie stoners idealized wandering about the American countryside. But rockers and writers, hippies and rednecks singing about white line fever were the culprits who imbued a persistent wander lust into the likes of me and my baby boomer peers.
Googleplex Yoga
YouTube creator Joe Rogan recently interviewed Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Rogan framed his questions about artificial intelligence in a catastrophic, end of times context that left one expecting a Skynet T1000 terminator, telepathically controlled by Musk, to burst in any moment and vaporize Rogan and his crew.
When I listen to digital newscaster Tim Pool on YouTube, I actually worry about Tim’s mental health given the dramatic doomsday language he uses to describe the influence Google and other social media companies have on world politics and culture. Just this week Tim breathlessly bemoaned the presence of impending civil war threat in the United States caused by algorithmic censorship on social media sites with statements like “we are witnessing a dystopian rewriting of history” and “we are in a dystopian nightmare”. Journalist’s self importance is way more impressive than their content is these days.
I’m skeptical about predictions of imminent self organizing collective intelligence emerging from an interconnected digital hive mind, becoming sentient, and ruling the world. When I go on YouTube, despite my significant English speaking presence on many Google sites, YouTube shows me ads in Thai because I live in Bangkok. The complex, all knowing, marketing algorithms of the Googleplex hive mind use a single data point to direct useless ads to me: my location. I could write a better program than that.
Near midnight on 8 May 19, a forty minute CalTrain ride from San Francisco International Airport delivered me to Mountain View California. Home to Uber, Google, Microsoft, Intuit and other tech giants, Mountain View is the heart of Silicone Valley. I walked approximately one mile from the rail station to my Airbnb place. Walking is a great way to get a feel for a place. Mountain View felt prosperous. At midnight there was little going on. Mountain View is not the-city-never-sleeps kind of place. But it is pleasant. Upscale restaurants and hipster boutiques abound on the town’s clean, well-lit main thoroughfare. A town police car cruised by twice during my twenty minute stroll through town. Pretty, nicely landscaped public parks are plentiful too. Safe, clean, upscale and attractive, Mountain View is a great place to live, if you can afford it. Fill a town up with wealthy tech geniuses and their well paid minions, the cost of living is bound to rise. However, an interesting work-around to high cost housing has emerged in Mountain View for service workers: RVs.
Want good Mexican food? Go to Taqueria Marlen on California Street in Mountain View. The food is great, inexpensive, and the portions are massive. Good stuff! I decided to try Taqueria Marlen because all the patrons were Mexicans, working folks on their lunch breaks. Guys in hard hats are a valuable cue when looking for a good place for lunch. It was from Taqueria Marlen I first noticed a cluster of RVs in the parking lot of a nearby shopping mall. When walking once again from my Airbnb apartment to visit The Googleplex — Alpabet’s headquarters — about a two mile walk, I passed by a large high school complex, also prosperous looking. The street adjacent to the high school was lined with small RVs. These campers, some self propelled, others trailers or pick-up caps, were modest. They had a lived-in look and there were many, dozens, perhaps hundreds, parked inconspicuously around Mountain View in parking lots and streets without residences on them, like the high school thoroughfare.
Construction projects are ubiquitous in Mountain View. As I walked along the town’s residential streets I passed many newly constructed condominium buildings going up as well as several renovation projects. Public road workers were also busy keeping Mountain View efficient and tidy. At Google’s HQ there is a huge stadium-like structure arising from the campus grounds. It reminded me of a newly designed airport terminal structure. I was there early on a Sunday morning, most business environments were quiet. But the site of Google’s large construction project was buzzing with workers. The many expensive restaurants and coffee shops in town are staffed by Latino workers, presumably Mexican. Before long, I learned the RVs and campers tucked away on obscure Mountain View streets and parking lots are home to many of the needed service workers, construction crews, hospitality employees, cooks and wait staff demanded by the booming economic environment. Want to make some good money in the trades but can not afford Mountain View rents? Get a camper.
Unintended Consequences
Aside from the giant arena-like construction project rising at Google’s main campus, the Google complex is not particularly impressive. I reached the center of the Google property about twenty minutes after walking past the first Google building I encountered. The collection of low rise office buildings is certainly large. And it is not unpleasant. The grounds are well kept with manicured lawns and ample trees creating a park-like setting. But there are not any art displays. I expected the billion dollar system-of-the-world HQ to be artsy. I was disappointed. I am saying this not to be picky about Google’s lack of good taste, although that’s a good point. I think a lack of art appreciation speaks to an underlying problem with the notion of machine intelligence.
Humans world wide share a common trait. We are all physical beings. Language, culture, politics, religion, everything we consciously experience are but abstractions of our physical experience. The Google hive mind, like most hives, is disconnected from the earth, hanging from a branch called rational logic, failing to feel — to experience sensually — a connection to the earth, the universe, everything. Art does that for us. Artists physically connected to the environment somehow sense what our rational consciousness can not sense. Good artists then express that hard-to-express reality in a way we kind of get. The Mona Lisa is not about a woman smiling (or not smiling).
I found the lack of art work at Google’s HQ disappointing but poignant. However, I did find Google Bikes.
Google’s “cloud” is not really a cloud. The cloud is actually comprised of a series of gigantic factories containing silicone processors and electronic relays connected by laser wire and cooled — as in the case of The Dalles on the Columbia River — by melting glaciers. Data centers are some of the most energy consuming facilities in the world. The hive mind queen bees are no dummies. To help promote Google’s image as a positive environmental guardian, Google made bicycles available to Googleplex employees to travel about the large Mountain View campus. The bikes are sturdy, traditional frames with a basket on the front of the handlebars. The bikes are painted with Google’s rainbow colors as well. They’re cute.
Unexpectedly, Mountain View residents began helping themselves to Google’s bikes as well. Disappearing bicycles presented a conundrum for the digital queen bees. After all, the bikes were most likely more about public relations than environmentally friendly transportation. The company could have easily, and probably less expensively, produced a small fleet of electric vehicles to get the transport job done. Google Bikes were about image. An authoritative confiscation and removal of what Mountain View residents were quickly adopting as a town perk would have a consequence opposite of the original intention: big bad bike stingy Google.
Google installed GPS tracking devices and hired van operators to routinely collect off campus bicycles. This also solved a civic problem as Google Bikes were being discarded in public spaces such as storm drains and culverts. One Google Bike was discovered at the annual Burning Man festival hundreds of miles from Mountain View.
Don’t get me wrong. The technical innovation of the times we live in is impressive. I can have conversations in languages I do not understand using Google Translate, for free, a notion deemed impossible thirty years ago. Digital computing machines can do things much faster and more efficiently than humans. But so does a plough. The difference is only in speed and scale.
Alan Turing, considered by many as the father of digital computing, long ago mathematically proved a digital computing machine needs an “oracle” a human outside of the system to provide instructions and judge output. Someone has to plug the damn thing in. That has not yet changed. Machines are still far from being able to sense in the way humans do. Our sensory abilities measure somewhere near 100 million bits per second of information. Maybe one day terminator machines will get there. But now they’re fiction.
I teach Hot Yoga; been doing it for decades. I taught a class for my friend Cynthia Wher, a world champion yoga practitioner. She’s awesome. Cynthia and her partner Barbara own Bomitra Yoga in Mountain View. Toward the end of the ninety minute Bikram style class I led for Cynthia, I told a joke to the thirty students suffering through the demanding routine of postures in a room heated to105 (40C) degrees. I said artificial intelligence can not be real intelligence because we can not teach the machines yoga.
They laughed.
