Never Satisfied

Conditions: Pretty Damn Good, Actually

On The Coming Robot Apocalypse

On watching the latest mess unfold in Tripoli, it occurs to me that real revolutions don't really have battles, or martyrs, or new flags. Real revolutions take place so slowly, and so completely, that you never really notice until it's too late. Take computers, for instance. In a few short decades they've gone from rare oddities to items that civilisation rely on to continue existing. And as we embrace our electronic "helpers", we are less and less likely to question exactly how they reshape our reality. A true revolution is never questioned.

At last month's TEDGlobal conference, algorithm expert Kevin Slavin delivered one of the tech show's most "sit up and take notice" speeches where he warned that the "maths that computers use to decide stuff" was infiltrating every aspect of our lives.

Among the examples he cited were a robo-cleaner that maps out the best way to do housework, and the online trading algorithms that are increasingly controlling Wall Street.

"We are writing these things that we can no longer read," warned Mr Slavin.

"We've rendered something illegible. And we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world we've made."

Right on, Kevin. It's not about not seeing the wood for the trees, it's becoming about not seeing the bark for the wood. The complexity of things only ever increases, and that's bad news for, you know, us puny humans who rely on infrastructures that are rapidly getting out of our control, simply because they're becoming harder to understand.

Algorithms may be cleverer than humans but they don't necessarily have our sense of perspective - a failing that became evident when Amazon's price-setting code went to war with itself earlier this year.

"The Making of a Fly" - a book about the molecular biology of a fly from egg to fully-fledged insect - may have been a riveting read but it almost certainly didn't deserve a price tag of $23.6m (£14.3m).

It hit that figure briefly on the site after the algorithms used by Amazon to set and update prices started outbidding each other.

It is a small taste of the chaos that can be caused when code gets smart enough to operate without human intervention, thinks Mr Slavin.

- bbc.co.uk/

Ponder this: Who really controls how we see the internet? Is it the directors and engineers of Google, or the overly-complex algorithms that those engineers created and refined over the last decade or so? Once you understand the nature of that question, you see the implications of what we will inevitably end up with: An automated world, where we sit uncomfortably squashed in as the superfluous organic component of a vast system of directives. What will we do?



Film Review: Captain America: The First Avenger.

Sigh. There's no denying that America's reputation has taken one hell of a battering over the last ten years. The attacks of 9/11 have seemed to brought out the worst, as well as occaisional glimpses of the best, in both the people and the leadership. The standing of America now is such that the idea of a virtuous Captain America, living up to everything America wants to be, bringing freedom and justice to all, while draped in the red white and blue, is frankly more than ludicrous, it is offensive. Frankly, I'm a little surprised they didn't laugh the pitch out of the office. Perhaps that's the main reason why the film is set in World War 2, back when America was still the good guy. It's really the only way this film could work.

Chris Evans plays Steve, a scrawny Brooklyn kid with a lot of moxie, who is accepted into America's Secret Super Soldier program and, soon after being turned into the prototypical super soldier, becomes the one and only when the genius scientist is killed by Nazis in an attempt to steal the formula. Relegated by a long-suffering Tommy Lee Jones to being essentially an animated recruitment poster, complete with patriotic outfit, the Captain nevertheless manages to get into combat in a daring raid to save his buddies, which brings him face to (a) face with this film's nemesis, Nazi General Hugo Weaving, who's trying to out-Hitler Hitler, with the monomaniacal plans, big speeches, and all around unpleasantness. He's using an old Norse myth to uncover a powerful energy device that he's naturally weaponised in order to drop massive bombs on various American cities. Can the Cap catch up to him in time to stop the evil plan? Well since the film starts off with a modern sequence where Arctic explorers find the frozen Cap in the crashed plane, not to mention the point that America wasn't bombed in WW2 by some crazed Nazi in a giant Stealth Bomber, it's fair to say that at no point in this movie are we ever in any kind of suspense

It's something of a pity that this film even exists. It can't be set in modern times because the audiences would puke from all the hypocriticalness. And yet setting it in the past makes it irrelevant and predictable. Much like the lead character, the film is pleasant enough, but there's no edge to it at all. No character, no menace, just a nice guy in an odd outfit, punching Nazis. Basically, like the recent Thor movie, what we have here is introductory filler, an entre, a set up for the oncoming Avengers movie which has the Cap as one of it's members. Could it really be worth all this preparation? They effectively could have encapsulated this whole film with a 5-minute intro. I don't know whether the Avengers will be any good or not, but a film that requires this many movie-length trailers to sufficiently setup the audience is either going to be ridiculous or inspired. Two Distressed Leather Jackets out of Five.


- Peace out

Signifying Nothing

Conditions: Gloomy

The Sky Is Falling?

And so Standard and Poor have downgraded the U.S credit rating to AA, essentially as a result of all the stupid dithering Washington had been doing over preventing financial Armageddon.

A cornerstone of the global financial system was shaken Friday when officials at ratings firm Standard & Poor's said U.S. Treasury debt no longer deserved to be considered among the safest investments in the world.

S&P downgraded the U.S. government's AAA sovereign credit rating, an unprecedented action that could send shock waves through the global financial system. WSJ's Money & Investing Editor, Francesco Guerrera, reports. (Photo: Getty Images)

S&P removed for the first time the triple-A rating the U.S. has held for 70 years, saying the budget deal recently brokered in Washington didn't do enough to address the gloomy outlook for America's finances. It downgraded long-term U.S. debt to AA+, a score that ranks below more than a dozen governments', including Liechtenstein's, and on par with Belgium's and New Zealand's. S&P also put the new grade on "negative outlook," meaning the U.S. has little chance of regaining the top rating in the near term.

The unprecedented move came after several hours of high-stakes drama. It began in the morning, when word leaked that a downgrade was imminent and stocks tumbled. Around 1:30 p.m., S&P officials notified the Treasury Department that they planned to downgrade U.S. debt and presented the government with their findings. Treasury officials noticed a $2 trillion error in S&P's math that delayed an announcement for several hours. S&P officials decided to move ahead, and after 8 p.m. they made their downgrade official.

- online.wsj.com

See, it kind of blunts their authority a little bit when they make a 2 trillion dollar error in math. So while American politicians look like a bunch of idiots, the Standard and Poor people look a little bit stupid as well. Who will watch the watchers?



Film Review: Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon

Ordinarily when you see a bad movie you feel a bit pissed off, annoyed that all the effot and money was wasted, along with your time and money. However by the end of the third Transformers movie I was really just left feeling sad. Sad to see what these actors have been reduced to. Sad to see what these fine animators, and lighting technicians, and sound designers have been reduced to. And I guess sad of all to see director Michael Bay, stripped of his mystique, of all his success and assurance, visible now as just a hack, desperately pedaling the same old tired shit, serving up yet more high-gloss crap, long since shorn of any actual meaning or worth. The latest and hopefully last installment of the robot toy franchise delivers up the exact same story as the first film, and the exact same story as the second film: Robots plotting, Shia Lebouf facing personal troubles, robots fighting, and then shit getting blowed up. There's a half-assed attempt at a historical tie in by making the 1960's space race actually a secret mission to explore a crashed space ship. All in order to bring in the latest bad guy, ...something Prime (voiced by Leonard Nimoy), who wants to take over the world.

Who bloody cares. It's an absolute wreck of a film, completely incoherent and so over-the-top it actually finds a new level of pathetic-ness. The actors, when not screaming their lines at each other, desperately run from one explosion to another while above them the various twirling bits of metal whir and crunch about, yet somehow continue to fail to impress the audience with any actual feeling of weight or presence. One particularly ridiculous sequence involves some kind of gigantic mechanized worm that mows it's way through a skyscraper our heroes have found refuge in. They fall into the building. They fall out of the building. They fall through the building. They even fall in the building. And yet, not one scratch! Are the human characters now made of metal as well?

This film is stupid. How come if the autobots are meant to be some giant secret, two of them are kept by Sam as pets? And their secret military base is in the middle of a city? And if the decepticons wanted to turn on this giant space bridge in order to bring Cybertron to earth, why didn't they just do that instead of resorting to tricking the autobots into reviving Spock Prime? What is the purpose of transporting the entire Cybertron planet to earth anyway? And if you're a 40 foot tall robot and two humans jump on your head, why don't you just crush them like bugs?

Perhaps the biggest thing I don't understand is how these films could have gotten worse over time? I mean, somehow the jokes are worse, the characters are even more shallow than they were when we started out, and the story, well, I mean what can you really say. Shouldn't these guys be getting better as they get more experience? To say this film insults your intelligence does not go far enough. This film insults everyone's intelligence. It insults the intelligence of our entire civilization. For God's sake, Bay introduces the new Hot Girl who's replaced Megan Fox by essentially sticking the camera up her ass. This has to be, please let it be, the height of teenage pandering. We deserve much better than this in a summer blockbuster film. We pay our money in the hope of being entertained in some way, but to sit there and be battered by gigantic relentless explosions, and then in between be battered by senseless and ridiculous performances, for two and a half hours, stretches the limits of human endurance. Zero whirs out of Five.


- Peace Out