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Something's gotten hold of my heart - Marc Almond/Gene Pitney

wacky baccy, they all

Hold Me Now ~ Red

Hold the Line - Toto

I’m already seeing, in the cheap newspapers, reports of AI costing thousands of jobs

and hippies who smoke

I Walk the Line - Johnny Cash

I took Adrian to the United Reformed Church. He was well behaved. I think I will take Adrian to a more child focused church most of the time, but I did not want to abandon the URC altogether. There was another guest pastor. I do not know how it works with the United Reformed Church and other Nonconformist churches regarding professional and lay preachers. This pastor was a woman who wore a dog collar. The start of the service was sad, because one of the congregation, who had been a stalwart since 1991 had died. Apparently he was very good at DIY. I don't think I'd ever met him, because he had been sick for a while. The sermon was about the NT passage about salt, and how it is only good for throwing out if it loses its saltiness. Then there was a bit about anti-racism, because it is Racial Justice day. After the sermon, I joined them for tea and biscuits. Adrian stole one of the old ladies' walking sticks. I bought Adrian his own walking stick, but he is more interested in other people's.

I am currently about two-thirds through. It is about how to stop superintelligent machines killing us all. Well, maybe not killing us all, maybe just those that oppose them or compete for resources. It has long been a topic of science fiction. I was suprised how far back it has been. Samuel Butler wrote a book called Erewhon in 1872. Erewhon is a country that has banned all mechanical devices after a terrible civil war with them. I read Samul Butler's The Way of All Flesh, which I did not like very much. In the Dune science fiction books, Frank Herbert referred to a Butlerian Jihad, after which AI was banned. In 1847, the editor of a religious magazine, railed against mechanical calculators like the one Charles Babbage was devising. Personally, I have been concerned about AI. What I think is really dangerous is allowing supercomputers to program other supercomputers, because then you have an evolving entity. There is also the big worry that a lot of people will be thrown out of work. Stuart Russell this research into AI will continue, because the economic rewards are so great. He came up with three principles for AI control: to maximise human preferences; to assume initially that it does not know what those preferences are, and to continually observe humans to finetune its knowledge of human preferences. The reason for these principles is that it is very difficult to program an objective into a general purpose AI without the risk of something majorly going wrong. He used the example of King Midas. Being able to turn anything into gold sounded like a good idea at first. An AI might be tasked with curing cancer, which it decides to do by inducing cancer on lots of people. Another phrase he uses is that 'You can't fetch the coffee when you're dead.' An AI might be going to ridiculous lengths to fetch you a cup of coffee, but you can't stop it, because the AI disabled its off switch, because that would stop it completing its mission. It is quite interesting, but not an easy read. It is not very hard, however. AI just seems like one more thing on the list that could kill us all. I took an AI module during my HND around 1988. I used Prolog to encode facts such as 'Dogs chase cats' and 'Rex is a dog'. The program could predict that Rex chases cats. I don't think that sort of AI was ever very useful, but I could be wrong. The other AI programming language was LISP. During my Open University studies, I learnt about neural nets. These are computer programs that you can train. You use part of your real life data to train the neural net, and another part to test it. Neural nets were on the way to AI, but things have progressed greatly since then. I once read a book called 'The Emperor's New Mind' by Roger Penrose, in which he argued that brains were not computers, and probably relied on some properties in the yet-to-be-discovered theory of Quantum Gravity. Roger Penrose persuaded me computers were not brains, but they don't have to be. For instance, there is nothing to say AI has to be conscious for it to take over. Getting back to the book, Stuart Russell says general purpose superintelligent AI is still a long way off. There are still many very difficult problems to solve, but AI is making huge strides.

Yes, very good even if there were at least two too many references to him being "emotionally incontinent"!

uppity women, tenement dwellers

Walk Like An Egyptian ~ Bangles

Like a Prayer - Madonna

reprobates... .dole claimants, single

My Prayer - The Platters ( I took a little liberty)

fly tippers and other

We Pray ~ Coldplay

Pray - Take That

Must admit I'm a bit of a pedant as well and can't stand repetition either! Still it's good to see Perez back I would imagine.

In the Blink of an Eye by Jo Callaghan. For once the blurb for the book sums it up perfectly (and much better than I could) In the UK, someone is reported missing every 90 seconds. Just gone. Vanished. In the blink of an eye. DCS Kat Frank knows all about loss. A widowed single mother, Kat is a cop who trusts her instincts. Picked to lead a pilot programme that has her paired with AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) Lock, Kat's instincts come up against Lock's logic. But when the two missing person's cold cases they are reviewing suddenly become active, Lock is the only one who can help Kat when the case gets personal. AI versus human experience. Logic versus instinct. With lives on the line can the pair work together before someone else becomes another statistic? This really is excellent, original, well paced (the misogyny of one character is a little heavy handed but no writer is perfect) and very hard to put down. Recommended. The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves. I was so looking forward to this, the start of a new series set on Orkney for Jimmy Perez and Willow. Jimmy's best friend is murdered and it's leading up to Christmas and the bad weather keeps the proper team from Glasgow arriving so Jimmy is investigating. Parts of this are very good indeed, Ann Cleeves is brilliant at giving a sense of place and some of her characterisation is very good but heaven is the writing clunky in places. There's endless spelling out of the obvious, Jimmy and Willow have four year old and he's constantly referred to as 'his son' not by his name as if the reader is too inattentive to remember who James is or that Fran who died several books ago was 'the love of his life' (told this three times at least. There are more murders and once you get to the end you'll realise they weren't credible, it leaves a bit of a sour taste. Finally, James aged 4 has quite an active role in the last grand scene and he talks like an articulate 10 year old. So a bit of a disappointment but if you don't get annoyed by the things I do (I freely admit I'm a pedant) you'll love it.

Reading The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller. So far very good indeed.

I read War and Peace when I was 15 and supposed to be revising for mock O levels, I was far too engrossed in the book to even think of picking up my texts despite beng the sort of stress bunny who usually got up at 4 in the morning to fit in 3 hours more of revision when there were exams. I surprised everyone, most of all my teachers, by passing every exam, a first, which goes to show the power of a good book. I still love it and am still annoyed by the misoginistic ending.

I can't think why I don't read more Maugham, his books don't shout out "read me" but when I do I love whatever it is.

Down to the River to Pray - Allison Krauss