Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell: A Novel by Stan Rice, part six. Recurring Prototypes

 

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

There are two important figures in Rice’s novel who seem to be almost the same person. They could be considered historical prototypes. One of them is King Henry VIII of England, and the other is Donald Trump. Not only do they talk and act alike, with similar delusions of total power, but they even look alike.

In another Rice novel reviewed in this blog, a third person also closely resembles Donald Trump. He is Andrew Jackson, the president who instigated the Trail of Tears. Not only in behavior and delusions, but even in appearance, Jackson and Trump (who has a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office) are nearly alike, especially in their disdain for Native Americans.

In Rice’s novel, it does not end well for either Trump or Henry.

Artificial Intelligence--The End of Life as We Know It? Part two

How do you know that this blog essay is not being written by an AI bot? It would seem unlikely, since you are not paying to read this essay. It is a free service on my part. But let us use our imaginations a little. Maybe, by writing essays that over two million people have read, I am cultivating you as a market, so that you will like me, and if you see my name somewhere else (as on Amazon), you just might buy one of my books. These books, however, are very cheap. So, for me, the cost-to-benefit ratio would be very high: I have to work hard to write these essays, and the money I would get indirectly from you would be very small. Of course, since I am retired, my actual income is mostly unaffected by the sale of a few books.

But AI can write essays that sound like they come from an actual human being. AI could take a headline or a news article and write an essay based on it, using the style I have employed in the hundreds of essays already published on my blogs. At very little cost to myself (if I knew how to use AI, which I don’t) and no effort, I could generate a (very) small revenue stream.

That being said, the money a scammer could make off of authors would seem to be miniscule. Not worth it. But the costs are so low that a scammer could make a little money off of it, except for these two exceptions. First, if the author is savvy enough to know s/he is being parasitized by an AI; second, in those few cases where the scammer could make a lot of money. For every thousand authors who recognize the scam and invest no money in it, it takes only one naïve author sending in a thousand dollars to compensate for it.

And there are plenty of us authors who are naïve and idealistic. We love to hear someone (who may or may not be an AI) say intelligently good things about our previous writings. Not stupidly good things; I doubt that any writer would be taken in by an AI that says Your book is one of the bestest that I have ever read. But when the AI writes an entire paragraph that summarizes your book intelligently, this seems human. But it probably is not. AI is really good at making intelligent summaries.

Which brings me to my story: How I was very briefly duped by an AI which posed as the editor of a major publishing house. Too briefly for me to disclose any sensitive information. But the fact that I responded to the email at all, even if just to say I’ll let you know if something comes up, tagged me as a naïve author. The AI got all the information from my author website and used the special author email that is found only on that website. I am now part of the pool of authors available for the next step. Any subsequent emails I receive will be ignored. I will have lost no money. I spent a couple of hours feeling good that a major editor was interested in my work, but aside from this, I have been unaffected.

You probably think that I should have immediately recognized the email as a scam. But there are at least two reasons that my response was not totally stupid.

• First, publishers and agents have been impersonated by scammers in recent months, not just recent years. This is a new phenomenon. It is probably because the scammers would not make very much money off of writers. Every literary agency I have checked on has warned, in big bold letters, that scammers are imitating them. Publishers also. So, of course, I knew of this possibility. But…
• Second, the email came from the publisher’s legitimate domain, and had the correct name of the editor-in-chief. If the email had come from parasite&*()@gmail.com, I would have suspected it to be a scam. Even if it came from the editor’s correct name, @gmail.com, I would have suspected it. But the email came from the publisher’s domain, which means the scammer must have hacked into it. The agents and publishers all warn writers to not trust any emails unless they have the correct domain name. Well, this scam did. This is a serious problem, not for me, but for the publisher.

My agent warned me that this might be a scam. At least, I think it was my agent, unless the scammer read recent emails and imitated her. Of course, a scammer would not want an agent advising an author to ignore the email. I think.

Scammers targeting minor authors reminds me of thieves stealing from poor people. I saw one homeless man under the bridge in Tulsa stealing from the campsites of other homeless people. He saw me seeing him and yelled, “It’s a f—ing gold mine in here!” (I still do not know if Blogger.com will allow me to write the word out.) But, apparently, a scammer getting the equivalent of a few half-smoked cigarettes is worth it.

The IRS sent me a refund check, on paper, to my French address. The French bank teller where we had an account had no idea what United States Treasury was and why the check came from Philadelphia. Eventually they deposited the check. But suppose it was an elaborate scheme that was just imitating the United States Treasury. How would a French bank branch ever know, until the check, which looked very real, bounced?

The really disturbing thing about this incident is that it might very well indicate an impending collapse of our economy. If a scammer can imitate all the documents, and hack into the domains, of businesses, then nobody can trust anybody else at least online, or maybe in person. If the scammer can use a real domain name, and just slightly alter the recipient name (for instance, orderss@amazon.com), what could anyone do about it? Online business would collapse, until law enforcement tracked down all of the hundred thousand hackers.

Artificial Intelligence—The End of the Life As We Know It? Part one

I will begin by answering the question: There is no way we can know. Artificial intelligence (AI) is neither good nor evil. It is an advanced computer method for analyzing streams of data and looking for patterns, then using those patterns to fill in gaps in our knowledge. Computers have been doing this for decades, and humans have been doing it for centuries with pen and paper and abacus. The difference is that we are surrendering our decision-making prerogatives to AI.

It would be very useful to have, if we do not already, an AI program to detect unusual patterns in our cells that may signal the onset of cancer, far earlier than a human observer could detect it. Then the program could alert a doctor, who would talk with the patient. This could save a life. But AI programs do more than this. They decide if the patient will, in fact, get cancer. They then alert insurance companies, which will then deny insurance coverage even if the cancer is a decade or more in the future. Insurance companies do not like to cover “pre-existing conditions” (in France, they have no choice), but what about future conditions? Too bad, buddy.

It is also useful to have AI programs that can detect possible clusters of terrorists or criminals. Law enforcement or military personnel could then take precautions. But what if a “terrorist cell” turns out to be a wedding in Gaza? Too bad, buddy. You get bombed. I wonder how many billions of dollars have been spent bombing what a human observer could easily have seen was the wrong place. We end up killing thousands of innocent people and creating enemies around the world.

Or an AI program identifies you as a criminal, and you get arrested. Eventually, you might be exonerated, but probably not for a long time, since, law enforcement assumes, computers are never wrong.

An AI program might identify the ideal investment for you to make with your huge stockpile of money. It could go ahead and invest it for you, since the opportunity might be lost otherwise.

In all of these cases, the human prerogative of making the decision was surrendered to the AI program itself.

An AI program can be racist, for example, if it is designed to be, or even allowed to be. Or it can use any metric of human appearance as a basis for discrimination. AI is designed to not let you know the basis of its decisions, because that basis will be a mathematical algorithm that would seem like gibberish to almost everyone. Facial recognition programs, for example, have a higher rate of misidentification among people of color than among whites. This is a problem that can be corrected, if someone wants to. You can bet that if Nazis had had AI, they would have built racism into it.

There is a fundamental delusion here, as explained by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. That delusion is: The more information you have, the closer you will come to understanding the truth. The problem is that much or most of the information that you have is going to be wrong, leading you in a random direction or even the wrong one. AI analyzes the information, and leads you, at best, in a random direction.

Harari’s books, this one and Sapiens and Homo Deus, are widely recognized as being the wisest and deepest books on human history. If you only read three books about human history, it should be his three books.

We all have our own AI horror stories. Mine is, fortunately, more funny than tragic. I publish books online through Kindle. One day, without warning, Kindle Publishing blocked one of my uploaded books. An AI program made the decision, a decision that was never explained to me. I tried solving the problem, and my account reappeared and disappeared over and over. Finally a human being (an underpaid staffer in India) got involved and reinstated my account and all my books. I never did find out what the problem was. Only the AI software knows. Maybe it scanned the cover image of my grandfather and decided that it was, in fact, a photo of Kim Kardashian. Is there a close resemblance? You be the judge.

Never heard of Yuval Noah Harari? His own book will explain why. The human brain is not designed by evolution to pay much attention to reams of data, no matter how important they may be. It is also not designed to pay much attention to big, overarching ideas, which is what Harari writes about. The human brain, evolving over millions of years in tribes, cares almost only about specific stories. We are good at remembering even complex story lines so long as they do not have too many complex ideas or too many characters. At most, the average person can remember just a part of the history of his or her own family or country. That is certainly the case with me; I know a lot about Cherokee history, especially my own family, but other aspects of history? Not so much.

If you have a racist AI program that picks out books for you to read, perhaps it would identify Yuval Noah Harari as African and that, therefore, he is biased or even stupid. Actually, he is Israeli. But by the time you have figured this out, you have already passed up reading his books.

Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell: A Novel by Stan Rice, part five. Eternally Suffering Jesus

Stan Rice as just published another novel, Billy Stormfield’s Visit to Hell. It is based on Mark Twain’s classic book about Captain Stormfield’s visit to Heaven. Here is the author’s description from Amazon:

Billy Stormfield, descendant of Captain Stormfield in Mark Twain’s book, wakes up in Hell. He meets Mark Twain, who takes him on a tour. All the interesting people are in Hell: Moses, Karl Marx (who is funny only when he quotes Groucho), Joe the Cherokee, the Apostle Andrew, and Pope Francis, because they were all what the fundamentalists called communists; Noah, because he was an environmentalist; General Douglas McArthur, because he forgave the Japanese rather than slaughtering them as the Old Testament commanded; and of course Charles Darwin. Thomas Jefferson, united at last with Sally Hemings, tells them how biologically stupid racism and oppression are. The only people in Heaven are the white supremacists and the jihadists, who spend all their time killing each other over and over forever. The young white supremacist Stonewall escapes to Hell, where he meets and loves the Black history teacher Philomena.

Between Heaven and Hell, Jesus eternally suffers the way Job did, dogs licking his wounds. With His friend the Prophet Mo, He watched His mother Mary helping people sneak into Heaven. Together with the crew from Hell, and led by the school girl Malala, Jesus and Mo storm the assembly in Heaven, kicking Henry VIII and Donald Trump (who look almost alike) down to Earth. Stonewall and Philomena celebrate their wedding feast.

Many fundamentalist Christians like to imagine that Jesus will return as a great Conqueror. Indeed, large portions of the New Testament present exactly this image.

Which brings up the question, what is Jesus doing now? Whatever it is, it is not going around and conquering people. The usual theological answer is that Jesus is at the Throne of His Father interceding on behalf of sinners. That is, He is a defense attorney. Dad, please forgive so-and-so. He was a big so-and-so but my blood paid for his sins and by the end of his life he wasn’t such a bad so-and-so. Perry Mason would have had it a lot easier if the judge was his father.

But Christians also like to fantasize that Jesus is infinitely loving. He feels every pain in everyone’s heart. One song said, “I felt every tear drop when in darkness you cried, …and for those tears I died.” Imagine that Jesus, as Christians insist, felt the full weight of human sin upon Himself as He died on the cross.

But fundamentalist Christians believe this will all suddenly change when, at the second coming, Jesus becomes a warrior with a sword coming out of his mouth and he makes the earth run red with literally millions of gallons of human blood. (Rice calculated how much blood it would be in another article in Skeptical Inquirer. It would take blood from 580 million freshly squeezed adult humans.

But in Rice’s novel, Jesus sits and suffers like Job, with dogs coming to lick his wounds. Which Jesus do you prefer?