%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
|
Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| As we acknowledge Writing.com's 25 years of existence this week, I'll be blogging about that instead of the usual stuff I find. Today's prompt has to do with AI. Artifical Intelligence: bane or blessing? Yes. But first of all, I'd like to clear something up: AI isn't really artificial intelligence. Certainly the argument can be made that what we call AI is artificial, but I subscribe to the philosophy that, since we are part of nature, anything we create or modify is natural, including food dyes, nuclear weapons, microplastics, and computers with their programs. This isn't a very useful philosophy, though, except insofar as it reminds me that not everything we make is "bad" and not everything we find in the wild is "good." So I'll continue to use "artificial" to refer to something some human made. It's the "intelligence" part I have a real problem with. It's hard enough to define that for humans. It's even harder to define it for nonhuman animals, such as dogs or housecats, neither of which would exist in their current form without human intervention, and can thus be considered "artificial" in a way. Since we don't know what intelligence really is, labeling a complex computer program thus is questionable at best. And I should also note that AI has been around in some form since the early days of computing. We gamers have dealt with various levels of AI in the form of game NPCs, and let's not forget they programmed computers to play chess, a game that used to be considered to be something only an intelligent entity could win. I'm splitting hairs, probably. But what we call something matters. You can call your dictatorship a "Peoples' Republic," or your fascist political party "socialist," but that's just propaganda. A lot of the hype surrounding AI is propaganda of another sort. Many of us have been using AI as writers for a while, now. Spellcheck is a rudimentary AI; grammar checkers, a more advanced one. I never want to be dependent on either, because I'd rather internalize rules and styles for myself, but I've used them. I've also, obviously, used what we call AI for graphics (notably above in this blog), mostly because I have no artistic talent whatsoever. What I've never done is have a Large Language Model write for me. I mean, sure, I've played with them a bit, but only to satisfy my curiosity; none of their output has made it into my writing here. As for whether it's a good thing or not, well, we hardly ever get to see things in black and white, ones and zeros, all or nothing. What we call AI is technology, and like almost all technology (and a lot of "natural" things), it can be used for good or evil or anything in between. You know, like nuclear fission can produce relatively clean energy, but it can also be used to blow shit up real good. I don't trust any report on it that sings its praises. I also don't trust any report on it that concentrates solely on the downsides. It has its problems, absolutely. Like any tool, it depends on how we use it. You can use a hammer to build, or smash someone's head. Since its current form is pretty new, though, and people don't like change, you get a lot of fear surrounding it. It's like how in the early days of civilian GPS, people freaked out about it getting them lost, as if no one had ever gotten turned around following a paper map. Thing is, like it or not, it's here, and it's not going anywhere until the power goes out in the coming inevitable global apocalypse. What I'd urge everyone to remember is that you have no control over what other people do with it; you can only control what you do with it. Notes: ▼ |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
Alaska is a state? Oh, right, you can see Russia from there. 
