152 Madeira Consorcio meeting 28.6.2025

Jun 30, 2025 at 1:10 pm | Posted in Posts | Leave a comment
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We met with in the Gallery and saw this video:

Angus Hervey: then good news you might have missed:

The speaker, at TED for the second time, brings good news on the affairs of the world.

His résumé: each person has to decide of he/she wants to listen to good news and restrict the intake of bad news, and to either believe in the collapse or the renewal of our human life on Earth.

It’s all about positive and negative news, how are the reactions?

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are fighting in the US for a positive view of the situation, in order to sway the Americans away from “bad” Trump.

We agreed that altogether, the western world is moving toward the right.

Albuquerque seems to be listening too much to the Trump diatribes. He says the bus drivers are trying to blackmail him to get a higher salary. He has forgotten that the bus drivers are his employees/partners and that he is responsible for their wellbeing . Now, has he hasn’t relented to their demands, they might strike on July 20, the day many bus drivers are needed to carry up the PSD fans to the Chao da Lagoa party…

There are protest in Venice against the Bezos event, people are starting to protest against the rich people.

IN East Germany, there was a “schwarzer Kanal”,a satire broadcast tolerated by the regime, criticizing the West German lifestyle. (the Eats German still coveted the West German achievements.)


“Dinner for One” a satire on an very nice old British lady, famous in Germany, wasn’t even known in the UK until recently although the sketch plays in the UK. In the UK, a lot of the life circumstances remained unchanged, seen from outside, that is bad news. The UK has a lot of artists, and many good musicians and movies come from there. But life is the UK seems to be stagnant. Class is still a system the average Briton accepts as a given.

We also spoke about the universities. In the UK, education is a good product, sold to foreigners (around 70% of the student body is from abroad.)

Universities are places of innovation, scientific advances, and networking. A title obtained from Oxford or Cambridge is a sound base for a successful career in life. Trump is destroying this system in the US.

K. spoke of her two granddaughters. One is growing up in the US and at five years, under pressure to succeed in school. The other one is growing up in Hamburg, and at this age, is allowed to have a more playful time. Her parents say that the learning of the alphabet etc. will come along in due time.

Youngsters are growing up in a more cosmopolitan ways, automatically with several languages, they move around in the world with more ease and are tolerant of others. Chinese students are often sent abroad by their parents, to a get a good education and maybe, stay abroad to have a better lifestyle than in China. Or they may be pressured to return there and use their education for the homeland.

The US may fall apart soon, in the Western + Eastern seaboard states, and the middle which is pro-Trump. Sad…

Trump wants to have his faced added to Mount Rushmore. Question: will he want them to remove the other faces first??

The résumé. Each of of us has to decide wether to deliberately look on the bright side or to be led by bad news to a negative view of the world.

The Guardian has The Upside:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/series/the-upside

The SPIEGEL has a regular newsletter with good news:

https://www.spiegel.de/thema/alles-gute-vom-spiegel/

Ursula

136 Madeira Consorcio 24.6.2023

Jun 25, 2023 at 11:40 am | Posted in Posts | Leave a comment
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We met with a small group in the Gallery as usual. The topic was “AI” (artificial intelligence), more concretely ChatGPT and similar programs,

The video is here:

The speaker pointed out that vast amounts of information are placed in AI on a massive scale but this does not mean that AI is intelligent or has common sense. It sometimes gives very stupid answers.

Websites which can now be found through a search engine, will in the future only be accessed via AI and if the website is not a part of a plugin for say, the search of news on Madeira or art galleries in Funchal, then they won’t be found anymore. Business owners may have to pay to AI companies to be found via paid plug-ins.

Human input will be lost with AI, it is scary. It will be more difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood because AI is very good at inventing things, and many human beings are not good at using common sense to see if an information can be true (the pope dressed in a skiing outfit!?).

Voice generated AI can copy the voice of a woman and say, call her grandma and say “Granny, I have been abducted, you have to pay ransome for me.”  Such thefts on unsuspecting older people will become more common.

“Mimo” “games” are already compelling children online to perpetrate small crimes and move them on to bigger crimes and even suicide. In the future, an AI driven game could copy the parents’ voice and lead them more toward to all kinds of obnoxious actions.

Humankind is already veering toward more nefarious things. There are people in the internet who watch moneys being tortured for “fun”,  AI can be used to produce more sociopaths.

AI is already out of control because its actions cannot be verified by humans. AI could plan to kill all humans at some point. Software engineers, even the developers of AI, are warning against their own product. It should be unplugged now.

People are gullible to all kinds of false information because life is too confusing, and religious guidance is crumbling. Spiritual questions such as “Why am I here? What is my purpose in life?” need to be asked, and getting to the answers takes effort and persistence. A trait that most human beings do not have. More and more, people are taking drugs, just to get out of life’s confusion for a few hours.

Evil deeds stem from fear, AFD voters in Germany (“Chega” in Portugal) are scared to lose their livelihood and property. AI will eliminate a lot of middle-class jobs.

With fear, aversions come to light, that then creates hatred for others which the person may never have met.

People who voted for Trump and “Chega”, are less cosmopolitan, many of them do not travel outside their known paths. In Spain: “Where can we get a Germany sausage?”

On the good side, young people are more “European” and bring with them less aversion against what seems to be “foreign”.

Wealth is more visible and obscener, creating envy in the simple folks. With AI, the jobs, many in health care, will be veering toward comfortable life styles, As long as AI can keep the working population in a comfort zone, these people will not complain or strive to change things. Amusement parks should proliferate, and artificial AI games become more accessible to the simple people. Bread and Games.. Revolution may not take place.

Is AI aware of itself? Answer by Rupert Spira: it is made of consciousness, like we are (all things are based in consciousness, not on atoms) but it is not self-reflective.

What is the remedy? Common sense. Children are much mor intelligent that AI, because they learn by trial and error and experiment. They base their next steps on real life experience which AI does not have. Even children will always be smarter than AI.

We can unplug and refrain from using the internet. We can try to live of the grid, autonomous. The Google search engine can be replaced with “DuckDuckGo” really, a good search engine!).

On getting results from AI on a question, we can ask AI on the topic of religion or spirituality, and it will have no answers because it cannot deal with morals or ethics. It has no values.

So a good question might be:

“What is your information good for?”

It might not be able to answer. This can reveal and distinguish AI answers to everybody, even simple people.

(Sherlock Holmes in “Elementary” asks the AI “What is love ?” Answer: “It is a concept and therefore useful.”)

AI does not know kindness and cannot take unpredictable decisions we humans can take. 

Question:

“Is this kind?”

could be a good answer to a proposal raised by AI.

Humans argue with themselves, AI never questions its answers. Another question politicians, business owners and rich people should ask themselves anyway is also a good question for AI:.

“Is this useful for the community?”

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