People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe. -Andy Rooney

I have a feeling that the truth is never told in the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson

The number of sides to any story equals the number of people in the story, plus the truth. --popular saying, first spoken to me by my father, Ken Breadner Sr.

In a word without truth, evil reigns. Ken Breadner Jr.

----------------------------

I've told you I used to be a compulsive liar. That's an understatement, actually. I lived most of my life IN a lie growing up. 

My mom was diagnosed with BPD when I was 11 or 12. This was kept from me for several years, but it was not news to me in any way when I did find out. Between the moods that often switched on a dime, the way they would spiral out to extremes I found by turns nauseating  and terrifying, and my mother's almost pathological need to appear strong to the world at any and all costs, determining the Truth about any situation involving my mom was a challenge. Truth felt malleable and fragile to me, easily replaced with an opposite truth at any moment. 

Honesty is such a lonely word

Everyone is so untrue

Honesty is hardly ever heard

And mostly what I need from you. --Billy Joel

When you live in a constantly changing lie, there are two ways you go: either the truth is incidental, unimportant, or it becomes a touchstone. I lived the first way until my braggadocio just exhausted itself into dust shortly after I dropped out of university in disgrace. 

Oh, it's fun at first. You can ignore the truth for a while. You can spout lies with great confidence, and you tell yourself people believe your lies, and maybe you even believe your lies at first. But before long the truth will out. 

That's a crushing moment if you have lived a lie. At first the truth feels like just another falsehood, a very unpleasant one, so you shove it away. The harder you shove, the closer it gets, until one day you find yourself in a harsh light that exposes every lie you ever thought. 

It was Eva who rescued me from that desiccated daymare. Eva is a woman who tells the truth (and sometimes gets damned by the consequences). She has made her share of enemies with her truth-telling, but even the worst of them would concede she's no liar. She deals in hard truths, like her mother before her, but I've softened the way she tells them, and in turn she has allowed me to find my own. She shares my mom's need to appear strong, but from our first meeting I saw the pain that strength costs her. She says I pulled back her curtain. I think she did the same for me. 

So now I tell the truth as I know it, and search always for deeper truths. And that's getting harder by the second.

I've written before that the world runs on bullshit. That was before the media bifurcated into one side that usually TRIES to tell the truth, albeit with an academic sneer most of the time,  and one side that believes truth is whatever it says. That was WELL before AI arrived on the scene spouting truthiness. The truth now, ha-ha, is that the world is drowning in bullshit. 

I'm sick and tired of hearing things

From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites

All I want is the truth

Just gimme some truth

I've had enough of reading things

By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians

All I want is the truth

Just gimme some truth. -John Lennon

---------------------

This came across my friend Maryanne's feed today. Says Maryanne, "Completely AI generated. This is not a real human but the entire conversation is around how beautiful and perfect she is. Looks like models are no longer required for real life."

This is, of course, merely the start. If you believe the techno-futurists, soon humans won't be required for real life. Hollywood no longer has any need of writers, no actors to realize the writers' visions. Some people estimate up to three quarters of all human employment will be going bye-bye in the next few years. Even if they're hyperbolizing, the societal upheaval will be intense. It's something I don't think anyone's bothered to really think through.

I've been hammering on this theme for some time, so I won't belabour it here. Suffice it to say that for someone who values authenticity as highly as I do, the world is increasingly TERRIFYING. 

I have to keep an eye on what's going on. One day we'll have a heat dome like what the Pacific Northwest experienced three years ago and Texas has been baking through for the last month. One day the fires will come for Parry Sound. The political situation in the United States bears watching because (a) there are people I care very much about down there and (b) I fully expect them to annex at least part of Canada in the next twenty years. 

But it's reached a point where I don't last long on sites where I used to lose hours. It's not the drumbeat of catabolic collapse, as much as the paragraph above might suggest otherwise. As difficult to navigate as the drawing down of industrial civilization undoubtedly is, it has its rewards, and one of them is mighty attractive to me just now: the re-realing of the world. 

At some point in the next few weeks, I'm going to grab whatever Callahan's book this vignette is in -- I think it's The Callahan Touch, but those books read like one big story for me -- and tell you about Solace. Solace is the Internet come alive and its intelligence is anything but artificial. There's a discussion held in the bar when Solace reveals itself, a very charged discussion about superhuman, subhuman and other-than-human intelligence that eventually concludes a sentient internet must be considered and treated as other-than-human. People don't generally relate well to other-than-human intelligence; many people insist there is no such thing. Cursory studies of the animal kingdom, with a few deeper dives, have convinced me intelligence of some sort is all around me. That's even more contentious in a time when anything unmeasurable on conventional scales can't be real. 

Spider Robinson wrote those Callahan's books and brought Solace into being within them. I consider Spider my literary father and admire the optimism, love and above all humanity in his tales...and I wish I could share his vision of artificial intelligence.

I can't.

I can't because the the moneylenders infiltrate every temple we create, and there is no larger temple than the whole of human thought. Consider the internet itself. When it was fresh and new, there was great promise. It was going to increase productivity so much that most of humanity would be freed from the shackles of capitalist servitude.

How'd that work out, again?

----------------------

The people I have come to admire the most possess a mix of book and street smarts. I'm reminded of Heinlein's famous admonition: 

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

--from Time Enough for Love

What are these various skills other than ways of recognizing and dealing with what is true and real? We posit AI as the ultimate generalist, and it can do some of these things very well...but by no means all of them. The thought of artificial intelligence planning an invasion chills the blood, but imagining it changing a diaper makes me collapse in giggles. Set a bone? That's probably just around the corner. Comfort the dying? I don't know about you, but my loved ones would be  considerably better at that than any silicon. 

My world is shrinking. I only have time and energy for what is real at this point.