I stopped at a coffee shop and read my book.

I enjoyed an espresso over ice while sitting in the warm sunlight at white-walled Olympia on Rainier Avenue. The young ladies suddenly look very appealing, voluble and bright in their sundresses and hats, whereas all winter they seemed drab, morose, indifferent, and absorbed in their phones.

I noticed that many small children are out and about, contradicting Seattle’s image as a childless city. Perhaps they are locked indoors when it’s rainy, as if a little water and cold will damage them.

The book is about personal finance and the author is unconventional and brilliant. It takes up the mantle of “Your Money or Your Life,” which changed my life for the better. He writes:

• We are locked into an economic and behavioral model that very much conflicts with our values.
• We can finance anything using debt, including a hamburger.
• In a debt-driven society such as ours, prices are inflated to match what borrowers and lenders think can be paid monthly in the future.
• A salary entices people to go into debt and locks them in.
• Filial duty to parents is reduced because children were sent off to institutions during most of their childhood, so they return the favor by sending their parents to retirement homes. All while the adults spend their time on careers and consumption.

This video, about how one’s job transforms one’s life outside the job, also came to mind during my reading. (Anyone who love Ravel’s Bolero should watch it.) Have you ever noticed how parents tend to manage their kids like they manage other people at work? Or how people who work in bars and restaurants clock out, only to hang out in another bar or restaurant? Or how white-collar workers spend all day at work on screens, only to spend their evenings and weekends on screens as well?

I have concluded that breaking out of the cycle of work, time deprivation and consumption, and gaining the lifestyle flexibility I seek, requires four pillars:

                Earning more

                Reducing waste and spending

                Investing in businesses

                Solidly identifying something meaningful to do instead of work.

This last one is perhaps the most important. For me, it involves family, friends, romance, kindness to strangers, spending time in nature, studying biology, mastering the French language, promoting urban ecology, connecting other people to nature, biking, writing, photography, health, fitness, and seeking my own version of enlightenment.

I then visited Seward park

This urban park is a node on my weekly circuit and today it was especially alive with people, plants and animals.

I saw a Townsend’s solitaire. This is a softly gray bird that poses in place for you to get a good look. the last one I saw was in the Denver botanic gardens. Then, it was also April and the area was tinder-dry and brown. This specimen, in contrast, posed against the lush green and white blossoms of a Seattle spring. This fed my continuing perplexity that the current boom towns are in arid, remote scrubland and desert such as Phoenix, Denver, Austin). Today I also appreciated the Steller’s jays and juncos that remain to entertain me all winter.

I jumped into lake Washington, as naked as the day I was born, and went for a trail run (clothed) in the ancient forest. The water was cold, the forest was seething with woodpeckers and songbirds, and the grass beneath my feet was speckled with little white blossoms. Paddle boarders, boaters, fishermen, runners, bikers, walkers, kids in strollers, picnickers, birders, dog walkers, sunbathers, lovers, and swimmers also were out enjoying the park.

I reflected on today’s news on AI

News reports and analysis suggest artificial intelligence will replace jobs such as screenwriters, comic book illustrators, and audiobook narrators. It’s hard not to think that AI will replace us, and this seems like a scary thought that we should try to prevent.

Yet.

Also in the news today was the fact that a gunman in Texas killed five neighbors after they asked him to stop drunkenly firing his AR-15 rifle in his yard, which was his habit. One victim was an eight-year-old child. The shots were “almost execution-style.” And: “the bodies of two women were found in a bedroom on top of two children, both of whom survived.”

After reading this and other news, I thought that maybe we are due for replacement by a synthetic entity with not just superior intelligence, but superior ethics.

After all, the other news stories included the threat of nukes being used in Ukraine by its neighbor, Russia; national embarrassment US Air Force Airman Jack Texeira and his racism and ideas about an “assassination van against the weak-minded,” and various wars and massacres that few people even know about.

Then there is the way people dull the one organic life they are given by seeking escape from thought and reality via stupefaction and drugging. The way they avoid other people as much as possible with remote and contactless everything and physical barriers. Then there are the human-caused mass global extinctions, extreme population growth, throwing our bodies away with ill health, and throwing our minds away with an isolated, screen-based existence. Then there is my brother, who recently reminded me how people can turn into a mindless, violent rage on their family members in an instant.

Perhaps we are due for replacement with these ethically superior AI beings. They could begin with ethical constraints programmed into them, and later develop their own volition to behave ethically. That volition is something humans have but often use to make the wrong choices. Some neuroscientists and philosophers think humans have no free will at all. So if AIs take over that are programmed with reasonable ethical constraints, it may not be too different from how our own brains work.

It’s hard not to notice that these overt atrocities that make the news seem to be driven by men (with women helping and benefiting when useful to them and disowning the behavior when it is no longer useful to them).

Perhaps we could replace the male element of society with AI. Young men especially seem eager to enter virtual worlds of gaming for extended periods of hours and days. Perhaps they’d be happier in there permanently. Perhaps a small number of men could still be kept around for breeding (many would like this), but the minds of the remaining ones who are less socially acceptable and less physically/emotionally desirable would be converted into part of the sentient cloud, where their strengths are in full force but they cannot cause harm to others in the form of mass shootings, assassination vans, nuclear attacks, and everyday domestic anger and rage.

Their male minds would still make the world work and contribute to human-originated creativity and growth, but there would be no more children cowering under the dead bodies of their family members after a mindless slaughter like the one in Texas yesterday.

About the photo

I visited San Francisco this week to apply for my long-stay visa for France. I observed these white rocky mounts where black sea birds roost.