Be honest. If the title had been “Are you prepared to be cancelled?” would you be reading this first sentence? Or how about “Are you prepared to be de-platformed?”? Would that have lured you in? Or does it sound too geeky?
The fact is, those modern-day synonyms merely reflect an awful tradition that dates back centuries, if not to the beginning of man’s time on Earth.
Indeed, there’s a really bad 1986 movie called The Clan of the Cave Bear. It stars Daryl Hannah, whose main character is ostracized from her Neanderthal family. As far as I can tell, they blackballed her because, unlike all the brunettes in the clan, she had blonde hair. (Of course, being caveman times and the lack of adequate shower facilities, perhaps it would be more accurate to describe her as a “dirty blonde.”)
In terms of good cinema, there’s always Looney Tunes’ 1953 cartoon “Bell Hoppy,” featuring Sylvester the Cat voicing the phrase “Blackballed again” when the Loyal Order of Alley Catz Mouse and Chowder Club declines his membership.
Most of us have had the unfortunate experience of being left out. It usually happens when Continue Reading “Blackballed Again: Are You Prepared?”
My Life With AI—Part II: The Search For The Holy Grail
I always had a certain curiosity (there’s that word again) with the idea of artificial intelligence. You can’t blame science fiction for this. It was simply the challenge. Artificial intelligence represents the Holy Grail of mathematics. It’s not simply ramming a bunch of formulas through faster and faster processors. It’s going a step beyond. It’s giving the computer a basic set of instructions, then allowing it to begin programming itself by building on top of that foundation.
Naturally, I monitored the subject. This is one reason I knew about the Boston-based investment adviser BatteryMarch, although, technically, it wasn’t artificial intelligence; it was just another example of brute force processing. For the inside dope on AI, I didn’t rely on the Wall Street Journal or even the data processing trade press. No, I paid attention to Continue Reading “My Life With AI—Part II: The Search For The Holy Grail”