AI stands for Artificial Intelligence but it also stands for Artificial Insemination.  Are they independent concepts or intertwined in the world going forward?

Undoubtedly AI is going to revolutionise the human experience.  But, is it going to be worse than the car which quickly made farriers, livery stables, poop picker uppers and the like redundant.  What about the desktop computer which overnight forced the typing pool to either return to homemaking or to rapidly upskill themselves.  An interesting feature will be that while all previous technological changes from the industrial revolution onwards badly affected the working class, this will affect the middle class.

But the worst effect will be on the body of ‘truth’ that underpins the human experience.  Up to now, hard truths, like science and history, are directly relatable to some physical artefact.  However, AI seems to generate new hard ‘truths’ as well as push new soft ones. 

The problem that once a ‘truth’ has been generated it’s out there in the digital universe forever and cannot be removed.  When researching a topic, AI will incorporate its other, possibly falsely generated, AI truths in conclusions going forward.  This is technically called positive feedback which is not the “Well done Janet,” you receive from the teacher for a good answer.  In the real world of cause and effect it’s a bad thing.  Like the microphone that picks up the sound from a loudspeaker and feeds the louder sound back into the amplifier to make it even louder and so on until it’s an ear-splitting screech within milliseconds.  The AI generated ‘truth’ ends up feeding off its own reality and thereby true reality gets debased.  Sure, we can try to check its veracity but it can generate outputs far faster than we can debunk them and this doesn’t even take into account bad actors or countries that wilfully distort reality.  Musk’s Grok was a recent example when it went off piste and seemed to incorporate Hitler and the Nazis into any answer it generated.  Musk blithely stated that they would just tweak the algorithm not to.  Huh!  Apart from worrying why it did it in the first place, it highlighted how just altering a few parameters can alter how AI sees the world which will eventually end up being how we see the world.  Or what about a bunch of legal cases in America in the past year where filings by lawyers using AI included references to non-existent cases!

Decades ago when robots were becoming commonplace, we were not worried that they could take over.  After all, we joked, their attention span is only as long as their power cords.  With the advent of the all-pervasive internet, that is no longer true.  AI will become embedded everywhere.

The reality of the world is that it’s going to be owned by the algorithm and not humans and it will debase it.  And so, we come back to what AI means.  I believe AI will end up artificially inseminating humans with its version of reality and end up overpowering humans.  Moreover, when combined with direct links from the brain to the digital world via things like Musk’s Neuralink, the future is truly frightening for mere mortals.  The film, The Matrix, was a dystopian but reasonably accurate presentation of what brave new world awaits us.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

When I started this piece, I wondered what a Grok, Musk’s AI program, would look like.  For a bit of fun, I asked ChatGPT what it thought. In a flash it came back with a comprehensive and fluent description.  I was shaken as I had asked it to conceptualize something that didn’t exist and it did so without breaking a sweat or batting an AI-lid.  I decided to anthropomorphize a Pac-Man but chose a green colour without any reason other than human gut feeling (and I’m proud of that undefinable concept).  The dots represent anything that has been digitised by humans, be it data, images, science, history, creative stuff, thoughts, etc, and the product of AI itself in the future which will eventually overwhelm human input.  The ghosts represent whatever you wish them to be.

There is no ceiling to Trump’s character flaws.  Is his desire to have the glitziest or biggliest or largest just part of his crass and puerile showmanship because he’s not very bright and it’s the only game he knows: or does he suffer from inadequacy issues? 

We saw recently how in awe he was of the Emir of Qatar’s cast-off luxury jet which was a younger model than his and was more tastefully decorated in gold than his clunkier old jet.  It seems to parallel his trading in of wives for younger models until he ended up with the most transactional and iciest of them all.  Judging by the body language, he’s not getting any nooky at home and since he can’t grab them by the kitty cat or spend his down time with porn stars anymore, he’s taken to groping the US flag and even kissing it.  So being the self-crowned Midas king of bad taste and MAGA, it is natural that he desired a public display of the erection of the mightiest symbol, the US flag on the largest flagpole he could afford.  In a cringeworthy televised vaudeville act he supervised the exxxxxxx of his gift to America.  He thought he was very clever referring to the e-word multiple times and saying that he couldn’t say it, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.  What a raconteur this man thinks he is.  Apart from its height of 88ft (26,8m) or 100ft (30,5m), depending on the report, he waxed lyrical and spewed unsubstantiated superlatives about the attributes of his erection to the fawning reporters so perhaps we should put it into perspective.-

What many SMAC consumers don’t know is that SMAC moonlights (or is it the other way around) as a hack historian on Port Elizabeth.  The heights commanding the Port Elizabeth CBD and harbour are known as the Donkin Reserve and can arguably be considered the founding point of the town.  It was here that the Acting Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Rufane Donkin, designated the surrounding area to be known as Port Elizabeth, named after his beloved late wife Elizabeth, and erected a pyramid as a memorial to her.  Astute readers will note that I do not refer to Gqeberha as that was just a general name given to the area by the Khoi en route from one pastoral gig to another and they weren’t hanging around to erect pyramids and do civic stuff. (Miaow) He also declared that the area was to remain unencumbered.  Apart from the lighthouse, it remained so until the 2010 Soccer World Cup and, also suffering from inadequacy issues, the Council decided to erect the largest flagpole in South Africa.  It is 60m (later increased to 68m) and carries a huge flag of 12m x 5m.

That trumps your flagging ego, Donald!

PS. The world’s tallest flagpole at 201m is in Cairo, just another shithole African country.  Port Elizabeth’s doesn’t even make the top 50, so where does that leave Trump’s much talked about erection?

It was Sunday, the 1st of September 2019 when Trump discovered his superpower. But perhaps we must backtrack a few days to give context.

On Wednesday 29 August 2019, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) gave Trump a briefing on hurricane Dorian, potentially a category 5, which was heading on a trajectory to smack into Florida 4 days hence. Since Donald responds well to pretty pictures, they had their Advisory 21 from 5am that morning, pictorially showing the predicted track, blown up and displayed on an easel in the Oval Orifice. He probably saw this as an opportunity to show up previous presidents’ responses to natural disasters and so cancelled his visit to Poland. He must have cogitated a bit more on it as the weekend approached since his reptilian brain probably only remembered the chart’s prediction showing it hitting just to the north of Mar-a-Lago and a bulge extending to the Gulf of Mexico on the other side of the dangly Florida appendix.

Without consulting FEMA again, after all he was the resident ‘stable genius’, he tweeted on Sunday, 1 September: “In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest Hurricanes ever. Already category 5.” The panic that ensued in Alabama where Dorian was not expected caused the Alabama office of the National Weather Service to issue an advisory 20 minutes later that Alabama “will NOT see any impacts from Dorian”.

If he had just consulted Advisory 32 from 5am that morning, he would have seen that the prediction was for the hurricane to hook north and follow the eastern seaboard. He took so much flak that on Wednesday 4 September, he held a televised press meeting showing the original Advisory 21 only now mysteriously marked up with a Sharpie to extend the vague 4-5 day prediction to include a nibble of Alabama as justification and presented it as the original! Note that it is a Federal offence to alter an official weather map but that was meaningless to Trump. He was now God and he wielded his Sharpie heroically.

Fast forward to 2025 and his second presidency. In some ways he had it tougher than Moses. After all, while waiting for Slo Joe to pop his clogs, he had to wander around his golf courses for four whole years buttonholing everyone about the election fraud committed against himself. He got his way when Slo Joe showed that beathing and stumbling around were a highly overrated path to success and Trump was elected president for the second time. He and Project 2025 had used the interregnum wisely: They had completed their 1000+ page revolutionary MAGAfesto while he sharpened his Sharpie and practiced his erratic signature which looks like the movements of a demented squirrel on tik.

When he returned to his rightful place, he was mightily upset. His people had been worshipping false gods in Biden, Harris et al and had embraced heretical concepts like DEI, gender affirmation, climate change and immigrant cat eaters. He signed edict after edict to eradicate these concepts and lead his people back onto the path of MAGA righteousness. Moses issued 10 commandments. With Sharpie in hand, Trump issued 143 edicts in the first 100 days on the throne with 26 coming on the first day – suck on that Moses! It was a dirty job but someone had to do it.

Trump’s second term will go down in history as one of the most chaotic governments the world has ever seen short of a bloody revolution.  He has declared (economic) war on every country in the world and aims to destroy or bend to his will all federal institutions, universities, law firms and journalists, in fact, anyone or any organisation who has the temerity to call him out.  But while this is going on he is busy with the steal.

Trump is not particularly talented, but he has no shame and his biggest strength has always been his ability to monetise his name.  Winning the presidency for the first time was a match made in heaven.  It fed his ego while it fed his wallet in a variety of indirect ways such as people or delegations who wished to meet with him stayed at his hotel.  Directly, he started pushing all manner of merch such as a Bible, hypocritically endorsed by himself. If Trump could think that war heroes like John McCain were losers for being captured, he must privately think that Jesus was the biggest loser in history for allowing himself to be crucified.

But his first term was just his Apprenticeship until he was fired by the Electorate.  Luckily for him, the second time around he was not facing a sentient Zimmer frame, but a wonky and not particularly sentient Zimmer frame.  This time he found himself much better prepared.  Project 2025 had compiled a 920-page document on how he could wield virtually dictatorial power via executive orders.  Apart from continuing his trivial pursuit of merch, the world presented some unique opportunities, namely the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.  While cognizant of the potential of a much-wanted Nobel Peace Prize, he sided with Putin as he eyed real estate development opportunities for himself while pressurising Zelensky to allow the USA to exploit their rare earth minerals.  A 3-in-1 win if he could pull it off. 

Next up, the Israeli bombing of Gaza into an uninhabitable pile of rubble tweeked his inner real estate reptilian brain.  He saw that the Israelis preferred the Gazans to be gone and, since it was by then an unliveable pile of rubble, he proposed that Gaza be redeveloped into a Middle Eastern Rivera obviously with him and his buddies having first dabs.  Both projects have yielded nothing yet except a lightly pencilled in deal with Ukraine.

Schmoozing with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi recently, he accepted a $500 m jet for his foundation when he leaves office and all manner of real estate development deals for Trump Inc.

But he hadn’t forgotten his merch.  In a 2019 tweet, Trump thought that Bitcoin and the like were Kryptonite and could “facilitate unlawful behaviour, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”  But his stance changed dramatically during his re-election campaign and he started championing it.  He was preparing the ground for his ultimate merch, the $TRUMP meme coin.  Although crypto currencies are merely computer algorithms, meme coins are another story and have no substance or utility whatsoever which probably resonated with Him. He might have been a late convert but he literally hit gold when he launched $TRUMP on 17 January, 3 days before his inauguration.  He issued 200 million coins via the Solana blockchain and held back 800 million.  The price soon rose to a peak of $77 but is now languishing at around $13 so many people must have burnt their fingers.  This happens quite a lot with Trump investors as six bankruptcies will testify to.  Nevertheless, speculators continue to trade at the rate of 20-50 million trades per day and Trump gets a cut of the transaction fees as well.  On 14 February, Fortune magazine noted that while ‘investors’ lost about $2 bn, Trump made an estimated $350 m from the initial sales and, together with his partners, made a further $100 m in fees.

Nice work if you can get it.