The Abolition Imagined (AI), as per the Lickorous Gluttons
I'm not a doomer, but this garden of braininess seems to be more, everything, forever, even perfection...
During the past couple of weeks I've been having sleepless nights. When I slept I had these weird dreams of people getting turned into things like matrix-like babies and gigantic paperclips. This carried on until my therapist suggested this very unusual therapy. No I'm just joking, no therapists in Shangri-La - I read about it! A new scientific book that makes a parody of all this FUD 1 that's been driving me crazy.
More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us, just as in Sam Altman’s essay. But that control isn’t limited to the future—it’s here, now. Their visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws. 2
The author, Adam Becker, has this boyish face. You honestly wouldn't think he's an astrophysicist, but he obviously knows a few things about science and technology. I must say this was quite a liberating experience, lying here at 03h35 while he’s asserting that it’s perfectly possible to thoroughly enjoy this amazing journey. I mean why was I getting all worked up about this intriguing story of hypothetical zillions of half-machine, half-humans living in the year 10,000, or having your bloody head cut off and frozen?
As I'm reading this book it slowly dawned on me that they, the lickorous gluttons, have a complete vocabulary of their own. For example, they talk about trust, crucial for the functioning of systems and societies, especially in the context of Abolition Imagined. Or tapestry, metaphorically it describes the complex interweaving of ideas or elements. This one really got me, information, central to their grand, futuristic discussions, often contrasted with truth and reality. Of course, none of them has the faintest idea what the grand theory of information really means.
But then this hit me:
It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. 2
I'm now slowly starting to comprehend what is really happening, amidst the parody side of this. This is kind of schizophrenic, part of me is laughing at Adam while the other part is still puzzled by this mad oligarchy. Stepping back, it is as if a large proportion of humanity has become completely mesmerized, like the management of Boeing back in early 2000s. Believe it or not, Mark Rabin, a former software engineer at Boeing, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. That should cause some alarms to go off in the heads of most normal, rationally thinking human beings, right?
Hmmm, well the AI nerds likes to talk about their meticulous approach, that highlights the careful and thorough nature of automated processes or actions. While we're working through this AI spaghetti, just keep in the back of your head that real, warm blooded human lives are at stake. Hundreds on the Boeing flights but millions or even billions, if you consider the context of my essay. Our insider at Boeing, Mark, recalls thinking “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed” during all these grand, new product developments at Boeing.
And then this happened:
The Boeing 737 MAX passenger airliner was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020, and again during January 2024, after 346 people died in two similar crashes in less than five months: Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019. The Federal Aviation Administration initially affirmed the MAX's continued airworthiness, claiming to have insufficient evidence of accident similarities. By March 13, the FAA followed behind 51 concerned regulators in deciding to ground the aircraft. All 387 aircraft delivered to airlines were grounded by March 18. 3
The lean experts who decades earlier taught Boeing about the Toyota Production System (TPS) certainly instructed the company to put quality first, even if that means stopping the line to address defects instead of passing them on. Then the fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019. Just bear in mind that any long term grounding of jumbo-sized aeroplanes cost a lot of dollars. It means less profit for the shareholders so this is not a holiday at the sea. Then, barely five years later, in 2024, another accident happened, but fortunately nobody got killed. Did Boeing forget what TPS taught them, or did they simply refuse to ever implement what was necessary to prevent the reoccurrence of the previous fatal accidents?
So amazingly, it happened, again:
In January, passengers, crew and the public were stunned by the latest high-profile incident involving a Boeing 737 MAX-9 jet. A door plug blew out during an Alaska Airlines at 16,000 feet. Thankfully (and perhaps luckily), nobody was killed in the incident. 4
Although these grand woodoo designs of the AI oligarchs still spook me, at least I'm sleeping a bit better since I read Adam Becker’s book. However, the activities of the lickorous gluttons are ongoing and it should concern everyone that is in the real creative business, the mainly analog, genuine human brain kind. Not the fancy copycat kind, now called Abolition Imagined. It is really getting crazy, like talented people are actually being fired and replaced with these unproven AI tools in the most idiotic, unscrupulous manner. Court cases are happening right now to dispute if copyright laws are still applicable in this liquid modernity, AI era. Laws are being pushed to prevent any AI regulations that might somehow impede on the creative process called innovation. These are crazy times, people, welcome to the holy grail of human discovery, the lickorous gluttons and their deep state enablers are fast becoming the untouchables of 2025.
The copyright wrangling:
Ugh, at least I can start to return to what drove me to this platform in the first instance. As a former addict I came here with lofty dreams to reach out and help others. I got a bit sidetracked, but perhaps not. Through those sleepless nights I noted this interesting, if not fascinating pattern. They are just drug pushers, these lickorous gluttons. Stinking rich and very smart, but still, just plain old drug pushers, albeit in fancy suits. The dealers are also there, the users are aplenty so it's just another great, sleazy drug business, originating from the malodorous streets of Silicon Valley. There's actually no difference between analog LSD and digital SLOB!
Just to be clear, everything about the Abolition Imagined is not negative. It is ubiquitous because of Cloud computing so all of us are being exposed to it, whether we like it or not. I do like the way my Brave browser works with its embedded AI hooks. A bit of a legend, Brendan Eich, co-founded Brave Software in 2015 along with Brian Bondy, who was formerly of Khan Academy and Mozilla. Eich is also known for creating the JavaScript programming language and co-founding the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. Really cool stuff, totally free, bravely packaged and supported across all major tech platforms.
I don't really use any other AI apps or tools cause, as a veteran Cybersecurity specialist, I simply don't trust it from a privacy perspective. Brendan and his team have done a splendid job to introduce AI, but in a totally predictable manner. I can decide what is acceptable, and what is not. I’m definitely not mesmerised by this stuff that I started working on, long ago. during my ICT career. There is literally nothing new under the sun no matter what all the associated PR is screaming at us. For me it is quite sad that these AI technocrats have decided to market this thing in such an abrasive manner. I'm not a Luddite, in fact much of my career was to pioneer the roll out of PCs, the Internet, Cloud computing and more.
If I was in charge of the PR for these lickorous gluttons I would have branded it completely different. For example, focus on how it can help people with disabilities, noting that I'm a deaf person so I'm a de facto, grateful user of very advanced hearing aid technology. Furthermore, the remote education of millions of people that can't afford those elite schools or universities. There are many other positive applications so I'm really quite horrified because these AI drug pushers can't see just how user unfriendly they have made this whole thing. Isn't it weird that amidst all this talk about intelligence there seems to be much hmmm, stupidity. There it is, I've said it!
Ok, I'm wrapping up and just need to make a final confession. This is a true story, by the way. Many years ago I was also a lickorous glutton, in the Silicon Valley of Shangri-La. But in the mid 1990s, just as the Internet was taking off from ground zero, I made a somewhat radical decision. I turned down a lucrative, executive position in a well known American IT group based here in Shangri-La and moved my whole family to the countryside. It probably saved my marriage and it gave my children an experience they will definitely never, ever forget. A conscious decision to abort the digital ship I was busy captioning for a career changing dive into the fresh, analog waters of life. We've never looked back, that is why I now consider all these AI fellas to be slubberdegullions.
Using AI is not about communicating. It’s about avoiding communicating. It’s about not reading, not writing, not drawing, not seeing. It’s about ceding our powers of expression and comprehension to digital apps that will cushion us from fully participating in our own lives. 5
Jeepers, is this really progress?
No more devastation ☠️
But still… Love never fails 🌾
PS: There are two 🔗 links on my profile to virtual communities that I personally know and trust. I'm a counsellor in training, but you are welcome to reach out to me if you have any questions about addiction, of any kind, analog and digital…
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD)
https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/boeings-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
https://www.industryweek.com/operations/continuous-improvement/article/55001296/boeing-executives-failed-to-lead-waved-off-lean
The Mind File’s Miriam Reynoldson on why she believes AI literacy isn’t the way forward
Interesting read, Horseman :)
At this point, I only really have questions... For example: if AI dulls agency and expression, are we handing over more than convenience? I’ve also been wondering about what’s really lost as AI changes how we create, connect, and make sense of things. I don’t have a clear stance yet, even though I’ve been thinking about it for a while.
Thanks for bringing the Boeing problems to light. We heard them falling out of the sky, but never heard why.