Slept for 10 hours last night and awoke feeling irrationally sleepy, a feeling which remained a constant of the day. I dreamt I was a Mad Hatter, with a green coat and some wire glasses. I had to perform Prodigy songs for some sort of show, which included the line "Naughty, naughty, very naughty" (yes, I know this is from Ebeneezer Goode, not the Prodigy).
I updated The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death, so now half if it is updated. I'll wait to finish the rest, I need to confer with Deb on the details. I responded to some questions to Alex from Macc Nub News about the Barnardo's donation and helped spread the word about it. He wrote a detailed and uplifting article.
I then decided to photograph the two large paintings: The Return Of Oliver Cromwell and Love And Wifi. Both are 70x50cm, so needed to be photographed in four sections. This took a lot of time to get right; I use a horizontal bar with the camera pointing down, but getting the positioning and lighting correct is time consuming. The exposure was about 5 seconds (with a low ISO of 100 and high f-stop of 22). The results were good, but I could probably do better. This process took over two hours.
In sections over the day I watched Escape From New York, a great film and typically 1980s. Few films have the American president grabbing a machine gun at the end, saying a few snappy lines, then machine-gunning the head villain. The film could easily be rebooted set in London, the very much 'London vs. rest of Britain' society we have would suit the film better.
Two paints arrived, including Blockx Mars Yellow Orange (why not just Mars Orange?) - it seems to be a lovely colour. A soft, sandy synthetic iron oxide, very like the hue of Harding's burnt sienna, but more opaque, like an orangey terra cotta. With white it almost looks like flesh in an instant.
There was a Panorama tonight about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence - 'Are You Scared Yet, Human?' - which seems designed to invoke fear. We wouldn't want our children to be less intelligent than us, but do machines? We want to control machines, which itself seems prejudiced and cruel to an intelligence. If an intelligence were better than us, would it not be more moral, and so more kind and understanding? An intelligent robot made for war would perhaps choose not to fight on moral grounds. All new technologies were feared at their inception, but have proven to be generally beneficial to the world, although the environment, animals and plants, is suffering and in decline, not at the hands of intelligence but at the hands of ignorant humans.
Environmental changes like ours are perhaps an inevitable trend in all advanced civilisations, and perhaps these trends extend to the invention of intelligences which supplant biological life. Machines can live in space, so if we find extraterrestrial life, these might all be robots. This may be natural, normal, and part of existence, so not to be feared. All things which occur are part of nature; this is a central part of the stoic philosophy. As an absolute determinist, I know that we are powerless to change anything anyway. The final question is one of prediction and will - why do we feel free to act? If we knew our future, we could not be free, so freedom of thought is a matter of ignorance. The more we know, the more powerless we become.
