I watched the second U.S. Presidential Debate, the talking-heads for an hour after, and then this morning’s Morning Joe Show. As I was watching this morning’s deconstruction of the debate, I became depressed. I then wondered what I would feel like if I stopped watching and listening to all news programs. Let’s try getting up, doing yoga-mediating, getting dreams transcribed, and then continue writing – taking breaks to walk the dogs in the park along the Red River. No news, no discussions, no texting, no Facebook, no nothing to do with any thing going on out in the World – an experiment with time space.

Before last night’s Presidential debate 10.09.16, I watched the “60 Minutes Show” Artificial Intelligence @ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-artificial-intelligence-charlie-rose-robot-sofia/.  and fantasize that these AI efforts will soon allow us to replace politicians with Bicentennial Men and Women.

The logic used by these human politicians, led by a man, not to allow robot Andrew to marry a human is that humans are mortal and would be jealous of anyone with immortality. Years later Andrew again appears before the Senate, now lead by a woman, and he has re-engineered his bio-analytics allowing aging and his death. However, the decision to allow Andrew to marry comes too late as he dies. The logic underlying the movie’s view on immortality is flawed; life could not have evolved without death. It is as important as birth and, besides, we go into it aware. The 60 Minutes AI documentary addresses this fear and Adam Curtis film All ruled over by machines of loving grace looks into challenges confronting us.

I just re-watched “machines of loving grace” and Hillary Clinton appears at the start looking dazed while Ayn Rand is hold-up in New York next to the Empire State Tower. Rand interviewed by Mike Wallace reveals her philosophy – the same as Donald Trump now hold-up in his New York Tower. We get a front row seat to Bill and Hillary Clinton building their Tower. Altas is shrugging!

Part 1 — Love and Power
Part one explores the myth that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world: They would bring about a new kind global capitalism purportedly free of risk and failure, without the boom and bust of the past, would abolish centralised political power, and create a new kind of democracy mediated by technology and the Internet, where millions of people would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems without hierarchy. This film explores how this myth came to be by following two groups that converged on the ideas. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s who saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires and that would somehow create a stable and equitable society. The other is the digital entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, many of whom were also disciples of Ayn Rand, that espoused grand visions of global utopia to be delivered by their technology. They believed that new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone would also follow their own self-interest but that would similarly somehow miraculously bringing a stable and equitable society too. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand, who became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of “stable capitalism.” BBC

Part 2 — The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
Part two shows how the modern scientific perspective of the natural world is actually a fantasy. It has little to do with the reality of nature. It is based on mechanistic ideas that were projected on to the natural world in the 1950s by scientists: That nature is a giant cybernetic machine of order that sees humans, and everyone else on the planet, as merely cogs in that machine. In an age disillusioned with modern politics, these ideas began to take on a new appeal, as the “self-regulating ecosystem” model became the basis for the utopian vision of society where technocrats would provide new ways of governing without leaders or politics, along with global visions of connectivity analogous, they claim, to the Gaia theory. These ideas emerged out of the hippie communes in the United States in the 1960s and from counter-culture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world. But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead what was found was that nature is really dynamic and constantly changing in myriad ways. But it was too late, the dream of the self-organizing network had already captured the imagination of the technologists and the wider culture, unwilling to revise technological “progress.” BBC

Part 3 — The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey
This episode looks at why popular culture finds this machine vision so beguiling. The film posits that it is perhaps as all past political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed, the retreat into machine-fantasies that reinforce the desire for it to be true that we have no control over our actions, is an excuse and rationalization of our failure. At the basis of the film is Bill Hamilton, a scientist. He claimed that human behavior is guided by codes buried deep within us—a theory later popularized by Richard Dawkins as the so-called “selfish gene.” Fundamentally, these people claimed that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure their ‘genetic codes are passed on for eternity.’ This final part in the series sets out to explain why these theories are problematic, beginning in 2000 in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda, where Hamilton is to espouse his dark theories. But all around him the Congo is being torn apart. The film then interweaves the two stories: The strange roots of Hamilton’s theories, and the history of the West’s tortured exploitation of the Congo in order to continue manufacturing the technology that keeps the West’s dogmatic utopian ideas alive. BBC