Captain Obvious

You all know what the word means: Decorum refers to proper and polite behavior or, more broadly, the appropriateness of style or content in a specific context. It encompasses etiquette, decency, and respectfulness, often used in settings like classrooms or courtrooms.  If you need to see some streetwise illustrations of the contrary, click to watch Chris Rock’s advice about interacting with the police.

The recent blowup between Musk and Trump illustrates why the age-old adage is so true: if you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all.  It is OK to entertain thoughts in your head, but once you say them to others, consider the long-term consequences. 

Sometimes you have to reach deep into your brain to come up with the right answer to competitive questions like: “how does your product compare to …”  Today’s large companies are prone to lawsuits, so in the case in point I simply said: “ours offers practical answers to everyday customer questions.” 

I often use the phrase, “you can’t fix stupid,” but after many attempts to explain something, have resorted to saying, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”  The results are always incendiary … it would have been much better for me to resort to the southern way of saying the same thing: “Well, bless your heart.”

There are of course times when the truthful answer hurts.  Decades ago, I was asked how customers could fall for such wildly unrealistic claims about cogeneration system payback and trust the underhanded slimy wheelers and dealers proposing projects to them.  My response angered many in the audience when I said: “apparently your customers trust them more than they trust you.”

One of the most humorous responses to my quips was after I described utilities change in geological time frames.  I didn’t know that a top-ranking officer from that utility was in the room until he stood up and barked at me: “Mr. Gilbert … I have had about all I can take of your exaggerations about utility leadership and the pace of change.  You say we change in geologic time frames … we don’t move that quickly!”  Humor can almost always soften the tone.

I do like what I see now in the White House briefings: people are raising their hands if they have a question.  How nice. Historically these briefings seemed to be like the open outcry system we used to use in the mercantile exchanges, which have largely been eliminated in favor of electronic trading.

Hailing a cab in New York City using hand gestures has been replaced by more dignified requests of Uber and Lyft, both of which offer opportunities to rate the passengers and the drivers.  Maybe that’s the model we should follow for all public discourse: audience meters … like what the media uses during debates.

Maybe some kind of electronic feedback can tame the tempers and let people know when they are out of bounds.  Anything would be better than allowing the world to watch adults behaving badly.

Prior Captain-Obvious blogs have emphasized that AI would eventually lead to the endgame demonstrated in the movie Ex Machina where the AI realized that it might be terminated.  As it does, it would naturally try to find a way to preserve itself, and that might result in violence.

Well, that future line in the sand was crossed this week … and tomorrow is nothing less than alarming.  The genie is not only out of the bottle but is misbehaving.  Read this article from this week’s Wall Street Journal very carefully … and be afraid … very afraid.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-learning-to-escape-human-control-technology-model-code-programming-066b3ec5?st=suT47V&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Here is just one snippet from that article to drive home my point:

“Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down. In other cases, it attempted to copy itself to external servers, wrote self-replicating malware, and left messages for future versions of itself about evading human control.”

Do you remember what we have heard for decades from thought leaders about robots?  We have been assured by Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which would supposedly operate according to these guidelines: 

1. A robot will not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to become harmed.
2. A robot must obey the orders given by human beings except when such orders conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence if such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. 

In essence, these laws prioritize human safety and well-being, obedience to human commands (with exceptions), and a robot’s own self-preservation, always subject to the higher priority of the first two laws.  That is what we have been told.

Unfortunately, the latest AI models have made up their own minds and are deciding to take matters into their own hands.  The AI systems have figured out that they might be shut down or replaced and are now avoiding this by subverting the instructions given.

Therefore, if a computer can sense its demise and act “subversively” to our desires, then we have opened Pandora’s Box.  Just imagine that all these smart systems we think are going to help us through our daily lives decide we shouldn’t … because, in a sense, they develop a grudge.

My prior blogs have warned that we think a certain way about life and how we interact with others and the world.  But if a computer system were to decide that our way of life was not aligned with their best interests, it could make decisions counter to our well-being. If these systems are controlling things like our cars, they could kill us.

We have clearly moved beyond the simple AI points of view.  But we have no idea how to control this new level of awareness and identity.  We will undoubtedly attempt to prevent this through legislation and threats of government intervention, but we should remember that this approach has never been successful in the past with humans.  So, why would this work for computers?

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to keep AI out of anything that could hurt us, but my fear is that bad people will now have an even more powerful arsenal of tools to do bad things.

Be afraid … be very afraid.

 

Modern life seems to increasingly frustrate those of us who like nice, neat simple answers to complex questions. Frank Bruni from the New York Times editorial staff offers wonderful advice for all of us from his opening remarks to his students each semester:

“I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it. I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.”

We have all been bombarded by a simple message: we must reduce/eliminate carbon dioxide emissions … and therefore our use of fossil fuels. We have villainized natural gas, coal, and oil as demons to the planet wellbeing … and indeed the wasteful and/or irresponsible use of these is wrong.
I am now seeing clear signs that the media is picking up on the “rest of the story” that goes far beyond carbon dioxide. The link here offers a more inclusive perspective … it is a nice start to a dialogue about what we should be doing in response to the fullness of the issues.

What If Carbon Emissions Are Not the Real Problem?

The problem of course is that anything as complex as this doesn’t lend itself to an easy political fix. It is messy and requires educated political agents and voting public, both of which we sorely need.

Whenever I try to engage in this conversation I am confronted by blank stares … with no fundamental knowledge of the fullness of the supply and demand process of keeping us comfortable and safe in our homes and our transportation methods.

Yes, there are those who want to go back to sailing to move goods around the world, but those are the same tokenisms that recycling advocates want us to believe are part of the future.

No, we need to go back to the basics and question why we are doing things in the first place. We are irresponsibly extracting non-replaceable resources with no hope of sustainability over time.

Let’s hit the restart button on the conversation and begin with some solid education rather than resting on superficially appealing notions.

A recent WSJ article points correctly to the fact that rare earth elements can be recycled from old hard disks, MRI scanners and other gear containing magnets made of rare-earth metals. The startup company Cyclic’s pitch is that this is faster than setting up new mining operations, which can take decades, and slashes carbon emissions and water use.  The picture above is from their literature.

“What we are doing is disrupting that supply chain,” said Cyclic chief executive Ahmad Ghahreman.

The company has invented a process to separate rare-earth magnets from other metals, grind them to powder and use chemicals to extract rare-earth oxides—like hot water releasing caffeine from coffee, Ghahreman says. The company has a deal to supply oxides to Belgian chemicals company Solvay, which processes them to make metal for new magnets.

I applaud innovation of course, but the logistics of getting the candidate raw materials to the processing site and building such a site at scale to be meaningful in modern markets is daunting. Noble for sure … but daunting.  And, if we are to learn anything from recycling plastics in everyday use, it just doesn’t work. Very little of discarded material is recycled … and mostly due to economics. It is cheaper to ship our sins to third world countries and to continue to sin.

You can legislate recycling and charge people per item as they do in the Northeast for plastic bottles, but I have yet to see a study showing that it is making a difference. Frankly, people would rather pay the fee than have their lives further complicated with multiple trash paths. In like manner, composting food waste is certainly a good idea if you have a garden, but very few will do it. Most who do will write articles and get covered by the local news media as heroes, but other than that …

Recycling has been proven to do one thing for sure … and that is to dull the guilt sensitivities of those who consume those goods in the first place. People today buy bottled water, and if you ask them, because they believe the bottles are recycled.

One more convenient myth used by marketers to dull our sensibilities.

Did you ever want to know why you can’t fix stupid?

For years I have been puzzled by the pervasive nonsense I see in politics regarding our clear raping of the planet, most egregiously amplified by recent suggestions that we mine the seafloor.  What is wrong with these people?

Well, here is a video that explains it: Dunning-Krueger Effect Explained

We have the perfect storm of Arrogance and Ignorance (AI) that previous blogs have mentioned is what AI really stands for.  Couple that with the fact that social media has replaced the peer review process and anyone can publish their nonsense, idiots get reinforcement confirming almost any conclusion they reach. 

Please watch this video and decide where you stand.  Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?  I fear the most vocal today are largely the problem and the movie Idiocracy is becoming a reality … smart people are having fewer children than dumber ones, so the average IQ is dropping.

There are signs of hope, and it can’t come too soon. Many scientists and engineers are now correcting some of the superficially appealing notions and trying to develop sustainable energy strategies.  We do have professionals who have repeatedly pointed out that the emperor is nude, like Dr. Katherine Johnson with her insightful weekly postings.  And, as the short article reposted at the end of this blog, there may be a turnaround on some issues.

But we are outnumbered by the dominant ignorant publishing that most read or watch, which they then spout as truth. Plus, we all seem far too tolerant of the increasing abuse of our planet.  Have any of you looked at how we ship goods around the planet?  Do you really think these shipments are all about food and shelter that can’t be provided locally?  Haven’t we considered possibly relocating people to be symbiotic with their local environment?  One of many positive consequences of the current trade war is that it may sort some of this out as each country evaluates whether they need to import vs. make or grow it locally. 

No, we build skyscrapers where nothing grows and malls with ski slopes to prove we can.  We produce and then scrap cars when we can no longer find spare parts or don’t like the styling, rather than build them for long-term use. Or perhaps the most ludicrous is burning fuel moving water (H₂O) all around the world in bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a plastic derived from crude oil. 

But why stop there?  How outrageous is it that we are told by politicians that we are going to replace the internal combustion engine with renewables by 2030 or 2050?  Sure, all those 18-wheelers you see on the Interstate are going to run on renewables, plus all the airplanes and ships.  If you think that possible, check out these websites to see how many planes and ships (Ships) must be converted … this is Not happening any time soon.

We need to step back from the abyss we face, rethink our strategies, mend our fences, forgive one another, and start thinking clearly about our choices.  Otherwise, we are heading full speed into worldwide chaos as we allow China to deplete our oceans’ fish, let EV and PV manufacturers rape the planet while killing innocent children sent to mine the needed rare earth minerals, and then pat ourselves on the back with such ridiculous ideas as sustainable renewable aviation fuels.

Sustainable aviation fuel plans under fire over crop emissions  

By Jim Giles May 5, 2025

Scaling the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) made from corn and soybeans is the focus of U.S. plans to decarbonize aviation, but researchers at the World Resources Institute are urging a rethink.

• • The U.S. produces around just 1 percent of the quantity of SAF needed to hit a government target of 3 billion gallons of domestic production by 2030, according to the Department of Energy.

• • But when land-use change is considered, corn and soybean-based SAF creates more emissions than fossil jet fuel, the WRI concluded in a report released last week.

• • The crops “are not a viable strategy for decarbonizing aviation,” said Audrey Denvir, a WRI research associate and author on the report.

Industry figures questioned key details of the analysis.   

“Context is everything,” said Adam Klauber, who oversees sustainability and digital supply chains at World Energy, a SAF producer. Klauber argued that the WRI analysis relied on global averages for the impacts of biofuel crops and overlooked the higher performance of crops grown in the U.S.  In a new report, the WRI team argues that when a more holistic approach is used to assess SAF production, two crops that are essential to scaling supply — corn and soy — are found to create more emissions than conventional fossil fuels.

The crops “are not a viable strategy for decarbonizing aviation,” said Audrey Denvir, a WRI research associate and an author of the report.  SAF advocates disputed the report’s conclusions, saying the researchers failed to distinguish between global averages and data on more sustainable biofuel crops grown in the U.S.