Who are you?

And other ramblings on our nomadic journey

A sixties question from the eponymous “Who”, penned by guitarist Pete Townshend and still relevant today. As we travel along our nomadic journey this is a recurring theme in my life as we visit different places and cultures, making me question my beliefs and conditioning. If you hold a belief strongly enough that is what you will see in life. Many people think it’s the other way around. “Think” being the operative word and their downfall. Believing is about feeling not thinking. As the bard said, “there is neither good nor bad, thinking makes it so.” Your body is your feeling instrument and continuously give you messages and outcomes directly as a result of what you strongly believe – feel – much of it coming from the words you say, which brings to mind another sixties gem “Say the Word” from the Lennon/McCartney music machine. It was on the “Rubber Soul” album, a title suggesting they were struggling with the question too.

I remember the sixties; I can still feel the rush on hearing songs like these two. No, it wasn’t the drugs, although it might have been the beer! My body knew the question was important, and no one was listening to the signals. 50 years later, with time to reflect on a life of “not listening” to my body, I am here, now, in me; some of the time! Looking at the world around me I do wonder what the youth of today will be reflecting on in 2075. I might just hang around to find out. After all we are designed, genetically, to live to 125 or so; something I am working on; stay tuned.

Here in the US, it’s “Fall”, and the leaves are doing just that, in many multicoloured hues. It is a very special sight to see from here up in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina.

They are still getting over the effects of Hurricane Helene that struck the region in September 2024. There are still folk living in caravans, being unable to rebuild as the land their homes were on has gone, and is now down river, slowly making its way to the sea. Sections of the 486-mile Blue Ridge Parkway Road are still closed. Deep valleys that channeled much of the flood waters are still strewn with trees and huge boulders. What struck us most was the sincerity of people who were so appreciative that we had visited their towns and villages and spent, what seemed to us, a few dollars in their shops and stores. We are very fortunate as well as very grateful to these people for their lessons in humility.

We are staying in Spartanburg, South Carolina until mid-December, when we return to Blighty for Christmas, before heading off to Bulgaria for a week, Bambaji is presenting at a Human Design Festival in Sofia, and then we head off for two months in India.

We are going to be on a retreat in Tiruvannamalai. After a while you can say that without thinking, although inevitably everyone calls it Tiru…We have a WhatsApp group for the people going and the interesting observation, for me at any rate, is the “fear” of India. How do I get vaccinations, do I take dollars are there ATMs that don’t get scammed, are there any usable toilets, what about mobile coverage? Ye Gods! India now has a burgeoning middle class – defined as over $15,000 annual income – and a rapidly growing economy which means the infrastructure and access to much of what we take for granted in the so-called developed world are so much better than 10 years ago. Yes, they still drive like lunatics, and the bureaucracy is still a challenge, but this is a country on the move so enjoy it, before it loses its inestimable charm.

It will be hot in India, and the markets seem to be warming up too. I have been reading a lot about AI and none of it is good. From personal experience I know that ChatGPT makes things up and if you ask the same question days apart you will get a different answer. This is okay if you are using it as a version of Google on steroids to ask how the latest app update works. It is touted as the dog’s bollocks for writing code. It makes mistakes and if you are relying on it in a commercial environment look out. If you want Python code, learn how to write Python! Here’s a quote from the highly respected MacroStrategy team (nothing whatsoever to do with MicroStrategy the Saylor / Bitcoin saga) on ChatGPT making things up.

Basically, it keeps inventing new data to appear helpful. The models have a powerful authority bias built into them which assumes that the model is right and that the questioner is wrong for doubting it, so will keep repeating the same nonsense in different ways. (Remember, learner algorithms work in the way of saying what algorithm turns the number 4 into 16, for example, for which there are an infinite number of answers, so it will just keep looking for the next way to arrive at 16). It will take increasingly irrelevant statements on the Internet as gospel to justify its fictitious answer. The models dismiss unconventional or independent research as improbable and actively rewrite it through fabricated counter evidence. In effect, LLMs do not merely reflect the institutional bias in their training, they actively police it, manufacturing counterfeit academic reality to defend the status quo.

And then you have the circularity of the chip manufacturers (Nvidia, AMD) and end users (Microsoft, Google, Meta) supporting the data centre builders and AI generators, (Open AI, Coreweave) who in turn buy their chips and software. This can all go on for as long as people believe, and with the inevitability of hindsight, for much longer than makes any sense. It is all very reminiscent of the TMT bubble that peaked in 2000. Some of us remember that period and 25 years later parts of the market are more highly valued than they were back then. Just saying…

I am not ignoring the fact that AI is bringing huge change to the world. I am just not entirely sure of the direction. What will folk do who have been replaced by AI and robots? Retrained? To do what? Play video games all day and live off UBI? Even more concerning is the continuous dumbing down of our knowledge. Already literacy levels are dropping as our kids cheat on homework by using AI so they can indulge their screen addictions.

I’ll close with a quote from a piece from of all places, the Grauniad. What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’:

As AI-generated content has started to fill the internet, it adds another layer of amplification to ideas that are already popular online. The internet, as the primary source of knowledge for AI models, becomes recursively influenced by the very outputs those models generate. With each training cycle, new models increasingly rely on AI-generated content. This risks creating a feedback loop where dominant ideas are continuously amplified while long-tail or niche knowledge fades from view.