Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is  here, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.1 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my fortieth published book, and the product of an investigation that's still ongoing. I happened to notice back in the early 1990s, as a result of voracious reading in odd books, that a surprising number of temple traditions around the world are connected to legends about increased agricultural fertility. I know, that's supposed to be mere superstition -- but it's funny how often "mere superstition" turns into evidence that the ancients knew more than it's fashionable for modern intellectuals to admit. That launched a quest that resulted in this book. I've come to theorize that woven into the design and use of certain specific kinds of temples is a lost folk technology that boosts agricultural productivity. I've collected physical evidence (including controlled double-blind studies) that there are energies known to science that could have been concentrated and put to use with resonating chambers of stone, designed according to specific geometries, filled with volatile organic compounds, and activated with sound waves. What's more, it's a technology that could be rediscovered and put to work to help plants thrive now.

This book was my first progress report on that investigation.  It's about to go out of print -- Llewellyn, the original publisher, still has a few copies left on sale, which you can get here -- but there'll be another edition in due time, and probably a further book not too long after that, as I'm continuing to find relevant data. Yes, there are also other people busy with this; the prospect of a working model, so that the details of the technology can be tested in real world conditions, may not be far off.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

[ecosophia]

Certainly AI shows all the classic signs of a Plutonian phenomenon -- vast amounts of overblown hype at the outset, lurid claims of utopia and/or doom, oceans of money flooding into the field, and then mediocre performance, spiraling gradually downward to total failure. Oh, and unacknowledged costs, which usually turn out to be the factor that makes the whole thing break down.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the costs of AI is one of the major things most people do not understand. There's a rather memorable anecdote in Genius Makers (a title I'd be willing to bet was forced onto the book by the publisher) by Metz Cade, a book on the history of machine learning: in 2013, some Google engineers worked out a way to use machine learning (which today would be called AI) to brute force the problem of voice recognition. The only problem was that in order to get it to work, Google would have to double it's processing power in the data centres.

I haven't seen hard data, but I've wondered for a while just how much of the global economy is being funneled into machine learning systems, and how big a role this might play in the continuous economic dysfunction over the last couple of decades.

[ecosophia]

That seems very likely to me. My guess is that the internet is already losing the ability to pay for itself -- thus the frantic efforts by the big corporations to monetize everything in sight -- and as that accelerates, a lot of AI and other resource-intensive internet stuff will do away in a hurry.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you think this obsession over AI might be an actual curse?

As a direct result of the push for AI, the internet's business model is breaking down. The basic business model for most of the net is that the big companies package content together, use it as bait to bring consumers in, and place ads next to it, promising huge returns to venture capitalists, and this being threated on all sides. Ad blockers are increasingly common as ads grow more intrusive because AI can push it right to the limit of what will prompt people to leave at that moment; content producers are increasingly shifting to other areas (such as paid sites, Substack, or offline entirely) as the parts of the internet relying on advertising grows less functional as broken AI systems are used to try to keep it clean enough for advertisers; these same advertisers are questioning why the should find their ads next to content promoting suicide, overt neo-Nazis, or the like, and asking how they know a human even clicked the links at this point given how common bots are; and venture capitalists are looking at this and growing increasingly concerned that their investments won't be repaid, especially given how much the entire thing costs because of the insane resource and energy requirements for a machine learning system.

And almost the entire tech world is acting as if bringing AI, one of the core causes of this problem is the obvious, and only possible, solution...

[ecosophia]

I don't know if anybody cast a curse on the internet, but if you mean by "curse" the inevitable consequences of stupid thinking, as I suggested here --

https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2012/05/night-thoughts-in-hagsgate.html

-- yes, you may be right.

[(Anonymous)]

Do curses have to be intentional? As I'm rereading that post, I'm struck by the thought that "State the reality of the situation, and it's inevitable consequences, then allow the flailing as people do everything except the things that actually matter" describes the climate change movement. It's almost as if the climate activists placed an unwitting curse on themselves....

[ecosophia]

That's a valid point! You may well be right.

[(Anonymous)]

This may be getting rather off topic, but my local paper picked up an editorial from the Los Angeles Times today titled "Generative AI could hamper fight against climate change." Quote "Google AI takes 10 times as much electricity to process a result as a regular Google search, according to one analysis." (No source for the analysis.) The editorial goes on to describe the problems caused by increased electrical demand. It does seem that awareness is growing that we need to be a bit more practical about the actual costs of AI...

[ecosophia]

Pluto is definitely fading out, then. That's exactly the sort of question that needs to be asked about all Plutonian phenomena: AI, space travel, nuclear power, Communism, and the rest of it. How do the costs compare to the benefits? And can we afford the costs at all, and for how long?