Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is Ephemeris for Native American Heritage Day, Friday, November 28th. Today the Sun will be up for 9 hours and 8 minutes, setting at 5:04, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:57. The Moon, at first quarter today, will set at 1:12 tomorrow morning.

Let’s take one more look at AI this week. There is a real fear that artificial intelligence, AI, is displacing certain clerical jobs, and computer coding jobs. The latter is something I used to do. But I’m safe now, having retired 12 years ago. I have coded just about all the code I’ve ever needed to code. As AI takes more and more jobs, who’s gonna be able to afford to buy all the stuff the AI bots make? I’ve heard of some thoughts of a universal guaranteed income. How is that going to be funded? The rich, lower my taxes crowd, won’t go for that. Most people’s identity is defined by their job, what they do in their career. What could possibly replace that for most people?

The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.

This is Ephemeris for Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 27th. Today the Sun will be up for 9 hours and 9 minutes, setting at 5:05, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:56. The Moon, 1 day before first quarter, will set at midnight.

As the constellation Orion rises in the evening, the Native Americans around here would say the Winter Maker is rising, we are waiting for the glory of the winter constellations to appear and the bright Moon to disappear from the evening skies. I thought I’d talk about another topic this week. I am interested in, but really don’t know the depth of detail about: AI, artificial intelligence or what I’d rather call machine intelligence. It seems to me that there are a lot of folks being hooked on talking to these AI models such as ChatGPT and others as somebody or something that’s sympathetic to them. AIs are what you might call book smart or really Internet smart, but they’re not street smart. They were literally born yesterday, with all the wisdom that entails.

The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.

This is Ephemeris for Monday, November 24th. Today the Sun will be up for 9 hours and 15 minutes, setting at 5:07, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:53. The Moon, halfway from new to first quarter, will set at 8:29 this evening.

Now that the Moon’s beginning to brighten in the evening sky, obliterating the faint stars and constellations, I thought I’d spend these bright nights talking about something which has intrigued me because of my former vocation. I’m an amateur astronomer, meaning that I do this for fun, although I made a few bucks lecturing in a planetarium in my early days. But my main career was being a computer systems analyst. I designed and programmed computer systems to do various accounting functions, especially for banks. So I was not anywhere near the cutting edge of computer science. I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of computer intelligence, and all of a sudden AI is here with all its promise and peril. Let’s investigate!

The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.

Addendum

While I will continue to use the abbreviation AI, I mean Machine Intelligence. That it’s not human, doesn’t mean it’s artificial. It’s just different, alien even.