It is well after

the real Thanksgiving Day, and partway to the one celebrated in the Terra Incognito to the South of this our frozen North, which a not-to-be-named Great White High Mucka-Muck Chief lusts after for its extensive mineral resources.

But in his reality thanks were given on Saturday November first in the Spy's manse, as some of the family were away at a regatta for the one on the calendar. Hmmm...mentioning that word reminds the Spy of Canadian humourist and man of letters Stephen Leacock's piece on the trials of A, B, and C, (The Human Element in Mathematics" for it was a regatta..well, rowing on a river... that ultimately did in poor old worn-out C, and led A to aimlessly offer to wager with B on which hearse would arrive at the cemetery first. (You really have to read more fine literature. Perhaps start with "The Sinking of the Steamship Mariposa Belle" originally published under the title "The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythia.")

Not your afternoon of tea and crumpets with marmie? How about some other humourists? After all, Canada is replete with such; we Northerners may not get out of our igloos all that often, but we laugh a lot, especially at ourselves. Our reader should try it sometime. The Spy was thinking of old-time skit-comedians Wayne and Shuster. Who can forget "Wash The Blood Off My Toga" the story of 44BC, done in Chicago/Detroit gangsta language, where Flavius Maximus, Private Roman Eye, was engaged by Brutus to solve the case of "Who bumped off Big Julie?" Or, just as good, and relevant to today, "Question Time" on the attempt to spice up Parliamentary proceedings in order to boost House of Commons ratings. Then there was the Brown Pumpernickel...

But seriously, can we not laugh at the antics of our modern Western governments? They spend like there isn't a tomorrow that will hold a financial reckoning, use tariffs as a weapon, defying the lessons of a century ago when they were the chief cause of the Great Depression, engage in mock battles over fine points of honour for minuscule electoral advantages, excoriate each other over real and imagined issues and crises, act as though their opponents are a danger to the country, and at the very extremes of the "left" and "right" are indistinguishable in practice--proud, arrogant, dictatorial, dangerous, and a clear and present threat to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the ordinary Josephine on the street. (The Canadian trio of nirvana society is "peace, order, and good government," to which modern politics are likewise inimical.) And that tirade was one heck-ov-a run-on sentence.

May we not also chuckle (even while shaking our heads, if we can do both at the same time, even if perhaps not walk and chew gum simultaneously) at the perversity of governing when it repeats all the old misteaks (The Spy never makes those) and apparently confidently forecast them to have a different outcome? The reality question is not so much whether the world economy will collapse due to the trade war, only when and how far.

Many moons of moons ago.

the Spy opined to his reader in this and other spaces that in the Information Age, one ought not particularly fear the inroads of "Big Brother" government into their private lives as much as those of little sister down the street with an Apple ][ and a modem (you can tell how long ago that was). The reasoning (correct as it turns out)? Governments by their very nature have far more friction than is implicit in the spread of new ideas and new technology. The two coefficients of friction were once similar, but hello government boffins, we all live in the information age.

Sadly the gears of modern government turn much too slowly to influence any emerging phenomena in a timely way. By the time the majority of elected parliamentarians figure just what is going on with the latest trends in either, they are far too late to the party to be influencers. He further expounded in that long ago day that we (and would-be politicians and other leaders among us in particular) had better embrace the notion that privacy would be obsoleted to the point where everything about everyone would be knowable by everyone else all the time. (Information "wants" to inform.)

So...you who would hide the involvement of Epstein's co-perverts take note. Everything about his and his allies' shameful exploitive lusts will become public knowledge. That's a certainty--a matter of when, not if--and all the denials, obfuscations, cries of "fake news", and attempts to investigate others coming from on high merely accelerate the drama on that day when the leaks in the dam of resistance break and the flood pours out.

But the title of this column...

...suggested it would be about AI. True, but did you O reader, not realize that's exactly what the Spy has been writing about today--the human kind of pretend intelligence. So...turning to the even more artificial electronic sort, the Spy takes note of some very large corporations (including one large soft drink producer who need not be named) that have produced major ad campaigns with cheesy low quality AI graphics. Why do this? Such shallow fakes look awful. A young child playing with crayons could surely do far better. Do the respective boffins not employ any quality control filters--or have they laid them off, assuming AI doesn't need it? Hire back your graphics designer people folks, AIs are not even close to being up to it, and may never be creative, given they feed exclusively on majoritarian existing human work, and only simulate creativity. It shows--badly.

Ditto to the Spy's computing science students who hand in AI-generated homework, ignoring that the task of a university student is to examine (not be indoctrinated in) the great ideas, to learn stuff, and to engage the gears of creative thinking about the underlying principles (BTW, too many of them pick the homonym spelling of that word.) Do any of them even read what Chat GPT writes for them before they paste it into their hand-in? Multiple midterm and final exam empty answer spaces would suggest not.

And...while the Spy is beating that drum, permit him another observation--the Mathematics skills of his first-year students have tanked markedly in the last four years. His Discrete Math course had a terrific group performance online during the COVID year, but not since--a combination, perhaps of a formerly only slowly deteriorating quality grade-school education accelerating sharply downward during and post COVID, and a generation of students who don't care if they learn, or ______(fill in the blank with what you think, or failing that, with your favorite made-up conspiracy theory...how about "aliens are stealing their minds!!").

More to the point, the news of the last couple of weeks has featured the inevitable downward tumble of many of the AI stocks. As in all market fads, they were far overbought, and likewise overdue for a correction. Likewise crypto currencies have corrected--though not completely, for they have no intrinsic value whatever. "Sic transit gloria mundi" applies here, as well as to kings, captains of industry, their profligate inheritors, and the wanna-bees associated with all said categories. The bottom line, at least for now: AI might sometimes better be rendered as Anti-Intelligence. If it does replace human intelligence it will be by default.

Mind you, it has its uses--in almost any heavily multi-variable data driven enterprise. The Spy well recalls getting a call from a former student wanting advice on a CO-OP project she'd been assigned--writing a Fortran program to correlate instances of breast cancer with soil types at or near the individual's residence. Following a reminder of basic principles that apply to such situations, she took a week or so to both learn a language she'd never seen before and complete the project. Assuming the data were integral, and given carefully worded instructions, that's just the sort of thing an installed AI could now deliver in seconds. Likewise the automation of vehicular traffic--"all" that's needed is sufficient data, and by the early 30's installing steering wheels in the new auto-mobiles could be illegal.

Those who drive for a living beware. Mind you, continuing to take transportation as a for-instance, available data is not always up to date-eh. A bridge washes out and barricades are erected to keep traffic from plunging into the watery abyss. Will the auto-mobiles get timely updates to their data? Will they be able to sense potholes, open manholes, spike belts, yellow lights, kids in a crosswalk, train crossing signals, traffic accidents, sic transit, errant obsolete vehicles being operated randomly by drunk drivers, and. . . The Spy supposes it must become so. After all, exceptional circumstances would just be part of the one hundred percent accurately detected/received real-time data stream, right? Same thing wherever and whenever AI is installed and absolutely relied upon, even when human lives are at stake. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fifth year as a high school and university teacher in 2025. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several commercial, nonprofit, and/or educational organizations and participated in developing industry computing and educational standards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named the best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He is a half century-long member of the IEEE, ACM, and MAA. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 when cancer happened and she left for heaven, so he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth has been released; site redesigned.) : https://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

URLs for the newest edition of Issues Text:

Wipf&Stock site for his 4Civ textbook Volume One: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385226818/the-fourth-civilization-volume-one/

Wipf&Stock site for his 4Civ textbook Volume Two: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385232932/the-fourth-civilization-volume-two/