Posted on 07/30/2021 7:12:24 PM PDT by tbw2
I was in an online debate on artificial intelligence when Robert Arvanitis brought up something he’d written referencing Lord of the Rings. From the title “The Orcs that ran away”, I thought it was a short fantasy story. In reality, it was a financial paper on the economic impact of the production of the Lord of the Rings movies in New Zealand and how AI was used to solve it.
(Excerpt) Read more at libertyislandmag.com ...
An Interview with Robert Arvanitis on the Economics of Lord of the Rings
https://libertyislandmag.com/2021/07/30/an-interview-with-robert-arvanitis-on-the-economics-of-lord-of-the-rings/
Robert Arvanitis: Creating value is not about software or computational power. It’s about making that shift in perspective, thinking broadly enough, to find the unexpected.
I was hoping it had something to do with the present value of rings.
The real life message from this model is that the Orcs (who are stupid but obedient to Sauron) will naturally only attack the good guys (Fellowship of the Rings) as long as they see that they have the numbers and the cost of attacking is less than the cost of running out of the battle (termination by Sauron or one of his minions). In a word, they are bullies. They like to win as long as it looks easy.
This applies directly to current events if you believe, as I do, that the effort to defeat the oligarchs and their all powerful IC minions is a quest, like Frodo’s, to save the world of men.
The “ring” is the lie that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Mike Lindell is Frodo who must destroy the ring by melting it in Mt. Doom with the PCAPs at his Cyber Symposium in August. Steve Bannon is Gandolf working his communication magic to keep all the armies motivated and working on the audits with his spell of “action, action, action”. Rudy Giuliani is Gimli the dwarf fighting enemies twice his size with a smile. Trump is Aragorn and Melania is Arwen the true King and Queen of Gondor who will return when Sauron is destroyed. All the two faced RINOs are Gollum clones who only want their precious power. The Orcs are the CCP and their Democrat minions that must defeat the Fellowship to satisfy their lust for power.
They are weak minded bullies who will incinerate in the flames of Mt. Doom if the opinion polls continue to show that more and more citizens regret Biden’s fake election and realize it was rigged even while the media is brainwashing them to obey the lie.
I snuck some economics into my Transformers fanfic in the form of discussing logistical restrictions in complex systems and how these can impose restraints not just on absolute capacity but incur diminished returns well before that … and I brought it up because of the physical size of a door they were trying to shove stuff through.
Elsewhere I’ve been critical about the perceived value of pilot programs because they are almost by their very natures set up to appear to succeed where the usually much larger programs that they spawn have none of their advantages (which I mainly identify — not an all inclusive list — as the difference between doing something vs very little (if anything), having relatively few motivated and capable staff vs many ordinary bureaucrats, still having organizational flexibility to respond to difficulties vs organization ossification, and having only a limited time to exist vs being open ended).
This too is a result of logistical restrictions and a cause for further logistical restrictions that may not be recognized till much later.
I had Battletech essentially say, IIRC, that with diminishing returns there comes a point that pushing a given system harder can have a negative effect. This is true of trying to load cargo on a ship, move relatively large numbers of people on a given battlefield (the French at Agincourt ran into that one big time) or pretty much anything including operating a government.
There is simply a point where you can be too big — an idea that is anathema to progressivism that identifies success with both size and trying.
This is why larger population States have the sheer wherewithal to be functionally bonkers compared to smaller States and, of course, the federal has with Arbitrary power in all circumstances whatsoever (vs only enumerated Powers, which would be constitutional) easily has the ability to be far more wasteful and hidebound than any single State might ever dare try to be … even California as at this time.
L.E. Modesitt, author of the Recluce books, wrote an article in one of his books griping about the lack of economic reality in most SF / fantasy. He did work a bout of inflation into one of the books that I remember.
Pohl’s Midas World had a healthy dose of economics gone awry.
Artificial Intelligence is not real. At least not yet. It may become real when humans figure out how to make machines do things based on emotions rather than logic. Whatever they call Artificial Intelligence is anything but. AI is a collection of highly complicated algorithms, and algorithms are linear. They may get a bunch of algorithms running in parallel so it seems like intelligence, but it is still linear. Emotion is not linear. Computers are going to need anger and frustration to become intelligent.
This stuff is bush league. The Tolkien Society Seminar 2021, the theme of which was Tolkien and Diversity had the good stuff. The must read of the seminar was Danna Petersen-Deeprose’s – “Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien. Now, THAT is worth reading! :0)
What is his position on lembas futures?
Is he shorting dragon gold?
Regards,
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