You are a Termite

I am still trying to get a grip on photography and equipment choices.

So I did a macro photo of a tiny weed blossom, and it was so beautiful, I wanted to blow it up, print it, and put it on the wall. I went to the true photography experts: Walgreen’s.

Okay, Ansel Adams wouldn’t have used them, but there is a Walgreen’s near me, and I can submit photos online for printing. And their candy aisle is outstanding.

I uploaded the photo, and the website told me it was too grainy to be printed at 16″x 20″. The photo is nearly square, but I figured I would print it in a rectangular size, cut off the blank parts, and put it in a frame made to hold it.

Now I have to decide whether to put up with the graininess or print a smaller photo. Sad, because every photo is unique. I can’t go out and redo it.

This problem showed me a couple of things.

First, I really do need a better camera. My camera has an 8-megapixel sensor, so you don’t get a lot of pixels. It’s fine if you’re not doing too much cropping, and you’re not printing big pictures, but otherwise, it’s a huge problem. Until yesterday, I was going along with the people who told me it’s the photographer, not the equipment, that matters. Turns out they’re totally wrong. You can take great pictures with a bad camera, but you can’t take EVERY great picture. A camera’s limitations can limit what you can do, very dramatically.

Second, when taking macro shots, you need to get as close as you can and fill up the viewfinder. That way, you get as many pixels as possible, and when you crop later, you get the best resolution possible.

A few days ago, I was wondering if I should blow $400 on a cheap DSLR body that would make better use of my old lenses. Now I’m thinking I should spend a few thousand dollars and get it over with. I have a wife. I may have a child sometime next year. I can’t keep letting bad equipment cost me opportunities to do good photography.

I also have to get out and shoot several times a week, because lack of skill and lack of familiarity with the equipment also ruin opportunities. I don’t want to be the old guy who finds himself cursing at his camera and millennials and electric vehicles and soy while his son takes his first steps.

I don’t know too much, but it’s starting to look like I need to put at least two grand into a camera, along with a big sum for a very good zoom. The zoom I have is 17-70mm, and it starts out at f2.8, so it’s unusual to have to take it off the camera for anything. I have a prime lens I never use.

I don’t want to find myself on a trip with two annoying cameras, plus lenses, to lug around, so whatever I get has to be very good for both video and stills. That means I need a flip screen so I can see myself and/or others when I’m in the picture. There are still a lot of cameras without flip screens, and they’re not going to work for me.

I don’t want a DSLR because they’re extinct already, and they are completely inferior to mirrorless cameras with far better electronics. They miss shots. They focus on the wrong things.

It sort of looks like the camera I want isn’t available yet. I looked at a bunch of products, and it seems like the Sony A7CII is the answer, given what I am willing to spend. It does great stills. It’s pretty good for video. It’s water-resistant, unlike most cameras under two grand. It has a flip screen. It’s intended to be a smaller version of an existing Sony people like, so it saves weight and space. It won’t be available until later this month.

Sony mirrorless cameras supposedly take an extremely vast array of lenses, unlike Canons, which are limited by a greedy refusal to license. What if I want to do telephoto stuff a year from now? Do I want to be confined to a few overpriced lenses that may or may not be what I want?

It turns out cameras are like rifles. I can buy a phenomenal rifle for under a grand, but glass to make it work right will likely cost more than the gun.

Today I’m doing continuing legal “education” again. Right now, I’m playing a video about attorneys who use artificial intelligence. It’s really depressing.

Most people are not overly bright or perceptive, so most of us don’t really understand what AI is going to do to us. We have ideas about computers creating big machines that go around exterminating us, and surely that could happen after enough technological progress, but the real threat, which would come to pass much sooner, is that we will become startlingly stupid people who do almost nothing except serve as receptionists and mechanics for computers who do our actual work.

Apparently, a huge number of people are using AI to do things they should do for themselves. Kids make it do their homework. Students have found ways to make it take exams for them. Lawyers are making it do research and writing.

The speaker in the video talked about using AI for things like doing writing tasks lawyers don’t feel like doing or are, frankly, too dumb to do. She talked about using AI to beat writer’s block.

I don’t get writer’s block. If you tell me you need me to write 500 words, I can sit down in front of you and get it done in 15 minutes. I once wrote a very good legal brief, 48 pages long, in a day. It’s not a problem for me. Some people can dunk a basketball. Some people can write symphonies at the age of 7. I can write legal documents quickly, well, and without help.

So now people like me are going to compete with numbskulls who struggled to get through law school, who pick up their phones, log into AI sites, and tell them to do what I do. When the product spews out a few seconds later, their only job will be to review it and correct it, and if what I’m hearing is true, a lot of the numbskulls aren’t even doing these things. They are getting caught submitting things AI messed up.

If I practice law again, I may spend 20 hours putting a brief together for you, but opposing counsel, with an IQ of 95, may bark some commands into his phone in a strip club toilet instead. Then I’ll bill you $10,000, and he’ll bill his client $10,000, but I’ll be doing about 20 times the work he does.

If this is how it works, aren’t we going to end up with generations of utter morons who are not able to practice law when they aren’t plugged in? Even many of the smart ones will stop learning the second they pass their bar exams.

Also, what will happen to fees? How long will $500 per hour seem reasonable when machines that cost little to use are puking the work out almost instantly?

It will only be a few years before reviewing AI work will not be necessary, because AI will be much better at the work than we are. The tables will turn, and if we actually write anything, AI will review it for US.

Remember I, Robot? Will Smith had a self-driving car. He got in it with Bridget Moynahan. She started shrieking about how unsafe it was to drive a car for yourself.

Won’t there come a time when doing your own legal work will be considered negligent? Computers will be so much better at it, it will be foolhardy to let humans do it. What happens to lawyers then?

It will happen, and it’s going to happen very soon. Within 5 years, probably.

Judges, quite frankly, are already stupid, without the help of AI, and they are also biased and dishonest. Not all of them have these faults to problematic degrees, but many, many do. Should we have AI judges? Maybe they’ll miss some things human judges would catch. At first. But what if the down side is grossly outweighed by the up side?

When I practiced patent law, the country’s only appellate patent court was reversing 54% of the cases it heard. Federal district judges were just too stupid to do the job. There are other areas of law that are also too hard for many federal judges, who tend to be stooges with political appointments. Should we continue letting these people ruin lives and mishandle cases when we have computers that will do a better job?

What if the reversal rate for human judges is 54%, and the reversal rate for AI judges is 35%? Could we ignore this?

Is there a way to team humans up with AI judges to balance the disadvantages out? I doubt it would work well. Human judges have a limitless capacity to screw things up.

What about medicine? Let’s be honest. There is no way a human being can consistently diagnose physical problems, or prescribe treatment, as well as a really good machine. A machine will know the symptoms of every problem known to medical science, no matter how obscure. It will know every cause. Every treatment. What the outcomes are. Most medicine boils down to following flow charts. Human beings can’t do that as well as machines. In the future, doctors will probably be limited to examination and data entry.

For a long time, we’ve had robots helping doctors rip out prostate glands. How long will it be before machines do many procedures from beginning to end, with doctors standing by mainly to collect fees?

I would rather have a machine than a doctor most of the time. Doctors have misdiagnosed me and given me the wrong treatments many times. I have stumped them many times, which should not happen. They have tried to con me into undertaking unnecessary courses of supervised treatment, so they could make more money. Give me a machine any day.

What about an AI president? Sometimes I wonder if the Antichrist will be a machine or a huge leftist mob wired together with a central machine.

The millennials who teach CLE courses think AI is wonderful. They can’t wait to see it do more. They may feel different when they’re collecting aluminum cans for a living.

Another disturbing CLE taught about social media and the law. Boy, are you in for a surprise if you’re a social media addict and you find yourself in court. They will go after your entire history. Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook…even Myspace. You name it.

You should probably delete every account once a year. If you really have to, you can start new ones with less dangerous data stored in them.

They’ll also go after every email address you have. Probably every forum you’ve ever joined. I have no idea how many I’ve joined. I’ve been on the web since about 1992.

If you lie about your whereabouts, or you just make a mistake, they’ll dig up things you’ve put up on the web, along with times and locations, to prove you’re wrong. Can you imagine anything more invasive?

On top of that, there will be forgeries, and lawyers will have to hire expensive experts to validate or invalidate things attorneys want to introduce into evidence. This is how it works right now, so expect it if you get dragged into court.

What a nightmare. You’ll be sitting in court looking at subpoenaed copies of your neighbors’ Ring videos.

I don’t want to live in the world that’s coming. Take me now. The Borg is real. It’s already here. Our lives are suddenly losing all purpose. We are losing our value as individuals. We are like ants in a farm. Bees in a hive. Gather the nectar, make the honey, and then die.

Oh, well. Back to CLE. When Jesus comes, I’ll be able to say I finished this cycle.