McAvoy Layne Sunday

Just when I thought I must surely have read everything Sam Clemens ever wrote, I stumbled onto a speech delivered in Boston away back in 1888, when Sam described the sleeping habits of Siamese twins: “While one sleeps, the other snores.” Yet again, Samuel brings a smile to my weathered face. I cannot count the times he has done that over the past four decades, and if each smile adds an extra minute of life, well, I should live comfortably to a venerable old age of 157.

Forty years ago or so, I recorded portions of a Nevada textbook, Battle Born Nevada, for the blind. That excellent little book by Don Lynch and David Thompson, surfaced today, and I took great delight in reviewing the inspiring words of Sarah Winnemucca, as she described a courting ritual of the Paiute. “The courting is very different from the courting of the white people. He never speaks to her, or visits the family, but endeavors to attract her attention by showing his horsemanship.

It never concerned me that there were so many people smarter than I was, because I always knew I had just enough smarts to appreciate and enjoy this crazy world of ours. But when a machine demonstrates that it is smarter than I am, well now, that is disconcerting. Just the other day, in a first such incidence to be documented, an autonomous AI guided drone killed a human target in Ukraine. Yes, McAvoy, weapons are now capable of making decisions to attack.