analog or digital

one of my all time favorite shows is 'mozart in the jungle'  it's amazing!  especially if you're musically inclined.  In the 4th season there's several episodes in Japan where WAM (an AI robot) conducts an orchestra in Mozart's unfinished 'Requiem' .  There's a whole lot of irony in the relation between Meistro (Rodrigues de Souza) and WAM.... i loved the part where he told the robot there's one thing robots can't do... 'swim' as he unceremoniously launches the robotic conductor into the creek.  WAM was looking to find Meistro's meaning of 'blood' in the music which he said was love.  How do you teach AI love?  you don't


Everything in this world is digital now - every single analog relation has been digitized into 0's and 1's.  



I remember this transition from analog to digital very, very well. I was in the midst of it at University  of Wyoming in 1975 when (as a research technician in the EE dept)  I was asked to help build a microchip lab.  We had a thick catalog from this newbie start-up company called Intel where we ordered all our TTL and CMOS chips.  Research professors were designing digital circuits to get grants and we technicians had to make them work in the real world (ahhh.... what a challenge that was!) 

I remember lamenting the slow creep of digitizing everything that was near and dear to my heart:  analog stereo, analog movies & TV, analog shopping, analog reading, analog everything.  We all thought the digital craze would be over soon since it can't possibly recreate most analog things accurately.  Boy, were we wrong!  As chips got faster and cheaper and could chop every event, every nook & cranny into a digital simulation by chopping it millions of times per second into 0's and 1's, the analog age (previously the only one known to humans) slowly came to an end.  But did it really?

There are many audiophiles that never accepted digital copies of music.  Just turn up an MP3 song on a hi-end stereo and you can hear the distortions.  Record players and tube amplifiers have made a comeback.  There's .flac extensions now trying to recreate hi resolution music.

But the real story here is that the world is analog - not digital.  Not our human world - it's way past that - everything is digital and then some.  But nature, the cosmos, mathematics, etc... everything is analog.  It is not a summation of 0's and 1's.  It's free flowing - it meanders and curves around to whatever shapes, forces, events occur.  It's like water.  try digitizing the flow of water... i know,i know... it's being done all the time.  But really!  the real flow of water cannot be digitized, just like the flow of weather can't be predicted with any accuracy more than a couple days out.  There are just too many variables.  

my rant??  wah, wah, wah... cry me a river!  i want to get back to an analog world where human F2F (damn digital culture -  face-to-face) contact is considered good and text/email is considered shitty.  

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