Bøker av W Houze

The book's title "Pumping 'Feathers' Into Your Seventies and Eighties" is a metaphorical and playful way of offering you information on how to maintain good health, vitality, and energy well into your seventies and eighties, typically considered advanced stages of life. The use of the word "feathers" in quotation marks is my way of suggesting that it's not meant to be taken literally but symbolically or metaphorically. In this context, "feathers" represents qualities associated with lightness, energy, and vitality. Pumping feathers, rather than pumping iron, metaphorically means maintaining or enhancing these qualities in your life as you age. The aim of my book, therefore, is to provide guidance on how to stay physically and mentally active, healthy, and vibrant as you and I get older, as if we are "pumping feathers" into our later years. In authoring this short book, I wanted to offer some perspective and some useful information to those of you who are asking themselves: "Should I get out of the house and into the outside world where things like gyms, swimming pools, hiking trails, even mountains exist, waiting for me to engage with them in order to improve my sense of well-being, physically, mentally, perhaps even spiritually?" And it is my intention to offer you, readers of all ages and physical condition, some perspective and even some incentive to get out there and engage with your physical side again. You might be surprised at the benefits that await you. You might even continue with your physically active life right up into your 80s and beyond. You might even find yourself doing more than just "pumping feathers."

This work of fiction presents a dark post-Trumpian time in America when the present-day (2019) battle between the Left and Right leads to the internment of Americans in very harsh re-education camps. Like FDR's internment camps following Pearl Harbor, these future camps would also be established under the authority and approval of SCOTUS, Congress, and the Executive Branch. But unlike FDR's, these future camps would be designed to replace the political, cultural, and racial beliefs and prejudices held by Alt Right internees. These are the citizens who today exercise their first amendment rights via YouTube, blogs, and other alternative media. Those who resist are subjected to conditions and treatment far worse than what occurred after the attack on 9/11/01. Many Americans opposed the internment camps during WWII. But it is true that many in and out of government tolerated them as a necessary step in time of War with Japan, Germany, and Italy. And it is noteworthy that it was not until 1983 that the 9th Circuit took up the matter once again and vacated the conviction of a Japanese American citizen who sued on grounds of wrongful internment.Will we oppose or tolerate a future political gulag? This novel raises this important moral question.

This book, and its exploration of AI's creative limitations, is the product of my back-and-forth use of Chat GPT-4 over the course of several weeks. As a result, there is a degree of overlap evident in the Chat Sessions and the presentation of related content in and across several major sections of the book's content. These areas of overlap could have been removed by blending all the content into one seamless screed, but doing so is not worth the effort. In fact, there is this additional rationale for leaving the material as it is presented herein. Ideas are pursued throughout that are not repetitive. And to the extent that they are, the exploration of them by me over the weeks goes in different directions and therefore the ideas discussed are approached from various perspectives. This approach, while not intentional, enriches the output of the AI tool. It also offers the reader my varied approach to the subject matter at hand. This occurred because, after reflecting on the content of each previous session, I was able to approach the following session from a different perspective. This protracted, possibly even haphazard? method of writing the book by periodic use of Chat GPT-4 ultimately offers a more nuanced reflective understanding of the basic ideas being explored in the book: what machinery lies behind AI's ability to be "creative" and what its strengths and weaknesses are when compared to human creative processes. To the extent that the reader finds this approach and the organization of the material herein to be repetitive, I offer you not my sincerest apologies whatsoever. Rather, I merely offer this: "Alas, Poor Reader."

Are we getting the very best candidates to run for President of the United States? How can we measure who is qualified and who is not qualified to serve as the Chief Executive of the Executive Branch? Is determining via a testing process who stands at the top of the pool of candidates in terms of overall ability even something that is in accord with the tenets of ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY as we know it in the West in general, and in the United States in particular? Or is "measuring" the candidates/sitting Presidents running for a second term even something at all American? The Constitution is silent on this point. But should we be, the citizens who vote for the candidate of our choice? Making that decision is based in part on what we read and hear about the candidate, plus how they perform in debates and how they comport themselves in all respects throughout the long primary process before we narrow it down to two finalists competing for the Office. If we "test" them, can we learn more about them beyond the sloganeering that the candidate/sitting Presidents cloaks themselves in as they prepare for the General Election? This brief Presidential Aptitude Test (PAT) is one example of one possible testing instrument we could use to gauge who is ablest and who falls short. Tongue in cheek it is, this brief PAT, but it need not be so much tomfoolery at all. Perhaps the time has come for something we can use to serve as another measure of the men and women who seek to reach the Oval Office.

This book presents a broad and in-depth examination of the current and future impact of AI and AGI on humans at work. Many job roles are examined in terms of what the various impacts will be on human workers of all kinds and in various settings, and how AI and AGI will impact for good and ill their job responsibilities, their displacement, possible retraining and the like--all as a result of the ever-increasing presence and use of AI and AGI in the workplace. I cover the impact for machinists on the factory floor, assembly line workers, physicians, lawyers, construction workers, structural engineers, and artists of all stripes in all major artistic fields of creativity. I pose the content gleaned from my own work experiences with AI as an IT consultant and teacher at the Graduate School level, admitting my own befuddlement with one AI tool. Based on my own background and research spent in authoring other books that touch directly on AI and AGI in my own world of work (specifically in IT consulting and project management), I create the questions about the impact of AI and AGI posed throughout the book. I then ask via OpenAI's Chat GPT-4 (Plus) what the latest trained language model tool has to say from what it has been trained on via its vast array of data. I also ask for primary and secondary source material to see what Chat GPT-4 (Plus) is using to produce the answers to the questions I put to the popular and leading AI databased fact-generating resource tool. In short, the book is meant to give workers of all kinds a heads up-if they still need one-about the pros and cons of AI and AGI in the world of work today and in the near term.