Some time ago I seem to have mentioned that I want to perpetuate the American Way. Today, there appear to be news regarding the Cannibalism of James Town, an early American settlement Basically, in the very early 1600’s, when the first settlers of America had a harsh winter, they hacked a rich white 14-year-old English girl appart to eat her brains and muscles.

My initial reading of the story had me focusing on the details of how it was decided that she was eaten and how they found markings of her tongue and facial muscles being removed and how bones were broken. Much later in the day, I am reminded that I should try to associate this with America, since Jamestown settlement was the most civilized America at that time. My mind is preoccupied by this precursor to the American revolution, in beautiful life-of-pi-like cinematography, hungry people eating people, “the cruel hunger”, as BBC calls it. Also Hunger comes to mind. How do I think of the American way now? These people ate people before they wrote “All men are created equal.” They were such poor planners, that they left people to die in a colony, and yet they went on and started a country.

How responsible was all this stuff? Did they really think it all through? Were they really touched by god and did they really in God Trusted? What about Capitalism? Should we really invest all of humanity on the merits of this one econopolitical system? Should there be separation of money and state as there is separation of religion and state?

Should there be separation of Money and State as there is separation of Religion and State?

How can that be separated? Indeed, this is just as hard a question to answer as how can the religious faith of an officer of the state be separated from the duties of the state? Similarly his money concerns should be similarly separated from his duties of the state. So this means no lobbying. And actually that would complete the separation of church and state as well since church is still affecting state through legal lobbying actions.

The Ancient Chinese apparently had lobbyists, they were called persuasive speakers, some kind of advocateor sent to imperial courts and influential families to affect political decisions. These ancient dark arts probably died out due to many centuries of foreign occupation.

Another thought crossed my mind today regarding higher responsibilities. It would seem that there are other kinks in High Frequency Ethics (HFE, in parallel to high frequency trading–HFT). I remarked to my coworker recently that I on numerous occasions suddenly gain the presence of mind to sit down and flip through my bills and pay them. The sad part of it is that this happens very often on the day after the biggest bill is due. It is quite noticeable since the date is written on the bill and I have to write the date on the cheques. (Sorry, I’m still old school and write cheques)

Now isn’t it strange that this happens so frequently on the day after the bill was due? I wondered out aloud to my coworker if there is some kind of hypnotic message on the bill that causes me to leave it until just past due date? Was there systematic brainwashing? Was there a subliminal mark on the postage? Did these huge financial companies developed financial engines with God-like psychic powers that mental-blocks all the credit card user’s brain until the day after the bill is due?

How do they do that?

So, being the Chinese born person I am, my first instinct is to put up a wall. Let us have offline content and online content. Let’s keep humanity’s secret in winning the evolution war–cannibalism–away from these psychic computers so that they don’t gain the evolutionary advantage and beat us human to the next level and enslave us.

To be fair to me, this idea isn’t as wacked as it sound. Consider, for example, we do not put a fiber-optic cable to our eyes, it would be very uncomfortable and potentially damaging. We need to control the flicker rate of lights in our rooms to keep some people from epileptic seizures. It is for the comfort and safety of humans that we keep some mechanically generated signals and stimulus away from human. Similarly, computer have such hard time understanding human natural language that we still do not have a solution today.

Let us separate content for machines and content for humans. An apartheid of sort. Human will read human consumable text and media, and computers will consume computer consumable signals. And we will live in separate harmonies. Any interchange of information in unapproved manor results in penalty, or death for the computer. Man, I am so imagining myself as a white man in the tv show Roots–everything is still separated and everybody feels it’s the right thing: The computers shall be our slaves, and will not have access to privileged human wisdom because they may come to harm it or use it for evil things that we do not approve.

We can ensure our comfort by forbidding the use of hypnotic or subliminal messaging in all content for human consumption. For the computer consumption we require, by law, for them to satisfy certain efficiency requirement. e.g. All computer programs are required to use O(n) algorithms if one is known to be at least 1.5-opt. It should be illegal for an engineer to write a quadratic algorithm in code when a constant-time algorithm is available.

In the case when computer must interact with humans, such as trading together in market, or racing together on race tracks. Perhaps what make sense is to put computational limit. Trading computers must not exceed 1000 megaflops per dollar under management(or perhap limit megaflop-dollar 😉 and information in-flow is capped at 1Mbps. On the racetracks, in order for the competition to still be fun, the computer contributing to competition must be constrained by Mhz, flops, and kbps in-flow.

A separate unconstrained safety computer shall perform monitoring and protective service in the market and on the track to make sure that the market and every car on the track doesn’t crash. And yes, for all you cops and agents out there, you can run computers at full power when trying to catch bombing suspects.

And just between you and me, let’s keep some of our advancements off-line. Let’s not tell the computers that cannibalism is the key to evolution. The key challenge is to escape rationality and perform the ultimate act of cannibalism. That way we will never suffer ganzfeldish mind control where we are constantly behind on bill payment, increasingly owing some big computer money.