Each day it is a little harder to recognize our world.

Each day it is a little harder to recognize our world.

Here are a few of scary items.

First… just watch…

Right?

Then there is this. I am reminded of the work of many modern painters who clearly hated their subjects. What’n tarnation is goin’ on in this?

And…

And then there is this, just for fun.

Abundant observations are welcome.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in TEOTWAWKI, The Coming Storm, The future and our choices, What are they REALLY saying?. Bookmark the permalink.

22 Comments

  1. TheCavalierHatherly says:

    Whilst the progress of automata don’t, for some reason, instill me with any amount of terror, I will say that bad art and Frankish anti-civilization have existed since at least the French Revolution.

  2. Rob83 says:

    The Charles painting is more sinister if you see it side by side with a mirror image of itself. There is someone else there, and it does not seem by accident.

  3. Gregg the Obscure says:

    big cat plays much like my dog does. oh to have that exuberance!

    Golden Stripes? that’s not creative. Residue of Rain would be creative. However I was impressed with recognizing the neighborhood and remembering where the eyeglasses were.

  4. JustaSinner says:

    St Terese Church is upsetting. The dark ones minions feel safe enough to come out in the open.

  5. Kathleen10 says:

    They could hang that picture of Charles for the next presidential address, he likes hellscapes. In case others can’t see it, as we face it, look at the right side of the image. On his left sleeve, see an “ear”, with a monkey face or demon face or whatever face attached. It’s not all of a face, but enough. We are in bizarro times, it’s gotten crazy. Nobody would have hung this thing 20 years ago, or even 10. Certainly not as an official portrait of a royal. It’s horrible. It’s not even flattering. It appears publicly manifesting your black soul is now a thing, they don’t even hide themselves anymore. If people can spin in their coffins the poor Queen is.
    AI is just another nightmare, who can keep track, there are so many. Denial is starting to look very good. Hopefully the good God doesn’t take his eyes off us.

  6. VForr says:

    The title of this post accurately summarizes my day today. Each day seems weirder than the previous which is terribly confusing and sometimes amusing.

    I agree with Rob83. It is disturbing overall. I cannot help but think that Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign has been followed by her son’s efforts to extinguish the monarchy. Reducing the number of working royals and the charities supported, fighting against climate change and supporting other fads, ugly portraits that won’t stand the test of time…

  7. Gladiator says:

    Maybe they could call the king’s portrait “Save us from the fires of hell”

    I find it creepy, but not nearly as creepy as the Google AI. Soon there will be no privacy. Maybe an MP wouldn’t be a bad thing after all.

  8. grateful says:

    I think the portrait of his face is very powerful.
    Is the fading a premonition of the monarchy.
    Is there a hint of the butterfly being a moth.

    I think the worst part of AI is that it has a human voice.

  9. Vincent says:

    I think the important thing to realise about “AI” is that it really is smoke and mirrors.

    It seems “clever” because it’s using a huge amount of data to do tasks that computers are good at (fundamentally pattern recognition). Taking “working out its location from an image” – it may well be that the “AI” is streaming an image to the internet and then a server centre is doing the pattern recognition for it, but the phone already knows (thanks to GPS, gyroscopes and cell towers) exactly where it is (and could in an instant show you on a map… Now try it in some tiny village that doesn’t have phone signal and a google street view car has never been into and see how it gets on!

  10. JonPatrick says:

    The concept of “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) has been around almost as long as computers were, and is basically the application of advanced computer technology in a way that appears to resemble human thought. Computers that were programmed to play chess for example started in the 1950s and by the 1960s could already challenge human players. They basically achieve this by using their speed to evaluate the exponential series of possible moves, using various algorithms to prune the huge tree of possible moves to something more manageable. The intelligence in AI is really human intelligence that has been transferred to a machine. At the heart of it is still a bunch of processors executing code that some programmers wrote. It is puzzling to me why this is treated as something new when it has been around for as long as computers have. Yes the new applications of it are scary since we are allowing computers more and more of a role in our lives. Reminds me of HAL9000 in the movie “2001 a Space Odyssey” where given instructions that nothing should stop the accomplishment of the mission, decided logically that killing off the crew was the only way to achieve it.

  11. Rich Leonardi says:

    Poitiers France; firefighters intervened at the Sainte-Thérèse church Tues 14 May due to an arson attack.

    The statue of The Virgin Mary was décapitated, benches were piled up & set on fire in front of the choir stalls.

    Militant Methodists?

  12. Reditus says:

    Regarding Google’s AI agent: I am a systems engineer (software/hardware/modeling). My question is: can I get it to open the pod bay door when I need it?

  13. Anneliese says:

    Father, in this screwy world, how are you able to hold your tongue and act in charity to those who treat you like a pile of dog poo because your opinion is different? I worry about the reckoning we’re going to have because we’ve disobeyed God so much.

    Also, stop betting.

  14. Charivari Rob says:

    Regarding the portrait…
    I find myself thinking of Cruella deVil. Weren’t her rooms furnished all in red & black, with heat turned high and excessive amounts of pepper in all of the food?
    That – and of interior design & the effect of different colors on mood.

  15. pac76 says:

    You know how sometimes you can’t believe how wrong “conventional wisdom” is? Now think about a society where people rely on AI to tell them “the truth” and answer questions for them. Now consider that people may someday have this tech implanted in them.

    It could be like wikipedia, where “truth” is defined by the content creator, sometimes with a bias and/or ax to grind. But if people believe it by default, the world is in trouble. Also, deepfakes.

    The portrait reminded me of some old album cover that I saw from the late 60s/early 70s. Can’t think of what it was, but same color.

  16. Sandy says:

    I saw that “mirror image” elsewhere a day or so ago. The creature seen in the mirror image has a name I will not repeat. It is not surprising considering what I have read over the years about the King’s beliefs. He and Bill Gates, and others, would make a good match, and that is not a complement!

  17. moon1234 says:

    The AI doesn’t really bother me. What is public NOW has probabaly existed for some time. Item recognition, scene identification, etc. have all existed for more than 15-20 years. They are used all the time in security/cctv systems.

    I think long term we need laws that govern HOW this technology is used. Telephones were wire tapped for a long time before laws came into effect that detailed how and when that can be done.

    Like any new technology laws need to be updated that outline how/when/where this technology can be used. I would love more use of this in medicine. Speeding up or catching early many diseases that if not caught early can be fatal would be a wonderful advancement.

    Ultimately we need to still train our children how to think for themselves. A well formed mind can USE technology to its benefit. The other risk becomes being USED BY those who control the technology.

    Sadly too many people no longer know HOW to think critically or logically. They rely on and believe what they see and hear on the internet (which is really just someone else’s technology/information).

  18. jhogan says:

    Watching the AI demo made me think about Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then thinking about it some more, I reminded of an episode of the British series, The Prisoner, where “speed learning” is introduced where one could answer what happened in history, but not why it happened. In conversation with a friend, he observed that the Internet had a lot of data, but not necessarily information which is understanding the data. I see the same with the AI demo—lots of data, but not necessarily any information.
    That job still belongs to us humans.

  19. Josephus Muris Saliensis says:

    It is so often a hideous world. Partly because we hear and see more now – maybe it is not really more hideous.

    But today these two stories popped up site by side in the newsfeed. England is now also becoming a hideous place to live. Pray for us.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjq5qxlgy39o
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-69016539

    Humanism is profoundly dehumanising.

  20. DCLex says:

    When AI goes full Skynet on us, its leader will be the evil King Dorian Gray.

  21. Sportsfan says:

    Open the pod bay doors Hal.

  22. Not says:

    The English Monarch is the head of Free Masonry. Free Masonry is all about the destruction of the Catholic Church. Looks like they are getting bolder.

Comments are closed.