Hotel California ...

 

This pix remind me of the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey as the mice are seemingly content but not.
A tale for the ages awaits as yours truly discovered in this gem on Medium. 

Odysseus removing his men from the company of the lotus-eaters
Template:Theodoor van Thulden - 17th-century French engraving 

In 1968, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health created a perfect world — unlimited food, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what would happen. What happened was extinction.

Eight white mice (four males, four females ) are placed inside a metal enclosure roughly nine feet square, with walls four and a half feet high. Inside are 256 nesting boxes, each capable of housing fifteen mice. Mesh tunnels — sixteen on each wall — run up the sides like stairwells in a tower block. There is food. There is water. There is nesting material. The temperature is controlled. The mice have been screened for disease. There are no predators. There is nothing in this world that can kill them.

The scientist who built it calls it mouse heaven.

Now jump forward. The population has peaked and collapsed. The last survivors sit in their nesting boxes, grooming themselves in silence. Their fur is immaculate. They have never fought. They have never mated. They have never raised young. They have never done anything except eat, sleep, and clean their own coats, over and over, in a world that was designed to give them everything.

They are the remnants of a population that once numbered 2,200. They will not reproduce. None of them will. The paradise is silent now. Most of the nesting boxes are empty. The tunnels are still. The food is untouched.

Every mouse in heaven is going to die.

John B. Calhoun was a biologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. He had spent two decades studying what happens to rodent societies when they run out of space. He had built twenty-four experimental enclosures before this one. All had to be ended early due to laboratory constraints.

Universe 25 was the first he ran to completion.

The only constraint was space, and even that was generous. The pen could theoretically support around 3,840 mice. The population never exceeded 2,200.

Instinct rules ...

Dominant males staked out the best territories and defended them with increasing aggression. Subordinate males — the ones who lost the fights — were pushed into the overcrowded central areas of the pen. With nowhere to go and no social role to fill, they withdrew. Some became randomly violent, attacking other mice without provocation. Others stopped interacting entirely.

Females in the overcrowded zones became aggressive. Some abandoned their pups. Others attacked them. Infant mortality soared. Pups that survived were raised in chaos, never learning the social behaviours that normal mouse development requires. They never learned how to court. They never learned how to mate.
They never learned how to parent.

By day 560, the population was in free fall. And a new group had emerged, the most disturbing subjects Calhoun had ever observed.

Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.”

They were mice that had withdrawn from society completely. They did not fight. They did not mate. They did not socialise. They retreated to secluded nesting boxes, often with a single dominant mouse standing guard at the entrance, and they did nothing except eat, sleep, and groom themselves.

Their fur was pristine. They had no scars, no bite marks, no signs of conflict. Physically, they were the healthiest mice in the enclosure. Behaviorally, they were hollow. They had no social function whatsoever. They existed, and that was all.

After day 600, no pup survived more than a few days. New births ceased entirely. The remaining population (mostly beautiful ones) lingered for months, grooming and eating in silence, and then died. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment began, the population had fallen from 2,200 to zero.

What is not in dispute is what Calhoun said when he presented his results to the Royal Society of Medicine in London on 22 June 1972. He stood before an audience of physicians and scientists, and he opened
with a sentence that has echoed through every decade since:

“I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man.”

Welcome to the Hotel California

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)

Such a lovely face

They're livin' it up at the Hotel California

What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)

Bring your alibis

Mirrors on the ceiling

The pink champagne on ice

And she said, "We are all just prisoners here

Of our own device"

And in the master's chambers

They gathered for the feast

They stab it with their steely knives

But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

"Relax, " said the night man

"We are programmed to receive

You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave"

 

The art of "viewing" ...

The Naked Sun, the 2nd novel of the 4 part robot series written by Issac Asimov in 1955, is prescient to a fault as said novel portrays a world focused on avoiding physical contact with other people. The Solarians interact with each other largely through technology. They live far from each other, spread out across a sparsely populated planet. People are taught from birth to avoid physical contact, and live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Face-to-face interaction (referred to in the book as "seeing") is seen as a repugnant chore. Communication takes place through technology: holography, 3-D television. Communicating with each other in this fashion is referred to as "viewing", in contrast to "seeing", which is face-to-face. Communication is frequent, but it is "viewing" of a transmitted image. Nudity in front of others is common. Sex is only practiced for reproduction when replacement of a citizen is necessary, and is considered a chore even more repugnant than seeing. A character remarks that to be in the same room with another person is "most unpleasant.... I feel strongly as though something slimy were about to touch me."[3]: 113 
A doctor has to "get hardened" to it.[3]: 136 

Like the mice in Hotel California, there are no threats. The planet has a rigidly controlled population of 20,000, and all work is done by robots, which outnumber humans ten thousand to one.

They, like the mice, became extinct.

Now, consider today, with cell phones replacing, for many, the need for face to face contact or to speak as texting by two thumb acrobatics replace the messiness of speech by incorporating a new version of Newspeak in order to properly navigate a limited interface requiring the compression of thought by compressing the length of words needed to communicate to one another. To whit. Cn U C Me Now?

Think when viable AR Glasses come on line with connect to one's ears. Mobile isolation 101. 

Interesting things to think about are they not?

In your shorts ... Soma applies

Spark is Google’s new agentic answer for everything. | Image: Google

In your shorts applies as Spark will take over your digital existence painlessly. Plan a trip, Spark has you covered. Need to get the best price on a pair of shoes along with the nearest place to get said shoes, Spark's got you covered as Spark is the ultimate aggregator, complete with intense AI, yours for $99/month/Ultra but the price will drop as membership increases.

Like Soma, the drug of choice in Brave New World, Spark's painless unless the power goes off or, in the case of Soma, the drug is no longer available because the ability to do stuff becomes compromised while the suppliers of both entities hoover ever more personal data while being in your shorts 24/7.

BraveNewWorld FirstEdition

I had a very different experience using Spark, Google’s new always-on AI agent. Spark is a hugely ambitious thing: Google intends it to be the interface through which you can use external apps, and over time even operate your computer. (“OpenClaw with better internet access” is a not-wrong way to describe it.) Spark is currently rolling out to Google’s $99 / month AI Ultra plan, but Google allowed me to try it early. I tested some simple action-oriented stuff, like having Spark go through my Gmail inbox and suggest a bunch of things I should unsubscribe from and having it comb my Google Docs for old tasks I still haven’t finished. In both cases, it did a fine job, even creating me a nicely organized document with a bunch of links to quickly unsubscribe from various marketing emails.

Then I gave Spark a simple trip-planning job. “I’m going to be in Hershey PA with my wife, two kids, and dog the weekend of July 18th. Can you make a plan for the whole weekend, including places to stay, eat, things to do, and everything else?” I left out a few salient details, like the concert tickets I have for that Saturday night, but figured I’d start with the six most obvious things to do in Hershey and go from there.

The hook ...

The whole Spark itinerary was filled with details like this. It included my wife’s name, and took into consideration the fact that she doesn’t like to eat onions or scallions. It included the Thomas Rhett and Niall Horan concert on Saturday night, presumably based on the Ticketmaster confirmation in my email, and noted that parking is included in the tickets we bought. When I got to the part where it mentioned getting a babysitter that night, I remembered to note that my parents are coming along for just that purpose, so I added a note to the conversation.

On the other hand, I can’t shake the deeply creepy feeling I get from the whole thing. What Spark did feels sort of magical, and very invasive. It’s weird that Spark is so casually telling me the names and ages of my children, reminding me that it knows where I live, and finding information I know for a fact I’ve never volunteered to Google. Intellectually, I know that Google knows an incredible amount about me — add up my emails, my calendar, my photos, and my search history, and you’ve pretty much got me pegged. But seeing Spark treat all that data not as something to be protected, but as something to be mined, just feels bad.

Soma applies ...

This is the trade we’re all being asked to make right now. There is a direct correlation between how much of yourself you’re willing to share with an AI system and how useful that system can be. Google is in such a strong position precisely because it already has all that information, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest are desperately trying to figure out how to accumulate it. The AI tools we’re being promised are the ones that know us intimately, that can take action on our behalf, that can make decisions without even needing us around. None of that works unless we open ourselves up completely to the machine. So that’s what we’re being asked, even compelled, to do.

Resistance is futile - The Borg, or is it?

Yours truly has been a geek for 50 years on the user side. From DOS and Unix to Mac OS and the net, the litany of apps and how to use them applies but this is different. This is abdication and with it comes the atrophy of skill. I use Gemini every day. Extremely helpful when used with precision and consistency and I know Google knows a lot about me but Spark, in my shorts, 24/7? Nah. More convenient, without question, quantumly dangerous & addictive, you bet. I have Ultra and like it but at a distance. 

BRT did a piece titled Hotel California. The society died as there was no purpose, think about it. I have.

In 1968, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health created a perfect world — unlimited food, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what would happen. What happened was extinction.

Factoid ... Microsoft's doing the same exact thing but at least they're being up front about it.

An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to agentic platform,” the documentation.

Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use. It is not particularly notable that Microsoft is developing new AI tools—the company has reoriented almost everything it does to focus on AI, and every major AI company has tried to figure out how to bring AI agents into their products after OpenClaw went viral earlier this year. OpenClaw allows users to create AI agents that can act on behalf of the person using it; it can send emails, edit calendars, publish blog posts, and more. What is notable is that the explicit goal of the people developing the product is to addict its users. Microsoft officially announced Scout Tuesday as an “always-on personal agent” that runs on OpenClaw and is integrated into Microsoft 365. 

I can't do adult ...

Illustrations: Cat Sims

Question, what's the difference between man and boys? Answer, their toys.
With AI, many guys get totally addicted. So far, this rube's still ok. :)

Meet the Sad Wives of AI

Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry.

If i had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. “JUST LOOK AT THIS!” he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. “SEE?!”

See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out.

“ARE YOU LOOKING?” he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am.

Is this a Sophie’s choice kind of situation? Please. I’d kill the AI baby in an instant.

This also applies to smart phones. :)

Studs

Another giant bites the dust but his humanity and sense of humor lives on. Studs Terkel died at the ripe young age of 96.

"Terkel was the voice of Chicago, the city of big shoulders, when it really was a bustling industrial hub and slaughterhouse to the nation. He moved there when he was 10 from another great city, New York, and called it his home for the rest of his life. During the Great Depression, his parents ran a boarding house and Turkel witnessed first hand those dispossessed by the nation’s greatest economic calamity.

Tradesmen, who often had lost their jobs, washed up at the hotel and would gather to argue about the social issues of the day. “The thing we miss today is argument,” Terkel said in a speech at the University of California-Berkeley in 2003. “We miss debate. We miss the whole idea of people going back and forth. I loved hearing those arguments.''

His take on the rightful role of the press says it all:

"Information, news, ideas--that's the juice that gets a democracy going. When a few corporations control all the juice, they decide how the democracy works. Or how it won't work. I don't worry that much about people doing the right thing if they have the facts about what their government is up to. But if they don't get the facts, the whole thing falls apart,"