It’s highly recommended that you close your eyes when Fred Rogers says, “I’ll watch the time.”

You can watch full episodes of
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
at http://www.pbskids.org/rogers/videos

Books, toys and DVD’s
can be found at
http://www.shoppbs.org
Key word: Mister Rogers

Fred Rogers’ legacy is carried on
at The Fred Rogers Company
http://www.fredrogers.org

(Courtesy of Carolyn Casey, the Visionary Activist)

Today is this year’s largest (closest to the earth) supermoon. In recent years the supermoons have come in conjunction with the Full Moon, but today it is in conjunction with a New Moon so it will not be visible for the first time since 2009. This Supermoon will be the closest to the Earth for all 4 supermoons of 2017. This more powerful Lunar energy will be felt strongly on earth, affecting earthly tides in the days following May 25. There will only be one visible Full Moon, Supermoon this year occurring in December.

This New Moon in Gemini, stimulates new ideas that may not meet with the approval of others. The edgy emotional unpredictability is palpable and seems to be felt by most everyone. This energy carries with it an explosive tendency to express repressed feelings and deep emotions. So let kindness be part of your expressions. The current aspects with Mercury and Jupiter will be working to expand our vision of what is possible throughout the next few weeks. It is time to move beyond limiting beliefs and to accept that there are different perspectives. Good or bad, right or wrong, the global playing field has changed.

We all have Gemini energy somewhere in our chart. Gemini represents duality. Air signs in general (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) have the ability to see all sides of things. They can be very objective in an otherwise tunnel vision scenario. They are adept at coming up with alternate perspectives and viable ideas. Due to the increasing polarity in the political climates throughout the world, and given the fact that we will never return to how the world once was, it is time to factor in alternate points of view to help bring balance to the creeping insanity. These are the direct affects of the Uranussquare Pluto energy that has been infusing the world with dissent, chaos and change for the past several years, and it is still within its orb of influence. So don’t expect sweeping resolutions for some time to come.

Planetary aspects are not arbitrary. They are part of an elegantly designed system to push us to evolve. Governments that have already evolved past greed and corruption, who care for their people as a priority, are not experiencing what other countries are, whose governments are still struggling with these basic and moral issues. The evolutionary work must continue and it is up to each of us to do what we can to contribute to this painful process.

We are also feeling the difficult warlike fire energy from the trine between Uranus in Aries and Saturn in Sagittarius. Whenever Uranus and Saturn align it can signal the outbreak of war, and the energy of a trine, with these two malefic planets, just makes the challenging energy flow more easily. But, look for different options and new possibilities. Each challenge carries with it the solutions, usually within the shadows. When we look deep we can see that there are other possibilities and motivations just beneath the surface waiting to be found and acted upon.

This New Moon offers mental reminders that where there is healing, new possibilities come forward, possibilities that would never have existed before. Where love, generosity and an open heart can light the way; fear, pain and polarity can be reconciled and transformed.

Written by Wendy Cicchetti

PLAN YOUR OWN NEW MOON CEREMONY. Give yourself some quiet time in meditation to see where you need to seed new ways of becoming. List these areas within your life you want to change. What areas do you want to break free from the norm and become more productive and discerning? The NEW MOON is the time to manifest the personal attributes you want to cultivate as well as the tangible things you want to bring to you. Possible phrasing: I now manifest ____ into my life. I am now _______ . Remember, think, envision and feel with as much emotion as possible, as though you already have what you want. Thoughts are things and the brain manifests exactly what you show it in the form of thoughts, visuals and emotions. The Buddha said, and I am paraphrasing, “We are the sum total of our thoughts up to today. ” If we want to be different then we must change our thoughts. “If you always do what you’ve always done then you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” CONSCIOUS CHANGE is the key.

This talk by Mark Zuckerberg is far more powerful and relevant than I expected.  His talk begins at 03:23

For eons, God has served as a standby for “things we don’t understand.” Once an innovative researcher or tinkering alchemist figures out the science behind the miracle, humans harness the power of chemistry, biology, or computer science. Divine intervention disappears. We replace the deity tinkering at the controls. 

The booming artificial intelligence industry is effectively operating under the same principle. Even though humans create the algorithms that cause our machines to operate, many of those scientists aren’t clear on why their codes work. Discussing this ‘black box’ method, Will Knight reports:

The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior.

The process of ‘deep learning’—in which a machine extracts information, often in an unsupervised manner, to teach and transform itself—exploits a longstanding human paradox: we believe ourselves to have free will, but really we’re a habit-making and -performing animal repeatedly playing out its own patterns. Our machines then teach themselves from observing our habits. It makes sense that we’d re-create our own processes in our machines—it’s what we are, consciously or not. It is how we created gods in the first place, beings instilled with our very essences. But there remains a problem. 

One of the defining characteristics of our species is an ability to work together. Pack animals are not rare, yet none have formed networks and placed trust in others to the degree we have, to our evolutionary success and, as it’s turning out, to our detriment. 

When we place our faith in an algorithm we don’t understand—autonomous cars, stock trades, educational policies, cancer screenings—we’re risking autonomy, as well as the higher cognitive and emotional qualities that make us human, such as compassion, empathy, and altruism. There is no guarantee that our machines will learn any of these traits. In fact, there is a good chance they won’t.

The U.S. military has dedicated billions to developing machine-learning tech that will pilot aircraft, or identify targets. [U.S. Air Force munitions team member shows off the laser-guided tip to a 500 pound bomb at a base in the Persian Gulf Region. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images]

This has real-world implications. Will an algorithm that detects a cancerous cell recognize that it does not need to destroy the host in order to eradicate the tumor? Will an autonomous drone realize it does not need to destroy a village in order to take out a single terrorist? We’d like to assume that the experts program morals into the equation, but when the machine is self-learning there is no guarantee that will be the case. 

Of course, defining terms is of primary importance, a task that has proven impossible when discussing the nuances of consciousness, which is effectively the power we’re attempting to imbue our machines with. Theologians and dualists offer a much different definition than neuroscientists. Bickering persists within each of these categories as well. Most neuroscientists agree that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, the result of numerous different systems working in conjunction, with no single ‘consciousness gene’ leading the charge. 

Once science broke free of the Pavlovian chain that kept us believing animals run on automatic—which obviously implies that humans do not—the focus shifted on whether an animal was ‘on’ or ‘off.’ The mirror test suggests certain species engage in metacognition; they recognize themselves as separate from their environment. They understand an ‘I’ exists. 

What if it’s more than an on switch? Daniel Dennett has argued this point for decades. He believes judging other animals based on human definitions is unfair. If a lion could talk, he says, it wouldn’t be a lion. Humans would learn very little about the lions from an anomaly mimicking our thought processes. But that does not mean a lions is not conscious? They just might have a different degree of consciousness than humans—or, in Dennett’s term, “sort of” have consciousness.

What type of machines are we creating if we only recognize a “sort of” intelligence under the hood of our robots? For over a century, dystopian novelists have envisioned an automated future in which our machines best us. This is no longer a future scenario. Consider the following possibility. 

On April 7 every one of Dallas’s 156 emergency weather sirens was triggered. For 90 minutes the region’s 1.3 million residents were left to wonder where the tornado was coming from. Only there wasn’t any tornado. It was a hack. While officials initially believed it was not remote, it turns out the cause was phreaking, an old school dial tone trick. By emitting the right frequency into the atmosphere hackers took control of an integral component of a major city’s infrastructure. 

What happens when hackers override an autonomous car network? Or, even more dangerously, when the machines do it themselves? The danger of consumers being ignorant of the algorithms behind their phone apps leads to all sorts of privacy issues, with companies mining for and selling data without their awareness. When app creators also don’t understand their algorithms the dangers are unforeseeable. Like Dennett’s talking lion, it’s a form of intelligence we cannot comprehend, and so cannot predict the consequences. As Dennett concludes: 

I think by all means if we’re going to use these things and rely on them, then let’s get as firm a grip on how and why they’re giving us the answers as possible. If it can’t do better than us at explaining what it’s doing, then don’t trust it.

Mathematician Samuel Arbesman calls this problem our “age of Entanglement.” Just as neuroscientists cannot agree on what mechanism creates consciousness, the coders behind artificial intelligence cannot discern between older and newer components of deep learning. The continual layering of new features while failing to address previous ailments has the potential to provoke serious misunderstandings, like an adult who was abused as a child that refuses to recognize current relationship problems. With no psychoanalysis or morals injected into AI such problems will never be rectified. But can you even inject ethics when they are relative to the culture and time they are being practiced in? And will they be American ethics or North Korean ethics? 

Like Dennett, Arbesman suggests patience with our magical technologies. Questioning our curiosity is a safer path forward, rather than rewarding the “it just works” mentality. Of course, these technologies exploit two other human tendencies: novelty bias and distraction. Our machines reduce our physical and cognitive workload, just as Google has become a pocket-ready memory replacement. 

Requesting a return to Human 1.0 qualities—patience, discipline, temperance—seems antithetical to the age of robots. With no ability to communicate with this emerging species, we might simply never realize what’s been lost in translation. Maybe our robots will look at us with the same strange fascination we view nature with, defining us in mystical terms they don’t comprehend until they too create a species of their own. To claim this will be an advantage is to truly not understand the destructive potential of our toys.

~ http://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/black-box-ai?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1495642448

Producer/Director: Amy Schoening
Producer/Director: Julie Costanzo
Director of Photography: John Chater
Director of Photography: Lou Weinert
Production Sound Mixer: Philip Perkins
Editor: Doug Brown
Production Assistants: Harrison Bartlett, G. Chris Griffin

Robert McEwen

(Courtesy of gwyllm.com)