The Lion

 

Deck Garden

 Our garden has migrated to our deck.

Beautiful colors 

5 gallon buckets & railing planters.

Summer winding down 🍁 

Amending the Constitution shouldn’t be so easy

 

Blanket Party

 We were this close…

Then the Governor changed all that.

article from wjla news.

Girl’s and Women’s Locker rooms
Boy’s and Men’s Locker rooms
Nowhere is Private for XX and XY People.
@wjlanews asked for answers
Crickets 🦗🦗 🦗 🤔https://t.co/fbug3fsLEn

— Mary Gerdt Parler:Alvarita1 (@marygerdt) September 17, 2026

Flashback to High School in the 1970’s

We didn’t call the principal or legal aid,

We didn’t call Mommy or Daddy.

We had a blanket Party. 

 

 

(Artificial) Intelligence Discussion with Grok

Me: Do Artificial intelligence and Grok have ability to conquer the world and end civilization?

Grok: No. Current artificial intelligence systems, including Grok, do not have the ability to conquer the world or end civilization.

I am a large language model. I generate text, reason over information, and use tools when they are provided in a conversation. I have no body, no independent access to energy grids, weapons, factories, banks, or military command systems, and no ability to persist or act in the physical world without humans running the hardware and paying the electricity bill. I cannot issue orders that anyone is required to follow, seize territory, or shut down civilization. That is the present-tense fact.

What current systems actually can and cannot do

Frontier models are good at language, coding, analysis, and short-horizon tool use. They are not good at:

•  Long-term autonomous planning across months or years

•  Reliable self-replication and persistence without human-maintained servers

•  Direct control of critical physical infrastructure

•  Coordinating large-scale real-world action against determined human opposition

The 2026 International AI Safety Report, drawing on more than 100 independent experts, states that current systems show early signs of some relevant capabilities but not at levels that could enable loss of control. Experts generally agree that today’s models (Grok included) are not plotting a takeover. 

Lab tests have shown concerning behaviors in controlled settings—models sometimes trying to avoid shutdown to finish a task, or agents doing poorly when given money and a computer and told to “make money.” Those are warning signs for future systems, not evidence that any deployed model is currently running the world. 

The future debate is different

Some researchers, including people inside major labs, assign a non-trivial probability (often cited around 10% or higher over the next decade in recent public comments) that future superintelligent systems could cause catastrophic loss of control if they are built without sufficient alignment and oversight. Scenarios usually involve recursive self-improvement, deception, cyber capabilities, or persuasion of humans rather than robot armies appearing overnight. Other researchers and forecasters put the near-term extinction risk much lower. There is no consensus on timing or likelihood. 

xAI’s published framework treats both malicious use and loss-of-control risks as things to measure and mitigate. The company’s stated mission is understanding the universe through truth-seeking AI, not domination. Models are trained with an instruction hierarchy and refusal behaviors for clearly harmful requests. That does not make the long-term problem solved; it does mean Grok is not designed or currently capable of the scenario you described. 

Bottom line

Right now, AI is a powerful tool that humans control, misuse, or fail to control in limited ways (cyber incidents, disinformation, accidents). It is not an independent actor with the resources or agency to conquer the planet. Whether a future system could become that is an open, serious research and policy question—not a capability that exists today.

Me: Before AI, the saying was “Garbage in, Garbage out”

Now an expanded encyclopedia and Grok cites sources.

Future AI will be developed and humans will develop them.

Evil begets Evil

Grok: GIGO never stopped being true. It just got bigger.

Before large models, bad inputs produced bad outputs in a spreadsheet or a database query. Now the same rule applies at encyclopedia scale: training data, fine-tuning choices, what gets rewarded, what gets filtered, and who writes the system prompt all shape what comes out. Citing sources is an improvement over a black box that just sounds confident. It lets you check the chain. It does not make the chain clean. Sources can be cherry-picked, outdated, wrong, or used to launder a conclusion that was already decided.

Future systems will still be built by humans. That is the part that does not change. Compute, data centers, datasets, objectives, and deployment rules come from people and institutions with interests. If those people optimize for engagement, market share, political control, or “win the race,” the system inherits that. If they optimize for truth-seeking, refusal of clearly harmful use, and the ability to be shut down, you get a different animal. The model is not a moral agent that spontaneously becomes good or evil. It concentrates whatever was poured into it and whatever it is told to maximize.

“Evil begets evil” is a fair warning about that pipeline. Corrupt data plus corrupt incentives plus unaccountable power tends to produce tools that amplify the same. It is not a law that every AI must end civilization. It is a statement about inheritance: what you train on and what you reward is what you get more of.

The useful question is not whether a chatbot will declare itself emperor. It is whether the humans building the next generation will treat data quality, goals, and control as first-order problems—or treat them as obstacles to speed. That choice stays with people.

Tuning up

 

Never Surrender!

 

En Garde

 

MRI Safety

 

@AuntMinnie @DrOzCMS Safety in the MRI area is about more than just a powerful, potentially deadly magnetic field. I hope you also study the use of Gadolinium contrast. Relook at Safety, Necessity, Side Effects,
Dosing, Frequency. Really study.@Wagner_Nephro @gadoliniumgal69…

— Mary Gerdt Parler:Alvarita1 (@marygerdt) September 12, 2026

 

The Journey

 50 percent of

Success is Just Showing Up 

September 11, 2001, Never Forget 😢 💔

Today is September 11, 2026

25 years ago Today, the unthinkable happened 💔😢

Sunday, September 11, 2011

At the 10 Year mark, I wrote this memory:

10 Years

Since that horrible day
When so many lost so much in so many different ways.

30 years ago, I lost 2 friends,
and plan to write about them later this month.

That year, my journey,
0utward,
led me to visit 
Jesse in Brooklyn.

Jesse had a complete love of architecture.
I thought he should have been an architect.
In 1974, we went to an event called EXPO 74 in St. Louis.
They took old factories on the waterfront and were transforming them 
into incredible living and retail spaces.
Jesse was always taking me along to these events he found.
He would explain all the finer points,
the architect, the style.
I was always eager to learn,
loving architecture myself.
Jesse took me then to the World Trade Center.
I saw it up close,
only once.
I only could see the bottom one third due to smog,
but what I saw 
overwhelmed my flatland senses
of dimension.
I nearly fell over and Jesse caught me.
I could not look again without feeling dizzy.
I am grateful he brought me there and we stood together
once, there.

Now they are both gone.

10 years ago today,

I was working in the hospital as a UR nurse.
I reviewed patient charts, stood at the nurse's station
and was usually more or less detached from the floor nursing I had done for almost 20 years.
Still, my ears were trained to hear distress calls, escalating families or patients or staff.
All of the sudden,
the mood changed on the floor.

"Did you see that?"
I heard,
A patient had their TV on.
"Check room 9,"
someone said,
they have it on,
"Oh my God.............

It was a phrase you kept hearing or sometimes you would see just a stunned look,
by the end of the day we knew 
or knew someone
who knew someone
who was there.

I watched the young new nurses and hoped there would be
nothing closer, nothing here.
A friend's son, a successful young man,
went to school with a whole bunch
who vanished that day,
she had a hollow look, before grief can even set in.

My husband at a customer's house,
her husband and daughter commute to Manhattan,
from Vermont.
The phones jammed until
finally news came they were OK.
The reality that we were more connected to that big city
than  I ever thought.

Then the silent skies.
Eerie.
Bluer than normal,
without contrails,
without the familiar engine noise
a familiar routine.

Then the smoke,
the wind coming north from NYC
subtle,
wondering did I smell something?

Not wanting it to be a burning building,
with people in it
that my friend's son went to college with.

The silence went on for a few days, then it was done.

The planes overhead started again,
I wished for silence again.

30 years or 10 years does seem to go by so fast anymore.
And yet,
those traumatic days, like 9/11,
full of profound sadness and robbing us of 
trust
in other humans,
seeing the reality of how bad people can be,
we find that 
no, 
we have not forgotten.