When I looked up some basic information on the Showtime TV Series Billions, the first thing I stumbled across was that “it was nominated for ‘Outstanding Drama Series’ in the 29th, 30th, and 31st GLAAD Media Awards for its representation of the LGBTQ community.” It received kudos for the groundbreaking inclusion of a non-binary character and for featuring bondage as a sexual fetish.
If I hadn’t already started watching, I probably wouldn’t have.
Now, I’m not one to turn my nose up at a little light S&M or some soft-core lesbian porn (Eps. 1 and 2 respectively), but taking in the latest and greatest in sexual kink isn’t how I want to spend my scarce entertainment time (much less dollar). What I was in the mood for was a variation on the cops-and-robbers narrative focused on the stratified world of ultra-rich hedge fund managers. Or, at least, a fantasy version of such.
So far, Billions seems to me much more the latter than the former, but with teats.
And “so far” might have to be watchwords for this one. This appears to be another offering aligned with the Amazon model whereby some content is made available free with Prime as an enticement to get a premium subscription for access to the follow-on seasons. My best guess is that Seasons 1-4 are part of Prime and 5-6 are not. As we know, that can change and might well do so before I hit the end of what is available to me.
Mercifully, unlike with the variousinternational series, Billions is also out on DVD. Although the hoo-haa is probably just as nasty as Californication, in a lot of ways Billions‘ bawdiness is a little less blatantly so. Point being, I’m not going to be embarrassed to borrow these DVDs when I need to pick up with whatever season makes it necessary to do so – when that time comes. In the meantime, I should probably dwell less on the T&A and more on the M&A. After all this IS Showtime. What did we expect?
As a financial drama, it is a pretty good one. A Wall Street for the new millennium. In fact, I’d say it makes a far better Wall Street 2 than Money Never Sleeps turned out to be.
I have often thought about (but apparently never written in this blog) how Oliver Stone’s classic intended for Gordon Gekko to be the irredeemable bad guy and yet, inadvertently, created a hero for multiple generations of traders. What about Billions? Is this a cops and robbers story? If so, who are the robbers?
It doesn’t help that I don’t believe that insider trading should be criminal*. But even setting that aside, it seems to me that Bobby Axelrod is a more sympathetic character than Chuck Rhoades. That’s even after the dislike I took to Damien Lewis after Homeland. Is that just me or is this show written to blur the line between good and bad, right and wrong, and to do so in a way to make the “criminal” the better man?
So far, at least, Billions has earned (in my eyes) the high praise it got from my more trusted sources**. Story, style, and (while I am at it) soundtrack are all right on. Even the opening credits – a four second aerial shot of lower Manhattan – is something different. I’ve read hints that the last couple of seasons aren’t quite what the first few are, but I’ll cross that Triborough Bridge when I come to it. No, it isn’t a show that I’d want to watch with my Mom but, then again, I don’t want TV with my Mom anymore ’cause I’m a grownup.
*This probably needs more discussion, but I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole. Maybe some other time.
This past week or so, I’ve brushed up against a number of different articles about professional wargaming. The latest encounter was through yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.
Often attributed to Winston Churchill, it is said that “Generals are always prepared to fight the last war.” Going back several generations, America’s armed forces deployed a military optimized for the North German Plain against insurgencies, often with disappointing results. For the first part of the Cold War, it sometimes seemed that we were preparing to refight World War II, just with more modern weaponry.
Our actual military experiences in that time demonstrated a flaw in this thinking. In recent decades, the U.S. has adopted and perfected a suite of counter-insurgency strategies and tactics (albeit still, sometimes, with disappointing results) and has reorganized and reprioritized accordingly. In the meantime, our adversaries, especially China, have worked to create their own force-projection abilities on par, technologically, with America’s.
Are we at a point where “the last war” is Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan while the next war is again the “great power” conflict of the previous century? Are we focusing our efforts on the suppression of irregular militia forces while China is prepping for War in the Pacific, Part II?
The front page (just below the fold) of The Journal suggests just that with their article The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict (presumably paywalled). It explains how an Air Force Lt. General was assigned to a “classified Pentagon wargame” simulating “a Chinese push to take control of the South China Sea.” In that game “China’s well-stocked missile force had rained down on the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the region, turning American combat aircraft and munitions into smoldering ruins in a matter of days.” The remainder of the article analyzes the ways in which America’s defensive structure falls short of its charge.
The article is billed as part 1 of a series. Reading through its roughly one-and-a-half pages, I get some details about the changes being proposed to align the nation’s wartime capabilities to its mostly likely challenges for the future – particularly focusing on China and Taiwan. Such an article fits into a larger effort by The Journal to advocate for the increasing of defense spending in the current budget cycle. Some of the details are interesting; fewer tanks/more ships, longer range standoff weaponry, and a renewed emphasis on electronic warfare, to name a few.
For myself, I’d be more interested in reading about the wargaming exercise. Unfortunately, I have neither the requisite security clearance nor a need to know so as to be privy to the details. I’m left to speculate on the nature of the session and how it might have achieved its results.
The “surprise result” was how advanced the Chinese offensive capabilities were and what quick work they made of U.S. preparations. Yet, it was our own military who provided that information about the opposition forces and it was we who calculated their effectiveness within the context of the wargaming parameters. I am going to guess this session was an exercise designed to pass on to the right people a determination about force readiness that someone had a priori figured out. It may be less of a “simulation” exercise than a “reveal” of the latest intel on what China has in store for us.
To say any more about this wargaming exercise would be to greatly overstep the limits of my knowledge and understanding. Instead, I’ll just leave this one as a link and, perhaps, come back to this topic later.
Here’s another industry I don’t understand; board gaming. I suppose I could make sense of it if I try, but do I really want to?
Let me instead tell you a tale of confusion. My confusion.
In the days of my youth…
When I was young, if I wanted a game I could find it at the store. OK, maybe not every game… the likes of Star Wars: Escape from Death Star Game or The Dukes of Hazzard Game likely weren’t on shelves much past the Christmas season in which they came out. But your classics; Risk, Stratego, Monopoly, Clue, Battleship, Scrabble – you could always find these in the store of your choice, and probably still can. In that simpler time, this set a level of expectations.
When I first got into more serious games, finding a desired game involved a bit more challenge… but only a bit. As I recall, a fair representation of the Avalon Hill game library was available at the mall in the “hobby” game-and-toy shop. In a pinch, there was always the option to mail order direct from the game company. I’m not going to dig out that old paper catalog again but my recollections says that just about everything was available… from the most recent additions to the Avalon Hill lineup to a copy of Tactics (II?). Unless a company went out of business, why would their games be out of print?
For decades I paid little attention to the physical side of game industry even as it was changing dramatically from what I knew circa 1984. At some point, maybe even around the time I started this blog, I again started picking up board games that really appealed to me. I note that I’ve not gotten back into “boardgaming,” not even to the superficial extent that I was as teen. It was just the a combination of the financial security of dawning middle age combined with a longing for the pleasures of youth. What I found then surprised me.
Surprise! Out of print!
Many of the games that I took a shine to were out of print. This isn’t surprising when I was eyeing a game available in my youth; one that I’d coveted but never purchased. Where it surprised me is how I found that many fairly recent games were also unavailable. It seems it can take only a 2-3 years, in some cases, for a new (and well-received) game to go from retail price to inflated collectors-item price and accompanying scarcity.
I say I don’t understand it but I suppose I can take a guess. I’ve read the stories of amazing old games being picked up for $5-10 at a thrift shop because somebody dumped an inventory for next to nothing. Keeping hobby stores and warehouses stocked with whatever game I wanted in the early 80s necessarily meant that there was excess inventory of those games. Every copy that wasn’t sold back then ended up in the liabilities column of a financial sheet.
That inevitable excess inventory also sets up an expectation that any game will eventually be discounted. For any title that looks good but not drop-everything-and-buy-it-today good, it was probably worth waiting until the shine wore off a tad. That expectation is a drag on sales when a certain percentage of your customers are deliberately NOT buying the game they want.
By contrast, the incentive today is to buy ASAP. The best price is often offered in a Kickstarter package or when pre-ordering. Once the game goes retail, you’re often looking at the best-and-final price. Holding off a year or two means, not a discount but a premium as the original inventory dries up. It helps that the printing industry itself has evolved to mitigate the necessity of high-volume print runs as a primary means to keep down unit costs. So maybe I understand but, no, I don’t want to pick it apart. I’d rather just acknowledge it and complain about it.
I resent being pressured into buying something because its new. Often, in gaming, it can take me a while to warm to a game. Sometimes it will take a decade or so to gain a reputation and earn my trust. I also like playing games which match may current historical (or otherwise) theme. If I’m going to buy a game, it should be based on what I want to play at that moment, not what a publisher happens to be printing that season.
The fact is (and maybe it’s just getting old) but a 2012 design still feels “new” to me. This is why I’m shocked to find an 11-year-old game unavailable and horrified to find a three-year-old game unavailable.
To the game at hand
When I read about howPolis was being used as a teaching tool, I went to Board Game Geek to look at the ratings. What I saw was a cream-of-the-crop 8.3 rating. I also saw some information that pointed to product scarcity. Was the game out of print? It kind of looked that way, despite seeing links to primary retailers selling at retail price. So when I found price on Amazon for less than retail (with free shipping to boot), I just bought. I didn’t think, nor analyze, nor look into the details of what I was buying, I just clicked “send it.”
That I subsequently found myself confused, then, is mostly on me. I could have easily figured out what I was looking at before hand. I’ll detail a few points of my confusion, just in case on of you is following me down my path.
That original article was written in 2016. This is important. The author references a game called Polis: Fight for the Hegemony. Although that article, too, has a link to Amazon for the purchase of the game, that’s not how I found it on Amazon (I figured any link from 2016 would be stale). Instead, I simply searched for the title on the various sites (i.e. Amazon, Board Game Geek, other retailers) which led me to find that superlative user rating and then the discounted Amazon price. I also grabbed a copy of the digital manual (a version that has been corrected for errata over the years) and downloaded the VASSAL module (because when trying out a new game’s components on my own, it is often easier to do it digitally).
Fast forward a couple of days. I had now finished reading the manual finished and had my freshly-arrived game box in hand. Next, I began poking around on Board Game Geek to get some additional information. It was only then that I noticed the “reimplements/reimplemented by” field had been populated for my new game.
Wait a minute! What did I just buy? What did I want to buy?
Competing City States
As I tried to answer that question, I found four games on Board Game Geek with the same name. Let me go through them.
Polis: Fight for the Hegemony. This is a 2012 game and the one described in the article. It is out of print and, when I did find it on Amazon, was going for $100. It does seem to be available in used condition for that $60 range.
Polis. This is a 2020 remake of the same game as above. Same developer, different publisher. It is this version that boasts the 8.3 rating (as compared to 7.5 for the original). Due to the way BGG weights their games, it is well down the “best games” list from the more widely played and reviewed original. It may or may not be “in print” currently. This is what I bought.
Polis. At the time of my purchase, BGG said that the above game was available for around $34 on Amazon. Following the link turned up a 2017 card game (average rating 6.5). As I write now, that game no longer appears to be on Amazon. Fortunately I didn’t find this until after I had bought the right version… although there was a moment of panic when I thought I had substantially overpaid.
Polis. There is also a BGG entry for a set of rules on Warp Spawn Games. I didn’t even look at those rules (average rating 6.0), my eye-saving filter having been deprecated, except to verify that it wasn’t a progenitor for any of the prior three.
If not obvious, polis is the Greek word for city (genitive declension). I would pronounce the word “poll iss” but the Greeks would not. To my American ear, the proper title of this game sounds more like “police” (αστυνομία) than what I would use as a suffix relating to towns, cities, and governments. Perhaps because of this, polis seems an underused name for a game. In a related search, I can come up with over two dozen uses of “hegemon” or “hegemony” (or, Zeus forbid, “hedgemony”) as a game title as contrasted to the mere five using “Polis” as a title (this once the Swedish games, where polis does in fact mean police, are pruned out).
Polis: An Unboxing
When I am reading other people’s blogs, I normally skip over any “review” labeled as an “unboxing.” You would think, then, that I would never write such a post. And yet here I am doing just that. The fact is, after all this reading and looking-up, I have a few more pre-play thoughts to get off of my chest.
As I said the newness of Polis (2020) means that BGG ranks it lower than the original, despite its higher average rating. Polis: Fight for the Hegemony, henceforth also Polis (2012), is ranked very highly as a wargame, despite it being a little on the light side. It ranks at #82, one slot above A Few Acres of Snow. Polis (2020) weighs in at a still-respectable #117, one position below The Great Battles of Alexander: Deluxe Edition. The different is in the number of ratings for each version of the game. Polis (2012) has roughly four times the number of reviews, and that’s enough to move it ahead almost 40 games despite having a lower score.
A quick glance at what makes the new game different comes up with a few obvious upgrades. Gamewise, it has been shortened. To explain how, I’ll offer a quick gameplay overview.
Polis is played in rounds which are subdivided into turns. Within a given round, players alternate taking turns, as many as they want to, until they no longer want to. Any player can pass rather tan take a further turn. At that point, the other player may continue unopposed* until he no longer wishes to continue. Once both players elect to pass some round-level actions take place, the round ends, and the next round commences. Polis (2012) used four rounds to make a game while Polis (2020) uses only three.
The second big change is that the manual has been rewritten. The improvement is substantial. The new version makes it much easier for a new player to see individual rules in context. Furthermore, there were some obvious holes or vagaries in the rules as presented by the original manual. These seem to be resolved in the new one. I’m sure there are plenty more of these minor improvements that I’d see had I actually experienced a game session or three of the old version.
Likewise, it is hard for me to tell how much the components have been “upgraded,” only experiencing one version of them. I do gather that they HAVE been upgraded. This is important, too, within that board-gaming-industry context. Often, it seems, new games and newer versions of older games are accompanied by an “economizing” in production costs. To the extent that Polis (2020) is a reissue, it seems to be a better-quality reissue at that.
Learning curve?
I did read that some long-time players are concerned about how the shortening of the game makes Polis even more difficult for new players. Again, I’ll digress into gameplay to explain.
The game allows each player, on his turn, to choose** from 11 actions (it was twelve in 2012). The actions may be economic, political, or military and each has a cost and benefit. I’m just going to quote directly from the most recent BGG reviews because I couldn’t possibly put it better if I tried.
Prestige represents political influence and power and at the end of the game that plus population equals your score. Makes sense. But you must spend prestige to do pretty much anything with your military, including moving forces around. How do you get prestige? Well, one way is by conquering a polis with your military. If you aren’t careful, you will paint yourself into a chicken and egg situation early on where you are constantly prestige-poor and can’t “do anything”. The other important resource is wheat, which is hard to get and must be sought after. Trade is crucial here, so watch your trade routes and build up a good navy. Oh, but to do that you will need to spend wood, so get a good supply of that, too, and also population… oh, but population, like prestige, ends up being your victory points, so don’t build needlessly. By the way, your land army also costs population, and also metal. You’ll want that, too, with the same caveats.
Everything is so tightly interconnected and interdependent that you want (and need) to do everything, but you can’t. You must choose a specific, focused, strategy. Become strong in some areas and manage your weaknesses very selectively trying not to overlook a fatal flaw. Your opponent will do the same.
Reading between the lines, then, there are going to be good strategies and not-so-good strategies. How does a player know what to forgo in pursuit of victory? It is not going to be apparent simply from a reading of the rules. On the face of it, every resource counts (even wine, not mentioned in the above excerpt). So where can one compromise and where should one concentrate? Even once you get a good sense of the tradeoffs, it right strategy would seem to be very dependent upon what your opponent is doing. In particular, the player who can spot his opponent’s strategy, and knows enough to understand it, has therefore also spotted his opponent’s weakness.
How much does one have to play before victory doesn’t automatically go to the player with the most experience?
Add to that the times that a single misstep can be irredeemable. With only four rounds to execute your strategy, you really can’t afford to squander. Advocates of the old way suggest that with only three rounds, the importance of each move – and the attendant advantages to the veteran player – gets even more critical.
It would seem to me that an owner of either version could play with either the old or new rules. Further, a player could mix and match the two rulesets. There are obviously implications for play balance but a smart pair players, surely, could figure that out.
Time to play?
For myself, I’m going to wait and couple my playing of Polis with a reading of my Thucydides. While Board Game Geek enticed me with a high-quality and well designed game, Dr. Lacey has convinced me that there are historical insights to be gleaned from this game. I’m going to wait and maximize the impact, if you don’t mind.
It will also give me a chance to revisit availability and cost for this game and how it changes over time. Stay tuned.
– Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com. The game is Kolejka and, yes, it is out of print
*There is an additional cost to taking further turns after your opponent has passed but that seems too small a detail to indulge in at this point. The problem is, I also don’t want to be inaccurate.
**Each player gets to choose two of them, including the same one twice as long as it is not the same action on the same city. Again, I’m getting into way more detail than is helpful. Nonetheless, I just don’t want to misrepresent the rules.
I want to riff, for a few measures, on Kleo in a political context.
I finished the show after, for the most part, enjoying it simply as solid entertainment. Kleo Straub is that sociopathic contract killer that seems so popular in cinema, adding a bit of sexy to the usual smooth and deadly competence. Throw in some dark humor and a historic context, even if the latter is pretty fast and loose, and it should be obvious why I found it so appealing.
Yet I couldn’t help wondering, as I have before, if it even possible to get your entertainment ventures funded these days if you’re not going to be checking off the right boxes. Does Kleo have a message and, if so, what is it?
Let’s ignore entirely the male lead’s black wife. Fact is, we weren’t all that racist 25 years ago and an interracial marriage in late-80’s Berlin may well have passed by everyone without comment. I won’t comment now.
What I will comment on is the fact that the film is told from the perspective of loyal, East German communists. As such, the justice of their cause and inherent wrongness of the fall-of-the-wall, are presented at face value. It’s a reasonable story-telling device and one that works well here… except…
I do detect an undercurrent of right versus wrong. And if I’m right, then I am the one who is in the wrong.
As an American and an heir of the cold war, the fall of the Wall was a very clear morality tale. It was the triumph of good over evil. It helped that it happened “across the ocean” and so the actors, especially the villains, felt very different from myself. Furthermore, the “West,” in this case the government and people of West Germany, were “our friends” and on “our side.” The Russians and the East Germans were not. They were an enemy.
The supporting imagery was everywhere. I had watched the summer Olympics, seeing the broad-shoulder and muscular East German women hoover up all the gold medals. The tyranny of East German Stasi was well known to be a nasty love child from a mating between the KGB and the SS. The fall of the Wall was one of the greatest free World victories of my lifetime, at least up to that point.
I also have some experience with other formerly Soviet-occupied countries. There too, the throwing off of the Soviet yoke was a tremendous national victory. From their standpoint, the native officials who ran the local Soviet Socialist Republic were little better than traitors. The freedom of self-determination more than made up for any hiccups in the conduct of their new governments.
But in Germany – my experience is very limited, but I think Germany has been different. Uniquely in Europe, their post-USSR world involved a reunification of two national identities that had been diverging for some four-and-a-half decades. When I think about the handful of friends I’ve had from Germany (and I’m going back to the early 90s, here), several of them had a soft spot for socialism. I hate to generalize from the politics of a few 20-somethings, but there is no doubt that the Germany of the late-80s, early-90s was far more liberal (in the American sense of that term) than the U.S.
For a glimpse of how Germany is today, how about we look at their leadership? Chancellor Olaf Scholz was, in his youth (and at the time when Kleo is to take place), an active socialist. This was demonstrated through membership in the Jusos – Working Group of Young Socialists in the SDP and by his active support for the Marxist wing of that organization. He was anti-capitalist, anti-NATO, and arguably anti-West Germany. Around the time in question, he rose to the vice-presidency of the International Union of Socialist Youth. Lest we consider him an outlier, recall that he just replaced Angela Merkel in that office. She was born in the West but had migrated to East Germany as a baby. Once there, she was a member of the the Free German Youth (FDJ) and managed to advance in academia and politics under the Soviet-controlled system (which requires at least a fairly convincing adherence to socialist principles).
My point? That in Germany today, it would certainly seem that identification of who were the “good guys” and who were “bad guys” at the end of the Cold War might be a determination involving many nuances.
In Kleo, the enemies against whom Kleo Staub fights are the corrupt politicians, the traitors, and the turncoats. So far, that taps a common sentiment among all of us. Beyond that, the German Democratic Republic isn’t necessarily bad and the Federal Republic of Germany isn’t necessarily good… in the show, they are mostly just richer. At the end of it all (and hopefully I’m not spoiling anything) we finally do find out who is the true “bad guy” behind everything. It is who else but… Ronald Reagan and his America.
I’m am probably trying to read to much into the show. I guess the key to all of this is it is impossible to separate satire from social commentary. It’s often possible to do both at once. In the end does it really matter what the writers believe? They’ve created a world framed by the characters’ beliefs and that worldview is genuine from the point of those characters. Is this the worldview of the writers as well? Much of it is quite obviously overdone. That would hint that maybe the same applies to the cases where it is not so obvious. Or, that is, not so obvious to me.
If you’re thinking of watching Kleo, just ignore everything I wrote above and do it. It is a fine show. It’s probably even better if you speak German. Better still if, like Kleo herself, you speak German, Spanish, English, and Russian.
– Image from Wikipedia. Flag graphic from the German Flaggenverordnung, digitized by Jwnabd. See link for details.
This past weekend I saw something that I’ve not seen before. In my copy of The Wall Street Journal, there was an editorial about the implications of ChatGPT. Nothing new so far… it seems everybody is writing about ChatGPT these days, myself included. What was strange was that the editorial filled up an entire page and then continued for more than half of a second. More editorial column-inches went to ChatGPT than to everything else in the world last Saturday!
Normally, a print-edition Journal editorial will run half-a-page… and that is for the longer ones. Others are a quarter page or less. The unattributed, board editorials usually are stacked into a column of three, leaving more than half the page for letters to the editor. To commit a full page-and-a-half to an editorial must mean somebody is taking something very seriously.
And that something is the potential for very rapid advancement in AI technology in the near future.
The article is co-authored by three notables. First named is Henry Kissinger, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. He is followed by Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO brought in by the founders when the company outgrew its startup britches. This almost leaves us unimpressed by the third author, Daniel Huttenlocher, a name I’d never heard before. Nonetheless, as the dean of the Schwarzman College of Computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he must be one of the better-informed experts on the future of Artificial Intelligence.
The tone of the article is pretty gloomy. The gist is that neural network techniques behind the likes of ChatGPT are rapidly producing results that exceed our ability to handle them, or even to comprehend them. While the authors probably would agree to the statement that there is less to ChatGPT’s intelligence than meets the eye, they see today’s results as the first, tentative iteration of what will very soon spark transformative change. They liken it to the development of the printing press and Western Civilization’s subsequent Enlightenment. Specifically, they cite the ability to easily print and distribute knowledge as the key enabler of the scientific method, which allowed a culture-rending technological explosion.
Perhaps because it’s what I already wrote, I see them as focusing on the ability of this technology to do research and reporting. What ChatGPT essentially does is scour* the archives of human knowledge and produce a short summary, in plain language, on what it finds. It can tailor that response to match expectations of human interaction – generating questions, writing a term paper, creating a press release, etc. Taking it personally, I mused how easily it could duplicate and improve upon my writing of blog posts.
Of course, it’s not all about me. Teaching is another profession that looks to be easily duplicated, or at least augmented, by this technology. Medicine has been a traditional target of AI technologies, going back decades. Long have I read musings about the irony that the jobs of doctors or lawyers were easily displaced by even rudimentary expert systems whereas the plumber or the electrician never could be.
Why I thought to write about this again is that I sensed a particular and peculiar focus in this editorial.
Much of the article is written as questions. “Are we,” “can we,” do we” all appear with great frequency. In very few of those cases, as I read it, is the “we” meant to be the trio of authors. Rather “we” encompasses the authors, the readers, and indeed the whole of society. This is a very big-picture, grand-idea editorial. And yet, the “we” who are called upon to take action are almost exclusively government policy makers and, to a lesser extent**, academics. It is our government leaders to whom we shall look to make sure we can coexist with the advance of technology.
As an expression of “the big picture,” it is a very odd assertion. Perhaps instead, like my own post, it is personal – it is about the three authors, themselves. Kissinger – advisor to Presidents and shaper of world events – sees this as a challenge to the men who risen to his former position. The Dean of one of the top AI research institutions, naturally, elevates the role of premier research institutions. The article laments that “[n]o political or philosophical leadership has formed to explain and guide this novel relationship between man and machine, leaving society relatively unmoored.” The real problem, in other words, is insufficiently zealous leadership. “We”, apparently, are the philosopher-kings and “society” is the system of which “we” pull the strings.
It also explains the explicit emphasis, and resultant trepidation, that a ChatGPT-like technology could replace those very same people. The authors worry that AI “may begin to compete with human functions in state administration, law and business tactics.” Oh, the horror.
By contrast, the examples of this disruption are rather pedestrian. Supercharged spam bots which send messages indistinguishable from personal correspondence generated by trusted friends. Enhanced “deep fakes” which are indistinguishable from reality. Academic papers without citations, making it impossible to fact check or reproduce research. There is an exception, an odd triplet of paragraphs suggesting that machine learning will alter reality itself though the application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. Somehow extremely high speed consolidation of knowledge will “observe” states that were previously unknowable, causing a collapse of quantum decoherence and a detachment from the reality that otherwise might have been.
I think Dr. Kissinger et al got a little carried away.
The solution, as I see such being needed, will have to come from each of us individually. That’s an idea that might scare the “leaders” of our world because individual action and responsibility are even less predictable and controllable than a massive and inscrutable neural network. Over the next decade, we will face some real problems. The markers that we’ve relied on to separate reality from fiction will become blurry. How do we trust that the video of some personage speaking was really something he said? How do spot the difference in an interaction between a real person and an artificial “chat” engine. How long until we can buy Voight-Kampff Tests at Walmart to help us get through our day?
While there is surely a regulatory component to all of this, it should be apparent that the nature of this technology is that it will always be moving faster than the government that attempts to rein it in. Yes, people will be required to relearn some habits. It will also require overriding our hardwired tribal, hunter-gatherer programing that often flummoxes our ability to deal with modernity. If I could convince my brain that, no, Rachel Green wasn’t really one of my Friends, I think I can handle not being taken in by a rogue ChatGPT bot.
So can you, Dr. Kissinger. So can you.
*The article reminds that the networks are trained in advance. Any query made to ChatGPT access the information already encoded in the model. One implication of this is that updating a model’s knowledge with “the latest” new information is, relatively speaking, an expensive endeavor.
**I am probably overgeneralizing, but I’ll explain what I think I mean. The biggest role of the academic, they suggest, is as philosopher. We will rely upon the credentialed brainiacs in their white towers to try to understand, explain, and justify coexisting with the otherworldly intelligence that we’ve created. As to the technology itself, they predict it will likely be self-replicating. That at some point the problem of advancing the state of AI will be to big for mere humans and we will rely upon AI technology itself to do the work. Within the context of he above, then, the purpose of academia is to advise government.
Reading that old article I shared inspired me to action. First of all, I impulse-ordered the board game Polis. That story I will leave that story for another time. Second, I started digging through my ancients game libraries to see what I had for the Peloponnesian War. The answer is “not much” but the exercise of looking prompted a discovery.
I own the Great Battles Collectors Edition – twice over in fact. I bought the extra-thick, jewel case package when it was in the store and then the GOG version more recently. I also, as I told you about when I was trying to get a crash-free version of Caesar running, have found Ian’s Great Battles Homepage to be a prime source for patches and information. Although the site hasn’t been updated in about seventeen years, it is still up and running.
Among the patches, hints-and-tips, and other fun stuff provided there, there are several sections dedicated to scenario creation. There is a link to an editor how-to guide (which apparently did not survived the intervening decades) as well as a curated library of user-created scenarios. I have, of course, seen these over the years. However, the instructions for actually playing a download scenario always put me off.
You see, it is not just a matter of plopping scenario files into the right directory to play. Apparently non-stock scenarios have to be played by way of the scenario editor, itself not part of the original game. The instructions in getting all this to work involve contacting Ian by email for permission* to download one of the several files necessary to get the “Custom Scenario Player” to work.
As I say, I am sure I went through all this stuff before. But with the installation looking as complicated as it does, I must have given up. Not this time though.
– This is Sparta
They key to success this time is that super-special editor file… I already have it. It was probably on my CD and it is definitely in my GOG installation. It didn’t work, mind you, but it was there. From the site, I then downloaded something called “Great Battles Scenario Player,” which is available in three pieces. I’m not sure I understand the hows and whys, but installing that piece allowed the scenario editor to launch and from there I found I could play a scenario called Last Man Standing. I don’t know if this was something that came with the original game or if I put it there myself a few years back… but there it was. It is a fantasy scenario which puts all the best generals of ancient times on the battlefield together for a grand slugfest.
Not exactly what I would look for to play but it was enough to let me know I could get the thing working.
Just to make sure, though, I downloaded another scenario. There is a set of five scenarios grouped together as “Sparta’s Conflicts” and I grabbed the first, Leuctra – 371 BC. This is a battle between Sparta and Thebes. The screenshot above shows those armies as they first engage.
So, success! Well almost.
The one problem in all of this is that all user-made scenarios, whatever era they are to take place in, use the Great Battles of Caesar iteration of the engine. At the time this game was current, this would have made sense. You would want to be using the “latest and greatest” version of the code. As I’ve complained, though, it is the Caesar version that is unstable for me on my current hardware/operating system combination.
Sure enough, I had two crashes in as many play-throughs. I have started a third game, which I haven’t finished… but it also hasn’t crashed yet. With the Caesar scenarios (the originals), some worked better than others. I explained before that, with frequent saving, I was able to make it through some. There were battles (I don’t recall the specifics) for which crashes were so frequent I gave up. My initial experience tells me these user-made scenarios will be playable with a little judiciously-applied effort.
The other mitigating factor is the way the games are scored. In Field of Glory 2, as a contrast, a battle can end very dramatically. I’ve often seen a battle line collapse suddenly so that a battle goes from winnable to disaster after a cascading chain of routes. While Great Battles uses very similar mechanics, with victory in both games based upon reaching a route threshold, my experience is that Great Battles battles see a steady progress towards victory. I think the key is that Great Battles doesn’t use the rule where a routing unit will cause morale checks on its neighbors, but there are probably other factors as well.
My point is that if Great Battles crashes in the next-to-last turn, I am able to shrug it off given that I knew that I was about to win anyway. For whatever reason, that victory screen gives me a little dopamine boost but, that aside, there is rarely anything dramatic that you’d miss out on if you lose the final turn to a game crash.
None of that, of course, addresses the Peloponnesian War. Unless I’m missing something, there are two user-made scenarios covering this conflict. That, too, I will save for a future post.
*The explanation is sensible. Ian did not want to violate anyone’s intellectual property rights but was also unable to contact anyone who was claiming the rights which used to belong to Interactive Magic. His solution was to keep track of to whom he gave copies of the executable. Later, if someone claimed ownership, he could square things up between the users he enabled and the owners. Given GOG’s takeover of what was, apparently, abandonware, I wonder if this still applies. I don’t know if there is anyone to answer website queries. It seems to me that anyone after that file could just pay GOG for the Great Battles Collection, assuming they don’t otherwise have it.