I’ve never been a fan of cats. I find them self-obsessed and neurotic.

If I was a cat fan, however, I certainly would not be dressing up as one. Some people are, putting on cat masks and tails, meowing and purring and rubbing up friends while referring to themselves by the pronoun it.

It’s a fad that has been around for a while. Some people say it is harmless: if some people think they are cats, that’s their business.

Folks who do this often are referred to as furries, a subculture that dresses as cartoonish animals as a sexual fetish, or simply for fun. 

Harmless enough, I guess, except it has created a blizzard of damaging flimflam designed to confuse and deceive, and it continues to grow.

Two years ago in Prince Edward Island a rumour spread that litter boxes were being placed in schools to accommodate students who identify as cats. It spread to other provinces, while appearing in school districts in several U.S. states.

Far-right politicians and media personalities promoted it as a real life issue and made it a topic in election campaigns. Last year in the U.S. at least 20 conservative political figures claimed that schools are putting litter boxes in schools for students who want to identify as cats. 

Scott Jensen, a Republican who campaigned unsuccessfully to become Minnesota governor last fall, raised it in his campaign, saying:

“Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry? We’ve lost our minds.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial Georgia Republican, told reporters outside a Donald Trump-campaign event that schools are putting out litter boxes for students. J.D. Vance, another Trump-backed Republican, also has said schools are doing this.  

No evidence has been found anywhere that any school administration has put litter boxes in schools for students identifying as cats.

Cat litter is purchased by some schools but not for use as student toilets. Some schools use it to prevent slipping on icy walkways. Others, in the U.S., store cat litter and pails to use as toilets in the event of an active-shooter lockdown. 

The flimflam hoax is believed to be backlash to gender non-conformity in schools. Some politicians and activists say protections for gay and transgender students have gone too far.

Untrue as it is, the litter box flimflam is causing considerable alarm among parents and much grief for schools administrations in Canada and the U.S.

“This claim as well as many others are simply false and are causing unnecessary stress to students and staff,” Norbert Carpenter, PEI director of schools, said in a statement denying the litter box rumours. 

Last spring a Quebec school district was forced to publicly deny it has placed litter boxes on school properties and that its students are being led about on leashes. It made the statement after being flooded by questions and complaints from alarmed parents.

The statement warned that anyone spreading the rumour could be subject to legal action.

School boards in Renfrew and Durham regions also have had to issue similar public denials.

Spreading the litter box hoax is the work of unintelligent people. It is putting stress on and wasting time of teachers and school administrators who are being distracted by nonsense that is making their jobs more difficult. 

It is shameful and says much about what our society has become – a society in which anyone can say anything about anyone (most often on social media) without challenge or retribution.

A lesson from the litter box scam is that we need to challenge everything that we hear these days. I’m getting to the point that if someone tells me it is raining outside, I’ll go to a window to see for myself. To be totally sure I’ll stick my arm out the window to see if it gets wet.

It’s a shame but truth and trust are giving way to tribalism. Truth today often is whatever a particular group promotes as truth as a means of reshaping the world into what they want it to be.

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I’ve tried to ignore all the hype about artificial intelligence (AI). How it will transform work and reinvent business. How it will replace me as a writer.

Any little attention I have given it has been with a great amount of skepticism. 
Until now.

I’ve just watched a ‘60 Minutes’ television news program in which CBS reporter Scott Pelley took a look at Google’s new piece of artificial intelligence named Bard. Pelley typed Bard a request asking it to produce a story based on six words. The six words were:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

In shockingly quick time Bard composed and spit out the following story:
“he shoes were a gift from my wife, but we never had a baby. They were sitting in the closet, collecting dust, and I knew they would never be used. So I decided to sell them.

“I put an ad in the paper, and I got a few responses. But the one that stood out was from a woman who said she had lost her baby a few months ago. She said she would love to have the shoes as a way to remember her child.

“I met with the woman, and she told me how she had been trying to conceive for years. She had finally gotten pregnant, but she had a miscarriage. She said she was devastated, and she didn’t know how she was going to go on.

“But then she saw my ad, and she knew she had to have the shoes. She said they would give her some comfort, and they would help her to remember her child.

“I gave her the shoes and she was grateful. She said they meant the world to her. 
“I’m glad I was able to help her and I’m glad to find a good home for the shoes.”

A human story, written by a computer using artificial intelligence!
A shocked Pelley said:

“It created a deeply human tale with characters it invented. I am rarely speechless, I don’t know what to make of this.”

As an aside, the six words Pelley gave to Bard to create a story have a history. Back in the 1920s, author Ernest Hemingway is said to have bet some other writers $10 that he could write a novel in six words. So Hemingway wrote: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. And won the bet.

The fact that artificial intelligence could produce a real story from those six words is amazing, and alarming.  

Some people are concerned that AI, while increasing productivity and efficiency, will eliminate thousands of human jobs. There also is concern that AI-produced fake news will create chaos in many fields, from law enforcement to politics.

Geoffrey Hinton, a retired Google executive who has been called the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence, worries that AI has the potential to one day take over from humanity.

“I think my main message is there’s enormous uncertainty about what’s going to happen next,” he said in an interview with Pelley. “These things (AIs) do understand. And because they understand, we need to think hard about what’s going to happen next. And we just don’t know.”

It’s certainly important that further development of AI not be left solely to huge tech companies like Google. Many different segments of society need to be involved to ensure the benefits of AI are promoted safely while potential harm is controlled by regulations, and laws that punish abusers.

Said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an interview last spring:

“This is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers, but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers and so on. . . . I think these are all things society needs to figure out as we move along. It’s not for a company to decide.”

Certainly AI is scary because even the experts don’t know its full capabilities, or where it is going next. Hinton expects that within five years AI models like ChatGPT may be able to reason better than humans.

So if in the next while you notice this column reads a bit differently – perhaps lacking its usual human flair and spark – you’ll know that I have been replaced by a computer.

 Baseball broadcaster Buck Martinez said the Toronto Blue Jays’ 2023 season would be a disaster if they could not advance past the first wild-card playoff round.

 

They didn’t. Their season ended. And yes, it was a disaster.

The Jays, a World Series prospect at the season’s start, were swept by the Minnesota Twins in the first playoff round. They scored only one run in two critical playoff games.

It’s the third time in four years the Jays made it to post regular season play. In those three playoff years they did not win one game.

The season ended much the way it had progressed: consistently inconsistent.

There is plenty to blame for the Jay’s disastrous season. Most of it rests with the club management, which needs a complete shakeup.

Despite denials, the club’s front office was behind the Game Two decision to pull pitcher Jose Berrios after a leadoff walk in the fourth inning. Berrios had thrown only 47 pitches and had struck out five batters in three innings. He was definitely on his game.

Things went downhill from there.

General Manager Ross Atkins says the decision to pull Berrios was manager John Schneider’s and not influenced by the front office. I don’t believe that for a minute. The Jays’ front office has been too involved in on-field play and must accept much of the blame for a disastrous season.

Atkins and others in upper management are not baseball people. They are moneyballers who stare into their laptops and make decisions based on statistics and math.

Their laptops told them the team needed more defence so they traded away dynamic hitters Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel, plus outstanding young catcher Gabriel Moreno, who had a 285 batting average and 50 runs batted in this season.

They needed that extra offence, plus they needed a manager who could inspire young hitters like Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero. Neither πlayer provided much in the abbreviated playoffs, except a couple of errors.

The redo of the Rogers Centre, the Jay’s home stadium, provides more insight into a fairly good ball team misdirected by a moneyball management. The renovations turned the place into a Party Palace focussed on gulping beer and chewing pizza, taking eyes off the real entertainment, which is supposed to be the game.

The Jays biggest problem on the field was their inability to move runners in scoring position (RISP). They ranked 24th in moving RISPs. 

They ranked 16th in runs scored per game, a miserable drop from fourth in 2022 and third in 2021.

“We didn’t score runs,” Bichette said following the beating by Minnesota. “Can’t win without scoring runs.”

No kidding.

The Jays had an okay 2023 pitching staff, although not as good as the broadcasters and other homer commentators would have you believe. Some of the opposition pitchers they faced in late season were just as good, if not much better.

When they did get good pitching the Jays hitters simply did not provide the scoring support.

Bichette provided the only honest appraisal of what the club needs before next season. Much more honest than the public relations fog provided by management.

“So, I think there’s a lot of reflection needed, from players but from the organization from top to down,” Bichette was quoted by Sportsnet last week.

From top down is the key phrase here. 

The reflection needs to result in a cleaning out of management, including on-field manager Schneider, who follows front office orders instead of playing his own game.

The Jays have some really good individual players but the moneyball management restricted them from playing together as a top-flight team. You could see the problem on the grim faces of frustrated players in many games throughout the season

Baseball is a game played by people, not computer algorithms. It is an art in which every move by any player has can have many outcomes.

If you want computer baseball, then replace the umpires with laptops that call balls, strikes and base running outs. Fans then don’t have to watch the game so closely, and can spend more time and money in the beer and pizza lounges.