Peru, the Arrival...

      Having just returned from a trip to see the wonders of Peru's "crown jewel" (Machu Picchu), I couldn't help but shake the story from National Geographic which asked, why do travels tales put people to sleep?  The piece gave many reasons, among which was that stories: ...could trigger a sense of nostalgia for our own past journeys, even if the specific bedtime story is about something we have not experienced...One genre of these bedtime stories stands apart for adults: travel stories.  Nearly a third of Calm’s 300 bedtime stories (which have been listened to more than 450 million times) are about travel, particularly adventure travel.  Some 45 percent of the bedtime stories on the app Breethe (which has been downloaded more than 10 million times) are travel-related.  Earlier this year, half of the top 10 bedtime stories were travel-themed.   So at least I'll understand if you doze off while reading these tales of our trip to Peru and Ecuador, and their respective attractions of Machu Picchu and the Galapagos; but first, let me back up a bit to the beginning...zzzzzz.

      So there I was, stuck in that uncomfortable middle seat on a full flight, an all-nighter no less and a flight which left just shy of midnight; onboard it would be a night made even longer by the darkness and the hundreds of passengers struggling or victorious in their fight to sleep.  But within a few hours, even those with their inflight screens or phones on had given in, the movies and the flight path maps now staring back at closed eyes and strained necks.  My wife, even with a sleep mask, tiredly commented that I was the only one in the entire cabin with a reading light on, which was true, so I shut it off and turned on my over-the-neck reading light (too bright as well, she added).  Perhaps all of this being awake was the culmination of my reading about AI, those artificial intelligence programs which seem to leap over one another as they "self learn," each version surprising its creators with newfound and seemingly untaught reasoning.  I didn't understand any of it.  The Atlantic met with Open AI founder Sam Altman, and he described how AI learned in tiny pieces then put it together collectively, allowing it to bypass traditional software, mainly with prediction: The neurons sit in layers.  An input layer receives a chunk of data, a bit of text or an image, for example.  The magic happens in the middle --or "hidden"--  layers, which process the chunk of data, so that the output layer can spit out its prediction.  What??   Oh, it was fascinating but I didn't understand it.  Earlier I had finished a much shorter piece on our need to return to humanity.  How, said the essay in the same magazine: ...Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly.  Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent).  For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life.  In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent said that.  Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.  Those seemingly conflicting thoughts were turning into a jumble so I gave up and turned off the lights, put on a "sleep" audio mix and settled in for nice nap.  And suddenly, I began to understand...

    The random bells and the meditative notes of the background music on the plane hummed quietly and no sense to me and yet somehow, it did.  I began to feel my sore knees, and to hear the  bathroom doors open and close, and the baby waking up and crying (which was probably what everyone felt like doing): things were uncomfortable, this was taking too long, when would it all end, and where were we going?  But I also felt my mind asking, as Mel Brooks did in an interview, where did it come from?  Those jokes,  those songs, those ideas.  How did friendships arise, and curiosities, and creative discoveries?  And dreams?  My "sleep" of 15 minutes was futile (I tend not to be able to sleep on long flights), but I found that my mind had been piecing together the spattering of thoughts and specks that floated in and out, and had somehow tried to make sense of it all.  How this related to AI was beyond me, but I couldn't help but think that this may be one of the ways AI worked, already zooming past languages and computations and catching stray bits at unimaginable speed, seeking a pattern, something cohesive, grabbing, sharing, and dare I say, learning at that same speed.  So what the heck did any of this have to do with something as grand as Machu Picchu?  Because here I was, heading to a place almost the polar opposite in thought and yet, where did their creative energy come from?  Said The Moon guidebook about the main Andean symbol: The Andean Cross, or Crux Andina, is a combination of two figures, an equal-armed cross that indicates the four corners of the Inca world (north, south, east, and west) and a superimposed square indicating the four elements of Inca cosmology (water, air, earth, and fire).  The three steps on each side of the chacana

Andean Cross symbol

 correspond to the three levels of the Inca universe.  

     My friends talked about the changes our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers witnessed, how they went from candles to lanterns to electric bulbs to today (I still have no concept of how a simple LED or laser can  "broadcast" light so brightly and so far).  And here we were, going to a place where entire civilizations revered the natural light from stars and treasured the darkness that allowed those stars to emerge.  Their core belief in nature was reflected in those three step designs incorporated into virtually all of their buildings.  Nature, above and below.  Admittedly my view of the Inca was a romanticized version of a time also filled with war, but still...the thoughts and dreams and ideas that must have flowed when humans were receptive to both nature and night.  And to think that now my wife and I were headed there on what would have seemed an unimaginable form of transportation that would get us there in hours, not the months it would have taken for a large sailing vessel.  Such changes would be difficult for our ancestors to imagine, but not for AI; months to days to hours to milliseconds were comprehended by machines only in their infancy.  Said another piece in The Atlantic:

Plaza de Armas, the central square in Lima

What's coming stands to dwarf every technological creation in living memory: the internet, the personal computer, the atom bomb.  It may well be the most consequential technology in all of human history...The technological norms and habits that have seized us during the triple revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web are themselves in need of a thorough correction.  Too many people have allowed these techniques to simply wash over them.  We would be wise to rectify the errors of the recent past, but also to anticipate --and proactively shape-- what the far more radical technology now emerging will mean for our lives, and how it will come to remake our civilization.  The larger question for us with this AI revolution might be, will we lose the wonder of it all?  Were the Incas that far ahead of their time, listening to something perhaps even beyond the capabilities of AI...our natural world?  So okay you're saying that's interesting but what about Machu Picchu?  Okay, but first you have to start in Lima...

Lima's Art Museum, MALI, with steel pillar supports & construction

     Our arrival in Lima (which is where lima beans originated) was met by fog, their "winter" off kilter as if not sure how to act.  It was sunny and warm this winter, the guide told us, but now with spring underway, it was growing cold and foggy.  Strange weather, he commented, but go have a quick nap and we'll see you in a few hours downstairs.  Wait, a few hours?  Nonetheless we met for an orientation and were pleasantly surprised.  Not only were the basic details worked out --what water we should or shouldn't drink, when to tip, how to do laundry, the tea made from the same leaves used in making cocaine, minus the kerosene-- but also got a fascinating summary of the political situation currently affecting Peru (who would have thunk that this would be part of a vacation orientation?)  Three former Peruvian presidents in jail and the most recent one likely facing 20 years in prison (he wanted to pretty much become a dictator).  All were all explained to us quickly and professionally but for some reason, what stayed with me was the explanation of the politics: the protests and the riots and the bad press we kept reading about in the US before the trip.  No more, our guide said; one of the two vice-presidents was now president (wait, two vice-presidents?) and their president was a female.  A parliamentary history lesson summed up in a few minutes.  Now if only my early school days were like that.  And here we were finding that right off the bat, we had much to learn both past and present.

     So that was our basic arrival, then off to a bus where more history unfolded, a variety of sights that slowly appeared on both sides (like any big city, the traffic is jammed at pretty much all hours), the plazas, the courtyards, the street vendors, the many plantation-style homes that early Spanish conquerors passed down to their families.  To be honest, it was a whirlwind, both a blessing and a curse since we wanted to spend time to gaze at things and to move at a faster or slower pace, undoable with a group of 19.  But then we arrived at the art museum, a "normal" looking white structure designed and built by Eiffel (yes the same Gustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame).  And while the building appeared "normal," plastered and painted over, it was completely made of metal (other than me being in a warehouse, this was my first time in a multi-level, all metal building).  Inside sat a wealth of history, from pre-Inca to the usual colonial gluttony of massive self-portraiture (the part where I lost interest since I'd already visited Hearst Castle and seen what excess can do to one's vision of beauty).  We also began to see the many "c" words everywhere: cathedral, church, chapel, catholicism, citadel, conqueror (a bit of trivia: two of the more well-known citadels, or fortresses, are the Acropolis and the Tower of London).  And as idyllic as the public plaza appeared, with horse-drawn carriages and families enjoying a weekend off, it was also the place where the Spanish had conducted most of their executions and erected their government buildings.  But that was this country of Peru, a land of contrasts much like the US, but one whose history went back centuries, despite the fact that so little of that history was  recovered (almost all of the items in the museum were purchased on the black market -- unfortunately, tomb-raiding is still quite profitable).  The Inca kept a complicated knotted-string method of recording things, one which has yet to be figured out entirely and one which the Spanish made every effort to destroy (only 600 such "records" have been recovered over the last 100 years or so); but in an ironic twist the main "history" that we have of the Inca was done by the Spanish themselves on the orders of Spain.  But who exactly were the Inca, and why did they get so much press when their entire civilization (and engineering accomplishments) seem to have lasted only 100 years (what??).  Indeed, this was a land of old and new insights, we were only beginning.  What lay ahead would prove far more interesting...