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Welcome to beautement.com - Site Summary ***
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You can still access the archive of research, military and technical papers from the abaci Partnership.
On this day, give thought to AI ...
- Firstly, yes indeed, there is no doubt that clever algorithms and pattern-recognition software can be very useful, but ...
... the use of ‘wild’ AI is now normalised ... Yet it is an irresponsible experiment with the lives of all humanity, making some crazy ... it is untested, unreliable, error-prone and unaccountable ...
... an experiment in which we have no say, in which we are all the ‘guinea-pigs’. In this ‘AI pandemic’ there is to be, can be, no vaccine ... because Big Tech has lost control of AI’s viral spread ...
... and worse, responsible organisations are now publishing documents stating that “... those who will not use AI will be replaced by those who do ...” - in effect an AI Tyranny!
Where has the sane ‘testing before implementation’ approach gone?
- Would we prescribe new drugs or vaccines without it, or sell untested passenger jets? No! But releasing AI untested is as mad as handing out a gun to every child ‘just to see what would happen’ ...
- Yet the people behind the current AI Gold Rush are not listening. They are drunk with the feeling that they will soon be Rulers / Saviours of the World - fabulously rich, powerful and famous. They do not see that AI, blind inhuman AI, will soon become unstoppable, and they they will be its unwitting tools ...
- And this, and the consequences for humanity, have all been foreseen - not in some ‘All Technology is Wrong Frankenstein’s Monster’ horror story, but in thoughtfully conceived predictions:
... such as the infantilisation of humanity that H. G. Wells foresees in his ‘Time Machine’ (1895), where the majority (the Eloi) are kept as ‘useful pets’ by the technocrats (the Morlochs) who provide the means [our AI] for the Eloi to exist, at the fearful price of their lives; or
... as in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) - where his Machine, which humanity has become totally reliant upon [as with our rapidly increasing AI dependence], fails; or
... take George Orwell’s book ‘1984’ (1949), where total surveillance and coercive control is in place via the ‘Telescreen’ [our smartphone with AI] and the sinister Thought Police; or
... the iconic cyberpunk thriller “Neuromancer” by William Gibson (1984) - of an apparently dysfunctional world run by a decadent AI-enabled super-elite; or
... the view of a future where the people of the world, desperate to free themselves from the enslavement of AI, fight a terrible world war to regain their true humanity.
- Are YOU going to give in, to succumb to the AI Tyranny? Or do you feel the loss of individuality, a frustration and anger, like YOU feel when you have to deal with a ‘call center’? If you do, good ...
... then resist AI’s mindless and thoughtless spread. Ask questions. Don’t be put off by smart answers, because otherwise an AI-mediated future is going to make you feel much much worse. Let’s see what we ‘cyberoutlaws’, in the name of the independence of future humanity, can achieve? Let’s work to form a true partnership with the support, not the domination of, AI ...
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This section of the website has blogs on boats we have built and on the techniques used to craft and restore traditional boats and ships. To help keep these crafts alive, you can  download here plans for the 15-foot, 4.6 metre, Irish gandelow - featured in Wooden Boat Magazine number 249 / 250 in 2016; in Watercraft Magazine number 130 in 2018; and in Chasse-Marée boat magazine issue number 301 in 2019 (in French). In 2024 a new area of work was started - looking at the Nordic Peoples called ‘Vikings’, and particularly their ships and the key part they played in the success of Viking raiding expeditions. But this Viking Boat Project has now ended, but without building one, as the post explains!
Beautement Books started publishing in 2014 with a guide to building the Irish ‘gandelow’ fishing boat.. You can read about all the books here. An ‘academic’ book “Complexity Demystified - a guide for Practitioners” - was first published in 2011 by Triachy Press - but can now be downloaded as a PDF from this site.
The resources section has been restructured and extended to include recommended books, articles, video and sound clips - as well as preserving the archive of the ‘abaci library’ from 2015.
The views on this site are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect either those of other family members, nor of any of the organisations with which he has been associated.
The History part of the site provides information about the author, and our unusual family name, its origins and our connections with boat-building and crafts.
  
[02 Jul 2025]
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