Rebane's Ruminations

Why Reason Fails

George Rebane

"It ain't what you don't know that worries me, it's what you know that ain't so."  Will Rogers

We are often taught that parties can always settle their differences by engaging in a reasoned dialogue – ‘Come, let us reason together.’  But the evidence, today available in thousands of comment threads on more thousands of blogs and online media outlets, seems to contradict such hopeful paths to resolution.  Self-referentially I can say that there is no reasonable basis for such a conclusion.  It’s the word ‘always’ that becomes the bugaboo, and gives lie to the frequent goal and noble sentiment.  Fisher and Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project acknowledged this failure in their landmark essay Getting to Yes (1981).

Recently this point was driven home by Mr. Steven Frisch, a RR reader and commenter of the liberal persuasion.  He posted two magnificent and voluminous ripostes (here and here) wherein he seeks to destroy my motive and method for the offered commentaries.  As I studied his comments in preparation for a reply, it became clear that his presumably reasoned compositions belonged to a class that was inaccessible to me (and perhaps others).  To contend with his assertions and accusations on a point-by-point basis would be a fruitless effort.  From my perch, his reasoning was insane and would give no purchase for me to attempt a reply.  Let me explain.

Singularity Signposts - 22sep2009 (updated)

George Rebane

- Advanced, cheaper solar panels rival fossil-fuel electricity;
- Human made crises coming faster than we can deal with them;
- Orwellian public monitoring system developed by EU;
- Nanotube springs as energy storage devices may replace batteries;
- New omni-flu vaccine, ‘one dab'll do ya’.
- The future of human enhancement from Nick Bostrom

New breakthroughs in solar panels promise to start providing electricity at costs competing with fossil fuel powered generators (here).  The advent of such unexpected technological developments in all fields is the prime reason why we should never allow government to become the gatekeeper to innovation in any field.  Today we have governments that more than ever seek to lay their cold, dead hands on human creativity.

In the meantime, there are people who point out that worldwide man-made crises are multiplying faster than our ability to deal with them.  Here is a report on how some scientists are calling for greater global control of everything we do so that life on earth can achieve some grand social engineering goals held by certain people.  My concern is that these scientists may be the intellectual descendants of the ones that had similar aims in the 1920s and 30s.  They seem to have skipped the technical courses teaching that central control of complex systems doesn’t work very well.

Singularity’s Apprehensive Approach

George Rebane

‘Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man’ is the title of an uneven yet revealing piece in the 25jul09 NYT by John Markoff.  The article was apparently motivated by a quiet (‘secret’ sounds too sinister) conference at Asilomar on Monterey Bay sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence last February.  It was a quiet conference in comparison to the concurrent announcements at the time that preceded the opening of the Singularity University this summer.  RR’s Singularity Signposts section has kept readers up to date on this and other events that herald the Singularity as the epochal new age of Man.

The February conference was lead by Microsoft’s Dr. Eric Horvitz who also happens to be the current president of AAAI.  According to the NYT, the conference was motivated by a growing cohort of well-read people from many areas who were now “impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence”.  It focused the discussion of “a group of computer scientists … debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.”

The attendees seemed to agree that “there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors. … The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home.”

The central idea of the Singularity is the ongoing “intelligence explosion” as proclaimed by Dr. Ray Kurzweil and others.  The inevitable result of this explosion is a world in which ever smarter machines will design ever smarter machines – and this explosion is already well on its way.  The result, for the instant we call the Singularity, will be the arrival of peer intelligence (‘what if your computer were as smart as your spouse?’), and then we enter the unknown post-Singularity era.  All the rules will change.

‘Is it Time for the Turing Test to Retire?’

George Rebane

Definitely not.  This question is asked by Dr. Aladdin Ayesh in a brief but serious article with the above title.  I presume Dr. Ayesh is a computer scientist, but he seems to be confused about how Alan Turing proposed his test for machine intelligence or, if you wish, AI almost sixty years ago.

Ayesh states that - Back in 1950, Turing proposed that a machine can demonstrate and be proven to possess true intelligence through a simple test of conversation, in which a human user converses blindly with two entities: a machine and another human. If that user could not tell the difference between the two entities, the machine is considered to be 'intelligent'.

Turing did not offer his test as any definitive method to ‘prove’ that a machine is intelligent.  In fact, Turing did not even want to answer the seminal question, ‘What is intelligence?’  Instead, in his characteristic and deep fashion, Turing offered an operational answer to a difficult but related question that was posed to him – ‘Can a machine be intelligent?’ – by addressing the question ‘Can machines think?’

Summer Science/Math Festival Starts in July

George Rebane

Wayne Watson, Nevada County’s ‘Mr Science Guy’, will sponsor and host “a Summer Science (and mathematics) Video Festival beginning July 8th. This is an opportunity to meet and perhaps share your interests in science, as well as enjoy some very interesting science from the past into the future. The material should be suitable for high school to adult ages.”

His email goes on to describe the program –

The festival consists of about 2 hours of science videos weekly that I have in my collection, from which I've selected topics for this purpose. The topics range from astronomy, biology, mathematics, evolution to psychology. The videos will be shown in the community room of the County Library on Wednesdays from 7:30 to 9:30 over five weeks, as below. There is no charge for attendance, but donations to defray cost of renting the room will be appreciated.  I'll be using the large screen in the room and my video/computer projector.  The first showing will be:

Singularity Signposts – 20may2009 Machine Augmented Man (Soon)

George Rebane

Let’s look ahead ten years or so.  You have finished lunch and are about to go back to work when you see something in a store window and go inside.  You examine the article and decide to pull up a couple of similar articles for comparison.  By thinking a command you make an overlay display appear in your field of view.  You are already on line as was your cell phone back in the old days. 

You now move the cursor on the browser’s interface to ‘thought recognition’ and by thinking, you command the browser to go to your favorite ecommerce aggregator’s site, and call up similar products by simply looking at the product’s barcode in your hand.  The displays of competing products appear in a matrix in front of you, which you examine while expanding certain features, and then you make a decision.  You will buy the article in your hand from the store’s website, and have it shipped to your home.  Moving the cursor while ‘clicking’ on some links, and you’re done shopping.

You now ‘hear’ a silent voice that reminds you of the early afternoon meeting during which you will make a presentation.  The shopping detour will make you a little late to the meeting, and you decide to call your assistant to tell everyone that you’ll be late.  Again by thought, you pull up the communication interface and by thinking your assistant’s name and silently commanding ‘call’, your assistant soon answers and you recognize the familiar voice.  Without moving your lips, you quietly tell her of the schedule change, and then decide that you will text the notification to the other attendees yourself.

Again by thought, you form the text message and command its transmission to your colleagues as you walk toward your office building down the street.  It occurs to you that there is a slide in your PowerPoint that you forgot to include.  You pull up your presentation, and it floats in front of you as an overlay of the passing scene during your brisk walk back.  Quickly you identify where the new slide will go.  Its composition will require a bar chart that combines both your corporate data with some census data from the Department of Commerce.

Again, while walking, into the building you pull up the corporate data array, with a cursor select the part you want, go on line to a government site that you had bookmarked and grab the corresponding data you need.  Before you get out of the elevator, you have composed the needed bar chart and inserted the new slide.  As you walk to the conference room, you pull up and view your afternoon schedule and the emails in your inbox.

Your colleagues are already assembled in the conference room, some chatting, some quietly staring out the window, working as you have been while your returned from lunch.  People greet you as they sit down.  Again by thought alone, you upload your revised PowerPoint to the company’s data archive and command the conference room display system to bring it up for viewing as you begin your presentation in ‘traditional mode’.

You and your colleagues decided to attend the presentation as a group because old habits die hard, and you did want to discuss it face-to-face using normal human interaction.  There are still some things you can get from face-to-face that you can’t from a machine user interface   You could, of course, have done all this on line with everyone in their office/cubicle ‘viewing’ and ‘hearing’ the presentation with complete ability to interact.

Singularity Signposts – 11may2009 ‘Physical Intelligence’

George Rebane

Physical Intelligence (PI) is the latest AI paradigm added to the efforts to develop machines smarter than humans.  A few days ago DARPA (Defense Projects Research Agency), the people who brought you the Internet and other spooky things you shouldn’t know about, posted a notice announcing informational workshops as a preamble to issuing RFPs (Request for Proposal) for PI research and developments.  A more accessible description of PI is given in this Wired post.

You can look at PI as the latest addition to modeling human brain function using the formalisms of mathematics and physics – i.e. these are physical processes described by sets of equations which describe how the brain senses, processes, decides, issues orders, and so on.  Maybe PI will even explain and implement how it (some matter and energy) becomes conscious with a sense of self and ability to synthesize aspirations of what it wants to do or become.  PI will join such approaches as hierarchical temporal memory to build complex substrates that may become intelligent.

Again, dear Reader, don’t think about any of these steady and accelerating steps toward Singularity as efforts where humans presume to ‘program’ a computer to be smart like a human.  ‘Smart like a human’ is most likely beyond human programming capacity – for you techies, it's something to do with self-reference and Gödel’s Theorem (or in this case Gödel’s Constraint).  Instead, the more promising approach is to fashion physical brains as very complex and adaptive systems that then can learn like we did as babies and children – but, of course, learn much more rapidly.

So DARPA is going to sponsor this work under its national security charter, which may or not be a bit scary.  People like me, who spent a good part of their lives designing and building spooky systems for the government, are always on the lookout for the dark side of success in such areas.  The more light that shines on this work in the coming years, the better.  And it may all happen very fast, we will never know.

Cognitive Radio??!!??!!

George Rebane

With the recent explosion of mobile intelligent devices, cell phones, PDAs, laptops, netbooks, etc, etc, all speaking wirelessly to each other through various networks (clouds), the airwaves have become very crowded.  The electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is pretty much fixed by the design of our universe, so it looked like we were going to hit the wall sooner or later and not to be able to do all the things we’re doing more and more every day with those gizmos.

About ten or so years ago some clever engineers took a look at how all those wavelengths were being used and discovered that there were plenty of unused time and frequency slots literally going to waste.  These valuable assets are called frangible in the sense that an airline seat on specific flight is frangible – once the airplane takes off the ability to utilize that seat for greater profit, whether empty or full, is gone and gone forever.  The engineers then concluded that if we could fill all or a goodly part of those empty and frangible slots, we could use the available spectrum to provide more, better, and cheaper service to the people and businesses now dependent on their gizmos.

To do this would require a massive change in how the use of the airwaves is regulated (in the US by the Federal Communications Commission) because this is one place where regulatory oversight is needed so that different users don’t bump into each other.  But assuming that such regulatory changes would eventually be implemented, research began in earnest on what came to be known as cognitive radio.  (The techies may also want to see the April and May 2009 issues of the IEEE Proceedings)

Ruminations - 11mar2009

George Rebane

Ending ‘Market-Based Government’ is a banner for Obama’s reform of government procurements from the private sector – especially in the defense sector.  The media elevated ‘outrages’ by service contractors like KBR and Blackstone in Iraq during the Bush years made a big impact on an electorate historically constrained.  Nobody remembers or has read about what went on during the nation’s real wars (WW2, Korea, and Vietnam), and, of course, the longest of them all – the Cold War.  Problems with government procuring things it needs have not gotten any better since George Washington had his troubles with the Continental Congress.  Government procurement people are sinecured bureaucrats pounded on mercilessly by politicians, end-users (e.g. military), and the contractors.  They are not involved in the excitement of development or the satisfaction of end-use, they never get credit for cutting a ‘good deal’ and are therefore experts at shedding blame for problems caused by their administrivia – they are the “bean counters”, despised by all.  It’s an ongoing bad situation and it won’t get any better no matter the grandstanding of the politician du jour.  We will still buy the $600 toilet seats, and a contracted security service mix-up will still cause the occasional politically embarrassing incident.  But to think that expanding government to provide some of these services ‘in-house’ is going to be more efficient or cheaper is just a lost lesson that has to be relearned at great expense.  (I was a DoD contractor for twenty years and have since stayed in touch with colleagues still in harness.)

Continuing to reject skilled workers.  The recent stimulus (here 'SP787') was not read by anybody and contains little poison pills that will make themselves known as this recession plays out.  One just discovered is a provision - Employ American Workers Act - which prevents an employer of highly skilled workers from importing them under the already stingy strictures of the H1-B visa program unless he can guarantee that he won’t lay off high skilled Americans in the interval.  In short, the government becomes the final arbiter of what skill sets and which individuals an employer in the daily grind of market competition should keep and could hire (more here and here).  RR readers are familiar with the brain-drain problems in our country’s wealth generating industries.  The graphic used in the last post on this may have seemed a little over-the-top, but perhaps re-evaluated in this new light … .

On a more enlivening note, belief in God is now identified with brain areas “that have evolved most recently”.  So take heart all you religious knuckle-draggers out there who have been told how ante-deluvian your beliefs are; you are really displaying that your wetware (aka ‘meat servo’ for you techies) has the latest and greatest add-on, and it’s fully functional.  New Scientist reports that -

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke researchers found from fMRI brain scans that religious beliefs "light up" the areas that have evolved most recently, such as those involved in imagination, memory and "theory of mind" -- the recognition that other people and living things can have their own thoughts and intentions.

More here - 'Theory of mind' could help explain belief in God.

'Ethanol Faces Facts'

[A correspondent sent me the following article on carbon footprinting of ethanol production by D.T. Adolphus that was initially published on the Hemmings eWeekly newsletter.  With minor format editing for readability, I have decided to post the entire article.  It sheds needed light on the important facets of the ethanol issue, and in the process shows how the public is led by the nose to politically motivated but scientifically dubious public policies.  gjr]

Ethanol Faces Facts
David Traver Adolphus

The roots of our ethanol industry are complex, but the EPA’s 2007 Renewable Fuel Standard (1.4MB pdf) has a lot to do with its presence in our gas. RFS required oil companies to develop renewable fuel sources and set minimum standards, which was straightforward enough, but now that President Obama has ordered the EPA to examine the ability of states to establish their own emissions regulations, the game is changing.

At the same time the feds were passing the RFS, California Governor Schwarzenegger created his state’s Low Carbon Energy Standard, which mandates that new fuels, like ethanol and biodiesel, meet specific greenhouse gas standards and include the total lifetime effects of production. At last count, 11 more states were interested in adopting LCES, which would make it a de facto national standard.

The challenge is in a change from the way the already-stressed ethanol industry measures their pollution: LCES “compels the EPA to look at both the direct and indirect effects of ethanol in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Brian Jennings, Executive Vice President of the American Coalition for Ethanol, in Agriculture Online. That means attempting to calculate relevant but nearly intangible effects like an increase in Brazilian slash-and-burn agriculture to offset the reduction in the supply of American corn for food, or change in cattle feedlot outgassing when switching from corn to soy feed.