Rebane's Ruminations

‘A copernican answers Fermi’

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – A.C. Clarke’s Third Law

George Rebane

Last month we were encamped with two other couples at Hat Creek in northern California.  It was a delightful trip – the weather was fine, the food, drink, and the friends superb.  Actually, we’re all experienced “road warriors” having traveled much with each other over the last years.  This was our second trip to the Hat Creek RV Park which is located far away from cities and towns in the middle of a broad and very ancient volcanic caldera with walls reaching up several hundred feet.  Hat Creek is a quiet place with few people, but because it is located in a bowl, it is also quiet in the electromagnetic (EM) sense which is important to radio astronomers and people searching the galaxy for evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI).

For that reason, the Hat Creek caldera is home to the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) that was built for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute to support their ETI search program.  We men, of course, had to go visit the observatory since it was only about 1.5 miles from the RV park.  We drove over, went into the facility, talked to the staff, walked into the array of dishes, saw the data gathering and control equipment, and watched the obligatory video extolling the virtues of the radio observatory and its mission.  Then we took a lot of pictures, one of which you see here is a close up of one of dishes.

We were told that the ATA currently serves the radio astronomy needs of both the SETI Institute located in Menlo Park, and the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto.  The array signal feeds go directly to those locations for further analysis, and from there the surveillance directions for the array are transmitted.

After returning from our visit, my little feverish mind started recalling all the things I’ve been reading and thinking over the years about ETIs and the galaxy with multitudes of post-Singularity super-intelligences.  And the constant points that I always had to revisit was Drake’s formula for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, and Fermi’s ‘Where are they?’ or ‘Where is everybody?’

Physicist Enrico Fermi’s question is even more poignant today than it was over sixty years ago when he first posed it to John von Neumann.  Because to date we have spent a lot of money and brainpower pointing sensitive radio telescopes at the sky, and we have heard nothing but radio noise – no sign of intelligent transmissions.  So, is there really anybody out there, or are we really alone?  What can explain the silence?

Monopsony and the travails of capitalism (updated)

George Rebane

Monopsony - the market condition that exists when there is one buyer.

Nobody has said that capitalism is the perfect way to organize society and commerce; it has just beat the bejeezus out competitors since King Louis XVI lost his head in 1793.  But capitalism does have its inevitable warts.  I was reminded of one last night when reading the online edition of Prof Alan Blinder’s ‘What to Do When the Labor Market Stops Working for Workers’.  Blinder is a proto-socialist economist ensconced at Princeton, and often shares his views on capitalism with us in the pages of the WSJ.

The good professor is a fan of unions and no fan of the extra-union work-employer arbitration methods used in today’s corporate workplaces.  His point is that arbitration methods currently in use to resolve labor disputes puts the worker at a disadvantage when facing a squad of the company’s astute labor lawyers.  Blinder has a point there, especially when the worker brings nothing more than his easily replaced commodity skills to the workplace and expects more over time simply because he has put in the time.

The commodity worker is at a special disadvantage, as we would expect, when the employer is the regional monopsonist for the worker’s skills, and there are other workers who would be willing to do the same work for less – i.e. in that market such workers are willing to compete for the job by offering greater value to the employer.

“Biased Algorithms” – Advent of Politically Correct AI

George Rebane

[9apr18 - An edited version of this commentary appeared (here) in the 9apr18 edition of The Union.]

Do you want to see the latest on how the progressives plan to take down our lead in one of the few remaining areas of technology in which we are still the world’s gold standard?  Tolerated by formerly science-driven institutions like MIT, the ACLU with activist allies like the ‘AI Now Initiative’ are starting to hold conferences at which they lament that “opaque and potentially(sic) biased mathematical models are remaking our lives—and neither the companies responsible for developing them nor the government is interested in addressing the problem.”

The growing hysteria is built around the proposition that “algorithmic bias is shaping up to be a major societal issue at a critical moment in the evolution of machine learning and AI.”  Has anyone else discovered this “major societal issue”?  The claim of the hysteria leaders is that the machine algos will somehow discriminate against the minorities and the poor, because they were either surreptitiously programmed to do such dastardly things, or they learned to do it on their own (gasp!) when given an objective utility function to maximize along with copious amounts of realworld data.

The Left’s activist elites have decided that government should somehow start regulating the kind of AIs we can use in our businesses and homes.  These limited knowledge types (aka ignorant) believe that they can dictate through regulatory means how machine intelligence should continue to develop and grow so that it’s the best for the most.  This is the shared and overwhelming hubris of collectivists.  According to their initiatives, we should prepare to soon see establishment of the Bureau of Socially Sensitive AI that will attempt to vet every machine-learning utility function, and then test/certify the performance of such AIs before they can be used by consumers or commerce.  (more here)

It is argued that such intervention will make the machine algos more transparent, sensitive to human needs, and prevent the usual litany of discriminants that promote racism, sexism, homophobia, gender bias, xenophobia, … , you know the drill.  Of course, those who are studied in the arts and technologies of smart machines know that this is madness right from the gitgo.  It also hearkens back to how Stalin sank Soviet agriculture by setting up bureaucrats under anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko to tell the collective farmers how much to plant of what and when.

Today, scientific and technical knowledge expands at an unimaginable pace, and bureaucracies (government and corporatists) react, if at all, at a snail’s pace.  Most of what they claim to know and write into gun-imposed laws and regulations is already false.  Ronald Bailey expands on this in ‘Half the Facts You Know are Probably Wrong’.

But all this is still possible with the country now firmly in the grip of dumbth (q.v.).  In the past and in the large, human ignorance was mitigated by market forces as economist Walter Williams once more points out in his ‘Human Ignorance and Market Genius'.  His "bottom line is that ignorance is omnipresent. The worst kind of ignorance is not knowing just how ignorant we are. That leads to the devastating pretense of knowledge that’s part and parcel of the vision of intellectual elites and politicians.”  And that “devastating pretense” is what overwhelmingly impacts the votes of the most desperate and deluded among us.  Just listen to their voices as they mass and march on our malls and streets.

And then what shall we do?

The company that pits its labor against another’s use of technology loses.  The worker who pits his labor against technology loses. – The John Henry Law & Corollary

George Rebane

[This is the linked transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 31 January 2018.]

Let’s take a break from the political goings on in Washington and Sacramento, and consider something that will really change our lives in the not too distant future.  In previous commentaries we have visited the approaching Singularity, when machines, the so-called AIs, surpass human intelligence. (more here, here, and here)  Many people already are aware that we live in the pre-Singularity years as we hear daily reports of smart machines and robots displacing humans in another area of expertise or somewhere new in the workplace.

It wasn’t that long ago when even well-read people still used the ‘never’ word – ‘machines will never be able to do this, or they’ll never best humans doing that.’  Well, today we are already on a slippery slope, and witness machines beating the best humans in the most sophisticated games, outperforming the most knowledgeable humans in more and more areas of medicine (such as diagnostics, prescribing treatments, and even in delicate surgical procedures); machines are already world-class masters in finance and manufacturing.  And autonomous vehicles are taking to the highways, our airspace, and distant battlefields.

The old shibboleth that new technologies will always create more jobs than they destroy has given us hope since John Henry the Steel Driving Man of the 19^th century (here and here), but sadly that no longer holds true.  Today human employment has become more selective than ever, and our current high employment rate is maintained almost entirely by low participation in the workforce, and an expanding economy which itself is driven by increased uses of advanced technologies.

What work humans will do in the next decade or two is anyone’s guess, but you can bet the farm that we all will be competing with tireless, strong, extremely agile, very smart, and much less expensive workers with silicon brains.  And talk about income inequality – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

As an example, let’s turn to a pursuit that almost all of us still think will forever be reserved for humans - making music.  Specifically, composing, producing, and performing it.  Before you write off silicon artists, both unembodied and humanoid, consider how second-best performances already fare in the entertainment and sports markets.  Why do women’s athletics have such a hard time competing with the men for media audiences?  Who today would be interested in following a man vs machine match in which the machine is the guaranteed winner?  And who would even watch a human vs human contest where it is known that they are second rate competitors – an intelligent machine has and would again beat either of them.  In short, consider that we might soon attend human-only competitions with the compassion that today motivates us to watch the Special Olympics or foot races for amputees.

Now imagine watching a perfectly fashioned, fully conversant, pre-sentient android virtuoso violinist or pianist play a difficult classical concerto or some newly composed music that no human could master.  How would we accept such artistry with the knowledge that even the best human virtuoso is not up to the art of the possible?  And beyond that beckon conceivable musics in new audio formats that can only be synthesized by machines, conceived by other machines which have learned to compose aural presentations that are siren-like to the human auditory system, and therefore overwhelmingly pleasing above the consumption of all other previously offered recreational sounds.

In such a fast approaching world, what then will we humans do to challenge, amuse, and entertain ourselves - in short, what shall we do to maintain a purposeful existence?  Today we already see some answers to what people will do when they see themselves as without hope and irrelevant to the established social order.  For the rest of us, our best defense and greatest comfort against such far out notions come from simply ignoring the possibilities, or holding fast to the belief that it will never happen.  But wait a minute, there’s that ‘never’ word again.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Scattershots – 8dec17 (updated 10dec17)

George Rebane

‘The Merge’ is the new label for progress toward transhumanism.  RR readers have been aware of this phenom for some years now.  Today such merging of Man and machine has entered the popular forums, and in some is starting to raise concerns about who will get to merge and to what extent such joinings will become ubiquitous or merely reserved for some elite cohort.  Here is what entrepreneur, programmer, and blogger Sam Altman writes about it. (H/T to reader)  Sadly, Altman, along with a growing number of other late comers, does not understand the original and precise definition of Singularity – they confuse a specific instant with an extended period of time (which deserves its own name).  More on the Singularity here and here.

Western culture is on the ropes; Islam has existentially achieved its early goals of changing what we believe and the way we live.  This morning on KXPR, Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio music station, declared that they now offer listeners “real alternative music – classical during the day and jazz at night”.  It was not that long ago when both classical and jazz were the mainstay music of western cultures; now it has become “alternative music” in the view of our progressive culture leaders.  I suppose that means that ‘throw-away music’ is now the new mainstay of the musical component of our new culture.  This kind of music has been gaining ground for at least the last half-century.  It consists of ‘songs’ that are here today, out of mode and memory tomorrow, and delivered into countless categories through countless channels, leaving the listener with no anchor in that dimension of cultural art.  This cultural disintegration is part and parcel of how placidly we have adopted to being searched for weapons at every turn of our daily lives, lest some of us decide to murder and maim in the service of God or some aberrant gollum.  Note the new norm simply portrayed as a point of humor in the accompanying Pepper & Salt cartoon from the 8dec17 WSJ.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, …"  President Trump is to be lauded for his recent recognition of the city as Israel’s eternal capital, a compelling reality that has been recognized in the west since biblical times.  I’m not sure as to why he did that now instead of earlier this year, but doing it is a latent sign of wisdom yet to be recognized by those who have succumbed to Einsteinian insanity.  The same may be said about the President’s policy toward the murderous fat kid in charge of NK.  Again, those counseling sclerotic and redundant rectitude must answer to the charge of their own form of Einsteinian insanity, as that rogue nation continues on the road to deliverable nuclear weapons sworn to be launched against the US mainland.

Should the government of a putatively free people, force a private business, under threat of prison or worse, to operate at a loss or raise prices to all of its customers in order to suffer the additional cost of providing some marginal product or service for the sole benefit of certain customers imposed under threat of force upon the business?  That again is the surprising question today roiling lamestream-managed public opinion when it comes to such issues as renting to the disabled who require special accommodations, and/or mandating the fashioning of custom made products to a certain cohort of customers, products that are distasteful and violate the religious beliefs of the business owner.

[10dec17 update]  America’s Deep State is very real, pernicious, cynical, and toxic to citizens who challenge its modus operandi let alone the legitimacy of its existence.  So argues Mark Steyn in a very persuasive article, ‘The Land of Mini-Coups’, wherein he analyzes the (non)workings of the Mueller investigatory roulette wheel.  Exhibit A is the recent mea culpa of Mike Flynn for lying to the FBI about a ‘non-crime’, which itself is a specious felony, that has nothing to do with Mueller’s commission to investigate Russia’s alleged influencing of the 2016 election.  Trigger warning – reading the piece will make your toes curl the wrong way if you are not a progressive for whom all this is simply water off the back of their established narrative.  (H/T to RR reader)

... and in the Poetry Department, we have a submission from a correspondent -

A Bayesian prof named Myers/ Says tenure is all he desires./ But his dreams won't be met,/ He'll be fired, I bet,/ When they catch him adjusting his priors.

 

Systemic Unemployment – now it kills (Addended)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 29 November 2017.]

Longtime listeners to these commentaries are aware of the approaching Singularity – when super-intelligent machines match and then exceed human intelligence – and what is happening with jobs and employment in these pre-Singularity years.  As machines replace more and more humans in the workplace, and the fewer newly created jobs call for workers with skillsets that require higher intelligence to master, what we have been witnessing is the rise in systemic unemployment in America and other developed countries.  Today, the estimated number of Americans systemically unemployed ranges between 70 and 90 million.  These are people who cannot sell their labor for wages that will maintain their former quality of life.

A new and alarming symptom of this socio-economic disease is that we have started noticing “deaths of despair” among the class of workers who traditionally had excellent jobs and great prospects for improving their careers and lives.  According to two academics who first discovered this symptom about two years ago, the increasing mortality rates for working age whites “with low levels of education” have now been confirmed.  Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton and his fellow Princeton University professor and wife, Anne Case report that the death rates for these white workers have increased while the death rates for other demographic groups such as Hispanics and blacks continue to improve.  (more here)

The causes attributed to this sad state of affairs focus on the changing nature of America’s culture, a subject we have also covered.  Our educational system is broken in several important ways.  A most important one is that kids graduate from high school without any marketable skills along with a carefully instilled yet unrealistic self-image.  Workers in the 40 to 55 age groups have had either several jobs with no definite career direction, or a career that suddenly has disappeared from the job markets.  Drs Deaton and Case also point out that our family structures have weakened markedly with soaring divorce rates and fragile cohabitation relationships that provide little or no support to the dejected and desperately unemployed.  In short, what they call the “pillars of life” – work, family, and church – have crumbled for these white workers, whom we may consider as the early harbingers for what will only get worse as more people permanently lose their ability to earn living-quality wages.

As we may expect, the increasing mortality rate for this demographic has been impacted by terminal alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide.  To fight this growing epidemic that sooner or later will affect other demographic classes, social scientists, economists, politicians, and even some very rich business people have started saying that now may be the time to try some forms of guaranteed national income.  Two countries – Canada and Finland – have launched test programs to see how a sample of their un- and under-employed will fare with such unearned income. (more here and here)

In the meantime, our government, desperate to protect lower paying jobs, is upping the scrutiny of workers we admit through the H1-B visa program, designed to attract highly skilled people to fill the shortfall of American workers. (more here)  And regionally, smaller communities lacking large manufacturing and service industries were thought to be more insulated from technology-driven unemployment.  A recent study by MIT’s prestigious Media Lab throws water on that hope, and reports that smaller cities and towns, due to their small high-tech worker base, are even more susceptible to automation with the loss of lower level jobs such as cashiers and waiters.  This study (here) is corroborated by other universities and adds one more reason to why it is difficult to create new jobs in Nevada County.

The bottom line is that almost half of current occupations, or kinds of jobs, in the US are at “high risk” of being automated out of existence in the near future.  And please don’t accept, without large doses of evidence, the popular myth that new technologies create as many or more jobs than they eliminate.  With the advent of smart and soon super-intelligent machines, that is pure pabulum, dispensed only to keep politicians in office while they kick the systemic unemployment problem down the road.  In the meantime, keep your eye on the mortality rates of workers frustrated and without hope.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Some more points to ponder during these pre-Singularity years.  One of the more reprehensible and destructive aspects of progressivism cum socialism has always been their generation of bad public policies that wind up killing jobs in the service of ‘social justice’.  As the progress of technology enables machines to replace more and more humans in the workplace, the Left continues to double that pain by eliminating even more lower level jobs (and thereby abet automation) through their horribly miscreant laws and regulations that mandate and constrain productive economic behavior.  In ‘Forget Robots: Bad Public Policies Could Be Bigger Job Killers’ Lauren Weber provides perspective for this phenomenon by citing some really eye-opening and relevant statistics.

And to show the cynical nationwide impact of such policies, consider that today there are 6,100,000 unfilled jobs in the US according to the Department of Labor.  (more here) These are jobs that Americans either refuse to do or, sadly, not enough of us are qualified to do.

Scattershots – 15nov17 (update 18nov17)

George Rebane

Whistling past the jobs graveyard.  Here is an example of highly paid people who don’t know what they are talking about as they attempt to convince us that AI will create more jobs for humans than the number it will destroy.  An inane example assures us that “In retailing, store jobs lost to e-commerce have been replaced by jobs in fulfillment centers."  No they haven’t; the fulfillment center jobs don’t come close to matching the brick-and-mortar jobs lost.  The hoaksters also come up with some new jobs such as “genetic diversity officer”, “virtual store sherpa”, and “personal memory curator”.  Right.  And even if these materialized in sufficient numbers, how long before they too are snuffed by smart machines?  To sum things up, these pinheads reach way down where the sun don’t shine and pull out some brown numbers such as, “… about 19 million positions in the U.S. will be automated out of existence in the next 15 years, while employers create some 21 million new roles.”  You literally can’t make this stuff up.

Now for some real job news that tells you what kind of jobs are really out there now, and that our educational system doesn’t supply enough workers able to do the work.  Take a look at what is happening in New London/Groton area where Electric Boat is building the Navy’s new submarines.  The company says “it can’t locate enough qualified employees as higher military spending boosts orders”.  Putting this into context in proto-socialist Connecticut, we read, “The defense industry is one of the few bright spots in Connecticut’s still-sluggish economy, which hasn’t fully recovered all the jobs it lost during the recession. Connecticut’s unemployment rate is 4.6%, down from a peak of 9.2% in February 2011, though above the national figure of 4.1% last month.”  Whouda thunk that such a progressive state would have such a hard time climbing out of the Great Recession?  (more here)

Finally, in this vein we are heartened to know that AI will now become a bona fide religion in which a super-intelligent godhead is conceived by its worshippers.  This new god will no doubt give comfort to its believers who are jobless in ways we have yet to imagine.  And it’s all happening – wait for it – yes, in the Bay Area (where else?).  Now all of you think that I’m just putting you on to end this series of items with a little humor – au contraire mon ami!  Get a snootful of what a correspondent just sent me – ‘Ex-Google Executive Registers First Church of AI with IRS’.

[18nov17 update]  ‘Political parties serve and important, powerful purpose’ is the title of former supervisor and RR reader Todd Juvinall’s op-ed piece in the 18nov17 Union.  In his commentary Mr Juvinall highlights the powerful argument for why likeminded people join in political parties, and what happens when one party or the other becomes dominant.  In the old days we had parties seeking compromise as each realized that in the future the pendulum would swing the other way.  Today that is a bygone as demonstrated in Sacramento and Washington.  The only remaining alternatives are to steamroll, be steamrolled, or obstruct to achieve legislative stasis.  Juvinall posits the Great Divide question for a number of contentious Right/Left issues.  The commentary’s comment stream should be interesting reading.

‘Top general says he would resist “illegal” nuke order from Trump’ is one of the breathless headlines now making the rounds of the lamestream.  The statement was made at an international security conference by Gen John Hyten, commander of STRATCOM, and in charge of passing the president’s order down to lower commands that would actually launch/deliver the weapons.  There is nothing new in this statement by any US military officer.  What’s news is the news media’s ignorance of how the US military works.  As I’ve explained before in these pages, it is the responsibility of every commissioned officer to determine the legality of the orders he receives from his superiors, and carry them out only when he determines that they are legal.  But more importantly, to refuse their execution if the officer believes the order to be illegal.  Every since the Nurnberg war criminal trials in 1946, the defense of ‘I was just following orders.’ is no longer valid.  In the American military every officer puts his ass on the line when ordered to kill.  It’s his responsibility and duty to determine the legality of all orders before he executes them.  Gen Hyten was just relaying what has been SOP for over 60 years, and the media were exposing their butt stupidity as usual.

An Innumerate SCOTUS, oh my!

A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 November 2017.]

Numeracy is the name given to a set of math oriented skills that an educated lay person is supposed to have in order to hold a job, function as a householder, and understand the day’s news and issues.  Such skills include the ability to do arithmetic, understand graphs and charts, be able think logically, comprehend the basics of chance and risk, and so on.  For a numerate person, the mastery of these basic skills need not be at the level of a technician, but sufficient to comprehend today’s work-a-day world that will be ever more complex tomorrow.

The Singularity is Nearer

George Rebane

Have you noticed over the years when we have met in these pages to talk about the Singularity, that today finally everyone is talking about it in one fashion or another.  It’s as if suddenly everyone who reads is being introduced to the newest developments in AI and the possible futures it portends for humanity.  To be sure, not everyone in this conversation is still aboard with the inevitable advent of AGI (artificial general intelligence), the level of machine cognition that has become the specific definition of the Singularity.  (see more in Singularity Signposts)

Let’s first dispense with troglodytes like the Dr Miguel Nicolelis, Distinguished Professor in the Duke School of Medicine, Professor of Neuro-science and Co-Director of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering.  He writes about ‘The Perils of Putting a Chip In Your Brain’ and tries to make the case that striving for transhumanism is fraught with unacceptable risks which in the end will still be futile in humanity’s competition with the machine, which he believes will never even equal us where it counts – creativity.  He concludes the display of his ignorance of what already has transpired with –

The human brain should be revered as something exquisite and unique. We need to rethink the role of digital systems in education and ensure that humans—not machines, or humans joined to them— control the creation and decision-making process for art, science, politics and all the things that define us. Digital technology will never surpass what our brains can do—but it can shape them, and that is the biggest danger.

Duke should be looking for a new a new co-director.

Nicolelis is not alone in his dim and uninformed view of machine intelligence evolution.  There are also international notables like Nick Bostrom and Stephen Hawking (whom we have reviewed), who still believe that humans will write the code for the first AGI, when even now such efforts have pretty much been abandoned by that dwindling rear guard of ‘programming AI’.  As argued in these pages for years, AGI will be achieved ONLY through machines that develop their smarts through learning.  The most that humans can do and are doing today is developing algorithms and paradigms that make such learning machines more facile.  None of these bleeding-edge workers know exactly what these machines will wind up learning and what they will be able to do after they have been allowed to chomp through vast amounts of realworld data, measurements, and/or observations.  Trained neural nets don’t yet fully reveal their inner workings as they fashion the immensely complex discriminants that allow the amazing feats they today demonstrate in game playing, medical diagnoses, financial decisions, speech understanding, facial recognition, and the dynamic control of some very complex systems.

In tune with what’s really happening and what will be required in the very near future are people like Dr Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science, who understands and promotes transhumanism.  He argues that ‘We’ll Need Bigger Brains’ in order “to avoid a dystopian future fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, (and) we must move quickly to create technologies that enhance the human brain.”  The whole goal is to “keep up with machines” and become a thriving part of the post-Singularity future.  The alternative is to become a kept species that will ultimately die out or just be disposed of by the then dominant intelligence as described by several authors, most recently by Max Tegmark in his Life 3.0 (2017).  Koch and other transhumanists point to computationally augmented humans with microchips in their bodies that can compute, communicate, and store data that is all accessible and controllable through new brain-machine interfaces being now developed by a “burgeoning neuro-tech industry”.  And ominously, Dr Koch makes it clear that it is the heavy hand of government that can act as the anchor to these critically needed advances.

The most significant ‘hardware’ developments to support all areas of modern societies are in quantum computing.  All nations have major programs akin to our fabled WW2 Manhattan Project to develop the first practical (i.e. 50 qubit) quantum computer.  And the big fear is that them that gets there firstest with the mostest will wind up ruling the roost on this planet.  A good tutorial on quantum computers, ‘Welcome to the Quantum Age’ by Jack Nicas, appeared this weekend in the Nov/Dec issue of WSJ’s magazine The Future of Everything.  Globally, China has placed the largest bets on getting there first with new quantum computing institute under construction.  In America the leading contender in the race is Google.  Our federal government, as usual, is a day late and more than a buck short.  It’s hard to tell how many times we can pull a hat trick by coming up with some critical needed technology in the nick of time.  We’ve done it in the past, but the lead times to do it again are getting exponentially shorter.  As usual, it appears that the only hope for salvation here is from a minimally fettered private sector.  (more here)

Ruminations – 11oct17 (updated)

George Rebane

MIT’s Max Tegmark just released Life 3.0 – Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which I bought immediately and dove right in last night.  In his prelude Tegmark takes us through a scenario of a developing AI super-intelligence and its human ‘handlers’ that includes treatment of rampantly systemic unemployment addressed through an institutional approach very similar to the Non-profit Service Corporations which I have proposed in these pages (here).  The book promises an education of how the current pre-Singularity years will unfold – check it out, Tegmark writes good stuff.

The Boy Scouts of America have decided to start admitting real girls, and I guess that means going beyond just boys who wake up feeling like they have been issued the wrong plumbing.  The move seems to be motivated by more than political correctness in these gender-confused times.  According to the Girl Scouts of America it really has to do with the BSA needing more funds, and thereby raiding the GSA membership is a reasonable plan forward.  The resulting dust-up will continue between what were two of America’s iconic institutions, as the times they are a’changin’.  (more here)

I have always viewed Kaspersky’s popular antivirus software with a gimlet eye.  I guess that I just don’t trust Russian companies, given the kleptocratic regime under which they all operate, and therefore are all instruments of the state in one way or another.  So why would I want to install Kaspersky on my company’s in-house computer systems, especially if I develop high tech stuff or have other valuable intellectual property that keeps me in business?  Well, now it turns out that ‘Russia Has Turned Kaspersky Software Into Tool for Spying’ – whouda thought?

[update]  Implicit Bias, another flat-earth pseudo-science lapped up by the liberal legions turns out to be bullshit.  Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse lately as “implicit bias.” Embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the press, implicit bias has spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry, along with a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law. Yet its scientific basis is crumbling.  (the hilarity of it all continues here)

Wanna see another liberal shibboleth bite the dust?  Take a look at ‘A Flawed Study Depicts Drug Companies as Profiteers’.  And then corroborate that with the share price histories of the big pharmas.

The ‘Casting Couch’ has been a Hollywood staple for over 80 years.  And since most of show biz folks have been historical proto-communists, the Left has left the sexual abuses of young sweet things under the rug where they have always had a home.  Now ol’ sleazebag Harvey Weinstein finally gets exposed, and our lamestream is making it out as if they have found the only bad apple in their barrel.  Another demonstration that they don’t give a crap about women save what political advantage they can wring out of our fair sex.  I’d love to see a clean sweep of the overwhelmingly leftwing entertainment industry to expose what aspiring women have really had to put out or up with to succeed.  It didn’t all happen in corporate offices of other industries that have a tilt to the right.

Max Tegmark, welcome aboard!

George Rebane

The Singularity must really be near when we have MIT physicist Max Tegmark climb aboard with the spate of science and industry luminaries who have recently discovered that intelligent machines will someday surpass humans, will systemically displace human labor, and (in a TBD form) will become the dominant lifeform on Earth.  Dr Tegmark has just published his epiphany in Life 3.0, and joins Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, … in spreading the news of the incipient Singularity to the general public.  Of course, none of them dare call it Singularity; for if they did, then it would instantly identify them as Johnny-come-latelies.

For those of us in the field, as recorded herein, the possibility of Singularity has been known for at least thirty years (and more decades in science fiction).  And science savvy entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) and Jeff Hawkins (founder of Numenta the developer of hierarchical temporal memory) have long staked out businesses that are pioneering the only branch of computer science that promises to deliver the Singularity – systems that are capable of learning from vast amounts of data present in their ‘environments’.  Here I don’t want to revisit the ‘learn vs program’ debate on the path to super-intelligence other than to say that the ‘program school’ of computer science has woefully been the dragged anchor, diverting resources from the ‘learn school’ which now finally dominates the field of AI.  All of the above people and technologies have been introduced and discussed here over the years (see RR’s Singularity Signposts section).

Deep learning is the label given to the latest generation of massive artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have learned to do amazing feats requiring intelligence and cognitive processing.  Most of these feats already far surpass humans’ ability to do the same tasks.  And what is happening today in the field of deep learning will literally blow your mind, in the sense of blowing it away as redundant, in the event that you decide to compete with it in the workplace – this brings to mind the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man (here).

Companies large – e.g. Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, … - and small are racing to integrate deep learned AI into their operations and products at breakneck speed.  The heads-up companies are launching in-house education and training programs to introduce deep learning to their technical and management staffs.  As an example, I can modestly cite my computer scientist son-in-law Roland Fernandez at Microsoft Research who has co-developed and operates that company’s online course in deep learning (q.v.).

What the sclerotic (‘programming school’) side of computer science did not realize for some decades, with some still in their benighted darkness, is the message Dr Kurzweil has been telling (preaching?) to people for years – that technology is advancing exponentially.  The programmers could not conceive that very soon there would emerge computers and databases that are large and fast enough to implement ANNs with thousands of layers that learn to ‘instantly’ manipulate millions of parameters in tasks like voice understanding, image recognition, medical diagnosis, concurrent large cohort control, and on and on.  And that’s just today.

For more on Professor Tegmark’s new book, I bid you read the excellent review ‘When Machines Run Amok’ by Frank Rose.

The Return of Featherbedding (updated 5aug17)

George Rebane

When George Westinghouse patented his railway ‘fail-safe’ airbrakes in 1869, that new technology inaugurated a century of what came to be called featherbedding for the railroad industry as unions successfully fought the railroads to continue employing unneeded workers.  Prior to airbrakes on each railroad car, the speed of trains on down grades were controlled by brakemen manually setting each car’s brakes and then releasing them.  This was demonstrably the most dangerous job on a train since it required the brakemen to run up and down the length of the moving train equipped with narrow wooden gangways on the roofs of freight cars, jumping from car to car night and day in all kinds of weather.  Thousands of brakemen died during the 1800s until all trains were equipped with the Westinghouse brakes.  Today we still have railroad ‘brakemen’ doing other things, but that’s another story.   (more here) 

The important notion to understand here is that after remotely operated airbrakes were installed, railroads were still forced to hire brakemen whose new make-work tasks allowed them to also while away their work hours ‘featherbedding’ in the obligatory caboose (crew’s sleeping quarters) at the end of each train.  Due to successful lobbying of the federal and various state legislatures by the unions, laws were passed to enforce specified crew sizes and compositions, and, of course, union memberships.  This continues to this day.

Scattershots – 12jun17 (updated 13jun17)

George Rebane

Investigations will cease only after all allegations have been proven – Dictum from The Swamp

The ‘Robot-Human Alliance’ is a hopeful promotion by Dr Kenneth Goldberg, a UC Berkeley engineering professor (here).  He sees little to worry about human job markets with the advance of ever more intelligent machines, and bases his sanguinity on discovering that humans and AI machines can still do useful work together, and that AI tools allow some people of more modest skills to get gainful employment.  He feels that this is such a significant discovery that it deserves a most inappropriate name with an extremely lame definition – “Multiplicity: diverse groups of people and machines working together to solve problems.”  It turns out that early 19^th century threshing machines also supported multiplicity.  Professor Goldberg’s problem seems to be one of a limited horizon.  Yes, humans and smart machines will be able to work together; and yes, AI based machines can act as a workplace prosthetic for the inadequately skilled, but all this describes is a temporary palliative for the pre-Singularity years in which we find ourselves.  With each passing month AIs are able to permanently displace more and more workers, and this replacement pace is increasing.  Only government’s regulatory intercession can slow it down using the fiat of the gun.  The important problem to solve today is how we will manage a guaranteed national income for the systemically (read terminally) unemployed.  The ongoing impact of AI on the workforce is longstanding theme in these pages - see Singularity Signposts.

The Beveridge Curve is the anointed name of a plot of unemployment rate vs job openings rate (see nearby graphic from the 12jun17 WSJ).  The curve abets the previous reflection on Goldberg’s multiplicity. This presents a “dissonant reading (that) points to an increasing mismatch between workers’ skills and the roles employers are seeking to fill.”  Increasing mismatch indeed, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.  (more here)  A more detailed discussion of this mismatch problem was presented in these pages here.

George Boardman’s column in today’s (12jun17) Union gives a person pause.  In his ‘It’s time to start affirmative action program for campus conservatives’ the man does a solid recounting of liberal bias and suppression of free speech in today’s academe, and goes on to recommend positive measures to correct the situation and expose the resident snowflakes to some heat from opposing ideas (here).  Mr Boardman’s contribution does much to regain the tilt of his perch as that of a mid-roader IMHO – in recent months it had gone a bit wopperjob toward port.  Given his words today, I am more interested than ever in learning what are the tenets of his assuredly complex credo.  As readers are aware, no one left of the conservetarians here have deigned to reveal any of their core beliefs in a clear list of tenets that define their ideological ontology.  (Mine is found in the upper right panel.)

[13jun17 update]  The Union’s columnist and mistress of trivia, Ms Hilary Hodge, makes a mighty attempt to elucidate ‘Housing in Nevada County’ in today’s (13jun17) paper.  But her attempt goes awry immediately after she once more establishes the nature of her sexuality for the chance new reader.  In lieu of serious editorial content, that seems to be the lady’s never-ending message.  (Full reciprocal disclosure, I am a lifelong heterosexual.)  Her column’s preamble forewarns us that this is but “the first part in a three-part series looking at housing in Nevada County.”  Unfortunately, after sliding in the now obligatory “my friend and eventual wife”, the sequel rambles off into the underbrush of her arcane anecdotal archives to retrieve some memories of their moving to Nevada County, snippets (or perhaps the entire opus?) of her vitae, and the subsequently understandable travails of finding employment here.  The patient reader departs with the hope that she still has two more chances to at least get a base hit on housing.  Nevertheless, given the other more appropriate sections of the newspaper, the question still ignored by The Union’s management - ‘Is our op-ed page really that desperate for content?’ 

As a relevant afterthought, for substance compare a Hilary Hodge column to The Union's other prominent women columnists Mses Lynn Wenzel and Terry McLaughlin.

Scattershots – 20may17 (updated 21may17)

George Rebane

It’s ALL in the algorithm.  Most of those who have the means to pay attention and are doing it know that AI is now on the march everywhere.  And suddenly everyone has concerns about AI taking human jobs – what difference a mere ten years makes.  Here we have talked about all this under the rubric of the pre-Singularity years in which we live.  Recently the tech crowd has had another reason to get excited about the latest algorithmic leap that will enable machines to get even smarter and faster.  The advance is called Sparse Fourier Transform (SFT) developed by (now Dr) Haitham Hassanieh and introduced in his award winning MIT doctoral dissertation.  So why get excited?  Well, the SFT computes the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) several times faster for most realworld data inputs like pictures, audio, data patterns, etc.  The FFT is one of civilization’s champion algorithm for improving our quality of life in everything from the music we hear to the movies we watch to the MRI images that diagnose our ills.  It’s also in the basis for enabling GPS and doing all kinds of real complex things that make possible leading edge military systems.  But the huge amounts of data now being thrown at FFT algos makes their ‘fast’ ability suddenly not seem so fast any more.  Enter Dr Hassanieh and his SFT which can extract meaningful information out of datasets several times faster than the FFT.  This will now allow big computers to really do new and marvelous things, and even make possible some mind-blowing apps on your smartphone.  Soon this stuff will also be in the public news.  (more here and here)

French brain drain.  Political analyst and former Paris correpondent for the Daily Telegraph, Philip Delves Broughton, reports that the relative nobody Macron recently became president of France simply because he had little or no competition as a center candidate given voters an alternative to the more risky Marine Le Pen.  As an ever more socialist state, over the last couple of decades France has driven its best brightest to foreign shores.  Broughton goes on to hopefully observe that “France’s brain drain has deprived the country of political talent.  Maybe Macron’s reforms can coax them back.”  His short piece (here) on this important social phenomenon should be a lesson to the rest of the developed countries, including the US, who continue to be swayed by socialism’s sadistic siren song.

China is suddenly stacking up its strategic metals and other commodity inventories.  And it’s doing that way beyond any reasonable projection of its normal industrial needs.  In the past countries have done that as preparation for war or as insurance against sanctions that may be imposed on them for planned bad behavior.  Its increasingly aggressive acts in both China seas must portend something that hopefully is not evading our intelligence services.  Stratfor synopsises its China update - For the past three decades, cheap exports and government-led investment have sustained economic growth in China. And in doing so, they have ensured political stability in one of the world’s largest and most populous countries. But leaders in Beijing understand that that model is unsustainable, and they have therefore begun to develop a new economic model, one built on consumption, an expanded services sector and technological innovation. The move from the old to the new will test the Communist Party’s will to reform and shake the very foundations on which its legitimacy stands.  When you sense your own weakness, you bolster domestic support by raising up foreign threats against which a united stand is necessary.  In the meantime China is actively reaching for world hegemon status by announcing its plan to (re)open overland commercial transport conduits across Asia to Europe and the Mideast along the lines of the fabled Silk Road.  Their antipodal approach here is stereotypically inscrutable. (more here)

[update]  That progressive ‘academics’ have essentially ruined today’s humanities and are making inroads into the hard sciences is known to most well-read people.  English columnist and novelist James Delingpole, who also contributes to Breitbart, recently penned this little piece (here) on the latest peer-reviewed hoax pulled on a gender studies journal.  “Gender studies is a fake academic industry populated by charlatans, deranged activists and gullible idiots.”  It’s a fun but sad read that also presents a new angle on what causes climate change.  And here’s what’s cooking at the American Mathematical Society to straighten out math education and answer that burning question, “What does it look like when everyone’s needs are valued?”  This read is guaranteed to cross your eyes.  Both pieces were brought to my attention by RR readers.

[21may17 update] President Trump’s speech in Riyadh – I think he hit it out of the park. He called out that civilization was fighting “a crisis in Islamist extremism”, and invited all Muslim countries to join in the fight to exterminate its terrorist agencies beginning with ISIS. He pointed out that Iran was fundamentally everyone’s enemy in its support of Islamic terrorism and its intent to dominate the Mideast as its new hegemon. I can’t fathom the omni-obeisant Obama ever coming close to making a speech like that and calling it like it is. And in the aftermath for the first time we are beginning to hear the notion of taqiyya (here) in conjunction with proponents of Islamic terror.  Taqiyya, a concept familiar to RR readers, is specific brand of lies and dissembling which is forgiven Muslims if used to promote the spread of Islam. Now let’s see how well our president does on this historic tightrope of a trip as he travels to Jerusalem.

Scattershots – 15apr17

George Rebane

California’s new gas tax is the latest fraud from Sacramento, and part and parcel of the state’s progressivist plunge.  News comes in daily of more companies departing California for greener pastures – Texas and Nevada next door remain favorite destinations.  The latest gas tax is rammed through by the perpetually insane Dem supermajority, all members of which know this is nothing but the latest fraud to use our dismal transportation infrastructure to suck more money out of our wallets for directed leftwing vote buying projects.  The deteriorating condition of our roads will remind all who pay attention as to why this state is becoming one big pothole.  It has gotten so egregious that even our Union’s usually leftwing editorial board wrote an op-ed protesting this latest flim-flam (here).

While perusing the 15apr17 Union I came across the latest offering from their columnist Darrell Berkheimer who has cracked the code on ‘What will it take to get real political reform’.  Mr Berkheimer’s solution is the formation of a third party from the disgruntled and querulous crowds of Indivisibles, Centrists, Resist Movement, Modern Whigs, Green Libertarians, and Our Revolution.  These folks should join forces to become the third and prominent stave in the national political structure.  Now in the past we have taken Mr Berkheimer to task for some of his nostrums and poultices to restore communal justice, fair play, and perhaps even the public weal.  But for his most recent helpful contribution to fix our polity, RR can do nothing but wholeheartedly support his third party concept and wish this effort Godspeed.

“Technology is indeed changing our economy, but in a way that’s leaving more and more people behind.”  So argue the academic dons at MIT when discussing how intelligent machines are changing the world.  They point out that past tech booms used to “lift all boats, but that’s not how it works anymore.”  (more here)  These pages alerted its leaders to this inevitability years ago while the dimwits were still busy preaching that another chapter of ‘creative destruction’ was upon us, and all buggywhip makers would again change jobs to become the moral equivalent of car builders and mechanics of yore.  Well no.  As we have spelled out in chapter and verse, what’s going on is destructive destruction aka the rampant growth of systemic unemployment.  The ugly heads of this societal hydra are now visible to enough politicians and bureaucrats that they have been forced to become creative in how they sauté the economic stats so as to delay alerting the nebbishes.  The truth still hidden is that in its wake freedom creates inequality (Yes Virginia, we are all unequal), and that the hidden hand of the central planners solves this problem by organizing leviathan to create a uniform (aka ‘fair and balanced’) level of misery.

This morning I woke as usual and, still in bed, put my pad on my belly to catch up on what happened while we slept.  There I was greeted by ‘The Profound Connection Between Easter and Passover’, an essay by R.R. Reno, former professor of theology and ethics at Creighton University.  It is an uplifting read for Christians and Jews, especially on this Easter/Passover weekend.

AI Will Change Everything

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 March 2017.]

For those who have been paying attention, you know that AI or artificial intelligence will change everything.  And the word here you want to wrap your head around is ‘everything’.  I’m a lifelong professional computer systems geek who has earned his bones in pushing back the AI frontier and building smart systems; those are systems that have various forms of AI, also known as machine intelligence, imbedded in them.  Over the last 50 years AI has traveled a rocky road, now and then delivering some real pyrotechnics to catch everyone’s attention, and then falling short on promises.

Those days are over.  During the last 20 or so years AI has quietly shed the hype and grown up, delivering real functionality in a range of systems and applications too wide to detail here.  But rest assured, your day’s labors benefit in untold ways from AI, starting with your smart phone, making big advances in healthcare, satisfying your transportation needs, managing your wealth, and keeping you employed in a hundred, mostly invisible, ways.

Regular listeners to these commentaries know we are living in the pre-Singularity years during which machine intelligences are catching up and surpassing human intelligence in task after task.  Most of us think nothing of asking our smartphone to dial a number, send a text message, or quickly answer any of a myriad of questions.  Today many of us already have intelligent assistants in our homes supplied by companies like Amazon and Google that respond to the spoken word to deliver information, entertainment, and control certain gizmos in our house.

For example, in our home we have Amazon’s Alexa ‘who’ is always listening and ready to do our bidding on a rapidly growing repertoire of commands and questions.  ‘She’ listens for her name, which is her wake-up word.  So now, we and several of our friends with Alexas, have to call her something else like ‘Judy’ when referring to ‘her’, else she will immediately join the conversation and try to make sense of it with unexpected results ranging from funny to annoying.  One of the ‘benefits’ of all these listening devices, like your phone, smart TV, house assistant, and even your computer, is that the government can now listen in on your conversations whenever they want.  Just yesterday the world heard more details on how that is accomplished.  How’s that for ‘1984’ already up and running in your living room?

Industry experts who develop and track the progress of AI advise us that “in a few years everyone will be using speech recognition.  It will feel natural.  You’ll soon forget what it was like before you could talk to computers.”  The WSJ recently interviewed Andrew Ng of China’s Baidu and Neil Jacobstein of the Singularity University (here).  They are among those who agree that today’s advent of AI is like that of electrification 100 years ago, the arrival of which changed every single industry in the land.  We are now “in the phase where AI will (again) change pretty much every major industry.”

But nothing comes for free.  Over the next 10 to 15 years we will have a transition where machines will be able to displace humans in almost every routine job available in industrialized countries.  Neil Jacobstein, who studies things like the ratio of jobs created vs jobs destroyed, tells us that “at least in the short term” that ratio could be “unfavorable”.  And according to my lights you can bet the ranch that that ratio will become even more unfavorable in the long term.

Finally, the left-leaning Brookings Institution did a study (here) on ‘work and social policy in the age of artificial intelligence’ that predictably concluded, “Progressive tax regimes that fund effective education, income support, health and housing programs will become more important in a future where many are working fewer hours for less pay. Policymakers need to acknowledge that dwindling work in the era of AI may look entirely different from the past. Deploying efforts to prepare for that future will go a long way to mitigating the potentially far-reaching impacts of automation on millions of workers around the world.”  And it has already done that for 90M of America’s workers no longer in the workforce.

So pay attention and be prepared, the smart machines are already here, more are coming in droves.  And sadly, there are no “effective education” programs that will enable the less intelligent among us to learn skills to earn enough for a good quality of life.  Any feasible solution will require fewer people and more wealth redistribution.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Ruminations - 13feb17 (updated 14feb17)

George Rebane

Americans have always been told to keep their powder dry; well, the Democrats want you to let government take over that job.

Systemic unemployment, in conjunction with the Singularity a much discussed issue on these pages over the years, is now beginning to draw the attention of more and more analysts, commentators, and media outlets.  A reader and correspondent picked up this piece from PJ Media that acknowledges (here) that the disappearing jobs (even for the middle class) will not be replaced by new jobs to re-employ the growing cohort of the permanently redundant.

[update]  Mr George Boardman, our intrepid columnist in The Union, today echoes (here) the liberal line that longtime school choice advocate and now SecEd Betsy DeVos is “unqualified” for her new job; so unqualified in fact that progressive punks physically denied her access to a school she was scheduled to visit.  But the real question for Mr Boardman is ‘If DeVos is an unqualified SecEd, what did all her qualified predecessors accomplish for America’s public education during the preceding decades?’  Take your time.

[14feb17 update]  A passing note on retired Gen Flynn’s resignation.  He did the right thing to resign.  And he did the right thing to talk to his Russian contacts as a member of the duly elected incoming president’s team – such a conversation was neither a first in our history nor a violation of the Logan Act.  And he was unbelievably foolish to lie to VP Pence about the affair; it was for that that he had to go.

Intelligent Design meets the Singularity

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 January 2017.]

OK folks, it’s time to take a break from politics and give our Trump trashing muscles a short rest – I’m sure we’ll be back at it soon enough, but in the meantime let’s talk about important things like the existence of God and the fate of mankind.  Scientists have made some very interesting recent advances that shed more light about the coming Singularity and also our understanding of God.  And in an intriguing sense these two ideas seem to have become entwined.  You may recall from past commentaries that Singularity is the anticipated event when machines reach and exceed human intelligence – that is, they become super-intelligent and no one knows what will happen to us all after that.  Many predict this event to occur during this century, perhaps even before 2050.

Today we live in the pre-Singularity years and witness accelerating technology surmounting humans in ever more complex skill sets that require higher and higher intelligence.  The visible result is growing systemic unemployment – more and more people leaving the workforce who can no longer sell their labor to maintain their quality of life.  You might also notice that few if any politicians want to talk about that since no one knows what to do about it.

Now consider world renowned physicist Michio Kaku, recognized for his work in string theory and cosmological philosophy.  Those are the fields attempting to unify Einstein’s relativity and Bohr’s quantum mechanics, and puzzle on the foundation of the universe and our place in it.  Dr Kaku is one of a growing cadre of scientists on the frontiers of human knowledge who no longer dismiss the notion of a universal super-intelligence or God.

Ruminations – 5jan17 (updated 6jan17)

Not the village constable. There are men of evil mind, who would make of everything a crime, and not because of passion, but just naturally.  Gracian #109

George Rebane

WSJ editor-in-chief Gerard Baker contributes a worthy analysis and commentary in his ‘Trump, Lies and Honest Journalism’.  Therein he touches on and corroborates a RR piece (here) on the nature of lies.  His bottom line is that journalists should be careful in labeling any false statement, say, by a politician, as a ‘lie’ since that implies intent to deceive – which intent is hard to prove.  Better present the fact along with the erroneous statement and let the reader determine intent.

My toes curl the wrong way every time I see the now accepted punctuation for communicating a list of things.   An example of that is seen in the above title to Baker’s WSJ piece.  Apparent from the article, what the author sought to taxonomize was the discussion of three separate notions – Trump, Lies, Honest Journalism.  Yet the title, by omitting the comma between ‘Lies’ and ‘and’ ambiguates the intended taxonomy by confusing the reader to think that ‘Lies and Honest Journalism’ are on par with ‘Trump’.  In previous times we were taught to express a list of three or more equivalent things as ‘X, Y, and Z’ which allowed the inclusion of compound objects in the list as ‘X, Y1 and Y2, and Z’.  With the modern omission of the comma before the final ‘and’ such clarity is no longer possible, and contributes one more lexicographic factor to reduce the information carrying capacity of English.  You will not see that omission on RR posts lest they snuck in as a typo.  (I’m sure I’ve vented on this before and will again.)

On the road to super-AI (aka Singularity)  BEIJING—A mysterious character named “Master” has swept through China, defeating many of the world’s top players in the ancient strategy game of Go. … Master played with inhuman speed, barely pausing to think. With a wide-eyed cartoon fox as an avatar, Master made moves that seemed foolish but inevitably led to victory this week over the world’s reigning Go champion, Ke Jie of China. (more here)

[update] According to the Left and their lamestream, obstructionism is now the highest virtue, both in and out of government across the land.  It was not so long ago we were told that obstructionism was contemptible and anti-American – remember that it was the dastardly Republicans who shut down government all by themselves.  To man the barricades the NYT is hiring ‘journalists’ with a public record of having been very unjournalistically in the tank for Hillary (even to the editing of their journalistic content).  The chasm grows.

Sen John McCain concluded that “we are in a state of war with Russia” after conducting an a hearing of the Armed Services Committee on Russia’s role in the attempt to influence last November’s election.  The key finding to come out of this morning’s hearing on the Hill is that ‘Espionage is an act of war’.  This immediately implicates most of the world’s nations as being in a continuous state of war with each other.  However, we are assured that this is a “new kind of war” that doesn’t involve shooting (yet).

The St Louis Fed summarizes the Obama years – short and sweet (H/T to correspondent)

[6jan17 update]  From the looks of the invigorating Trump bashing conversations going on in the comment stream of the last 'Scattershots', it appears I may have to start a new regular feature similar to 'Sandbox' that can serve as repositories for all the Trump bashing that we are promised for the next four years.  Such repositories would invite comments not related to then current policy issues or actions of the federal government, but focus on spine tingling arguments like the 497th recounting of Trump's crotch grabbing braggadocio, or making fun of disabled reporters, and similar awkward bagatelles.  Our readers would then know exactly where to go to get the latest barn circling on the President's escapades of yesteryear.  This would be a public service for those whose motto and exhortations will be to 'Never Forget!'

Guaranteed National Income and Jobs (updated)

George Rebane

We in the IT development industry became aware over thirty years ago that the coming technology revolution would destroy more human jobs than create new ones.  Things would be different, very different.  No one believed us, least of all government types and those in the social sciences.  They all had their eyes in the rear view mirror.

That awareness became a reality in the late 1980s when when research made large gains in machine intelligence – Bayes nets, neural nets, robotics, fuzzy logic, causality, … - that quickly began to be integrated into various industries ranging from defense, through manufacturing and services, to medicine and finance.  While all this was happening our central planners were still firmly focused looking backward in their attempts to look ahead; no one in the public policy arena was looking through the windshield.

The early harbinger of the yet to come was and still is systemic unemployment – workforce age people in and out of the job market unwilling and/or unable to economically sustain themselves.  What to do about it eludes our governing elites to this day – half of them don’t recognize the problem, the other half would rather not talk about it.  Ten years ago I ran some numbers and predicted that by 2020 the US would harbor around 70M systemically unemployed – even though no one believed me, I was wrong.  Technology accelerated at rates that even amazed me; five years ago I upped my prediction to 90M as reflected in these pages.  I was wrong again because today we have already reached that 90M figure, and now people (excluding locals and liberals) are beginning to take notice.

AI masters Go – time to apply brakes? (updated 30jan16)

George Rebane

A couple of days ago Google’s parent Alphabet (actually its DeepMind division) announced that their AlphaGo deep-learned software system has mastered the ancient Chinese board game Go.  This is a very big deal during these pre-Singularity years and marks a milestone toward intellectual peerage with humans.  AlphaGo is not just a souped-up version of Deep Blue that defeated chess champion Kasparov.

The number of possible moves in Go is trans-astronomically bigger than those in chess for which the next good move can be discovered by generating an expanding search tree of possible future move sequences.  In Go such search trees are literally not possible to either construct or ‘grow’ in any useful manner.  The alternative approach is to mimic the human brain in its ability to assess the current situation through abstracting board patterns, and then derive the best move by evolving more possible future patterns from alternate courses of action.  That in essence is what we do when we play Go, and more importantly, attack myriads of other problems in our daily round.  (more here and here)

Alphabet intends to productize and promote various versions of AlphaGo into a number of markets which require high levels of performance within large data and complex image environments.  For example, most experts foresee that skilled and experienced physicians and medical practitioners who interpret diagnostic imagery (MRI, CAT, X-ray, sonograms, …) will quickly be surpassed by the new machines.  Similar results are expected in fields such as finance, genomics, athletics, complex design, decision making and planning, and so on.  The portents here are that large cadres of very highly educated and experienced workers will become increasingly redundant as customers demand state-of-art performance at lowest cost, and companies compete to satisfy such demands.

Given the recent turn of our socio-political expectations, it will not be long until some politicians will argue that it is a human right for everyone to obtain such ‘best practices’ goods and services.  But before we go sailing off into that future fraught with unknowns, there are other voices rising to be heard.  The 28jan16 WSJ reports that an emerging cadre of ‘experts’ is now considering how to put the brakes on AI developments.

The advance, published in the journal Nature, impressed artificial-intelligence experts and revived a debate about whether limits should be placed on computer programs that gain humanlike abilities to learn by themselves.

In any event,  DeepMind CEO Demis Hannabis is “thinking very carefully about how to ethically use and responsibly deploy” the technology. When DeepMind was acquired in 2014, its founders required Google to agree not to use the technology for military purposes. Google has created an ethics committee to ensure such benefits “accrue to the many, not the few,” he added.

I urge you to evaluate these sentiments in light of the countless enterprises worldwide which are developing, advancing, and racing to market the latest concepts in AI.  Putting on the brakes?! - talk about pissing into the wind.

[30jan16 update] Robots will devastate third world jobs; robots will replace most white collar jobs; robots will do all future manufacturing; robotic vehicles will replace all transport jobs; … .  The Financial Times reports that “The Rise of the Robots Threatens the Poor”; and studies from prestigious universities are now coming in telling us that the robotic “revolution could leave up to 35% of all workers in the UK, and 47% of those in the US, at risk of being displaced by technology over the next 20 years, according to Oxford University research”.  (also google ‘robots, job loss’)

RR has been a little alarm bell for the last decade relating news and prognostications in these pre-Singularity years about the growth of systemic unemployment due to accelerating technology. Now finally there emerge some louder voices repeating this message, but still not getting it quite right.  Meanwhile, the socialists among us are proposing policies which will guarantee a future world of tyranny much as foreseen by Orwell in the 1940s – recall that tyranny is the most stable form of governance against which ‘democracy by the dumb’ doesn’t stand a chance.  And technology-augmented tyranny is a rock stable slam dunk.

I believe the probability is close to one (certainty) that today we are irredeemably beyond the tipping point. There remain few approaches – e.g. the Non-Profit Service Corporation schema - to implement the required redistribution of wealth which may preserve the Bastiat Triangle of Rights.  However, all of them require an overwhelmingly educated and enlightened citizenry to pull off.  Instead, we are overrun with collectivists and central planners whose interests lie in fomenting class warfare between various manufactured cohorts of ignorant yet compliant voters with scant intellectual assets to figure out where they are being led.  (Today we remain in a government induced Depression2 with a hokey unemployment numbers and GDP growth rates last seen during Depression1.  See also PriceWaterhouse study on millennials.)

A delayed advent of Singularity that could give rise to a transhuman world is looking less like the saving grace that it once did.

 

Preventing a Dystopic Singularity

George Rebane

While most people don’t have a clue about the portents of AI or the Singularity, among those who do there has been a growing concern that super-intelligent machines may not provide the post-Singularity utopia that hopeful technicians like Ray Kurzweil describe (The Singularity is Near). Among this group of knowledgeable commentators are also those who believe that there is no chance that machines will ever dominate man, and the achievement of peer intelligence is a pipe dream or bogeyman depending on your perspective.

RR holds the position that the Singularity will indeed arrive before the end of this century, and also that it will arrive sooner than later. The peer intelligence will be achieved by unpredictable and spontaneous learning, not programming, and that the first intelligent machine will not declare its existence until it is certain of its subsequent survival.

But since the beginning of the acknowledged pre-Singularity era there have been those who see nothing good for mankind coming out of the Singularity. And for good measure some of these people (like former Sun Microsystems CTO Bill Joy) throw in unintended advances in genomics and nanotechnology – the “gray goo” scenario - as additional sources for the end of man.

RR’s vision of the future of intelligent life on earth involves the evolution of a trans-human race of beings that result from the beneficial joining of man and machine, and the subsequent disappearance of the H. Sapiens species. To assure such a post-Singularity future, people are beginning to make/recommend plans for how to prevent a dystopic Singularity from happening.  In these pages we have reviewed the hopeful but naïve nostrums of Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies) among others of those who believe AI will achieve peerage through purposeful programming.

For the reader who at this point dismisses the whole affair as nothing but science fantasy, I remind that every major corporation in the high-tech arena has an ongoing internal activity that does everything from monitoring the progress toward Singularity to actively planning their own technology’s participation in the event. Organizations like the Singularity Institute and the Singularity University are active conclaves of such discussions and activities.

Now we hear that a personage of no less notoriety than the wealthy visionary Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame has joined those concerned by dystopic possibilities that face us in the next decades. “Mr Musk and a group of partners have announced the formation of OpenAI, a nonprofit venture devoted to open-source research into artificial intelligence. Musk is co-chairing the project with Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman, and a number of powerful Silicon Valley players and groups are contributing funding to the project, including Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston, and Amazon Web Services.”  (H/T to reader)

OpenAI will be charged with monitoring the developments that may lead to super-intelligence and inviting researchers to open-source their discoveries in code and publications so that the possibility of bad people with bad intentions don’t get the better of humanity and use AI to dominate or destroy us. I find it hard to conceive how this enterprise will function, let alone succeed in its mission.  However, I do wish it well and hope to learn how such collective undertakings can remain untainted by greed and/or government as technology continues to accelerate.

Other than that, please enjoy your holidays ;-)

Agnosticism vs Atheism

George Rebane

[The is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2015.]

Our secular humanist brethren misconstrue Darwin as having claimed and conclusively demonstrated that the cosmos was uncreated, and that life arose by chance from the primordial muck.  In fact, Darwin made neither claim, but did present compelling evidence that once life came about, it then began transforming to adapt to its environment through evolution.  Today evolutionary progress of the species has been accepted by all except the most fundamentalist believers in the several faiths.

Secular humanists of all stripes arose in the latter half of the 19th century, and by the mid-20th popular champions of ‘God is dead’ were penning eagerly read volumes claiming to demonstrate how science explained everything, including no need for creation and God.  All that was still required was the Big Bang.  Among those who arose to lead this movement of science-glorifying people to atheism, are Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins – the latter of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion fame.  Being a declared atheist was supposed signal to society that you were an intellectual, an independent thinker, and above all cool.

Reflections on Directions

George Rebane

We are told that the Internet is forever.  The global system today is already so vast and complex that no one can map it, and no one knows what comprises all of its processors (aka bit shifters) and data storage repositories (aka bit buckets).  So we can think of entries like these as being squirreled away in some bucket(s) somewhere, perhaps purposely archived, but most certainly forgotten.  And then in some distant future a sentient sapience may come upon it accidentally or in the process of researching the happenings and attitudes of ancient times.  In that spirit, I send them greetings from this last great century of Man.

Today the world is tightly interconnected.  By this I mean that for those who pay attention, a significant event in one part of the world can be quickly known by everyone in the world.  And this goes also for most of the not so significant happenings.  What we have called western civilization is in retreat – its cultures, values, mores, and beliefs rapidly and compliantly transforming as more aggressive civilizations, once great then declined, are reasserting themselves.  In the ‘west’ wholesale dumbth (q.v.) is the new modus vivendi.

America’s Great Experiment is on the verge of massive failure.  Everywhere we look, ‘Can Man govern himself?’ is answered in the negative.  We are beyond the tipping point in the sense that the normal correctives of governance that restored stability in the past are now inoperative, and if the legacy of the Founders’ ideas are to be restored, it will be through a yet to be determined catharsis.  And the more likely result of such a catharsis will not be a restoration but a fundamental transformation, already an adopted objective of many who still call themselves Americans.

The Robots in Our Future

George Rebane

Has everyone been noticing that the news and commentaries have suddenly become inundated with stories of robots, new golden ages of man and machine, dystopias in which humans are redundant, and things bespeaking generally of the Singularity?  Also there is a new slate of AI cum robot movies about to be released that examine alternative futures (more here).  In my ongoing correspondences – yes, there is life beyond RR – a couple of these threads have been alive on-and-off for months.  They generally relate to the related harbingers of change and social disparity much discussed here, and recently expounded well in Tyler Cowen's Average is Over (2013), George Gilder's Knowledge and Power (2013), and Charles Murray's Coming Apart (2012),  As I opined to my correspondents,  ‘My strong belief is that if you cannot follow the arguments in those three essays, then you literally have no clue about what has been going on in America, and less where the country is going.’

(BTW, should you want to evaluate the import of any such works, just make note of their predictive power, both achieved and how they enable you to successfully anticipate what comes next.  This is also an especially quick way to judge ideologically based public policies that are always launched with strong predictions about their future benefits.  Back to robots.)

A correspondent pointed to the review of The Robots are Coming, the new book by John Lanchester reviewed in the London Review of Books.  In perusing Lanchester’s utopian vision of the coming society of man and machines, I was more than a bit miffed at how short-sighted (ignorant?) most of these writings are.  In my contribution to the exchange I launched into what for me is now becoming a familiar rant (edited for inclusion here) –

The problem with these technology-lite writers (besides being collectivists) is that they conceive of such smart AIs as coming to create a stable human/robot society.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  When machines reach near-human intelligence and can walk the streets with us, it will be but a short skip and a jump from the Singularity, after which all the rules will change to what we know not.  Lanchester’s contemplated reign of Pax Homo et Machina is a naïve wet dream, and doubly so as it also envisions a world with some centrally planned society having “alternative forms of ownership” that prescribe humans living in a la-la land of contemplative and creative bliss while robots clean our toilets and go to work as our proxies.  Light thinking on steroids.