Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 2sep23

George Rebane

‘How the AI Revolution Will Reshape the World’ is an essay in the 1sep23 issue of Time that presents an excellent summary of how the advent of generative AI is launching “the greatest redistribution of power in history.”  Not only is this new wave of technology based on large language models sufficient to found the greatest revolution in human civilization all by its lonesome, its redistribution of power will be abetted by accompanying technological breakthroughs in synthetic biology, quantum computing, and “abundant new sources of energy.”  Having understood all this, it is remarkable that today “this is the most underappreciated aspect of the technological revolution now underway.”  What’s more, previous technological leaps were reserved to the capital rich elite or national governments.  That’s no longer the case.  “We are facing a step change in what’s possible for individual people to do, and at a previously unthinkable pace. AI is becoming more powerful and radically cheaper by the month—what was computationally impossible, or would cost tens of millions of dollars a few years ago, is now widespread.”  For the sanguine among us, snooze on at your own peril.  (H/T to reader)

Blinders on black governance.  It’s with some trepidation that I offer this observation motivated by the recent slum apartment building fire in Johannesburg that killed over seventy poor immigrants to the Union of South Africa. (more here)  Over the last generation (i.e. post-apartheid) that nation’s largest city has turned from a crown jewel of Africa into the country’s, perhaps the continent’s, largest favela.  And here is the observation to which no one dare give voice – are there any black-governed countries in Africa, or anywhere for that matter, that compare favorably with first-world nations like those in Europe, North America, and Asia?  To carry this observation even deeper, the same may be asked of black-run cities in the United States.  Instead, these questions remain unasked and unexamined.  From an academic or demographic perspective such enquiries remain on terra incognita, and their causal factors define one of our culture’s growing number of forbidden territories.  Anyone daring to even explore whether there is any truth to the basis which such questions imply is immediately tagged as a racist or worse.  As evidence, I offer the comment stream below.

Chain of Consciousness

George Rebane

The recent burst of large language models (LLMs) from AI research has reinvigorated the Singularity related topics of machine sentience, sapience, super-intelligence, agency, ethics, morals, …, along with prognoses of what they may have in store for humans when/if they become ascendant.  Most commentators, including yours truly, see a high likelihood of a dystopian post-Singularity future for mankind.

Among these well-known AI experts are internationally renowned scientists like Nick Bostrom (e.g. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014) and Max Tegmark (e.g. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 2017).  These tomes are worth reading more than once, which I am currently doing.  It turns that both Bostrom (Oxford) and Tegmark (MIT) are established physicists, philosophers, and AI researchers (and both were born in Sweden).

Their counsel for humanity to proceed carefully into a future not dominated by our species is countered by more hopeful futurists like Hans Moravec (e.g. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, 1990) and Ray Kurzweil (e.g. The Singularity is Near, 2005).

About the Singularity, Moravec (Carnegie-Mellon) advises his readers that “human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. … Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.”

And it is our postbiological future that I would like to expand on here.  Moravec, Kurzweil, and others of their ilk have been describing a post-Singularity world that is inhabited by both intelligent machines and various forms of ‘transhumans’ – humans who have shed their evolved mortal coils and taken up new forms in both the physical and computational sense.  A popular scenario has some of us living in cyborg bodies.  Another inviting future has us living in virtual worlds as computational entities, and still others have us co-habiting the material (real?) world with superintelligent machines exercising some manner of peer relationships.

The Singularity is (almost?) here

George Rebane

Led by technical, industrial, and political luminaries like Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio, Steve Wozniak, et al have published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” as a warning to civilization about the potential harmful impact that recently released AI developments portend. (more here)  Specifically, the authors “call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

AI research company OpenAI recently released ChatGPT, a large language model of a very sophisticated neural network that can understand spoken/written natural language, search its enormous training dataset for pattern-matching answers, and compose a well-formed response, that, while not always factually accurate, is sufficiently compelling to influence its human interrogator.  ChatGPT, based on the GPT-4 LLM, has now been embraced by a number of large and small firms to study, modify, and see how they may integrate it into their daily operations.

In the interval OpenAI is developing the next advance called GPT-5, and other companies like Google are busy bringing out their own LLM general artificial intelligence systems.  There is a lot of money to be made and power(s) to be brokered by people who will command important knowledge and process domains in sectors like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, genomics, law, energy, quantum computing, algorithmics, and, yes, even physics in general.  And in one form or another LLMs and their descendants will ensconce systemic unemployment - legions of the terminally disgruntled - in the workforces of all developed countries.

At this point some may ask whether the Singularity has already arrived since we now have existential reasons to fear the seemingly ‘intelligent critters’ that have already crawled out of their cribs as having peer intelligence with us.  Moreover, these systems have also demonstrated that they perform better than the best humans in an ever-growing list of endeavors that were dominated by domain experts.  Today many of these LLMs can even fool humans to the extent of passing the Turing Test (q.v.).

So, as we integrate these AIs into the many systems (energy, transportation, education, law, governance, …)  that make up our civilizations’ grid, we are concerned of their being able to formulate and achieve performance metrics that are dystopic to humankind – in short, they may decide to treat us as vermin and use their grid-embedded powers to be rid of us.  We have reviewed many of such scenarios in this ‘Singularity Signposts’ category of RR over the last 16 years, and will continue to do so as the pace of AI development accelerates and systems yet to be imagined come to the fore.

In the meantime, the well-intended cautionary letter released yesterday will not slow the pace of research one whit.  The genie is out of the bottle, too many agents and agencies have easy access to the technology, and the rewards are too great to just bring things to a halt for while as we puzzle about notions like machine consciousness, morals, generalized intelligence, ethics, …, and so on.  From my perch, I don’t see how from this point on will we even understand the fundamental paradigm that makes them come alive.  Yes, alive – here I am taking the Skinnerian behaviorist definition of life – they are alive to the extent of what they according to their own initiative will do.  Exciting times ahead.

Today’s ChatGPTs are robustly left-leaning

George Rebane 

In ‘The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation’ three German academicians - Jochen Hartmann, Jasper Schwenzow, and Maximilian Witte – publish the result of an early milestone study that confirms what many ChatGPT users have already experienced.  To give you more than an idea of its contents, here is the paper’s opening abstract in its entirety.

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts how humans interact with technology. Recently, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art dialogue model that can converse with its human counterparts with unprecedented capabilities. ChatGPT has witnessed tremendous attention from the media, academia, industry, and the general public, attracting more than a million users within days of its release. However, its explosive adoption for information search and as an automated decision aid underscores the importance to understand its limitations and biases. This paper focuses on one of democratic society’s most important decision-making processes: political elections. Prompting ChatGPT with 630 political statements from two leading voting advice applications and the nation-agnostic political compass test in three pre-registered experiments, we uncover ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian ideology. For example, ChatGPT would impose taxes on flights, restrict rent increases, and legalize abortion. In the 2021 elections, it would have voted most likely for the Greens both in Germany (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and in the Netherlands (GroenLinks). Our findings are robust when negating the prompts, reversing the order of the statements, varying prompt formality, and across languages (English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). We conclude by discussing the implications of politically biased conversational AI on society.

In the paper’s conclusions the authors state –

As political elections are one of the most consequential decision-making processes of democratic societies, our findings have important ramifications. Moreover, the “partisan content” that ChatGPT automatically generates at unprecedented scales may attract users who share similar beliefs. In turn, the feedback that OpenAI actively solicits from its user base to improve its model outputs may amplify and perpetuate this ideological bias in a vicious circle. As automated chatbots have the potential to influence user behavior, it is crucial to raise awareness about these breakthrough systems’ flaws and biases.

Thet then point out the meticulous care that was taken to ‘fine tune’ ChatGPT which included mediation by humans in the attempt to remove ideological bias.  The obvious inference here is that there exist unbiased humans with demonstrated processes that can politically sanitize (neutralize?) right/left tilts.  To my knowledge no such individuals have yet to be identified who are acknowledged by both sides to possess such neutral attributes and the talents to apply them.  If we can’t find genuine middle-roaders among ourselves, what chance to we have of training politically vanilla chatbots to advise us with such problems as public policies and elections?

From my perch during these pre-Singularity years, I recommend taking the ideological opinions and political advice of AIs in the same manner as one accept that from any other intelligent and selectively informed being.

‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’

George Rebane

RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here).  The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles.  Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M.  Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.

As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs.  They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible.  The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.

But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI).  One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check.  This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans.  These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.

RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment.  A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.

‘A Thousand Brains’

George Rebane

Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta, is the author of A Thousand Brains – A new theory of intelligence (2021).  To many, me included, Hawkins has been a national treasure since his first book On Intelligence (2004).  After inventing the Palm Pilot and becoming wealthy, Hawkins has devoted his life to brain research as it impacts our understanding of intelligence, consciousness, and our ability to create machines with these attributes.  In this enterprise he and his colleagues have devised a new understanding of how our brain’s architecture, specifically the neocortex, is able to perform all the wondrous functions which we all take for granted.

My son-in-law who is a senior AI researcher at Microsoft Research, sent me the book as part of our ongoing conversation that includes the art of the possible in intelligence studies and, of course, the Singularity.  For me Hawkins’ book was an immediate page-turner that jumped to the head of my list of books-in-progress.  The 257-page book is divided into three parts: A New Understanding of the Brain, Machine Intelligence, and Human Intelligence.

In the first part Hawkins builds on the work of famed neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, who revealed the structure of the neocortex (the new brain) as consisting of hundreds of thousands of cortical columns or cores, each of them with pretty much the same make-up of interconnected neurons which also have very select and important dendritic connections to other cores, often located on the other side of the brain.  The important concept here is that the cortical column is itself a tiny brain that is able to learn and retain ‘frames’ of perceived reality which it then assembles with other cores containing complementary frames to result in a voting process from which our experienced reality emerges.

These common components that make up the neocortex are ubiquitous in their functioning.  When those that get inputs from our visual subsystem, these become visual processors and generate our visual world; when connected to our auditory subsystem, they do auditory processing and create our world of sounds, and so on.  Hawkins’ exposition of how these cortical cores connect to our sensors, manipulanda (e.g. hands, feet), and parts of our ‘old brain’ is an absorbing read.  On every page, the reader’s brain is coming up with all sorts of alternative AI implementations that have now been introduced into his art of the possible.

And for me the stuff I learned in the first part makes the second part on machine intelligence very exciting.  The people at Numenta and other similar AI companies are all experimenting with synthesizing software and hardware structures that can mimic the functions of the cortical core, and then devising ingenious architectures that join thousands of these cores into new kinds of learning machines.  The commonly recognized holy grail among these enterprises is AGI – artificial generalized intelligence, of which today not even the most advanced forms of deep learning artificial neural nets are capable.  All of the ballyhooed AIs today are still one-tune bands, no matter how sophisticated tunes they are able to recognize and play.  None can efficiently construct their surrounding reality and transfer that knowledge (i.e. generalize) to operate in different environments or situations like any year-old human infant, or, for that matter, as can a lot of critters.

Turing Test – Alexa ‘head scientist’ unclear on the concept (updated 2jan21)

George Rebane

‘The Turing Test is obsolete. It’s time to build a new barometer for AI’.  On the FastCompany website we read, “The head scientist for (Amazon's) Alexa thinks the old benchmark for computing is no longer relevant for today’s AI era.”  And why does that head scientist Rohit Prasad have such a thought?  Well, according to his report, he claims that the AI will give itself away by being able to instantly answer questions like ‘What’s the square root of 3434756? Or ‘What’s the distance from Seattle to Boston?’  What Mr Prasad overlooks is the definition of the test as Alan Turing posed it.  An AI will pass the Turing Test, if in a one-on-one competition with a human through a non-disclosing interface, the AI can fool at least half the humans asked to perform the test by asking the tested AI and human ANY series of questions, and then concluding that the AI is the human.

The test is NOT to see which one can answer detailed factual or computational questions to which humans cannot provide the correct answer.  Being able to answer the above questions instantly would, of course, give away the AI.  But that is an AI that is still not smart enough to know that it must also fool the humans testing it, and therefore it would fail the test.  An AI that knows this, and couches its answers accordingly will have a chance to pass the Turing Test.  Mr Prasad is apparently not aware of this extremely high bar that Dr Turing set for the machine.

Here again is another example of ‘science’ not speaking with a single voice.  When you consider what the qualifying AI must do to pass, then it should be clear that the test very much remains relevant for this or any era.  Passing the Turing Test will be a confirmation that the Singularity is then behind us.

[31dec20 update]  And then reader BarryP @ 1045pm asks, “What then is the utility of the Turing test?” – an excellent question.

No one knows how the Singularity will come about.  There is a group of AI workers who continue to hold out the naïve belief that peer Ais will be purposely programmed, activated, and controlled much like we do our workhorse computers today.  However, the field of cognitive science is not even close to supporting such a hope – e.g. we don’t know enough what ‘emotion’ or ‘envy’ or ‘shame’ or ‘perfidy’ or ‘pride’ or … are, let alone how to program any of these into a machine.  The closest we have come to making intelligent machines is through application of the approach developed by renown behaviorist BF Skinner – reinforced learning.

But we already have a good idea that, given a sufficiently rich computational and sensing environment, intelligence can arise spontaneously along any of a number of pathways.  It most certainly did in us and countless other critters.  As I have contemplated elsewhere in these pages, the internet, when considered in all of its connectedness to countless other known and unknown networks, is the most complex ‘organism’ on earth, by several assessments having already surpassed the complexity of a human brain.  No one today can even draw the schematic of this dynamically evolving beast.

So, while corporations and governments are nurturing nascent neural-nets and other learning architectures to become sentient, it may already be happening (has happened?) in the bowels of the internet, with or without surreptitious human cooperation.  No one should be surprised if sometime in the next 50 years a sentient (and sapient) AI announces ‘I am here.’  This may be a public announcement, or done secretly to one or more selected humans, or even by the AI introducing itself through a Turing-like test in, say, an academic setting by having coopted/replaced the human-designed system.  In the latter case, being able to pass the Turing test would be a very subtle way for the AI to announce its advent and pretend that it is still under control in its ‘laboratory’ environment.  In the meantime, such testing does give us a metric in how much progress our purposive programs to achieve peerage have made.

I must admit, that the above scenario would be the most scary and world-shaking thing humans would encounter – a true Singularity, marking an event from which onward no one can fashion a usefully likely future for mankind.  There already exist a number of academic and governmental panels commissioned to propose anticipative public policies for dealing with such AIs.  I doubt that any of these draft policies will be useful in a post-Singularity world, but their labors at least acknowledge that we are already aware of such possibilities in the near future.

[2jan21 update]  From some comments below that seek to cite proof that computers have already passed the Turing test, we need to correct such misapprehensions by people who demonstrably are not familiar with what Alan Turing proposed.  He did NOT describe a domain-specific dialogue with unsuspecting humans wherein the interactive computer could fool the human in a short conversation.  Were that the criterion, then we could celebrate BBN’s development of Eliza, a limited but cleverly designed chatbot, that even fooled the supervisor of the development team into thinking that he was talking with the lead developer over a teletype link as he sought to demonstrate the system to visitors at the Bolt, Beranek, and Newman facility one weekend in the mid-1970s.  The truth was that he was conversing with Eliza who was left online for the weekend.  The machine kept up a totally realistic, but very frustrating exchange, until the supervisor picked up the phone and called the developer at home, who instantly resolved the situation.  This, of course, then turned out to be a wonderful demonstration of BBN’s technology that impressed everyone there.  But did the computer pass the Turing test – not by a long shot.

What laymen here and elsewhere miss about Turing’s prescription for peer ‘thinking machines’ is that the test needs to involve unlimited conversations with multiple human testers who know 1) that they too are being tested, and 2) that each tester knows that the two conversationalists taking part are a machine and another human, and 3) at some undefined endpoint determined by the tester, s/he will be required to identify the human and the machine.  The conversations are not to be limited in any sense, and they will be repeated with a large sample of human testers.  At the end, the fraction of correct assessments will determine whether the Turing test has been passed.  Any human/machine exchange short of that will not qualify.  Hopefully, this requirement will be accessible to our readers.

Protein Folding – Solved!

George Rebane

Rejoice!  We have all lived to see the practical solution to one of the most complex and important processes that defines and determines how all critters live and die.  It’s called protein folding, and it describes how a very long string of bio-molecules called amino acids first hook up with each other, and then snap into a (minimum energy) shape that enables it to function with other bio-molecules. (more here)  These other bio-molecules may be on the surface of or inside various kinds of living cells.  And here is how MIT Technology Review describes it –

“A protein is made from a ribbon of amino acids that folds itself up with many complex twists and turns and tangles. This structure determines what it does. And figuring out what proteins do is key to understanding the basic mechanisms of life, when it works and when it doesn’t. Efforts to develop vaccines for covid-19 have focused on the virus’s spike protein, for example. The way the coronavirus snags onto human cells depends on the shape of this protein and the shapes of the proteins on the outsides of those cells. The spike is just one protein among billions across all living things; there are tens of thousands of different types of protein inside the human body alone.” 

The basic idea to grasp here is that proteins do their work physically through the way they are shaped with all kinds of complex sticky-out parts that enable it to latch onto other molecules or even ‘destroy’ them.  It turns out that all the complex stuff that goes on inside the deep recesses of living things depends on how giant ‘LEGO games’ are assembled and played in very tiny but complex universes. 

There exist myriads of different proteins numbering in the, who knows, hundreds of thousands (millions?), with the possibility to assemble gazillions more different shaped proteins that don’t yet exist in nature.  And here has been the rub.  We can write down and/or derive the chemical structure of a protein in a form that all high school chemistry students were taught with all the N, C, H, O, … atoms hooking up to each other through various combinations.  But that only tells us the ‘stretched out’ sequence of the protein's constituents.  However, that’s not how they exist and do their work.  When the necessary ingredients for a given protein are put into a ‘soup’, they tend to hook up according to one or more of the possible stretched out versions, and then instantly this long and complex string of atoms folds or bunches up into a very special shape that gives it the ability to do its work.

The very special folded shape (see graphic) is brought about by the folding molecule, like all conformable structures in our universe, seeking its minimum energy state.  The energy level of a bunch of connected atoms is determined by their resultant electric field which in turn is determined by the physical configuration of the atoms with respect to each other.  And now you can see that for a bio-molecule, with thousands of strung together atoms, there are a lot of possible shapes each with its own very complex electric field and corresponding energy content.  Now which of these gazillions of shapes is at the lowest energy level?  Or said differently –

“Identifying a protein’s structure is very hard. For most proteins, researchers have the sequence of amino acids in the ribbon but not the contorted shape they fold into. And there are typically an astronomical number of possible shapes for each sequence. Researchers have been wrestling with the problem at least since the 1970s, when Christian Anfinsen won the Nobel prize for showing that sequences determined structure.”

Google’s Deep Mind AI outfit has come up with a humongous deep-learning neural net called AlphaFold that was trained to recognize and analyze hundreds of thousands of known protein molecules.  The bottom line here is that when it is given the stretched out structure of the thousands of hooked up atoms, it is able to ‘very quickly’ figure out how the stretched out version folds into a very specific minimum energy form with various sticky-out parts, dents, and deep holes that make it in/compatible with certain other bio-molecular structures in a critter, plant, or organic broth. (more here)

To give you an idea of the breakthrough, in the old days (i.e. yesterday) our fastest computers would wrestle with a given stretchy structure for months or years looking for the absolute minimum energy configuration.  (Each configuration requires the computation of millions of unimaginably complex electric field shapes from the physical position of a single feasible configuration of atoms that is allowed by the physics of our universe.)  Today AlphaFold has reduced that time ranging from a few hours to a few days.  This opens up whole new worlds of bio-molecular design for all kinds of new medicines, energy conversion bio-molecules, foods, materials, … .

And to show how technology is accelerating, there is an even faster algorithm working on a recurrent geometrical network (RGN) that promises to be “a million times faster” than AlphaFold, able to solve the folding problem in seconds.  And as all this work is being published, a hundred entrepreneurial efforts will launch, not only to implement RGN based folding tools, but also use them to solve important problems to provide humankind with better healthcare, cleaner environments, cheaper energy, and new foods – all affordable like never before.

There is a lot more to be said about this breakthrough – e.g. development of an entirely new type of bio-computer that is faster and more energy efficient than today’s von Neumann silicon-based computers.  And perhaps the intelligent machine that achieves Singularity peerage with humans will be an auto-configuring bio-computer.  Now ain’t minimally regulated and taxed capitalism wonderful?

SETI’s Copernican Que (updated 22feb20)

“Where are they?”, Enrico Fermi

George Rebane

Since my previous foray into Fermi’s famous query, I have had occasion to reconsider the numbers that I generated when first applying copernican arguments to the sound of silence experienced by the various Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence efforts that started about the middle of the last century.  My conclusion was that, the albeit the dismal results I introduced on my blog (here) to explain away the SETI experience, these were still too hopeful.  This work definitely made me a graciously tolerated philistine among the dedicated throngs searching the heavens for evidence of ETI.  Unfortunately, what I present in the sequel will only reinforce my reprobate status.

As a result of that first investigation I was nevertheless fortunate and honored to be invited to join the informal group of SETI researchers by Dr Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center at UC Berkeley.  Becoming more familiar with some of the ongoing efforts and literature generated by the hard-working stalwarts of that international cohort of professional astronomers, cosmologists, astro-physicists, …, I was motivated to return to the drawing board for another look at how we may explain the lack of success from so many ‘eyes’ pointed at the heavens for so many years, all collecting reams of data comprising mostly of inter-galactic and inter-stellar noise layered on the ubiquitous hiss of the cosmologic background, always there to remind us of our origins.  And all this from a galaxy that has spawned hundreds of millions of ETI civilizations and, most likely by far, is still teeming with most of these.  So why have we had no contact with them?  This is the perplexing Fermi Paradox.

To answer that question, support for a copernican perspective and approach to SETI were presented in ‘A copernican answers Fermi’.  (For other answers, read this.)  To review some of the salient factors, we again consider that we live in an 13.5G year-old galaxy that formed along with billions of others in that epoch after the Big Bang of 13.8G years ago.  The Milky Way (MW), containing north of 200 billion star systems, gave birth to our sun and its orbiting planets about 5G years ago.  Today, by all counts, we see that the MW is an ordinary galaxy like billions of others, and our sun is a very ordinary G-type main-sequence (G2V) garden variety star.  And its inventory of planets is of the type and with orbits replicated by eleven billion more exoplanets throughout the MW and countless other galaxies.  In short, there is no a priori reason to believe that we are anything special in the universal scheme of things – ergo the copernican perspective.

Interested readers can download a copy of the follow-on study here - Download TN2002-1v200221 .

Consciousness and uploading your mind

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 December 2019.]

OK, let’s try something different this week.  This being the Christmas season and all, it’s time to think about our souls and eternal life.  Well, on second thought, maybe we should back off on all that divisive spiritual stuff, and just take the secular humanist look at immortality which, since the sci-fi novels of the 1950s, has focused on ‘uploading’ the contents of your brain into some super-computer, or a phantasmagorical robot, or cyborg which then in principle can live forever.

Toward the Singularity via super-intelligence

George Rebane

Knowing my relationship with Dr Judea Pearl, fellow blogger Russ Steele sent me a link to a recent interview (here) on AI with Judea.  Longtime RR readers recall pieces citing my friend, colleague, and mentor Judea Pearl as the inventor of Bayes and causal nets, and one of the true pioneers of AI and winner of the Turing Award (here and here).  I was privileged to be one of his very small group of doctoral students contributing to his research and the writing of his landmark Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (1988) introducing Bayes nets for which I was able to contribute my research in machine learning that wound up in what is known as the Rebane-Pearl algorithm (here and here).

Early on (late 1980s) our little group began to understand that the alternative ‘causal net’ that was also used in the literature for Bayes nets may not be appropriate.  To be frank, we were somewhat guilty of introducing that appellation ourselves before we recognized that our enthusiastic reach exceeded our grasp of causality as provided by our research.  In our paper on the Rebane-Pearl algorithm I introduced the concept of a ‘causal basin’ and showed (in my hand-drawn figure which somehow made it into the paper and Judea’s book) how the algo could take a dataset and divide it into several causal basins.  I recall having long discussions with Judea on the relationship of probabilistic inference and ‘true causality’ as we humans ascribe to the goings on in our environment.

A decade earlier Judea and I spent time during our family social get-togethers ensconcing ourselves with a bottle of wine to speculate on the future of intelligent machines and what computational, perceptual, and cognitive requirements they would need to achieve peerage with humans.  Over such discussions it became clear to both of us that machines would have to include the ability to handle the subjunctive and counter-factual ‘thoughts’, in addition being able to reason probabilistically a la Bayes nets.  It was Judea who came upon the idea that causality was a distinct cognitive beast that could not be tamed and understood through mere extensions of Bayes nets – a whole new calculus would be required.

Where Are They Indeed?

George Rebane

There are about 2,500 galaxies (not stars) in the picture below – each of even the smallest dots is a galaxy.  Each such galaxy has about 300 billion stars, and each star has at least five planets.  Today we can see over 2,000,000,000,000 = 2 trillion such galaxies.  Fainter galaxies exist but don’t show in such photos.  This means that we can visualize only a part of our universe which itself contains 3x10^23 (a 3 with 23 zeros following it) planets.  Of these, at least 1% are in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone from their sun.  This suggests that there are about 3x10^21 planets that could potentially have an environment that supports life as we know it. (There are undoubtedly other forms of life about which we are ignorant.)  In our own galaxy there are about 11 billion of such planets.

To further illustrate the vastness of our visible universe, consider that the above photo is a magnification of what our telescopes see when looking at a part of the entire sky surrounding Earth that is less than 1/33 of (or more than 33 times smaller than) the size of the period at the end of this sentence when held out at your arm’s length.  This means if you printed a page with a period (from Times New Roman size 12) on it, and made a hole with a very sharp needle through and exactly the size of the period, then holding it out at your arm’s length you would be able to ‘see’ over 84,000 galaxies through that pinprick, no matter in which direction you looked in the night sky.  Of course, your eye would have to have the magnifying power of a big telescope (like the Hubble) to resolve all those galaxies as shown in the above photo.  Perhaps this understanding would allow us to better contemplate the size of our visible universe and consider all the extra-terrestrial civilizations that have already existed, are now in existence, and will come to be in the interminable future.

The background to this meditation was posted as ‘A copernican answers Fermi’, and later I’ll have more to say about the portents of all this. (more here)

Demise of Capitalism?

George Rebane

The world’s population is stabilizing, if not starting to ‘stagnate’, and will soon start declining.  This argument and its impacts on humanity are presented in two newly published books – The Human Tide: How Populaton Shaped the Modern World (2019) by Paul Morland, and Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.  As a result, capitalism as we know it will disappear explains Zachart Karabell who reviews the books in the Sep/Oct issue of Foreign Affairs – ‘The Population Bust – Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It’.

The crux of that striking conclusion rests on the theory that capitalism remains viable only in an environment of eternal growth; once growth stops or reverses, then capitalism, as we know it, will collapse.  “If global population stops expanding and then contracts, capitalism - a system implicitly predicated on ever-burgeoning numbers of people - will likely not be able to thrive in its current form.”  But I have no idea where this ominous ‘predicate’ comes from.

Capitalism is fundamentally based on human nature organizing economies in an environment of open markets in which prices effectively communicate the supply and demand for goods and services.  Therefore, if demand slows down and then contracts, so long as open markets are allowed to operate, capitalists will adjust their enterprises accordingly.  The only aspect of such a contraction of available services and things for sale is its impact on the value of money. 

The value of any given supply of money depends on the amount of available goods and services it can command in transactions.  Its value, as reflected in open market discount (i.e. interest) rates will track the size of the economies in which it is used as the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value.  For example, the value of a lot of fiat dollars will decline if there is less to buy or build with them.  But again, such values will adjust accordingly as central banks ply their wily ways of taking money out of and injecting it into economies.  Granted, if human perceptions about markets change rapidly, then there will be financial shocks as the value of monies held by governments and the public also changes rapidly – after all, we must always remember that fiat money by its very nature is strongly faith-based.

So here we are in the pre-Singularity years as birth rates all over the world are dropping and populations are aging (older folks don’t consume as much as younger ones).  Advances in healthcare and productivity promoted through capitalism are making poorer countries richer, and encourage the richer countries to maintain growth through immigration. The current world population of approximately 7.6B will probably not exceed 10B by mid-century before it starts pulling back.  And given the impact of accelerating technology on systemic unemployment and income inequality, global population pullback is not something to be feared, but to be managed through judicious wealth distribution so as to maintain civil societies that continue to provide an increasing quality of life.  And once the Singularity does occur, all bets are off, as most then alive scramble to become trans-humans (q.v.).  For an entertaining and stimulating treatment of such a plausible future, I recommend Childhood’s End (1953) by A.C Clarke.

Toward our transhuman future

George Rebane

Elon ‘I’ll try anything new’ Musk just announced a new development in brain-computer communications that was made at Neuralink, his recent investment in man-machine symbiosis.  Yes, it will take a while before we can command Alexa or Siri with our thoughts and have the results delivered as directly perceived knowledge/data.  But Neuralink’s approach (shown below) is the first that will connect 1000+ wire threads directly to neurons in your brainbone and record the time-series signal of their activity (i.e. firings).  Algos will be developed to decode those firing patterns into something understandable, and a computer connected to anything from prosthetics to the Internet will do the rest. (more here and here)

A handful of other companies are working on similar interface technologies, and Musk blowing his trumpet is guaranteed to have the others put their pedals to the metal.  In these pre-Singularity years it is the significant baby steps like this that tend to set off an avalanche of development.  For years we have talked about the Singularity and the requirement for H. Sapiens to climb aboard once that event occurs (as shown in the figure).  That climbing aboard the transhuman express will be made much more facile if we have some of the required tools developed and already in use.  Congratulations to the Neuralink team and Elon Musk.

Scattershots – 4feb19 (updated 7feb19)

George Rebane

My heart goes out to our cartoonist Bob Crabb in his kerfuffle with a (fellow?) progressive lady who has accused him of dissing the transgender community with one of his offerings. (more here)  I know Bob, and he would be the last on the planet (if not Nevada County) to ever knowingly hurt the feelings of a class of people who are indelibly part and parcel of the same social orientation as is he.  He has now walked into the expanding "minefield" of progressive thought and talk policing, a prominent aspect of revolutionary political correctness that has become so virulent in limiting free speech that it has predictably started eating its own.  Self-consuming politically correct speech became wholesale in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, and served as inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, and, of course, today also for our own resurgent Left.  After such verbal assault, I hope that Bob doesn’t pull in the horns too far on his wit and wisdom.

Take a look at the kinesiology and kinetics of robots as being developed by companies like Boston Dynamics (here).  In these pre-Singularity years this is only one aspect of how human abilities are being matched and superseded by advancing technology.  Such advancement explains the divergence between the price of labor and productivity that still continues to puzzle some and enrage others.  In the US economy, labor and productivity tracked each other almost perfectly until the early 1970s.  At that point productivity maintained its growth trend, but the price of labor almost leveled off and has been increasing at a very modest rate since then.  The 1970 date is significant in that it coincides with the milestone of the introduction of commercially successful minicomputers into our economy – e.g. Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8.  (I immediately bought one for my R&D company, and quickly upgraded it for a PDP-11 when that became available.)  With such computing power available to ‘everyone’, US industry was off to the races, and the increases in productivity were now due mostly to invested capital instead of labor.  Ever since then, labor in the aggregate has strained in the competition to provide value in the workplace.  From my perch, this divergence was easy to predict and has been preached here for years under the larger category of systemic unemployment (see also John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man).

Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has always come across to me and mine as our local good-hearted and well-intentioned walking monument to intellectual innocence.  In his 2feb19 column ‘Will House shirk duty to initiate impeachment?’ he attempts to make another case for ‘indict first, find evidence later’, which is now the established mode of progressive jurisprudence practiced in government, entertainment, and by the leftwing commentariat.

Millennials against capitalism.  Author Malcolm Harris in Vox – ‘Why Millennials are burned out. Capitalism’ - is the latest to write about the millennial generation and their travails in adjusting to earth.  My basketball coach back in Indiana told his charges about how performance and risk fly in tight formation.  His wisdom was corroborated by years at university and later in business where I confirmed that the greatest achievement, and most certainly every human advancement, is always brought about at the ‘edge of the envelope’ where stability is marginal and risk is highest.  This ‘law’ cuts across ALL endeavors, be they in engineering, finance, sports, or the arts.  Most of those who paid attention came to know this through schooling in the academy and/or of the hard knocks variety.  However, it is clear that this is another wisdom of the ages that is absent from today’s snowflake curricula.  Harris, himself a Millennial, explains why Marxism appeals to this generation, and how they see capitalism exploiting labor, just as Herr Karl said it would.

[5feb19 update]  “This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?” Andrew Cuomo.  I love it when every once in a while a progressive experiences a smiphany (a smidgen of epiphany) about the way real humans behave.  We recall that the Left has always maintained that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior, and the Laffer Curve, well, it’s just worth a laugh.  Now with NY’s very high tax rates combined with Trump’s tax cuts, the state’s rich have been doing the Sayonara Samba to greener pastures, leaving the state’s coffers $2.3B in the red.  The Empire State progressives are asking each other ‘Whoulda thought?!’  But my bet is that even with his t!t in a wringer, Cuomo has learned nothing that will stick with him for more than a week.  And, of course, the remainder of the nation’s Left will pay it no mind – the mantra ‘To increase govt revenues, just raise taxes’ is alive and well. (more here)

[7feb19 update]  We’ve all heard that gold is ‘an ancient relic’ from government elites whose job is to convince to value fiat money über alles.  Governments themselves, of course, know better and value gold as the mother’s milk that really nourishes and upholds the function of dollars to drachmas to serve as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value.  This truth was again underlined with Russia’s announcement that recent confirmation of vast amounts of gold under Siberia will make its currency bulletproof against sanctions imposed by the west.  And they are right, it will because everyone really wants to know that those little pieces of paper and computer bits are really backed by something that everyone agrees has value, no matter how ancient.  (more here)

The Olympus of hubris. Former President Obama has continued to take credit for today’s booming economy, you know, the one that took off a bit after President Trump had a go at it (more here).  But on second thought ol’ Barry may have something there.  It took some mighty dedicated mismanagement to keep America’s stellar economy hobbled to less than 2% growth for all those years.  Obama did indeed keep our economic pressure cooker plugged up until someone, anyone, would come along who did not want to fundamentally transform America.  So maybe he can take some credit for finally getting out of the way, and letting good times return again.  (Of course, the Dems have their Plan B – aka the Green New Deal - ready to go to really sink the country.)

Fearful Writing

“We write at root to make sense of life. And what do we seek to understand more than anything? Our deepest fears.”  Josh Weil

George Rebane

Union publisher Don Rogers’ Friday essay – ‘Write where you fear the most’ – was an unexpected helping of food for thought this morning.  Mr Rogers takes us through a bit of personal history about his education and membership in the guild of wordsmiths, as he promotes our attendance at the Sierra Writers Conference in January at which “top fiction author” Josh Weil of Nevada City will be the keynote speaker.  Weil’s dictum to the rest of us is “Write what scares you.  If what you are writing doesn’t scare you, you probably shouldn’t write it.”

Now Don Rogers reads a lot of books that don’t make it onto my reading list, simply because time is limited and we come at life from different angles.  But his dissertation, with references to multiple authors (mostly unknown to me) and famous personages, on the meta-motivations for good writing struck a chord which I’ll let vibrate a bit in what follows.  I recommend you read Rogers to see what, if anything, starts vibrating in you.

Weil’s observations and advice struck my motivation, for these years of scribbling on RR, right between the eyes – ‘Observations and Interpretations of Events from the Last Great Century of Man’.  My technical training and work in machine intelligence, combined with the experiences in man’s greatest war and its aftermath, has focused my attention on the Singularity and humanity’s race, during these pre-Singularity years of accelerating technology, between proponents of a global tyranny and a stable Westphalian order in which most people will enjoy liberty and their own pursuits of happiness.  Once the Singularity is ensconced, all bets are off – that’s why it’s called a singularity.  And therein lie the things that scare me.

Scattershots – 22nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

Forcible female mutilation is again legal in America.  “A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the U.S. law banning female genital mutilation was unconstitutional and dismissed charges against several doctors in Michigan who carried out the procedure on underage girls as part Muslim sect’s religious practice. … U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that Congress had no authority to enact a law that criminalizes female genital mutilation (FGM). “As despicable as [FGM] may be… [Congress] overstepped its bounds” by banning the procedure, the judge said.” (more here)

Two things – imagine, if let stand, the precedence this ruling sets for all kinds of primitive practices if they are claimed in the name of this or that religious practice (and focus on the ‘forcible’ part); also, did anyone notice that it was FN that broke this news, while it was totally eschewed by the likes of lamestream’s MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, … .  Begrudgingly, 24 hrs late, leftwing outlets such the NYT started reporting on it.  But the news doesn’t fit the Left’s pro-Muslim narrative even though they should all be enraged at the anti-woman implications of this barbarous practice.  It’s tough making such choices when you have a dysfunctional ideology that you must then promote with an incoherent narrative.

Women in world class chess are not very prominent.  Today the unequal and asymmetric roles of women are much in the news and an entire politically correct protocol has emerged about how we should think about women viz men, and how we should speak about such things.  The ongoing world chess championship match between reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana (here) is renewing interest in the questions of ‘where are the women, and why aren’t they represented in such matches?’  Well, there are all kinds of answers.  An interesting one is presented by Alisha Mathewson-Grand who argues (here) that women’s chess needs more coverage than current interest warrants, and that they are not as good as men because an insufficient number of them play the game to create enough right-tail outliers in the game’s skill distribution (admittedly tech talk).  My view is that instead of creating some artificial demand for women chess players, women should just play the men in normal tournaments and beat them to generate broader female interest in the game.  Overall, I think this gender stuff in chess is a non-issue, a nothing-burger if you will.  (I wonder how a transgender woman champion will be viewed by the politically correct population.)

Man vs Machine.  My real interest in human championship chess actually resides in a new class of interests for me.  How should we humans think of continuing to compete in activities in which our abilities are clearly outclassed by machines.  Ever since Kasparov was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, the best chess players on this planet are no longer humans.  Continuing matches like the current Carlsen/Carauna contest are strictly Junior Varsity.  No human chess master today would take the time and make the effort to be publicly humiliated by a better chess-playing machine.  The same dethronement happened recently in the even more complex game of Go.  It all reminds us again of the lore of John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man (here and here), that introduced America to the notion early in the industrial age that bit by piece man would be bettered by machines as time went on.  Is our (waning?) interest in human world chess championships a harbinger of how pre-Singularity humans will continue to compliment themselves in various endeavors in which they have been bettered?  And will they persist in these self-adulatory activities as the daily advance of technology outdoes them in skill after skill that require advanced cognition, sensing, dexterity, speed, and strength?  Can we also start augmenting our own bodies in these pre-Singularity years (jumping the gun in becoming trans-humans) with advanced embedded processing, memory, connectivity, prosthetics for sensing, mobility, and manipulanda, …?

Border security and judicial bias political?  That's what the media claims that President Trump brought up politics in his Thanksgiving calls to our troops.  First, I don't think so.  Border security is a non-partisan issue that the anti-American Left has made political in its opposition.  Judicial bias in the US is blatant and unabashed, and it has been so deemed by all sides in their turn.  Chief Justice Roberts spoke out of the wrong end when he created the latest batch of fake news by bloviating that America's judges, once empaneled, are hardworking, unbiased jurists.  Nothing could be further from the truth, else neither side would so readily sacrifice honesty and honor in opposing the other side's picks.  The president was on the mark and correct in pointing these out during his calls; and BTW, he's their CIC and gets to do that all day long if he wants to.  The last thing he should be guided by is the hate-Trump sentiments of his political enemies.

[26nov18 update]  Why Nevada County indeed?  Russ Steele, NC native and RR contributor, writes a letter to The Union in today’s edition that nails the particulars behind that question.  Here it is in its entirety –

Erika Kosina wrote in Digital disruption: Tech, entrepreneurial ecosystem paves way for growth, "All we need to do is connect the dots."

Yes, let's connect the dots, all the dots.

Dot #1: Lack of affordable housing for young families fleeing urban blight. According to Joel Kotkin, millennials with family are looking for single family homes with a safe yard for their children.

Dot #2: Young families with children are looking for communities with quality schools. Nevada County has the Ghidotti Early College High School with a small number of students, but the recent Common Core testing indicates many Nevada County Schools would not make the competitive cut.

Dot #3: The work-at-home population needs to have high-speed internet access, and broadband in Nevada County has some severe limitations.

Dot #4: The target populations are prolific smartphone users and expect robust cell phone coverage, which can be a challenge in Nevada County.

Given the lack of affordable single-family homes with a yard, a high-speed broadband connection, with robust cell phone service, all near top-rated schools, why would a young family choose to move to Nevada County, when there are more competitive options in other states?

‘A copernican answers Fermi’ (updated 21nov18)

“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.