Rebane's Ruminations

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.

‘Our Best Days Lie Ahead’

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 December 2014.]

‘Our Best Days Lie Ahead.’  How many times have we heard some politician or public figure repeat those words into a microphone while looking at a sea of bright-eyed upturned faces?  This claim is almost never backed up with anything but unwarranted hope that the future will be a reprise of the longed for yesteryear.  And the speaker always leaves us with a feeling that such a future is inevitable, regardless of how we educate, employ, or allow ourselves to be governed (more here). 

Looking back at the last two centuries, one can almost make the case for such ‘best days’.  Two hundred years ago the industrial revolution was in full swing in Europe and America.  New ways of doing things were constantly being invented, and technology had finally been set free from the scientist’s laboratory to firmly settle in the arena of business and enterprise.  Capital began to displace labor, and new wealth began to be generated, as opposed to old wealth being inherited.

Scattershots – 1dec14 (updated 3dec14)

George Rebane

‘Why We Needn’t Fear the Machines’ is a feel-good piece by science writer Christopher Mims in 1dec14 WSJ.  I have no idea what the man’s educational credentials are, but from his article it is safe to say they are not much (his Facebook page omits his education).  Mims' piece looks like a promo for the current movie ‘Imitation Game’ about computer pioneer Alan Turing.  In the piece he makes some wild claims about what Turing taught and thought, while completely missing what is going on in the field of computer science.

His flagship proposition, what he calls “a basic truth”, is that “the machines we create are not, indeed cannot be, one-for-one replacements for humans”.  In a sense that he no doubt misses, machines have already become one-for-many replacements for humans in more fields than we can count.

But where he really blows a tire is by claiming that Turing himself gave rise to the notion that machines “indeed cannot be” replacements for humans.  Turing made no such claim, and Mims seems to confirm his claim by having interviewed “mathematicians, philosophers, physicists, and even neuroscientists”.   Somehow computer scientists were not worthy to be included in the list.  Mims also considers that the only kind of computers that man is limited to is the so-called ‘Turing Machine’ which can functionally mimic almost all the computers that now exist.  But for some reason the notion of accelerating technology is totally missed, Mims’ concept of the art of the possible is limited to the current state of our knowledge frozen in time (without even so much as look back at how rapidly we have arrived here).

I have no idea what is the purpose of this one-sided and flawed piece, and why the WSJ decided to include it.  The layman will walk away from it with the comfort that, as a human worker, he is safe; no machine will be able to take his job.  He should only talk to the millions already so displaced.

ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, it “controls the root zone of domain names and addresses on the Internet.”  This has been a non-profit American enterprise located in California that has done a wonderful job of managing the Internet ever since America invented that technology.  Now the America Last crowd in Washington, led by Team Obama, is planning next year to give up American control that has kept the Internet facile and free of politics.  Once we give it up, ICANN will come under international control with its board members coming from some of the biggest autocracies on earth.  Even Bill Clinton opposed Obama when the messiah introduced that as his latest bad idea (where does he get that garbage for public policy, can we blame it all on Valerie Jarrett?).  Clinton said, “A lot of people who have been trying to take this authority away from the US want to do it for the sole purpose of cracking down on internet freedom.”

A Republican Congress should do all that it can to put a stop to this travesty.  As Gordon Crovitz writes in ‘Halfway to Wrecking Internet Freedom’, “The Obama administration is so uncomfortable with Ametrican exceptionalism that it violated the cardinal rule of good government: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

[3dec14 update]  The other day I was perusing RR comments over the past years, and was struck by how frequently and vehemently our leftwing readers continued to expound their views and analyses concluding the imminent demise and/or shrinking into insignificance of the Republican Party.  As with the climateers, they seem to have become quite sanguine about the passing reality since issuing those dire predictions.  Today, in addition to blithely ignoring their manifest and manifold errors, they also seem to overlook what such ‘Wrong Way Corrigan’ prognostications indicate about their understanding of the national political scene, its history and dynamics.  Nevertheless, the best policy, it seems, is to just soldier on unphased, letting bygones be bygones, and remaining as certain as ever about their capabilities in the arena.

ABCs of California Business (updated 27aug14)

George Rebane

With the new gas taxes staring us in the face after the new year, you just can’t say enough about the socialist mindset that is driving out California businesses, causing them to expand elsewhere, and convincing outsiders to not to start new enterprises here.  The only exceptions that the socialists can point to are businesses who must be close to their California customer base.  The big deception that these self-serving politicians push is on the very ‘peehpul’ of whom they claim to be defenders.

While attracting and importing thousands of illegals and people without marketable skills to pack their voter rolls, the regulations and fees Sacramento adds daily do nothing for wealth creation, and everything to keep increasing the state’s population of indigents and welfare recipients.  The numbers tell the story.  According to taxfoundation.org, California is 48th in the State Business Tax Index, and at 11.2% has the 4th highest burden of state and local taxes.(more here, here, and here)

Today as the middle class depopulates the golden state, we will wind up with the double humped distribution on the wealth scale that is so common in third world countries with massive unemployment.  And given the leftwing leeches in the form of rent-seeking NGOs, the countryside is covered with propaganda urging us to work together with Sacramento to make California ‘green’ again – and that ain’t the kind of green that creates the kind of green that makes a difference.  Yes, rapidly becoming an old saw (here), but today truer than ever - Anywhere But California.

[25aug14 update]  The ‘What Recovery?’ t-shirts worn by the unemployed protesters at the just concluded central bankers’ big do at Jackson Hole underline what RR has been telling its readers for some years – we are in Depression2.  There is yet no recovery by any acceptable definition of the term.  (Please review the more arcane details in 'The Recovery Rigmarole'.)   A reader sent me the following graphic by Sentier Research that details how the country has been doing in the net worth department over the recent years.  Here’s what more of Depression2 data looks like.

All this makes mind boggling the legislation dished out by the double dummies in Sacramento to Californians who are doing their best to stay put and work to pull the state out of its much denied nose dive.

[26aug14 update]  Check out the new RoboBrain project of the National Robotics Initiative sponsored by the feds and major corporations.  This involves the assembly of a vast online knowledge base of things ranging from common sense to sophisticated probabilistic reasoning, all connected to the everyday life of humans.  It will be assembled in a format that is accessible to individual robots serving in various jobs in the home, office, and, more importantly, in service jobs like in restaurants and store clerks.

I include this item here because we are talking about the economy, businesses, and jobs.  It appears that the Japanese paradigm for robot assistants is gaining traction.  Instead of developing only new robotics systems to make things and perform tasks, robots that have the form factor of humans will make up one echelon of human replacements.  It is these robots that have a free form interaction with humans in their existing environment that will need to access RoboBrain in order to function usefully.

The growing impact of all this on systemic unemployment should be obvious to educators, politicians, and policy makers.  But it isn’t.

[27aug14 update] Depression2 for the record.  Today we learn from filed court documents that both ex-Fed chair Bernanke and ex-SecTreas Geithner both acknowledge that the financial meltdown that started this depression was historically the worst.  And we do have to recall that this was again an entirely government induced meltdown, as was the one that made the 1929 market crash into Depression1.  Here is a quote from the 27aug14 WSJ report on the matter.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a prominent student of the Great Depression, contends that the 2008 financial crisis was actually worse than its 1930s counterpart.

Mr. Bernanke is quoted making the statement in a document filed on Aug. 22 with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims as part of a lawsuit linked to the 2008 government bailout of insurance giant American International Group  Inc.

“September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,” Mr. Bernanke is quoted as saying in the document filed with the court. Of the 13 “most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is quoted in the document offering a similarly apocalyptic assessment. From Sept. 6 through Sept. 22, the economy was essentially “in free fall,” he said.

Ruminations – 9aug14 (updated)

George Rebane

IBM’s new NeuroSynaptic chip was recently announced and is making a big PR splash in the print and online media (more here and here).  The chip’s processing power is based on the parallel implementation of essentially identical ‘neuronal’ structures that mimic major sections of the brain’s neocortex.  We reported on one such promising structure – hierarchical temporal memory - developed some years back by Jeff Hawkins (On Intelligence).  The IBM chip achieves higher transistor density levels, but most remarkably has an architecture that consumes miniscule power compared to standard chips with equal numbers of transistors.  The claim for the NeuroSynaptic chip is that we are now a skosh or two away from truly intelligent machines in the form factor of a human brain that don't require a dedicated utility to supply its electricity.  I will get real excited when IBM starts reporting on how easily a brain from such a chipset can learn to do everyday things in the real world.  

Common Core is the latest jumbo sized Community Kool-aid served in Nevada County.  Opening this morning's (9aug14) Union, we see multiple articles (here and here) and commentaries (here) on the joys of the new federal education standards.  RR readers long ago learned how the heavy hand of federal education funding programs now mandate the adoption of this fast track to a deeper national educational deficit.  The naifs still claim that CC is the best thing since sliced bread for our kids who will now learn less at a slower rate, and be forced into college catch-up courses when they leave high school.  The remediation of CC kids will be required for many majors before they can start the prescribed four-year course of study.  But hey, education will then be much more expensive, employing additional legions of registered Democrats, who will take more classroom time to teach the little darlins to think correct thoughts.  All of it part and parcel of the ongoing fundamental transformation.  (For more, search RR for ‘Common Core’)

Data scientists are highly paid and in short supply.  Data scientist is the new label for a class of STEM workers who are skilled in handling massive databases, searching them for patterns, and developing algorithms to use such pattern data to generate information that is used for making decisions in all kinds of fields from medicine, through energy production, to investing and finance.  We learn that STEM degrees in data intensive fields of science and engineering can get a twenty-something upwards of $300K a year for openers.  (more here)

Over the recent months (years?) there has been much discussion here (search RR for ‘STEM’) about the availability of STEM workers, the number of STEM jobs, importing STEM workers, and so on.  According to my lights,  STEM fields and skill sets are now so numerous and diverse that not all areas are equally likely to ‘guarantee’ employment to the graduate.  It pays to do some considerable research and get in on the ground floor in a promising STEM field during school.  And when in doubt, take lots of courses in applied math, physics, algorithmics (computer science), and data handling.

Romney's return in 2016.  I felt kinda lonely coming to the conclucion that Mitt might not be a bad candidate again in 2016 given the absolute disaster that Barack Hussein Obama has made of the Office of the President.  I have reported the recent writings of American pundits on that possibility.  Now we are starting to hear people overseas looking back at the big mistake our electorate made (again) in 2012.  Here is an interesting report from a very popular British outlet.

Cracking the Code

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 March 13, 2014.]

It’s TechTest season again.  On April 5th some of Nevada County’s brightest students heading for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math or STEM careers will be competing in a grueling four-hour merit scholarship exam that has become a springtime rite of passage for our high school juniors and seniors.  The test is sponsored by the Sierra Economics and Science Foundation with scholarship contributions coming from a variety of local individuals and organizations.  If you know of a young person who should compete with the elite this year, please contact Mr John McDaniel at Nevada Union High School where the test will be given.

This brings me to the topic of how education is changing to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s job markets.  In these commentaries I have talked about the related topics of widespread innumeracy and the growth of systemic unemployment in these pre-Singularity years, when accelerating technology is producing machines that will soon be smarter than humans.

Most economists and students of the human condition agree that technical literacy of workers will be the common denominator in all wealth creating jobs.  Even if you are not a STEM worker, you will be required to understand enough about STEM subjects in order to work with or manage such people.  The fundamental requirement and stepping stone to that ability is being numerate, and the most important aspect of numeracy is the ability to think logically and algorithmically – to be able to understand systematic processes and conceive of reliable procedures that accomplish a given goal.

It turns out that to acquire this ability, learning to program computers to various levels is the most effective and useful skill.  Universities, public schools, and private enterprises have launched a two-pronged approach to teach how to write computer code, and about what computer programming entails, especially as it used on the internet and working with large databases, or simply ‘big data’.

More and more kids in the early grades are being offered programming classes, workshops, and bootcamps to introduce them to basic concepts of creating programs that can display web pages and handle numbers.  Several easy to learn programming languages have been developed to allow students to write code, and then immediately see their work on the web.  In these environments young people enthusiastically embrace such challenges where they learn how the familiar world around them happens.

By the fifth grade 10-year-olds can enroll in formal courses offered by a variety of organizations that teach web programming.  And this activity is not only a draw for STEM oriented students.  The fundamental principle at work here is that “coding is important because it teaches a different way of thinking.  Programming teaches logic, higher-level math and learning concepts that make you smarter and useful no matter what.” (more here)  In short, understanding programming basics should be an arrow in all of our quivers.  It then follows that concerned parents should find out whether their children go to a school that offers programming classes?

These same learning concepts are being pursued by adults.  Workers from diverse fields are signing up for web and data programming classes, paying over $10,000 for courses lasting several weeks.  Showing such STEM capabilities on their resumes makes them very desirable to a variety of employers, besides giving credence that such workers can reason and think logically.

Finally, today mid- and top-level managers are taking programming courses designed for them. And this not for the purpose of their being able to create a website, but to be able to manage information technology workers and projects, because they need to know what is involved in such undertakings.

So we should all take a moment to consider what will be required of us to understand today’s world, to speak about it reasonably, and perhaps to even contribute to the building of a better tomorrow.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on NCTV and georgerebane.com 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.

The Liberal Mind – Work and Workers (updated 11feb14)

George Rebane

Two major factors are now in the forefront of impending social upheavals in America – the growing economic destruction wrought by Obamacare and the accelerating surge of systemic unemployment.  And there is little help on the way because the polarized sides have no middle ground in which to search for solutions.  To even define a middle ground, each side would have to visibly give up their much publicized and long held principles and tenets which found their worldview.  And so we proceed apace to the precipice.

The collectivist contingents know well that large scale civil unrest is more likely with each announced executive order and bureaucratic regulatory diktat.  Preparations for such disorder have been well documented in these pages (more here and here).  To this we add today’s announcement that the idyllic mountain community of South Lake Tahoe has just received its war machine for the purpose of “saving lives”.  NPR (KXJZ) announced this morning the delivery of an almost new $600,000 MRAP fighting vehicle sporting a heavy weapons turret that is a gift to the community from DHS.  With one of these on their side, the authorities expect to snuff out any nascent popular uprising or resistance.  It’s your guess as to which lives will be ‘saved’ in such an encounter.

But that’s not the main point I want to cover here.  The continuing conundrum is the cognitive dissonance in the minds of collectivists when it comes to economics and human nature.  The collectivist believes that attendant costs do not affect the behavior of humans and businesses; that members of each category will behave unchanged as costs – be they taxes or wages – go up or down.  Therefore those considerations go by the board as the central planners fashion and implement public policies.

‘Humanity in Jeopardy’ (updated 29jan14)

George Rebane

I was going to report on the just released results from the Index of Economic Freedom that celebrates its 20th year.  In it the dire news is that the US has dropped out of the top 10 of the 186 countries rated – we are now 12th and continuing to go down (more here and here).  In that report I would lament the eternally dense liberal mind that in its collective application is doing everything possible to reduce our freedoms and ability to have an economy which supports broad-based generation of wealth.  I would also point out the undisputable global evidence that it is the poor that suffer most in countries lower in the IEF rankings.

But in this last great century of Man we have bigger problems facing us as a species huddled on the third planet revolving around a no count star in an unexceptional galaxy.  I was drawn to Max Tegmark’s report of the same title as reported in Ray Kurzweil’s newsletter (here).  Dr Tegmark of MIT is a physicist who, I was advised by a reader, just published Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2013), offering a new theory on the sum and substance of our cosmos.  But as we learn from his 13jan14 report, he wants to alert us to a much larger and proximate concern - our ignorance of and inattention to the impending Singularity.  (Regular RR readers should be very familiar with the topic featured in the Singularity Signposts section.)

In the developed world we are seeing the impact of the pre-Singularity effects every time we open a newspaper or turn on the news.  Our own country is following an increasingly insane path in how we amplify these effects through taking another turn down on our educational system (cf Common Core) – dumbth abounds and continues to spread – and tighten the screws on wealth creation through ever higher taxes and regulatory pile on.  The declared aim of our progressive elites is to herd more and more of these low-information, increasingly un/deremployed sheeple into the voting booths so as to enable them to accelerate the process.

Then what will WE do?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 20 December 2013.]

If you have been following the non-political side of the news recently, you no doubt have picked up on a hot topic getting hotter – robots and robotics.  In these commentaries we have covered the social impact of robots, and there is more to be said about that.  But today there is a new buzz on new robot developments and how robots have already become part of our everyday lives.  By robots we mean software, machines, and humanoid looking characters that have more than a little intelligence built into them, and that intelligence is growing daily at an astounding rate.

Great Divide – ‘America 3.0’

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good, will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.  From C.S. Lewis's essay anthology "God in the Dock" (1948)

George Rebane

The decentralized America of 2040 may be a country of 71 states with populations of 8 million and under.  This is the vision presented by James Bennett and Michael Lotus in their just released America 3.0.  (Thanks and H/T to RR reader who sent me a copy of this book.)  Their essay is based on the same reasons I have outlined over the years which call for a new structure for America’s governance.  Actually, it is not so much a new structure, but one more akin to what de Tocqueville observed during his visit here in the 1830s.

Bennett and Lotus acknowledge the deep ideological divisions that have arisen since the Great Society years, and see a transformation that seeks to retain America as a single sovereign nation-state that molds itself into regions of smaller states.  Each of these states will be more uniform in their political outlook, social philosophy, cultural values, and perhaps even ethnicities.  The fundamental truth that will out in such a reconfiguration is that people like to live among people who share their ideologies, cultural values, and mores.

The America of 2040 will come about through its successful transit of a number of financial crises that arise for all the reasons RR readers are familiar.  These give impetus for Congress to launch massive new legislative initiatives that reform national tax policy and the functions of the federal government.  Most of what the feds now do will be relegated back to the states.  The watchword for success will be the re-establishment of local control down to the city and county levels.