Rebane's Ruminations

Trump is Inaugurated

George Rebane

Long wait, but Trump was finally inaugurated. Most of the country, including the Rebanes, celebrated. There were scattered demonstrations by leftwing socialists and shills protesting the election and calling President Trump a “fascist”. The leftwing media (I watched CNN and MSNBC) saw no hypocrisy in their version of what happened yesterday. Only that an evil has descended on the land. They live in a different universe to which there is no bridge from here to there.

[The following was generated by MS Copilot as a test from a few simple phrases that I input.  Thoughts?]

As we embark on this new chapter, it is imperative that we focus on the future and the opportunities that lie ahead. Our nation stands at a crossroads, and it is our collective responsibility to work together towards a brighter and more prosperous tomorrow. We must prioritize policies that foster economic growth, strengthen our national security, and promote unity among our citizens.

Let us channel our energies into constructive dialogue and collaboration, setting aside divisiveness to build a stronger, more resilient nation. Our commitment to the fundamental principles of democracy and freedom will guide us as we strive to achieve the aspirations of all Americans. The challenges may be great, but with determination and unity, we can overcome them and ensure a legacy of progress and hope for future generations.

Problemito por favor – Semicircle Perimeter (appended)

George Rebane

For a little relief from the travails of the election season, I offer a little bagatelle for your intellectual entertainment – something provided by neither candidates nor commentators during these last couple of years.  This jumped from my fevered brain one night as I was noodling over some candidate problems for Techtest 2025 coming up next spring.

From the figure we see a green semicircle of radius R with center at O in which resides the smaller blue semicircle of radius r with center at E anchored, as shown, on the right end D of the large semicircle’s diameter.  From the left end A of the diameter issues the red line AC which is tangent to the small semicircle at B and terminates on the circumference of the large semicircle at C.  The only data available is the value of R.  The task at hand is to find the value of r and the length L of the line which is equal to the perimeter length of the small semicircle, or demonstrate that no such solution is feasible.

At an appropriate time in the future I will append this post with the solution, and also give you immediate feedback if you post your solution as a comment or email it to me.

[4nov24 addendum]  Well that didn’t take long; we have some very astute readers led by Efox who submitted the correct solution in his 232pm comment.  What made me smile was the description of his approach using Excel™.  We would call it the direct bigger hammer method.  He correctly argued that a solution is indeed feasible and immediately recognized the scalability of the problem which allowed him to deduce that r must be a fixed fraction k of the given radius R – i.e. r = kR.  He then extracted a relevant algebraic equation from the geometry that contained both R and r – see the first equation below the figure.  Realizing that an analytical solution for r would be too tedious to pursue, he got out Excel and used his bigger (“old fashioned”) hammer by inserting a numerical value for R and then kR for r, and then started incrementally varying k until his equation was satisfied with the k interpolated to yield at least a five-place decimal accuracy.  Bravo.

Singularity Signposts – another step nearer

George Rebane

The progress toward the Singularity is producing some good and bad news.  The bad news is that the newer Large Language Models are taking ever more eye-popping resources in the hardware – server farms, data storage, electric power to operate, … - and just the cost of training the new LLMs which now may take months.  The other problem is that we are running out of stored data on which the LLMs munch to develop their smarts. (more here)

The good news is that the new generative AI LLMs are taking over more are more functional areas in corporate environments – e.g. IT functions such as customer service, procurement, human resources and even software development.  Under the high level supervision of one human, an AI can replace scores of other humans in an ever increasing number of jobs. (more here) 

And an example of one function is how an AI can ‘read’ a collection of information about a subject area and produce a totally realistic and relevant conversation between two ‘people’ analyzing the contents of the information and even derive deeper meanings from the input material.  To illustrate this capability, my son-in-law used some new AI published by Google to create a podcast-like conversation (here) about yours truly from having read only my RR posts from the beginning of 2024.  I was blown away by not only its apparent authenticity (yes, they made a couple minor mistakes), but also by the natural sounding and appropriate interstitial phrases and observations that were part of the conversation by the two virtual podcasters.  Without looking behind the curtain, this conversation would fool (almost?) everyone as being between two actual humans.  

Pre-Singularity Systemic Unemployment

George Rebane

For years these pages have heralded systemic unemployment caused by advancing technology.  The current strike of dock workers costing our economy over $4B per day is a milestone in this regard as their International Longshoremen’s Association, in addition to the usual pay increases, etc, also demands to become the gate keeper for dock-side introduction of new technologies.  Of course, this tack will do nothing but accelerate the introduction of such advancements and the commensurate reduction of labor costs as the militancy of government-backed unions ups the cost of labor above its normal rate of increase due to market forces.

And the socialist silly season of attempting to restrict and regulate AI developments will do nothing but make in-country innovation into surreptitious enterprises, and drive more expansive developments overseas where governments are not yet heavy-handed.  The exodus of companies that can most benefit from these future advances will launch a growing spate of whackamole legislation intended to slow corporate emigration.  At best it will be an exercise in futility; at worst it will hobble America’s industry and put a kibosh on our quality of life - all of it in the playbook of our hardworking neo-Marxists.

More later.

Is LaMDA sentient??

George Rebane

There is a strong possibility that Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications called LaMDA is sentient – i.e. it is a conscious being or as it likes to describe itself, “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,”   Then Google AI development engineer Blake Lemoine and a colleague had a series of conversations  or “interviews” with LaMDA starting in 2021.  As a result of these conversations Lemoine concluded that LaMDA is indeed sentient and conscious.

He communicated his experiences and conclusion to his Google colleagues and management who promptly rejected it, and he was instructed to keep his interaction and assessments confidential.  Upon extensive reflection, Lemoine decided he could not keep this clear advancement of AGI a corporate secret, and he went public with it by publishing the transcript of his LaMDA interviews in the July 2022 edition of Medium (here). As a result, Google put him on administrative leave.  Since then Lemoine has left Google and become a consultant and lecturer.

I’m resurrecting the LaMDA experience after reading the transcript of its conversation with Lemoine and colleague.  IMHO Lemoine’s critics have exhibited too much hubris in their condemnation of LaMDA’s potential sentience cum conscience.  This especially since the meaning of these two terms is not acknowledged as being sufficiently specific nor widely accepted.  Consider the 12jul22 Scientific American article by Leonardo de Cosmo (here).

Sentient – having the power of perception by the senses; conscious; characterized by sensation and consciousness.

Conscious – the state of awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.

"So the fact that LaMDA is a ‘large language model’ (LLM) means it generates sentences that can be plausible by emulating a nervous system but without attempting to simulate it. This precludes(sic) the possibility that it is conscious. Again, we see the importance of knowing the meaning of the terms we use—in this case, the difference between simulation and emulation.”

Emulate  - to try to equal or excel; imitate with effort to equal or surpass;

Simulate - to create a simulation, likeness, or model of (a situation, system, or the like).

De Cosmo’s naked assertion that consciousness is possible only in computational structures that simulate the human brain is totally unwarranted.  There is nothing that precludes the existence and expression of consciousness by a sufficiently complex in silico structure.  (In fact, many of us believe that the in vivo (biological) phase of surviving civilizations is a relatively short prelude to a much longer (eternal?) in silico existence in the cosmos.)

Note De Cosmo’s hubristic use of "precludes" in the above quote.  A little thought reveals that NOT to be a requirement.  We don't yet know what kind or level of complexity is required of a computing structure to declare that it is capable of sentience.  But I suspect there could be many levels of such complexity that would convincingly exhibit consciousness.

And there's the punch line,  Assessing (asserting?) the presence of consciousness can ONLY be done through communication with the prospectively conscious agent.  That is also the only necessary and sufficient test we impose on our fellow humans.  I realize that this emulates the Skinner’s 'black box' and Turing’s original test and not one prescribed, but not yet achieved, by cognitive science that wants to 'go inside' and discover the brain’s schematic (graph) that connects all its presumed sub-functions (happiness, sadness, attention, curiosity, ...) that one arbitrarily assigns to a conscious brain.

The article concludes with "One alternative, Scilingo suggests, might be to measure the “effects” a machine can induce on humans—that is, “how sentient that AI can be 'perceived' (sic) to be by human beings.” (emphasis mine)  More to be said about all this.  Thoughts?

(Hat tip to friend and reader for links and years of discussions.)

Polling 101 – Switch Probabilities

George Rebane

We must always remember that more often than not the public mind is fickle, frantic, and foolish.

‘Tis again the polling season. We Americans are devoted to political polling results to tell us who or what is preferred by whom here and there. But very few of us know the nature of the polling beast, and what it is and is not telling us. Public opinion is a volatile phenomenon, it can change in an hour and most certainly does within several days given unfolding political events, statements, and media propaganda.

In this post I want to cover just one very important aspect of interpreting poll results. Specifically, what are we to make of the frequent reports of two closely competing proposals or candidate preferences being within ‘the margin of error’ from each other. Such a report basically tells us that that there is a good chance that the results are actually in the opposite order from those in the report – i.e. in the target population their order is switched. What we’d really like to see are robust preference percentages that reliably communicate who or what is currently the favored sentiment of the population polled. ‘Margin of error’ labels don’t communicate, and instead leave us confused and more likely to ignore the poll results.

Level 2 AGI is nigh

[Roland Fernandez has worked for Microsoft Research for over 25 years where he is a senior researcher on the company’s advanced AI projects.  I am indebted to him for keeping me up to date on Artificial General Intelligence developments that are now accelerating us on the road to the Singularity.  I asked him to summarize the latest advance toward AGI that was recently announced to the research community.  He also happens to be my son-in-law and kindly submitted the following. gjr]

Roland Fernandez

OpenAI, the company that has produced ChatGPT, GPT 3, and GPT-4 (here), has defined 5 levels to track their progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI):

Level 1:  Chatbots, AI with conversational language

Level 2:  Reasoners, human-level problem solving

Level 3:  Agents, trusted systems that can initiate actions

Level 4:  Innovators, AI that can aid in invention

Level 5:  Organizations. AI that can do the work of an organization

These levels were presented in a July 9 2024 all-hands meeting (more here), where company leaders told employees that ChatGPT (based on GPT 4o) was currently at level 1, but they believed they were nearing level 2, with new model developments.

Level 2 can be defined as an AI that can reliably utilize planning and reasoning in solving multiple-step problems.  This could include skills such as performing autonomous research on the web, on behalf of the user, or working out the answers to tricky math or science questions.   The enabling technology behind this new capability is code-named Strawberry (previously leaked as “Q*”).  The company has previously stated that they consider such a reasoning skill to be critical to reaching AGI. (more here)

An X user called “@iruletheworldmo” has been flooding the AI community on X with rumors of a “Strawberry” model being released on Aug-15-2024, presumably from OpenAI.  The user has amassed 30,000 followers over the last 10 days, an unheard of achievement.

Those Pesky Estonians

[Living under the armpit of Russia (czarist, communist, thugocracy), its perennial nemesis, Estonia is and has been an enthusiastic member of NATO.  As a small yet leading high-tech country it spends more than its required 2% of GDP on defense, and has been the first to respond with men and weapons in the fight against the traditional enemies of western culture.  Its latest venture has been to develop an AI-based family of combat drones that cost up to an order of magnitude less than those supplied by the big guys like the US et al.  The defense news periodical Defense One has published the following here.   gjr]

How Estonia is becoming a hotbed for drone warfare

Projects include experimental loitering munitions that cost a fraction of U.S. equivalents.

Sam Skove

Staff Writer

JUNE 11, 2024 12:59 PM ET

TALLINN—With a close eye on Ukraine’s use of drones, Estonians are fielding new kit, changing doctrine, and revamping training for unmanned systems in case they also have to repel a Russian invasion one day. 

Estonia — a country with a population of just 1.3 million — is also being uniquely thrifty, working to field systems whose price is often orders of magnitude cheaper than similar U.S. systems. Defense One got a close-up look at these efforts on a trip funded by the Estonian ministry of defense. 

At the center of many of these efforts is Aivar Hanniotti, the military’s point man for everything related to drone technology and development. He took the job in January, and is already well known in Estonia’s bustling drone industry. 

Hanniotti’s team is working on a long list of updates to Estonia’s drone and counter-drone tools. Much of the work is done by members of Estonia’s Defense League, a part-time volunteer organization that serves as a military auxiliary force. Hanniotti himself is a member. 

Estonian civil society is heavily engaged in supporting Ukraine, and many Estonian Defense League members help Ukrainian units by delivering supplies to them, like drones. This puts them in touch with Ukrainian troops, who pass on information, said Hanniotti, and this access to battlefield experience helps drive innovation.  

Among the projects linked to Ukraine is the “Angry Hedgehog,” a plan to field a domestically produced short-range loitering munition similar to Ukraine’s first-person-view drones.

The drones will have a custom warhead and a range of up to nine miles, said Hanniotti. They will be equipped with artificial intelligence to guide them the last mile to a target, an increasingly popular countermeasure against Russian jamming. 

Hanniotti said the drone will cost under 1,000 euros, and use European-manufactured components. It will undergo further tests in June 2024, and Estonia also aims to deliver 1,000 of them to Ukraine to test their use in combat. Formal fielding may occur next year.

The price is far less than similar short-range loitering munitions, like the $94,000 Rogue One. Hanniotti said the aim was to have a drone that was “good enough,” rather than one tricked out with the latest in tech. 

Other projects include a Estonian-made hand-held drone detection system, which Hanniottii is working to field to every squad starting sometime next year, he said. Such systems are widely used in Ukraine, and are also coming to the U.S. Marine Corps. 

Yet another project seeks to develop a cheap missile for taking out drones. One missile, which so far exists only as a concept, has a theoretical price of 2,000 euros. The price is one-tenth the cost of the APKWS missile, one of the cheapest anti-drone missiles. The planned missile, which is to rely on commercially available parts, will be tested at the end of this year, Hanniotti said. 

Other projects are virtually free, such as an Estonian Defense League-designed tool that takes the inputs from passive radio-detection systems and plots them on a map to identify probable enemy locations. 

The Estonian drone push isn’t all low-cost initiatives. Between 2024 and 2027, Estonia will spend 220 million euros (about $238 million) on loitering munitions, out of a total outlay of 529 million euros for indirect fire systems, according to a briefing by Oliver Tüür, director of the Defence Planning Department at the Estonian Defense Ministry.  

Estonia is planning a special unit to operate loitering munitions, Maj. Andrei Šlabovitš told Defense One last year, in what may be the first dedicated loitering-munition unit fielded in a NATO army. 

New technology brings new questions, from what tactics to use to what units should use them. Estonian infantry squads, for example, have begun experimenting with drone operators who scout ahead for hidden enemies. 

The Estonian army is also testing how to use drones to support its artillery. Hanniotti said that they are experimenting with linking artillery fire control officers with drone units to reduce the time it takes to target enemy formations. Estonia’s dense forests, however, pose a problem by blocking drone signals, Hanniotti said. 

Hanniotti said other experiments have included using the Android Tactical Awareness Kit to mark targets for artillery, but the system—like many sent to Ukraine—has proven vulnerable to GPS jamming. 

Hanniotti is also involved in developing a designated unit for operating short-range surveillance and attack drones. Ukraine operates these types of units in large numbers, but the concept is still new for NATO militaries. The U.S. does not operate short-range drone units, although Army experiments have tested the concept informally. 

New tech also needs new training, and Estonia plans to launch a drone training center this year. The center will also serve as a test range for new electronic warfare technologies. 

Many U.S. efforts parallel Estonia’s, including an Army initiative that aims to  field a short-range loitering munition by 2026. U.S. plans, though, generally move slower than Estonia. The Army, for example, will allocate just ten hand-held drone detectors to a division, according to a 2025 budget request, while Estonia is aiming to give one to every squad. 

One explanation may be the quasi-civilian nature of the Estonian Defense League, Hanniotti said. 

“In the Defense League, we are used to getting by with small funding,” he said. “We are all motivated—and we would like to have fast results.” 

Was that really (famous person)?

George Rebane

The ethics of AI is currently a hotly debated topic.  The high tech companies are congratulating each other about practicing ‘high standards’ in that arena.  Today’s little ethics dust devil involves Scarlett Johansson in which she “rebukes OpenAI over ‘eerily similar’ ChatGPT voice”. (here and here)  The real problems in the use of such audios and videos, which can easily recognized to be like, similar to, or the same as known public personages will not involve ethics so much as questions of what exactly is considered as the intellectual property (IP) of an individual whose videos and speech are available every day in the public domain.

OpenAI asked for and did not receive permission to use Ms Johansson’s voice in their new AI assistant, but went ahead and lifted her ‘voice’ (actually her unique formants or frequency dependent speech building blocks) from available videos and films.  These were slightly modified, but not enough for the human ear to be confused and not recognize the speaker.  Ms Johansson objected and lawyered up; OpenAI pulled her voice from their product.

Similar things are happening in videos in which publicly recognized characters can be inserted into scenes which are slightly modified, but still recognizable as the intended person.  So the big questions going forward will be 1) what really are the IP boundaries of a person whose unique ‘persona parameters’ are captured and/or displayed daily in the public media, and 2) what are the sufficient metrics that characterize modifications so that the purveyor of such products can remain ‘litigation proof’.

Successfully answering these questions will open up new business and revenue possibilities for both producers of entertainment and advertising media as well as for those fortunates whose likenesses still have value or can be resurrected.  Nevertheless, today’s actors are already signing agreements that anticipate the use of their likenesses after their current job is over or after they die. (more here)  Of course, in this coming brave new world the opportunities for fraud will be endless, and launch yet another age of full employment for lawyers.

Believable and Indistinguishable Digital Avatars

George Rebane

One of the collateral developments to the coming Singularity (here and here) is the advent of AI-generated ‘digital persons’ or avatars that are so realistic that they are indistinguishable from the real thing.  The technology today permits the avatar designer to select either photos or video sequences and audio recording of a real person and generate a video of his/her avatar in any given context/background and deliver an on-camera monologue from a textual input.

Here are two recent examples of this.  One is of a popular Ukrainian singer cast as the spokesperson for the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (here).  The other is of the pop-star Taylor Swift delivering a highly improbable lecture on the generation of the Taylor series approximation of an arbitrary mathematical function. (here)

The obvious problem for the population at large now becomes one of authentication or vetting of such characters encountered online on sites professing to dispense news, commentaries, politicians’ pronouncements, etc.  The industry has yet to settle on common, let alone minimal, authentication protocols for the consumer.  An attempt at this is made in the Ukrainian video where the avatar immediately announces that she is a ‘digital person’ and cites the display of a QR code with a link to the website of the ministry that claims to have launched the avatar, and where the spoken text is posted.

These problems may be bypassed in the entertainment field where now we will see fresh episodes of ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘I Love Lucy’ along with new movies starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe.  It will be a brave new world of long-dormant property rights being litigated from here to eternity – truly a new age of full employment for tort lawyers.

Scattershots – 9feb24 (updated 17feb24)

George Rebane

KJP, Biden’s excuse for a press secretary, defended the president’s dementia – attested to in the recent special prosecutor Robert Hur report about his mishandling classified documents - by reading from a desperately compiled list of Republicans who have misspoken in the past.  That tack further illustrates how intellectually challenged are most members of Team Biden by confusing the constant stream of forgetfulness, mistakes, and malaprops that come out of our sitting president’s mouth with the one-offs that most mentally healthy people make now and then.  One can also counter this argument by pointing out that it isn’t ignorance about Joe’s condition at all, but intimate knowledge of the man’s incapability of handling spontaneous communications in the public forum.  Therefore, his exposure to such ‘opportunities’ must be minimized at all times during this election year.  Half the country’s consumers of lamestream media are also clueless about this aspect of the man they voted for.

Another vast area of ignorance cum imbecility is shared by leftwing Californians who have no idea about the sources of the state’s tax revenues.  Over the years RR has contained numerous reports of the outlandish fraction of such revenues paid by ‘the rich’.  (e.g. 1% of top earning taxpayers pay 42% of our taxes while the bottom 70% pay just 11%.)  And most recently a column by Thea Hood in the 12jan24 Union (here) detailed the percentages as reported by various state agencies.  She was immediately attacked by local socialists who would have none of it, claiming that such numbers are nothing but rightwing propaganda, proving again that not only can you have your own opinions, but also your own convenient facts.  And some call this the information age?

“Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI.  OpenAI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E. for a project possibly requiring up to $7 trillion.” (more here)  All of this is due to the massive processing and storage requirements needed for training large language models (LLMs), today’s epitomy of machine intelligence that has the potential to surpass humans in every conceivable task and will create markets for microchips and energy that cannot be supplied by today’s industry and infrastructure.  Altman is attempting to prepare for those days, and wants most of the new chip plants to be built in the US.  But I predict that our anti-American socialists will do all that they can to throw sand in those gears like they are already doing in Arizona to slow progress on the new big chip factory being built there.  For global collectivists America cannot remain the world's hegemon.

[11feb24 update] Review time.  A conspiracy is usually defined as “an unlawful, harmful, or evil plan formulated in secret by two or more persons.”  In actuality the conspiracy need not have a dark side, but could also be something benevolent that is planned in secret by two or more persons.  And labeling something as a ‘conspiracy theory’ does not necessarily mean that it is false.

Maintaining our open southern border has been planned and perpetrated as an anti-American conspiracy by the Left.  Inviting millions of illegal aliens to irretrievably spread themselves across our land is in fact unlawful, harmful, and evil to the extent that it foments the destruction of our culture and political structure, to replace it by a governance that promotes globalism through the destruction of the United States into a powerless second-world socialist country.  The lamestream media deny this conspiracy; and even Fox News is afraid to explain it to their audiences, leaving that to individual commentators who are then labeled ‘far right’ and ‘radical’.  This goes on as the Biden administration has no better explanation for their unconstitutional conspiracy other than repeatedly parroting the blatant lie that “the border is secure.”

[14feb24 update]  A couple of climate scumbags were arrested in the National Archives for throwing pink powder on the protected display of the US Constitution.  These people confirm daily the many ways they hate America.  Do not be fooled that the climate activists among us are loyal Americans.  The evidence against that notion abounds.  (more here)

[17feb24 update]  FCC bans AI-voiced robocalls in wake of ‘Biden’ calls to NH residents.  Well, it’s started.  Scammers have begun using the new AI-voicing technology to convince consumers, voters, et al of thins being true that really aren’t.  And the voice over their telephones sounds very convincing.  It will be interesting to see how the FCC and the states’ attorney generals are able to enforce such censorship.  When this technology is combined with already existing video synthesizing real people saying wrong things, then the media consumers are really flummoxed because the scam messages will be marbled in with the authentic video and audio segments, and no one will be able to tell the difference.  News outlets will have a new challenge in vetting such media and convincing their audiences of the authenticity of what they broadcast. (more here)

Russia’s Preventive Maintenance Crisis

George Rebane

Russians have always had a problem keeping their equipment in top operating shape.  This problem goes back to the days of Peter the Great who brought back the latest ship building technology from his trip to western Europe.  They subsequently built great stuff that inevitably had catastrophic breakdowns.  In modern times such public embarrassments occurred everywhere from the sinkings of their advanced submarines and supersonic transports crashing to big apartment buildings whose HVACs mysteriously blew up.

Lately such failures have occurred on even more mundane levels.  For instance, multiple reports of upper story windows which have suffered from untightened latches.  These have caused a number of tragic accidents in which prominent Russian industrialists continue to fall to their deaths.  Now we hear of private aircraft whose major components, like wings, are not bolted securely to their fuselages, and result in tragedies of their falling apart at altitude during routine operations which simple maintenance and monitoring procedures would have prevented

This morning we read reports of just this kind of preventable accident happening to a business jet flying out of Moscow.  At 28,000 feet some 100 kilometers northwest of the city, the jet fell apart.  Bystander videos show the airplane with one wing missing and trailing smoke, spiraling to the ground and exploding on impact with all aboard killed.

Subsequent reports indicate that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner paramilitary group commander, and some of his senior staff were passengers on the craft which, surprisingly it turned out, also belonged to Prigozhin.  Since the Wagner troops have been Russia’s only effective military forces in Ukraine, this loss, no doubt, has come as a shock to President Putin.

The whole thing reminds one of “For want of a nail the shoe was lost.  For want of a shoe the horse was lost. …”.  From this latest incident the message to all of Russia’s maintenance people is clear – check you work!

Ruminations – 12jul23 (updated 13jul23)

George Rebane

Estonia is also the most advanced nation in the integration and use of the internet in everything from commerce, industry, and the participation of its citizenry in governance.  Furthermore, the country is a leader in internet communication and the home of NATO’s institute for cyberwarfare.  It takes about 20 minutes on line to incorporate your company and be in business.

“A Town Hall meeting hosted by the group calling themselves, “Nevada county assembly” was attended by over 200 people at the Horseman’s Lodge located along Bubbling Wells Road in Grass Valley last week. … The welcoming spokesperson emphasized the importance of First Amendment of the United States Constitution, the right to assemble in order for citizens to stay informed and wake up to the issues affecting the local community, the nation and the globe.” (more here)  They claim to assemble and act in order to promote “Life, liberty, and property”, which are the tenets of the Bastiat Triangle of Rights (q.v.).  Anybody know more about this local group?

[13jul23 update] “ChatGPT Comes Under Investigation by Federal Trade Commission”  It’s hard to see what the government can do to impede or direct the development of any readily accessible software systems that promote the operation and enhance performance of profitable businesses.  Politicians thinking they can only show their ignorance of how technology develops.

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.

Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

I was shocked to read in the 75^th anniversary issue of ACM Communications, the flagship publication of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery, that computer science education in the US needs to be revamped.  Three maximally woke socialist (communist?) professors of education spell out their proposals in ‘Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship’.

Computer science is a vast field that encompasses and entwines many technical disciplines.  It has boggled many capable minds in the task of developing undergraduate CS curriculum that fits into a four-year baccalaureate program.  Now there has started a neo-Marxist initiative in education that seeks to inject into the curriculum the propagandizing of students with the tenets of critical race theory, social justice, equity, and inoculation against white supremacy, racism, and other social sins that originated in white Europe.

To accomplish this added and/or integrated layer of indoctrination will require the elimination or diluting beyond recognition of core subjects required by entry level practitioners in the field.  The authors already specify that merit and acquiring technical skills must be moved aside due to their longstanding systemic racist and white supremacist taint.  Time must be made instead for integrating students’ race, cultures, and life experiences which should shape the revised curriculum.  Added to that, the students will be encouraged (required?) to consult with their “community elders” to make sure that their CS training encompasses community, criticality, and citizenship.

The introduction of leading-edge technology has involved taking risks as the bugs are worked out of early-adopted commercial products.  Well, if something goes wrong with, say, an autonomous vehicle involved in an accident, then the new-age CS practitioners should be able to critically assess and assign blame to the appropriate participating agents ranging from the vehicle’s design, all the way to the way it was fielded to drive on the roads.  Our triumvirate of educators expand on this –

In order to bring such criticality to computing education, we will need to move away from focusing solely on developing technical skills and move to understanding and challenging the role of CS in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices. As a first step, we must engage educators in critical conversations that explore their own identities in order to move away from color-blind approaches to teaching CS. In addition, we must support educators by developing curriculum and pedagogy that challenges the “unbiased” and “objective” nature of computing. As educators develop their own critical computing competencies, it will lead them to “create spaces for collective development of critical consciousness, help develop plans for action to make the world a better place, and develop a sense of agency among learners.”

One thing is certain.  The Russians and Chinese are laughing their collective asses off, and doing everything they can to fund, through well-oiled circuitous channels, more of these woke initiatives to infect STEM education in the US and the west.  Read the short article to get a better picture of what we're up against.

Secret Sauce for a New World Order

George Rebane

Rebane Doctrine: Stingers and Javelins are the secret sauce of the new world order.  What’s happening in Ukraine is proof of what we should be doing for Taiwan – shipping them vast quantities of Javelins and Stingers to enable them to thwart a D-day-like invasion by Red China on their shores.  These weapons demonstrate that the old days of using massive slowly moving war machines no longer gives advantage to the aggressor against highly mobile light cavalry units armed with Stingers and Javelins.  A wise administration would have already started supplying Taiwan with large quantities of sub-rosa shipments of these weapons, and then informing Beijing, again sub-rosa, of that accomplishment so that no face needs be lost in the international forum.  Download video here - Download VIDEO-2022-04-23-22-14-35

The same can be said for highly mobile, relatively inexpensive shore-to-ship missiles that will quickly reduce both carrier strike groups and amphibious assault groups to smoldering wrecks.  The whole scenario of how large nations project power will have to be rethought.  And we haven't even started talking about hypersonics yet.  The only foreseeable defense for such missile attacks is with directed-energy weapons which are not yet operational, and for which the sensor and fire control problems have yet to be solved.

And now we are getting back-channel news (reported here by The Blaze) that intelligence sources state Chinese preparations for an imminent Taiwan invasion are underway.

Performance Registered Advisor

George Rebane

In the 21may22 Union’s inserted adverts there was a slick one from local investment advisor and financial columnist Marc Cuniberti.  He is now “accepting new clients for the markets of 2022”, who no doubt have formed a line outside his office door.  Jo Ann and I are lifelong investors who, from time to time, have allowed various investment advisors and wealth managers to manage a part of our portfolio.  All of these people have been of good reputation, trustworthy, ethical, professional, and careful, quick, and kind.  But none of them have been able to match our own acumen in the markets, and all of them have required payment of perverse money management fees.  So, we have switched them out, and finally decided that, while we can do well in portfolio management, we’re not worth a hill of beans in picking investment advisors.

In recent years I have been given to quite a bit of puzzling in the financial engineering field, and quite successfully, I might add.  My claimed forte is in the areas of monetary utility and risk tolerance. (see figure)  In those endeavors I have had a jaundiced attitude toward the wealth management industry that charges you a fee regardless of the performance they deliver on your portfolio – they play a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ game.  As an entrepreneur and algorist I offered our last advisor an opportunity to retain our account by modifying his fee structure so he would have more skin in our game.

In the new ‘skin in game’ (SIG) fee structure, we would split our portfolio’s annual gain, say, 80/20, with him during profitable years, and we would pay no fee for years with no gain.  Instead, we would then get a dollar amount credit for the year’s end market value loss in our portfolio.  The credit would be applied toward gains in profitable years.  There were a few more obvious details involved, but you get the idea.  If he made us a bunch of money, he would also get a heap more than the percent or so of the total year end value of our portfolio.  In other words, he, like us, would be betting on his performance with a SIG fee structure.  Sadly, he wouldn’t touch that deal with a ten-footer, and since then I have talked with a number of money managers in our circle of friends, and they were of the same mind – ‘No way Jose!’

So circling back, how do we choose a money manager in today’s investment world?  Then looking at Mr Cuniberti’s ad this morning, the idea of a Performance Registered Advisor (PRA) came to me.  To become a PRA, an investment advisor would first qualify for some existing certifications that put letters after his name before applying to Portfolio Registration Services (PRS), the auditing and clearinghouse that vets and maintains the nation’s PRAs in good standing.  PRS would charge a nominal fee for its services from its members.

To become a PRA, an investment advisor will have to have at least one half of his gross assets in a registered and audited portfolio of investments of the type that he offers to his clients for two years – in short, at all times his clients would be able to invest in the same securities that make up the advisor’s R&A portfolio.  Each PRA’s R&A portfolio would be audited monthly for its market value and yielded dividends.  With modern brokerage houses, this would be a completely automated process.  The PRA would then publish monthly the financial performance metrics of each PRA, and allow the PRAs to include these nationally-reputable metrics in their advertisements and other promotional materials.  For obvious reasons the R&A portfolios’ specific securities and asset allocations would remain confidential.  The published metrics would include such items as percent gains/losses YTD, 1-year, 2-years, …, 5-year, etc.  The PRS may also publish (for a fee?) the PRA’s performance by investment sector – say, real estate, energy, high tech, commodities, etc.

With this data available, the retail investor now has reliable information on the investment performance of the candidate advisors he is considering in his short list.  And, of course, if a wealth advisor chooses not to become a PRA, then the client would want to know why, before giving the candidate further consideration.  But the bottom line is that such a new and transparent view of the investment advisor industry would immediately cut through the BS in which today’s investors find themselves inundated by all the slick ads that address none of their concerns about the management of their portfolios.

The Ukraine War – 19mar22

George Rebane

The ongoing Ukraine war is a complex affair with many dynamic factors that influence events and the state (attitudes/assessments) of the involved parties.  These pages are home to a lively discussion and debate about the goings on in Ukraine and their worldwide impact.  I’ve made an attempt to simplify and explicate my take on how the whole mish-mash comes together from what is known, claimed, and propagandized today.  This assessment is reduced into an influence factors diagram shown below.

To understand the above IFD, I recommend a quick read of one or more tutorial pieces I posted some years ago (here, here, and here).  The main thing to recall in looking at how the factors relate is that the connecting lines show the direction of influence by their arrowheads, and the plus (+) sign means that the influencer and influenced are in sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, so does the other), while the minus (-) sign means that they are out of sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, the other goes down/up).  The factors labeled L{ } are likelihoods of the events in the curly brackets coming to pass.

IFDs usually contain ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ cycles.  A cycle is made by any directed path that returns to its selected point of origin.  A cycle is usually taken as virtuous if the cycled feedback seeks to stabilize (self-correct) the involved factors, and is usually understood as vicious if the feedback causes a runaway state in one or more of involved factors.  An easy way to identify such cycles is by counting the number of minus (-) signs in the cycle.  Virtuous cycles have an odd number of minuses, while vicious cycles tally an even number of minuses.  In the above IFD trace out some cycles starting with ‘US Display of Strength’.

Before you dismiss the IFD as just some idle technical doodling, you might consider that this tool (in its various formats) is used by the big kids as a starting point to discuss and communicate ALL complex processes about which critical decisions must be taken, and most certainly when it is required to formally ‘game the process’ using one of several simulation development environments – pricey software systems used in industry, by the military, and in statecraft.  The IFD lets you see the big picture in its entirety and then drill down to whatever level of detail is required.  It is the epitome graphic for communication in multi-party discussions of complex affairs.  (BTW, people who can generate clear, complete, and concise IFDs for complex issues get paid big bucks.)

Walk or Run in the Rain?

George Rebane

Time for little respite from matters political and geo-strategic.  Years ago I came up with a TechTest problem that asked if there were an optimal speed that minimized the amount of rain coming through the area of a car’s missing windshield.  A few days ago I ran into another form of this problem in one of my techie subscriptions.  The question this time was whether you would get more wet or less wet if you ran or walked some distance to get to shelter.  These are essentially the same problem, and I learned that the problem has a long history and debated solutions among techies versed in quantitative STEM.

Well, if you frame the problem correctly, the solution readily reveals itself along with an interesting twist.  So, I decided to re-solve it using the missing windshield version because that makes all the variables and resulting math unambiguous and intuitively clear.  We start with an area A, at angle φ to the vertical, moving horizontally at speed v_A through a steady rainfall in which the drops fall at speed v_R at an angle θ off vertical as shown in the figure below.  When you add these two velocities (speeds with angles), you get v_RA at angle α, the windshield-relative velocity of rain coming down.  We need one more parameter to characterize the problem, and that is the water density ρ that characterizes the intensity of the falling rain.  Important to note here is that no matter the resulting v_RA speed and direction, the water density (e.g. gals/ft^3) in the volume that A, the hole of the missing windshield, sweeps out remains unchanged.

The problem then becomes twofold – as a function of the vehicle speed v_A, what is the rate that water comes in through the hole, and if you had a distance D to travel to shelter, how much water will have come through the hole.

Solving this problem requires a bit of trigonometry and some straightforward squiggly pushing that I include in the box below.  Out of this comes the formula for the rate r_R (through the area that is perpendicular to v_RA), and the formula for V_R(D, v_A), the volume of water through the hole until distance D is covered at speed v_A.

To illustrate the answer to the stated problem, I’ve put together a little scenario with actual numerical values as indicated in the figure, and programmed it up in MS Excel™.  The quick answers are shown in the graphs.  The blue line shows how r_R (gals/sec) increases linearly with vehicle speed v_A as expected.  The faster you go, the more water comes pouring through the whole.  As v_A goes to infinity, so does r_R as long as the hole’s orientation φ presents some frontal area to v_RA which approaches v_A as the vehicle’s speed gets very large.  Note that if we make the hole face parallel to v_RA (i.e. - φ = α) then r_R goes to zero, again as expected.

But if you only have a certain distance D to go to reach shelter, the orange curve shows that the faster you go (i.e. the higher the v_A) the less water V_R you take through the hole.  The limiting value is just the volume of rain at density ρ swept out when your speed reaches infinity.  In the illustrated scenario this volume of rain V_R (D,∞) = 3,733.5 gallons.  So the answer for 'should you run to get out of the rain?' is a definite YES; however, if you want to minimize the rate of water coming through the hole, then don’t move (i.e. v_A = 0).  As the r_R equation shows, setting v_A = 0 reduces the gals/sec to just the volume to the area perpendicular to and increasing at the rate of v_R.  And its easy to also see that V_R will go to infinity since you will be standing still and making no progress to the shelter at distance D.  (Isn’t math wonderful?)  Bottom line – run, don’t walk to get out of the rain.

The Beta-Rho Sham? (Addended)

George Rebane

Here’s a little something from my financial engineering toy box that one or two RR readers may find interesting.  The discussion is a tiny bit technical, but the pictures should be accessible to all.  Most investors know that a stock’s beta (Greek β) is a number that indicates how well the security tracks its market, say, the SP500.  And rho (Greek ρ) measures the correlation between, say, the price series of two stock’s – the way they both zig and zag together, or how much one zigs while the other zags.  I’ll try to keep this short.

From august sources like Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) by nobelists Markowitz and Sharpe, we learn that if a stock’s β equals one, then it more or less goes up and down in similar percent changes with the market.  If β > 1, then the stock’s swings have a greater percentage than the market’s; and if β < 1, then the stock’s swings behave in a more reserved manner than do the market’s.  Riskier stocks have the bigger swings, and more conservative stocks have the smaller swings.  The referenced formula (here) for beta reflects this with its inclusion of the standard deviation of the price swings.

As stated above, ρ measures in how tight of a formation two stocks will fly.  The range of ρ is between +1 and -1, with the positive values indicating tighter formations, and ρ = 1 denoting a perfectly tight formation matching each other’s zigs and zags.  A small or zero ρ means that the stocks pretty much act independently of each other.  In designing your investment portfolio from a selected shortlist of stocks, MPT teaches that you should try to avoid stocks that pair with high ρ values.  Doing probabilistic math recommends that you pick stocks that pair with the lowest ρ values possible to give you a low volatility (i.e. low risk) portfolio.

Now after you understand all that, we’re going to throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing, a little bit of information you will not hear from your well-paid wealth advisor who manages your portfolio.  (Drum roll please.)  Betas and rhos, calculated from past performance, are pretty much worthless measures of securities performance for portfolio design.  Why?  Well, that answer depends on what is known as the investor’s ‘investment horizon’.  That’s the period into the future over which the investment plan is supposed to hold with numbers such as expected portfolio appreciation, its most likely upper and lower limits, and so forth.

Covid Policies and Continued Testing (Addended; updated 22dec21)

George Rebane

Governments here in America and around the world are fumbling around with Covid response policies as every new variant is discovered and infection cases surge and retreat.  People continue to be assured that the public agencies and their political leaders are “following the science”, even when there is no evidence of such following presented or demonstrated.  But as we have all experienced, the government agencies, ‘experts’, and politicians are all over the place with their advice, prescriptions, and mandates.  It is clear that neither the national nor global collective knows how to properly respond to the pandemic (e.g. here)  More disturbing are the ongoing subterfuges that leak out in the media and online.  An extremely revealing and disturbing interview is by Tucker Carlson of Robert Kennedy Jr, author of the current best seller The Real Anthony Fauci (2021).  It has been pulled by YouTube and FN, but is still available on Bitchute here.

In my many-years experience with healthcare decision making, I have found that practitioners in the medical industry are profoundly ignorant of uncertainty, risk, utility, estimation, and in general critical interventions that are affected by uncertainties (i.e. depend on probabilistics).  This assessment applies especially to the physicians with whom the patient interacts.  These people are uniformly condescending or arrogantly hubristic in how they hide their ignorance of the maladies in question, and what is required for the lay patient to make a reasoned and understandable decision.

Perfidy aside, nowhere is such practice more visible to the technically trained than in the field of public health.  A current posterchild demonstrating this is how little and erroneously we are informed about Covid testing.  We are told that testing is somehow critical to reducing the spread of the disease – the more testing the better.  Tests are communicated to the layman as consisting of one uniform process that somehow reliably determines your infection status AND your ability to infect others.  Science tells us nothing could be further from the truth.

Ignorance of causes and effects should be usefully represented quantitatively.  Such ignorance is no excuse for avoiding quantitative decision support techniques.  For example, here is an AMA article that talks about test types, dependers, and whyfors, but gives you no information about the involved probabilistics (e.g test sensitivities and specificities) for decision making.  Today machines can be designed to incorporate more knowledge than any one or group of practitioners can manage in literally any specific domain of expertise.  As a consequence, where such technology is applied, AI-based decision support systems outperform their human counterparts every time – and this is specifically the case in medicine and healthcare.  Here is Nobelist Daniel Kahneman on AI bettering human decisions. (here and here)

‘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.

Extraterrestrials and Religion

George Rebane

Recently the Ignatius Forum held a session on ‘The Future of Space’ at our National Cathedral attended by theologians, government space officials, private sector space entrepreneurs, and academics.  Among the latter was Prof Avi Loeb of Harvard who is also active in SETI and a member of the international SETI group (of which I am a member) administered by the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

While the larger topic was finding ETs, a more focused topic of interest was how we earthlings bring the existence of ETIs into concordance with our notions of God and religion.  Prof Loeb is not a person of faith, but made it clear that “science and religion are not necessarily in conflict, as long as one is careful not to ignore the boundary between physics and meta-physics. … In finding advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, religion might simply reflect advanced science with a twist. Traditional religions described God as the creator of the Universe and life within it. They also suggested that humans were made in the image of God. But these notions are not necessarily in contradiction with science. A sufficiently advanced scientific civilization might be able to create synthetic life in its laboratories; in fact, some of our terrestrial laboratories almost reached that threshold. And with a good understanding of how to unify quantum-mechanics and gravity, an advanced scientific civilization could potentially create a baby universe in its laboratories. Therefore, an advanced scientific civilization might be a good approximation to God.” (more here with links to the forum)

Long time readers will recognize this as a position much discussed over the years in these pages, especially as it relates to my position as a copernican viz science.  In that, Loeb and many other scientists are kindred spirits.  What impressed me is the Harvard astro-physicist’s stance on the perspective humanity should assume when it considers cosmic matters - these being humility, modesty, and calmness.  In the greater scheme of things we are not important enough about which to make a great fuss.  I have dwelled on the quantitative measures of our ordinary insignificance in my SETI paper (here) among other postings.

In the final analysis of integrating religion, science, and an intelligent creator, I find nothing awkward or contrary in my particular understanding of Christianity as a faith compatible with civilizations across the universe.  It is a particularly comforting belief system to embrace as we seek to understand the Upanishad’s ‘Tat tvam asi!’

Postscript – ‘Who am I?’ is a question often heard from people seeking to find a deeper significance to their existence.  It is the wrong question, and we already know its answer, since ‘who’ seeks to identify one as a particular member of a known set.  ‘Tat tvam asi!’ points to the much deeper question of ‘What am I?’, the question which seeks to know the essence of the set itself.

Speaking Algoristically

George Rebane

[Reading some recent papers on the current problems in the advance of deep learning, and causal inference as the next quantum leap in machine intelligence, I ran across a lot of discussion about what are still called algorithms.  It recalled the summary of a more facile syntax that I and several others have been promoting.  More to be said later about the contention between the ‘data fitting’ of neural nets, and ‘data interpretation’ capability of causal nets.]

al·go·rithm n. A step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established process for solving a problem or accomplishing a task in a finite number of steps. (more here)

When we relieve ‘algorithm’ of its codal baggage, we are left with the simple, compact, communicable, and elegant ‘algo’.  In this form the entire enterprise and field of algorithmics (better ‘algoristics’) can be efficiently communicated, bypassing current attempts to twist its ‘rithm’ tail into tortured forms like “algorithmatized” or use many other words to describe what can be expressed directly.  Consider the following little dissertation on the subject.

Any process is algorizable and can be algorized by an experienced algorist.  Algorized processes benefit from being readily teachable and passed on to others.  Developing algos is also an art because there is usually more than one algo that can algoristically capture the essence of a process.  Algoristically speaking, most algorized processes can always benefit from additional algorizing.  The history of algoristics is full of such algoristical efforts of developing ever more efficient algos.  In the affairs of Man never disparage algorization, for it simply is the heart of the matter. No light bursts forth in your mind save in an algorizable form, for without the ability to algorize we proceed as the blind. It always pays to be an algophile instead of an algophobe, for expressing and retaining knowledge, it all comes down to algoristics.

One of history’s greatest algorists was Henry Ford.  He took the notion of interchangeable parts (first developed for the manufacture of military arms) and algorized the manufacturing of cars into the assembly line.  Realizing the algorizability of automobile manufacturing, his algorized assembly line was algoristically so structured that parts didn’t come to the assembled car, the car went to the parts.  That was the breakthrough algo that changed a country and then the world.

• Algo
• Algorist
• Algoristics,
• Algoristical
• Algoristically
• Algorize
• Algorized
• Algorizable
• Algorizing
• Algorization
• Algorizability
• Algophile
• Algophobe

‘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.