Rebane's Ruminations

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.

Bumblebrain’s Bungles – 14mar21

George Rebane

Here’s an exercise in critical thinking that’s been circling the backwaters of my brainbone.  Most of the nation has debated Biden’s mental capacity and come down on this side or that.  And during this time a lot of new evidence keeps coming in on the policies he’s intitiated and how he’s handling his office.  So, if we are to surmise that one of four mutually independent characterizations (i.e. hypotheses) of his administration is true, how do we incorporate the newly arriving evidence to update our belief across the four Biden cases.  Let me define these as follows.

H1 – Biden is mentally fit, politically strong, and in full charge/command of his office.

H2 – Biden is mentally fit, politically weak, and is an instrument of his party’s radical leftwing.

H3 – Biden is not mentally fit for the office, is politically weak, and is an instrument of his party’s radical leftwing.

H4 – Biden is not mentally fit for office and is being prepared for an early resignation.

Assigning beliefs (probability values summing to one) to these cases, we can now examine arriving evidence – e.g. his avoiding a press conference and spontaneous encounters with the press – and update our beliefs.  Once you determine how likely it is that the evidence supports each case/hypothesis, it’s real easy to update your beliefs.  With these four cases in mind, a piece of evidence E will let you assign four likelihood ratios L1 through L4, one for each case.

Updating Beliefs, Knowledge, and Facts

George Rebane

I’m working on a piece that describes in a more formal and specific sense how people can have their own opinions AND facts, given that they all formulate or update them from the same body of newly arrived evidence.  How can that be?  The answer to that question also goes a long way toward an understanding of how the gulf formed between the polarized factions in our land, and sadly, the difficulty in attempting to bring the two (or more) sides together to a new common understanding, or at least to a workable common ground.

The answer lies in the manner we humans approximate Bayesian inference and reasoning.  Along the way in my studies I stumbled upon a form (there are many) of the Bayes formula that I had to rederive years ago, and surprisingly, since then I have seen used in very few instances.  This formula from Bayes theory is so deliciously intuitive and straightforward to understand, that I thought a quick intro to it in the context of updating everyday beliefs and knowledge would be helpful to the layman, or at least provide some amusement before it disappears into the memory hole.

Before diving in, let’s all appreciate that every piece of knowledge or tenet of our belief system is represented by a probability distribution, whether or not we realize it.  These distributions quantify everything from ‘certain knowledge’ (probability = 1), to items that are more iffy (probability between 0 and 1), and all the way to the ‘impossible’ (probability = 0).  Most people believe with certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, however, most people will know the time of the sunrise only to within a range of values to which they attach an unquantified subjective probability.  The events ‘sun will rise’ vs ‘sun will not rise’ are mutually exclusive with the first having probability of occurrence equaling one (unity, the certain event), and the second having probability zero (the impossible event) – well, there is a very small probability that the sun will not rise tomorrow, but let’s not quibble here.  So these are discrete events described by a simple discrete probability distribution consisting of a one and a zero characterizing our knowledge of these mutually exclusive events.

‘Luxury Floating Real Estate’

George Rebane

Living on a huge manmade island may be the thing of the future for those who can afford it and want to escape from the ever more contested and politically roiling lands that cover about 29% of the Earth’s 197,000,000 sq mi surface.  The first of these islands is being built off the Bahamas by an outfit that calls itself The Blue Estate (here).  Multiples of such islands are planned to reside off Dubai in the Persian Gulf which are advertised to be miniature havens of German, Swiss, Italian, and Swedish culture.  The Blue Estate plan envisions an island measuring 1,500 by 1,000 meters as shown below.

The island’s size, modular construction, and high (130ft) free board, augmented by another 100+ foot extendable windwalls, we are told will assure the structure’s calm survival in the roughest of hurricanes.  The island will also have propulsion and guidance so that it can transit open ocean areas to avoid storms.

Yet to be explained is to what extent the island will be energy self-sufficient using solar, wind, and wave energy extraction technologies.  Its home area will be in international waters, minutes by air away from Miami and Bahamian towns.  Apparently, food and other consumables will be imported.

The community will also be economically self-sufficient by being home to clean commercial enterprises and the successfully retired.  The commercial activities will be heavily IT oriented with ample satellite connectivity.  I can envision that it might also be home to small R&D firms engaged in computer science, genomics, and similar areas.  Located in a tropical sea with abundant (300+ days/yr) sunshine, the island can also operate a sizeable nearby sea farm containing various flora supported by an underwater matrix which will give rise to a whole new ecosystem of rich sea life similar to what exist around oil drilling platforms and the Navy’s ‘kelp farm’ (off San Clemente Island) on which I worked years ago.

One of the potential attractions of such seaborne communities may be their ability to provide social stability through a discriminative selection of residents.  It is clear to me that some such island communities will emphasize cultural cohesion of their residents.  Offering such cohesive environments seems to be the goal of the planned Persian Gulf islands that will focus on providing culture-specific resort living and holidays.

As an entrepreneur and systems nerd, I am drawn to the dreaming and planning of such habitats, and in the present case could go on for pages contemplating different concepts and their supporting technical, commercial, environmental, educational, cultural, … support systems and institutions.  But to me the problem of having the seas support a considerable population of such islands in different parts of the world will come down to the solution of the inevitable political problems that will arise and need solutions that can be implemented globally.

Because these island communities will attract (and be limited to) the smart, productive, and ‘financially capable’ people, they will naturally become hotbeds of wealth generation.  And they will therefore become tax and tariff prey for the land-based political grifters who maintain their collectivist regimes by bamboozling their poor and huddled masses yearning to be free.  These people need state supplied succor that their political leaders will not allow them to generate for all the reasons we have discussed in these pages.

In such political landscapes those who can will escape to available locales with lower taxes, regulations, and abundant liberties.  This we see happening in today’s American migrations, and have witnessed for decades (centuries?) in Europe and Asia where the productive congregate in enclaves such as Singapore, Taiwan, and formerly Hong Kong.  Therefore, new political paradigms need to be discovered if the financially and culturally attractive island communities are to thrive and multiply.  Else the early ones will just be economically harvested to oblivion by the land-based stifling autocracies that see such free and enterprising enclaves as low-hanging fruit.

Much more to be said about all this.

Reliability in Predicting Termination of Minimally Known Processes

George Rebane

This mildly technical posting is intended for those concerned with the use of R-G Theory to predict the termination (and continuance) of minimally known processes (MKPs).  As initially posted in these pages and subsequently expanded, I extended Richard Gott’s seminal work that applied the Copernican perspective to calculating the probability of longevity for the human species (here).  R-G Theory now enables such probabilistic calculations for both continuous and discrete event ongoing MKPs known only by their age or lifetime.

We all run into many MKPs in our daily round.  These range from stock market trends through the arrival of a delivery to successful observations of periodic or repeating events.  The basic question answered is ‘Given only the age or lifetime of an ongoing process, what is the probability that it will terminate in a specified future time interval?’  A classic example used here is, ‘The Old Faithful Geyser has been erupting for 11,000 years, what is the probability that it will cease eruptions in the next year? the next ten years? or even between 13 February 2081 and 22 October 2119?

The present addition to R-G introduced here involves the calculation of the reliability (or error distribution) of the calculated probabilities, given the assumed/measured uncertainties in the age or longevity of the MKP in question.  The detailed technical dissertation that provides these answers is introduced in ‘R-G Theory Propagation of Error’ (Download R-G Error Prop) which references the technical development in TN2011-2: R-G Error Propagation (Download TN2011-2_R-GerrorPropagation).

‘2034’

George Rebane

This is a heads-up on a good read – 2034 – A Novel of the Next World War that will be published in early March.  It is written by two military and national security heavyweights – Elliot Ackerman and Adm James Stavridis, both ranking high in our national security apparatus; Ackerman in the White House and Stavridis former CIC of our Southern Command and then head of NATO military.  The first part of the novel took up the entire Jan 2021 issue of Wired.  I started reading it, and it immediately grabbed me.  I’m a kinda finicky reader, especially fiction, reserving time only for geo-political and edge sci-fi written by people who’ve 'been there and done that' – ‘2034’ definitely qualifies and promises to also be an education on a lot of systems and tactics.  Anyway, I thought that you would find this a good and timely read.  Here’s some promotional copy – “From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic, geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034--and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.”

I sent the above notice to a group of friends who may be interested in geo-political thrillers with technical element that is written by knowledgeable authors.  Since then, the book has received some very good reviews from noteworthy people.  (more here and here)

“War with China is the most dangerous scenario facing us and the world. Absent a strategic method to manage our differences, Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman’s chilling novel presents a realistic series of miscalculations leading to the worst consequences. A sobering, cautionary tale for our time.” — Jim Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (Ret.) and 26th Secretary of Defense

“A real page-turner, 2034 is a novel about a conflict we hope never happens. Drawing on their deep operational and diplomatic backgrounds, Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman have conjured a nightmare we desperately need to avoid. The novel is a cautionary tale for our times, and a reminder how quickly events can spin out of control—even before 2034.” — Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense 2006-2011

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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