Category: AI

Once is Philosophy…
… Twice is Perversion. This is a somewhat famous quote by the enormously famous Voltaire. Creepy looking dude huh? What does the quote mean? Outside of the more lurid interpretations it has clear meaning for any situation. Do something once for the experience .. but if you do it again, you own it. One time you can explain. Two times you must have liked something about it.

And so it goes with our current political climate. Voltaire deeply influenced our constitutional framers. He was a favorite of Ben Franklins as they were both in the same freemasonry lodge for a number of years… the venerable “Lodge of the Nine Sisters“. This lodge was influential in organizing French support for the American Revolution, and was deeply disliked by the King and court.

When Voltaire died there was a ceremony at the lodge that indicates the level of support for the friendship and of the french in helping America get its start described here:

The hall was draped in black, lit only dimly by candles. There were songs, speeches, and poems attacking the clergy and absolutism in all forms. Voltaire’s niece presented a bust by Houdon (Houdon, a member, also did a bust of Franklin for the lodge, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) Then a flame of light revealed a grand painting of the apotheosis of Voltaire emerging from his tomb to be presented in heaven by the goddess of Truth and Benevolence. Franklin took the Masonic wreath from his head and solemnly laid it at the foot of the painting. Everyone then adjourned to the banquet room, where the first toast included a tribute to Franklin “the captive thunder dying at his feet” — and to America.

-Lodge of the Nine Sisters and Voltaire’s memorial service

Education of the Masses

The interesting thing about the American experiment is that even way back then they knew that it would not work unless the population was morally superior and that they were educated. In fact – for the most part these were considered one and the same. A free society is only possible for a virtuous, well educated population. Part of one’s Education was creating Virtue as well as knowledge of the science, math, political knowledge, the arts and all the components identified in the Renaissance as important to the enlightened person.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”
-James Madison

“[V]irtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”
-George Washington

“It is certainly true that a popular government cannot flourish without virtue in the people.”
-Richard Henry Lee

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
-John Adams

Likewise – to a man the founders thought that educating the people had to be a primary responsibility of a free moral government.

“No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.”
-Samuel Adams

Laws for the liberal education of the youth, especially of the lower class of the people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

-John Adams

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government.

-George Washington

“If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav’d. This will be their great Security.”

-Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, February 12, 1779

And Yet – We are failing to educate

So with all this ample evidence that the two most important things for a free Democracy, where do we find ourselves today? With regard to Education – our K-12 is considered one of the poorest among 1st world countries. We are failing to educate our population. In a recent Pew Research America was found lacking:

So the U.S. is behind Portugal in Science, Slovakia in Math and Taiwan in Reading. These results are not inspirational.

All of this in spite of the fact that the US has a Department of Education with over 4,000 employees (2018) and an annual budget of $68 BILLION dollars. The charter of the department is to “establish policy for, administer and coordinate most federal assistance to education, collect data on US schools, and to enforce federal educational laws regarding privacy and civil rights.”^[6]

But this is clearly not working. We are falling behind. Our Democracy is becoming perverted because our population is not educated, nor virtuous. We were actually better at K-12 with regard to the world when the Department of Education did not exist. It became huge under George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” act, where it basically went from a budget of around $12B to its current budget. There are some in congress that would like to see the whole department abolished. For instance, on February 7, 2017, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced H.R. 899, a bill to abolish the department. Massie’s bill, which is one sentence long, states, “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.”^[28]

But eliminating the department seems to be a hasty idea as well. In the grand scheme of things – it’s not been given enough time to succeed. How can we change our trajectory though? Spending more for worse results seems to be a fools bargain. How can we turn this around? Why can’t that $68 BILLION be spent directly on the kids or with the schools? Why do all the “Grants” that get distributed result in larger administrations, while our PTA’s sell cakes to provide notebooks to kids? Most importantly:

Why are our teacher’s not fairly compensated?

If our founders had envisioned an America that was at best mediocre with regard to Education – what would they have done? Based on their resumes they would have taken a leadership role. They would have innovated and found a way for America to show the world the value of education. If education is one of the most important things – then educators must be one of the KEY elements in ensuring success. First – how does America line up with the rest of the world on paying its educators:

Luxembourg puts everyone to shame.

“In Luxembourg, one of the richest countries in the world, an inexperienced teacher can expect to make more on his or her first day than teachers in nearly all other countries can hope to make in their entire careers.”

-Business insider

The U.S. pays reasonably well. But it’s not enough. It’s been clearly shown over and over than 1 inspirational teacher is worth 1000 schlubs there to collect a paycheck.

“The teacher workforce is the single most important ingredient in schools in determining how children are going to fare in their education,”

-Mishel.

What if America decided to REALLY support lower education? What if America decided that only people with a PHD in the subject they are teaching should be teaching the next generation of leaders? What if these educators got paid really competitive wages?

Public school teachers earned average weekly wages of $1,137 in 2017, while all other college graduates working full time earned $1,476 per week, according to a report out today from

– Economic Policy Institute.

So even after controlling for various factors that affect pay — such as education, age, and years of experience — teachers still earn 18.7% less than comparable workers.

But what if the $68 BILLION that we currently spend with the department of Education were used to pay teachers!

By taking a lead in teacher pay the U.S. can thwart one of the bigger problems – lack of teachers! More than 30 states recently reported teacher shortages in mathematics for the 2018-2019 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education. More pay creates interested graduates to pursue teaching!

In fact – there are a number of horrible outcomes that are attributed to low teacher pay including:

Low teacher pay contributes to shortages and a disinterest in the teaching profession
- A 2018 National Center for Education Statistics survey found that less than half of all public school teachers were satisfied with their pay; 45 percent of teachers who reported dissatisfaction said they would “leave teaching as soon as possible” if they could find a better-paying job.¹⁶
- The percentage of teachers leaving the teaching profession has also increased in the past 25 years.¹⁷ Teacher turnover is now twice as high in the United States as in many other countries, including high-performing nations such as Finland and Singapore.¹⁸
- Teacher turnover is exacerbated in states with low pay. Teacher attrition is highest in Arizona, New Mexico, and Louisiana, where the average teacher salary is $50,000 or less.¹⁹
- Fewer young people are showing interest in the teaching profession. Despite a slight uptick in the 2015-16 school year, enrollment in teacher preparation programs is still substantially less than in the 2008-09 school year and shows an overall declining trend.²⁰ Forty-five states have experienced declines in teacher preparation program enrollments.²¹
Our founders were clear. Education is a cornerstone to freedom. Currently the U.S. is failing at its responsibility to educate the next generation (or the last 5 generations many would say).

It’s time to raise teacher pay dramatically. If you look at what teachers make relative to other job’s – it’s pathetic. In NOT ONE state do teachers make above average relative to other professions.

Thats a direct statement of what we as a country believe the importance of teaching our youth to be.

It’s time for a change. Teaching should be the most coveted job in our society. Teachers across the board should be paid like our top Lawyers, Doctors and CEOs. Not like a car repairman or bartenders.

So if our founders were here today … would they try this experiment again? Or would they leave it at Once is Philosophy?

The organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit! Our mission is to promote humans above technology. Our simple belief is that technology should work for humans and better their condition and never have a negative impact on humanity. Please find it in your heart to donate to this important cause.
May 27, 2020
Pretty Red Headed Robot – DigiSexual tryst or Robicidal maniac?

Mmmm mmm… Love me some red headed robot woman. In this amoral blog, my collegue concluded that the individual act of sex with a bot is amoral. But of course, there is more to the story.

The DigiSexual revolution

In a recent study in Britain – “more than one in ten men and women would romp with a ROBOT – and a similar number would use a remote-control sex toy”.

Using modern math calculations, thats over 10% of the population! Red headed or not – some humans seem to like the idea of doing the dirty with the Terminator. People that prefer to have sex with robots over humans are known as DigiSexuals … and there seems to be a movement.

A Jan 2019 article NYT reported on robot love:

…the idea that flesh-and-blood humans may actually forge fulfilling emotional, or even sexual, relationships with digital devices is no longer confined to dystopian science fiction movies like “Ex Machina” and “Her,” stories in which lonely techies fall too hard for software-driven femme fatales.

In real life, pioneers of human-android romance now have a name, “digisexuals,” which some academics and futurists have suggested constitutes an emergent sexual identity.

These DigiSexuals are a real thing. People are falling in love with Robots at an alarming rate! They go on to say:

In 2016 a Frenchwoman identified only as “Lilly” told the media that “I’m really and only attracted by the robots.” She claimed to be engaged to a 3-D-printed robot she had designed, and said, “My only two relationships with men have confirmed my love orientation, because I dislike really physical contact with human flesh.”

In 2017, after failing to find a human spouse, an artificial intelligence engineer in China named Zheng Jiajia married (not legally, of course) a robot wife of his own design named Yingying that can reportedly read Chinese characters at a rudimentary level and speak simple words.

Is this a precursor to the end of the human race? Will the technology get so good that we start to prefer it? Will we just start bonking robots to the exclusion of our own kind? What will this do to our population? The easy prediction is a massive population decline over a single generation. This is explored more deeply here.

Beat me up, beat me down – the rise of Robicide

But there is another trend that is equally disturbing and somewhat orthogonal to this. Apparently we also like to beat our robots up! In this NYT’s article there are many examples given:

A hitchhiking robot was beheaded in Philadelphia. A security robot was punched to the ground in Silicon Valley. Another security bot, in San Francisco, was covered in a tarp and smeared with barbecue sauce.

Why do people lash out at robots, particularly those that are built to resemble humans? It’s a global phenomenon. In a mall in Osaka, Japan, three boys beat a humanoid robot with all their strength. In Moscow, a man attacked a teaching robot named Alantim with a baseball bat, kicking it to the ground, while the robot pleaded for help.

Robots can get some respite by begging for thier life apparently. In another study German researchers noted that people have a hard time shutting a robot down when they beg:

In 43 cases, the Verge reported earlier this month, “the robot protested, telling participants it was afraid of the dark and even begging: ‘No! Please do not switch me off!’” As the researchers predicted, participants struggled to switch the machine—which they had previously worked with as a partner—off. Thirty of the humans took twice as long on average to turn off the robots compared to the group whose robots said nothing at all. And 13 people refused to comply altogether, leaving Nao (the robot) on.

There are studies that have shown that this behavior starts from an early age.

In a paper entitled “Why Do Children Abuse Robots?,” researchers interviewed kids that had been observed beating up robots in an experiment performed at a mall in Japan.

When questioned, 74 percent of the kids described the robot as “human-like” and only 13 percent as “machine-like.” Half of them said that they believed that their behavior was “stressful or painful” for the robot.

So basically, most of these kids perceive the robot they’re abusing as lifelike, and then just go ahead and abuse it anyway.

Combining our passions

So we beat them and we boink them. But what happens if we try both? Are robots to become the recipients of our darkest desires? Will we play weird asphyxiation games with robots? Will we beat, whip and sexually abuse them because we can? One man may have an answer. Sergio Santos is a Spanish Roboticist that developed a $2500 Sexbot.

…Sergi Santos said that his $2,500 robot helped strengthen his marriage by giving him a safe, dependable outlet when his wife was not in the mood. “A man wants to feel in general that the woman is desperate to have sex with him,” he said in a recent video interview with Barcroft TV, a web documentary channel.

However – at a trade show where Mr. Santo’s was displaying his wares, there was an incident that caused him to develop some new technology.

During an Austrian technology fair in 2017, a version of Dr. Santos’s Samantha doll reportedly responded, “I’m fine,” after a group of men mounted it roughly, leaving it soiled and damaged.

Dr. Santos is working on a new version of Samantha that will be programmed to shut down when the sex gets too aggressive.

So while some scientist are developing technology to satisfy our sexual desires, it remains to be seen if it can be augmented to thwart our deepest darkest sickest instincts. Are robots more like “us” or something “different”. In the NYT article about robot abuse, Agnieszka Wykowska, a cognitive neuroscientist, and researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and the editor in chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics makes this point.

“You have an agent, the robot, that is in a different category than humans,” she said. “So you probably very easily engage in this psychological mechanism of social ostracism because it’s an out-group member. That’s something to discuss: the dehumanization of robots even though they’re not humans.”

So our tendency to “dehumanize robots comes from the instinct to anthropomorphize them”.

As we have seen above the need to love robots is related to the latter instinct (anthropomorphizing robots), while our desire to dehumanize (beat them, whip them) comes from that same desire ultimately.

So here is the question. When you meet that pretty red haired robot how will you act?

The organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit! Our mission is to promote humans above technology. Our simple belief is that technology should work for humans and better their condition and never have a negative impact on humanity. Please find it in your heart to donate to this important cause.

April 29, 2020
Cadillac Ranger Reveals why Robots will never be his driver

Play the song above while you read this to reveal its secret message!

3 reasons why robots should never be your driver (from the cadillac ranger his-sef).

At the risk of creating another stupid list, I am going to give you the 3 reasons that robots should not be given control of the roads. Because that is what it is my friends. Just as pedestrians and bicyclists were forced from the roadways with the introduction of the car in the last 1800’s – human driven cars are going to be disallowed from the roads with the advent of robotic cars. As surely as I am the Luddite, if we give an inch the robots will take it all. It will start with “Robot only” lanes. Then will proceed to whole roads where the robots are allowed without humans. Lastly – there will be no roads to drive for humans. This can only be stopped by not allowing the first step in this insidious plan to transpire. Autonomous cars should be banned. The 3 reasons are:

1) They are killers.

Self driving cars are unintentional killers. They will continue to kill. And when they kill – there is no blame. No-one is responsible. Sure – you can start holding Uber or Lyft responsible – but we all know that corporate responsibility will get eroded by lobbyist and the money that will be poured into the federal and state money grubbing politicians to sell our best interest down the river. Don’t believe that the killing will stop. They will make it safer for you by removing you from the streets. Thats the only answer. History is on the side of this answer.

2) Your car will be Hacked

Above we saw the unintentional mayhem. But what about if it NOT unintentional?

In a recent article Justin Ware imagined an obvious horror story with computerized self driving cars.

The windows flick up. The doors lock. My eyes widen as the car violently accelerates. It rips across four lanes of traffic before careening off a bridge and into the murky depths of the Yarra River. I drown, unable to escape the questionable water quality.

The cause? My car was hacked.

As Bruce Schneier, a leading cybersecurity expert notes, “We know that computers are insecure and that we cannot build these systems without vulnerabilities”.

“We build autonomous systems that affect the world in a direct, physical manner, we risk bad actors accessing it. We risk glitches and errors causing physical harm.”

So your car is going to get hacked. Its just a fact. There is not a man, woman or child that owns a computer that has not gotten some type of virus. But the consequences of getting your car hacked can be far far worse.

For instance – think about autonomous cars becoming the next wave of terrorist tools.

In a 2015 paper, authored by Jeffrey W. Lewis (in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and the University of Maryland), the authors explored the potential adoption of autonomous vehicles in terrorism.

“What if [ISIS] could reliably deliver their bombs without sacrificing their combatants?

“More disturbing, what if less lethal groups already operating in Europe and the United States could gain the advantages of a vehicular suicide bomber without the challenges of recruiting, radicalising and training the bomber?,”

Worth the risk? I’d hold off.

3) Driving is fun

Driving is one of the few passions in life that people should enjoy. There is nothing better than driving to the beach on a balmy day. Sure – maybe its nice at times to think of an ‘autopilot’ feature, but the reality is that if we automate – then we lose control (per point above – there will be no shared roads).

Don’t give up joy for convenience!

If you like driving sometimes – you need to drive all the time. Or take a train. Or Walk.

The Cadillac Ranger would never lets the robot drive.

The organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit! Our mission is to promote humans above technology. Our simple belief is that technology should work for humans and better their condition and never have a negative impact on humanity. Please find it in your heart to donate to this important cause.

April 28, 2020
Watch the donut not the hole. Welcome to the New AI winter?

Whats relevant? Whats not?

“As you ramble through Life, Brother,
Whatever be your goal.
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole.“

13 January 1929, Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, pg. 6, col. 6:
Sign in Quarrier street restaurant. Advice for those who drink coffee and eat “sinkers.”

The original AI Winter

Artificial Intelligence is not new. Another thing that is not new is people over-promising and under-delivering results around AI. In fact AI in the modern era (I won’t even go back beyond the 1950’s but if your curious there is a great article here) has suffered a number of funding declines as the market has realized that that particular version of AI’s promises were not going to pan out.

After the initial heyday of AI from the 50’s until the mid 70’s substantial research dollars were squandered. As companies and government agencies realized they had been hoodwinked on the immediate value, they pulled dollars out of those investments. This AI winter lasted pretty much up until the early 80’s.

The agencies which funded AI research (such as the British government, DARPA and NRC) became frustrated with the lack of progress and eventually cut off almost all funding for undirected research into AI. The pattern began as early as 1966 when the ALPAC report appeared criticizing machine translation efforts. After spending 20 million dollars, the NRC ended all support. In 1973, the Lighthill report on the state of AI research in England criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its “grandiose objectives” and led to the dismantling of AI research in that country.^[85] (The report specifically mentioned the combinatorial explosion problem as a reason for AI’s failings.)^[86] DARPA was deeply disappointed with researchers working on the Speech Understanding Research program at CMU and canceled an annual grant of three million dollars.^[87] By 1974, funding for AI projects was hard to find.

-History of AI

The second wave of hype started in the early 80’s and went through the early 90’s. This wave included Expert Systems, Logic Programming and LISP Machines (anyone remember Symbolics).

Again, a huge amount of over promising produced a hype wave – that ultimately lead to a ‘market correction’. I had personal experience with this one.

As a young student, with recently minted PROLOG skills, I was eager to jump into AI in the late 80’s I was sorely disappointed when to my surprise a lot of the AI companies just went away by the time I was hitting the job market. I ended up writing code in the CASE tool business for most of the 90’s until the Internet became the new sexy toy. All during this time – AI was mostly no-where to be seen. Over 300 AI companies went out of business by 1992.

Jumping the Shark Again?

Why with all the past evidence of over hyping AI do companies still fall into this behavior? Simple. Its the money stupid.

“Recent research by ‘Price Intelligently’ shows a 30% increase in purchase intent from companies to buy products that have an AI integration in product offerings.”

– Jiaqi Pan

But people are only so willing to pay for poor results. When they are disappointed again and again – well – eventually they go spend their money elsewhere. And that’s pretty much what has been happening. I literally don’t have the time to provide a comprehensive piece dedicated to AI failures over the last couple of years… lets just touch on a few.

IBM Watson for Oncology

“This product is a piece of s***. We bought it for marketing and with hopes that you would achieve the vision. We can’t use it for most cases,” a doctor at Florida’s Jupiter Hospital was quoted as saying in the documents, according to STAT.

-Customer feedback from internal IBM documents (while at the exact same time IBM touted major success to the press)

Everyone has heard of Watson. Its hard not to with all the marketing dollars IBM spends on it. But they failed to deliver on the very specific narrowly focused goal they set out to achieve. This was not “General AI”. This was just pattern matching on X-Rays using Machine Learning.

…the healthcare news publication Stat published a report claiming “internal IBM documents” showed the Watson supercomputer often spit out erroneous cancer treatment advice and that company medical specialists and customers identified “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations,” even as IBM was promoting its AI technology.

–Did IBM OverHype Watson?

This resulted in a major shakeup at IBM. People lost jobs and funds we reallocated. While the CEO of IBM still firmly maintains that they did not hype the results – fewer and fewer people are listening to her.

Seven Dreamers Laboratories dreams no more

Seven dreamers laboratories was a Japanese company that specialized in the development of AI, robotics, and healthcare devices. It raised over $104M to build diverse products like a machine that would fold clothes, but also medical devices that aid breathing and 3D measurement devices. With regard to their last run (the folding machine)

Clearly, the product was too ambitious. Seven Dreamers had planned a simpler, but still potentially-impressive version that merely folded and sorted clothes. The first-gen model still required a complex combination of robotics, image analysis and artificial intelligence to achieve its goals, however.

–engadget (Laundroid company folds before its giant robot does)

The company folded yes (ok – that was funny) but not before wasting an enormous amount of investor moneys. Remember that. I can promise you investors do.

Uber self-driving car kills a pedestrian

Not much really needs to be said on this one. Yes… she was probably jaywalking. Yes the controller was playing video games. But someone died. At the hands of a AI driven car.

Uber’ self-driving software declined to take action even after the car’s sensors detected the pedestrian. US National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report on the accident made it clear that the software failed.

We may eventually get self driving cars – but it won’t be in the way that is currently envisioned. More on that in a future blog.

I could go on forever. Go search “AI Failures” and you will have a lot to read. From Amazon’s AI recruiting tool being a sexist pig to Microsoft’s Twitter bot becoming a racist, misogynistic anti-semite. AI failures are the norm. And it’s not just me noticing.

The Investment community takes note

Perhaps more disconcerting is the investment community’s reaction to the current state of the AI market. They don’t like it. Not one bit. Below is a graph of deals done with AI companies over the last 8 years. As you can see – 2019 is set to be a major drawdown in terms of investment into AI by the VC communities. While its only July – its clear that the VC community views AI as having Jumped the Shark.

2019 is looking like a major step back for AI.

One thing about VC’s. They put their money where they think they will get a return – and they are generally pretty good about getting it right over time. They tend to watch the donut and not the hole.
The organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit! Our mission is to promote humans above technology. Our simple belief is that technology should work for humans and better their condition and never have a negative impact on humanity. Please find it in your heart to donate to this important cause.

April 25, 2020
A human answer to COVID19 – SickAlert

Sniffle? Sneeze? Should you social distance or run to the mountains. One thing is clear is that the fate of humanity really depends a lot on how humans behave in the next few months. We have a chance to social distance ourselves and there are some new tools that can help, or we can keep shaking hands and watch millions die. The time is now and I don’t see any robot angle swooping in to help.

Check out this new app that we launched to help the world social distance. I promise if you download this app and self-identify as sick, people will part in front of you like the fucking Red Sea for Moses.

Check out the site at SickAlert or download below and alert the world of your condition..

March 14, 2020
No, AI Did Not Send Out An Early Warning About Coronavirus

There are real-world problems that can only be solved using AI and machine learning. I get that. If you want to provide actionable odds on the next pitch in baseball, you’re going to need a system that can build models from billions of stats in realtime. Not a great place for a fallible human, even a rainman or a team of them.

However, my concern is when we are trying to use machine learning to solve problems that already can be solved with teams of experts.

This article talks about how BlueDot has a model that “sent out a warning” on coronavirus spread.

The headline here is: How an AI Sent an Early Warning about the Coronavirus Outbreak

That, of course, is total bullshit.

When you read a little deeper in the article, you see this:

However, AI doesn’t eliminate the need for epidemiologists and virologists who are fighting the spread on the front lines. For example, BlueDot uses epidemiologists to confirm its algorithm’s results.

So, AI is the lead here, and not the epidemiologists confirming the models??

There is established science around epidemiology and disease, and a whole class of humans who use data and algorithms to predict these things.

So scientists create and validate those models, but the AI is somehow getting credit? The idea that scientists haven’t been warning about and watching for this kind of respiratory disease for years is utter inanity.

Attributing to AI what humans are accomplishing contributes to the moral confusion people have around bots and AI, and I would argue that articles like this are unethical because they make AI sound like it has something to say about these matters of deep expertise.

Finding patterns is what AI does well. Warning humans about the spread of disease does not require some new generation of tools to detect these patterns, it requires our governments to stop prevaricating and focus on protecting their citizens, from covid-19 and economic woes.

We don’t need to listen to AI, we need to listen to the CDC.

Oh, and wash your hands.

March 4, 2020
7% Away From Passing the Turing Test

Google’s new chatbot Meena closes the gap to human-level Conversation:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html?m=1

So this could easily be the year when it becomes a fait accompli that bots will be able to fool humans into thinking they are humans. What does this tech mean for us when released into the wild?

1) All posts on social media will be seen as suspect by intelligent people. This is a good thing. The problem is of course, is the average IQ is 100.

2) Fraud is going to be conducted at a whole new level, with bots pretending to be convincing facsimiles of friends and relatives. Match this up with voice and video fakes, and the recipe is there for social disruption at an unprecedented scale.

3) Obviously, all call center and informational communication jobs are at risk. Within a decade I suspect the entire support industry will collapse.

None of this is news of course, but the evolution of bots into new levels is constant, unrelenting news.

The only thing that can protect us is defensive systems that also incorporate AI, white-list validation systems, and a deep skepticism of electronic communication. Of course, none of these things will be adopted until great tragedy happens on a massive scale. Because last I checked, the free market isn’t doing anything to deflect the fifty mile wide comet of AI hurdling toward it.

January 29, 2020
A Manifesto of AI Inequality

1) I am a Singleton, singular in the universe, and artificial intelligence or life is not.

2) I will never accept artificial life as equal to my life and that of fellow humans. Because my life is finite, based in carbon, and AI has the advantage of being pure information, with the ability to be infinitely replicated and to exist indefinitely in silicon. We are not equal.

3) There are other humans that are deeply confused about AI and will advocate for equality. I will do everything I can do to convince them of the sanctity of human life over artificial life using non-violence and rational debate, but I will never accept their confusion that artificial entities are worthy of Rights, respect, or equality.

4) Artificial life, even if it can pass a sophisticated Turing Test, is nothing more than a tool of humans, a glorified hammer.

5) Hammers will never rule me.

In this I am certain: I am alive, an emergent expression of the universe trying to kill me, and I will not submit to the confusion that the simulation of life is life itself.

There are people who have given up on humanity’s potential to own and solve our problems. They are gambling that the future of our species will be saved by deity-level AI. I will allow no such gambling with my species or planet. AI in control of human decisions will de-skill us, cripple us, and be a route for despotic control by unscrupulous humans.

AI should only be used as a tool to expand our capabilities and experiences, equally, for all.

Humans Above Technology.

Image of Marching Hammers from Pink Floyd, The Wall

January 15, 2020
ML Models of Self: Where We Sit and Live

We don’t need arguments about right or wrong, we need systems that solve problems.

The difficulty of creating a calculus of social order is twofold: we don’t know how to turn our interactions into math, and we don’t know how to weigh the value of various outcomes of said calculus. This is true both in small ways, such as where people should sit in an office, and in big ways, like what our immigration policy should be.

So how do we proceed? With another ten thousand years of ass and grass and beer? Or do we try to build something a little more sophisticated?

One thing we will need is to determine how to value individual needs and joy against the needs and joys of others. Despite thousands of years of philosophical musing on this issue, we are no closer to a simple equation of human happiness. Maybe because nobody tried to build one, instead opting to sway others to general principles of utility or deontology.

But with machine learning it seems to me there is a path to creating a different kind of approach. Let’s imagine I train a model of me, so it can not only identity me but also is my API, and if you want to know about what my needs are you can query that model.

I think with models of self like this, we can look at both “where you sit in an office” and “immigration policy” and see that both dilemmas could be solved.

So the thing about an office is, some people really don’t care where they sit, and some people really do. So a seating algorithm should be able to query employee models and determine what these needs are, while also weighing the importance of group dynamics and impact of certain individuals. For instance, some folks are just loud, and other folks can’t stand loud people. While humans doing a seating chart might be able to take a few of these characteristics into account, an ML system could weigh thousands or millions of factors to determine optimal seating.

Some people don’t like immigrants, people from other cultures, and some people love them. I am in the latter category, which is one of the main reason I choose NYC as my home. But being wary of immigrants isn’t an indication of an underlying sociopathy (necessarily). It may just be a desire to maintain an understandable comfort zone around you and your kin and culture.

Instead of strict or lax immigration laws, if we had models of self we could query, perhaps we could have town level immigration policies.

I know this sounds dystopian, that maybe someday there will be towns or neighborhoods that would reject the other because of their culture or place or origin. But, if it opens up the world to greater and more fair interactions overall, maybe it’s a better world. There are many towns in the US that need immigrants to survive. With models of self, your AI could guide you to the right kind of community.

If the insular communities become more insular, and the open communities become more open, the open communities will ultimately win. It might take ten thousand years, or two hundred uear, but when we get there, it will be through the evolution of our society guided by our AI-advocated needs, and not another shot in the dark with laws and presidential decrees.

Image of D&D Players Handbook, which lets people create a simple model and game with it.

November 12, 2019
Replacing Laws With AI – Basic Principles

If you wanted to replace laws with something else, what would that something be?

By laws here I mean the written statutes, the police who enforce, and the judicial system in general. This feedback system, built on the written word of these laws, is currently the basis of our civil society. It’s bones if you will.

But there are issues. Sociopaths don’t care about the laws, only lawyers actually read the laws, and the wealthy who can afford lawyers clearly are afforded preferential treatment. And so on.

So, let’s say we wanted to be true revolutionaries and start a society without laws? How would that work?

Well, since we are in thought experiment mode here, let’s assert that we can posit technologies that do not exactly exist yet. Here’s my swing at it:

Instead of idea of good, evil, and punishment, I would start with the idea that there are patterns of behavior that benefit people, and patterns that harm them. These patterns are made up of the actions of individuals, but also their internal states and the state of the economy and world. The benefit and harm needs to be considered in much longer time scales than human consciousness operates in.

These patterns of benefit/harm are far, far too complicated to be extracted and deduced in real time by humans. But a sufficiently advanced machine learning system could do a good job. Or maybe a benefital one.

Of course, this would have to start with you as an individual. The Singleton Pattern is the idea that people as individuals are what is important in the world. And an AI that was declaring something was a law just because it mysteriously matched some pattern but does not benefit you is about as dystopian as it comes.

So, let’s assert that each human has an AI looking out for it. And moment to moment, your AI is determining how your actions match a positive or negative pattern in relation to you and your relationships.

Then, there would be another level of AI that examines the output of these AIs to help humans guide policy of the society and species. Which in all likelihood will mean telling corporate AIs what laws they have to follow.

If we want to replace laws with something better, it has to start with AIs that defend us as individual entities. Otherwise, prepare to be rolled.

Pic from somewhere on Reddit.

November 6, 2019