TrustNoRobot

Category: AI

  • Democracy and Science Are Failing: Upward

    Democracy and Science Are Failing: Upward

    The news looks grim. Democracy will fail. Science is in a Replication Crisis as the planet cooks. Language is broken.

    None of this is news. The viability of Representative Democracy has been in question since Plato, and probably for thousands of years before that. Science has always been a “look at me and my big brain” contest that led to shoddy methodologies and conclusions. And language has always just been a magic trick to convince yourself and others that truth can be wrung from the filthy dish cloth of reality by barking sounds and pointing.

    But let me explain why I am excited to be living right now: it’s a time when the general public is starting to suspect that Democracy, Science, Language and yes even Money are not ground truths. They are skeins laid over the true power of the human brain and society, and we can remake them, craft them into anything we wish. That doubt of ground truth makes the public open to change, change we sorely need.

    We are all connected, not by some mystical noosphere, but rather in reality, with computers in our pockets connected by an extremely reliable global network. At our disposal, finally, a way to extend our mental processing powers using AI.

    It is time for the great flowering, the age of Computer Assisted Pragmatism.We don’t need to align on the exact methods and applications that will be built to further the next step in our personal and social evolutionary tale. In fact, using language to try to align everyone is not going to work. We just need to build the next phase and be willing to adapt to further the ultimate aim. It is that aim that we do need to align on.

    For me, this alignment entails that we must agree that individual humans are Singletons, worthy of empathy, respect, and fair treatment. Technology (and yes, Money and Language and Government are technologies) built to further the Singleton Pattern is worthy. Other tech should be discarded as evil.

    Which is why I do not reject the ultimate value of AI out of hand. Because it is very possible that the new world we will build cannot be negotiated without the extension of our consciousness, cognitive powers and Language (HAiL) using AI. AI that looks out for us, and protects us from folks who just don’t care about others, and will do their best to steal our shared futures.

    So do not dispair sisters and brothers and non-binary friends. It took Representative Democracy over two thousand years to spread, Science a few hundred, and electronic intelligence almost a few dozen. It will still take time for us to thread new social structures around the bones of the old ones. But it is happening today, and right now there is a college undergraduate realizing what I realized in University: that all of the structures of thought and control that people take for granted are grand illusions.

    The difference is, today that student is a comp sci major, and they have the power to build a platform to change the world.

    Build. Build like the wind.

    Image from The Guardian

  • RadioWar, 1938-2019+

    RadioWar, 1938-2019+

    Television did not replace radio, it stole the spotlight from it. Radio still remained on the stage, and eventually transferred bits of video and half truth via WiFi and LTE. So in a way, radio subsumed television.

    AI will not replace human thought processes and actions, it will augment and change us, and perhaps someday we will absorb it back into the core of what it means to be human. Perhaps.

    It’s the “along the way” part that bothers me as the xkcd above suggests.

    And now, of course, because this is the Internet, I am going to get to the point of this post and talk about Hitler.

    But wait, don’t click away yet! I promise, nobody is going to be compared to Hitler, and this isn’t a warning about the rise of facism in the West. Well, not really.

    But it is a suggestion that the only reason Hitler came to power was because he harnessed radio, and radio was magic. A lot of focus gets put on the rallies he held, but the radio broadcasts and movies (another magic invention) and yes, early television in Nazi Germany (first used to broadcast the Olympics) reached far more people than any rally did.

    Radio transfixed and changed the German-ish people into Nazis, as the Guardian article shows:

    As the tension increased at the beginning of September 1938, radio became more than just a tool of propaganda. For some days, pro-Hitler Sudeten German activists had been working with agents from the Reich to sow the seeds of a coup in the Sudetenland, which would effectively turn its annexation by Germany into a reality on the ground. The cue for the uprising was to be Hitler’s speech on September 12, which was broadcast live from the Nuremberg party rally on all German radio stations. With each sentence, the Führer stirred the Sudeten Germans to rebellion. The British journalist, Sydney Morrell, witnessed the speech’s impact in the spa town of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), where he listened in the company of an elderly Sudeten German widow and her teenage son. While the widow got rather bored, “her son, his head pillowed on his arms, huddled up to the loud-speaker, listened avidly, his bright eyes darting round the room, seeing visions …” Such was the alchemy of radio.

    FDR pulled off the same trick in America, using radio to bring America together during the Great Depression. When things are bad, when times are tough, magic technologies have undo influence.

    Enter the Internet, and mobile devices, and constant-scroll experiences. Back in the early days of the Web and email (and before, on BBSes and The Well, etc), misinformation was something that could be tackled directly in forums via public debate. Language still had a chance, even if the scourge of trolling and anonymity seemed overwhelming.

    But then came The Flood, the Human Wave, the massive group of users who entered the digital space in the 2000s, using social media, that has led us to the current Miasma. Guys like me who had a special shelf for our Wired magazines just didn’t see this coming, didn’t realize that when anyone could Internet that the ground truth would collapse under the sheer weight of shitposts.

    Trump was not the first Internet President, Obama was. And from the moment he raised money directly online for his campaign the die was cast. From the moment he used Twitter to weigh in on an issue, he legitimized that tech. And if you add together money and micro logging you have a perfect shitnado.

    The medium is not only the message: the medium is the drug, the thing that makes us feel connected without any connection. When the US radio broadcast the German invasions of the late 1930s without the pictures and stories of the millions being killed in occupied territories like Ukraine, it actually lulled the US into a sense of the inevitable nature of German conquest. Instead of the horror.

    Language is broken technology, and social media (most) is broken technology not worth participating in. There is no truth in a headline, no matter how slowly you scroll it. And my guess is, we will soon look back and realize that all of this confusion happening around us is just one more iteration of one of the oldest human dances:

    War.

    Wave of people image from aidcurrent.com

  • The Smart Cow Theory of History

    Perhaps you have heard of the Great Man Theory of History,

    The great man theory is a 19th-century idea according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of great men, or heroes; highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural attributes, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect.

    I’m not really on board with that one to be honest. Mostly because I think the real changes in history happen due to technology, and not ideology, warfare, or singular heroism or leadership. The invention of firearms, antibiotics, and alternating current have changed average lives much more than most of the Herculean achievements supposedly attributed to the Heroes of History.

    But, how did those technological and scientific advancements occur? This brings me to my proposal: the Smart Cow Theory of History.

    The Smart Cow idea is derived from the Smart Cow Problem:

    The smart cow problem is the concept that, when a group of individuals is faced with a technically difficult task, only one of their members has to solve it. When the problem has been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing the less technically proficient members of the group to accomplish the task.

    The term smart cow problem is thought to be derived from the expression: “It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow.”[1]

    Imagine that each advancement we make in technology brings us, a metaphorical herd of cows, to a new, greener pasture. For instance, the development of the internal combustion engine by a Smart Cow, or small group of smart cows, suddenly gives us massive power and abilities. Tesla figures out Alternating Current to unlock the gate of power transmission, and then the regular cows can build the power grid.

    But then we inevitably come to another locked gate: not enough fuel, dangerous vehicles, carbon emissions. We bang against these gates until the smart cows, the technologists and scientists and yes, the capitalists who fund them, figure out a way to unlock these gates. Then we all blunder through, blindly, into the supposedly greener pastures of our future.

    Smart cows would be folks like: Tesla, Edison, Curie, Einstein, Ada Lovelace, Ford, Taiichi Ohno, Oppenheimer, Herbert Boyer, Tim Berners-Lee and so on. Every woman and man working in a lab coat somewhere or pounding on a keyboard is likely a Smart Cow in some way. Because really smart and effective cows don’t do it alone; it usually takes a cowteam to unlatch those gates.

    And what are those gates? Those are the problems we face. Energy, food, travel, health, understanding, control.

    The Smart Cow Theory of History implies a few things. One, is that us cows that blunder through the unlocked gates have no idea what lies on the other side of the fence, and most of us don’t even know that gate was there in the first place.

    Second, and more importantly, the Smart Cows don’t know what lies on the other side either.

    Sure they can theorize and discuss, but Smart Cows are just individuals who can apply their focus to a single issue and solve it. They are just looking for a solution to the unhappy mooing around them

    Oppenheimer didn’t know how nations would negotiate power through nuclear weapons. He was more worried that the initial atom bomb tests would ignite the oxygen on the planet and kill us all.

    The Smart Cows building AI, putting computers in our pockets, and editing our genes have No Idea what the outcome of these actions will be. They can’t, the universe and humans are just far too complex to know what the next pasture and gate will look like. But we do know that these gates are getting more and more complicated, the pastures more dangerous, and the Smart Cows are going to keep unlatching.

    Telling Smart Cows to stop fiddling with the locks isn’t going to slow them down. But if we all just spend a few moments asking the right questions, and enshrining the right values, maybe, just maybe, we can set our boundaries in time to prevent disaster.

    Perhaps some gates need to remain locked to keep the herd from wandering onto the highway, or into the slaughterhouse.

    Moo.

    To hear a couple of very Smart Cows discuss some upcoming gates around biotechnology and CRISPR, I highly recommend episode 50 of the After On podcast with Kevin Rose.

  • Robot sex, robot dogs and what it means to be human

    Robot sex, robot dogs and what it means to be human

    In a nondescript bedroom in an undisclosed industrial neighborhood of Toronto, Canada, Erika is being prepped to meet her first john. Before her appointment, an attendant will wash and sterilize her. Then they’ll dress her in the white tank and black thong underwear fitting for a French-Canadian girl-next door.  (from Rolling Stones article by BREENA KERR – ‘Are Sex-Doll Brothels the Wave of the Future?’)

    $120 for an hour and robot love can be yours today at https://www.auradolls.com/erika.

    However enticing this may seem, I suspect the future is less brick and mortar style and more personal in people’s homes.    Perhaps we will even see a blend of therapy and sex merged into one device.  Take a look at this new Tombot that is hitting the market in 2020.

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tombot/tombot-affordable-robotic-companion-animals-for-se/

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  • Smarter than who?

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    As was mentioned in a previous blog, America as a whole has failed the turing test. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, is now warning us that their AI may be stupider than previously mentioned – or at least riskier to the business.

    “New products and services, including those that incorporate or utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning, can raise new or exacerbate existing ethical, technological, legal, and other challenges, which may negatively affect our brands and demand for our products and services and adversely affect our revenues and operating results.”

    Microsoft in its previous filings did a similar red flag warning in August:

    “AI algorithms may be flawed. Datasets may be insufficient or contain biased information. Inappropriate or controversial data practices by Microsoft or others could impair the acceptance of AI solutions. These deficiencies could undermine the decisions, predictions, or analysis AI applications produce, subjecting us to competitive harm, legal liability, and brand or reputational harm.”

    Why are two of the major purveyors of commercial AI waving their hands in the air like a couple of teenage girls that got caught smoking in the bathroom.

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     Because they KNOW that:

    1. The AI they sell is potentially very dangerous – in two distinct ways. The first is that someone with evil intent uses it to do bad things. The second is if someone with good intentions but with incompetent execution uses it for bad things. The second scenario is probably much more likely.
    2. The marketing engines of IBM, Google, Microsoft and Amazon (and others) have so overhyped the potential for AI that there is an inevitable crash coming. There was already a long AI winter from the 80’s until about 8 years ago. I am predicting another one – and clearly they are too.

    What would these companies need to feel comfortable that their AI was not going come back and hurt them? Meaning hurt their bottom line? The obvious answer is that it would need to be smarter. Right now AI is a tool. Not a thing. Its a set of features. Because its not smart – scenario (1) and (2) above are not only perfectly reasonable outcomes – but will in fact inevitably will happen.

    So what to do with dumb AI? Maybe rename it? Would Microsoft and Google be putting warnings in their annual reports about the dangers of “a dumb set of tools that allow people to build things that seem to learn over large datasets, but really its kind of an illusion.” Hardly.  But it does not seem likely that we can do that. The collective marketing departments of these companies are WAY too invested in selling the current set of tools as “Artificial Intelligence”.

    The other option is to create a new standard of intelligence.

    Something better than the turing test.

    We have mentioned in a previous blog that “Being alive” and “Staying alive” are the clearest essence of Existential philosophy. And we know that Existential philosophies are the best because they are French. The French just know more than the rest of us. They are both the most liberal and most politically incorrect group on the planet. Think about that a moment.

    And who is the paragon of French Existentialist thoughts? Sartre of course!

    So let us note that in this Blog we are the first to submit to critical review the idea that software pretending to be smart are ONLY TO BE LABELED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IF AND ONLY IF THEY ARE SMARTER THAN SARTRE.

    Camus might be ok too.

    Humans-Above-Technology-Logo-B1The 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.

  • The GreatFake

    URME-mask

    On April 1, 2022, the GreatFake occcurred.

    It started at 3:30AM Eastern Time, when 17,985 state and local police departments began receiving a slightly elevated number of phony 911 calls. These calls took the form of local residents, panicked about a variety of fantastical things. Lights in the sky. Weird sounds and voices from their computers. Sometimes it was them reporting some terrible crime they had just seen another local commit. Other times, committing suicide on the phone call.

    These were not local residents, of course. These were human controlled networks of AI bots, using tens of thousands of local personas crafted by mining social media for voice and speech patterns. They were the voices of real people, and could answer simple questions about the people they were posing as. They could easily pass any Turning test a harried 911 officer could concoct.

    We simply had no defense for this. As the calls escalated, by 5:30AM the call centers were jammed to a point where the Federal Government was on the case.

    Unfortunately for the Federal Government agencies, they had been hit by a similar assault. But this time it was AI posing as people’s bosses calling them and telling them not to come into work, that they were fired, or committing suicide on the phone.

    It quickly became clear that every government and police official in the country had an AI version of him or herself running amuck. These AIs were sending offensive emails to the press, deep-fake nude photos of colleagues, and locking police and emergency responders out of critical systems.

    On YouTube, deepfake versions of celebrities spouted conspiracy theories in crafted videos. The president was shown doing terrible things, but nobody really cared. In fact, what folks had missed all along was that the threat deepfakes posed wasn’t to celebrities, it was to them. Their everyday lives.

    What the nation awoke to on that April 1 was a complete breakdown in trust of voice and video. The repercussions were profound. Thousands died. Cities rioted. Fear of bots spread like a cancer. Social media networks were shut down by the government.

    It sucked.

    And the perpetrators were only doing it to short-sell stocks in American markets, and buy cheap on the bounce back. A bunch of gangsters. In this case, Russia was pissed because they stole the plan it had saved for a rainy day.

    But then something happened. We cleaned up the mess and decided to fight back. Systems for controlling your identity and validating content creation quickly took hold and flourished. There were false starts, but within five years every human on the planet who could afford an electronic device, which was most of them, could validate any video or voice communication of themselves easily and securely. And without that validation, video and voice communication was instantly rejected as compromised.

    We whitelisted ourselves.

    The GreatFake, like the Thanos snap, was inevitable. The only question was what form it would take. In another, darker world, perhaps the attackers went after our nuclear facilities.

    We were lucky.

    Image from 3D printed mask to help you evade surveillance, project here.

    Story inspired somewhat from this research to put words in your mouth.

    By analyzing the speech patterns in a video of one person speaking into a camera, they’re able to swap whole phrases for completely different ones. The result is pretty realistic.

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  • I have wasted all my life .. on a Glowing Piece of Plastic

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    As the man says “A Wasted life in fluorescent lights for a hard earned buck or two… ”

    We have written here about the depression and alcohol and drug abuse that can set in when robots have taken your job. But, what about those pathetic loser’s that actually get to KEEP their job and work a meaningless existence? What about those that don’t get the quick exit? What about the desperate, sad, deluded, blinded wage-slaves who embrace their chains for the sake of a thin dime.

    In this upbeat article Mother Jones makes the point that everyone is going to lose their jobs. We previously made the same point, but for you lower life forms that can’t keep up here is it again:

    I don’t care what your job is. If you dig ditches, a robot will dig them better. If you’re a magazine writer, a robot will write your articles better. If you’re a doctor, IBM’s Watson will no longer “assist” you in finding the right diagnosis from its database of millions of case studies and journal articles. It will just be a better doctor than you.

    And CEOs? Sorry. Robots will run companies better than you do. Artistic types? Robots will paint and write and sculpt better than you. Think you have social skills that no robot can match? Yes, they can. Within 20 years, maybe half of you will be out of jobs. A couple of decades after that, most of the rest of you will be out of jobs.

    They continue with examples…

    Last October, an Uber trucking subsidiary named Otto delivered 2,000 cases of Budweiser 120 miles from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Colorado Springs—without a driver at the wheel. Within a few years, this technology will go from prototype to full production, and that means millions of truck drivers will be out of a job.

    They go on to conclude:

    Unfortunately, for those of us worried about robots taking away our jobs, these advances mean that mass unemployment is a lot closer than we feared—so close, in fact, that it may be starting already.

    At that point they become lost in the big AI debate (True AI, Singularity, bla bla bla) … but the point of taking jobs is a crucial one.

    20 years is a long time. 40 years longer. That is most peoples entire career. So if anything like this is true, we are all the last suckers in the world that will be working our lives away. After us … its milk and gravy.

    “Money is the root fool… and you’ll be parted faster than you know”

    So how does it feel to be the last generation of people that will have to work? It is kind of like being in the last generation of people that have to die. You can see the finish line. But you can’t get out of the desert. Its RIGHT THERE. You can almost touch it. But instead you have to go to work and waste away your days in a dreary fog of meaningless activities and stand up meetings. Code reviews, project plans, budget meetings, sales calls and issue tracking all ticking away the seconds and minutes that make up your lifespan.

    And all so you can make enough $$ to pay for your tacobell and miller light while the next generation will be served free cavier and champaign by robot slaves.

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    Do yourself a favor today. Go outside. Breathe deep. You are the last of the Mohicans.

    Have a great day!

  • Humans Above Technology

    Humans Above Technology

    Humans-Above-Technology-Logo-B1

    Super excited to announce that the organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit that has been created to help 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 stand by for our projects and activities that grow past this blog.  Our mission is clear and there are difficult waters ahead to navigate in this time of massive change for humanity.  We need to make sure every technology is examined and hold it up to a standard of what is in the best interest of humanity, not just the bottom line of a company, government or simple convenience.    We are all interconnected, we live on the same rock floating through the universe.  We need to be thoughtful of our decisions and what we will accept and what we need to stand against.   We can no longer tolerate ‘progress’ at the cost of human rights and condition without inspection and accountability.

    I thank you for reading this blog and hope you stay to collaborate on where we go from here.  Exit the matrix and join us.. more to come from Humans Above Technology..  

  • Why Are We Idiots?

    Reading my colleague’s blog on grey goo, I was struck by his conclusion:

    So maybe we intentionally wipe everyone out with Nanobots or maybe we accidentally do it. In some sense justice would be better served if stupidity killed us rather than malice. Its just the way we are. We are idiots.

    What I suddenly realized is that in my whole life I had never asked a simple question: why are we idiots?

    See, when people ask that, they usually have an agenda to sell. “People are idiots because education sucks, video games, Millennials and ribbons, etc”

    But why are we actually idiots?

    And then it hit me like a diamond bullet right in the center of my forehead.

    We are idiots because that’s what works best from an evolutionary perspective.

    Stretching back behind you in history is a million year history of ancestors who believed idiotic shit, and it kept them alive. Because bands of people believing idiotic shit will almost always beat bands of individuals who are not synching on some foolishness.

    “Let’s kill that mammoth. Then we will eat for weeks!”

    At some point, one of your ancestors said something like that. Or more likely they just nodded and picked up their spear when they heard it.

    “Life is ok, but I hear in America the streets are paved with freedom!”

    Uh huh. Not smart. But following that fantasy kept a lot of people alive, made a very small percentage rich beyond imagining, and that foolish thought brought the best idiots the world can make into our free market.

    To be an intellectual on any scale is to swim against the tide in some way, to question and probe your own suppositions. I think intellectuals need to stop thinking that their thoughts will somehow stop the great waves of stupidity we all swim in.

    The job of a white blood cell is not to change all the other blood cells into white blood cells. Its to defend the body by attacking foreign agents.

    The job of a thinker in the 21st is not to rally people around a cause. Like a white blood cell, we should defend our society of fellow idiots by attacking or repairing bad ideas.

    Building self replicating nanobots is a bad idea. Building bot managers is a bad idea. Handing over society to AI is a bad idea. Autonomous vehicles are bad in many situations but make perfect sense in others.

    We can debate the specifics for sure, but if you feel in any way like we do about the threat that stupidity in science and technology pose, raise your voice. Don’t just forward info on social media, put your identity and voice into it. It’s worth more than you know.

    Because here is the secret: ideas, dropped into a ripe bowl of idiots, are self-replicating also. And dangerous as hell.

    Because the reason we are all still here is because just one person in the tribe said:

    “If you’re gonna kill the mammoth, you’re going to need a bigger spear. Let me help.”

    The first white blood cell, the first thinker, the first engineer.

    Image from here

  • Imagine All The (DeepFake) People

    Imagine the year is 1989, and I put in front of you a computer with a mouse, keyboard, and wired connection to, if not the Internet, CompuServe or one of the other graphical interfaces to remote machines and information.

    Now, if I asked you to project forward twenty years, could you have imagined all that boiled down and expanded 100x in your pocket, connected wirelessly to billions of remote services? Some people have that kind of imagination for sure, but most people would have struggled to see how it would be possible. Or necessary.

    Now I ask you to consider these technologies:

    1) Realtime face mapping to simulate another person, as seen here.

    2) Realtime voice cloning that matches your own voice, as seen on sites like lyrebird.ai.

    3) Enough processing power to enable real-time near-perfect simulation of a human being.

    All three of these things exist today, and we are already seeing the emergence of DeepFakes as a service with sites like deepfakesweb.com. Sure, it’s not anywhere near passable as a human yet, but neither was your Apple IIe as a mobile device.

    And here is the kicker: it’s not going to take 20 years. It’s going to happen over the next two years. By 2021 you will not be able to trust the authenticity of any given talking head video unless it’s certified in some way.

    We don’t need new laws to protect us from this forced-Turing test, existing fraud and copyright laws should suffice. We need new technology. And not tech to identify a fake once it’s out in the world, already damaging our identities, but rather tech to certify the authenticity of a video from its inception.

    Digital watermarking will be an important component of this new technology, but that’s like saying RAM is an important component of your mobile device. We will need to authenticate our devices and use Distributed Human Identity Tests to validate ourselves.

    More about some research on AI-based digital watermarking research:

    It replaces the typical photo development pipeline with a neural network—one form of AI—that introduces carefully crafted artifacts directly into the image at the moment of image acquisition. These artifacts, akin to “digital watermarks,” are extremely sensitive to manipulation.

    In tests, the prototype imaging pipeline increased the chances of detecting manipulation of images and video from approximately 45 percent to over 90 percent without sacrificing image quality.

    It’s a start, but will need to be created into consumer tech rapidly to afford us any protection from the chaos that is about to occur.

    DeepFakes are going to be a lethal new weapon dropped into the ongoing ideological, class, and epistemological battles being waged in our society. The level of disruption they will cause is hard to imagine, but start by thinking about a perfect video of you saying the opposite of your current political beliefs posted on social networks.

    Identifying bots is almost impossible now. When they begin to hijack real identities, or fabricate them whole cloth, the game is over for a trusting society.

    Astounding Science Fiction Oct 1953 cover art