TrustNoRobot

Category: better capitalism

  • Building Angels

    I get it. The world is overwhelming, language is broken technology that doesn’t even try to meander toward the truth anymore, and as Yeats said, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

    But. If.

    If instead of building bots to influence public opinion, what if the bots were built to protect us, to nurture us, to provide us with maximum agency and happiness? What if the deamons of AI became our better angels?

    Nothing is written in stone for how the twenty-first is going to go. Sure, it could be a downward spiral, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was instead the century we righted the ship, when we built the new communication and organization tools for the next ten thousand years?

    I think the dilemma we face is that not everyone is going to come along for the ride. But that’s ok too; it has to be. At many points in human history we were forced to migrate to survive, and when we did people were left behind. Most of us now are the decendants of those who chose to move on.

    Move we must. Move away from belief that exposure to information somehow moves the needle on truth, move away from a faith that the Internet and social networks have not been compromised, that empathy can scale.

    We need to migrate toward a world where AI serves as our shields and protectors, and we must criminalize the manipulation of other humans using bots. We must accept that the only way we can protect ourselves from AI is to build AI defense systems.

    The only logical way to create these is for a marketplace of protector bots to exist, since depending on the government to provide you with a defense system simply puts too much power in it’s hands (especially if it is compromised). Here, capitalism can shine, and the same system that allowed the creation of bot armies to influence elections can innovate defensive systems against them.

    The battleground is all around you, every second of your attention, and the prize is the future.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We’ll Be Right Back…

    The meeting had an impressive roster. The heads of the world’s media and advertising companies sat silently around a massive walnut conference table in a sparsely furnished room on the 89th floor of a featureless midtown tower, awaiting their guest.

    The door opened, and Trump shuffled in and sat down at the head of the table.

    A throat was cleared and an Australian accent intoned “Donald, we have a problem. Ratings and revenue are down.”

    “Impossible.” Huffed Trump, crossing his arms

    “This isn’t about polling, this is about ad revenue. And we are down on sales 15% for the year. The Wall and the tariffs and minor scandals just aren’t cutting it. And our economists say unless we get more people watching more commercials, the global economy could collapse,” said a voice with a Chinese accent.

    “The people love -” Trump started.

    “Listen boy” a thick Texas drawl cut him off. “Your act just ain’t pulling in the numbers. We gunna have to go for plan B, and hope that a nice juicy Impeachment will pull in some viewers. The writers have several gold options for this…”

    “Ok, and you still promise me I won’t lose in the Senate?” Trump asked.

    There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. An older woman’s voice broke it.

    “Depends on how that storyline tests in the Midwest.”

    Art from Beeple

  • 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

  • The big tent

    The big tent

     

    We live in the richest country in the world, and no one should be hungry, and no one should be homeless.
    A livable wage, affordable healthcare, affordable educational opportunities, and the ultra rich paying their fair share of taxes would all go a long way towards resolution as the general citizenry would then have opportunity to better themselves.
    Question; when did these simple and humanitarian concepts become associated with the far left???     Hell, it was the majority of the republican platform when Ike was president, and America had a robust and thriving middle class.
    What ever happened to the republican party that championed fiscal responsibility, family values, limited government, and a formidable military standing?
    I look at trump’s GOP, and I see a party that more resembles the taliban; they advocate forced patriotism, they’re anti-gay, they’re misogynistic, they want god in government, and their leaders seemingly refuse to recognize or accept any government mandated checks on their power…
    What I see clearly is that trump and his enablers have pushed the right so far in the direction of hate, intolerance, and totalitarianism that anything left of center now appears to be extreme, when in reality, it represents the diversity of our people. It speaks of equality, freedom of choice, and humanity; the very virtues on which America was founded, and grew into the greatest nation on the planet…
    Mark my words, old boy, this is a dark and tumultuous time for the American people, and history will, in our lifetime, reflect the truth regarding these events…

  • Attempts to Ban Face Recognition and ML Will (and Should) Fail

    You can’t ban facial recognition technology as this BuzzFeed screampiece suggests. You can’t ban building a model and querying the model, neural networks, or recording digital video. That genie has left the bottle and is on a plane to Singapore sipping mimosas.

    You can ban misuse of the result of those models, but we already have laws for that.

    Sure, facial recognition is going to be used by authoritarian regimes to oppress and enslave us. Last I checked, so were tanks, nukes, taxes, water rights, and every single piece of technology humans have ever created.

    Stop thinking that the problem is technology, and start thinking the problem is naked apes in silk suits pretending they are leading while they are just grunting in favor of their own tribal power.

    So why should we think face recognition or machine learning tech isn’t terrifying? One reason: there are thousands and thousands of GitHub repos where normal programmers are hacking and reverse engineering the future. Because unlike tanks and artillery, ML can be used against the ruling class just as it can be used against us.

    Here’s an example: let’s say I want to prove that a Politicians or CEO is lying. I know, a real edge case.

    The way it works now is we wait 24 hours for some intrepid reporter at huffpost or wherever to dig up the video, and… we have already moved on as a society (and the liar has gotten away with it). All this depends too much on people who care knowing what happened in the distant past, and people who care going to a website and caring enough to care.

    In the computing world, we would say our monitoring and alerting system for truth is not alerting fast enough. Thanks journalism, but turns out you are waaaaaay too slow for the 21st.

    But what if everything a professional liar ever said was indexed and put into a model of them, where a system that understands their words would instantly pull up video of their previous lies alongside their current bullshitting. ML could allow us an experience of multiplexed video of those people through time.

    In other words the next time a liar like Zuckerberg lies in front of Congress, we can display realtime his previous lies which expose his new ones. Like this 2009 video of him saying Facebook will never sell your data.

    Imagine having to give testimony when your previous lies are blasted in your face. Go ahead, argue with yourself for a while. Imagine a reporter holding up their phone and asking questions in real-time based on what an ML analysis of the liar’s words were.

    I would guess that liars would hate that. Good, let’s drive them into the darkness.

    Quit pretending that this is about appealing to reason, or protecting our imaginary rights. This is historical, epic war, and to win against the oligarchy we are going to need to have our own suite of metaphorical weapons. ML is going to give us the tools to change the game, and secure a future based on supporting the health and happiness of individual humans, Singletons, which I would argue isn’t socialism at all.

    It may take fifty years, or a hundred, but society will evolve around this tech as it always does. But if try to ban ML, you’re taking away our best technique of making this change equitable.

    Because real equality needs real data, and tools and people to understand it.

    Render by Mike Winkelmann

  • Corps Control Government with Winks and Jobs

    America is cursed with a terrible, creaking Government system only because we were early adopters of the freedom tech the Enlightenment was selling. But I don’t blame my ancestors for believing in the people. I honor them for it.

    But what is cool is that we adapted and built these entities called corporations. They were purpose driven Mini governments that could dominate markets, and change lives, and influence the big lumbering Government.

    Then the entities broke the law, and the government fought them, and asserted authority. The battle for control raged through the courts, and the Government even resorted to breaking up companies.

    Starting in the late Twentieth, the companies figured out how they could take over the government.

    Then they did.

    Turns out offering nice “consulting” jobs after exiting Government was all they needed to do. Bingo, state control via corp bribery was born.

    Corporations have taken over Government before and been driven back. It will happen again. It’s the cycle of control that will only be resolved historically when one thing happens:

    When people, individuals, Singletons, are able to use technology and laws to fairly control both companies and Government.

    Because both Government and corporate Entities are real only as control surfaces for crowds. Only individuals are real, and worth protecting.

    Render by Mike Winkelmann

  • Empathy Will Not Scale

    The limitations of empathy as a model of morality are more than just philosophical ones. The capacity for empathy is not only a finite resource, it is a zero sum one.

    We know empathy is finite because of Dunbar’s Number, the limitation we have as humans to maintain social networks.

    Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[

    The exact number, be it 150 or 10, of your empathy range is irrelevant. As the illustration above shows, there are various boundaries/sizes of different social types. The point is, you only have so many slots that can be filled with real people that you actually care about enough to see the world through their eyes, and shuffling folks in and out of slots doesn’t change this finite capacity.

    Neither does the trick of some religions of slotting in God or all other humans into an empathy slot – the abstractions are easy to imagine but almost impossible to realize for most folks over a lifetime. Holy men and women can pull it off, but they are outliers for sure.

    I think the best way to think about empathy is as another physical sense, the bonding one. And just like you can’t see over the horizon or hear all things at all times, you can’t suddenly will yourself into having a super-empathetic sense.

    Plus, we have another conundrum, and maybe the bigger one: even if we can somehow juggle our way around Dunbar’s spectrum and feel something for everyone, the people we are having empathy with have no requirement to give us empathy in return.

    We can understand the terrorists all we want, but if they don’t understand us then it’s a pointless undertaking.

    I grew up in the 70s, when there was a belief that without empathy for everyone we couldn’t end racism or prevent a final world war. But racism has not gone anywhere, and war has just morphed to remain profitable.

    So let’s quit making each other feel guilty that we aren’t universal empathy machines. Let’s find a new way forward.

    My suggestion is the Singleton Pattern, which is a recognition of the special status of humans in the universe as distinct and special. It’s not about recognizing empathy, it’s about recognizing value. Together, small teams of humans can make massive improvements to our reality. We are all Worthy.

    When you walk through a forest, you can feel deep affection for the natural world and want to preserve it, but that doesn’t mean you have empathy for every tree. It’s a different feeling, and that’s the feeling we need for society.

    Instead of using guilt and shame to force folks to have empathy for all, we should find ways to discuss our goals for society. And that entails putting some numbers to things.

    What crime rate are you willing to tolerate? What rate of abortions? What rate of poverty? What is the minimum cost college should be? Homelessness %? Tax rate?

    The metrics of the world, and building a data driven society, do not require empathy. They just require understanding statistics and percentiles, and believing that caring about data is more maintainable than your emotional connection to other individuals. High school math, and caring about your grade.

    I don’t need a leader telling me how to think or feel. I’ve got that covered, thanks. What I need is leaders who care about demonstrable, quantifiable results of policy choices.

    Dunbar boundary Image from this article.

  • You Own Copyright on Your Metadata

    Your Identity isn’t owned by the state or corporations, it’s owned by you. And not just the identity of who you are right now, but also the data wake you leave in the Universe.

    In other words, every interaction with a computer, every frame of video with you in it, every email and text, photo and blog post.

    These are extensions of you, and if used to make derivative works (such as face recognition systems) you are owed for the use of that data, for the use of you.

    Companies are profiting off of you by building models from and selling our metadata. By not compensating us, these organizations have reduced the value of our metadata.

    There are two ways to go on this, and I’m not a lawyer so I won’t charge you for my opinion.

    One way is to copyright your metadata. We will get to that in a second.

    But what about patents?. Could you patent your data?

    While I don’t think most software should be patentable, I am open to the idea that person’s metadata should be. After all, the Singleton Pattern states there is only one unique version of us in this universe, so of course I believe that you are a unique invention.

    The problem with patents, even assuming Uncle Grandpa Sam would grant one for your metadata, is that they only last for 20 years or so. Not good in this use case.

    I guess you could also try to trademark your metadata, but I having acquired a trademark before (without a lawyer) I can assure you it isn’t going to be practical to send reams of metadata to constantly apply for trademarks of you.

    So, copyright it is.

    Copyright is a form of intellectual propertythat grants the creator of an original creative work an exclusive legal right to determine whether and under what conditions this original work may be copied and used by others, usually for a limited term of years (50-100 after creators death)

    What would a world look like where you have copyright of your metadata? Let’s explore.

    Step one: claim your copyright.

    Well, to start with, to claim this copyright of your metadata all you would need to do is claim this copyright in a particular territory.

    In all countries where the Berne Conventionstandards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape, or a computer file), the copyright holder is entitled to enforce his or her exclusive rights.[21] However, while registration isn’t needed to exercise copyright, in jurisdictions where the laws provide for registration, it serves as prima facie evidence of a valid copyright and enables the copyright holder to seek statutory damages and attorney’s fees.[33] (In the US, registering after an infringement only enables one to receive actual damages and lost profits.)

    So you don’t need to register anything, you already have a copyright of the metadata you create! You made it with your force of willpower to be alive. Congrats! You’re an artist, Harry. Step one done.

    Step two: find a company or Government who is making a lot of money off your metadata.

    I can think of a few, but I would rather let folks fill this in on their own. But some candidates might be social media companies, computer vision companies, digital signal companies, machine learning companies, direct mail companies, online shopping…etc.

    Step three: Lawyers.

    The next step is to begin the process of putting together massive class action lawsuits against these companies. The FTC will never actually regulate anything besides its own cowardice to enfore laws to protect us against fraud. It’s time to use the free market to attack the organizations abusing our copyrights.

    You made your life, and your interactions with the world are creative expressions of this thing we call your will. The best case we can make for this is to start to build unique models of ourselves and then sell them to companies, and fight against the validity of any model of us not in our control.

    This is the information battle of the next twenty years, a fight for identity and ownership of metadata. And to win it, we are going to need some great lawyers.

    Render by Mike Winkelmann