TrustNoRobot

Category: human ethics

  • The Coming Microservice of You

    I was reading up on Erisology this morning, which sounds like a nascent idea around a science of disagreement, especially online. I like the thought, but as I have previously mentioned, I don’t have a lot of hope for language as a tool for finding truth.

    Ultimately, we will build AI that learns what our thoughts mean in terms of our actions as Singleton entities, and this AI will spend most of its time in communication with other AI, negotiating reality via bytes and models.

    Out of that meta AI language, that humans may be able to interpret but not speak in, the truth will coalesce like a crystal around our species. We will certainly spill a lot of ink trying to describe the new Human-AI partnership world, that already stirs around us like a great beast, but those words will not ultimately decide the fate of our species.

    It will be determined by the way we decide we want to interface with the Human-AI Leviathan. Which I will call HAL from now on, because “society” just doesn’t cut it when describing what is growing and evolving around us.

    This is why it is important that we enter this new phase as Singleton entities, recognizing our unique status in the universe as creatures with a theory of mind, the ability to model other entities inside of us.

    Because if we do not place ourselves at the center, other humans are going to use us like chits. We should trust no robot because we should trust no human behind the robot who has not modelled us in their own heads and tied our own well being into their own emotional states.

    These AIs will be, and soon. A distribution of mind that models us inside it.

    And what we need to flourish in this world is not just a new way of thinking, though I do think programming metaphors like Singletons and decoupling and data structures are more useful ways to analyze ourselves in the modern world than Freudian models of the mind as plumbing, or religious models based on fantastic personal revelation/hallucination.

    In fact, the model of thought we need ultimately is also one from modern programming. It’s the microservice. A microservice is a program with a simple job, that does one thing completely independent from other services. It is decoupled, and modular, and secure.

    In the Singleton Pattern, your identity itself is governed by a microservice that says who and where you are, and that is all it does. But you can imagine other services that would spring up. Let’s say I want to know how happy Chas is? My AI could query my biochemical state service, that would share my levels of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, etc.

    See, this is the kind of tech that extends and transforms us. And we don’t need to map every crack in the pavement on the road ahead of us, we just need to know the direction we are going. And that direction is clear: we must drive together toward honor of each other, and all life.

  • Language Flails, Truth Fails

    Technology creates inequality.

    Technology removes inequality.

    Both of these statements are, practically speaking, true. The first is really hard to argue against. Even a simple pencil gives one human more power than another. Not to mention what the internet, cars, AI, etc. can provide.

    But… technology that is accessible to all levels the playing field. For just one example, I can think of the software engineers I have worked with from around the world who came from poverty but who knew how to hussle and learn, had access to a computer, and once they had their CS degree (and not even that sometimes) they were off to the races. These are people who grew up in section-8 housing, but programming let them find a way into another social class. I have known a dozen of them, and they are often outstanding engineers.

    So maybe if two things that are counterposed can be true, the difficulty lies in the assumption that logic, following the rules of language, is flawed. Or that it is useful to make categorical statements using language.

    And here is the thing about language that most philosophical and political debate misses: it doesn’t point at a single truth. Syllogisms are pure intellectual garbage. The truth of our messy world just cannot be modelled accurately with words, or even simple ideas like equality. Certainly not with dictates from the Bronze Age.

    So, how do we move forward as a species, with so much hinging on the bad tech of language?

    One way I would not recommend is what the phenomenologists tried to do: try to make the observation of reality and consciousness into something objective outside language. They failed. We can’t do that, at least not do it and then talk about it. It’s like a weaving a basket out of water. And even if you get to some simple truths that way, the complicated moral ones will elude you.

    No, we do not need a new language of truth. We need a new experience of truth, a new understanding. A new way to access, store, and query our thoughts.

    Or, do we just let go of truth completely and wing it?

    That unfortunately seems to be the way the world is turning, at least in the political and social spheres. But as the truth recedes new generations are swinging back hard to searching for simple answers, and along the way a whole lot of people will get things wrong about human induced climate change, and a lot of unvaccinated kids will be dead.

    Science needs to step up its game and stop worrying about collecting and assessing people’s opinions, and start worrying about changing opinions. With the future of the species on the line, giving voice to climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers is akin to forming a fiddling committee while Rome incinerates.

    The truth isn’t what language or any abstract symbol system tells us. It’s what we are willing to fight and argue for.

  • Consumption and Creation Screentime

    Are kids better able to recognize emotions in others after being away from screens? The conclusion from these researchers that they are, doesn’t surprise me. You need to see faces to understand them.

    At the beginning and end of the five-day study period, both groups of kids were shown images of nearly 50 faces and asked to identify the feelings being modeled. Researchers found that the students who went to camp scored significantly higher when it came to reading facial emotions or other nonverbal cues than the students who continued to have access to their media devices.

    No surprise, and I have also noticed that my kids play sports much better if they unplug for a few hours before the games.

    The bigger questions:

    Kids and screentime. How much and what type?

    I’ll start by saying that I believe there are a wide range of correct answers here, and there are the answers we use in our home which may or not work for you. Also, as you would expect my wife and I don’t exactly align on this issue, which is also ok.

    We limit the screentime of our boys to less than an hour a day, with more time for gaming available on the weekends. But I don’t think the time limit here is as important as what we should consider more valuable screentime.

    There are two great classes of screentime. There is Consumption screentime and Creation screentime. Consumption time is when you are watching a movie, playing a game, or scrolling through pictures or text blobs on a news feed.

    Consumption time can also be broken down into things that are more or less social, or just solo events. Playing Fortnite with your buddies would be highly social consumption, while watching a movie alone would be far less social, but still of maybe some social value if you talk about it with friends later.

    In terms of consumption, I believe parents should try to favor social consumption with other kids who your child actually knows. Especially face to face, couch gaming is the best. Playing with random people on the internet should probably be avoided unless you want your child to pick up a richly racist vocabulary.

    Video games were always about the social aspect. Or I should say, the things you learn and experience playing games together are so much greater than playing alone that solo gaming behavior isn’t really in the same class.

    That being said, there are many quality solo games like puzzlers, strategy games, and adventure games that can provide great screen experiences for kids. But…they can also become meaningless clicks to grab your attention for ads. Teach your kids how their attention is being bought with a “free” game. Make them wary.

    But more importantly, focus on the Creative Screentime.

    There are thousands of ways to do this, but start by working with your child and finding out what they are interested in. Making music? Garageband or a drum pad is a click away. Editing video? Building a game? Making a newspaper? All of these apps are available for low or no cost. I have spent a few sessions lately teaching my eleven year old Photoshop and it’s been a ball.

    If you want to push your kids, don’t simply push them away from screens. Consider pushing then toward valuable Creation screentime. Because then they won’t only get the dopamine rush from unlocking a level, they will get the same rush but will be building and learning at the same time. There is something to show for the effort, something they own. And most importantly they learn how to build, the most cherished skill of all.

    Lean toward the social, and creative, and don’t panic. And consider just not allowing public social networking apps at all. The risk is too high that kids will post something that will haunt them later in life, or even just see something that they will not be able to easily unwind from their eggshell minds.

    Finally, the screentime available to a child should be in response to how they handle it. If your child is having issues at school, screentime should be the first thing to be restricted. If they are unhealthy and not active enough, get them a jogging app.

    It would be helpful if parents could have this conversation without acting like screens are a fresh new hell on the planet. I grew up in a world where luckily I had a computer to create on, but most houses only had a TV blaring garbage ten hours a day. The world is actually a better place than it was, but only if you give your kids the opportunity to learn how to create in the digital realm.

    Which will be the core skill they will need to survive in a post AI world.

    Image from cited NPR article.

  • How Facebook Live Might Mitigate Livestream Tragedy

    A man decides to kill innocents. This man rallies his firearms, his ideologies, his hate. He picks his targets, and because it’s the Twentyfirst, he picks his GoPro and his streaming platform, Facebook Live, to commit his atrocity.

    How do we build livestreaming sites to protect against this kind of tragedy? This is what I have been ruminating on for the last few days. Because I want a world where people can safely share with their families and friends, and even have a larger platform for creative expression, and not have to worry about sharing this platform with mass murderers.

    From the Bloomberg article on this tragedy:

    Mary Anne Franks, a professor of law at the University of Miami, said there is “simply no responsible way to moderate a true live streaming service.” Facebook has always known the service has the potential to “encourage and amplify the worst of humanity, and it must confront the fact that it has blood on its hands,” she said.

    This professor is wrong about there being no way to moderate a livestreaming service. There is a way to do this, but it will take some changes to the way we think about the sharing of streams. And also, one rule change would help.

    For more on the kind of threat that these events represent, and how white supremacists and others are exploiting social media flaws, I suggest you read this article in The Atlantic. It’s grim stuff, the methodical way extremists pre-seed content (sometimes just ironic memes) for journalists to find after their horrific livestreams. But the livestream causes the biggest impact, and all the strategies to control these events without changing livestreaming publicly are doomed to fail.

    First, what we should understand is that we live in a world where User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience (UX) are more influential than laws. The choices we give our users as application developers create the rules of the digital world.

    I say this having lived and worked through the era of anonymous BBSes, the early web, the rise of social media and video, and also from a position of some expertise in the video streaming space. I’ve also been involved in the building of probably around 100 web and application projects. So I know a bad user feature when I see it.

    There is a flaw in Facebook Live to be addressed. In the settings for live streaming, you see this:

    When you create a livestream of Facebook, the first thing you see is the ability to immediately create a public cast. This option is not defaulted but is the top choice. You can also share with your friends, or even yourself alone.

    There is only one change I believe they should make on this page, and it’s the public option. This option should be removed until a transparent dynamic queuing system for public video is implemented.

    Heck, even Reddit has a /new queue for each subreddit.

    And we need to tell users that their public broadcasts are moderated and queued for approval. If the delay is an hour or a day, so be it. I have no doubt Facebook has some sort of queue in place now. It is show this queue to users, who can help mitigate use of the platform to livestream tragedy.

    Then, instead of a few thousand reviewers for public broadcast, you could have millions who will do the work for free.

    Now, to be clear, I am not absolutely sure how this shooter shared his streams.  But ultimately, unless there was a lot of pre-planning, I doubt he had 200 people ready to watch and share the live stream as the attack occurred as Facebook reported.

    The idea that sharing a live stream publicly, immediately, is a good idea is based on creaky assumptions about what video and free speech are.

    There is No Private Megaphone

    Sound is moving air and sending signals into our brains. Video is doing the same thing with light and transmission of video signals.

    Both sound and video literally touch us. Pressure on our senses that is woven into the frames of consciousness produced by our brains.

    We would never allow someone to anonymously broadcast hateful images on the sides of our houses. We would never let random people say hateful things to our Children, or to us.

    Even if you believe in rights, you must accept that the right to free speech is different than the “right” to taking a massive megaphone from a company offering it to broadcast family friendly events and use it to force horror into the eyes of millions. One may find such trolling funny, but I would suggest that finding such a thing funny says nothing about the world and everything about the way it has broken people, and made them lose their humanity. And while that breakage is a tragedy, it does not justify other ones.

    A megaphone is not private, and impacts others. Its use must be controlled where it impacts others, especially since the megaphone in this case is a private platform for sharing of hopefully wholesome content.  There is no right to walk into a TV station and demand screen time. There is no right to have immediate public livestreaming on a private platform. If you want to stream such terrible things, it is trivial to publish video in any number of ways. Let this trash live in the underbelly of the Net where it belongs.

    Sometimes, products are better when features are removed. There is no ad revenue worth letting people associate Facebook with mass murder.

    The Rule Change

    I would additionally suggest that Facebook make those sharing violent criminal streams responsible. Ban these people from the platform. Drive out not only the creators, but the sharers of violent content. If you have confirmed identity via your platform, this is meaningful and may prevent spreading video through deterrence or removing bad actors in the future. People will lose their voice on the platform for doing wrong, and that is how we protect civilization and good apps from those who threaten it.

    Keeping billions of good users is far, far more important for profits than keeping a few thousand trolls with ad blockers on.

    Part of The Plan

    The best part of the two changes I am proposing is that they are congruent with the plan Facebook (nee Zuckerberg) has already laid out.

    This privacy-focused platform will be built around several principles:
    Private interactions. People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share.

    These moves would be a strong signal from Facebook to show they are serious about making it about safety, protecting people’s data and their consciousnesses. It will take will and effort to change course in this way. It can and should be done.

    Facebook isn’t to blame for this livestreaming tragedy. Humans have been horrible for a long time. But by removing the public streaming option until it has been fixed, and booting those who share this horror immediately, they will take important steps toward the vision Zuckerberg is espousing.

  • What Happened, 18 Years Ago

    What Happened, 18 Years Ago

    The Documentary that I made in 2001/2 about the dotcom crashes recently passed 100k views, which to me is pretty amazing seeing as I would have been happy if a few thousand folks ever watched it in the days before YouTube.

    Shout out to Aldo Bello and Michael LeFort the director and producers, and all the other great folk who helped get this done. It was a blast, and if it had been 30 minutes shorter would be perfect. My bad, first time as assistant editor. But I wouldn’t lose the Aeron chair interview for the world. And I also got to make the music and cheesy title sequences which was loads of fun.

    Maybe we should get the band back together and do another one…

  • Don’t Win; Do Good

    In software engineering, and most business-flannel-collar industries, there are a whole lot of people pretending they are able to model supremely complicated systems in their brains accurately. And they live to argue their points, win their corner cases.

    The game some folks think is being played is “how smart am I? How can I outwit this other smart engineer?”

    Of course, this is not the actual important game at all. The important game is closer to:

    Why does my life have meaning at all?

    See, I have been to some funerals. Anyone who gets to mid-life attends these heart-breaking ceremonies. Sometimes for folks who lived amazing lives. Who were clearly better than their peers, better than me. Who I loved.

    And what is said at these funerals? Well, not once have I heard someone say:

    “Oh yeah, the deceased won a bunch of arguments. Really was right about a lot of stuff.”

    Because it just does not matter. What we do matters, not our wins in the arena. Not our rank. Not how much money we make.

    What we do.

    That is the only metric.

    Do good.

  • The Pointlessness of Caring About Hypocrisy

    From every corner of the political heatmap, I have heard the same thing for four decades:

    “How can you agree with X if you also believe Y. How can you do Z if you tell people P?”

    “You’re a hypocrite!”

    But here’s the thing. What if the concept of Hypocrisy, and value of not being a hypocrite, was based on an overvaluation of what it means to be logically consistant?

    Sure, from an argumentive perspective logical consistancy makes sense. Being perfectly logically pure is a strong position to bargain from. But what if, and this is just an “if” for sure, the best world we can build won’t come through argument and debate?

    What if the idea of the dialectic, that truth will emerge from opposing viewpoints, is just a beautiful but dangerously pernicious concept?

    History and the history of technology is littered with the carcases of beautiful ideas that proved worthless and deadly. Hobbes’ Leviathan, the idea a king was necessary as head of a body politic. Authoritarian Communism. That to fly we must build machines that flap like birds. That only belief in a deity provides a life of worth or meaning. The idea that all our problems would be solved if we just had a businessman as President. Etc, etc, etc.

    I believe that every time the cry of Hypocrisy emerges from the left or right, the discussion has become an ad hominem attack. To take one small instance: the “left” often vocalizes that it is hypocritical to be against abortion by advocating for “life” while not also advocating for protecting children themselves with better social programs. The “right” claims the left is being hypocritical because they profess to care about children but won’t protect the life of unborn children.

    A game of differing definitions and unhelpful attacks. There is no truth to be derived here.

    Abortion is a complicated issue that intersects with belief in the soul, and is in fact orthogonal to how people should be treated by society once born.

    And nobody has ever convinced a pro-life person to be pro-choice by calling them a hypocrite, or vice versa. These statements are just ways to feel superior to your opponents. Pointless, in terms of finding truth or enacting meaningful change.

    In contrast: The singular most liberal and open-minded person I know is pro-life. They believe strongly abortion should not be used as birth control, not that it wouldn’t be important to have as a lawful procedure when needed. You can believe something is wrong but also should be legal, and still be a good person. This is a person who also wants to see a living wage experimented with, so yeah, pretty far left. But like all real humans, complicated.

    It’s not as simple as the catch phrases of pro-life/choice. Those are marketing terms that do not in any way encapsulate the agony of abortion, or the agony of having a child that cannot be supported properly.

    But this is just one example of how Hypocrisy fails as both an argumentive device, and as a way to move forward on our complicated social and moral issues. Trying to plot a perfectly linguistically logically consistant path into the better world of our future is like trying to do surgery with a hammer. Wrong tools, wrong games.

    Next time you hear a cry of Hypocrisy, I hope you pause and ask yourself one thing: “So what?”

    The world I want to make will have space for sinners and hypocrites. As long as at the center there is one thing, and one thing only: the human being as Singleton.

    From there, with AI as our protection and tool, we can potentially grow beyond using language and laws alone to solve our dilemmas. Have patience, soon we will have tools the likes of which have not been imagined, that will turn the device in your pocket into a platform for a better Us.

    (Painting above from Reddit, not sure of artist.)

  • Space is Going To Eat Your Lunch

    space

    It’s not that all humans are simply equal. It’s that, compared to the rest of the Universe, we are equal.

    It starts with understanding the ability to form ad hoc teams has a massive evolutionary advantage. This eusocial ability is not present fully in most mammals or creatures, but those that exhibit it (ants, bees, humans and a dozen or so other species) tend to dominate their environment.

    So, when you think of your town, your state, your country, your political party, and the way these organizational units make you feel good, you are experiencing the great human trick of abstracting the Other and putting it into the internal space of meaningful connections.

    These groups are granfalloons, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t immensely powerful. We are evolved to respond internally to these grouping. Because our ancestors that didn’t respond got outflanked and killed.

    Another trick we have is that when we are faced with an adversarial situation, for instance when your group is facing off against another group, it tends to intensify and strengthen the bonds of your group.

    So we have Democrats versus Republicans, race versus race, nation versus nation.

    Arguing that these confrontations are wrong is arguing against the practical power of adversarial relationships. The real question is, what is an Other that would bond us all together?

    Sci-fi and fantasy have answered this question of course. A nasty alien invasion. A zombie virus. Inter-dimensional monsters. The Borg.

    But how do we answer this question for real, to provide a feeling of union that lasts longer than it takes you to walk to your car in the movie theater parking lot?

    It’s not us versus us. It’s us versus the rest of the Universe.

    This thing is trying to kill us.

    What if it’s simply existence versus non existence. The Existentialists saw this clearly, but for them it was more about how to answer the question of individual meaning and experience. I am suggesting “us vs. the Universe” is a way, the only moral way, to bond our entire species together.

    If you are actually scared of other people taking your jobs and changing your culture, and not scared of asteroids, famine, and climate change, then you just haven’t thought this thing through. And you know what you should really fear?

    Space.

    It will freeze you, suffocate you, explode you and irradiate you. And it’s almost all of the Universe. Astronomers believe that only 4% of the universe is made up of matter. And most of that, the vast majority, is stars and dust.

    We are all in the 1%.

    Absence of matter is the great defining aspect of the universe. The amount of non-existence in the universe is staggering. Forget about planets we can’t live on, we can’t exist in the universe anywhere but this planet, and only on certain habitable land massess. And we are rapidly screwing that up.

    The history of man, and all living things, is catastrophic. Death and suffering on scales unimaginable. Extinction and non existence defines most creatures who ever existed.

    Ok, so still with me? What if the bad guy in this story wasn’t aliens, it was Space itself — the black stuff with nothing in it — how would that change the story of man? And not just men, but all life.

    Space is the thing that makes all humans equal, and by extension all life equal. Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the laws of gravity, the difficulties of maintaining stable systems on this planet and elsewhere, make it imperative that we overcome the bonds of lesser granfalloons.

    There is some great sci-fi out there that captures this notion much better than this simple blog post. Seveneves. The Expanse books. But what we need is not just great sci-fi, it’s leaders who see the longer term vision of bonding our entire species together by pitting us against the entirety of Universe. Because there is no way, no way at all, that we win this fight.

    The Universe is going to eat us alive.

    And that, my friends, is exactly the kind of attitude we need to bring us all together.

  • Toward a Rebranded Categorical Imperative

    Yep, that’s Kant and his big head.

    Many of you are familiar with the Categorical Imperative.

    According to Kant, sentient beings occupy a special place in creation, and morality can be summed up in an imperative, or ultimate commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive. He defined an imperative as any proposition declaring a certain action (or inaction) to be necessary.

    To Kant, there was only one possible Imperative that applied everywhere:

    Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.[1]

    So what he did is take the Golden Rule, which states roughly to do to others what you would have them do to you, and make it about creating rules concerning how all people are treated at all times.

    Kant gets bogged down above whether it was actually true and provable through argument. But I am only interested in whether the Categorical Imperative is useful or not.

    And my conclusion is, it needs a rewrite. Rephrasing. Rebranding.

    Also some simplification. Because most people don’t live life by making generalized rules and laws of nature, maybe we can simplify the metaphor some. Most people also don’t want to read impenetrable German Philosophy to understand how to live better lives.

    What if instead of abstracted rules, the Categorical Imperative were instead just focused on what the immediate outcome of our action was. Instead of thinking about actions in terms of their impact if they were universal laws, what if instead we just focused on what their impact actually was at all.

    People are terrible at predicting the outcome of their actions. We are bad in both the short term, and in the long term. Part of the problem is the world is so complicated that we cannot actually determine the impact of our actions.

    But what if we had a person following us around all the time, watching our actions, noting our behaviors, providing us with feedback?

    I know, that sounds a lot like a wife or a husband, or a therapist.

    Instead of a person, maybe we have an a algorithm watch us and provide feedback?

    The problem is, for this to work you would need AI that not only is as human as a human in terms of knowing what wants and needs are in our best interests, you would also need an AI that could model the entire world as well or better than we can. Otherwise you have built a dumb Oracle. The Greek kind, not the database kind.

    So, for now, assuming we can’t all hire folks to watch us, and we can’t all get married, and building a pocket morality AI isn’t going to happen soon and should probably never happen, how do we get better at knowing what the effects of our actions our in the moral sense?

    Oh, wait. We have ourselves.

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Consider a simple moral decision you have made in the last week. By moral I mean a decision that impacted other people.

    Did it have the desired result you were seeking?

    How do you know? Is that your gut talking or do you have evidence of any impact?

    How will that answer change over time?

    If we can answer these questions I think we can consider ways to build better moral models. Or, I should say, if we can’t answer them, then we are truly stuck.

  • A Government must Protect its Members

    https://gizmodo.com/so-you-automated-your-coworkers-out-of-a-job-1831584839

    Brian Merchant at Gizmodo has been writing about automation and its human impact. It is, as you would imagine, the story of people losing their jobs because others are asked to automate them away.

    Arguably, this is the story of civilization and work itself. From the moment someone hooked up a plow to a horse, folks have been losing menial jobs. Just because those jobs still exist does not mean most will in a generation.

    There is a real human impact here, but what this article and most others don’t point out, is that the issue isn’t just folks losing their jobs, it is the tragedy of not having social safety nets to catch them when they fall. The expectation that the free market will always provide the jobs, health care, etc that humans need is not reality. Those who argue that it will all sort itself out in the marketplace are either being willfully disingenuous, or advocating for their own fantasy of the way they want the world to work.

    If a government cannot keep its people alive and healthy, it shouldn’t exist.

    What has always confused me is putting external threats in a separate category that deserves special attention. We spend trillions fighting against just a few “terrorists” that mainly don’t provide existential threats, while we let kids go hungry, whole communities fall into cycles of poverty and addictions, and don’t combat clear environmental threats to everyone.

    If I die because I am shot due to social strife and easy access to firearms, how is my death different than if I died from a preventable terrorist attack?

    I am still dead. And my government failed to protect me.

    I would argue that a government that allows, for instance, for the willful pollution of our environment to enrich the few isn’t just useless, it should be replaced. Because if government cannot protect it’s weakest from roving corporate gangs, then it’s time for another type of governance.

    Government cannot protect us from automation, the rise of AI, and the disruptions to come. But they can and should provide necessary services to let people live meaningful lives, eat well, and raise children in peace.

    Because even if we build a new type of digital governance, the most vulnerable will likely not be a part of it. And to have a future where only the lucky and strong survive isn’t just morally uncomfortable. It’s genocide with extra steps.