TrustNoRobot

Category: Singleton Pattern

  • 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

  • Being and Somethingness

    This morning over a bowl of cereal I asked my six year old Quinn what the most important thing in Life was.

    Without hesitation he said “Being Alive.”

    I told him that was a valid point, and asked him what the second most important thing in Life was.

    “Staying Alive.” Quinn replied.

    It’s peculiar how we age and lose this clarity of thought. This is, in four words, the essence of Existential philosophy. And there is a certain magic to it, to frame all experience in the wonder of your existence and the knowledge it is limited in scope.

    At the heart of the Singleton Pattern is a recognition of our special status in the universe. We don’t need a Deity to anoint us to comprehend our uniqueness. We just need to observe the night sky, the vastness of the sea, or the victory of a single seed of grass in its climb toward the light of the Sun to understand our purpose.

    Our continuous existence is our frame, our stage, to act out our parts.

    And we do not need expensive costumes, or disco balls overhead, or even an audience for our play to be meaningful and beautiful. The act of living our myriad, prosaic lives is the purest act of expression and Art we can make, and only the weakest among us try to gain power by disparaging the play of others.

    The goal can be to thrive, but first, we must exist. Then, we must survive.

  • From HAL to HAiL

    Arguably one of the most iconic evil robots in cinematic history was HAL 9000, the murderous brain of a doomed spaceship in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, I don’t think this trope of an red-eyed AI gaining sentience and killing us is an actual real threat we face from robotics or AI. Worrying about that is akin to worrying nuclear weapons will start robbing banks. But killer AI makes a better movie than people losing their jobs to automation or getting relentlessly spammed by bots via social media.

    But I’ve been thinking a lot about the term I coined in this blog post for the Human-AI Leviathan, or HAL. Obviously I was making an ironic reference to the original HAL here, and for that reason I would like to withdraw my coinage, or alter it at least. I don’t want people to think I am suggesting that the metalanguage that will evolve between AI and humans is going to be conscious and/or evil.

    Plus, most folks won’t get the Leviathan Hobbes reference, and I also think that particular work of philosophy is claptrap. Or people may think I am being literal in suggesting it is a creature or being. It will not be, nor should be talk about it as a being.

    In fact, I think this evolving AI feedback loop will be a positive movement in our species evolution. And while it is not a creature or really a language in the traditional symbolic way of thinking about language, I do think Language suggests more of what I intend, that its raison d’être will be human communication and facilitation, than “Leviathan” does.

    So, here is my re-coinage:

    HAiL, the Human-AI Language.

    To break it down, Human comes before the AI because that is what the Singleton Pattern is all about. There is a lower case “i” for AI to remind us that artificial intelligence should never be considered a being. And because it looks cool.

    And finally, Language. Because even though this will not be a spoken or coding language solely, this will be a medium of exchange between human beings. We will just be using models of self and society to communicate that only machine intelligence will be able to query effectively.

    A concrete example of HAiL is a spam filter. Or a social media news feed. Or a reminder from your calendar app. Or an ad served based on your preferences.

    And wonders yet unrealized, like thought mail.

    This blog is not about instilling fear of AI. This is about setting a new course. Because naming things is important. If we call the thing evolving and growing around us a language, we can understand that. Spoken languages change and grow around us all day long, and besides the folks who are still upset that nobody uses semicolons properly, generally language evolution is seen as a good or natural process. And nobody tries to marry a language. We break through the confusion that AI is a being in its own right.

    HAiL will be a manifestation of technology as an order of life, in the way Kevin Kelly talks about in What Technology Wants, a wonderful book that for some reason I seem to be the only person who made it through. Worth a read. Basically he makes a case that Technology itself has purpose, and is a new type of life. A big idea, maybe a little too big.

    AI should be incorporated into our species as HAiL, which suggests both signaling and dangerous ice falling from the skies. Both threat and greeting. A future not of threatening red eyes, but of raising our hands and being heard.

    And no, I am not making a Hail Hitler reference. Man, the Internet has ruined us.

  • 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.

  • A New Shell Game

    Your house is a shell. Your car, a mobile shell. Your clothes, your preconceptions, your choice of news websites, your LLC, all form shells around the gooey center that is you.

    And even if you believe, as many do, that the self is an illusion, the no-thing hallucinating the self still loves shells around it.

    These shells form protection from the elements, from bad ideas, and hopefully from actual crimes against you. The largest crime that goes unanswered right now is theft of your attention.

    The trouble as I see it is that we have built machine learning tools that provide easy ways to crack our shells, by for instance spreading misinformation on trusted channels for advertising, but machine learning hasn’t been shown to actually protect us from much of anything.

    Nobody has built an AI shell for us. Yet. Sure, there are firewalls and anomoly detection for financial security that might use machine learning, but what I am talking about is an AI that knows you, and only you. That is, in effect, the information shell you will wear throughout your life.

    That will protect you, and only you. That is trained to identify you, by learning all of your biological and information patterns.

    I am a user of the Titan security key, which ensures that only devices I physically authorize can access my Google accounts. Now imagine a system that does this one better and removes the key itself. The key is the AI who knows you on millions of factors of authentication.

    And deep fakes become irrelevant. Without your true signature, provided by your AI shell, all is ignored.

    Because when we have absolute security of ourselves as individuals, when spreading information requires knowledge of the people behind the spread, we can halt the flood of disinformation. And we can rebuild Government and Corporations to serve humans better.

    There are those that believe that anonymity is still needed to allow leakers to speak truth to power. I disagree. Two points here: what happens when wikileaks gets taken over by Russians, or any other supposed anonymous bastion like the press is compromised? Being anonymous really only has power when the megaphone is trustworthy. And while I don’t agree with the president on much, I believe if you blindly accept what is on the front page of the NY Times after the second Iraq War then you are living in a seriously compromised shell. If an anonymous leak appeared there from this White House, I would assume nothing but malfeasance first.

    Secondly, the idea of anonymity has a lot more relevance when there is less noise. But right now, when bots create so much noise as semi-anonymous or fraudulent actors, we need more authentic humans to stand and be heard.

    It sometimes hurts, but we need to take the hits it takes to change the world. I realize my ideas in this blog, for instance, are beyond controversial. I am suggesting that we need to rebuild society based on a new understanding of the self and equality and technology. And while I believe we can do this successfully only without violence, so I am not really a traditional revolutionary, if you don’t think someone advocating replacing traditional governance with something completely different using self-focused machine learning isn’t sort of crazy, then it just proves my point that we are all over-saturated with information. Nothing shocks.

    But my point isn’t to shock, or convince people that the robots or people who build them are winning and inspire change through fear alone. My point is to tell you that there is a way forward if we place the individual Singleton human at the center of the change to come. If the shell we build for information protection becomes our second skin, filtering out the noise, giving our voices more and more power.

    Then we build a whole new shell game, an operating system for the world with encryption for individuals on by default.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • De-skilling the Future

    A reader writes:

    So can automation cause de-skilling to handle complex situation? If routine problems are dealt with by the algorithm then how do humans develop the skills to handle catastrophic problems? I’m thinking autopilot, self driving cars, call centers. If the answer to complexity in the system is plugging humans in the top end to close the gaps I’m not sure how to get skill set without experience?

    I believe human de-skilling is a real thing, and it happens not only with AI but also with all technology. The development of cars reduced the amount of walking and horse riding people do, for instance.

    But there is also a paradox that emerges: while fewer people walk great distances, more people run marathons for enjoyment than they used to. While spreadsheets have replaced the skills of bookkeeping for many, they have opened up those skills to a far greater number. Tools like TurboTax have reduced the number of skilled accountants, but make those that still exist more valued in certain areas. Hunting skills lost are made up for by more nuturious diets for greater numbers of people, etc.

    To be clear, I am not making an economic argument. Paying jobs that are lost to robots are likely gone for good. What I am suggesting is the adaptability of humans makes us quickly pivot from lost skills to new ones. Adaptation is our best, and maybe only good, feature.

    However, the reader makes an excellent point about dealing with catastrophic problems. If we only have medical robots that care for us and they are hacked or break down, tragedy is sure to follow.

    Which is why I keep emphasizing in this blog that we must never give ethical choices to machines. There must always be a trained doctor working with the surgery robot. There must always be a human behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle, who will likely choose to drive on their own at times. AI must always be a tool, and never seen as a being, no matter how much people want to marry their waifus or venerate Elon Musk.

    Does this mean I am suggesting that we cripple our technology? That we stop building robots and programs when they cross the threshold of moral action?

    That is exactly what I am suggesting. We should use the technology of Laws to limit AI to being the tools of individuals, with always a single individual to blame for misuse. Because de-skilling alone we can handle. We will adapt, and maybe even steal back the skills when we tire of the machines. It would not surprise me at all if there were more family farms in 100 years. But if we let AI be our bosses in any way, we lose for all time our purpose, which goes far beyond living our lives in fulfilling ways.

    Our purpose is much more grand. We are a biological expression of the universe itself. We are its great transparent eyeball. And there is a dystopian future to prevent, while reclaiming our paradise lost. Work to be done, a world to unite, space to claim for life. A world to save from climate change, families to grow, a solar system to colonize.

    The skills we lose will be nothing compared to what we will gain if we classify machine intelligence correctly, as a tool. We must stop trying to build new life, and instead empower the individuals of our planet equally.

    And we must make the falsification of human being with bots a clear crime. It’s fraud of the highest order. Even if it helped get the person you wanted elected.

    Because of all the manufactured ideas of the modern world: justice, freedom, happiness, etc, the one that means the most for our future is equality. And that starts by defining AI as not equal to us, to prevent the moral confusion that follows.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • The Singleton Pattern as Kernel

    The Singleton Pattern is not a model of the internal states of self. It is solely a potentially practical political model of society and governance.

    This is a simple but effective model of what it means to be human. In non-programmer terms, it means there is only one of you, and you are a special kind of object in the universe, and you are special primarily because you can build an internal model of others and tie it to your internal reward and stress systems.

    This model also does not require us to come up with concepts like Rights to create Justice in society. We can instead just focus on each individual’s internal states, while understanding there are base limitations in what humans can feel and model.

    This is the core point to understand: I am suggesting that we need this new model not because our models of self and belief are somehow deficient. You should be able to hold any religious beliefs or view of self, or lack therefore, that your mind can contain. In the diagram above, the self or lack therefore and the soul and belief would reside in the green boxes where CPU, Memory and Devices reside.

    I am proposing that we follow this pattern to rebuild social order, because it puts individual humans at the center of our social equations and doesn’t accept simple unverifiable aggregations of our opinions, or even feelings, as being more important than protecting individual sentient life from the real threat.

    Which to me is clearly amoral and immoral humans using machine algorithms to attack and control our information networks, Governments, and markets.

    So, lest you think I am fear mongering, which I most certainly am, consider the news that legit natural text generation has most certainly been conquered.

    New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators | Technology | The Guardian

    It was pretty bad on r/politics back in 2016, but trust me the new bots to come will likely have years of personal history built up, and be able to pass credit checks. Which is just a crappy Turing test anyhow.

    We are about to be flooded with full gibberish. Entire news orgs will arise overnight generating trillions of flashing lights to draw us into the fires to control our attention. Chaos is going to become templated and installed via npm. Enterprise grade.

    To fight this, we need to hold dear our personal beliefs, but we must accept that the professions of politician and journalism have no regulations, are full of amateurs, and have already been compromised.

    What if instead we built a new society? And built it like you would an operating system. Free and open source.

    So, what’s the first line of code we would write? The first box on the whiteboard you would draw?

    In the core of an operating system is something called the kernel. It has complete control over all systems.

    In the Singletons Pattern, the core of our operating system is the Singleton, which is instantiated when you come into existence. It has public and private methods of access. It can model other things inside it, including Singletons, and it has constraints and limitations.

    And it has complete control, of you.

    The cool thing about a Singleton is you can write a test for it. And the first test we can write is to try to create a Singleton.

    The funny thing is, when you write a test against a Singleton to create the Singleton,

    Function create(chas)

    The test returns an error. Because the Singleton already exists from the beginning of the program, and only one can exist in the whole world throughout the lifetime of the program. This is the security measure that lets all humans control access to our identities, and if we own it, than the franchises and governments of the world must come to us for access.

    This is the core of our permissions and identity system for the future. Plus, we made Test Driven Governance.

    Now, what kind of social structures could we grow from this? Here’s the thing: probably lots of crazy organization systems. Who know what will work best in each situation?

    Software projects can we run lots of ways. But the best way is to let the team set the process. That’s the way an adaptable society should run.

    An operating system or kernel isn’t an app, it’s a framework for running them. The Singleton Pattern is not a new form of government, it’s a shared underlying framework for new forms of government to be built.

    To be clear, the Singleton Pattern is not a model of your private internal models. But we can build that protection in from the beginning. And we can validate our legitimate human status and stop this disinformation tidal wave, so it crashes harmlessly against the shores of our society, and we are strengthened by the test.

  • Without Confirmed Identity we Are Lost

    (Picture of Chas with great guitarists, identity confirmed)

    Prepare yourself for an unpopular opinion to be expressed, that will likely make no sides of the political spectrum happy.

    The opinion is: All humans should be immediately identifiable to other humans. In other words, the State or some entity or technology should be able to validate our true identity, and other humans should be able to confirm it.

    Don’t worry, I am not about to talk about the blockchain.

    I know the arguments against this from the left and the right. Liberals will usually point out how identity validation was used to disenfranchise voters in the American South in the past or is being used now to discriminate against those without IDs, the poor and minorities. This Atlantic article is a good sample of this position.

    On the Right, you will see the standard fear of the nanny state pop up, concerns about limitations on our freedom, etc. Also that people have a “right” to be anonymous.

    Generally speaking, these concerns around identity are valid, and should be seriously considered. To the Left I would say: let’s make sure everyone gets equal consideration in generating identity validation, and that isn’t going to happen at the county level. It will take a national movement to ensure this is done fairly. To the right I say: yep, ever vigilant, thanks for your service, etc. Seriously, identity has been used as a precursor to genocide in the past, and we should tread lightly.

    But my concern is not about voting or proportional representation. This is actually about protecting our species from those who would use bots to do us harm and take advantage of this massive hole in our security.

    In the last year I have had to replace my bank card three times. We live on the edge of deep fakes entering the popular discourse. The gaps in our current cobbled together system are apparent and are being filled by for-profit companies like Clear selling face recognition and biometric tech to law enforcement agencies without any real oversight.

    Soon, only cops will know who you really are. But that misses the point. We all need to know that you are a human Singleton and part of our larger tribe.

    The funny thing is, the only real way to validate identity is by having people who know you attest to your validity. That is the promise of our social networks. Instead, because they can be so easily manipulated with paid ads and false beings, they are bastions of fraud.

    But this can be fixed. We just need to accept the cost of helping each other prove we are real.

    When you interview for a job, you often have to provide references. You may think this is a cursory procedure, but humans are actually really good at finding red flags in simple conversations like “tell me about the company you worked at” kind of questions.

    So imagine if, with the help of machine learning, a transaction could be flagged as potentially fraud. Instead of having a bank rep call me to validate with canned questions or voice recognition, which is going to be easily faked by low level hackers in the next few years, what if instead we used video to validate identity with people you know and trust. Then you pass this valid token back to the ML system.

    All day long we talk to people over video conferences, posting vids of us and our kids, etc. Instead of just selling ads space, social media could sell us something actually valuable: protection. Validation of who I am.

    What will make all of the above happen will be the rise of deep fakes that can easily pass the elementary Turing test that a bank rep would give.

    A Singleton can only be in one place at a given time. There is only one of you in existence. If we cannot validate this, with hardware keys, multifactor auth, and the confirmation of other Singletons, we will have no defence when the real AI shows up in the 2020s.

  • Of Luddites, Bots, and the FTC

    A Luddite is not anti technology. They are anti fraud.

    The Luddites were a secret oath-based organization[1] of English textile workers in the 19th century, where a radical faction destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting against the use of machinery in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labour practices.[2] Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry.[3] It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt the progress of technology. Over time, however, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation, or new technologies in general.[4]

    Language is defined by the winners of conflict, and in this case, the Luddites lost the deeper conversation about unequal distribution of the spoils of capitalism to the thrill of industrialization. Just as a language is a dialect with an army and Navy, a definition is a sound with implied threat and reward.

    The Luddites made a mistake, besides being violent and murderous. 200 years ago they were happily smashing machines all throughout England, but then they tried to smash the wrong machine. The British army.

    The British Army clashed with the Luddites on several occasions. At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula.[27][d]

    Not only did the Luddites begin to lose badly to the army, they lost badly to the legal system. As the Luddites gasped their last breath:

    A Parliament by the voting 3% made “machine breaking” (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime with the Frame Breaking Act of 1812[32]and the Malicious Damage Act 1861.[33] Lord Byron opposed this legislation, becoming one of the few prominent defenders of the Luddites after the treatment of the defendants at the York trials.[34] Coincidently, Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace would become the first computer programmer by combining the technology of the Analytical Engine with the Jacquard loom[35].

    The daughter of the lone defender of the Luddites was Ada Lovelace. Huh.

    And so being a Luddite become an anti-technology slur, a joke, a way to suggest that you didn’t understand the economics of change. Economists even call this the Luddite Fallacy.

    Far be it for me to suggest that economics itself is chock full of fallacy and pseudo science.

    But the reason I bring up Luddites is not only because I was once in the band called the Luddites. (There are a couple such bands, I was in the one in Atlanta that played “Giant Robots”).

    I want to be clear this is not an anti-technology blog. Nor would I condone violence for political gain. I am not a Luddite in the traditional or Neo sense.

    But, I do think that the technology of Laws and Armies and Nations can and should be oriented to protect people, and not just a few people. Everyone. Every Singleton in the universe.

    There is no sum total of human experience, there are only discrete human experiences. Anyone who suggests they can “add it all up” is trying to sell you something. Likely their BA in Economics.

    The conversation about the threat of AI in terms of economic disruption needs to shift gears away from trying to make people afraid. People are afraid already, that battle is won.

    The conversation needs to be about which entity will protect us. Sure the ACLU will do their part, but how about the FTC protecting us from bot fraud as I have written about? How about city government banning autonomous vehicles without a human driver with hands, and moral responsibility, available.

    The Luddites did not have true democratic means to pass laws to ensure a safe and meaningful life for their children. So they broke stuff. We do have those means. And we don’t even need to elect new people to do it. We just need to let our government know that we demand it do its job.

    Protect us. Not from immigrants. Not from bots. From the people who would use bots to create fear of immigrants, distracting us from the real issue:

    Fraud.

    Fraud against consumers. Stealing our attention, our only real commodity. Making us believe the unreal is real, that code is a human. Faking out our natural tribal instincts. We need to throw a real legal wrench in the use of bots in this manner. People need to go to jail.

    FTC, do your job.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag