TrustNoRobot

Category: Singleton Pattern

  • Running the Pattern

    Running the Pattern

    The Singleton Pattern is generated by your entire brain for some other part of your self to consume.

    What consumes these frames is not for this model to answer, so as to respect different and various theories of consciousness and spirit.

    The Singleton Pattern aspires to be an open API model of political self.

    So you lived, at some moment in time, at time t in location l.

    In other words, say you lived in Minnesota when you were thirteen years old. You lived in the basement. Each second of each day you created snapshots of the world that impressed themselves in the clay of your memory.

    This Pattern you created was eventually rebuilt and scrapped and rebuilt again as you decided, as you grew, what aspects of your pattern have a pleasing impact on your reward systems, and which were to be avoided based on your stress systems.

    As you executed the creation of the frames of existence, the impression it created in your neural network was like grooves in a river bed that shaped the flowing river of the generated self.

    Inside each person around you the same complex magic trick was taking place, and when you interfaced with them, real magic happened.

    People make all the difference. They always do. Because we not single entities. We are built, from the ground up by evolution, to interface and work as our own distributed super network.

    We are eusocial. If you do not understand this fundemental fact about yourself, you are lost.

    What if we simplified the equation of self? Instead of I(t,l) what if we just passed in the entire world, which includes the time and location? But we do want keep time also since change over time is crucial to the model’s success.

    And then what if we passed in our special class of Singleton objects the we can deem the other that are the other people in our Dunbar Radius? We would have:

    Chas( world, time, other )

    The other is any thing, person or concept tied to your brain’s reward and stress production.

    When we look at ourselves, we place our own Singleton in the other object.

    We look at ourselves a lot. It’s a human thing to do. But if you don’t look at others as the same kind of object as yourself the model for our greater organization abilities as a species is weakened.

    We must stop fighting to be on the top of everything. We must provide limits to what groups of people can do, based on real, measurable data from their internal states. And not words, and polls, and legislation written by trolls.

    If you treat people as data, which we call the world here, the Singleton Pattern will return garbage.

    If in place of the other for instance you pass in your idea of negative stereotypical behavior of a group you don’t like, that is the way your reward and stress systems reinforce prejudice.

    Replacing the other with advertising, cars, robots, ideology, stereotypes, sports, etc. is how we got here in history as a species. Where we go from here is entirely dependant on what we allow into our other category, and how we alert and monitor attempts to compromise our pattern by outside forces.

  • The Third Law

    Lets call a Dynamic system a system with multiple inputs that are difficult to predict the values of. Like the real world.

    A football game is a stable but dynamic game. A riot is an unstable one.

    Dynamic systems tend to need finely tuned weight feedback systems to remain stable. Think of a gyroscope stabilizing a Segway, a great spinning weight. It’s the constraint on falling.

    Without constraints dynamic computer systems tend to fly into very unstable states and crash.

    So, lets say we give AI power over life, death or happiness in some way. Since this is going to be operating in the real world, it must also have an accurate model of the world to help determine the rightness of your directed actions. And if it gets it wrong to any degree, it’s predictions will be hugely wrong.

    It must have a reason to act, and weight one action over another. A robot boss must in other words be better than we are at predicting reality itself.

    And if you think modelling the weather systems is complicated, try modelling New Jersey from the dust mote level up.

    The problem is not that AI is going to suddenly magically become sentient and start programming itself. That sounds wonderful compared to the current option: large companies control the models of us, the literal impression we are making on the universe and human datasphere.

    And instead of doing good with it, they feed us ads.

    It’s time to stop waiting for companies to take responsibility for the future of the world. It is time to force them to take responsibility, and take over the corporations with reasonable, good people.

    The third human Law concerning AI systems:

    No AI bosses.

    All actions by an AI must be the responsibility of the human who funds or creates it. This is the Second Law.

    The moment we open the door to allowing algorithms to be considered as Singletons, we will rapidly lose control of all society.

    Not because robots will take over on their own. Because people will use the AI as cover to stage their own assaults.

    Like Russia did against the US with troll farms using ML to create reasonable fake accounts for spamming. But that is nothing compared to what someone could do if computers are given any agency.

    The will use robots to control our every action. People will use this intelligent but unfeeling tool, that is able to falsify human caring and emotion, to manipulate us all day long.

    Sort of like now, but without any rules. And with certain cyberwar to follow.

    For better or for worse, we are the deciders of what it best for us. By banning all robot bosses, we are drawing that line in the sand for all time for our species. And we are doing it for a good reason. To protect ourselves from ourselves.

  • The Second Law…

    If I were to propose a second law of robotics, a law for humans to follow regarding AI and what is allowable, it would be this:

    Every action taken by an AI will be considered the responsibility of a single human being.

    If you kill someone with a hammer, it’s not the hammer’s fault. If you create or fund an AI that harms other humans, you will be help responsible.

    And if you did so by creating an AI with emotional states, you should be treated as we treat those that use weapons of mass destruction against the defenseless.

    If there is always a human behind the decisions of AI, we will always treat AI as a tool. As an extension of our selves.

    And thus its agency will be constrained, and another layer of protection is afforded.

    Image from https://www.google.com/amp/s/arnoldzwicky.org/2013/06/10/rosenbergs-laws-of-robotics/amp/

    Further reading, but not really relevant to the current discussion:

    Three Laws of Robotics

  • On Being the Right Size

    Regarding constraints of biological systems:

    https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html

    Written in 1928 by J. B. S. Haldane, its a quick read and worth it. Near the end JBS sneaks in this conclusion:

    And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.

    Two points here. Dunbar’s Number suggests there is a right size for our ability to meaningfully model other humans in our immediate perimeter of experience. So there is a right size for close meaningful relations if you are human.

    And there is a right size of Government, also. And money. And everything touched by life.

    Second point: For the first 60 years AI neural networks were completely constrained by the hardware they were run on. They still are, but movement to the cloud has changed the ballgame.

    AI is beginning to have no real physical constraints on size as compute and memory resources are cheap and getting cheaper by the hour. The only constraints will be time.

    AI is not going to play our size game.

    Right now, this AI is being used to create models of you. To target you for advertising. To assess your likelihood to vote. To spit you out as data to be manipulated by other Singletons who do not know you.

    But we are not data.

    We are Singletons.

    And we are the right size for the future, if we use AI only to expand ourselves, and not to turn ourselves into a commodity.

  • Rights

    “Rights” are a concept that Western people have embraced for the last few hundred years, and the concept of God-given Rights to life, liberty, etc are at the root of much of the social advances of the last era.

    However.

    In technology we often encounter something called the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

    It basically states that once you find something that sort of works you will often stick with a bad idea or tech even if it can be shown something is better. We do this because we over calculate the value of the time and money we spent on the defective idea.

    To be clear, I am stating that the concept of Natural Rights is a defective idea. The idea of Rights have gotten us this far in the history of humanity, but there is no indication that this idea will protect and assist us in our quest to self organize more effectively, and to create the safest and best work possible for all.

    The defective part of the idea of Rights is that there is no evidence that such things exist. Even John Locke argued that Rights primarily exist because God gave them to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Not a strong argument for a modern multicultural world.

    A Right in the Singleton Pattern is just another internal value to be modelled.

    Let’s talk about Freedom for a second. The right to be Free specifically means…what? That nobody can enslave you, force you to do things you don’t want to? But that happens all the time. People go to jobs they hate, stay in broken marriages, etc.

    So what is Freedom again in your model? Do we even care what the definition of Freedom is?

    Freedom is a word, and words are data tools. Impercise ones at that. Freedom is not given or a natural state, it’s a model you either care about or not.

    A Singleton should not fret over not being able to define freedom using words alone. Freedom as an internal value as real as hunger. Even put it into the protected class of internal values we call Rights if it makes you comfortable.

    But Rights are just data. Rights are not Singletons, and in the Singleton Pattern only other Singletons values are to be considered first class models.

    So don’t fight for your rights (to party or anything else). Singletons instead should assert the power for their internal values to be modelled in others. In other words, if a person creates a model of you and your rights inside themselves, then they will feel empathy toward you and let you be Free. But the abstract model of Freedom inside us will never take the place of this Singleton empathetic experience.

    The Sunk cost here is the belief that it will. The concepts of Rights allowed America to throw off the yoke of Kings, to free the slaves, to let women vote. How can we not believe that they will solve other issues?

    But a King was just a Singleton who was demanding respect because of the accident of his birth. Slavery was caused by Singletons who justified it’s practice with bad ideas instilled by region and racism, and women only won sufferage when they started marching and demanding it. The concept of Rights focused the conversation for sure and won people over as a rhetorical device, but in all of these and other cases, only action taken by Singletons changed the state of affairs.

    In all things, it is not the idea that matters as an external data object, but the internal model of the idea that provokes action on the part of the Singletons. This is how change happens.

    As far as Rights for robots: if they are an illusion for Singletons, why would it be different for robots? The power of robots needs to be constrained and limited where it negatively impact people, and when people assert their Right to build robots that harm humans, we should treat them in the same way we would if they said they have the right to harm humans directly.

    Only when the political left realizes that the arguments of the Enlightenment will lose the battle against robots, will be begin to make progress against this threat.

  • The Five Principles of Singletons

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    In The Singleton Pattern, there are two basic classes of objects in the world: Singletons and Data.

    Data is any type of information or object that is not a Singleton. This includes physical objects, forces, and non-visible phenomenon. Data is the World and all its contents.

    If you can read this, you are a Singleton.

    A Singleton is a special class of Data that adheres to these 5 Principles:

    1. There can be only one Singleton in existence at any given time
    2. A Singleton has the ability to model other objects inside of it and tie the perceived state of that object to its own reward and stress systems
    3. A Singleton generates frames of experience for consciousness, or something, to consume in a timely fashion
    4. A Singleton has biological or physical constraints
    5. The internal models of the Singleton will change over time, as will the Singleton class itself between iterations of the consciousness feedback cycle.

    We should express the value of ourselves not only as I, but as I(t) where t is Epoch Time. For we change over time. In fact, I(t, l) where l is location is the most basic representation of the human Singleton.

    I(t, l)

    This is what you are. A being moving through time and space, changing internal states based on interactions with external data.

    A Singleton is a factory that creates time-slices of experience like frames of video, but across a vast number of sensory dimensions.

    When we speak of ourselves, we should recognize that

    Chas(1543554453, latlong)

    differs from

    Chas(1543554502, latlong).

    And that we only leave a wake in the Data lake around us, rocking the boats of the other Singletons.

    And maybe, someday, we might even agree that it isn’t very useful to quibble over what, exactly, the other thing is that is observing the frames of experience generated by our Singleton Patterns. Is it the soul, the neurons, the meta-metaphor? Something else we don’t have a word or idea for?

    The Singleton Pattern doesn’t care, and believes how people define this “thing that observes the generated frames of reference” should be left up to the individual Singleton to decide.

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Consider how a robot does or does not meet the The Five Principles of Singletons? Could it ever meet them?

  • The Impossible Moral Robot

    A normal computer program, which is created to accomplish a task, is amoral. Whether simulating a 3D world, streaming video, or calculating values in a spreadsheet, It is just another tool like a hammer. Could be used for good or evil.

    A program that is designed to impact Singletons in a negative way, whether by design or accidentally, is Immoral. In other words, a spreadsheet itself is amoral, but a spreadsheet that is tracking how many people should be rounded up and killed is a tool being used in an immoral way. Especially if it uses bubble charts.

    The real danger of robots, by the way, is likely misuse by bad human actors and not through the spontaneous development of robot consciousness as seen in the movies. This misuse of Machine Learning systems has happened many times in century 21 and this will continue to be a threat for the foreseeable future, unless AI is built in a vary particular way.

    For a program to be moral, it must model Singletons within it and have their well-being tied to its own reward systems.

    But computers don’t have reward systems in the same way that biological entities do. And even if we simulate them, what’s the test that validates they are operating in the real world properly? How would we validate the value systems when we can’t even agree on what values other humans should follow?

    We can build machines that learn. Trying to build machines that are Singletons themselves, that feel, will likely result in dangerous failures that could threaten our species’s existence.  In fact, the existence of all life on earth.  The Grey Goo scenario is unlikely, but so is anyone from Queens becoming President.

    So let’s do something different with AI. Instead of trying to build beings, what if we use it to transform each Singleton into a new type of being?

    Exercise:
    Enter a contemplative state.

    Consider: What if instead of working on making computers that can pass the Turing test, we created computer programs and robots whose only purpose was to look after us as Singletons?

    What would those programs look like?

    What would it need to know about you?

    How would you interface with it?

    How much would it cost?

    Who would have access to the data?

    Who should own the model of your Singleton?

    How could this redefine what it means to be a Singleton Pattern?

    Image from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287209604_Prediction_of_Final_Concentrate_Grade_Using_Artificial_Neural_Networks_from_Gol-E-Gohar_Iron_Ore_Plant

  • Is it True?

    Is the Singleton Pattern true?

    No, it’s a model. A model is a way to think about and assess the real thing. If you could actually create a perfect representation of the real thing it would not be an abstraction of the thing it is modelling, it would be a copy of it.

    A model by definition loses fidelity.

    But a model is willing to trade truth for other things. Like effectiveness. Speed. Ability to be turned into a presentation deck.

    So no, the ideas about the Singleton Pattern are not presented here as Truth, any more than any other model is. To wit: a model should be judged not on it’s truth factor, but on its ability to create a satisfactory result for the model creator.

    Oh cool, I finally got to use “To wit” in something I am writing.

  • The Singleton Pattern

    The Singleton Pattern

    We are Singletons. More closely stated, human beings are a class of object that generates ephemeral states of consciousness.

    Self reflective states are good evidence that the Singleton class can also model internal simulations of itself. Clearly we can model others and tie those models to our own internal reward and stress systems.

    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. We will get to these limitations soon, but they are primarily biological and are expressed in concepts like Dunbar’s Number.

    Yes, the irony of being a Singleton is that we are singular things defined by our ability to model others.

    We could call this caring, or love, or any other number of English words with tons of baggage.

    But the Singleton Pattern has very little baggage as a metaphor, being just an often misused programming design pattern.

    If we think of the whole world is made up of either discreet objects or Singletons, it allows us to determine how we should treat robots and computers. Because if they cannot model us, and they have no reward systems at the core of their beings, they cannot be Singletons.

    And a tool with intelligence but no internal checks is a very dangerous class of object.

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Consider the models you have of yourself and others, and how they tie into your reward and stress systems that generate happiness, fear, anger, etc.

    Consider someone you don’t know, living on the other side of the world. Do you have a model of them? Is it tied into your reward and stress systems?

    Consider your home in the same way. A sandwich. A robot.

    Read on…

    The Five Principles of Singletons

    Further reading:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_pattern

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number