Inventing a New Color

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

Tags

colors, invention, painting, short story

Inventing A New Color — A Chapter from Tales from an American Childhood

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After my dad returned from World War II, he married my mom and nine months later, I was born. We lived in a number of places, but when I was about three and a half, we moved to Portugal. My dad headed up a tire factory there. I don’t remember much about Portugal, but I do recall going with him to some of his fancy dinners. For reasons I did not understand at the time, when I was five, my mother and I took the long ocean liner ride back to America without my dad. Mom and I lived with grandpa and grandma at their house. I attended a kindergarten in Firestone Park and had a very nice teacher. I loved kindergarten.

I missed my dad but liked grandpa and grandma. She told me “Old Pete” stories and we listened to radio shows such as Roy Rogers, Hop-along Cassidy, and Tom Corbett and the Space Cadets. “Little Grandma” lived there too. She was my grandpa’s mom and stooped over very tiny, very old, and looked like a Native American. Much later, I learned that that was because she was Native American or perhaps half Native American. I loved “Little Grandma.”

Grandpa worked as an engineer and designed airplane wings, among other things. Grandpa was also a painter and his beautiful and detailed oils hung in large wooden frames throughout his house. Mostly, these were landscapes but there were also portraits and my personal favorite depicted two warships firing cannons at each other while being tossed on giant waves. Grandpa taught me many things. Naturally, I wanted to return the favor. When I was about five, I overheard him saying that it was impossible to invent a new color. Well, I could definitely teach him something about that! I loved the idea of being an inventor.

In the middle of kindergarten, my dad returned from Portugal and re-united with my mom. He bought a house and we moved away to a different neighborhood from grandpa & grandma. I had to start school in a new kindergarten with all strange kids. The very first day, my new teacher decided that I would lead the parade and draped the rope of a large drum around my neck. I didn’t want to play the drum and I made that about as clear as I could to her, but nonetheless, I ended up marching around the room with the heavy drum around my neck. I hated kindergarten.

My dad worked as an engineer and my mom was a teacher so both of them were gone all day. They hired a housekeeper to take care of me. And, somehow, after the first day, I convinced my housekeeper that I did not need to go to kindergarten any more. This was fine with me because she was nice enough to give me my favorite lunch every day — a jar of maraschino cherries! They were so sweet and such a pretty red. And, not only were the cherries themselves delicious. The jars proved to be perfect for my experiments! So, in the second half of kindergarten, I stayed home and instead spent my time inventing a new color to show grandpa. I had a paint set and I water and I had lots of empty cherry jars. It was all a matter of time and careful work. At last, I would be able to teach grandpa something. I love teaching.

After many weeks of careful work, I finally created a new color! When grandpa and grandma came to visit, I was ready. Under my bed were about 40 little jars of diluted paint. Thirty-nine of them were failed attempts. But one of them contained the prize. I carefully crawled under the bed and located my invention, pulled it out, and scampered into the living room where the adults practiced their buzz-talk.

Buzz-talk sounded serious and low but didn’t actually mean anything so far as I could tell. Surely, no-one could mind if I interrupted buzz-talk by announcing my invention. I proudly held out my prize to grandpa. Grandpa was very smart, so the fact that he did not immediately catch the significance of this jar surprised me. He merely glanced at the watery liquid in the maraschino cherry jar without comment.

I decided that I’d better clue him in. “Grandpa! It’s a new color!” He glanced at it again and said, “I’ve seen it before.” And just like that, he went back to buzz-talk! Crest-fallen, I wandered back to my bedroom and placed the prize beneath my bed with all the failed experiments. Apparently, this was just another one. Despite this terrible turn of events, I hardly gave up. I just redoubled my efforts. I knew there was a new color out there somewhere and I would find the perfect mix and next time be successful! I loved the challenge.

Grandpa had already taught me that red and yellow paint made orange; that yellow and blue paint made green; and that red and blue paint made purple. So, obviously, most of my experiments involved various proportions of red and green, purple and yellow or orange and blue. Most of them ended up as fairly similar shades of gray-brown. But if I mixed very carefully, I produced not dull gray-brown but something with a slight tinge of something…new! I somehow found other jars because I needed more than just the supply offered by one a day lunch-time maraschino cherry jars. I didn’t think bigger jars would have anything to do with inventing a new color, but it was possible. After a few weeks, grandpa and grandma came over to visit again. And again, I interrupted their dull living room buzz talk by showing off my latest creation. This time, I was more apprehensive. The first time, after all, I had known for sure I had a new color. This time, I was uncertain. I waited for the right opportunity — that slight pause in the buzz-talk — to display my new creation.

“I’ve seen that,” Grandpa said and turned back to buzz-talk. I wasn’t yet old enough to argue. And, even now, years later, if someone claims they have seen a color and you think they have not seen the color, I am still not sure how to argue. Convincing other people is seldom an easy task and convincing them that their own perception is limited — that is extremely difficult. Many times, I have heard the old saw, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I actually doubt that. I suspect in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is more likely to be declared in league with Satan and end up being stoned to death.

Let’s think about this. Suppose you are the one-eyed person in the land of the blind. Say everyone is hungry and you see a berry bush a couple hundred yards away. Now what? Well, you could say, “Hey, everyone! I see a berry bush over there (uselessly pointing). Let’s go pick some berries.” Everyone else says, “What berry bush? I don’t feel one. I don’t hear one. I don’t smell one. There’s no berry bush. Be quiet and stop talking non-sense.” Alternatively, you could just quietly walk over to the berry bush and bring back a small quantity for everyone to share. Of course, if everyone went, you could bring back a lot more, but no-one wants to follow you. You bring back some berries but people would be suspicious. They might well think you had been hiding these and had many more you failed to share.

Similarly, if you saw a pack of hyenas headed your way and warned people, the blind might well think you were in league with the hyenas. After all, you were the first one to know about them. You must have told the hyenas where everyone was. At long last, if you were the one-eyed person, you might be pretty tempted to put out that other eye. Life would run a lot smoother for you. Alternatively, you could leave the tribe and live on your own. And, many people do make this choice, essentially. But it’s a pretty lonely life. You could try to patiently explain that just as sometimes they could smell things they could not feel and feel things they could not smell, and hear things they could not yet feel or smell, that you could “see”…ah, that’s the sticky bit. How do you explain sight to the unsighted?

Of course, my grandfather was not blind. Far from it. He was not only an adult, with more power and experience and knowledge than a five year old kid. He was, in fact, an artist. He was an expert on color. I could see evidence of his expertise everywhere. His paintings adorned our house and his own. So, he probably was right about the particular colors I had shown him so far. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t invent one next time that was truly new. So, back to the lab, I went. I failed a few more times and eventually gave up. Inventing a new color really was impossible.

Or was it?

Many years later, I attended an art exhibit in Pittsburg. It featured many kinds of “modern art” including a very cool kinesthetic art exhibit. In one exhibit, I simply stood on a platform in front of a large rotating disk. I watched the disk rotate until quite unexpectedly, the disk was quite still and I was rotating the other direction!

Of particular interest were some extremely large extremely brightly colored canvasses which featured huge swaths of complementary colors. If I stared for a good long time at the super bright red and then moved my eyes over to the super bright green, the combination of temporal and spatial contrast produced an unearthly bright green, a “supersaturated” color impossible to produce by merely using one pigment. While I had not invented this, at least I now had experienced a color it was likely my grandpa never had. I could not really check this out though because he was long dead. Of course, I have met him in dreams many times and in the dreams he’s not really dead. It was all a big mistake. And, in my dreams, there are often landscapes painted in supersaturated colors that even he has to admit are new inventions. I love it when even the wisdom of elders may be mistaken and changes over time.

My grandpa knew that we humans are all mortal but he also knew that we still had some fragmentary art that was thousands of years old. Perhaps art provides a kind of immortality. When I was about ten, grandpa visited Europe and saw many of the oil paintings of the “Old Masters” that he had admired so much. He saw with his own eyes that, over time, the oil that they used turned yellow and the colors that they had used were transformed. Father Time himself invented new colors for these artists. When, he returned from Europe, he switched from oil painting to water colors. Beyond that, he limited himself to using only three pigments all of which were oxides of metals. He was also very careful in his choice of canvas for the same reason. He stuck to these constraints so that his paintings, unlike those of the “Old Masters”, would not yellow or fade with time.

Grandpa’s paintings were designed by an artist/engineer to be stable and unchanging over time. When Grandpa died, I inherited quite a few of my favorite water colors and I can testify that the colors were extremely stable over time. They remained stable, that is, up until the time we moved to California and almost everything we owned was burned up in a moving van fire. What was burned up included all our furniture, electronics, papers, and almost all clothing and paintings. All the carefully laid pigments of metals were altered forever. All of the work and effort were now white ash floating somewhere in the sky near Continental Divide Arizona. A little carelessness on the part of a trucker in too much of a hurry, perhaps, to check the lubrication and the whole truck went up in flames. Robert Burns comes to mind.

It seems to me that our country once comprised a long-standing collaborative work of art involving many artists and many colors. This was a painting of scale and magnificence, though not yet completed. Every shade of the rainbow and more besides swept from sea to shining sea. The painting combined portraiture and landscape, scenes of war and peace, city, country, rivers, lakes, deep woods, and shining plains. Yet, somehow, people became impatient with the progress of the painting. Maybe, they thought, the work would go faster if we just painted the whole canvas white. They no longer cared what the end result looked like. They just wanted to get done so we could move on to the next project. We really couldn’t take the time to make sure the bearings were lubricated. And, now, the transport burned up along with the painting. What’s left are scattered white flakes snowing down on the countryside. I love irony, but I loved the paintings more.

At some point, grandpa said something else to me about color. He said that most people look at color in the light but that there is also color in the shadow. And, so, despite the deepening, darkening shadows, I am trying to see the color hidden there in those shadows. It is too soon to know whether I am inventing a new color, inventing a new way to look at color, or just seeing what is actually an after-image — beautiful for now, but sure to soon fade to the dull white gray of old and sooted snow. Maybe one of us can invent a new color or a new way of painting or a new way of looking or a new way of helping people be less impatient with the slow careful progress required for a timeless, collaborative work of art. Inventing new colors is not easy work; that I can say for sure, as is restoring true color that has faded to a uniform and pasty gray.

Perhaps I’ll buy a jar of maraschino cherries.

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After the Fall

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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NOTE: The following is the first of a series of short stories/essays. The collection is called “Schooled Haze.” Readers might also enjoy other works of fiction and non-fiction available at the link at the bottom of the page.

I have only a few scattered memories from the time before I learned to read. Like fallen autumn leaves, early memories are often brightly colored but randomly assigned far from their tree. The sight of swelling giant green ocean waves over the railing of the ship lacks attachment to any origin or destination of the voyage. The shiny red toy gun appears but no stem attaches to a giver or an occasion. My father’s quavery voice as he hunkers down in the bow of the paddle boat, cautioning us to do the same because of the airplanes overhead, held no connection to his time in the army, his wounds, or where we were.

Once formal schooling began, whether because of age or training, my memories began to connect to a framework. Whether this made my memories more accurate or less accurate still causes intra-psychic debate, but that they were different — this is not in doubt. In the first grade, we began to learn to print. I actually already knew how to print. I had taught myself before school began. I suppose that was part of the problem. Even now, I don’t make my letters and numbers with the same “strokes” that most people do. Anyway, we were supposed to be learning to print, and since I was there, I wanted to play the game along with everyone else.

With our giant awkward green pencils poised above our cheap, lined, gray-yellow paper, we were to copy our teacher’s printing. At that point, blackboards were still black and chalk was still white. Miss Wilkins had neatly printed: “TODAY IS TUESDAY. TODAY IS TUESDAY. TODAY IS TUESDAY.” We were to fill our paper with this vital all-caps phrase. Indeed, it was Tuesday, but I really only needed to print it once to remember that. In fact, zero times would have sufficed. But, you see, there were rules in school. There were rules at home as well, but by comparison, very few. Home rules almost always made some modicum of sense, even to a six year old. School rules seemed part of some elaborate, religious, magical ritual or game imposed without explanation or exception.

Of course, this only surprised me a little because home and school smelled quite different. The black slate board had a smell, dark and clean and sharp. The chalk had a smell, that was attractive but choking. The cheap shiny paper had it’s own cheap shiny smell. And, if you took the time to notice (which most kids did), the bare wood of the giant green pencils smelled quite nice and much better than the shiny green paint part of the pencil. In fact, volunteering to sharpen pencils was a job most people were eager for, not only for the wonderful woody odor but also for the idea that we were making our own tools, and possibly our own weapons.

I understood the task at hand. I needed to fill up the page with “TODAY IS TUESDAY.” And, so I began. First I made a long vertical line for the “T” letters. Then I crossed every “T.” Then, I made a long vertical column of “O’s” and another long vertical line for the “D’s.” I began to add the bows for the “D’s.” Just as I was about halfway done with my “D-bows” however, the teacher yanked me out of my chair. She screamed as she marched me out into the hallway. Then, she grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me. As she screamed, she began to sob. I felt kind of bad for her, but I honestly had no idea what she was so upset about.

Sadly, this was not my only run-in with my first grade teacher. We also had a long debate about whether heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. She seemed quite satisfied that her example of the rock and the feather should leave any sane person convinced, but whether sane or not, it didn’t convince me. My father and grandfather were both engineers and my grandfather subscribed to Sky and Telescope, Scientific American, and The Atlantic Monthly. I probably mostly perused the pictures, but I also read articles from a very early age. Whether from reading or from talking with Dad and Grandpa, I somehow had heard about Galileo’s little experiment performed from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I explained this to her as best I could, but she refused to believe it. Again, she gave the example of the stone and the feather. She must have thought me a bit dense.

Perhaps that is why she thought so little of it when one of my classmates pushed me down the concrete steps in front of our school door. Such a head over heels tumble presents the oddest sensations! I recall being astounded by the seemingly random jumble of images swirling by. My head didn’t feel too great either, but I think the lack of control over what I was seeing was even more disconcerting. Typically, one of the few school rules that did make sense to me was that we were not allowed to hit, kick, bite or shove other pupils. I have never felt that much inclined to injure others so I didn’t mind following this rule at all. But here I was, not having been punched or kicked, but victim of a potentially far more dangerous rule violation. At the time, I didn’t think of it so much as dangerous as it was rude. And, beyond that, it clearly constituted an egregious violation of the rules. If we were going to have all these school rules, why should they not apply to everyone? Why should someone get away with pushing me down the concrete steps when I had seen the mildest of pushes and punches get punished mightily?

At the time, I could generate no coherent explanation. The cognitive confusion about how adults failed to meet my expectations simply added to my perceptual confusion from free-fall tumbling. It seemed as though the world were saying to me, “All Bets are Off” and “Adult Authorities are Not to be Trusted” and “You never know.”

Who could be trusted, then? Well, my beautiful dog Mel for one. My Dad brought Mel back from Portugal. He was a beautiful honey-colored Cocker Spaniel. Mel loved me no matter what. A few weeks earlier, however, I had heard my parents talking about giving him away because other kids in the neighborhood were teasing him and Mel, tied up, was snapping at them. He had a wire lead connected at one end to his collar and the other end was looped around a horizontal wire. Some kids quickly saw just how far he could go and found great pleasure in getting him to run to the end of his lead and then watch his neck snap back as he reached the end. This infuriated Mel and he snarled and snapped at them. My folks were worried that a bite could lead to a lawsuit.

I made them promise not to sell Mel. And, they didn’t. When I got home from school one day, he was gone. But he hadn’t been sold at all. Not at all. He had been “put to sleep.” Our small two bedroom bungalow had one main hall closet with a blue quilt folded up at the back. That’s where I went to hang out for the next hours. I didn’t much want to talk to my parents. Not about Mel. Not about anything. It seemed to me, that if anyone should have been “put to sleep” it would be the kids who were teasing him. I just sat in the dark on the cool blue quilt crying for Mel.

Despite what my first grade teacher might think, sometimes small, light things — things even so light as a soul — can fall very fast.

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#BACK2017

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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Here is the germ of the idea. Have people see that other people are actually mostly not being greedy nasty bullies. Instead, show feedback as in the following scheme.

BACK: a Billion Acts of Compassion and Kindness. Here’s the idea. During 2017, people throughout the United States perform acts of compassion and kindness every day, particularly across potential divides like age, gender, race, religion, political party, national origin, but basically everyone counts if you’re doing it without monetary reward. We have people on Facebook and Twitter (perhaps other social media) use #BACK in their messages about it. At the end of the day, the various social media update the totals and they are posted by all participating social media. I think the results should be displayed with stickers in groups and super-groups shaped like American Flags. Every day, citizens will be reminded that there are plenty of generous people out there doing good things. By the end of 2017, I would like to see a BILLION acts reported. In some cases, all people need to do is post or tweet something very minimal such as: “Helped a non-English speaking person get directions” or “invited a LBGT couple over for Holiday dinner” “called out some absurd misogyny” or even “chalk up another one.” In other cases, maybe people have come up with a good idea that can be used by other local communities and they may want to include more details.

In the news media, there is a natural tendency to report on “bad news” which may be inherently more fascinating and attention grabbing. If you add the profit motive on top of that, it is very tempting for the mainstream media (and many sponsored sites as well) to report on outrageously bad behavior. This makes it actually *more likely* for others to think such anti-social, anti-American behavior is acceptable.Instead, if people are shown feedback that indicates the vast majority of Americans actually spend most of their time being productive contributors and some of their time helping others even when they aren’t compensated.

If we can get this going it also sends an important message to the government of other countries. “Of course, you have to deal with the official government of the USA. However, never forget that we as a nation are comprised *not* of mostly fascists but are a diverse nation of mostly good hearted people and we’re still here. Keep that in mind.”

Comments and suggestions welcome.

A Bridge too Far?

12 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by petersironwood in driverless cars, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AI, Artificial Intelligence, ethics, Food Safety, Globalization

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A Bridge Too Far? Have We Overdone Globalization?

There are many benefits to globalization. Indeed, I have been somewhat involved personally in attempting to make one of the organizations I belong too more global. In the early days of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction, major conferences were held in North America and most of the attendees were from North America with a good number of European colleagues joining. Over time, there have been more local chapters world wide and we have had our major conference in Europe several times and recently held a very successful conference in South Korea. Others have been held in other continents as well. I have no doubt whatever that this process has brought a wonderful diversity of thought into our field that would not be there if we had stayed focused in North America. Apart from the progress in an academic field, meeting people from all over the world provided a huge opportunity for everyone involved. If you meet decent people from all over the world, it certainly becomes more difficult to “demonize” them or desire your government to bomb them.

Similarly, the economic benefits of “Free Trade” have been touted for a long time and by many economists. Although opinions differ somewhat, most economist believe that the net effect that freer trade has had. for example, on the US economy is good, not only in providing cheaper goods for consumers but ultimately creating more jobs than are lost. Of course, if you are one of the people whose job is lost and you have almost no prospect of getting one at equal or greater pay, that is small comfort. I am willing to grant that, on average, it makes more sense from an efficiency standpoint to have the “cheapest” place produce goods and services, other things being equal.

Naturally, other things are seldom equal and jobs often shift overseas from North America and Europe to places who not only give less money to their workers but where they have very lax safety conditions, loose child labor laws, loose if any controls on environmental impact and allow harassment of workers. In addition, there can be unanticipated costs associated with coordination across time zones, cultures, and educational backgrounds. The predicted savings of moving operations overseas are not always realized.

I have seen all of these issues been addressed before but I would like to focus on another issue: the impact of situational ethics. We all like to believe that we are one of the “good guys.” We like to believe that we (and indeed, most people) behave ethically most of the time and it is only a few “bad apples” who behave unethically. When people’s behavior has actually been studied though, what we see is a more nuanced picture. Most people most of the time in most situations, cheat “a little bit” and about as much as they assume other people cheat. However, the propensity to cheat depends a lot on the details of the situation. In particular, people are more likely to cheat or take more than their fair share when they are removed from the situation.

For example, if ten people are sitting around a table passing around a plate of twenty Easter Eggs, the vast majority of people will make a quick calculation and pick two. Indeed if someone is allergic and passes on the eggs leaving two left to share among 9 people, everyone falls all over themselves to offer the eggs to someone else. It’s extremely rare for someone to start by taking six or seven eggs for themselves! No-one would think of taking all twenty!

Now, imagine instead that the Monday after Easter, I bring into my work group (which happens to have ten people) 20 Easter Eggs. I tell everyone at the morning staff meeting that I brought in 20 Easter Eggs and put them in the fridge next to the coffee maker. Let us assume that all ten of us get along pretty well. The chances that someone goes into the break room and takes 3-4 eggs increases hugely over the “sitting around the table” scenario.

We humans are social animals. We respond to social cues and we care about our reputation. Most of us experience empathy. If we are sitting around the table and take more than our share of eggs, we don’t just worry that others will judge us badly. We genuinely do not want to “feel the pain” of someone looking forward to the eggs and not getting any. That’s just the way we are wired. If we take more than our share from the break room however, it is far more abstract. We don’t really know whether everyone will really want Easter Eggs. And, even if we are pretty sure they will, we don’t know who the last person will be. We can’t really “see” the disappointment of the last few people who open the fridge.

Now, consider how this plays out in commerce. Imagine that you are a baker of bread for a local village. It doesn’t really matter that much whether your are the baker for a small town in Vermont, Germany, England, France or Egypt. Of course, you want to make enough money to survive, but you want to make really good bread. You want people to say good things about your bread. You want to think of these faces that you recognize having your bread be a part of the pleasure of their meal. You want to be part of having them and their family grow up and thrive because of your bread.

Now, contrast this with being a worker in a bread factory that makes bread that is shipped all over the country. Again, it doesn’t matter that much what the country is but let’s assume it’s a factory outside of Paris. You feel some obligation to do a good job, but you are far less invested in making sure your bread is especially good than if you were the baker in a small town. Part of the reason for that is that you won’t really see that many faces of the people eating your bread. Part of the reason is also that you are following a recipe and a procedure that someone else constructed for you. Of course, other things being equal, you’d like to make a good product and do a good job — and not just because you could lose your job if you don’t. It’s more than that. Most people really do want to do a quality job. But suppose one day the boss comes in and says, “Hey folks. Bad news. Profits are down and costs are up. We are really getting squeezed. We are going to change our recipe to put a little more water and a little less egg in the bread. It will save costs and we’ll be able to stay in business. And, you’ll be able to keep your job.” You realize that this will make the bread a tiny bit less tasty and a bit less nutritious but still —- you do need to keep your job. So, you go along as do your fellow workers.

Now suppose a few months later, the boss comes in and says, “More bad news. We are going to have to cut costs still further. We are going to add more water, but to keep the bread from being too runny to bake properly, we are going to add a bit of glue. Most people won’t notice the taste and most people won’t get sick enough to die from it, although a few might. Still, we need this to keep in business.” I believe that at this point, there would be a rebellion. You would not go along with this and neither would most of your colleagues. But we need to remember that in France, there are strong unions, the population reads, there is a government that you may not agree with but that you count on to enforce laws. You may not be able to get a job as good as the bread factory job, but you will get something. If all else fails, you have friends and relatives you can count on as well as a financial safety net. You have reasonable costs for health care.

Now suppose instead that this factory is not outside Paris and shipping bread to France. Instead, let’s imagine it’s in a country that is far more authoritarian and hierarchical. You are in a small village constructed solely for the purpose of making bread at a giant factory. You are not making bread for your fellow citizens. This bread is being shipped overseas to somewhere you have very little knowledge of and no realistic prospects of ever visiting. Even under these circumstances, I believe the vast majority of people would like to do the right thing; they would like to do a good job. However, you are being told to adulterate the bread in order to keep your job. You already owe two months rent on the company housing that you would have no way to pay off without your job. You have zero other job prospects in any case. There is nothing in the town except the bread factory. You cannot call up “Sixty Minutes” or the local newspaper or the police and protest this. You know from your own personal experience that every other worker is likely to go along. And so do you. It isn’t because the people in all these previous scenarios are “good” while the ones in this scenario are “bad.” It’s because the scenario has become increasingly divorced from our natural social cues for doing the “right thing.”

In essence, this points to a “hidden cost” of globalization. It isn’t just a question of efficiency. As producers become more and more isolated from the consumers in terms of geography, culture, and physical contact and as more and more steps intervene, there is an increasing process of abstraction. Along with increasing abstraction, it becomes easier and easier for people to avoid, ignore or actively work against ethical principles. (By the way, there is another hidden cost to globalization; the bread may not be as tuned to local tastes as bread made in the village but that’s a topic for another post).

Simultaneously, there is another sort of abstraction going on. The top executives of the hypothetical “bread company” are not themselves making bread. They are not meeting with consumers. What they are looking at is numbers; specifically, they are looking at the profit and loss, ROI, their stock value. So for them, in fact, it has very little if anything to do with nutrition, bread, pleasure of eating, or ethics. It is all a numbers game. The numbers do not typically reflect much about ethics. Of course, there is a chance that poison bread may come to light and that might be slightly embarrassing, but the chance of the top executives going to jail is slim. True, they may scapegoat the local manager or some of the workers, but they themselves are fairly immune and they know this. But it isn’t only that they are immune from prosecution. It is also because they will not have to look the sick end users in the eye.

Besides the abstraction that comes from remote geography and the abstraction that comes from monetization of interaction (as opposed to actual face to face interaction), there is another kind of abstraction that makes unethical behavior easier. Discussions of driverless cars lately have quite rightly begun to focus on ethics. One scenario involves a car having to “decide” whether to run over a small number of children or veer off the road quite possibly killing the driver. Regardless of what you personally think the “right answer” is, I contend that most human drivers in control of such a car would instinctively swerve off the road and avoid the children even though it was likely to result in a serious accident or death for the driver. It would be extremely difficult for most drivers to choose intentionally to run over the children to save their own skins. On the other hand, if you worked at a car company as a programmer, it would be far less stressful to program the car to behavior in that way. It would be easy to rationalize.

“Well, the chances are, this section of code is never going to actually run.”

“Well, the driver after all is the one paying for the car. And, he or she does have the option to over-ride.”

“Well, if I don’t program what I am ordered to program, what is the point really? They will fire me and hire someone else to program it and they will keep doing that until they find somebody who will program it that way.”

All is “well.” Or is it?

But I contend that this same programmer, if they were actually driving the car, seeing the faces of little children, is quite likely to swerve off the road to avoid the kids.

Yes, we humans have developed some fairly elaborate ethical codes, but often we behave “ethically” simply because our sociality is “built in” genetically and guides us to the ethically correct behavior. If we abstract away from social situations, whether through geography, monetization of value, or by programming another entity, our “instinctive” ethical behavior becomes easier and easier to over-ride. Perhaps then, rather than making unethical behavior “easier” for people by removing social cues, we need to re-instate them — perhaps even amplify them. If you really need to send a drone into an elementary school, maybe you need to hear the screams of the unwitting “participants.”

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Is Smarter the Answer?

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, ethics, learning organization

Lately, I have been seeing a fair number of questions on Quora (www.quora.com) that basically question whether we humans wouldn’t be “better off” if AI systems do “take over the world.” After all, it is argued, an AI system could be smarter than humans. It is an interesting premise and one worthy of consideration. After all, it is clear that human beings have polluted our planet, have been involved in many wars, have often made a mess of things, and right now, we are a mere hair’s breadth away from electing a US President who could start an atomic war for no more profound reason than that someone disagreed with him or questioned the size of his hands.

Personally, I don’t think that having AI systems “replace” human beings or “rule them” would be a good thing. There are three main reasons for this. First, I don’t think that the reason human beings are in a mess is because they are not intelligent enough. Second, if AI systems did “replace” human beings, even if such systems were not only more intelligent but also avoided the real reasons for the mess we’re in (greed and hubris, by my lights), they could easily have other flaws of equal magnitude. The third reason is simply that human life is an end in itself, and not a means to an end. Let us examine these in turn.

First, there are many species of plants and animals on earth that are, by any reasonable definition, much less intelligent than humans and yet have not over-polluted the planet nor put us on the brink of atomic war. There are at least a few other species such as the dolphins that are about as intelligent as we are but who have not had anything like the world-wide negative ecological impact that we have. No, although we often run into individual people who act against our (and their own) interest, and it seems as though we (and they) would be better off if they were more intelligent, I don’t think lack of intelligence (or even education) is the root of the problem with people.

Here are some simple, everyday examples. I went to the grocery store yesterday. When I checked out, someone else packed my groceries. Badly. Indeed, almost every time I go to the store, they pack the groceries badly (if I can’t pack them myself). What do I mean by badly? One full bag had ripe tomatoes at the bottom. Another paper bag was filled with cans of cat food. It was too heavy for the handles. Another bag was packed lightly, but too full so that the handles would break if you hold the bag naturally. It might be tempting to think that this bagger was not very intelligent. I believe that the causes of bad packing are different. First, packers typically (but not universally) pay very little attention to what they are actually doing. They seem to be clearly thinking about something other than what they are doing. Indeed, this described a lot of human activity, at least in the modern USA. Second, packers are in a badly designed system. Once my cart is loaded up, another customer is already having their food scanned on the conveyer belt and the packer is already busy. There is no time to give feedback to the packer on the job they have done. Nor is the situation really very socially appropriate. No matter how gently done, a critique of their performance in front of their colleagues and possibly their manager will be interpreted as an evaluation rather than an opportunity for learning. Even if I did give them feedback, they may or not believe it. It would be better if the packer could follow me home and observe for themselves what a mess they have made of the packing job. I think if they did that a few times, they’d be plenty smart enough to figure out how to pack better.

Unfortunately, packing is not the only example of this type of system. Another common example is that programmers develop software. These people are typically quite intelligent. But they often build their software and never get a chance to see their software in action. Many organizations do not carry out user studies “in the wild” to see how products and services are actually used. It isn’t that the software builders are not smart. But it is problematic that they do not get any real feedback on their decisions. Again, as in the case of the packers, the programmers exist in an organizational structure that makes honest feedback about their errors far too often seem like an evaluation of them, rather than an occasion for learning.

A third example are hotel personnel. A hotel is basically a service business. The cost of the room is a small part of the price. A hotel exists because it serves the customers. Despite this, people behind the desks seldom have incentives and mechanisms to hear, understand and fix problems that their customers encounter. A quintessential example came in Boston when my wife and I were there for a planning meeting for a conference she would be chairing in a few months. When we checked out, the clerk asked whether everything was all right. We replied that the room was too hot but we couldn’t seem to get the air conditioning to work. The clerk said, “Oh, yes! Everyone has that problem. You need to turn on the heater for the A/C to work.” This was a bad temperature control design for starters, but the clerk’s response clearly indicated that they were aware of the problem but had no power (and/or incentive) to fix it.

These are not isolated examples. I am sure that you, the reader, have a dozen more. People are smart enough to see and solve the problems, but that is not their job. Furthermore, they will basically get “shot down” or at best ignored if they try to fix the problem. So, I really don’t think the issue is that people are not “smart enough” to fix many of the problems we have individually. It is that we design systems that make us collectively not very smart. (Of course, in outrageous cases, even some individual humans are so prideful that they cannot learn from honest feedback from others).

Now, you could say that such systems are themselves a proof that we are not smart enough. However, that is not a very good explanation. There are existence proofs of smarter organizations. The sad part is that they are exceptions rather than rules. In my experience, what keeps people from adopting better organizations; e.g., where people are empowered to understand and fix problems, are hubris and greed, not a lack of intelligence.

Firstly, in many situations, people believe that they already know everything they need in order to do their job. They certainly don’t want public feedback indicating that they are making mistakes (i.e., could improve) and this attitude spreads to their processing of private feedback. You can easily imagine a computer programmer saying, “I’ve been writing code for User Interfaces for thirty years! Now, you’re telling me I don’t know how?” Why can we imagine that so easily? Because the organizations that most of us live in are not organizations where learning to improve is stressed.

In many organizations, the rules, processes, and management structure make very little sense if the main goal is to make the organization as effective as possible. Instead, however, they make perfect sense if the main goal of the organization is to keep the people who have the most power and make the most money to keep having the most power and making the most money. In order to do that in an ongoing basis, it is true that the organization must be minimally competent. If they are a grocery store, they must sell groceries at some profit. If they are a software company, they need to produce some software. If they are a hotel, they can’t simply poison all their potential guests. But to stay in business, none of these organizations must do a stellar and ever-improving job.

So, from my perspective, the reason that most organizations are not better learning organizations is not that we humans are not intelligent enough. The reason for marginally effective organizations is that the actual goal is mainly to keep people at the top in power. Greed is the biggest problem with people, not lack of intelligence. History shows us that such greed is ultimately self-defeating. Power corrupts all right, and eventually power erodes itself or explodes itself in revolution. But greedy people continue to believe that they can outsmart history. Dictators believe that they will not suffer the same fate as Hitler or Mussolini. CEO’s believe their bad deeds will go unpunished (indeed, often that’s true). So-called leaders often reject criticism by others and eventually spin out of control. That’s hubris.

I see no reason whatever to believe that AI systems, however intelligent, would be more than reflections of greed and hubris. It is theoretically possible to design AI systems without hubris and greed, but it is also quite possible to develop human beings where hubris and greed are not predominant factors in people’s motivation. We all know people who are eager to learn throughout life; who listen to others; who work collaboratively to solve problems; who give generously of their time and money and possessions. In fact, humans are generally very social animals and it is quite natural for us to worry more about our group, our tribe, our country, our family than our own little ego. How much hubris and greed are in an AI system will very much depend on the nature and culture of the organization that builds it.

Next, let us consider what other flaws AI systems could have.

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Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence

29 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, emotional intelligence, ethics, the singularity, Turing, user experience

The Pros and Cons of AI Part Three: Artificial Intelligence

We have already shown in the two previous blogs why it more effective and efficient to replace eating with Artificial Ingestion and to replace sex with Artificial Insemination. In this, the third and final part, we will discuss why human intelligence should be replaced with Artificial Intelligence. The arguments, as we shall see, are mainly simple extrapolations from replacing eating and sex with their more effective and efficient counterparts.

Human “intelligence” is unpredictable. In fact, all forms of human behavior are unpredictable in detail. It is true that we can often predict statistically what people will do in general. But even those predictions often fail. It is hard to predict whether and when the stock market will go up or down or which movies will be blockbuster hits. By contrast, computers, as well know, never fail. They are completely reliable and never make mistakes. The only exceptions to this general rule are those rare cases where hardware fails, software fails, or the computer system was not actually designed to solve the problems that people actually had. Putting aside these extremely rare cases, other errors are caused by people. People may cause errors because they failed to read the manual (which doesn’t actually exist because to save costs, vendors now expect that users should look up the answers to their problems on the web) or because they were confused by the interface. In addition, some “errors” occur because hackers intentionally make computer systems operate in a way that they were not intended to operate. Again, this means human error was the culprit. In fact, one can argue that hardware errors and software errors were also caused by errors in production or design. If these errors see the light of day, then there were also testing errors. And if the project ends up solving problems that are different from the real problems, then that too is a human mistake in leadership and management. Thus, as we can see, replacing unpredictable human intelligence with predictable artificial intelligence is the way to go.

Human intelligence is slow. Let’s face it. To take a representative activity of intelligence, it takes people seconds to minutes to do simple square roots of 16 digit numbers while computers can do this much more quickly. It takes even a good artist at least seconds and probably minutes to draw a good representation of a birch tree. But google can pull up an excellent image in less than a second. Some of these will not actually be pictures of birch trees, but many of them will.

Human intelligence is biased. Because of their background, training and experience, people end up with various biases that influence their thinking. This never happens with computers unless they have been programmed to do something useful in which case, some values will have to be either programmed into it or learned through background, training and experience.

Human intelligence in its application most generally has a conscious and experiential component. When a human being is using their intelligence, they are aware of themselves, the situation, the problem and the process, at least to some extent. So, for example, the human chess player is not simply playing chess; they are quite possibly enjoying it as well. Similarly, human writers enjoy writing; human actors enjoy acting; human directors enjoy directing; human movie goers enjoy the experience of thinking about what is going on in the movie and feeling, to a large degree, what people on the screen are attempting to portray. This entire process is largely inefficient and ineffective. If humans insist on feeling things, that could all be accomplished much more quickly with electrodes.

Perhaps worst of all, human intelligence is often flawed by trying to be helpful. This is becoming less and less true, particularly in large cities and large bureaucracies. But here and there, even in these situations that should be models of blind rule-following, you occasionally find people who are genuinely helpful. The situation is even worse in small towns and farming communities where people are routinely helpful, at least to the locals. It is only when a user finds themselves interacting with a personal assistant or audio menu system with no possibility of a pass-through to a human being that they can rest assured that they will not be distracted by someone actually trying to understand and help solve their problem.

Of course, people in many professions, whether they are drivers, engineers, scientists, advertising teams, lawyers, farmers, police officers etc. will claim that they “enjoy” their jobs or at least certain aspects of them. But what difference does that make? If a robot or AI system can do 85 to 90% of the job in a fast, cheap way, why pay for a human being to do the service? Now, some would argue that a few people will be left to do the 10-15% of cases not foreseen ahead of time in enough detail to program (or not seen in the training data). But why? What is typically done, even now, is to just the let user suffer when those cases come up. It’s too cumbersome to bother with back-up systems to deal with the other cases. So long as the metrics for success are properly designed, these issues will never see the light of day. The trick is to make absolutely sure than the user has no alternative means of recourse to bring up the fact that their transaction failed. Generally, as the recent case with Yahoo shows, even if the CEO becomes aware of a huge issue, there is no need to bring it to public attention.

All things considered, it seems that “Artificial Intelligence” has a huge advantage over “Natural Intelligence.” AI can simply be defined to be 100% successful. It can save money and than money can be appropriately partitioned to top company management, shareholders, workers, and consumers. A good general formula to use in such cases is the 90-10 rule; that is, 90% of the increased profits should go to the top management and 10% should go to the shareholders.

As against increased profits, one could argue that people get enjoyment out of the thinking that they do. There is some truth to that, but so what? If people enjoy playing doctor, lawyer, and truck driver, they can still do that, but at their own expense. Why should people pay for them to do that when an AI system can do 85% of the job at nearly zero costs? Instead of worrying about that, we should turn our attention to a more profound problem: what will top management do with that extra income?

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Turing’s Nightmares

Pros and Cons of Artificial Insemination

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, emotional intelligence, ethics, the singularity, user experience

The Pros and Cons of AI: Part Two (Artificial Insemination).

Animal husbandry and humane human medical practice offer up many situations where artificial insemination is a useful and efficient technique. It is often used in horse breeding, for example, to avoid the risk of injury that more natural breeding might engender. There are similarly many cases where a couple wants to get pregnant and the “ordinary” way will not work. This could be due to physical problems with the man, the woman, or both. In some cases, it will even be necessary to use sperm from someone who is not going to be the legal father. Generally, the couple will decide it is more acceptable emotionally if the sperm donor is anonymous and the insemination is not done via intercourse.

But what about all those cases where the couple tries and indeed, succeeds, the “old-fashioned way.” An argument could certainly be made that all intercourse should be replaced with AI (artificial insemination).

First, the old-fashioned way often produces emotional bonding between the partners. (Some even call it “making love.”) No-one has ever provided a convincing quantitative economic analysis of why this is beneficial. It is certainly painful when pair-bonded individuals are split apart by divorce or death. AI would not prevent all pair bonding, but it could help reduce the risk of such bonds being formed.

Second, the old-fashioned way risks the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Even when pairs are not trying to get pregnant and even when they have the intention of using forms of “protection”, sometimes passion overtakes reason and people, in the heat of the moment, “forget” to use protection. AI provides an opportunity for screening and for greatly reducing the risk of STDs being spread.

Third, the combinations of genes produced by sexual intercourse are random and uncontrolled. While it is currently beyond the state of the art, one can easily imagine that sometime in this century it will possible to “screen” sperm cells and only chose the “best” for AI.

Fourth, traditional sex if often quite expensive in terms of economic costs. Couples will often spend hours engaging in procreational activities than need only take minutes. Beyond that, traditional sex if often accompanied by special dinners, walks on the beach, playing romantic music, and often couples continue to stay together in essentially unproductive activities even after sex such as cuddling and talking.

There are probably additional reasons why AI makes a lot of sense economically and why it is a lot better than the old-fashioned alternative.

Of course, one could take the tack of considering life as something valuable for the experiences themselves and not merely as a means to an end of higher productivity. This seems a dangerously counter-cultural stand to take in modern American society, but in the interest of completeness, and mainly just to prove its absurdity, let us consider for a moment that sex may have some intrinsic and experiential value to the participants.

Suppose that lovers take pleasure in the sights, sounds, smells, feels, and tastes associated with their partners. Imagine that the sexual acts they engage in provide pleasure in and of themselves. There seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about the monetary value of these experiences since the prices charged for artificial versions of these experiences can easily vary by a factor of ten or more. In fact, there have been reports that some people will only engage in sex that is not paid for directly.

So, on the one hand, we have the provable efficiency and effectiveness of AI. On the other hand, we have human experiences whose value is problematic to quantify. The choice seems obvious. Sometime in this century, no doubt, all insemination will be done artificially so that everyone (or at least some very rich people) can enjoy the great economic benefits that will come about from the increased efficiency and effectiveness of AI as compared with “natural” sex.

As further proof, if it is needed, imagine two island countries alike in every way in terms of climate, natural beauty, current economic opportunity, literacy and so on. In fact, the only way these two islands differ is that on one island (which we shall call AII for Artificial Insemination Isle) all “sex” is limited to AI whilst on the other island (which we shall call NII for Natural Insemination Isle) sex is natural and people can spend as much or as little time as they like doing it. Now, people are given a choice about which island to live on. Certainly, with its greater prospects of economic growth and efficiency, everyone would choose to live on AII while NII would be virtually empty. Readers will recognize that this is essentially the same argument as to why “Artificial Ingestion” should surely replace “Natural Ingestion” — cheaper, faster, more reliable. If readers see any holes in this argument, I’d surely like to be informed of them.

Turing’s Nightmares

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The Pros and Cons of AI: Part One

24 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by petersironwood in health, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, ethics, health care, the singularity, user experience, utopia

This is the first of three connected blog posts on the appropriate uses and misuses of AI. In this blog post, I’ll look at “Artificial Ingestion.” (Trust me, it will tie back to another AI, Artificial Intelligence).

While ingestion, and therefore “Artificial Ingestion” is a complex topic, I begin with ingestion because it is a bit more divorced from thought itself. It is easier to think of digestion as separate from thinking; that is, to objectify it more than artificial intelligence because in writing about intelligence, it is necessary to use intelligence itself.

Do we eat to live or live to eat? There is little doubt that eating is necessary to the life of animals such as human beings. Our distant ancestors could have taken a greener and more photosynthetic path but instead, we have collectively decided to kill other organisms to garner our energy. Eating has a utilitarian purpose; indeed, it is a vital purpose. Without food, we eventually die. Moreover, the quality and quantity of the food we eat has a profound impact on our health and well-being. Many of us live in a paradoxical time when it comes to food. Our ancestors often struggled mightily to obtain enough food. Our brains are thus genetically “wired” to search for high sugar, high fat, high salt foods. Even though many of us “know” that we ingest too many calories and may have read and believe that too much salt and sugar are bad for us, it is difficult to overcome the “programming” of countless generations. We are also attracted to brightly colored food. In our past, these colors often signaled foods that were especially high in healthful phytochemicals.

Of course, in modern societies of the “Global North” our genetic predispositions toward high sugar, high fat, high salt, highly colored foods are manipulated by greedy corporate interests. Foods like crackers and chips that contain almost nothing of real value to the human diet are packaged to look like real foods. Beyond that, billions of dollars of advertising dollars are spent to convince us that if we buy and ingest these foods it will help us achieve other goals. For example, we are led to believe that a mother who gives her children “food” consisting of little other than sugar and food dye will be loved by her children and they will be excited and happy children. Children themselves are led to believe that ingesting such junk food will lead them to magical kingdoms. Adult males are led to believe that providing the right kinds of high fat, high salt chips will result in male bonding experiences. Adult males are also led to believe that the proper kinds of alcoholic beverages will result in the seduction of highly desirable looking mates.

Over time, the natural act of eating has been enhanced with rituals. Human societies came to hunt and gather (and later farm) cooperatively. In this way, much more food could be provided over a more continuous basis. Rather than fight each other over food, we sit down in a “civilized” manner and enjoy food together. Some people, through a combination of natural talent and training become experts in the preparation of foods. We have developed instruments such as chopsticks, spoons, knives and forks to help us eat foods. Most typically, various cultures have rituals and customs surrounding food. In many cases, these seem to be geared toward removing us psychologically from the life-giving functionality of food toward the communal enjoyment of food. For example, in my culture, we wait to eat until everyone is served. We eat at a “reasonable” pace rather than gobbling everything down as quickly as possible (before others at the table can snatch our portion). If there are ten people at the table and eleven delicious deserts, people turn many social summersaults in order to avoid taking the last one.

For much of our history, food was confined to what was available in the local region and season. Now, many people, but by no means all, are well off enough to buy foods at any season that originally were grown all over the world. When I was a child, very few Americans had even tried sushi, for example, and the very idea of eating raw fish turned stomachs. At this point, however, many Americans have tried it and most who have enjoy it. Similarly, other cuisines such as Indian and Middle Eastern have spread throughout the world in ways that would have been impossible without modern transportation, refrigeration, and modern training with cookbooks, translations, and videos supplementing face to face apprenticeships.

Some of these trends have enabled some people to enjoy foods of high quality and variety. We support many more people on the planet than would have been possible through hunting and gathering. These “advances” are not without costs. First, there are more people starving in today’s world than even existed on the planet 250,000 years ago. So, these benefits are very unevenly distributed. Second, while fine and delicious foods are available to many, the typical diet of many is primarily based on highly processed grains, soybeans, fat, refined sugar, salt and additives. These “foods” contain calories that allow life to continue; however, they lack many naturally occurring substances that help provide for optimal health. As mentioned, these foods are made “palatable” in the cheapest possible way and then advertised to death to help fool people into thinking they are eating well. In many cases, even “fresh” foods are genetically modified through breeding or via genetic engineering to provide foods that are optimized for cheap production and distribution rather than taste. Anyone who has grown their own tomatoes, for example, can readily appreciate that home grown “heirloom” tomatoes are far tastier than what is available in many supermarkets. While home farmers and small farmers have little in the way of government support, at least in the USA, mega-farming corporations are given huge subsidies to provide vast quantities of poor quality calories. As a consequence, low income people can generally not even afford good quality fresh fruits and vegetables and instead are forced through artificially cheap prices to feed their families with brightly packaged but essentially empty calories.

While some people enjoy some of the best food that ever existed, others have very mediocre food and still others have little food of any kind. What comes next? On the one hand, there is a move toward ever more efficient means of production and distribution of food. The food of humans has always been of interest to a large variety of other animals including rats, mice, deer, rabbits, birds, and insects. Insect pests are particularly difficult to deal with. In response, and in order to keep more of the food for “ourselves”, we have largely decided it is worth the tradeoff to poison our food supply. We use poisons that are designed to kill off insect pests but not kill us off, at least not immediately. I grow a little of my own food and some of that food gets eaten by insects, rabbits, and birds. Personally, I cannot see putting poison on my food supply in order to keep pests from having a share. However, I am lucky. I do not require 100% of my crop in order to stay alive nor to pay off the bank loan by selling it all. Because I grow a wide variety of foods in a relatively small space, there is a lively ecosystem and I don’t typically get everything destroyed by pests. Farmers who grow huge fields of corn, however, can be in a completely different situation and a lot of a crop can fall prey to pests. If they have used pesticides in the past, this is particularly true because they have probably poisoned the natural predators of those pests. At the same time, the pests themselves continue to evolve to be resistant to the poisons. In this way, chemical companies perpetuate a vicious circle in which more and more poison is needed to keep the crops viable. Luckily for the chemical companies, the long-term impact of these poisons on the humans who consume them is difficult to prove in courts of law.

There are movements such as “slow food” and eating locally grown food and urban gardens which are counter-trends, but by and large, our society of specialization has moved to more “efficient” production and distribution of food. More people eat out a higher percentage of the time and much of that “eating out” is at “fast food” restaurants. People grab a sandwich or a bagel or a burger and fries for a “quick fix” for their hunger in order to “save time” for “more productive” pursuits. Some of these “more productive” pursuits include being a doctor to cure diseases that come about in part from people eating junky food and spending most of their waking hours commuting, working at a desk or watching TV. Other “more productive” pursuits include being a lawyer and suing doctors and chemical companies for diseases. Yet other “more productive pursuits” include making money by pushing around little pieces of other people’s money. Still other “more productive pursuits” include making and distributing drugs to help people cope with lives where they spend all their time in “more productive pursuits.”

Do we live to eat or eat to live? Well, it is a little of both. But we seem to have painted ourselves into a corner where most people most of the time have forgone the pleasure of eating that is possible in order to eat more “efficiently” so that we can spend more time making more money. We do this in order to…? What is the end game here?

One can imagine a society in which eating itself becomes a completely irrelevant activity for the vast majority of people. Food that requires chewing takes more time so let’s replace chewing with artificial chewing. Using a blender allows food with texture to be quickly turned to a liquid that can be ingested in the minimum necessary time. One extreme science fiction scenario was depicted in the movie “Soylent Green” which, as it turns out, is made from the bodies of people killed to make room for more people. The movie is set in 2022 (not that far away) and was released in 1973. Today, in 2016, there exists a food called “soylent” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food)) whose inventor, Rob Rhinehart took the name from the movie. It is not made from human remains but the purpose is to provide an “efficient” solution to the Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan). More efficient than smoothies, shakes, and soylent are feeding tubes.

Of course, there are medical conditions where feeding tubes are necessary as a replacement or supplement to ordinary eating as is being “fed” via an IV. But is this really where humanity in general needs to be headed? Is eating to be replaced with “Artificial Ingestion” because it is more efficient? We wouldn’t have to “waste our time” and “waste our energy” shopping, choosing, preparing, chewing, etc. if we could simply have all our nutritional needs met via an IV or feeding tube. With enough people opting in to this option, I am sure industrial research could provide ever less invasive and more mobile forms of IV and tube feeding. At last, humanity could be freed from the onerous task of ingestion, all of which could be replaced by “Artificial Ingestion.” The dollars saved could be put toward some more worthy purpose; for example, making a very few people very very rich.

There are, of course, a few problematic issues. For one thing, despite years of research, we are still discovering nutrients and their impacts. Any attempt to completely replace food with a uniform liquid supplement would almost certainly leave out some vital, but as yet undiscovered ingredients. But a more fundamental question is to what end would we undertake this endeavor in the first place? What if the purpose of life is not, after all, to accomplish everything “more efficiently” but rather, what if the purpose of life is to live it and enjoy it? What then?

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Turing’s Nightmares

Rules and Standards nearly Dead?

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, ethics, law, speeding, the singularity, Turing

funnysign

Ever get a speeding ticket that you thought was “silly”? I certainly have. On one occasion, when I was in graduate school in Ann Arbor, I drove by a police car parked in a gas station. It was a 35 mph zone. I looked over at the police car and looked down to check my speed. Thirty-five mph. No problem. Or, so I thought. I drove on and noticed that a few seconds later, the police officer turned his car on to the same road and began following me perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 mile behind me. He quickly zoomed up and turned on his flashing light to pull me over. He claimed he had followed me and I was going 50 mph. I was going 35. I kept checking because I saw the police car in my mirror. Now, it is quite possible that the police car was traveling 50, because he caught up with me very quickly. I explained this to no avail.

The University of Michigan at that time in the late 60’s was pretty liberal but was situated in a fairly conservative, some might say “redneck”, area of Michigan. There were many clashes between students and police. I am pretty certain that the only reason I got a ticket was that I was young and sporting a beard and therefore “must be” a liberal anti-war protester. I got the ticket because of bias.

Many years later, in 1988, I was driving north from New York to Boston on Interstate 84. This particular section of road is three lanes on both sides. It was a nice clear day and the pavement was dry as well as being dead straight with no hills. The shoulders and margins near the shoulders were clear. The speed limit was 55 mph but I was going 70. Given the state of my car, the conditions and the extremely sparse traffic, as well as my own mental and physical state, I felt perfectly safe driving 70. I got a ticket. In this case, I really was breaking the law. Technically. But I still felt it was a bit unjustified. There was no way that even a deer or rabbit, let alone a runaway child could come out of hiding and get to the highway without my seeing them in time to slow down, stop, or avoid them. Years earlier I had been on a similar stretch of road in Eastern Montana and at that time there was no speed limit. Still, rules are rules. At least for now.

“The Death of Rules and Standards” by Anthony J. Casey and Anthony Niblett suggests that advances in artificial intelligence may someday soon replace rules and standards with “micro-directives” tuned to the specifics of time and circumstance which will provide the benefits of rules without the cost of either. “…we suggest…a larger trend toward context specific laws that can adapt to any situation.” This is an interesting thesis and exploring it helps shine some light on what AI likely can and cannot do as well as making us question why we humans have categories and rules at all. Perhaps AI systems could replace human bias and general laws that seem to impose unnecessary restrictions in particular circumstances.

The first quibble with their argument is that no computer, however powerful, could possibly cover all situations. Taken literally, this would require a complete and accurate theory of physics as well as human behavior as well as a knowledge of the position and state of every particle in the universe. Not even post-singularity AI will likely be able to accomplish this. I hedge with the word “likely” because it is theoretically possible that a sufficiently smart AI will uncover some “hidden pattern” that shows that our universe which seems so vast and random can in fact be predicted in detail by a small set of laws that do not depend on details. In this fantasy future, there is no “true” randomness or chaos or butterfly effect.

Fantasies aside, the first issue that must be dealt with for micro-directives to be reasonable would be to have a good set of “equivalence classes” and/or to partition away differences that do not make a difference. The position of the moons of Jupiter shouldn’t make any difference as to whether a speeding ticket should be given or whether a killing is justified. Spatial proximity alone allows us as humans to greatly diminish the number of factors that need to be considered in deciding whether or not a give action is required, permissible, poor, or illegal. If I had gone to court about the speeding ticket on I-84, I might have mentioned the conditions of the roadway and its surroundings immediately ahead. I would not have mentioned anything whatever about the weather or road conditions anywhere else on the planet as being relevant to the safety of the situation. (Notice though, that it did seem reasonable to me, and possibly to you, to mention that very similar conditions many years earlier in Montana gave rise to no speed limit at all.) This gives us a hint that what is relevant or not relevant to a given situation is non-trivially determined. In fact, the “energy crisis” of the early 70’s gave rise to the National Maximum Speed Law as part of the 1974 Federal Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act. This enacted, among other things, a federal law limiting the speed limit to 55 mph. A New York Times article by Robert A. Hamilton cites a study done of compliance on Connecticut Interstates in 1988 showing that 85% of the drivers violated the 55 mph speed limit!

So,not only would I not received a ticket in Montana in 1972 for driving under similar conditions; I also would not have gotten a ticket on that same exact stretch of highway for going 70 in 1972 or in 1996. And, in the year I actually got that ticket, 85% of the drivers were also breaking the speed limit. The impetus for the 1974 law was that it was supposed to reduce demand for oil; however, advocates were quick to point out that it should also improve safety. Despite several studies on both of these factors, it is still unclear how much, if any, oil was actually saved and it is also unclear what the impact on safety was. It seems logical that slower speeds should save lives. However, people may go out of their way to get to an Interstate if they can drive much faster on it. So some traffic during the 55 limit would stay on less safe rural roads. In addition, falling asleep while driving is not recommended. Driving a long trip at 70 gets you off the road earlier and perhaps before dusk while driving at 55 will keep you on the road longer and possibly in the dark. In addition, lowering the speed limit, to the extent there is any compliance does not just impact driving; it could also impact productivity. Time spent on the road is (hopefully) not time working for most people. One reason it is difficult to measure empirically the impact of slower speeds on safety is that other things were happening as well. Cars have had a number of features to make them safer over time and seat belt usage has gone up as well. They have also become more fuel efficient. Computers, even very “smart” computers are not “magic.” They cannot completely differentiate cause and effect from naturally occurring data. For that, humans or computers have to do expensive, costly, and ethically problematic field experiments.

Of course, what is true about something as simple as enforcing speed limits is equally or more problematic in other areas where one might be tempted to utilize micro-directives in place of laws. Sticking to speeding laws, micro-directives could “adjust” to conditions and avoid biases based on gender, race, and age, but they could also take into account many more factors. Should the allowable speed, for instance, be based on income? (After all a person making $250K per year is losing more money by driving more slowly than one making $25K/year). How about the reaction time of the driver? How about whether or not they are listening to the radio? As I drive, I don’t like using cruise control. I change my speed continually depending on the amount of traffic, whether or not someone in the nearby area appears to be driving erratically, how much visibility I have, how closely someone is following me and how close I have to be to the car in front and so on. Should all of these be taken into account in deciding whether or not to give a ticket? Is it “fair” for someone with extremely good vision and reaction times to be allowed to drive faster than someone with moderate vision and slow reaction times? How would people react to any such personalized micro-directives?

While the speed ticket situation is complex and could be fraught with emotion, what about other cases such as abortion? Some people feel that abortion should never be legal under any circumstances and others feel it is always the woman’s choice. Many people, however, feel that it is only justified under certain circumstances. But what are those circumstances in detail? And, even if the AI system takes into account 1000 variables to reach a “wise” decision, how would the rules and decisions be communicated?

Would an AI system be able to communicate in such a way as to personalize the manner of presentation for the specific person in the specific circumstances to warn them that they are about to break a micro-directive? In order to be “fair”, one could argue that the system should be equally able to prevent everyone from breaking a micro-directive. But some people are more unpredictable than others. What if, in order to make it so person A is 98% likely to follow the micro-directive, the AI system presents a soundtrack of a screaming child but in order to make person B 98% likely to follow the micro-directive, it only whispers a warning. Now, person B ignores the micro-directive and speeds (which would happen according to the premise 2% of the time). Wouldn’t person B, now be likely to object that if they had had the same warning, they would have not ignored the micro-directive? Conversely, person A might be so disconcerted by the warning that they end up in an accident.

Anyway, there is certainly no argument that our current system of using human judgement is prone to various kinds of conscious and unconscious biases. In addition, it also seems to be the case that any system of general laws ends up punishing people for what is actually “reasonable” behavior under the circumstances and ends up letting people off Scott-free when they do despicable things which are technically legal (absurdly rich people and corporations paying zero taxes comes to mind). Will driverless cars be followed by judge-less and jury-less courts?

Turing’s Nightmares

Abracadabra!

07 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by petersironwood in apocalypse, The Singularity, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

"Citizens United", AI, Artificial Intelligence, biotech, cognitive computing, emotional intelligence, ethics, the singularity, Turing

Abracadabra! Here’s the thing. There is no magic. Of course, there is the magic of love and the wonder at the universe and so there is metaphorical magic. But there is no physical magic and no mathematical magic. Why do we care? Because in most science fiction scenarios, when super-intelligence happens, whether it is artificial or humanoid, magic happens. Not only can the super-intelligent person or computer think more deeply and broadly, they also can start predicting the future, making objects move with their thoughts alone and so on. Unfortunately, it is not just in science fiction that one finds such impossibilities but also in the pitches of companies about biotech and the future of artificial intelligence. Now, don’t get me wrong. Of course, there are many awesome things in store for humanity in the coming millennia, most of which we cannot even anticipate. But the chances of “free unlimited energy” and a computer that will anticipate and meet our every need are slim indeed.

This all-too popular exaggeration is not terribly surprising. I am sure much of what I do seems quite magical to our cats. People in possession of advanced or different technology often seem “magical” to those with no familiarity with the technology. But please keep in mind that making a human brain “better”, whether by making it bigger, or have more connections, or making it faster —- none of these alterations will enable the brain to move objects via psychokinesis. Yes, the brain does produce a minuscule amount of electricity, but way too little to move mountains or freight trains. Of course, machines can be theoretically be built to wield a lot of physical energy, but it isn’t the information processing part of the system that directly causes something in the physical world. It is through actuators of some type, just as it is with animals. Of course, super-intelligence could make the world more efficient. It is also possible that super-intelligence might discover as yet undiscovered forces of the universe. If it turns out that our understanding of reality is rather fundamentally flawed, then all bets are off. For example, if it turns out that there are twelve fundamental forces in the universe (or, just one), and a super-intelligent system determines how to use them, it might be possible that there is potential energy already stored in matter which can be released by the slightest “twist” in some other dimension or using some as yet undiscovered force. This might appear to human beings who have never known about the other 8 forces let alone how to harness them as “magic.”

There is another more subtle kind of “magic” that might be called mathematical magic. As known for a long time, it is theoretically possible to play perfect chess by calculating all possible moves, and all possible responses to those moves, etc. to the final draws and checkmates. It has been calculated such a calculation of contingencies would not be possible even if the entire universe were a nano-computer operating in parallel since the beginning of time. There are many similar domains. Just because a person or computer is way, way smarter does not mean they will be able to calculate every possibility in a highly complex domain.

Of course, it is also possible that some domains might appear impossibly complex but actually be governed by a few simple, but extremely difficult to discover laws. For instance, it might turn out that one can calculate the precise value of a chess position (encapsulating all possible moves implicitly) through some as yet undiscovered algorithm written perhaps in an as yet undesigned language. It seems doubtful that this would be true of every domain, but it is hard to say a priori.

There is another aspect of unpredictability and that has to do with random and chaotic effects. Imagine trying to describe every single molecule of earth’s seas and atmosphere in terms of it’s motion and position. Even if there were some way to predict state N+1 from N, we would have to know everything about state N. The effects of the slightest miscalculation of missing piece of data could be amplified over time. So long term predictions of fundamentally chaotic systems like weather, or what your kids will be up to in 50 years, or what the stock market will be in 2600 are most likely impossible, not because our systems are not intelligent enough but because such systems are by their nature not predictable. In the short term, weather is largely, though not entirely, predictable. The same holds for what your kids will do tomorrow or, within limits, what the stock market will do. The long term predictions are quite different.

In The Sciences of the Artificial, Herb Simon provides a nice thought experiment about the temperature in various regions of a closed space. I am paraphrasing, but imagine a dormitory with four “quads.” Each quad has four rooms and each room is partitioned into four areas with screens. The screens are not very good insulators so if the temperature in these areas differ, they will quickly converge. In the longer run, the temperature will tend toward average in the entire quad. In the very long term, if no additional energy is added, the entire dormitory will tend toward the global average. So, when it comes to many kinds of interactions, nearby interactions dominate, but in the long term, more global forces come into play.

Now, let us take Simon’s simple example and consider what might happen in the real world. We want to predict what the temperature is in a particular partitioned area in 100 years. In reality, the dormitory is not a closed system. Someone may buy a space heater and continually keep their little area much warmer. Or, maybe that area has a window that faces south. But it gets worse. Much worse. We have no idea whether the dormitory will even exist in 100 years. It depends on fires, earthquakes, and the generosity of alumni. In fact, we don’t even know whether brick and mortar colleges will exist in 100 years. Because as we try to predict in longer and longer time frames, not only do more distant factors come into play in terms of physical distance. The determining factors are also distant conceptually. In a 100 year time frame, the entire college may or may not exist and we don’t even know whether the determining factor(s) will be financial, astronomical, geological, political, social, physical or what. This is not a problem that will be solved via “Artificial Intelligence” or by giving human beings “better brains” via biotech.

Whoa! Hold on there. Once again, it is possible that in some other dimension or using some other as yet undiscovered force, there is a law of conservation so that going “off track” in one direction causes forces to correct the imbalance and get back on track. It seems extremely unlikely, but it is conceivable that our model of how the universe works is missing some fundamental organizing principle and what appears to us as chaotic is actually not.

The scary part, at least to me, is that some descriptions of the wonderful world that awaits us (once our biotech or AI start-up is funded) is that that wonderful world depends on their being a much simpler, as yet unknown force or set of forces that is discoverable and completely unanticipated. Color me “doubting Thomas” on that one.

It isn’t just that investing in such a venture might be risky in terms of losing money. It is that we humans are subject to blind pride that makes people presume that they can predict what the impact of making a genetic change will be, not just on a particular species in the short term, but on the entire planet in the long run! We can indeed make small changes in both biotech and AI and see improvements in our lives. But when it comes to recreating dinosaurs in a real life Jurassic Park or replacing human psychotherapists with robotic ones, we really cannot predict what the net effect will be. As humans, we are certainly capable of containing and testing and imagining possibilities and slowly testing them as we introduce them. Yeah. That could happen. But…

What seems to actually happen is that companies not only want to make more money; they want to make more money now. We have evolved social and legal and political systems that put almost no brakes on runaway greed. The result is that more than one drug has been put on the market that has had a net negative effect on human health. This is partly because long term effects are very hard to ascertain, but the bigger cause is unbridled greed. Corporations, like horses, are powerful things. You can ride farther and faster on a horse. And certainly corporations are powerful agents of change. But the wise rider is master or partner with a horse. They don’t allow themselves to be dragged along the ground by rope and let the horse go wherever it will. Sadly, that is precisely the position that society is vis a vis corporations. We let them determine the laws. We let them buy elections. We let them control virtually every news medium. We no longer use them to get amazing things done. We let them use us to get done what they want done. And what is that thing that they want done? Make hugely more money for a very few people. Despite this, most companies still manage to do a lot of net good in the world. I suspect this is because human beings are still needed for virtually every vital function in the corporation.

What will happen once the people in a corporation are no longer needed? What will happen when people who remain in a corporation are no longer people as we know them, but biologically altered? It is impossible to predict with certainty. But we can assume that it will seem to us very much like magic.

Very.

Dark.

Magic.

Abracadabra!

Turing’s Nightmares

petersironwood

~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

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Abracadabra!