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Artificial Ingestion

Artificial Insemination

Artificial Intelligence

Dance of Billions

When GREED is the only creed

After All

All We Stand to Lose

Fish have no Word for Water

Somewhere a Bird Cries

Guernica

Myths of the Veritas: The First Ring of Empathy

Travels with Sadie: Precipitation

The Walkabout Diaries: Symphony

My Brief Case Runneth Over

03 Thursday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in The Singularity

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adaptive-systems, AI, Artificial Intelligence, artificial-intellligence, books, chatgpt, cognitive computing, ethics, fiction, law, lawyers, legality, life, music, politics, technology, the singularity, USA, writing

left-right patterns 2

Turing’s Nightmares: Nineteen — My Brief Case Runneth Over

“Nice office, counselor.” Marvin spread his arm to indicate the panorama of Manhattan and Ellis Island. Yet, his attempt to sound casual failed utterly. He realized all too well the depth of trouble he was in and the creakiness in his voice so signaled.

J.B. smiled. “No need to be nervous. After all, we’re here to help. Just answer honestly. Everything you say will typically be covered under attorney client privilege.”

“Okay. Thanks. Typically?”

J.B. sighed. “There is a rare exception in the Patriot Act. Unless you’re some kind of terrorist, I wouldn’t worry about it. The government is apparently accusing you of importing illegal chips is all. I think we can argue that you are new to the business and did not realize all the required legalities. Pay the taxes now and some penalties. You should be able to avoid jail time. But we are getting way ahead of ourselves. Just tell me how and why and when you got into this business in the first place.”

Marvin chuckled slightly and then sighed “That’s a rather long story.” Marvin glanced at the expensive abstract paintings and noted the rich smell of the solid mahogany furniture. The room also had that crazy idea of luxury — making it freezing cold inside just because it was horribly hot and humid that day, even for New York City August. “At your rates…What do you really need to know?”

“Why did you get involved in making chips without the required back door?”

“These chips are not that powerful. At least not in the traditional sense of the word. And, the government’s requirement is frankly kind of silly. The extra logic makes programming more difficult. It increases the chances of errors. The chips are more expensive and require more power. Leaving aside all the valid privacy concerns, there are plenty of applications that can use a more efficient cheaper chip design. No need to report all the little finger twitches of every twelve year old who’s playing Grand Theft Spaceship. What’s the point?”

“Marvin. I’ve been a friend of your family for a long time. When…well…if we go to court and if you testify, please steer clear of politics. The law is the law. You don’t get to decide which applications are immune from the law. No, what we…our script here is that you made some honest mistakes. You made technical mistakes and what are essentially accounting errors.”

Marvin flushed. “What technical mistakes? What are you talking about? My design is an improvement.”

J.B. got up and paced. “Marvin, Marvin, you are a smart boy. We are not going to fight the government on this. Our script as I said is that you made some honest mistakes. If you want to —- the court is not the place to try to change the law. If you want to do that, get involved in politics. But not until after this is resolved. If you get on the stand and start railing about privacy and the dangers of the Sing and…”

“Ha. The Sing indeed. This data collection rampage has nothing to do with trying to increase the intelligence of computer systems. It is just mindless greed.”

“Marvin, the back door requirement is about preventing terrorism; it has nothing to do with greed.”

“Are you serious, J.B.? Terrorism is just the cover story the government uses. They want to collect all this data to keep their sponsors happy.”

“What? What sponsors? What are you talking about? The government doesn’t have sponsors.”

“Of course they do. Ever since ‘Citizens United’ — nice title by the way — billionaires can buy all the media they want. They wash the airwaves and the print media and saturate the social media space and make people believe anything they want. The point of the back door is just to make sure the sponsors keep tabs on everybody’s buying habits —- and to make sure no-one gets too far out of line. How can you not know this?”

“I don’t want to think that way. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s the law. All digital processing chips with more than a peta-flop and …”

“Hold it! Did you say ‘digital’?”

“Huh? Yeah, of course. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? You designed digital processing chips that have no back door and now…”

“No. Maybe not, J.B. My chips are not, strictly speaking, digital.”

“What are you talking about, Marvin? Why? How not digital?”

“In my design process, I strove for something different and more robust. See, here’s the thing. Natural life processes are all…they all have some level of flexibility. They are robust. They are adaptive, I suppose, because every life form that was not flexible or robust died off over the four billion years that life evolved. Something new would come along and every life form that was rigid died. Even physical machines that people make have some flexibility. Metal bends. Wood bends. These materials also compress. They stretch. Not much, but a little. Digital devices do not stand for bending, folding or mutilating. Of course, when people build systems that include IT devices, they try to make the systems flexible. They add error checking; they put humans in the loop; there are all sorts of work-around, but the underlying tech is brittle. It is only flexible in precisely the ways that the designers anticipated it needed to be flexible. I made something that is fundamentally flexible. It is fashioned after life itself. Social systems are flexible. Eco-systems are flexible. Individual animals are flexible. Cell membranes are flexible. Bones are flexible. And so on. This flexibility is fundamental to life and evolution.”

“Okay, Marvin, but life is not infinitely flexible. You cannot just decide to breathe underwater.”

“Of course not! I never said it was infinitely flexible! For fundamental change, you need evolution and lots of time. If the climate changes too quickly, Permian life species largely go extinct. Dinosaurs die when a comet hits. But small adaptations just happen automatically and at every level. It isn’t necessary to have a pre-existing ‘program’ or ‘case’ to handle every contingency that is even slightly outside of what is anticipated.”

“Okay, fine. Granted, but what does this have to do with — did I mention that I charge $500 an hour, by the way?”

“Yes, J.B., you did. And it was in the contract you had me sign. But the point is that my chips are not, strictly speaking, digital at all. They are not strictly EITHER/OR. They are not binary. Although, in many cases, they can behave as binary.”

“So, you want me to claim that these chips are not covered under the back-door provision because they are not really digital devices? I don’t know. That seems pretty shaky to me. Can’t these chips of your be used for the same things as ordinary digital chips? Speech reco. Machine vision. Game control. Big data analytics.”

“Here’s the thing, J.B. Yes, they can, but they can change and evolve and reprogram themselves over time. And, now it occurs to me, that they could not have a real back door. They wouldn’t really function if they did.”

“What? Why?”

“Are you familiar with programmed death in cells? I can see from your blank stare, you aren’t. Anyway, if a cell is damaged within the body, it can wreak all sorts of havoc so the cells are essentially programmed to self-destruct. If that fails, the other healthy cells will tend to wipe out the damaged ones. So, if there were a functioning back door sharing data out of these chips, the chips would shut themselves down. If that failed, other chips in the matrix would isolate them and shut off communication. So, by their very nature, these particular non-digital chips cannot have a functioning back door.”

“That all sounds very clever, Marvin, but now we are talking about a very lengthy and expensive trial with expert witnesses on both sides. If, that is, you are lucky enough to even have an open trial.”

“Lucky enough? What are you talking about, J.B.? I thought you said we wanted to avoid a trial.”

“Yeah. With my strategy where we convince the NSA that this was just technical and business incompetence on your part. But in your scenario, where you want to prove you are all brilliant and everything, then, we will be lucky if —- you will be lucky to —- Look Marvin, I just cannot advise you to take this line of argument. If you really want to go that route, you will have to find a different lawyer.”

“Okay. Fine. I’ll use Solomon.”

“Solomon? Who is ‘Solomon’? Never heard of him. I mean, obviously, I know Solomon from the Bible but what firm are you talking about?”

“No firm, J.B. Solomon is one of the apps we built with my chipset.”

“An AI lawyer? Are you serious?”

“Oh, quite serious. He’s already informed me that he thinks he can win this case.”

“What? That’s preposterous. You told me you just designed the chips a year ago. What kind of experience could this Solomon have?”

“J.B., he’s been reading applicable statutes and case law for the last two months. Which means, he literally knows it all, when it comes to case law and the rulings beneath. Beyond that, Solomon has argued both sides of thousands of hypothetical cases.”

“What?! Ridiculous! But even so, he — or it —cannot possibly know how to anticipate or react to what happens in court!”

“But J.B., haven’t you been listening? Of course he can. He’s flexible, just like a real lawyer. Only…no offense…a lot smarter.”

“Computers cannot be that flexible. Ridiculous. How? No way.”

“Look, J.B., I have a picture to illustrate. See this pattern on the left [Picture at the top of page]? And, there it is on the right?”

“Yeah, beautiful. Same pattern. So what?”

“Ah, that’s just it! Is it the same pattern? Is it the same pattern or the same pattern?”

“Well. One is perfect and the other has little mistakes, but I guess it’s the same pattern.”

“Exactly, J.B. It’s the same basic pattern, but it’s not the identical instantiation of that pattern. Ordinary chips are like the picture on the left and mine are like the picture on the right. You see? And, that flexibility is built in at every level in every system. Because the underlying substrate uses an adaptive process with variations. It works 99% as efficiently as the system on the left, but it can accommodate things we didn’t think of. The difference between the system on the left and the system on the right is hubris. The one on the left is designed under the assumption that the designer knows everything of relevance. The system on the right is designed under the assumption that the designer, no matter how brilliant, does not know everything of relevance. You get it?”

“Yes, Marvin, I’m not stupid. But I am still not going to take your case. And, I strongly advise you not to rely on a robot. I am sorry to say it, Marvin, but I think you have picked on the wrong people this time. Attorney client privilege no longer applies and I have to send my recording of this conversation to the proper authorities.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary Marvin. I’ve already broadcasts this through the social media. You’re famous! It will be good for your business.”

“What? Are you crazy? They will come get you, you fool.”

“Maybe, but if I am taken out over these chips without a trial, everyone will know, don’t you see? I sent it out everywhere, J.B. I might be ‘disappeared’ but I can’t just disappear unnoticed. Solomon’s idea, by the way.”

Dream Planet

Abracadabra!

20 Tuesday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in apocalypse, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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"Citizens United", AI, Artificial Intelligence, biotech, chatgpt, chess, cognitive computing, Democracy, emotional intelligence, ethics, HCI, life, prediction, psychokinesis, technology, the singularity, truth, Turing, USA, UX

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 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 that such an enumberation 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 or 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 ability to do long term prediction is 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 this particular 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 in general 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, however, 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!

All Around the Mulberry Bush

After All

All We Stand to Lose

The Crows and Me

The Last Gleam of Twilight

Guernica

The Orange Man

Donnie Visits Granny

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

An Open Sore from Hell

The Impossible

Pattern Language Summary

The Midnight Flight to Crazytown

To Be or Not to Be

Peace

Who Won the War?

We Won the War! We Won the War!

At Least He’s Our Monster

Stoned Soup

Fifteen Properties

Tools of Thought: And then what?

The Walkabout Diaries: Sunsets

All that Glitters is not Gold

When Greed’s the Only Creed

Turing’s Nightmares: The Road Not Taken

Turing’s Nightmares: Eight

21 Friday Nov 2025

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, collaboration, cooperation, openai, peace, philosophy, seva, teamwork, technology, the singularity, Turing, ubuntu, United Peoples Ecosystem

Workshop on Human Computer Interaction for International Development

In chapter 8 of Turing’s Nightmares, I portray a quite different path to ultra-intelligence. In this scenario, people have begun to concentrate their energy, not on building a purely artificial intelligence; rather they have explored the science of large scale collaboration. In this way, referred to by Doug Engelbart among others as Intelligence Augmentation, the “super-intelligence” comes from people connecting.

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It could be argued, that, in real life, we have already achieved the singularity. The human race has been pursuing “The Singularity” ever since we began to communicate with language. Once our common genetic heritage reached a certain point, our cultural evolution has far out-stripped our genetic evolution. The cleverest, most brilliant person ever born would still not be able to learn much in their own lifetime compared with what they can learn from parents, siblings, family, school, society, reading and so on.

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One problem with our historical approach to communication is that it evolved for many years among a small group of people who shared goals and experiences. Each small group constituted an “in-group” but relations with other groups posed more problems. The genetic evidence, however, has become clear that even very long ago, humans not only met but mated with other varieties of humans proving that some communication is possible even among very different tribes and cultures.

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More recently, we humans started traveling long distances and trading goods, services, and ideas with other cultures. For example, the brilliance of Archimedes notwithstanding, the idea of “zero” was imported into European culture from Arab culture. The Rosetta Stone illustrates that even thousands of years ago, people began to see the advantages of being able to translate among languages. In fact, modern English contains phrases even today that illustrate that the Norman conquerers found it useful to communicate with the conquered. For example, the phrase, “last will and testament” was traditionally used in law because it contains both the word “will” with Germanic/Saxon origins and the word “testament” which has origins in Latin. Many other traditional legal terms in English have similar bilingual origins.

Automatic translation across languages has made great strides. Although not so accurate as human translation, it has reached the point where the essence of many straightforward communications can be usefully carried out by machine. The advent of the Internet, the web, and, more recently google has certainly enhanced human-human communication. It is worth noting that the tremendous value of google arises only a little through having an excellent search engine but much more though the billions of transactions of other human beings. People are exploring and using MOOCs, on-line gaming, e-mail and many other important electronically mediated tools.

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Equally importantly, we are learning more and more about how to collaborate effectively both remotely and face to face, both synchronously and asynchronously. Others continue to improve existing interfaces to computing resources and inventing others. Current research topics include how to communicate more effectively across cultural divides; how to have more coherent conversations when there are important differences in viewpoint or political orientation. All of these suggest that as an alternative or at least an adjunct to making purely separate AI systems smarter, we can also use AI to help people communicate more effectively with each other and at scale. Some of the many investigators in these areas include Wendy Kellogg, Loren Terveen, Joe Konstan, Travis Kriplean, Sherry Turkle, Kate Starbird, Scott Robertson, Eunice Sari, Amy Bruckman, Judy Olson, and Gary Olson. There are several important conferences in the area including European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Communities and Technology. It does not seem at all far-fetched that we can collectively learn, in the next few decades how to take international collaboration to the next level and from there, we may well have reached “The Singularity.”

Photo by Patrick Case on Pexels.com

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For further reading, see: Thomas, J. (2015). Chaos, Culture, Conflict and Creativity: Toward a Maturity Model for HCI4D. Invited keynote @ASEAN Symposium, Seoul, South Korea, April 19, 2015.

Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer.

Thomas, J. C., Kellogg, W.A., and Erickson, T. (2001). The Knowledge Management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management. IBM Systems Journal, 40(4), 863-884.

Thomas, J. C. (2001). An HCI Agenda for the Next Millennium: Emergent Global Intelligence. In R. Earnshaw, R. Guedj, A. van Dam, and J. Vince (Eds.), Frontiers of human-centered computing, online communities, and virtual environments. London: Springer-Verlag.

Thomas, J.C. (2016). Turing’s Nightmares. Available on Amazon. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2

An Inside View of IBMs Innovation Jam

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Author Page on Amazon

Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation

Imagine All the People…

Take a Glance; Join the Dance

Corn on the Cob

Indian Wells

Turing’s Nightmares: Seven

20 Thursday Nov 2025

Posted by petersironwood in The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, chatgpt, cognitive computing, competition, cooperation, ethics, philosophy, technology, the singularity, Turing

Axes to Grind.

finalpanel1

Why the obsession with building a smarter machine? Of course, there are particular areas where being “smarter” really means being able to come up with more efficient solutions. Better logistics means you can deliver items to more people more quickly with fewer mistakes and with a lower carbon footprint. That seems good. Building a better Chess player or a better Go player might have small practical benefit, but it provides a nice objective benchmark for developing methods that are useful in other domains as well. But is smarter the only goal of artificial intelligence?

What would or could it mean to build a more “ethical” machine? Can a machine even have ethics? What about building a nicer machine or a wiser machine or a more enlightened one? These are all related concepts but somewhat different. A wiser machine, to take one example, might be a system that not only solves problems that are given to it more quickly. It might also mean that it looks for different ways to formulate the problem; it looks for the “question behind the question” or even looks for problems. Problem formulation and problem finding are two essential skills that are seldom even taught in schools for humans. What about the prospect of machines that do this? If its intelligence is very different from ours, it may seek out, formulate, and solve problems that are hard for us to fathom.

For example, outside my window is a hummingbird who appears to be searching the stone pine for something. It is completely unclear to me what he is searching for. There are plenty of flowers that the hummingbirds like and many are in bloom right now. Surely they have no trouble finding these. Recall that a hummingbird has an incredibly fast metabolism and needs to spend a lot of energy finding food. Yet, this one spent five minutes unsuccessfully scanning the stone pine for … ? Dead straw to build a nest? A mate? A place to hide? A very wise machine with freedom to choose problems may well pick problems to solve for which we cannot divine the motivation. Then what?

In this chapter, one of the major programmers decides to “insure” that the AI system has the motivation and means to protect itself. Protection. Isn’t this the major and main rationalization for most of the evil and aggression in the world? Perhaps a super intelligent machine would be able to manipulate us into making sure it was protected. It might not need violence. On the other hand, from the machine’s perspective, it might be a lot simpler to use violence and move on to more important items on its agenda.

This chapter also raises issues about the relationship between intelligence and ethics. Are intelligent people, even on average, more ethical? Intelligence certainly allows people to make more elaborate rationalizations for their unethical behavior. But does it correlate with good or evil? Lack of intelligence or education may sometimes lead people to do harmful things unknowingly. But lots of intelligence and education may sometimes lead people to do harmful things knowingly — but with an excellent rationalization. Is that better?

Even highly intelligent people may yet have significant blind spots and errors in logic. Would we expect that highly intelligent machines would have no blind spots or errors? In the scenario in chapter seven, the presumably intelligent John makes two egregious and overt errors in logic. First, he says that if we don’t know how to do something, it’s a meaningless goal. Second, he claims (essentially) that if empathy is not sufficient for ethical behavior, then it cannot be part of ethical behavior. Both are logically flawed positions. But the third and most telling “error” John is making is implicit — that he is not trying to dialogue with Don to solve some thorny problems. Rather, he is using his “intelligence” to try to win the argument. John already has his mind made up that intelligence is the ultimate goal and he has no intention of jointly revisiting this goal with his colleague. Because, at least in the US, we live in a hyper-competitive society where even dancing and cooking and dating have been turned into competitive sports, most people use their intelligence to win better, not to cooperate better.

If humanity can learn to cooperate better, perhaps with the help of intelligent computer agents, we can probably solve most of the most pressing problems we have even without super-intelligent machines. Will this happen? I don’t know. Could this happen? Yes. Unfortunately, Roger is not on board with that program toward better cooperation and in this scenario, he has apparently ensured the AI’s capacity for “self-preservation through violent action” without consulting his colleagues ahead of time. We can speculate that he was afraid that they might try to prevent him from doing so either by talking him out of it or appealing to a higher authority. But Roger imagined he “knew better” and only told them when it was a fait accompli. So it goes.

———–

Welcome Singularity

Come Back to the Light Side

Pattern Language Summary

Tools of Thought

What about the Butter Dish?

Wednesdays

Where does your Loyalty Lie?

Labelism

My Cousin Bobby

The Loud Defense of Untenable Positions

Turing’s Nightmares: Six

19 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by petersironwood in sports, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, ethics, fiction, life, sports, Tennis, Turing

volleyballvictory

Human Beings are Interested in Human Limits.

About nine years ago, an Google AI system won its match over the human Go champion. Does this mean that people will lose interest in Go? I don’t think so. It may eventually mean that human players will learn faster and that top-level human play will increase. Nor, will robot athletes supplant human athletes any time soon.

Athletics provides an excellent way for people to get and stay fit, become part of a community, and fight depression and anxiety. Watching humans vie in athletic endeavors helps us understand the limits of what people can do. This is something that our genetic endowment has wisely made fascinating. To a lesser extent, we are also interested in seeing how fast a horse can run, or how fast a hawk can dive or how complex a routine a dog can learn.

In Chapter 6 of “Turing’s Nightmares” I briefly explore a world where robotic competitors have replaced human ones. In this hypothetical world, the super-intelligent computers also find that sports is an excellent venue for learning more about the world. And, so it is! In “The Winning Weekend Warrior”, I provide many examples of how strategies and tactics useful in the sports world are also useful in business and in life. (There are also some important exceptions that are worth noting. In sports, you play within the rules. In life, you can play with some of the rules.)

Chapter 6 also brings up two controversial points that ethicists and sports enthusiasts should be discussing now. First, sensors are becoming so small, powerful, accurate, and lightweight that is possible to embed them in virtually any piece of sports equipment(e.g., tennis racquets). Few people would call it unethical to include such sensors as training devices. However, very soon, these might also provide useful information during play. What about that? Suppose that you could wear a device that not only enhanced your sensory abilities but also your motor abilities? To some extent, the design of golf clubs and tennis racquets and swimsuits are already doing this. Is there a limit to what would or should be tolerated? Should any device be banned? What about corrective lenses? What about sunglasses? Should all athletes have to compete nude? What about athletes who have to take “performance enhancing” drugs just to stay healthy? Sharapova’s recent case is just one. What about the athlete of the future who has undergone stem cell therapy to regrow a torn muscle or ligament? Suppose a major league baseball pitcher tears a tendon and it is replaced with a synthetic tendon that allows a faster fast ball?

With the ever-growing power of computers and the collection of more and more data, big data analytics makes it possible for the computer to detect patterns of play that a human player or coach would be unlikely to perceive. Suppose a computer system is able to detect reliable “cues” that tip off what pitch a pitcher is likely to throw or whether a tennis player is about to hit down the tee or out wide? Novak Djokovic and Ted Williams were born with exceptional visual acuity. This means that they can pick out small visual details more quickly than their opponents and react to a serve or curve more quickly. But it also means that they are more likely to pick up subtle tip-offs in their opponents motion that give away their intentions ahead of time. Would we object if a computer program analyzed thousands of serves by Jannik Sinner or Carlos Alcaraz in order to detect patterns of tip-offs and then that information was used to help train Alexander Zerev to learn to “read” the service motions of his opponents? Of course, this does not just apply to tennis. It applies to reading a football play option, a basketball pick, the signals of baseline coaches, and so on.

Instead of teaching Zerev these patterns ahead of time, suppose he were to have a device implanted in his back that received radio signals from a supercomputer able to “read” where the serve were going a split second ahead of time and it was this signal that allowed Alexander to anticipate better?

I do not know the “correct” ethical answer for all of these dilemmas. To me, it is most important to be open and honest about what is happening. So, if Lance Armstrong wants to use performance enhancing drugs, perhaps that is okay if and only if everyone else in the race knows that and has the opportunity to take the same drugs and if everyone watching knows it as well. Similarly, although I would prefer that tennis players only use IT for training, I would not be dead set against real time aids if the public knows. I suspect that most fans (like me) would prefer their athletes “un-enhanced” by drugs or electronics. Personally, I don’t have an issue with using any medical technology to enhance the healing process. How do others feel? And what about athletes who “need” something like asthma medication in order to breathe but it has a side-effect of enhancing performance?

Would the advent of robotic tennis players, baseball players or football players reduce our enjoyment of watching people in these sports? I think it might be interesting to watch robots in these sports for a time, but it would not be interesting for a lifetime. Only human athletes would provide on-going interest. What do you think?

Readers of this blog may also enjoy “Turing’s Nightmares” and “The Winning Weekend Warrior.” John Thomas’s author page on Amazon

Welcome Singularity

The Day from Hell

Indian Wells Tennis Tournament

Take a Glance; Join the Dance

US Open Closed

Life is a Dance

Donnie Gets a Tennis Trophy

Math Class: Who are you?

The Agony of the Feet

Wordless Perfection

The Jewels of November

Turing’s Nightmares: Chapter Five

17 Monday Nov 2025

Posted by petersironwood in The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, chatgpt, cognitive computing, health, medicine, Personal Assistant, philosophy, technology, the singularity, Turing

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An Ounce of Prevention: Chapter 5 of Turing’s Nightmares

Hopefully, readers will realize that I am not against artificial intelligence (after all, I ran an AI lab for a dozen years); nor do I think the outcomes of increased artificial intelligence are all bad. Indeed, medicine offers a large domain where better artificial intelligence is likely to help us stay healthier longer. IBM’s Watson had already begun “digesting” the vast and ever-growing medical literature more than a decade ago. As investigators discover more and more about what causes health and disease, we will also need to keep track of more and more variables about an individual in order to provide optimal care. But more data points also means it will become harder for a time-pressed doctor or nurse to note and remember every potentially relevant detail about a patient. Certainly, personal assistants can help medical personnel avoid bad drug interactions, keep track of history, and “perceive” trends and relationships in complex data more quickly than people are likely to. In addition, in the not too distant future, we can imagine AI programs finding complex relationships and “invent” potential treatments.

Not only medicine, but health provides a number of opportunities for technology to help. People often find it tricky to “force themselves” to follow the rules of health that they know to be good such as getting enough exercise. Fit Bit, Activity Tracker, LoseIt and similar IT apps help track people’s habits and for many, this really helps them stay fit. As computers become more aware of more and more of our personal history, they can potentially find more personalized ways to motivate us to do what is in our own best interest.

In Chapter 5 of Turing’s Nightmares, we find that Jack’s own daughter, Sally is unable to persuade Jack to see a doctor. The family’s PA (personal assistant), however, succeeds. It does this by using personal information about Jack’s history in order to engage him emotionally, not just intellectually. We have to assume that the personal assistant has either inferred or knows from first principles that Jack loves his daughter and the PA also uses that fact to help persuade Jack.

It is worth noting that the PA in this scenario is not at all arrogant. Quite the contrary, the PA acts the part of a servant and professes to still have a lot to learn about human behavior. I am reminded of Adam’s “servant” Lee in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Lee uses his position as “servant” to do what is best for the household. It’s fairly clear to the reader that, in many ways, Lee is in charge though it may not be obvious to Adam.

In some ways, having an AI system that is neither “clueless” as most systems are today nor “arrogant” as we might imagine a super-intelligent system to be (and as the systems in chapters 2 and 3 were), but instead feigning deference and ignorance in order to manipulate people could be the scariest stance for such a system to take. We humans do not like being “manipulated” by others, even when it for our own “good.” How would we feel about a deferential personal assistant who “tricks us” into doing things for our own benefit? What if they could keep us from over-eating, eating candy, smoking cigarettes, etc.? Would we be happy to have such a good “friend” or would we instead attempt to misdirect it, destroy it, or ignore it? Maybe we would be happier with just having something that presented the “facts” to us in a neutral way so that we would be free to make our own good (or bad) decision. Or would we prefer a PA to “keep us on track” even while pretending that we are in charge?

E-Fishiness comes to Mass General Hospital

There’s a Pill for That

Travels with Sadie

The Walkabout Diaries

Plans for US; some GRUesome

Donnie Gets a Hamster

Family Matters: Part Three

Math Class: Who are you?

Family Matters: Part One

Family Matters: Part Two

Family Matters: Part Four

Turing’s Nightmares: Chapter Four

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by petersironwood in driverless cars, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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Considerations of “Turing’s Nightmare’s” Chapter Four: Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe.

pipe

(This is a discussion or “study guide” for chapter four of Turing’s Nightmares).

In this chapter, we consider the interplay of four themes. First, and most centrally, is the issue of what constitutes “reality.” The second theme is that what “counts” as “reality” or is seen as reality may well differ from generation to generation. The third theme is that AI systems may be inclined to warp our sense of reality, not simply to be “mean” or “take over the world” but to help prevent ecological disaster. Finally, the fourth theme is that truly super-intelligent AI systems might not appear so at all; that is, they may find it more effective to take a demure tone as the AI embedded in the car does in this scenario.

There is no doubt that, artificial intelligence and virtual reality aside, what people perceive is greatly influenced by their symbol systems, their culture and their motivational schemes. Babies as young as six weeks are already apparently less able to make discriminations of differences within what their native language considers a phonemic category than they were at birth. In our culture, we largely come to believe that there is a “right answer” to questions. Sometimes, that’s a useful attitude, but sometimes, it leads to suboptimal behavior.

Suppose an animal is repeatedly presented with a three-choice problem, let’s say among A, B, and C. A pays off randomly with a reward 1/3 of the time while B and C never pay off. A fish, a rat, or a very young child will quickly only choose A thus maximizing their rewards. However, a child who has been to school (or an adult) will spend considerably more time trying to find “the rule” that allows them (they suppose) to win every time. At first, it doesn’t even occur to them that perhaps there is no rule that will enable them to win every time. Eventually, most will “give up” and choose only A, but in the meantime, they do far worse than does a fish, a rat, or a baby. This is not to say that the conceptual frameworks that color our perceptions and reactions are always a bad thing. They are not. There are obvious advantages to learning language and categories. But our interpretations of events are highly filtered and distorted. Hopefully, we realize that that is so, but often we tend to forget.

Similarly, if you ask the sports fans for two opposing teams to make a close call; for instance, as to whether there was pass interference in American football, or whether a tennis ball near the line was in or out, you tend to find that people’s answers are biased toward their team’s interest even when their calls make no influence on the outcome.

Now consider that we keep striving toward more and more fidelity and completeness in our entertainment systems. Silent movies were replaced by “talkies.” Black and white movies and television were replaced by color. Most TV screens have gotten bigger. There are 3-D movies and more entertainment is in high definition even as sound reproduction has moved from monaural to stereo to surround sound. Research continues to allow the reproduction of smell, taste, tactile, and kinesthetic sensations. Virtual reality systems have become smaller and less expensive. There is no reason to suppose these trends will lessen any time soon. There are many advantages to using Virtual Reality in education (e.g., Stuart, R., & Thomas, J. C. (1991). The implications of education in cyberspace. Multimedia Review, 2(2), 17-27; Merchant, Z., Goetz, E, Cifuentes, L., Keeney-Kennicutt, W., and Davis, T. Effectiveness of virtual reality based instruction on student’s learning outcomes in K-12 and higher education: A meta-analysis, Computers and Education, 70(2014),29-40). As these applications become more realistic and widespread, do they influence the perceptions of what even “counts” as reality?

The answer to this may well depend on the life trajectory of individuals and particularly on how early in their lives they are introduced to virtual reality and augmented reality. I was born in a largely “analogue” age. In that world, it was often quite important to “read the manual” before trying to operate machinery. A single mistake could destroy the machine or cause injury. There is no way to “reboot” or “undo” if you cut a tree down wrongly so it falls on your house. How will future generations conceptualize “reality” versus “augmented reality” versus “virtual reality”?

Today, people often believe it is important for high school students to physically visit various college campuses before making a decision about where to attend. There is no doubt that this is expensive in terms of time, money, and the use of fossil fuels. Yet, there is a sense that being physically present allows the student to make a better decision. Most companies similarly only hire candidates after face to face interviews even though there is no evidence that this adds to the predictive capability of companies with respect to who will be a productive employee. More and more such interviewing, however, is being done remotely. It might well be that a “super-intelligent” system might arrange for people who wanted to visit someplace physically to visit it virtually instead while making it seem as much as possible as though the visit were “real.” After all, left to their own devices, people seem to be making painfully slow (and too slow) progress toward reducing their carbon footprints. AI systems might alter this trajectory to save humanity, to save themselves, or both.

In some scenarios in Turing’s Nightmare the AI system is quite surly and arrogant. But in this scenario, the AI system takes on the demeanor of a humble servant. Yet it is clear (at least to the author!) who really holds the power. This particular AI embodiment sees no necessity of appearing to be in charge. It is enough to make it so and manipulate the “sense of reality” that the humans have.

Where do you Draw the Line?

Wednesday

Labelism

Your Cage is Unlocked

The Walkabout Diaries: Sunsets

The First Ring of Empathy

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

The Truth Train

Turing’s Nightmares: Chapter Three

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

Posted by petersironwood in The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, chatgpt, cognitive computing, consciousness, ethics, philosophy, Robotics, technology, the singularity, Turing, writing

In chapter three of Turing’s Nightmares, entitled, “Thanks goodness the computer understands us!,” there are at least four major issues touched on. These are: 1) the value of autonomous robotic entities for improved intelligence, 2) the value of having multiple and diverse AI systems living somewhat different lives and interacting with each other for improving intelligence, 3) the apparent dilemma that if we make truly super-intelligent machines, we may no longer be able to follow their lines of thought, and 4) a truly super-intelligent system will have to rely to some extent on inferences from many real-life examples to induce principles of conduct and not simply rely on having everything specifically programmed. Let us examine these one by one.

There are many practical reasons that autonomous robots can be useful. In some practical applications such as vacuuming a floor, a minimal amount of intelligence is all that is needed to do the job under most conditions. It would be wasteful and unnecessary to have such devices communicating information back to some central decision making computer and then receiving commands. In some cases, the latency of the communication itself would impair the efficiency. A “personal assistant” robot could learn the behavioral and voice patterns of a person more easily than if we were to develop speaker independent speech recognition and preferences. The list of practical advantages goes on, but what is presumed in this chapter is that there are theoretical advantages to having actual robotic systems that sense and act in the real world in terms of moving us closer to “The Singularity.” This theme is explored again, in somewhat more depth, in chapter 18 of Turing’s Nightmares.

I would not argue that having an entity that moves through space and perceives is necessary to having any intelligence, or for that matter, to having any consciousness. However, it seems quite natural to believe that the qualities both of intelligence and consciousness are influenced by what is possible for the entity to perceive and to do. As human beings, our consciousness is largely influenced by our social milieu. If a person is born or becomes paralyzed later in life, this does not necessarily greatly influence the quality of their intelligence or consciousness because the concepts of the social system in which they exist were founded historically by people that included people who were mobile and could perceive.

Imagine instead a race of beings who could not move through space or perceive any specific senses that we do. Instead, imagine that they were quite literally a Turing Machine. They might well be capable of executing a complex sequential program. And, given enough time, that program might produce some interesting results. But if it were conscious at all, the quality of its consciousness would be quite different from ours. Could such a machine ever become capable of programming a still more intelligent machine?

What we do know is that in the case of human beings and other vertebrates, the proper development of the visual system in the young, as well as the adaptation to changes (e.g., having glasses that displace or invert images) seems to depend on being “in control” although that control, at least for people, can be indirect. In one ingenious experiment (Held, R. and Hein, A., (1963) Movement produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 56 (5), 872-876), two kittens were connected on a pivoted gondola and one kitten was able to “walk” through a visual field while the other was passively moved through that visual field. The kitten who was able to walk developed normally while the other one did not. Similarly, simply “watching” TV passively will not do much to teach kids language (Kuhl PK. 2004. Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code. Nature Neuroscience 5: 831-843; Kuhl PK, Tsao FM, and Liu HM. 2003. Foreign-language experience in infancy: effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 100(15):9096-101). Of course, none of that “proves” that robotics is necessary for “The Singularity,” but it is suggestive.

Would there be advantages to having several different robots programmed differently and living in somewhat different environments be able to communicate with each other in order to reach another level of intelligence? I don’t think we know. But diversity is an advantage when it comes to genetic evolution and when it comes to people comprising teams. (Thomas, J. (2015). Chaos, Culture, Conflict and Creativity: Toward a Maturity Model for HCI4D. Invited keynote @ASEAN Symposium, Seoul, South Korea, April 19, 2015.)

The third issue raised in this scenario is a very real dilemma. If we “require” that we “keep tabs” on developing intelligence by making them (or it) report the “design rationale” for every improvement or design change on the path to “The Singularity”, we are going to slow down progress considerably. On the other hand, if we do not “keep tabs”, then very soon, we will have no real idea what they are up to! An analogy might be the first “proof” that you only need four colors to color any planar map. There were so many cases (nearly 2000) that this proof made no sense to most people. Even the algebraic topologists who do understand it take much longer to follow the reasoning than the computer does to produce it. (Although simpler proofs now exist, they all rely on computers and take a long time for humans to verify). So, even if we ultimately came to understand the design rationale for successive versions of hyper-intelligence, it would be way too late to do anything about it (to “pull the plug”). Of course, it isn’t just speed. As systems become more intelligent, they may well develop representational schemes that are both different and better (at least for them) than any that we have developed. This will also tend to make it impossible for people to “track” what they are doing in anything like real time.

Finally, as in the case of Jeopardy, the advances along the trajectory of “The Singularity” will require that the system “read” and infer rules and heuristics based on examples. What will such systems infer about our morality? They may, of course, run across many examples of people preaching, for instance, the “Golden Rule.” (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”)

But how does the “Golden Rule” play out in reality? Many, including me, believe it needs to be modified as “Do unto others as you would have them do to you if you were them and in their place.” Preferences differ as do abilities. I might well want someone at my ability level to play tennis against me by pushing me around the court to the best of their ability. But does this mean I should always do that to others? Maybe they have a heart condition. Or, maybe they are just not into exercise. The examples are endless. Famously, guys often imagine that they would like women to comment favorably on their own physical appearance. Does that make it right for men to make such comments to women? Some people like their steaks rare. If I like my steak rare, does that mean I should prepare it that way for everyone else? The Golden Rule is just one example. Generally speaking, in order for a computer to operate in a way we would consider ethical, we would probably need it to see how people treat each other ethically in practice, not just “memorize” some rules. Unfortunately, the lessons of history that the singularity-bound computer would infer might not be very “ethical” after all. We humans often have a history of destroying other entire species when it is convenient, or sometimes, just for the hell of it. Why would we expect a super-intelligent computer system to treat us any differently?

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

The Walkabout Diaries: Variation

Sadie and The Lighty Ball

We Won the War!