Cobb

The Paradox of Wanting AI To Run the World

Q: Can artificial intelligence run the world.

A: No.

I’ve looked at this many different ways, and today I am thinking of the classic film Metropolis . It is, to make it overly simple, the story of a beautiful city of the future run by advanced machines. In the upper classes of society there is utopia and the designer of the city is rightfully proud. In the lower classes of society there is drudgery in service to the machines that keep the city running. One day the machine breaks, killing workers, and the resulting chaos destroys the dream of Metropolis.

The second film I am thinking of is part of The Animatrix and it is an origin story of what we currently believe to be our deus ex machina, AI. This story, The Second Renaissance, tells of a future in which humankind refuses to accept machines as equals, banishing them to the Sahara Desert where they ultimately flourish, making better manufactured parts than any humans. Ultimately humans and the machines battle for world supremacy and to destroy the source of the machines’ power, the Sun, human destroy the sky. Thus is born the world we begin to watch as The Matrix.

I can’t tell you much science fiction literature and film has dealt with such questions. They are enormously complex. Nevertheless it really boils down to this. What is more important to you as a human being? Is it that which you can give and receive from other human beings, or that which you can give and receive from machines? The answer, for all of history has been that humans are much more important than machines - and that machines only exist to serve the needs of mankind.

I believe this is consistent even today. The consequence of that means underneath the question of machines running the world is a profound lack of trust in those who are running the world now. Logically then, one must ask the question, who is going to teach machines how to run the world better than humans? In otherwords, which humans will get the trillions of dollars necessary to design, build, and educate machines? Why would they do that for machines and not for humans? You see the paradox.

I say that AIs will not emerge with any intelligence that humans can trust for such matters as security guard duty within the next 40 years. I predict at that point in the future we will be lamenting all of the money wasted on self-driving cars when we could have just built self-driving subways for a lot less money, and having saved many more lives.

The Logos Project

For about 20 years I have been saying that I have 2 or 3 original ideas. Today I'm going to share them in one giant tarball. I'm going to call it the Logos Project. The reason I'm calling it the Logos Project is because of Jordan Peterson's big book Maps of Meaning. It was a very rambly book but it was one that lay behind all of my most profound interests. In one way you could say it represented a reconciliation between faith and reason, which is ultimately the combination of religion and science. What could be more fundamental to the prospects of Western civilization? The one Bible piece I've been able to quote was the beginning of the Book of John. In the beginning was the word. And it seems that many of us have abandoned the word, and that needs to be addressed. Social media falls short. We need to build logical media. We need to transform our computer mediated communications into something that serves the purpose of social maintenance of the commons. This is a management problem which is poorly served by the faint number of actions that social media spaces allow us to perform. We are trapped in Twitter because of what Twitter is, and because we have given it over to the builders of Twitter to be the masters of Twitter, Twitter doesn't belong to the people. Anyway, there are a lot of problems like this and the aim of the Logos Project is to solve each and every one of them.

 

This is something I'm ready to contribute to for the rest of my career. And at this moment I am particularly excited about the Intellectual Dark Web, in that they are finally doing what I've been hoping would be done. Of course I've been creating all kinds of content but I couldn't quit my day job. Now is about that time to see if I can integrate all I've been building and thinking into something both concrete and sticky. I'm sure I'll need others to help me pour the concrete, and this teaser is the sticky part. So please do check it out and put in your comments and criticism. 

Fall; or Dodge in Hell

Fall is a massive book that runs across multiple generations in two different planes of reality. In the world we are familiar with, characters we know from previous books by Stephenson appear, and we are pleased to be reunited with them, even though we don't remember much about them. In the alternative world we are entertained by an entirely coherent mythical universe that contains some of the same characters as they play into an epic struggle. The barrier between the two planes of existence is opaque but events in one affects the reality of the other.

What makes this book particularly brilliant is how well Stephenson's mythical universe dovetails with archetypes we all know. In that it is part sword and sorcery, part game of thrones, part creation story, part clash of the titans.

Allegorically, as is expected, Stephenson proposes answers to some eternal questions that vex us in contemporary American society. How bad can a post-reality internet get? What might be the consequences to an America subject to powerful schismatic cults? How far could a War of the Worlds level hoax be perpetrated on social media? But even more curious to fans of his fiction, what is really going on with Enoch Root? How can we live in virtual reality? What about the Singularity? And even, Why does God allow suffering in the world?

Where REAMDE was a giant action movie in book form and Seveneves was a hard science fiction, this is an extended study and romp into virtual reality. Moreover it proposes some questions about the nature of the human mind and what are the inevitable effects of is disembodiment? Nothing is so revealing as Stephenson's understanding that the limits of our imaginations are essentially nothing more or less than the human drama of dreams. More importantly that our dreams are of little value to us if they are not shared with other people. So whatever humans can be, they must dream it first, and guess what - practically all dreams are familiar, but being social creatures nothing quite defines humanity as 'make my dream come true and share it with you'. Well, the other side of the coin, which is 'I am your worst nightmare'.

There is something altogether familiar in science fiction that I think C. S. Lewis came to understand, Arthur C. Clarke explained famously and now that Stephenson understands. That is that science fiction and ultimately science is best understood as magic. Magic is nothing more than the wish fulfillments that defy the constraints of our knowledge of cause and effect in the physical universe. What humans will always want from science is predicted by science fiction which is nothing more or less than magic. Once you connect magic to science fiction, you inevitably connect it to fantasy, and human fantasy is, in that way, predictable. Fantasy tastes like mythology - in the end these are the stories we use to teach ourselves, and religion is how we discipline our mythologies and engrave it in memory and dreams. It's all connected.

So in that way, Stephenson knows that he is writing books that come full circle in mythology, in fantasy, in science fiction. In all of these, miraculous things happen. The only difference is the selection of machina, type of deus and the direction of ex. In Fall, they are executed in parallel between the two planes of existence, each an opaque reflection of the other.

It comes as no surprise, and is a usefully instructive matter that Stephenson does not create a post-scarcity universe in either plane of reality. In fact, his illustration of the relativity of time and its relationship to energy and matter is spot on. I'll let you read that. His words do it best. That is best when you are wanting to please readers of science fiction. But in a cryptic ending, Stephenson gives us a surprise we have to leave as a mystery. It is either a massively hokey joke or the test condition of a recursive story. In the case of the former, it can be forgiven considering the scope of the tale. The very idea of history stopping is a hokey joke and Stephenson's best books are historical fictions. But there is a playground out there for alternate planes of reality that are not only turtles all the way down, but perhaps turtles all the way around. After all, which way is down?

Fall, does not induce dizzying nausea. It delivers some stunning moments that are exciting and dramatic in the way the best fantasy can be. Stephenson's characters are less well defined as a matter of course if you read the book as I did, which is to give equal weight to both analogues in both planes of reality, but it is easy to be enchanted by those on either side. Nevertheless Stephenson weighs more deeply on the fantasy side - as some fraction of the book plays interestingly with rather hackneyed stereotypes of extreme Americans. The heroes and villains are not so clear in our world.

My overall take is that this book is an ambitious attempt at something only a few writers are bold enough to try. I don't know any who have come close. I would like to say that Stephenson has been reading Gene Wolfe who is, to my reckoning, the absolute master of sword and sorcery fantasy writing. He remains intrigued by the probabilities of magical science and remains upbeat on the whole. Although Fall might have been made profoundly darker - all the elements were there - there is a happy ending. And in the end one must confess that in this rendering, Hell is a relative term. Where there might have been some Kafkaesque absurdity throughout, Stephenson's characters never lose their minds or abandon their purposes in confounding frustration. Where there might have been some great experimentation with the element of chaos, a fundamental building block of the fantastic plane of existence, it is only marginally mysterious and stochastic.

Since I cannot believe that Stephenson is finished with his characters or the fecund prospects of co-dependent universes, I must conclude that Dodge and his entourage must have more adventures in our future. Please.

AI - A New Dimension

For me it started in 1982, four years after I graduated from highschool, I engineered my return to college. With that, I worked up my ability and willingness to read thick books. And so as a new 21 year old freshman at Cal State Northridge, my head was led by several fat books outside of the Computer Science curriculum. "Goedel, Escher, Bach" was the first. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood the Incompleteness Theorem. "Turing's Man" was the second book, who was that mysterious genius? Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" was book that excited me about work in the industry and its spirit of go big or go home was to set the pace for the insane startup work ethic of Silicon Valley years later. "Megatrends" validated that my obsession with computing had a future, but the book that made the largest impression on me was the legendary collection of essays "The Mind's I".

It was Dennett and Hofstadter who captured my imagination. What is thinking? What can think? The distinction between hardware and software became clear in my mind and I was all about the software. Even years after I was done with school, I still didn't understand hardware and so was captivated by the vision of 'Tron'. And still it was about the programs. In those days, hardware was the constriction. It was all slow and clunky and claustrophobic. Thinking the great thoughts had to take place in larger realms. That is why, I think, six years later my introduction to H.L. Mencken, the bigger world was that of the generation of political ideas, the analysis of history and the combat of philosophy. So I decided for myself to write for people in both essays and in programs. Both were realms of persuasion but the compute platform was more narrow and disciplined. It appealed to a smaller audience, and of course it was an expensive medium. In fact, the compute world was hostile to using too many text strings. Now this is no longer the case. Back in 1987 when my full time employment began at Xerox, my theme song was IGY by Donald Fagen. The lyric went - "Trust machines to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision." I was that fellow.

The fellowship however was weird, and I probably shrunk my balls by straddling so many fences. I was told that I could be in business or computing but not both, not to mention my politics and philosophy. So it is very pleasant, if not entirely rewarding, to have more compute accepted as the medium for politics and philosophy. But the hybrid medium is not quite disciplined enough. That is the audience that I seek to satisfy, those who are entirely disappointed in what social media has become - a ribald public square that obeys no orthodox parliamentary procedure. When I first conceived of 'X Republic' years ago, parliamentary procedure was the first thing on my mind. 

Now politics is not so entirely important to me, so much as understanding the semantics of thought itself. But we're clearly going to have to crawl out of the semiotic swamp of populist politics and fake news to get beyond where we are today. And that's going to require some unmediated chaos to make itself popular in the public imagination. It needs the intent of millions to communicate in a new way, something that satisfies both the limbic and the cortical impulses of mankind.  

So I am in the process of attempting to get some support for what life has had me thinking. The compute universe is large enough. We can do in text, animation and live action what logic dictates. And ultimately we can do it interactively. The question now is how we use AI to provide the right gating that will help us overcome our evolutionary boundaries in the cortical and limbic schemas when their representations are chock full of overloaded types.  It is in that vein of thought that the following article sparked inclusion here:

Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.

I made several different attempts to try to group these 20 or so at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address. Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.

The Cognitive Bias Codex is one of the most exciting maps around. I haven't seen anything so delicious since the publication last year of the Memetic Tribes of Culture Wars 2.0. You can get that map Download Memetic Tribes - Memetic Tribes. 

AI's Ultimate Future - Today's Thinking

So firstly I started thinking about the future in around 2008 when I was finally done mastering the technology I'd been building with for a decade or so. I started reading science fiction again, and joined the Long Now. By 2010 I was mostly done with enterprise software and jumped into open source and cloud. Right now, I'd say that I get that - mastered it in a different way - not so much as a practitioner. So I'm starting to look past my immediate horizon again. 

I'm thinking that programmers are their own worst enemies, and that eventually their nasty habit of trying to make more money with tech they themselves understand will create some oligopolies, and black hats will accelerate that process. Looking forward, relevant software and hardware IT will become reduced to a smaller, more ubiquitous, more capable, more secure and more dominant set. So with AI coming along that is inevitable too. We all call this 'interoperability' and 'best practices'. Nobody wants to run afoul of these guiding principles except perhaps retro indy game designers.

All that said, there is a finite universe of applications that humans themselves will care about, as Musk says, in service of the human cortex and limbic systems. 

Right now, for me the most complete and perhaps most compelling vision is that of the late Iain M Banks' Culture. He has conceptualized and illustrated a post-scarcity galaxy in which humans and other alien species are governed and protected by massively powerful machine-based AIs with goofy names. That to me sounds like the endgame because it presents us with a compelling dramatic rendition of both planet sized catastrophes and the death by natural causes of entire civilizations. He calls the latter 'sublimation'. Essentially, nobody wants to live forever, and after you've been a hero and a villian, a man and a woman and a fish and a bird and a good angel and an evil demon and lived for 500 years and so has everyone in your species, you get bored with life. You sublimate and hang a sign on your planet that says gone fishin', do not disturb. You tell the master AIs to make you corner of the galaxy a no-fly zone and it's enforced. 

On the generative side of this, though unrelated is a series called the Bobiverse, which over several volumes tracks the person of Bob, a future computer scientist who becomes the first true cyborg, embedded in a space station, eventually clones himself and thus is the prototype for the Culture Ships, say 1000 years ahead of them. 

So I kick it off with Iain Banks and Dennis E Taylor. Where do your AI ideas go?