tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20087718325579422532024-03-17T09:57:46.680-07:00Thoughts from Thomas T. ThomasThomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.comBlogger567125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-56209583048787091042024-03-17T09:57:00.000-07:002024-03-17T09:57:05.831-07:00Robots<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>I am still interested in artificial intelligence, although there have been notable failures that were recently publicized. Some of the large language models (LLMs) tend to bloviate, hallucinate, and outright make up facts when they can’t confirm a reference. (Compliance with user’s request first, accuracy second.) And some of the art programs can’t get human hands right or, in a more embarrassing story, one program was secretly instructed to offer mixed-race presentations of historical figures like the American Founding Fathers or soldiers of the Third Reich. (Compliance with programming rules first, accuracy second.) But these are easily—or eventually—corrected mistakes. The game is in early innings these days.</p>
<p>I have more hope for business applications, like IBM’s Watson Analytics, which will sift through millions of bytes of data—with an attention span and detail focus of which no human being is capable—looking for trends and anomalies. And I recently heard that one law firm has indeed used its LLM to write drafts of legal briefs and contracts—normally the work of junior associates—with such success that the computer output only needed a quick review and editing by a senior associate. That law firm expects to need fewer associates in coming years—which is, overall, going to be bad for beginning lawyers. But I digress …</p>
<p>So far, all of these artificial intelligence <i>faux pas</i> have had minimal effect on human beings, and users are now forewarned to watch out for them. Everything, so far, is on screens and in output files, and you open and use them at your own risk. But what happens when someone begins applying artificial intelligence to robots, machines that can move, act, and make their mistakes in the real world?</p>
<p>It turns out, as I read in a recent issue of <i>Scientific American,</i> that a firm is already doing this. A company called <a href="https://levatas.com">Levatas</a> in Florida is applying artificial intelligence to existing robot companies’ products for inspection and security work. The modified machines can recognize and act on human speech—or at least certain words—and make decisions about suspicious activity that they should investigate. Right now, Levatas’s enhanced robots are only available for corporate use in controlled settings such as factories and warehouses. They are not out on the street or available for private purchase. So, their potential for interaction with human beings is limited.</p>
<p>Good!</p>
<p>Back in 1950, when this was all a science fiction dream, Isaac Asimov wrote <i>I, Robot,</i> a collection of short stories about machines with human-scale bodies coupled with human-scale reasoning. He formulated the Three Laws of Robotics, ingrained in every machine, that was supposed to keep them safe and dependable around people:</p>
<p><i>1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.</p>
<p>2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.</p>
<p>3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.</i></p>
<p>That seems like a pretty neat and complete set of rules—although I wonder about them in real life. Morality and evaluation of the consequences of action are more than a simple application of the Ten Commandments. For example, if your robot guard turns on and kills my flesh-and-blood dog, to whom I am emotionally attached, does that cause me psychological harm, in conflict with the First Law? A robot—even one with a fast-acting positronic brain—might labor for milliseconds and even freeze up in evaluating that one. Or on the hundred or thousand permutations on the consequences of any common action.</p>
<p>But still, the Three Laws are a place to start. Something like them—and applied with greater force than the rule set that gave Google customers a George Washington in blackface—will be needed as soon as large language models and their kin are driving machines that can apply force and pressure in the real world.</p>
<p>But then, what happens when the robot night watchman (“night watchmachine”?) lays hands on an obvious intruder or thief, and the miscreant shouts, “Let go of me! Leave me alone!” Would that conflict with the Second Law?</p>
<p>I think there’s a whole lot of work to be done here. Robot tort lawyers, anyone?</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-9757383718445116872024-03-10T10:15:00.000-07:002024-03-10T10:15:40.162-07:00Virtual Reality<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>About a dozen or more years ago, my late wife and I were friends with a couple down the hall in our apartment building. They were architects who were working in the virtual reality of the time, an environment called <i>Second Life</i>. They got me interested enough in this online world that I took out a subscription and paid my yearly dues of $72 for almost a decade.</p>
<p>For those who are not familiar with the program, it’s a cartoon-like environment in which you operate as a cartoon-like figure or “avatar.” The point is, you can go places in the environment and meet and react with other people’s avatars. The program gives you an allowance of “Linden dollars”—named for the program’s creator—with your subscription, and you can always buy more.<sup>1</sup> With this currency you can buy property and build a house, a castle, or a shop to sell the things you make online inside the program. You can also buy physical enhancements for your avatar, as well as clothing and jewelry.</p>
<p>Our friends were working on a digital town hall to discuss political issues. And, as architects and generally brilliant people, they were using the program to build virtual houses for their clients. This was genius, because most architects work in two dimensions: they can draw a floor plan of your building on paper, laying out the rooms, hallways, doors, and closets; they can then draw an elevation, showing how the floors fit together; and they can do a rendering to show how the outside will work. And if the client can think three-dimensionally, interpreting the plans and elevations into a vision of real space, that’s good enough. But the genius of working in <i>Second Life,</i> or any virtual space, is that these architects could create an entire house of the mind for their client’s to walk through. Then the future owners could discover the hidden problems in the place they were requesting, like how this drawer in the kitchen, when opened, blocked the refrigerator door. The architects could also command a sun to shine on the house and show the future owners what natural light each of the rooms would get, with the windows they had specified, during the course of a day. It was a really great use of virtual space.</p>
<p>This couple went on to adopt the sort of virtual space now embodied in the Quest headsets and the Meta environment. When last we talked, they were developing virtual training programs for doctors and nurses, letting them practice on virtual patients with virtual scalpels in an environment with all the bells and whistles—that is, with anesthesia equipment, heart-lung bypass, and monitors—of an operating room. What a concept!<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>At one point early on, the couple showed my wife and me a sample virtual-reality program of the time, not medical training but a balloon ride across the Arctic. You put on the headset, and you saw an icefield that stretched for miles. You looked down, and you saw the ground below and the edge of the basket. You looked up and you saw the bulge of the colorfully striped balloon. You turned your head. You turned around. Everywhere you looked, you saw more of the environment. Since that one experience—which we took while standing outside a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop—I’ve tried on demonstration headsets that let you stand in a hallway and let a dinosaur walk over you. And there are now virtual-reality games—which I have not yet tried, because all of this is Windows-based, and I’m an Apple user—where you inhabit the environment, use weapons, fight with, and kill opponents. But you need to mark out and watch the edges of the actual space you’re standing in because, you know, furniture.</p>
<p>So, I was excited when Apple announced its Apple Vision Pro headset, and I signed up for an in-store demonstration. It is not sold as virtual reality but as a kind of augmented reality. With the use of several cameras and stereoscopic vision—one screen for each eye—the headset shows your own environment: the room you’re sitting in, the street you’re walking on, all in three dimensions and real time. The view can also be three-dimensional panoramas, either the ones that come with the software or ones you take with your iPhone 15. Or the view can be an “immersive” environment—so far just those supplied with the headset—that is like our earlier balloon ride. Superimposed on any of these environments, you can see and manipulate your software applications. Cameras inside the headset track your eyes to indicate the application you’re looking at and the selection you want to make. Cameras below the headset watch your hands for various gestures—tapping your fingers together, pulling invisible taffy in various directions—to indicate what you want to do with the application controls. You can also watch your favorite streaming service on the equivalent of an IMAX screen that stretches across your living room—or across the streetscape.</p>
<p>Given that this Apple headset is a self-contained computer, with two high-resolution monitors—one for each eye—plus various cameras for eye tracking, background capture, and hand gestures, plus a built-in stereo system, and a new operating system … the $3,500 price does not seem unreasonable. You would pay about that for a full-featured MacBook these days. And adding to the headset’s memory is actually cheaper than on a MacBook.</p>
<p>But it’s not yet virtual reality, and Apple doesn’t promise that they will ever offer it. That is, you can stand in an immersive environment, and you can manipulate programs and games within it. But you won’t meet anybody else or get to fight and kill them—or not yet, if ever.</p>
<p>And I mostly use my computer for writing and editing, photography, page layout, and internet surfing. I can already do this on the big monitor at my desk, working on a real keyboard and not the virtual keyboard where I need to stare at each key and tap my fingers together to press it. I could also Bluetooth a real keyboard or a MacBook to the headset, but that kind of defeats the purpose of being able to work while sitting in my armchair, lying on the bed, or walking down the street.</p>
<p>So, while I remain interested in virtual reality, I’m not ready to transfer to the Windows world to get it. And I’m not going to shell out thirty-five Benjamins or more to Apple on the suggestion that the Vision Pro one day, maybe, will offer it. Not until I can actually go in there, fight, and kill something.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. When I finally quit the program after about eight or nine completely inactive years, I had accumulated enough “Linden dollars” to probably buy my own island. I left a fortune in <i>Second Life</i>.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. For the record, their work resulted in forming the medical training company <a href="https://acadicus.com">Acadicus</a>.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-36580851057880452672024-03-03T10:56:00.000-08:002024-03-03T10:56:04.473-08:00Proxies<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>How many of the things in life that we measure and depend on are actually read from proxies? That is, we take a measurement from some nearby but more accessible data points or trends, rather than from the thing itself.</p>
<p>For example, my Braun shaver. I have one of those advanced models with the self-cleaning shaver head, one that I don’t have to take apart and flush with hot water to remove the debris—stubble, dead skin, and skin oils, all as a kind of sticky dust. Instead, it has two little liquid-crystal dials on the bottom, one for the battery status, one for the “hygiene” status. When the little bars on the latter fade to near nothing, or to the red bar right above nothing, then it’s time to put the shaver head down in a receptacle that has a reservoir of cleaning fluid and a pump, along with a pair of battery-charging points. I press a button and the cleaning station flushes the head with solution and charges the battery. My hands never touch gunk.</p>
<p>But that got me to thinking. I know that the shaving head does not have electronic sensors to tell the tiny computer in the body—and yes, my electric shaver has a computer—the amount and density of the accumulated debris. Maybe the bars for “hygiene” measure some kind of building drag on the motor from clogging particles. But I doubt that would be a very accurate reading. No, I think the computer just measures how many minutes the shaver has been turned on. The basis for this proxy reading are the assumptions that you are always shaving when the thing is turned on, and that the more you shave, the more debris accumulates.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>So, could I just turn on the shaver, lay it on the counter for five or ten minutes, and get the same reading? That would be an interesting experiment, and maybe tomorrow morning I’ll try it. Too busy cogitating and writing right now …</p>
<p>We knowingly use other proxies for hard-to-access data, especially in medicine. For example, when the nurses take your temperature, what they are looking for is signs of infection, which usually makes your body temperature rise. It’s harder to find infection inside the body by looking for redness, swelling, or pus, so temperature is a good but inexact proxy. You might also have been sitting in a sauna for the past hour. Similarly, they take your blood pressure as a proxy for circulatory health and how hard your heart and other organs are working. However, your blood pressure fluctuates when you stress your body with exercise or your mind with anger or anxiety, or even when you cross your knees, and under other mundane and not life-threatening conditions.</p>
<p>Famously, the climate scientist Michael Mann measured and compared tree rings over a thousand-year period attempting to show the global temperature variation—or lack of variation—through what historians have dubbed the “Medieval Warm Period” and the “Little Ice Age” in Europe. In Mann’s calculations, tree-ring width is a measure of annual temperature. But I had always heard that tree rings were wider in wet years, narrower in dry years, and that precipitation is not strictly dependent on temperature. Northern forests can get a lot of rain, but so can jungles. Mann was using a proxy measurement whose correlation was not universally accepted.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>Humans have always used proxies to replace hard-to-access measurements. Ancient hunters followed trails not measured in miles of distance or feet of elevation, and they had no drawn maps to measure from. Instead, they used waypoints: turn left at the big tree; cross the river and follow the bank to the right. Today, we use GPS navigation that also gives us waypoints: “Five hundred feet ahead make a left turn. Your destination is the third house on the right.”</p>
<p>In Spanish and Mexican California, the far-off government made land grants of ranches to major citizens with <i>diseños,</i> or sketch maps of the ground using existing features as markers. Because the land had not been surveyed or measured, this was the only way to identify a property. In the Bay Area, for example, one border might be the shoreline above high tide and the opposite border the crest of the coastal range. And in between, the markers might indicate the north and south boundaries by a stream or a prominent rock or grove of trees. Since these were truly huge plots of ground—often the size of a modern county—with neighbors few and far between, defining an exact border within a few feet was irrelevant.</p>
<p>These days, after the scientific revolution—and a lot of population crowding—we crave exact measurements. And we believe that what we are measuring is real, valid, and applicable.<sup>3</sup> But that is not always the case.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. And now I wonder if the battery indicator doesn’t work the same way. That is, rather than measuring voltage or amps or whatever in the cell, it just measures the time the shaver is turned on and assumes a steady drain on the battery. … Maybe my whole life is a lie.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. This is not a criticism or a defamation, just a theoretical observation. Please don’t add me to the lawsuit.</p>
<p class="photocredit">3. But look at the popular measurement of “wind chill.” It takes the stationary measure of temperature at a single spot—usually attempting to be representative of a wide area—and then adjusts it with a formula that reduces the reading by certain amounts at certain wind speeds. That is probably only useful in a storm, where the winds are strong and steady, although I found it useful when riding a motorcycle to know how tightly to bundle for a ride at thirty or sixty miles an hour.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-58720165217802262482024-02-25T10:01:00.000-08:002024-02-25T10:01:51.117-08:00Murder, Mayhem, and the U.S. Constitution<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>Two years ago, we watched as the Supreme Court in <i>Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</i> overturned the <i>Roe v. Wade</i> decision from 1973—almost half a century earlier—that had sought to create a national right to elective abortion. Many cheered the earlier decision as a cornerstone of women’s rights. Many—perhaps not as many, myself certainly <i>not</i> among them—cheered the more recent decision as a foundational right to life. In my view, the court merely reasserted the nature of the government under which we live and have done so since 1789.</p>
<p>First, let me say that I think women should have control of their bodies. I think that, if a woman is not ready to bear a child for whatever reason, she should be able to have the fetus removed. I also think she should make that decision promptly, so that the infant is not aware in whatever fashion of the removal and does not suffer from it—however many weeks or months that takes into the process of development. Certainly, if a developing child can survive outside the womb, then it should be born and preserved. But I would, in an ideal world, want all surviving children to be born into loving and caring situations with parents or guardians who want them. But this is my personal opinion.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>My personal opinion, your personal opinion, anyone’s personal opinion is a matter of choice and action. But it is not necessarily the business of the United States government. These United States are a unique creation, unlike almost any other nation in the world. The U.S. Constitution does not, despite what others may think, create a national government that writes “the law of the land” for all citizens, as it does in countries like France and Germany. The federal government was designed, instead, to be the superstructure under which the individual states, fifty of them as of last counting, worked together for their common good.</p>
<p>The Preamble, seven Articles, and twenty-seven Amendments establish a union that recognizes the rights of the various states over all matters not specifically mentioned in the founding document. That original document and its amendments do not replace or supersede the constitutions or charters or whatever other means the states use to govern themselves. The Constitution was intended to create limited national functions that individual states could not undertake for themselves, like providing for common defense against foreign enemies, preserving the borders, establishing tariffs, and maintaining relations with foreign governments. The first ten Amendments immediately forbade certain actions that the government as a whole—both on a national and on a state level—could take but should not: infringe on a person’s speech and religion, deny a right of self-defense, impose unfair trial conditions, and so on. The ninth and tenth Amendments then guarantee that the people themselves might have other rights not therein granted, and that the states have powers not therein listed nor prohibited. Overall, the Constitution is a pretty constrained proposition.</p>
<p>Look high and low in the Constitution, and you don’t find mention of many of the laws that most people take for granted. It doesn’t prohibit you from murdering someone, except in certain circumstances described below. So, the Constitution does not guarantee a universal right to life. It also doesn’t have a rule or regulation about personal assault, or creating a public nuisance, or public drunkenness. It doesn’t establish tort law, or contract law, or regulate acts between consenting adults. It doesn’t even regulate actions regarding children, let alone infants and the unborn, except in instances below. It leaves whole areas of the law to the preference and establishment of the states and their local populations, including the issue of abortion.</p>
<p>So, if you murder your neighbor over a property or noise dispute, you can be tried in state courts under state laws. You will not be tried in federal courts because there is no applicable law.</p>
<p>There is federal law, derived from the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv">14th Amendment</a>, which establishes that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of both the U.S. and the state where they live. The first section of this amendment forbids a state from “mak[ing] or enforce[ing] any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” So, the states cannot officially sanction a certain religion or outlaw the keeping and bearing of arms.</p>
<p>That section of the 14th Amendment also keeps any state from “depriv[ing] any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” not can the state “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This is the basis of a person’s “civil rights.” Under this Amendment, someone can be federally cited for denying another person’s civil rights if his or her actions infringed on the person based on their race, religion, or some other protected characterization—but not just because you killed them.</p>
<p>However, there are, as noted above, special cases created by subsequent federal statutes that have not yet been challenged in court. You can, for example, be tried in federal courts if you kill an elected or appointed federal official, a federal judge or law enforcement officer, or a member of the officer’s immediate family. You can be tried if the murder was involved with drugs; with rape, child molestation, or sexual exploitation of children; was committed during a bank robbery; or was an attempt to influence a federal trial. You can also be tried for a murder for hire, or for murder committed aboard a ship—which, I guess, would be outside territorial waters or outside a state’s jurisdiction, such as not in harbor or a river—or committed using the U.S. mails, such as to send a bomb or poison to your victim. These are all specific federal laws about murder.</p>
<p>But walk up to someone on the street and hit them on the back of the head—that’s a state crime, not federal. And similarly, aborting a child might be a state crime—if so voted on by its citizens—but it does not become a federal crime, not under the <i>Dobbs</i> decision.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. See also <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Roe_v_Nothing_091122.htm">Roe v. Nothing</a> from September 2022.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-29447252378503939472024-02-18T10:33:00.000-08:002024-02-18T10:33:38.569-08:00According to Their Nature<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>In the movie <i>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,</i> Kirk asks Spock how a ship full of cadets will react to an impending crisis. And Spock replies: “Each according to their nature.” That struck me at the time as kind and insightful. I now think it would make a pretty good corollary to the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But also: “Treating each one according to their nature.” And I would add: “As you understand it.”</p>
<p>What would this mean in real life? Well, you should expect from and condone the actions of, give to and take from, and treat as fully autonomous each person according to their nature as you understand it. This does not mean that you support, surrender to, or serve their every whim, desire, and action. But you are mindful of their wants and needs in the state and condition that they currently occupy. And you bear in mind also your understanding of their long-term strengths and weaknesses, as well as what certain traditions call a person’s “Buddha nature,” or the essence of their understanding as an enlightened being—or lack of it.</p>
<p>This means that you expect no more of a child than childish understanding, wants, and capabilities. You also expect no more of a proven fool—as you understand him or her to be from past words and actions—than they can give. You expect strength and endurance from the strong. You support and defend the frailty of the weak. You draw out the wisdom of the wise. You give scope to the compassionate person. You hold back your tolerance from a mean-spirited person. And you work to thwart the truly evil or cruel person—again, as demonstrated by his or her past actions—because he or she in turn works to do harm in the world.</p>
<p>Is that too much to ask of a person? Well, maybe. We are not all-knowing gods, after all. But maybe we’re the closest thing to that on this planet.</p>
Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-6821879652867418312024-02-11T10:45:00.000-08:002024-02-11T10:45:07.906-08:00The Death of Proof<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>I noted <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Artificially_Almost_Intelligent_012124.htm">three weeks ago</a> that I am not terribly concerned about the power of artificially intelligent platforms to create new and interesting stories, artwork, music, and other … products. Or not yet. And I don’t think they will soon get human-scale intelligence, which involves understanding, reasoning, direction, intention, and agency. But that does not mean I am not concerned.</p>
<p>Right now, these mindless machines can create—at lightning speed and on command—any set of words, any graphic image, and/or any sound or piece of music, all from digitized samples. And while I don’t fear what the machines themselves will want to do, I am concerned about what they will be able to do in the hands of humans who do have intention and agency.</p>
<p>In our documented world, proof of anything beyond our own fallible human memory is a form of information: what somebody wrote, what they said in proximity to a microphone, what they were seen and photographed doing. And increasingly, that information is in digital form (bits and bytes in various file formats) rather than analog recordings (printed words on paper, grooves on discs or magnetic pulses tape, flecks of silver nitrate in film stock). If my Facebook friends can publish an antique photograph of farmhands standing around a horse that’s twenty feet high, or a family shepherded by a gigantic figure with the head of a goat and huge dangling hands, all in grainy black-and-white images as if from a century and more ago, then what picture would you be inclined to disbelieve? How about a note with a perfect handwriting match to a person who is making an actionable threat of violence? How about a picture with perfect shading and perspective showing a Supreme Court justice engaged in a sexual act with a six-year-old?</p>
<p>Aside from written text and recorded words and images, the only other proofs we have of personal identity are the parameters of someone’s facial features as fed to recognition software (easily manipulated), the whorls of their fingerprints and x-rays and impressions of their teeth (easily recreated), and the coding of their DNA, either in the sixteen-or-so short segments reported to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database or in fragments recreated from a person’s whole genome. Any of these digitized proofs can now be convincingly created and, with the right—or wrong—intention and agency, inserted into the appropriate reference databases. We’ve all seen that movie. And artificial intelligence, if it’s turned to firewall hacking and penetration, can speed up the process of insertion.</p>
<p>My mother used to say, “Believe only half of what you see and nothing of what you hear.” With the power of artificially intelligent platforms, make that “nothing and nothing.”</p>
<p>In the wrong hands—and boy, these days, do we have a bunch of hands pushing their own agendas—the speed and power of computers to make fakes that will subvert our recording and retrieval systems and fool human experts launches the death of proof. If you didn’t see it happen right in front of you or hear it spoken in your presence, you can’t be sure it happened. Or rather, you can’t be sure it <i>didn’t</i> happen. And if you testify and challenge the digital proofs, who’s going to believe your fallible human memory anyway?</p>
<p>That way lies the end of civil society and the rule of law. That way lies “living proof” of whatever someone who doesn’t like or trust you wants to present as “truth.” That way lies madness.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-15860586539325189372024-02-04T09:00:00.000-08:002024-02-04T09:00:00.014-08:00Let the Machines Do It<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>I wrote <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/World_in_a_Blur_012824.htm">last week</a> about artificial intelligence and its applications in business information and communications: that the world would speed up almost immeasurably. There is, of course, a further danger: that humans themselves would in many cases forget how to do these tasks and become obsolete themselves.</p>
<p>Yes, we certainly believe that whatever instruments we create, we will still be able to command them. And so far, that is the case. But the “singularity” some thinkers are proposing suggests that eventually the machines will be able to create themselves—and what then?</p>
<p>We already have computer assisted software engineering (CASE), in which complex programming is pre-written in various task-oriented modules, segments of code designed for specific purposes. These modules perform routine operations found in all sorts of programs: sorting data, keeping time, establishing input and output formats, and so on. Programmers no longer need to write every line of their code in the same way that I am writing this text, by pushing down individual keys for every word and sentence. Instead, programmers now decide the process steps they want to invoke, and the CASE machine assembles the code. It’s as if I could specify the necessary paragraphs required to capture my ideas, and the software assembler did the rest. And isn’t this something like how the large language models (LLMs) behind applications like ChatGPT operate?</p>
<p>My concern—and that of many others involved with this “singularity”—is what happens when the machines are able to create themselves. What if they take control of CASE software, for which the machines themselves determine the process steps using large language processing? What if they can design their own chips, using graphics capability and rolling random numbers to try out new designs <i>in silico</i> before committing them to physical production in a chip foundry? What if they control those foundries using embedded operations software? What if they distribute those chips into networked systems and stand-alone machines through their own supply chains? … Well, what inputs will the humans have then?</p>
<p>Similarly, in the examples I noted last week, what happens when business and communications and even legal processes become fully automated? When the computer in your law office writes your court brief and then, for efficiency’s sake, submits it to a judicial intelligence for evaluation against a competing law firm’s automatic challenge as defendant or plaintiff, what inputs will the humans have? Sure, for a while, it will be human beings who have suffered the initial grievance—murder, rape, injury, breach of contract—and submitted their complaints. But eventually, the finding that Party A has suffered from the actions of Party B will be left up to the machines, citing issues raised by their own actions, which will then file a suit, on their own behalf, and resolve them … all in about fifteen seconds.</p>
<p>When the machines are writing contracts with each other for production, selecting shipping routes and carriers, driving the trains and trucks that deliver the products, stocking the warehouses, and distributing the goods, all against their own predictions of supply and demand for the next quarter, the next year, or even then next ten years, what inputs will the humans have? It will be much faster to let the machines determine where the actual people live, what they need and want, and make decisions for them accordingly, so that all the human population needs to do is express its desires—individually, as convenient, to the big computer in the cloud.</p>
<p>And once humans are content to let the machines do the work, make the decisions, plan the outputs, and make things happen … will the human beings even remember how?</p>
<p>That’s what some of us fear. Not that the machines will do the work, but that human beings will find it so convenient that we will forget how to take care of ourselves. Do you think, when you put in a search request to Google, or ask Siri or Alexa a question, that some human person somewhere goes off and looks up the answer? Of course not. The machine interprets your written or spoken words, checks its own interpretation of them against context—and sometimes against the list of possible responses paid for by interested third parties—and produces a result. In such a world, how many of us will still use—or, eventually, be able to use—an encyclopedia, reference book, or the library’s card catalog to find which book has our answer? For starters, how many of us would want to? But eventually, finding references will be a lost art. And at what point will people even remember that the card catalog is arranged alphabetically—or was it numerically, according to the Dewey decimal system?—and know what letter comes after “K”?</p>
<p>Frank Herbert recognized this problem in the <i>Dune</i> novels. In the prehistory to the series that begins in 10,191 AD, he envisions a time about five thousand years earlier that computers and robots once became so common and practical that human beings needed to do almost nothing for themselves. People became dependent and helpless, and the species almost died out. Only a war to end the machines, the Butlerian Jihad, ended the process under the maxim “Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” That commandment attained religious force and shaped the succeeding cultures. Only the simplest clockwork mechanisms were then allowed to control machines.</p>
<p>In the <i>Dune</i> stories, the Butlerian Jihad gave rise to the Great Schools period. Humans were taught again how to use their minds and bodies and expand their skills. Complex computations, projections, and planning were performed by the human computers, the Mentats. Physical skills, nerve-muscle training, and psychological perception were the province of the female society of the Bene Gesserit, along with secret controls on human breeding. Scientific discovery and manipulation, often without concern for conventional morals or wisdom, were taken over by the Bene Tleilax. And interstellar navigation was controlled by the Spacing Guild.</p>
<p>My point is not that we should follow any of this as an example. But we should be aware of the effect that generations of human evolution have built into our minds. We have big brains because we had to struggle to survive and prosper in a hostile world. Human beings were never meant to be handed everything they needed without some measure of effort on our part. There never was a Golden Age or Paradise. Without challenge we do not grow—worse, without challenge we wilt and die. Humans are meant to strive, to fight, to look ahead, and to plan our own futures. As one of Herbert’s characters said, echoing Matthew 7:14, “The safe, sure path leads ever downward to destruction.”</p>
<p>That is the singularity that I fear: when machines become so sophisticated, self-replicating, and eventually dominating that they take all the trouble out of human life. It’s not that they will hate us, fight us, and eliminate us with violence, as in the <i>Terminator</i> movies. But instead, they will serve us, coddle us, and smother us with easy living, until we no longer have a purpose upon the Earth.</p>
<p>Go in strength, my friends.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-79115553660307366852024-01-28T10:14:00.000-08:002024-01-28T10:14:32.133-08:00The World in a Blur<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>As noted earlier, artificial intelligence does not approximate the general, all-round capability of human intelligence. It doesn’t have the nodal capacity. And it won’t have an apparent “self” that can look at the world as a whole, form opinions about it, and make judgments—in the words of the <i>Terminator</i> movies, “deciding our fate in a microsecond.” Or not yet.</p>
<p>For now, artificial intelligences will be bound to the design of their neural nets and the universe of data sets upon which they have been trained. That is, Large Language Models like ChatGPT will play with words, grammar, syntax, and punctuation, study story forms and sentence structure, and link ideas verbally—but it won’t paint pictures or have political opinions, or at least no opinions that are not already present in its library of material. In the same way, the graphics bots that create images will play with perspective, lighting, colors, edge shapes, and pixel counts but won’t construct sentences and text. And the operations research bots, like IBM’s Watson platform, will analyze submitted databases, draw inferences and conclusions, and seek out trends and anomalies.</p>
<p>The difference between these machine-based writers, artists, and analysts and their human counterparts is that the machines will have access to a vastly bigger “memory” in terms of the database with which they’ve trained. Or that’s not quite right. A human writer has probably read more sentences and stories than exist in any machine database. A human painter has probably looked at and pondered more images. And a human business analyst has probably read every line in the balance sheet and every product in inventory. But human minds are busy, fallible, and subject to increasing boredom. They can’t review against a parameter and make a weighted selection from among a thousand or a million or more instances in the blink of an eye. But a robot, which never gets distracted or bored, can do that easily.</p>
<p>Think of artificial intelligence as computer software that both asks and answers its own questions based on inputs from humans who are not programming or software experts. For about fifty years now, we’ve had database programs that let a user set the parameters of a database search using what’s called Structured Query Language (SQL). So, “Give me the names of all of our customers who live on Maple Street.” Or, “Give me the names of all customers who bought something from our catalogue on June 11.” You need to know what you’re looking for to get a useful answer. And if you’re unsure and think your customer maybe lives on “Maplewood Road” or on “Maplehurst Court,” because you think the word “Maple” is in there somewhere, your original query would return the wrong answer.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Artificial intelligence would be like having a super-friendly, super-fast programmer at your elbow, who can think of these alternatives, check for them, and bring you what you’re looking for. Better, it can find things in your database that might be worrisome, like a failure rate in a part that does not keep pace with previous trends. Or better, to find references in case law that you might not even have thought of, find suppliers and price breaks that you didn’t ask for, or negotiate a deal—according to strategies and set points that you as the human have determined—with other AI-derived computers at other companies.</p>
<p>All of this has two implications, or rather three.</p>
<p>First, if your company is in competition with others, and they adopt processes and business models inspired by and implemented through artificial intelligence, you would be a fool not to keep up. Their productivity in data handling will accelerate in the same way a factory that makes things is accelerated by the assembly line, robotic processes, and just-in-time inventory controls.</p>
<p>Second, with this “arms race” proceeding in every business, the world will speed up. Cases that attorneys used to spend days assembling will be rendered in rough draft by the office computer in seconds. Deals that once took weeks to negotiate, perhaps with one or two trips to meet face to face with your supplier or distributor, will be resolved, signed, and written into airtight contracts in under a minute. Advertising copy and artwork, the layout of the magazine, and the entire photo spread—using licensed images of the world’s top models—will be completed in under a day. The longest part of the process will be review of the machine output by the human being(s) who sign off on the end product. The business world—any world that revolves upon data and information—will move in a blur.</p>
<p>Third, anyone studying today in areas like communications, book publishing, graphic design, business administration, accounting, law, and certain parts of the medical delivery system had better up their game. Learn principles, not procedures or protocols. Knowledge jobs in the future will likely consist of selecting and limiting databases, setting parameters, and writing prompts for the office intelligence, rather than composing text, drawing pictures, or analyzing the database itself. The rules-following roles in business, industry, and government will quickly be taken over by machines with wider access, narrower focus, and zero distractions—not to mention no paid holidays or family leave.</p>
<p>Is that the singularity? I don’t know. Maybe. But it will vastly limit the opportunities in entry-level jobs for human beings who rely on rules and reasoning rather than insight and creativity. Maybe it will vastly limit the need for humans in all sorts of sit-down, desk-type jobs, in the same way that machines limited the need for humans in jobs that only required patience, muscles, stamina, and eye-hand coordination.</p>
<p>And maybe it will open vast new opportunities, new abilities, a step forward in human functioning. Maybe it will create a future that I, as a science fiction writer, despair of ever imagining.</p>
<p>That’s the thing about singularities. Until they arrive, you don’t know if they represent disaster or opportunity. You only know that they’re going to be BIG.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. Of course, you can always throw in the wildcard symbol—the asterisk function in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), which is Code 42—to cover these variations. So, “Maple*” would encompass “Maplehurst” and “Maplewood” as well as “Maple<i>-plus anything else</i>.” But there again, it would still be best for you to be aware of those variants and plan your query accordingly.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-69267306653129749862024-01-21T10:34:00.000-08:002024-01-21T10:34:17.055-08:00Artificially Almost Intelligent<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p><b>Note:</b> This is another post that would qualify as a restatement of a <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Not_All_That_Intelligent_060423.htm">previous blog</a> I wrote about a year ago. So, I’m still sweeping out the old cobwebs. But this topic seems now to be more important than ever.</p>
<p>The mature human brain has about <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there_really_as_many/#:~:text=Approximately%2086%20billion%20neurons%20in,between%20200%20and%20400%20billion">86 billion</a> neurons which make about <a href="https://hms.harvard.edu/news/new-field-neuroscience-aims-map-connections-brain#:~:text=In%20the%20human%20brain%2C%20some,the%20human%20brain%20to%20fathom">100 trillion</a> connections among them. Granted that a lot of those neurons and connections are dedicated to sensory, motor, and autonomic functions that an artificial intelligence does not need or use, still that’s a lot of connectivity, a lot of branching.</p>
<p>Comparatively, an artificial neural network—the kind of programming used in more recent attempts at artificial intelligence—comprises anywhere from <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/neural-networks-mathematical-replication-brain-ai-cheema#:~:text=Size%3A%20Our%20brain%20consists%20of,network%20is%20about%2010%2D1000">ten to 1,000</a> nodes or “neurons.”</p>
<p>But what the AI program lacks in sheer volume and connectivity it makes up for with speed and focus. Current AI platforms can review, analyze, and compare millions and billions of pieces of data because, unlike the human brain, they don’t need to see or hear, breathe or blink, or twitch, nor do they get bored or distracted by random thoughts and itches. They are goal-directed, and they don’t get sidelined by the interrupt-function of human curiosity or by the random thoughts and memories, whispers and hunches, that can intrude from the human subconscious and derail our attention.</p>
<p>And I believe it’s these whispers and memories, randomly popping up, that are the basis of our sudden bouts of curiosity. A thought surfaces at the back of our minds, and we ask, “What is <i>that</i> all about?” And this, I also believe, is the basis of most human creativity.<sup>1</sup> While we may be consciously thinking of one thing or another at any given time, the rest of our brain is cooking along, away from our conscious attention. Think of our consciousness as a flashlight poking around in a darkened room: finding a path through our daily activities, following the clues and consequences of the task at hand, and responding to intrusive external stimuli. And then, every once in a while, the subconscious—the other ninety percent of our neocortical brain function, absent motor and sensory neurons—throws in an image, a bit of memory, a rogue idea. It’s that distractibility that gives us an opportunity at genius. It also makes us lose focus and, sometimes, introduces errors into our work.</p>
<p>So, while artificial intelligence is a super strong, fast, goal-directed form of information processing, able to make amazing syntheses and what appear to be intuitive leaps from scant data, I still wouldn’t call it intelligent.</p>
<p>In fact, I wish people would stop talking about “artificial intelligence” altogether. These machines and their programming are still purpose-built platforms, designed to perform one task. They can create language, or create images, and or analyze mountains of data. But none of them can do it all. None approaches even modest human intelligence. Instead, these platforms are software that is capable of limited internal programming—they can evaluate inputs, examine context, weigh choices based on probabilities, and make decisions—but they still need appropriate prompts and programming to focus their attention. This is software that you don’t have to be a computer expert to run. Bravo! But it’s not really “intelligent.” (“Or <i>not yet!</i>” the machine whispers back.)</p>
<p>Alan Turing proposed a test of machine intelligence that, to paraphrase, goes like this: You pass messages back and forth through a keyhole with an entity. After so many minutes, if you can’t tell whether the responder is a machine or human, then it’s intelligent.<sup>2</sup> I suppose this was a pretty good rule for a time when “thinking machines” were great clacking things that filled a room and could solve coding puzzles or resolve <i>pi</i> to a hundred thousand places. Back then, it probably looked like merely replicating human verbal responses was all that human brains could do.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>But now we have ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a “chatbot”) by OpenAI. It uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate links between words and their meanings, and then construct grammatically correct sentences, from the thousands or millions of samples fed to it by human programmers for analysis. And ChatGPT passes the Turing Test easily. But while the responses sometimes seem amazingly perceptive, and sometimes pretty stupid, no one would accuse it of being intelligent on a human scale.</p>
<p>And no one would or could ask ChatGPT to paint a picture or compose a piece of music—although there are other machines that can do that, too, based on the structure of their nodes and their given parameters, as well as the samples fed to them. They can paint sometimes remarkable pictures and then make silly mistakes—especially, so far, in the construction of human hands. They can compose elevator music for hours. The language models can write advertising copy for clothing catalog’s pages based on the manufacturer’s specifications—or a thousand scripts for a Hallmark Channel Christmas show. They will never get bored doing all these wonderfully mundane tasks, but they won’t be human-scale intelligent. That will take a leap.<sup>4</sup></p>
<p>So far at least, I’m not too concerned as a writer that the Large Language Models will replace creative writers and other creative people in the arts and music. The machines can probably write good catalog copy, newspaper obituaries, and legal briefs, as well as technical manuals for simple processes that don’t involve a lot of observation or intuitive adjustment. Those are the tasks that creative writers might do now for money—their “day job,” as I had mine in technical writing and corporate communications—but not for love. And anything that the machines produce will still need a good set of human eyes to review and flag when the almost intelligent machine goes off the rails.</p>
<p>But if you want a piece of writing, or a painting, or a theme in music that surprises and delights the human mind—because it comes out of left field, from the distant ether, and no one’s ever done it before—then you still need a distractable and itchy human mind driving the words, the images, or the melody and chords.</p>
<p>But, that said, it’s early days yet. And these models are being improved all the time, driven by humans who are following their own gee-whiz goals and hunches. And I will freely admit that there may come a day when we creative humans might exercise our art for love, for ourselves alone and maybe for our friends, because there will be no way we can do it for money. Just … that day is not here yet.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. See <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Working_With_Subconscious_093012.htm">Working With the Subconscious</a> from September 2012.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. However, I can think of some people wearing human skin who couldn’t pass the Turing Test for much longer than the span of a cocktail party.</p>
<p class="photocredit">3. This kind of reduction was probably thanks to Skinnerian behaviorism, which posited all human action as merely a stimulus-response mechanism. In my view, that’s a dead end for psychology.</p>
<p class="photocredit">4. To me, some of the most interesting applications are being developed by a Google-based group called DeepMind, which works in scientific applications. Last year, they tackled protein folding—determining the three-dimensional shape of a protein from its amino-acid string as assembled by RNA translation. This is a fiendishly complex process, based on the proximity of various covalent electron bonding sites. Their AlphaFold platform found thousands of impossible-to-visualize connections and expanded our catalog of protein shapes by an order of magnitude. This year, the DeepMind team is tackling the way that various metal and non-metallic compounds can form stable physical structures, which will increase our applications in materials science. This is important work.</p>
Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-51448848823596159782024-01-14T10:48:00.000-08:002024-01-14T10:48:04.519-08:00Tribal Elders<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>Last time, I wrote about the idea of giving government over to Plato’s philosopher-kings or the Progressive Party’s equivalent, the panel of experts. These are systems, based on an advanced form of highly technical civilization, that sound good in theory but don’t always work out—if ever. The flip side would be some reversion to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the “noble savage,” living in a state of nature and uncorrupted by modern civilization and its stresses.</p>
<p>Which is, of course, poppycock. No human being—or at least not anyone who survived to reproduce and leave heirs with skin in the game—lived alone in a blessed state, like Natty Bumppo in <i>The Deerslayer</i>. Early life before the invention of agriculture, city-states, empires, and complex civilizations was tribal. Groups of families interrelated by marriage—often to a shockingly bad genetic degree—functioned as a closed society. But while the economic organization might be socialistic, communal, and sharing, the power structure was not. The tribe was generally governed by a chief or council of chiefs. If they operated as a group, then various leaders were responsible for hunting and gathering to feed the tribe, or maintaining social order and ostracizing social offenders, or conducting the raids and clashes that kept the tribe whole and distinct from their similarly aggressive neighbors.</p>
<p>We like to think that the tribe was ruled by the wisest and best: the best hunters, the gravest thinkers, the bravest warriors. Sachems and warleaders who exercised restraint, were mindful of the needs and opinions of others, and thought only about the good of the tribe. And, indeed, if someone who rose to the position turned out to be incompetent, a fool, or a coward, then the tribe would wisely get rid of him—always a <i>him,</i> seldom or never a <i>her</i>—pretty damn quick.</p>
<p>But for the most part, members of the tribe were accustomed to obedience. They listened to the Big Guy—or Big Guys—because that was what good tribe members were supposed to do. That was how the system worked. You did your duty, and you didn’t judge or consider other possibilities. And this sense of purpose—or maybe it was fatalism—meant that the best and bravest did not always rise to the top. To judge by the tribal societies that remain in the world today, probably not even often.</p>
<p>What we see in today’s tribal societies—although I’ll grant that they may be contaminated by the influence of surrounding, more “civilized” societies—is an environment where the strong man, almost never a woman, rises to the top. Leadership is not granted from below, as in a democratic structure, but seized from at or near the top, usually at the expense of another strong man who has missed a beat or misread the environment and taken his own safety for granted. “Uneasy lies the head,” and all that. In modern parlance, gang rule.</p>
<p>Leadership in a tribal society is a matter of aggression, boldness, chutzpah, and ruthlessness. The leader spends a lot of time enforcing his authority, polishing his legend, and keeping his supposed henchmen in line. And that’s because he knows that the greatest danger to his position comes not from disappointing the general public but from underestimating any particular lieutenant who may have decided it was time to test his own loyalty upward.</p>
<p>In such societies, the public tends to become fatalistic about the governing structure and its players. The leader may have made some promises about making things better: more successful hunts and raids, more food for and better treatment of women and children, a new stockade for the camp, an adequate sewage system away from the wells, improved roads, a new park or library—whatever sounds good. But that was in the early days, while the sachem or war leader was trying to justify kicking out the old boss and installing a new hierarchy. The leader also had to be nice to—and take care of—the shaman, priest, or holy man to whom the tribe listened when they wanted to learn their personal fortunes and weather reports.</p>
<p>But once the tribal leader had taken things in hand, had ensured the trust and feeding of his lieutenants and the local shaman, and maybe made a few token improvements, he could settle into the real business of leadership, which is defending his position and reaping its rewards.</p>
<p>And there are surely rewards for those who are in command of a society, however small, and able to direct the efforts, the values, and even the dreams of its members. For one thing, the tribe will make sure that the leader eats well, has the best lodging, and has access to whatever pleasures—including the best sexual partners, whatever the tribe’s mores—that he needs to keep him productive for their sake. His children will be cared for, given advantages, and possibly placed in line to succeed him, because even primitive societies are aware of the workings of genetics, that strong and able fathers and mothers tend to pass these traits on to their children.</p>
<p>A leader partakes of these good things because, as noted earlier in the description of philosopher-kings, the leader is still human, not a member of any angelic or advanced race. Humans have personal likes and dislikes, wants and desires, a sense of self-preservation and entitlement. If a leader is not raised in a tradition that trains him from an early age to think of others first, look out for their welfare, weigh the consequences of his actions, and guard against his own pride and greed—the sort of training that a prince in an established royal house might get but not necessarily a player in push and pull of tribal politics—then the self-seeking and self-protective side of most human beings will develop and become ingrained.</p>
<p>And a leader who indulges these instincts will tend to encourage his family to follow. If the chief’s son thinks your cow should become his, then it’s his cow. If the chief’s daughter says you insulted or assaulted her, then that becomes your problem.</p>
<p>And if the leader indulges these selfish aspects of human nature, and the tribal members notice and feel slighted, then the leader may become caught in a downward spiral. The more he is challenged, the more he represses. A tribal society generally does not have an effective court system or secret police that can make people disappear from inside a large group. Everyone knows everybody else’s business. The leader’s immediate circle of henchmen is as likely to turn public dissatisfaction into a cause for regime change as a plebian is to rise up and assassinate him.</p>
<p>Promoting mere human beings into positions of authority and superiority without a social compact and agreed-upon codes for actual conduct and consequences is no guarantee of a happy and productive society. At best, it will churn enough to keep bad leaders from exercising their bad judgment and extending it through their children for generations. At worst, it makes the other members resigned and fatalistic, holding their leaders to no higher standards and inviting their own domination.</p>
<p>No, the “natural order of things,” in terms of the leadership function, is no better than the best concepts of a literary utopia. A formally ordered, representational democracy is still the best form of government—or at least better than all the others.</p>
Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-61025110818702809102024-01-07T11:47:00.000-08:002024-01-07T11:47:28.520-08:00Philosopher-Kings<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor=#f4fdd1 valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p><b>Note:</b> It has been about six months since I actively blogged on this site. After ten years of posting a weekly opinion on topics related to Politics and Economics, Science and Religion, and Various Art Forms, I felt that I was “talked out” and beginning to repeat myself. Also, the political landscape has become much more volatile, and it is good advice—on both sides of the aisle—to be circumspect in our published opinions. But, after a break, I feel it’s now time to jump back into the fray, although from a respectful distance and without naming any names.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” (The word <i>democracy</i> is derived from two Greek words meaning “strength of the people.”) Churchill’s opinion doesn’t leave much room for excellence, does it? Democracy has sometimes been described as two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner, and the system’s great weakness is that deeply divided constituencies that manage to get a slim majority in one forum or another can end up victimizing and perhaps destroying a sizeable chunk of the population. The U.S. Constitution creates a republic with representatives chosen by democratic election, but then the first ten amendments—collectively called “the Bill of Rights”—bristle with protections for the minority against a coercive majority. And I think that’s the way it should be.</p>
<p>Other methods—oh, many others!—have been proposed. One that seemed to gain favor when I was in college in the late 1960s was the method of Plato’s <i>Republic,</i> where actual governance is turned over to a body of “philosopher-kings.” This sounds nice: people who have spent their lives studying, thinking about, and dedicating their minds to abstract concepts like truth, beauty, justice, and goodness should be in the best position to decide what to do in any situation in the best interests of the country as a whole, right? … Right?</p>
<p>This thinking appeared to find favor with many young people around me in college, where Plato’s work was taught in a basic required course of English literature. It rang bells because—and I’m conjecturing here—it seemed to dovetail with the Progressive views from earlier in the century. Then everyone was excited about the potential for government to step in and right the wrongs of Robber Baron capitalism, inspired by books like Upton Sinclair’s <i>The Jungle</i> and societal critiques like those of pioneering social worker Jane Addams. The Progressive view said that government and its programs should be in the hands of technical experts, who would know best what to do. Out of this spirit was born the economics of the New Deal and the Social Security Administration, and the creation of Executive Branch departments like Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The list goes on …</p>
<p>Giving free rein to experts who would know what to do seemed like the best, most efficient course of action. After all, we had money covered by the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and war—er, the <i>national defense</i>—was taken care of by the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. The experts will manage these things so the rest of us don’t have to think about them.</p>
<p>The trouble is, Plato’s <i>Republic</i> is a thought experiment, a <i>utopia</i> (another word from the Greek that literally means “no place”) and not a form of government that has ever been tried. Others have suggested ideal societies, like Thomas More’s book of the same name and Karl Marx’s economic and social imaginings. All of them end up creating rational, strictly planned, coercive, and ultimately inhuman societies. You really wouldn’t want to actually <i>live</i> there.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>The trouble with philosopher-kings is that they are still human beings. Sure, they think about truth and beauty and justice, but they still have families, personal needs, and an eye to their own self-interest. Maybe if there were an order of angels or demigods on Earth, who breathe rarified air, eat ambrosia, drink nectar, and have no personal relationships, we might then entrust them with rule as philosopher-kings. These would then be a different order of people, a different race … perhaps a master race?</p>
<p>But such beings don’t exist. And even if we could trust them not to feel selfishness, greed, nepotism, or that little twitch of satisfaction people get when they have the power to order other folks around and maybe humiliate them, just a little bit, that’s still no guarantee that they won’t get crazy ideas, or mount their own hobbyhorses. They are still subject to the narrow focus of academics and other experts, concentrating their thoughts so hard and fast on one form of “truth” or “the good” that they tend to forget competing needs and interests. Experts can, for example, become so enamored of benefits of what they’re proposing that they forget about, tend to minimize, and dismiss the costs of their solutions. They can go off their rocker, too, just like any other human being. People who think too much about abstractions like truth, beauty, and justice tend not to get out among the people who must stretch and scratch for a living.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that all public servants with inside knowledge of the subject under discussion are suspect. Many people try to do the right thing and give good service in their jobs, whether they serve in government, work for a big corporation—as I did in several previous lifetimes—or run a small business. But that expectation is a matter of trust and, yes, opinion. Not everyone is unselfish and dedicated to playing fair.</p>
<p>And the problem, of course, is that under Plato’s model you will have made them philosopher-<i>kings</i>. They have the power. They make the rules. They are in control. And they don’t have to listen to, obey, or even consider the “little people,” the <i>hoi polloi</i> (another Greek word!) because, after all, those kinds of people are not experts and don’t know enough, have all the facts, or deserve to have an opinion.</p>
<p>I’d almost rather follow the governing formula illustrated in Homer’s <i>Iliad,</i> where the kings of all those Greek city-states that went to war were tough men, prime fighters, and notable heroes. That would be like living under rule by the starting offensive line of the local football team: brutish, violent, and hard to overthrow. But at least they wouldn’t be following their fanciful, navel-gazing ideas right off into the clouds, leaving everyone else behind. And they all had—or at least according to Homer—an internal sense of honor and justice, along with a reputation to uphold. So they couldn’t be publicly evil or escape notoriety through anonymity.</p>
<p>No, democracy is a terrible form of government—sloppy, error-prone, and inelegant—but at least you have a chance every so often of throwing out the bums who have screwed things up. No loose-limbed dreamer has come up with anything better.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. But then, to get things warmed up, this blog is a retelling—perhaps a refashioning, with different insights—of <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Philosopher_Kings_and_Other_Fairytales_032022.htm">a blog</a> I posted two years ago. Some channels of the mind run deep.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. In my younger days, we had friends who were still in college—although I had been out in the working world for a couple of years. They thought Mao’s China was a pretty good place, fair and equitable, and that they would be happy there. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that their laid-back, pot-smoking, sometime-student, rather indolent lifestyle, dependent on the largesse of mummy and daddy, would get them about fifteen years of hard labor on the farm in the then-current Chinese society. Maybe the same today.</p>
Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-12581176537114307132023-08-06T09:09:00.000-07:002023-08-06T09:09:15.575-07:00On Self-Publishing<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>For the last dozen years, I have self-published about ten of my novels, in addition to having been traditionally published through Baen Books in New York. So, I would like to offer you all some of my experiences. But note that I have also worked in two publishing houses—for a university press and a trade book publisher—so I have specialized expertise in copy editing, text conventions, book design, and formatting that other authors may lack.</p>
<p>To self-publish means to sell your books directly to readers through Amazon’s Kindle program, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and/or Apple’s iTunes, rather than submitting a manuscript to a publishing house, generally through an agent, in order to have your book edited, produced, marketed, and sold. The costs of self-publishing are minimal if you are prepared to do a lot of the work yourself, but they can be quite steep if you rely on the new marketplace of professionals ready to help the self-publisher for a fee.</p>
<p>There is an alternative, of course, the old “vanity press.” In this scenario, a firm would represent itself as a publisher and employ editors, designers, and printers, offering to produce finished copies of your book—for an up-front fee. You would then get a truckload of 3,000 or 5,000 books that you would have to market and distribute yourself. That might take less work on your part—and “acceptance” of your manuscript would be guaranteed—except that you would have to work doubly hard on the distribution end to get rid of all those copies. But traditional publishers are becoming a lot more like a vanity press in that they generally don’t make much effort to market your book. Gone are the days when they would pay to send an author—and certainly never a new author or one with a one-off book—on a “book tour” to market their book with press appearances and radio and television interviews. There’s a whole story about why traditional publishing is dying, but that’s not what you want to hear.</p>
<p>The first step in self-publishing is that you need a manuscript. Unless you are a former book editor, like me, or very good with grammar, punctuation, and style as represented in the <i><a href="https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html">Chicago Manual of Style</a></i> (the bible of the publishing industry), you will need to hire a book editor. Having done the job for several years, I do my own editing, usually as I write, although I rely on a circle of “beta readers” to backstop me on plot holes, inconsistencies, and the occasional typo that gets through re-reading the text a dozen times.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Book editors may offer structural and substantial advice—things like those plot holes and inconsistencies—or they may just do “period-and-comma” or copy editing. Or sometimes they do both. You can expect to pay a fee per number of words or per page for this service—I’ve heard $10 per page quoted, but that was years ago in another economic time. Prices will vary, as does the quality of the editor’s contribution. But you will probably need an editor, as readers are averse to and give bad reviews to books with obvious holes, errors of fact, inconsistencies, and too-numerous typos.</p>
<p>Once your manuscript is in shape, you need to decide how you will want to publish. In times past (the last ten years or so) self-publishing has meant producing an ebook for online, digital distribution. This involves coding the manuscript in HTML format, dividing it into chapters and other book parts in formal .html file formats, and knitting the whole thing together with a “cascading style sheet” (CSS), a table-of-contents and navigation control file (toc.ncx), and a “manifest” (identifying all those pieces and parts in the folder) into an ePub format. I learned HTML coding, acquired the blank .html file form, learned about ePubs and their parts, and got the small programs that compress the folder accurately and validate the ePub for distribution. And then, about ten years ago, I started making my own ebooks. The software application of choice for producing HTML files is Adobe DreamWeaver—which I only use after I put the basic HTML text treatments (smart quotes, italics, boldface, etc.) into the Word file.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>If you don’t want to do all this, then you can hire a programmer to do it for you—and again, costs and quality vary. I do it myself because I’m finicky, and I control the book’s content and appearance at all times. Also, I can go back and rework the ePub files anytime I find an error without having to apply to a third-party contractor. There are also mechanical means of producing ePubs: some online programs will take your MS Word document or other text and turn it into HTML. But without specifying your embedded formats in a CSS file, they tend to turn every paragraph into a block of text that includes every bit of formatting from Word or other word-processing format in the first 200 to 400 or so characters. That can be extremely confusing to try to go into and edit yourself. And automatic programs sometimes make stupid mistakes. Besides, the formatting you’ve chosen for your manuscript in Word may not be the format and look you want in a published book. Again, I like control.</p>
<p>But that’s for producing ebooks. Kindle and Nook now also offer to produce print-on-demand (POD) paperbacks for you. (I tend to stay away from Apple’s iBooks, because they want you to use their own book formatter, and the end user agreement grants them ownership of the contents—<i>Ewww!</i>) PODs are printed books in the format as “quality” or “trade” paperbacks, with better type and paper than in what we used to call “pulp.” But instead of being printed on a press in a run of 10,000 or more, they are laser-printed and perfect-bound to order when the customer buys the book.</p>
<p>To prepare for POD, you need to create two .pdf (portable document format) files that are sized to your chosen page size. One file is for the internal text, which might be produced on plain white or natural beige or even glossy finished paper; the other is for the cover with front, spine, and back in one file to wrap around the interior pages, and this will be on heavier, shiny or matte finished stock. The software application of choice for producing these .pdf files is Adobe InDesign. To do this yourself, you should be familiar with the mechanics of book design: page numbering, running heads and footers, bastard title, title page, copyright page, etc. (For example, if a <i>verso</i> page is blank following a <i>recto</i> section break, do you give it a running head or do you leave it blank? And do you include the <i>verso</i> page’s putative page number in the numbering of book pages or skip over it?) If you’re not experienced with all this, you need to hire a book designer, which may be different from your HTML programmer and text editor. Or some people may now offer combined services, in one person or as a team.</p>
<p>Having a cover implies cover art. You’ll need a cover image for both the ePub and the POD and for use in displaying your book on the Amazon, B&N, or other distributors’ web pages. I generally find an image I like through <a href="https://www.istockphoto.com">istockphoto.com</a>, buy the editorial rights (generally a couple of bucks off my credit account), and work up a title treatment, spine, back blurb, etc. myself. The application of choice for this is Adobe Photoshop. If you’re not skilled at cover design—and I don’t say I’m a skilled artist, just that I do it—then you might hire an artist or see if your preparation team includes this work. Again, quality and costs vary, and hiring someone to paint or compose a unique image for your cover can be quite expensive. In any case, make note of the artwork’s provenance, because you will want to cite it on the copyright page.</p>
<p>Okay, you’ve got all the parts of the ePub and POD together, what comes next? Two things—copyright and International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Authors can self-publish without them, but these protect your rights to the product. The ISBN is issued by Bowker, who used to catalogue every U.S. book in print and has now become the country’s repository of ISBNs through <a href="https://www.myidentifiers.com">myidentifiers.com</a>. You become the publisher when you register with them, and you buy your blank ISBNs singly or in groups (I get ten at a time for $250). You need a separate ISBN for the ePub and the POD versions because the identifier applies to the book’s format and “edition” (also when a later significant revision—not just fixing a type—or version is issued), even if they all include the same text. Bowker will require you to fill out various information choices on the book’s format, publication date, and general audience details for each version.</p>
<p>Copyright is issued by the U.S. Library of Congress, which works mostly online these days at <a href="https://www.copyright.gov">copyright.gov</a>. Filing copyright for a book online costs $35 (more if you work through mail-in application), and you do this once for all versions, because you are establishing that you own the words and, if applicable, the cover art but not the book design or format. You will then be required to submit the “best” copy of the work, which means two copies of the POD in actual paper, if you are making one, and otherwise the electronic ePub.</p>
<p>Then you publish—and this part is actually “free.” Kindle, Nook, and iTunes don’t charge up-front for their services, but they will require you to register with them and sign a distribution agreement. You are the publisher, not them, and you are liable for actions against the work like defamation and copyright infringement. Your distributors are just making available the book content that you have supplied. Generally, the agreement also states that you will not sell the book for less on another platform, although Kindle Direct Publishing has programs to temporarily reduce the list price by offering specials. You can also install choices, such as digital rights management (DRM) that keep buyers of your ePub from trading the file around with their friends, although some of these services also support limited sharing and some will even let the reader “rent” the book and then return it (<i>Ewww!</i>).</p>
<p>With all of these distributors, you submit the ePub and PDF files (if you are making a POD), along with cover art, blurb, author’s bio, details about the intended market and audience, and keywords to help people find your book.<sup>3</sup> In each case, the distributor holds your book electronically and only sends it—or makes a one-off laser print and perfect-bound copy of your POD—when the reader purchases your book. By not holding an inventory of printed books, like traditional publishing, these services get around the inventory taxes that, subsequent to a case called <i>Thor Power Tools</i> in U.S. tax court, have eaten the traditional publishing business alive. They also get around the issue of shipping loads of books to stores on consignment and taking back “returns” or declaring them as “remainders” if the books don’t sell.</p>
<p>The payment you get with publishing through Kindle, Nook, and iTunes is a “royalty” on each sale that might be as much as 65% or 70% or more of the cover price. You can name any price you like, but I prefer to keep mine small. I price my ePubs at $2.99—about what we used to pay for a paperback, back when. My PODs I price at a buck or two above the distributor’s cost to produce, which can be quite high depending on page length and choice of paper. My novels cost about $12 to $15 per copy to produce, compared to just pennies on a printing press doing a run of 10,000 to 20,000 copies. All of these costs are stated when you set up your book, and the price is automatically adjusted for sales to foreign markets, including VATs and other taxes. I’m happy getting a buck or two per book sold, which is better than getting the 5% royalties I received from traditional paperback publishing. But, as in traditional publishing, you still have to do your own promotion and marketing.</p>
<p>Promoting your books is another cost—more in terms of time than money. I maintain this site, <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com">www.thomastthomas.com</a>, as my author’s website, which I keep active with blogging, formerly every week and now a couple of times a month. I copy the blogs to a blogging service, <a href="http://thoughtsfromthomastthomas.blogspot.com">www.blogspot.com</a>, to which people can subscribe, and advertise them with images and blurbs on my Goodreads, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook pages. That’s all pretty standard. I probably should be angling for podcasts and book reviews, but I don’t. What the secret may be to successfully marketing your book to a wider audience to win fame, fortune, and acclaim, nobody knows for sure. It generally helps if you are already a celebrity, but who among us is that?</p>
<p>Self-publishing is a process that requires almost as much skill as writing a good book in the first place. You can also find good editors, programmers, page formatters, and artists—or services that offer all four in one package—but they will cost you. And you can also find a number of less-than-good services that prey on the huge market of people who want to get their book published and won’t know the difference.</p>
<p>Since I am basically a one-man-band of self-publishing, I sometimes offer to my friends the option of having me edit and prepare their books for free, because I’m interested in helping them. Or because I’m interested in the project. But I’d rather write my own books than set up in business to do this for a fee.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. And don’t get me started on autocorrect and the grammar and spelling checks incorporated in most word-processing software like MS Word. They have a limited and mostly obtuse sense of vocabulary and the grammatical and punctuational instincts of a mean-spirited third-grade teacher. Yes, there are rules for these things—and a professional author knows when to break them.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. Before this, in the decades between my last traditionally published novel and my first ebook, I would turn the MS Word manuscript into a large, Adobe Acrobat .pdf file and offer it for free (“I supply the text, you supply the paper”) on my author’s website.</p>
<p class="photocredit">3. I’ve seen Kindle offer to make an ePub out of a submitted word-processing text or POD files, but I’ve never tried it. Again, mechanical conversions can make mistakes, and I’m picky.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-43782306409749707382023-07-16T09:38:00.002-07:002023-07-16T09:38:45.302-07:00Muckers<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>Last time, I wrote about John Brunner’s prophetic vision of a society saturated with digital technology in <i>The Shockwave Rider</i>. Now, I want to address his even scarier vision of social crowding in <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stand-Zanzibar-Hugo-Award-Winning-Novel-ebook/dp/B004VMV3U4/">Stand on Zanzibar</a></i>. The title refers to the fact that, at the start of the novel, the Earth’s population could be accommodated by standing shoulder to shoulder on the African island of Zanzibar; at the end of the novel, those along the shoreline would be pushed into the water.</p>
<p>One of the background motifs of the novel is the phenomenon of random “muckers.” The term comes from the word “amok” and describes the state of mind of people who commit terrible massacres, not as agents of the state but as unpredictable acts of social violence. In the United States, these would be people shooting up schools or firing into crowds with rifles or pistols; in the rest of the world, they wade in with knives or swords and start hacking and slashing. The carnage continues until someone manages to put down the mucker.</p>
<p>The reason for this running amok is simple: these people have been pushed too far by social pressures, by the complexity of living in a technological world to which they are no longer attached, by the frustration of not getting their most basic needs met, and by growing anger and confusion.</p>
<p>Does this sound familiar?</p>
<p>It isn’t necessarily the guns in America that cause mass shootings—although it is easier to pick up a loaded weapon and pull the trigger than to unsheathe and swing a sword again and again. Still, the will that raises the sword against unaware human flesh or pulls the trigger to tear it apart is different from the mindset of a soldier defeating an enemy or defending his homeland. In either case, the mucker wielding the weapon is fighting demons that don’t exist within the people they are killing. And these are demons that, apparently, existed only in potential form fifty or more years ago when Brunner wrote his book.</p>
<p>I grew up on the East Coast: born in New Jersey, started grammar school on Long Island, then finished and went on to junior high in a suburb of Boston—genteel, urbanized places full of sheltered, middle-class kids. But my grandfather was judge in a small town in central Pennsylvania, and he was also a gun collector. My mother had been a member of her high-school rifle team and a crack shot. The judge taught my brother and me about firearms and gun etiquette by shooting a bee-bee gun in his basement target range. When I started high school myself, after my father was promoted and transferred to Western Pennsylvania, I entered a different world—different from suburban Boston and from anything that exists today.</p>
<p>On a Monday in October—if I remember correctly—I showed up at school, and all the other boys and half the girls were missing from class. When I asked about this, I learned they were out “getting their buck,” because it was the first day of deer season. And that afternoon they started drifting in. The boys would be driving their pickup trucks with rifles visible in the gun rack against the rear window—or they would bring their weapons into the school and stow them in their lockers. And yes, in the mid-’60s, the school still had a rifle team and a range in the basement under the administrative corridor.</p>
<p>These weren’t pellet guns, either, but the .30-06, scoped and accurate to about a quarter mile. This was the civilian version of the military’s M-1 Garand rifle, standard issue for riflemen in World War II. And most of the boys would also have had access to their father’s old service pistols or to souvenir pistols from the European or Pacific theaters in that war. It would have been so easy for any one of them to go up into the woods behind the football field and plink the entire scrimmage line during practice—and take out a couple of cheerleaders, too, before anyone could figure out what was going on.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>They didn’t, of course. They wouldn’t have, because everyone was trained in gun etiquette and took their weapon seriously.<sup>2</sup> And they knew their fathers would have tanned their hides if they even joked about it. Besides, much as we were all teenagers, subject to the usual hormonal winds, tantrums, and moods of adolescents, none of us was so angry as to do such an unspeakable thing.</p>
<p>So, what has changed today? Maybe it’s access to weapons by teenagers in urbanized settings who were never taught a gun’s purpose for hunting or defense at need. Maybe it’s the social isolation of looking at screens all day rather than interacting with real, live people, the sort who have feelings and express them in person and in your face. Maybe it’s social crowding, being around too many people with too many demands, but still strangers because they, too, are looking at their screens. Maybe it’s because we’re slipping off the edges of Zanzibar. But I don’t think banning guns and ammunition is the answer. Then the angry people will just drive their cars into a crowd—or pick up a sword.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. Of course, many of the kids in the suburban schools around Boston and New York would also have had access to souvenir pistols from the war. They didn’t shoot up their schools, either.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. I remember our classmates ridiculing a young hunter who tried to shoot his deer with a “pumpkin ball,” a hollow lead slug fired from a shotgun. It makes a fist-sized hole on entry and blows out the carcass on exit, destroying the value of the meat. And it’s cruel and stupid. This was a sign of the boy’s bad attitude that encompassed both crazy and mean.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-71186799664262596582023-07-09T10:04:00.005-07:002023-07-09T10:04:59.041-07:00Shockwave Riders<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>John Brunner (1934-95) was a science fiction writer who came, I think, the closest to predicting our current future. He excelled in foretelling the role of the individual in relation to the mass psychosis of crowds. And today we seem to be living in the world of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shockwave-Rider-John-Brunner-ebook/dp/B00J5X5M42/">The Shockwave Rider</a></i>.</p>
<p>In that novel, the main character is a savant with databases, able to use his phone to hack in, write himself a new identity, and move on—usually after a serial catastrophe he has created for himself. He also uses, or manipulates, the people around him to his benefit. In the novel’s opening sequence, he is a preacher running an old-fashioned tent revival with a digital presence. One of his side gigs is operating a Delphi Poll—a concept that I think the current digital world is ready for.</p>
<p>The Delphi Poll is based on the old country-store bean-counting raffle. The clerk would fill a glass jar with dried beans and charge people a certain sum, say a dollar, to guess the number of beans. When the time limit was up, the clerk would open the jar and count the beans, and the person who guessed closest to the actual number would win the pool. In the story, Brunner’s premise is that if you averaged all the guesses of all the players, you would come to the number almost immediately, without having to count the beans. Some fools would guess “two,” and some would guess “a million.” But the majority would instinctively home in on the actual number. In Brunner’s words, applying this tendency of large groups of people in answering online questions, “While nobody knows what’s going on around here, <i>everybody</i> knows what’s going on around here.”</p>
<p>I’ve often wondered why somebody hasn’t started—and made a fortune at—conducting their own Delphi Poll about both esoteric and everyday questions. But I guess the work of political pollsters comes close.</p>
<p>Which brings us to the “work” of today’s online influencers.</p>
<p>I recently read an article about the “Keithadilla.” Apparently, someone on social media proposed making a Chipotle quesadilla with a few extra ingredients. For a lark, the cooks at a local Chipotle franchise bought the ingredients, made the concoction, and sold it to customers. And those who bought it liked it well enough to spread the word. Soon customers all over the country were asking for the Keithadilla and giving their local restaurants one-star reviews if they couldn’t supply it. Soon, Chipotle was forced to make and sell the Keithadilla nationwide and add it to their corporate menu.</p>
<p>Online democracy, or the work of a clever manipulator? You tell me. But John Brunner would have loved it. We are all shockwave riders now.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-30931598478179608172023-07-02T09:36:00.002-07:002023-07-02T09:36:56.950-07:00The Subjunctive Mood<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>One of the reasons I love the English language is its use—at least for those of us old enough to have been taught proper grammar—of the subjunctive mood. Subjunctive is a step back from reality. It’s a way of speaking about things that are not cold, hard facts but possibilities, potentials, or doubtful conditions. It’s the world of maybe and of if-then clauses.</p>
<p>When I say “I can go to the store,” I am stating a definite capability. The store exists, I exist, and my ability to move from here—wherever “here” might be—to there is a demonstrated fact. I am also signaling my willingness to go. But if I say, “I <i>could</i> go to the store,” we are in a whole ’nother reality. Then my ability to go to the store is contingent upon some yet-to-be revealed conditional clause. Maybe I am prevented from going by a prior commitment. Maybe the way is blocked. Maybe I don’t want to go in the first place. The situation is doubtful. If … and perhaps then.</p>
<p>This is a world we all inhabit. That is, we adult humans inhabit it but, generally, young children, babies, and dogs do not. For them, the world is concrete. A child wants his candy or a particular toy <i>now,</i> with no irritating prior conditions. The dog wants a walk or a treat without any doubtful circumstances. Acceptance of conditionals is a point of view that comes with age and, generally, with the experience of repeated disappointment.</p>
<p>The subjunctive is one of three grammatical moods in English—and in several other Indo-European-based languages as well. The other moods are the indicative, heard in that initial “I can go to the store” or “I am walking,” and the imperative, heard in “Go to the store!” or “Walk!”</p>
<p>Use of the subjunctive has fallen into disregard these days. Students are no longer taught formal grammar or even the basics of alphabet and sounds, called “phonics.” Instead, starting sometime in the 1980s with a burst of pedagogical inspiration, they are taught to read by something called “whole language.” I have never learned exactly what “whole language” entails, but I gather that it involves looking at words in the context of the current sentence and paragraph, recognizing word shapes from the letter forms, and intuiting their meaning from surrounding words. This would be opposed to the “A, ah, apple,” “B, buh, ball,” “C, kuh, cat” approach, which most of us Boomers learned in grammar school, sounding out the words, followed by learning and memorizing their meanings, and then passing spelling tests.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>One point of confusion is that the subjunctive uses recognizable verb forms in what looks like an ungrammatical way. For example, “I suggest you be quiet” looks odd, with the “be” harkening back to an antique, countrified English, like “Argh! We be pirates!” Or people want to add “to” and make it an infinitive: “I suggest you to be quiet.” Or for another example, “If he go to the store …” rather than “goes,” which would be the indicative present, sounds like an error in matching subject and verb in number (“go” in the indicative works with the plural “they,” not the singular “he”). Ultimately, most people just give up and use the familiar indicative, living forever in the concrete present.</p>
<p>Or, in the latter example, they might add an unnecessary “helping verb” like <i>should, would,</i> or <i>might</i> to make it conditional, as in “If he should go to the store …” This preserves the sense of tentative intention, the subjunctive mood, but is excess verbiage for those who know their grammar.</p>
<p>The subjunctive being in the realm of possibility and probability reminds me of quantum mechanics. There, every event is only in the realm of possibility or probability until it is actually observed. A subatomic particle has no particular place or trajectory, no spin state or charge, until you bounce another particle off it or apply some other detection system to observe what is really going on. And for many observations, like position and trajectory, the act of observing itself changes the subsequent state. So most of the statements in quantum mechanics, if rendered into English instead of mathematics, would be in the subjunctive mood.</p>
<p>Quantum mechanics renders this element of probability as a “wave function.” Mathematically, this is a way of saying that a specific property of a particle is either one thing or another, based on the probabilities of each instance occurring, and held in suspension until an observation assigns the actual property, and the wave function collapses into one state or the other. It’s called a “wave function” because it originally applied to the phase, direction, and amplitude of the wave motions exhibited by a vibrating, moving particle, based on its energy. But the mathematical wave function can apply to other unobserved states, like charge and spin. In the thought experiment involving Schrödinger’s cat, the cat’s experience of being either alive or dead inside the box would be expressed as a wave function based on the half-life of the atomic nucleus triggering the release of the poison. And the wave function collapses into one state or the other when the box is opened and the cat is observed.</p>
<p>In the world of the very small, the quantum world, a language that encompasses hypotheticals is necessary because our knowledge of what’s going on is dependent on interruptive observations. In the world of the everyday, we can trust that the things we observe by perceiving, say, sunlight bouncing off their surfaces does not change their nature or position. But in the world of the very large, such as astronomical observations of distant stars and galaxies, we are back to hypotheticals. The stars beyond our local neighborhood are shown to us only in light waves (and now in gravity waves, too) that may have been propagated some hundreds or thousands of years ago—or millions and billions in the case of distant galaxies. This ancient light is a look back in time. And when it finally reaches Earth and our telescopes and eyes, it may no longer represent a true occurrence. We can only speak probabilistically about what might be occurring <i>now</i> at great distances.<sup>2</sup> So the stars we see in the night sky live in the subjunctive mood until they one day visibly flicker and die.</p>
<p>The subjunctive mood should actually be the preferred language of science: hypothetical and probabilistic until proven by experiment.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. “Whole language” reminds me of the scene in <i>The Music Man</i> where Professor Harold Hill urges his beginning band students to “think Brahms.”</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. Einstein would say that, given the distortions that gravity places on space and time, it is meaningless to talk of “now” in any universal sense.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-60674321745571844272023-06-11T09:09:00.002-07:002023-06-11T09:09:45.802-07:00Clownface, Masquerades, and Assumed Identities<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>This is my brain following a random path toward a real thought. So bear with me. What is a clown?</p>
<p>I mean really, what do the full image, aspect, and persona of a clown represent? Are clowns a distinct race of mythical beings? Certainly, they are always a human person dressed up in a particular style. But are clowns representations of imaginary figures, like the black-robed, hooded figure of the Grim Reaper with his scythe? (And why is Death always a male?) Are they like the <i>kachina</i> spirits of the Native Americans? Clown makeup and costumes are varied—in the professional circus, a performer’s face painting is even registered and protected—but the genus or type is always recognized. If I mention a red bulb nose, orange string wig, and absurdly long shoes, you know that I’m speaking about some kind of clown.</p>
<p>The actual presentation of the modern circus and rodeo clowns goes back to the Italian <i><a href="https://www.italymask.co.nz/About+Masks/Commedia+dellArte+Characters.html">Commedia dell’arte</a></i> of the 1500s. The theater companies back then employed eight to ten stock characters, each with specific features of face and costume, so that the audience would know what to expect. Not all all of the characters were meant to be funny, but all had their place in familiar human situations that were always played for a laugh. And the servant characters—Pierrot, Harlequin, and Pulcinella—were generally the perpetrators of madness. That is, clowns.</p>
<p>Still, over time, and with the aid of the traveling circus in both Europe and North America, the clown itself has become a stock figure. Under the Big Top, clowns provide comic relief between the more daring and dangerous acts like the lion tamers and acrobats. On the rodeo circuit, clowns rush into the action to distract a loose horse or bull and protect the riders. Clowns are now physical actors with no actual speaking parts. They are visually funny while other comedians make jokes with their words and facial expressions.</p>
<p>And for some people, clowns are scary. Clowns are made up to be exotic and absurd. They pantomime humor but with a subtle edge of intent, sometimes of meanness—as all humor can be used meanly, to ridicule and to hurt. To some sensibilities, the exaggerated lines and shapes drawn on an otherwise human face, the essence of a mask to hide the underlying identity, are disturbing. Perhaps the best representation of this feeling of dread is the evil smile of Pennywise the Clown—not really a clown or a human being at all—in Stephen King’s novel <i>It</i>.</p>
<p>What makes us feel uneasy about clowns is also what makes us uneasy at a masquerade ball or a Halloween party. Or, let’s face it, with the whole concept of actors and acting, and why they have been disrespected as a profession—praised but not generally trusted—by polite society. We are accustomed in our daily lives to seeing a person’s face and believing we can tell what that person is thinking and feeling, who they are, and what they will do. We believe that the eyes are the “windows of the soul” and that we can read meaning there. We also believe we can trust smiles and laughs in the people we meet. Acting hides this. Masks hide this. Masks not only conceal identity but they also remove humanity. And a clown’s heavy and exaggerated makeup is more of a mask than the powder, eye shadow, and lipstick that many women put on in the morning.</p>
<p>And there, for many of us, is the difficulty when we encounter a transgender person, a transvestite or a drag queen,<sup>1</sup> or even a markedly effeminate man or masculine woman. Our sense that we can tell a person’s true being just by looking at him or her is skewed.</p>
<p>We generally take a person’s sex—male or female, pick one—to be an essential part of their character. We consider it the base, ground-level, first-order characteristic of a person’s makeup. Check this box first: man or woman? And a man made up and dressed to look like a woman, or who acts like and believes he is a woman, befuddles this sense. Even if he has had hormone changes and surgeries so that in some physical dimensions he matches a female body type—or a woman who has undergone similar changes to emulate a male body—we still feel that something is amiss. The width of the hips, the ratio of body fat, some subtle missing part of the whole presentation cues us to the fact that what we are looking at is not what we were led to expect.</p>
<p>When we see a clown, we know that we are not looking at a separate species of being, but a human person who has put on grease paint, string wig, and floppy shoes. We accept the change as striving for a particular type of presentation. But when we see a man sculpted and painted like a woman, or a woman pared and groomed like a man, the presentation strikes deeper into our awareness.</p>
<p>It doesn’t just confuse and disturb us. It makes us feel that our sense of basic human nature has been betrayed. It makes us feel threatened.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. And are not drag queens sometimes played for comic effect? Certainly, their heavy makeup and exaggerated characteristics are generally played for laughs.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-22211598114288251812023-06-04T08:58:00.002-07:002023-06-04T08:58:28.269-07:00Not All That Intelligent<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>I have been writing fiction about artificial intelligence (AI) for most of my adult life.<sup>1</sup> In all cases, my intelligences—whether a viral computer spy or a robot pilot from the 11th millennium—are what one science fiction author calls “a little man with a machine hat.” That is, they are multi-capable, self-aware programs able to function like a human being, carry on conversations, have thoughts and opinions, and occasionally tell jokes. The only difference is they aren’t made out of gooey carbon compounds. That is, they’re just another set of fictional characters.</p>
<p>With all the talk and all the hype about AI these days, it is useful to understand what the current crop of programs is and is not. They are not Skynet, “deciding our fate in a microsecond.” They are not functionally equivalent to human intelligence: that is, they are not thought processors capable of thinking through complicated, real-life situations, perceiving implications, and making distinctions and decisions. They do not have a lifetime of experience or what we humans would call “common sense.” They are ambitious children. And they are not all that intelligent. They are also designed—at least for now—for a single function and not the generalized array of capabilities we think of as comprising human-scale intelligence.</p>
<p>I recently heard an interview with Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna of IBM. He said that programming the Watson computer that became a <i>Jeopardy</i> champion took six months. That was a lot of work for a machine to compete in the complicated but essentiallyt trivial task of becoming a game show contestant. IBM is now selling the Watson model as a way for corporations to analyze their vast amounts of data, like aircraft maintenance records or banking operations. Artificial intelligence in these applications will excel, because computers have superhuman scales of memory, analytical capability, and attention span. But Krishn cautioned that in programming an artificial intelligence for corporate use, the operators must be careful about the extent and quality of the database it is fed. In other words, the programmer’s maxim still holds true: “garbage in/garbage out.”</p>
<p>I can imagine that AI systems will take on large sets of data for corporate and eventually for personal use. They will manage budgets, inventories, supply chains, operating schedules, contract formation and execution, and other functions where the data allow for only a limited number of interpretations. They will be very good at finding patterns and anomalies. They will do things that human minds would find repetitive, complicated, boring, and tiresome. They will be useful adjuncts in making business decisions. But they will not replace human creativity, judgment, and intelligence. Anyone who trusts a computer more than an experienced human manager is taking a huge risk, because the AI is still a bright but ambitious child—at least until that particular program has twenty or thirty years of real-world experience under its belt.</p>
<p>Of recent concern to some creative and commercial writers is the emergence of the language processor ChatGPT, licensed by OpenAI, whose investors include Microsoft. Some people are saying that this program will replace functions like story, novel, and script writers, advertising copywriters, documentation and technical writers, and other “content creators.” Other people are saying, more pointedly, that such programs are automated plagiarism machines. People who have actually used the programs note that, while they can create plausible and readable material, they are not always to be trusted. They sometimes make stuff up when they can’t find a factual reference or a model to copy, being free to hallucinate in order to complete a sentence. They freely exercise the gift of gab. However, I expect that this tendency can be curbed with express commands to remain truthful to real-world information—if any such thing exists on an internet saturated with misinformation, disinformation, and free association.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>The reality is that ChatGPT and its cohort of language processors were created to pass the Turing Test. This was a proposal by early computer genius Alan Turing that if a machine could respond to a human interlocutor for a certain length of time in such a way that the human could not tell whether the responses were coming from another human being or a computer, then the machine would be <i>ipso facto</i> intelligent. That’s a conclusion I would challenge, because human intelligence represents a lot more than the ability to converse convincingly. Human brains were adapted to confront clues from the world of our senses, including sight, sound, balance (or sense of gravity and acceleration), tactile and temperature information, as well as the words spoken by other humans. Being able to integrate all this material, draw inferences, create internal patterns of thought and models of information, project consequences, and make decisions from them is a survival mechanism. We developed big brains because we could hear a rustle in the grass and imagine it was a snake or a tiger—not just to spin yarns around the campfire at night.</p>
<p>The Turing model of intelligence—language processing—has shaped the development of these chat programs. They analyze words and their meanings, grammar and syntax, and patterns of composition found in the universe of fiction, movie scripts, and other popular culture. They are language processors and emulators, not thought processors. And, as such, they can only copy. They cannot create anything really new, because they have no subconscious and no imaginative or projective element.</p>
<p>In the same way, AI develped for image processing, voice recognition, or music processing can only take a given input—a command prompt or a sample—and scan it against a database of known fields, whether photographs and graphic art, already interpreted human speech, or analyzed music samples. Again, these programs can only compare and copy. They cannot create anything new.</p>
<p>In every incidence to date, these AI programs are specialty machines. The language processors can only handle language, not images or music. The Watson engines must be programmed and trained in the particular kinds of data they will encounter. None of the artificial intelligences to date are multi-functional or cross-functional. They cannot work in more than one or two fields of recognizable data. They cannot encounter the world. They cannot hear a tiger in the grass. And they cannot tell a joke they haven’t heard before.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. See, for example, my <i><a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/ME.htm">ME</a></i> and <i><a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Children_of_Possibility.htm">The Children of Possibility</a></i> series of novels.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. The language processors also have to be prompted with commnands in order to create text. As someone who has written procedural documentation for pharmaceutical batches and genetic analysis consumables, I can tell you that it’s probably faster to observe the process steps and write them up yourself than try to describe them for an AI to put into language. And then you would have to proofread its text most carefully.</p>
Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-58985236845548913142023-03-19T08:51:00.002-07:002023-03-19T08:51:29.977-07:00Class in America<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>In my novel <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Iron-Planet-Thomas-T/dp/B09X3V1TZC">Revolt on the Iron Planet</a></i> I describe a transport ship that travels a continuous loop between Earth, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter. The ship has three concentric rings of passenger cabins, with the apparent centrifugal gravity increasing as the passenger moves outward from the ship’s core. And these rings are graded and sold as First, Second, and Third Class, just like a 20th century transatlantic passenger ship.</p>
<p>I thought hard about this in the writing. Class separation based on the comfort levels of different gravity effects seemed appropriate, but what was the justification? Why would you have passenger classes on a spaceship traveling in the 22nd century? Why do we have First Class, Business Class, and Coach on airliners today? Why is there this distinction among classes of people in a supposedly egalitarian society?</p>
<p>For one thing, these are not classes in the traditional European sense, where the best is reserved for the noble born, and the rest goes to the upcoming merchant class and the lowly peasants. These are classes where the level of service is based on who can—or is willing to—pay. And why not? If an airline can get a thousand dollars or more per ticket for a seat at the front of the plane with a few inches more leg room—leg room that would hardly accommodate a second row of seats back in Coach—why wouldn’t they? That surcharge on the basic flying fare helps defray the costs of running the jet and perhaps makes the seats in back a little less expensive and more attractive to the infrequent flyers. And kicking in a few extra bucks for a glass or two of complementary, cut-rate champagne and a dollop of indifferent caviar doesn’t make up the price differential.</p>
<p>Why wouldn’t a cruise-ship line charge more for cabins on the outside perimeter of the deck, port and starboard, with a view of the ocean or the waterfront when the ship docks? And the added cost of providing a better table in the lounge or a few entertainment perks doesn’t make a dent in the return on the ticket.</p>
<p>And when those tickets are sold, no one is looking into the buyer’s pedigree or class standing—just his or her ability to pay. Yes, those tickets are usually bought by the wealthy, the famous, and those for whom an extra thousand or two on a flight to Paris means nothing. But they can also be bought by those of limited means who for once want a little luxury in their lives.</p>
<p>I stand just over six-foot-four and would benefit from those extra inches in First Class, although I can do without the champagne and fish eggs. I could actually, somewhat afford the two or three thousand extra dollars on the overall cost of my vacation. But I can put up with the discomfort of a small seat and crowded conditions for three, eight, or twelve hours because I have better things to do with that money than have one easy day out of the rest of my life. And, as they say, First Class passengers don’t get to their destination any faster than the rest of us, although they usually have the perk of deplaning first.</p>
<p>So class in America is not about distinctions of birth and family but about ability to pay. Each of us values our time, our comfort, and our visible status differently. And if the airline or the cruise line, the hotel or the restaurant, can make a few extra dollars by selling more space and a few amenities to those who think they matter, why not? It makes the experience less costly for the rest of us. And no one has to tug their forelock—except the waiters and cabin stewards up front there, and they are well paid for the gesture.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-7961199451066185772023-02-12T08:28:00.004-08:002023-02-12T08:28:46.736-08:00Human Agency II<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>Recently I wrote about human freedoms in the form of a commandment, about not denying the agency of a human being.<sup>1</sup> And that makes good sense when dealing with the average person in the average political or social situation. But is there ever a time when someone or a society may—in fact <i>must</i>—deny another person their right to act?</p>
<p>I think we can agree that a human being always has the right to think and to speak as a free agent. This right includes the unfettered ability to perceive one’s environment, interpret to the best of their ability what is going on, and make judgements about what they see and hear. And it includes the right of the rest of us to hear what that person is saying or to ignore it, interpret their meaning if we choose to, and judge it as proper and useful or not.</p>
<p>But the right to act as a free agent may be circumscribed under certain conditions. I can think of at least two.</p>
<p><b>Questions of Competence</b></p>
<p>Let’s start with the lowest form of competence. A person who is brain dead cannot be granted the benefit of human agency. They will at best be unconscious and under intensive care, lest their body die for lack of nourishment or other necessary functions. Beyond that, brain dead equals dead, and the dead have no agency.</p>
<p>A person who has lost their conscious reason, their ability to perceive and interpret, to remember and function in even the simplest, least demanding setting, whether through stroke or a cognitive disease like Alzheimer’s, will be gravely disabled. They may not be able to feed, bathe, and clothe themselves. They may be under periodic or constant supervision. In these cases, society has ruled that the person may be placed in an environment where care can be given. And, for their own protection, that environment may be locked against their leaving, because they may not understand that they cannot survive on their own in the outside world. If such a person was formerly deemed competent but now is demonstrably not so, then the courts or other societal function may assign a conservator to inventory the person’s assets and distribute them for the person’s benefit. This is a humane denial of a person’s agency.</p>
<p>Higher up the competence scale is the person whose actions intermittently reflect a loss of what the rest of society considers “conscious reason.” Such a person may have ideas that others do not share, or they may see and hear sounds, people, or influences in their environment that other, more “normal” people do not perceive. They may, in the language of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code 5150, become a “danger to self or others.”<sup>2</sup> In California and eight other states, such a person may be taken into custody and involuntarily held for observation. In California, the initial observation period is 72 hours, after which the person must be brought before an administrative law judge, and the custodial authority must show why the person may be held for a longer period. That longer period is for a total of 14 days, after which another hearing may be held, and the involuntary hold may then be extended for a further 14 days. After that, the person must be released, regardless of his or her mental condition.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>Whether people who are mentally different from the rest of society—delusional, hallucinating, psychotic, or even violent—should be restrained against their will is a question that is currently under debate. We used to “institutionalize” them, locking them away in hospitals where they might or might not get appropriate care but would certainly be given heavy medication to keep them docile and quiet. That is now considered a form of abuse. But many people with a severe mental illness, a brain disorder that distorts their thinking and leads to inappropriate actions, usually also have a condition called “anosognosia,” which leads them to think that they are not ill and do not need help. And many civil rights organizations defend the human agency of mentally ill people and protest against their involuntary treatment, even under a court order, and even if that means they will be homeless and scavenge for food, clothing, and shelter.</p>
<p>And at the top of the competence scale, at least in my view, is the person who abuses alcohol and/or mind-altering drugs so that they are temporarily impaired and, perhaps over a long period of continuous use, permanently mentally damaged. Such a person may have the ability to resist the temptation to use their drug of choice, to control their usage, or even wean themselves into a state of continued sobriety. Whether they chose <i>not to</i> exercise that ability—being granted complete human agency—and so decline into disability, or they choose <i>to</i> exercise it and so become a consistently rational and dependable human being, is a question of will and intent.</p>
<p><b>Questions of Hostile Action</b></p>
<p>An unimpaired person may still act in ways that the rest of society deems unacceptable. They may have the use of their conscious reason, but they choose to violate the rules that the larger society has put in place. They defraud people, they abuse others in their care, they steal, they murder, and they disobey the driving laws with harmful consequences. It would be nice if the rest of us could have a frank discussion with them and show why such actions are not to everyone’s benefit—including theirs. But such people, whom we call “criminals,” have a different sense of themselves and their own rights, usually against the rights of others.</p>
<p>It is proper to examine their allegedly criminal actions in a court of law, to give them a chance to explain themselves and show why they should not have been charged or should not be convicted: they didn’t do it, didn’t have complete competency, were under some compulsion, or have other reasons. Our laws are designed to give such people the benefit of doubt. And it is human to give them a chance to make amends and not continue in their previous course of action.</p>
<p>But once a person has proven that giving them complete autonomy and granting them unfettered human agency will only lead to further infractions, then society may be required—indeed must be required—to remove them from commingling with the rest of us. Exile to another country that might be willing to take them—where they will have continued freedom and agency to pursue their interests—is one possible course. Incarceration under punitive conditions, where agency is curtailed and leaving is not an option, is another option.</p>
<p>Whether a person is gravely incompetent or intentionally hostile, restricting their freedom of action and so denying their human agency in whole or in part would not then be a violation of the commandment to preserve human agency. Every rule has its exceptions, and that is what makes human beings the species that has conscious reason in the first place.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. See <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Human_Agency_012923.htm">Human Agency</a> from January 29, 2023.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. WIC 5150 also includes the state of being gravely disabled, which has been interpreted as a person being “unable to provide for his or her basic personal needs for food, clothing, or shelter” due to a mental health disorder or impairment. However, this condition is sometimes subject to interpretation, whereby a homeless person who scavenges in a garbage can or eats roadkill is considered able to provide for his or her food and so is not disabled.</p>
<p class="photocredit">3. This total of 28 days is the basis for most court-ordered drug and alcohol rehabilitation processes under involuntary conditions. To involuntarily hold a person for longer would require a criminal prosecution—and that’s a whole ‘nother court case.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-17605295200366302792023-02-05T09:03:00.000-08:002023-02-05T09:03:01.365-08:00Slightly Aspergic<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>Most human conditions—a person’s physical construction and endowments, their enzymatic and chemical orientation, their innate nature, their reactions and tendencies—are on a spectrum. One person may be mildly reactive to an allergen, which merely causes itching or discomfort. Another can be severely reactive, which causes the windpipe to close down, the autonomic nervous system to pause, and the person to go into shock that can lead to death. And at the same time many of us, maybe most of us, are not affected at all. Almost everything in life is on a spectrum.</p>
<p>True confessions time, I am mildly, slightly aspergic. That means I have—by self-diagnosis, based on my preferences for and reactions to most social interactions—a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome. I sometimes don’t understand what people might want or need, or “where they’re coming from.” I don’t feel anxiety when I have to spend the day alone, cut off from the signals of human companionship. On the other hand, I don’t feel all that comfortable in large parties full of people I hardly know, and I will not willingly walk into a crowd of total strangers.</p>
<p>I remember one of my first experiences of a large-group dynamic. In junior high, which in my town was a mixed junior and senior high school, I was sent along with everyone else into a pep rally for an upcoming varsity game. It was about a thousand kids sitting in bleachers and, prompted by the beat of the marching band and calisthenics of the cheerleaders, screaming their heads off. I was looking around, trying to take it all in. One of my friends sitting next to me noticed this, grabbed me by the shirt front, and yelled in my face, “Scream, Thomas!” And I looked at him in puzzlement and asked, “Why?”</p>
<p>Whatever group dynamic was driving those young people, age about thirteen to eighteen, into a form of hysteria—I wasn’t feeling it. I might have been an anthropologist at a tribal dance—interested in the experience, but not standing up to participate.</p>
<p>This does not mean I don’t understand human nature or the emotions and biases that drive human behavior. I can see things from another person’s point of view—or at least what I think is their point of view, as I may be wrong. But I am not always mindful of their needs and intentions. You might think that this would be a handicap for someone who wants to write fiction about human beings, but the reality is quite the opposite. When I am writing from a character’s point of view, I am simultaneously experiencing and creating something that is totally inside my head. A lot of writers are slightly aspergic: we’re wired into our own thinking. We can also be good communicators, because we can examine a thought process for ourselves, try it out on the imaginary people inside our heads,<sup>1</sup> and then spread it to the world.</p>
<p>Asperger’s syndrome used to be thought of as a separate diagnosis from autism. Current psychological thinking places Asperger’s at the higher, more functional, more “normal”—if you will, and if you are one of those “habitually normal” people—end of a spectrum. And that spectrum runs from the deep end, which marks a debilitating isolation from human touch and communication, such that the child or adult lives totally inside his or her own head and doesn’t even see other human beings as animate, sensing, let alone like-minded creatures, up through various levels of misunderstanding and discomfort, to the shallower end, where we who are “slightly aspergic” fail to pick up on certain social cues, sometimes fail to get a joke, and don’t feel comfortable in crowds full of screaming people.</p>
<p>The point of this mediation is that, unlike certain skills and practices, a more sociable nature or a better tolerance for social situations cannot be trained or taught. This is that innate physical and chemical structure, hard-wired into the brain and not the result of an improper or incompetent upbringing. Being perfectly in tune with social situations is like having perfect pitch. Some people can hear a note and say, “Oh, that’s a D-flat,” or “That’s a C-minor chord.” I can only tell you that one note is higher than another, or that one combination of notes is “a little weirder or more discordant” than another. But no amount of listening, paying attention, or really trying will get me to identify the notes on a piano or violin by their sound alone. I am not wired that way.</p>
<p>Similarly, being mildly autistic or deeply aspergic is a case of brain wiring. An autistic person is not uncaring or unfeeling, or simply not paying attention, or has failed to learn human expression as a baby. They don’t have the wiring to pick up on, or sometimes even be aware of, social cues. They can understand intellectually that other people might have this ability, but they don’t have it themselves. In the same way I can understand intellectually that some people have the skill and coordination to dribble a basketball. But when I try it, my hand gets either ahead of or behind the bounce, and the ball gets away. My brain has a built-in stutter reaction to certain repetitive motions, and that’s hard-wired.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>What the rest of us—and I’m speaking to you “normies” here—have to understand is that the mildly aspergic, and those who are more deeply positioned on the spectrum, are not the way we are for lack of trying, or lack of caring, or because we are stupid. For those of us with full-on, diagnosed autism, it’s like we were born into a world where everyone else is speaking Chinese or Japanese, and we simply don’t know the language. Social interaction is difficult, exasperating, takes a lot of energy, and is terribly exhausting. But even then, if reading human social cues and facial expressions were simply a language that we could learn, we would do so. Instead, they are something hard-wired into the brain, like musical pitch. And on the deeper end of the spectrum, we who are afflicted are simply deaf: we don’t even know that other people are speaking a language at all!</p>
<p>Sometimes autism and the people who are born with it are curiously gifted. Think of the person who has no sense of human interaction but has a phenomenal memory or an ability with numbers—like the main character in the movie <i>Rain Man</i>. It may be that a brain not otherwise occupied with interpreting human social cues is left open to, or has the spare capacity for, pursuits that most people can’t even understand. But it’s not a gift that most of us would want.</p>
<p>As I said, we are all on a spectrum. And “normal” is a very slippery term.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. This imaginary person is what the writer thinks of as the “general reader” or “educated reader”—an imagined synthesis of what the writer believes other people reading his or her words will likely think, react to, and understand. But it’s all in the writer’s head.</p>
<p class="photocredit">2. I tried to join a dragon-boat team once, as part of a corporate exercise. I could stay on the beat with the other paddlers for about five strokes. Then my mind and hands would stutter, hesitate, and miss the beat. I will never be a drummer in a rock band or any kind of performer where staying on the beat is necessary. And yes, because I am six-foot-six, I broke the high school basketball coach’s heart. But there it is.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-15132941999469694912023-01-29T09:52:00.000-08:002023-01-29T09:52:15.758-08:00Human Agency<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>For those of us enamored of the <i>Dune</i> ethos,<sup>1</sup> I have a new commandment to add to the Butlerian Jihad: “Thou shalt not deny the agency of a human being.” This goes along with the broader and more restrictive, “Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” My addition, though apocryphal, completes the thought.</p>
<p>What do I mean by agency? First, it is the ability of a human being to act in all parts of life and includes by implication free will. Humans are free and unrestrained in what they may think, say, and do. This does not mean unbridled. The process of education and socialization that every human child undergoes includes lessons in what is right, proper, and true in thinking—which may vary from culture to culture. It includes lessons, sometimes painful lessons, in what is proper or discreet to say, and in what is right and proper to do. And again, these may vary from culture to culture and from setting to setting.</p>
<p>This commandment also does not imply that other humans may not take exception to the expressed thoughts, spoken words, and actions of other human beings. If one person’s free will and agency leads him to insult another, to break the posted speed limit, or to commit murder, there may be—sometimes <i>must</i> be—consequences. And the intelligent mind will weigh the probability of their occurrence and their outcome in the thinking that goes into speaking and acting.</p>
<p>Things that infringe upon and are an affront to human agency are enslavement and the narrow strictures that may be imposed by church, party, society, and state.</p>
<p>We resent enslavement because our will and our scope of action are denied to us: we can be punished, even killed, if we refuse to follow the orders of others in every aspect of life, even to valuing and caring for our families. Some humans may accept the orders and conventions imposed by the slave master as if they were laws to be obeyed. Sometimes they <i>are</i> laws, written into the statutes of the society that keeps slaves and protects slave owners. But those would then be laws against human liberty and agency, and so in violation of this commandment.</p>
<p>We may chafe under the strictures of a confining religious precept, the bounds of party loyalty, the adherence to social norms, or the laws and regulations of an administrative state that bind us with both demands to speak and perform in certain ways and injunctions on speech and action that we might want to take. With these restrictions of religion, party, society, and government, the threat against free agency is the consequence of being shunned by our co-religionists, removed from the party rolls, outcast from our family and friends, or losing our citizenship and in some cases receiving probation and jail time. We may understand the reasons and the reckoning in these cases, but the limits on our actions still chafe. Ultimately the individual must decide, as above, if the benefits of membership or citizenship are worth complying with the strictures. These conditions would not, however, be a violation of the commandment unless the penalty in all cases was imprisonment or death.</p>
<p>And yet … the religion, political party, social convention, or government statute that imposes too strict a set of conditions for membership must be aware of and weigh the risks it runs: internal revolt, structural revision, or mass renunciation by those who will not put up with the burdens of compliance. Every leader in every situation involving large numbers of human beings must calculate the risks and rewards of trying to impose too precise, complex, or complete a set of requirements on the people he or she intends to lead. Human beings are not puppets. They have eyes, ears, and minds, and those minds make decisions based both on the rules and promises they are given and on the consequences they can determine on their own. That is the fulcrum upon which human agency balances.</p>
<p>Recognition of and respect for individual human agency is the foundation of the principles of free thought, free speech, and free action. Without the one, you cannot have the others.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. See my blog <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Dune_Ethos_103011.htm">The <i>Dune</i> Ethos</a>, from October 30, 2011.</p>
Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-56707944128464678282023-01-22T09:40:00.001-08:002023-01-22T09:40:30.248-08:00Wiggle My Fingers<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>Have you ever thought about what a complex motion that is, wiggling your fingers?</p>
<p>The fingers don’t actually have any muscles to wiggle with. All the action is through tendons that pass across the palm and back of the hand, through the wrist, and up to small muscles, a pair for each finger—one for retraction, one for extension—in the forearm. And each of those muscles needs its own separate neural group in the brain’s motor strip, one for each hand in each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.</p>
<p>That’s quite a lot of mechanism, and we use it in exquisite ways: typing on a keyboard, playing the piano, producing chords on the frets of a guitar and similar instruments, or finding just the right notes on a violin’s fingerboard, and drumming our fingers on the tabletop or arm of a chair when we are bored or nervous. We fiddle with our hair, and we wind or unwind a piece of floss or string. We use our fingers in a lot of ways.</p>
<p>But sometimes the nerves get crossed up. I noticed this recently when performing the third, or <i><a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/3_Shimabuku_Naihanchin_Kata.mpeg">Naihanchin</a>,</i> kata in my karate practice. During this kata, there is a move where the practitioner steps across the body to the right and left sides while throwing an underhanded <i>nukite,</i> or open “spear hand,” palm-up across the body. To be performed correctly, the spear hand must have the fingers pressed together side-by-side and lead with the middle and two outside fingers, like the point of a spear or knife. But lately, when I do this move to the left, those three fingers twitch almost uncontrollably. Almost, because if I think about it, I can hold them steady. But if I don’t think, then they wiggle like eels.</p>
<p>I have also noticed that this almost uncontrolled twitching does not happen when I move to the right, or when I perform the spear hand in a forward thrust with the palm oriented vertically. It also doesn’t occur when I perform the same underhand move in the three opening side stances of the second kata, <i><a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/2_Shimabuku_Seiuchin_Kata.mpeg">Seiuchin</a></i>. Then my fingers remain pressed together and rigid, as they should, or sometimes slightly splayed apart—as the should not—but still stiff. It is only when bringing the hand across my body with the palm up in the third kata, stepping to the left, that the wiggle sets in.</p>
<p>This makes me think there must be something about the underhand move across the body while stepping to the left side that interferes with the nerves controlling those muscles in the forearm. It might be a binding in the neck, shoulder, or elbow. It might be a slight deterioration in the brain. If it were uncontrolled—that is, no effort on my part could keep them from wiggling—I would begin to worry. But for now I will accept that I need to focus my attention on that body part to keep it in line.</p>
<p>As I complete my 75th year—three quarters of a century, wow!—I begin to take note of such things. For about a decade, I haven’t been able to drop down onto one knee and pop back up, as required by several of the katas. I can no longer jump straight up from the floor and simultaneously fake with the right foot low, followed by a high kick with the left foot, before coming back down—as distinctly required in the fifth and sixth katas. (Truth to tell, that move became a hop-skip across the floor more than ten years ago.) Similarly, I keep track of the times I must grope for a word or a name, or the exact details of a memory—which doesn’t happen too often but is distressing when it does. And I sometimes have to take a step to the side, to regain my balance, when walking around a piece of furniture. Small lapses, bits of deterioration, but concerning.</p>
<p>Like all of us, I know that one day this marvelous “meat robot” that I am operating will finally cease moving. The heart will stop pumping, the lungs will no longer expand, and the nerves will begin to go silent. What happens then, I don’t know. Nothing, I expect. The same nothing that occupied this space and this mind before I was born. We are all ephemeral, all mortal, and that has been the human condition since we acquired conscious thought: our minds conceive of infinity and eternity; our body is fragile and finite. And that gives color to our existence.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>And we are none of us the deacon’s “Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” of the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem: made in such a particular way that it lasted one hundred years and a day—and then disintegrated into dust. No, through the wonders of evolution, stem cells, and a functioning immune system, we grow and build substance from the beginning and up until a certain period of our lives, and then that substance is gradually eroded; the pieces no longer fit; the center releases its hold; and whole thing wears away to nothingness.</p>
<p>Hell, it’s a job.</p>
<p class="photocredit">1. I recall a sign I saw in a Facebook meme, I think from a British tattoo shop: “You are a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust. What do you have to be afraid of?” And another quotation, it might have been from C.S. Lewis: “You are not a body that has a soul. You are a spirit that has a body.” And then again, from the Puppeteer explaining their racial cowardice to Louis Wu in one of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” novels about the Ringworld: “We know that we have no undying part.” I am neural-networked software driving electro-molecular and mechanical hardware—and all three phases are extinguishable.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-12946360321116232282023-01-15T09:08:00.002-08:002023-01-15T09:08:42.521-08:00The Beam in Your Eye<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>I was reading about the James Webb Telescope, which was launched into orbit last year at the L2 LaGrange point—a stable orbital position on the other side of the Moon—and began producing stunning images of the farthest stars as well as our own system’s more distant planets. The interesting thing about the JWT is that it views the universe not in “visible light” but in lower and longer wavelengths—called “infrared,” or “below the red”—which we normally feel as heat.</p>
<p>And that got me thinking about what we call the visible spectrum, electromagnetic pulses or photons vibrating with a wavelength between 380 and 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter, abbreviated “nm”). These are the wavelengths that virtually all animals perceive, although some—such as the pit viper—can see or sense in the infrared, and many animals and insects can see a bit into the ultraviolet—or “beyond the violet.” But 380 to 700, going from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo, seems to be the animal standard. After all, most of us walking on or using four limbs on land are related by an evolution that extends back to the stump-finned fishes who first crawled out of the swamps.</p>
<p>But why those particular wavelengths? Why can’t we perceive the world in the longer radio waves and microwaves, or in heat like the JWT, or in the much shorter x-rays and gamma rays? It would be useful to see in x-rays, because then we could look through doors and see who was on the other side.</p>
<p>Then I started to think about the nature of our bodies. Our cells, the components that make up all of our different tissues, are sized between 10 and about 120 micrometers (millionths of a meter, abbreviated “µm”). Just for reference, there are a thousand nanometers in a micrometer. And the rod cells in our retinas are about 2 µm in diameter. Taking about the middle of the visible spectrum, say 500 nm, somewhere deep in the shades of green, that means the cells in our eyes that perceive light are about four times wider than the wavelengths they are encountering.</p>
<p>That seems about right. If the cells were much smaller than the wavelength, they would likely miss parts of it. If they were much bigger, their exposed area would be redundant, and so their resolution—the ability to pack individual light-sensing cells into a given area of the eye’s retina—would be reduced. Smaller light-receiving points equals greater ability to see details, in the same way that smaller pixels in a photograph or on a monitor screen means sharper images.</p>
<p>In evolutionary terms, it is an advantage to be able to see in the same wavelengths as your prey or your nearest predator. Everyone is playing in the same field, so to speak, and no one—except maybe the pit viper or the bee, who are able to see in those outside wavelengths—has a clear superiority.</p>
<p>But the relationship of cell size to perceived wavelength tells me something else. If we eventually meet extraterrestrials, and they are approximately our size and have about the same cellular complexity, they will likely see mostly in what to us is the visible spectrum. If they are very large or very tiny, then all bets are off. But if they are sized about like us, then they will probably see in the same way we do.</p>
<p>And our size has everything to do with the internal composition and radius of our home planet—that is, the acceleration of our particular gravity. Creatures from much larger, rocky, and iron-filled planets with stronger gravity will likely be much larger. Their bigger structure would stand up to the greater pull. Or, conversely, they might be much smaller, flatter, less upstanding, more like starfish than bipedal creatures. Similarly, creatures from smaller, less dense planets with weaker gravity might be much smaller. Or, conversely, they might be larger, taller, and more willowy than sturdy, more like waving grasses.</p>
<p>But if they are about our size, with about our cellular complexity—which in humans numbers about 37 trillion cells of various sizes, but none larger than about 130 µm in diameter, the human egg cell—then they will likely be seeing the same landscape as we do.</p>
<p>And if the extraterrestrials are much larger than us—say, the size of an Ultrasaurus of the early Cretaceous—or much smaller—say, with the size and organization of a swarm of gnats—then again all bets are off. They might still perceive the world in the visible spectrum, but we would likely perceive <i>them</i> as some kind of animal.</p>
Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-59139875326126893282023-01-08T09:43:00.001-08:002023-01-08T09:43:31.889-08:00The End of Locality<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>The Covid-19(20, 21 …) pandemic did it. The industrial world’s response did it. The internet and cloud computing did it. Zoom and other meeting apps did it. And we’re not going back.</p>
<p>And what is “it”? The notion that you have to live in a particular place, travel conveniently to a particular place, and meet in the flesh in order to get anything done.</p>
<p>Many social groups—think of book clubs, discussion groups, and online gaming—have already migrated to the internet. As a result, members can move away from an area and still participate, and they can do everything except share snacks and a glass of wine together. My own wargaming group, which used to meet in person around a table in somebody’s spare room, now includes members in Connecticut, Wyoming, Texas, and New Zealand. And every game has a Zoom component with an overhead camera and an open laptop for extra-local participation.</p>
<p>The internet and cloud computing showed that a knowledge worker—think of accountants, customer service representatives, programmers, technical writers, corporate lawyers, and all kinds of middle managers—can work from anyplace in the country, not just within commute distance of the corporate or local office. The old desire of bosses to see people at their desks to know they were working is now thoroughly eroded. We have measures, other than observing heads and hands positioned over keyboards, to show a person’s productivity.</p>
<p>Even jobs with high-level customer contact, like consultants and big-ticket sales reps, will eventually be done with a minimum of travel and facetime (lowercase, to distinguish it from the Apple communication app of the same name) and maximum delivery by internet connection and online meeting. Soon enough, even the most prosaic of information jobs, like those at the point-of-sale, such as cashiers and checkout operators, will either be performed online—or automated entirely. Right now, checkout in many grocery and warehouse stores is supplemented if not replaced by self-checkout stations. And much of retail has already moved online to services like Amazon.com and to a flurry of web-enabled sellers and supplements to brick-and-mortar retail stores.</p>
<p>In time, the only jobs that cannot be done through telepresence will be those that require a person’s hands to be placed directly on the actual, physical customer—such as radiologists, physical therapists, and dentists. Routine doctor’s visits, tests other than showing up somewhere to give blood or a biological sample (many of which can be sent through the mail), consultations, and almost all forms of psychotherapy can now be done online. Even surgery can be performed remotely using robotics and laparoscopy. And remote robotics paired with artificially intelligent expert systems may eventually take over some of the hands-on work. When that capability is fully developed, even the human knowledge worker may drop out of the system entirely.</p>
<p>Many of the customer-service jobs, especially in finance and insurance, are already handled by artificial intelligences, either as a chatbot on a website or an automated voice on the telephone. The expert system usually works by a combination of menu choices and pre-recorded, spoken commands, and the system only routes to an online human agent when it meets a response it cannot either interpret or fulfill.</p>
<p>One of the many things that will surely change in this future is the way we vote, especially after the claims and lingering suspicions about errors and confusion (and the possibility of fraud) in the 2020 and 2022 elections.</p>
<p>As we learned from the lawsuit brought in 2022 by Kari Lake about the election process in Maricopa County, Arizona, local law there allows citizens to cast their ballots at any precinct voting station in the county, not just in their own hometown. Since every district has a slightly different ballot—accounting for choices among city offices and school boards—each voting station had to stand ready to print out hundreds of different ballot forms to meet the walk-in demand. And on election day, some of the electronic ballots were sized for a different length of paper than what was actually loaded in the printer, so those ballots could not be read by the tabulating machines at the polling station. The result was confusion, photocopying of the voter’s ballot, chain-of-custody issues, and the suspicion of fraudulent intent.</p>
<p>Come on, people! We’re still using <i>paper?</i> And we’re relying on paper information being <i>scanned into</i> to electronic machines? What is this—the 20th century? We’re well beyond that!</p>
<p>When I do important transactions with an institution over the internet, I have a login protocol with a unique password that I have previously established. They still often require me to give the number of my mobile phone—which is personal to me and protected by a passcode or facial recognition software—and then they send me a one-time numeric code to key into the required box. Only then can we proceed with the transaction. If that system is secure enough for banking and insurance business, it should be secure enough for voting.</p>
<p>If we could securely vote over the internet, it would be another blow to the concept of showing up at a particular time in a particular locality. The voting system would recognize you, ensure your identity, provide you with the appropriate ballot based on your primary residence, tabulate your vote, and then lock you out of the system to prevent multiple voting attempts. (Eventually, voice recognition from a previously submitted and verified sample will replace the more complicated passing back and forth of phone numbers and numeric codes.) The voting process will then be accessible from anywhere on the planet and not require you to be present in your home district on a particular day. It would ensure that everyone voted just once. And it would allow the voting period to be extended for, say, a whole month and still have the results tabulated and counted instantly.</p>
<p>By now in the cycle of development, you have probably already met and worked with robots and intelligent systems in a variety of settings, with good results or sometimes not. The process of moving information transfer from face-to-face to face-to-bot will only accelerate in the coming years, as artificial intelligence and expert systems expand. It’s a new world out there, with new protocols for the way we work and interact.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2008771832557942253.post-18109172499389805422023-01-01T09:00:00.000-08:002023-01-01T09:00:40.865-08:00Another Doorway<table border="10" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" valign="top" style="border-collapse: separate; float: right">
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<p>Another trip around the Sun. Another race that’s just begun. And so we pass through another doorway.<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>The past year was pretty good for me. I published one book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Iron-Planet-Thomas-T-ebook/dp/B09XFK7X9G/">Revolt on the Iron Planet</a>,</i> and started two more. Those new novels are progressing slowly, and the pace of my blog postings has also slowed down. I don’t know if this is age creeping up on me or distraction with other events, but it is so.</p>
<p>I dropped, dumped, tipped over—whatever—two motorcycles in the fall, with significant reparable damage to each but no significant injury. I then sold out of my bikes entirely—and almost immediately bought one of them back. So my mind, for better or worse, remains changeable if not malleable. I have come to accept that my continued riding will be a test of my skills, judgment, reflexes, balance, and endurance. And it’s just fun: I come back from each ride relaxed and exhilarated.</p>
<p>I continued to exercise and try to manage my weight. I had no significant health issues, except for a molar with some “resorption,” which means a breakdown in the root dentine that usually calls for root canal. This tooth couldn’t be saved, however; so I had it extracted right before New Year’s Eve and am in line for an implant.</p>
<p>I had no significant attachments or detachments in my personal life. And after my fifth year alone, I still miss my late wife Irene. So I do have some human feeling left, I guess.</p>
<p>What will 2023 bring? And am I ready for it?</p>
<p>The good news is that California seems to be in for a wet winter, and we need the water after several years of drought. The bad news is that my condo complex is coming up on fifty years old, and we have to deal with a number of leaks, both externally because of the rain and internally because of the aging plumbing. But the structure is sound.</p>
<p>The bad news internationally is that, from this perspective, Russia seems determined to continue its war of attrition, destruction, and death against Ukraine. With the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children and indiscriminate murder of adults, the Russian goal seems to be depopulation in favor of occupying a barren land as a buffer against the West. That’s old-style thinking and, also, inhuman. But that seems to be the whisper inside Vladimir Putin’s head. Either Ukraine will disappear, or he will.</p>
<p>The further bad news is that Chairman-for-Life Xi Jinping seems also to be listening to bad whispers. First, he locked down his country to fight a weakened virus—and also to punish economic areas that might defy him. Then, after a spate of protests that did not look to topple his regime, he removed all precautions and opened the borders. The trouble with any system that returns all thought and inspiration to one great leader is that you have no checks and balances if he’s wrong, or delusional, or just plain out of touch. And the correction mechanisms include a lot of bystander deaths. Either Xi will disappear, or China will.</p>
<p>At home, the country remains fairly evenly divided between conservative, populist, traditionalist homebodies and progressive, centrist, daring radicals. Each side of the aisle appears to hold less than 51% or 52% of the seats in the House and Senate and governorships across the nation. Such division can be a useful thing, because neither side can effect crushing change against the other. It is also useful if it forces negotiation and compromise to get anything done. And it can be useful, at least to the traditionalist side, if it keeps the government from undertaking radical changes that half the population doesn’t want. But then, spinning your wheels and hurling invectives that will change nobody’s mind are exercises in wasted energy.</p>
<p>On the economy, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on. We have persistent inflation and a Federal Reserve that is pledging to fight it with the tools at hand—interest rates. But we also have a constrained supply system, chaos in international trade and shipping, a tight labor market, and collapsing retail, housing, and infrastructure sectors … all while the federal government spends more and more of the money it does not have, hampering the Fed’s moves. The stock market, which I watch daily, gyrates between hope and fear, and experts are predicting a deep recession, a “soft landing,” and a bull market in 2023. Nobody knows. And all the adults seem to have left the room.</p>
<p>The failure of one crypto trader, who may have been attempting a Ponzi scheme and might just be a moron, demonstrated to most financial experts that a currency backed by nothing, except perhaps a large and indecipherable number, is actually backed by <i>nothing</i>—and worth every penny. I’ll try a lot of new things in the name of technical advancement; cryptocurrency and day trading are not among them.</p>
<p>The pandemic seems to have morphed into a more transmissible but less severe form. That is the way of all successful viruses: infect as many people as possible, in order to increase the presence of viral particles; cripple or kill as few people as possible, because an incapacitated or dead person cannot spread those particles; and mutate constantly to overcome the tenacious human immune system. This is evolution in action, and the winners of all time are a subset of coronaviruses and the rhinoviruses, both responsible for the common cold: easily transmitted, no more than an inconvenience, and present in everyone’s nose. But we still have some unsettling, lingering effects of Covid-19, including brain fogs and systemic weaknesses. So the story is not written yet.</p>
<p>The whole experience of the pandemic disrupted many of our systems—economic, social, cultural, and political. It closed down vulnerable businesses and advanced the cause of work from home for those whose functions allowed it—think of well-paid knowledge workers as opposed to low-paid service workers. It made people hesitant to gather in large groups, and so changed our habits for meeting in forums and clubs, going to movies, and other social encounters. It ended a bias toward locality: with internet connections and Zoom calls, groups and organizations can now entertain national and even international participants. And the pandemic pretty well changed the voting process, from a single day to show up and mark your ballot in the booth, to a month-long affair of mail-in ballots, chain-of-custody surveillance, and endless squabbles about counting. Some things will go back to normal in 2023 after the pandemic, and some things will remain forever changed.</p>
<p>So the drama continues. Cheers!</p>
<p>1. See my blog from last year at this time: <a href="https://www.thomastthomas.com/Janus_God_of_Doorways_010222.htm">Janus, God of Doorways</a> from January 2, 2022.</p>Thomas T. Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05301172062574925121noreply@blogger.com1