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| 0691127093
| 9780691127095
| 0691127093
| 3.92
| 424
| Jul 02, 2007
| Jul 22, 2007
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it was ok
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A Certain Ambiguity is the story of certain young man spending some time in college, feeling confused about his future prospects, torn between pragmat
A Certain Ambiguity is the story of certain young man spending some time in college, feeling confused about his future prospects, torn between pragmatism and passion. He listens to some jazz, he finds a young miss, he takes a course on Set Theory, and he reads old correspondence from mathematicians, including the court transcripts in which his grandfather argued with a Christian judge about the nature of certainty. The narrative is whatever, it’s just a vehicle to explore certain math and philosophy topics. Basically, the book has some Set Theory (the math of infinity) and also some geometry, particularly the evolution from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry and all the angsty uncertainty along the way. Your average human being doesn’t know a postulate from a pustule, so the book will have a limited audience. However, I - who love and teach math - am among that audience, so the math side of this book was both business and pleasure. I taught myself tensor calculus one summer, so I’ve explored certain topics of non-Euclidean geometry. But I really only did so in order to learn General Relativity. I didn’t bother with its historical development. So I quite enjoyed doing so now, and, if nothing else, knowing the history shows me how my occasional uncertainty and doubt in understanding the math were mirrored by the very creators of that math. As for the philosophy… meh. It’s all about certainty. It’s all about Rene Descartes’ motivation in penning his famous, “Cogito ergo sum”: I am thinking, therefore I exist. Don’t get me wrong, this is an important topic. Before I conceded the impossibility of the task, my original review was a much lengthier mini-primer on the topic. It’s just, honestly, the topic bores me now. I’ve studied Hume’s Problem of Induction; Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem; the many forms of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; the No-Cloning Theorem; etc. The heuristic nature of human decision making and the distinction between possibility and probability are important topics that not nearly enough people know appreciate. But, again I, personally, find it boring. Childish actually. So this facet of the book was a bit aggravating. I mean, the book’s philosophical exploration ends with the concession that absolute certainty is impossible. So… the first and easiest step on a much longer, more interesting philosophical journey. In short, The good: math. The bad: philosophy. The neutral: narrative. And never forget, God hates idiots, also. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 22, 2021
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Mar 09, 2021
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Feb 22, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0465094252
| 9780465094257
| 0465094252
| 4.06
| 3,108
| Jun 2018
| Jun 12, 2018
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really liked it
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There’s a phrase the author Sabine Hossenfelder uses throughout the book that I found initially mystifying: “Physics isn’t math.” I found the phrase my There’s a phrase the author Sabine Hossenfelder uses throughout the book that I found initially mystifying: “Physics isn’t math.” I found the phrase mystifying not because I didn’t understand its meaning but because I didn’t understand its point. It’d be like my writing, “Poetry isn’t English.” Of course it isn’t. English may be the language with which poetry is crafted, but they are not equivalent. Same relationship between math and physics. But so what? The "Poetry isn't English" analogy helped me understand her point - and why this book's quest ultimately fails - because I immediately thought of the poem, "The Jabberwocky." It's one of my favorites. During university, I would sneak out at night and graffiti lines of the poem all around campus. I would only scrawl a few of the lines, but I would return later to the scene of my crime and be delighted to discover other vandals had completed the rest! Anyhow, "The Jabberwocky" proves this point that Poetry Isn't English because only half the words even are English. The poem describes the Bandersnatch as "frumious," a delightful portmanteau of "furious" and "fuming." But other words aren't even combinations! They're just made-up, like the hero's "vorpal" sword. And yet, despite all these made-up words, the poem itself isn't particularly difficult to understand. When I read the first two lines, “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” I imagine this dense virgin jungle, pierced by shafts of brilliant sunlight, filled with exotic beasts rooting about. When I read of the hero who "took his vorpal sword in hand; / Long time the manxome foe he sought," I picture this armored hero, shining black blade in hand, stalking through the jungle, hunting for the Jabberwocky, a cockatrice-type beast. And so on and so forth. It's clear "The Jabberwocky" isn’t JUST its language, but rather what that language refers back to. Without that referent, it truly would be nonsense - and so would all poetry and indeed most language. That’s what Hossenfelder means when she says, “Physics isn’t math.” The math of physics is supposed to refer back to some underlying physical reality. If it doesn’t - or if it's not possible to determine whether it does - then it’s not really physics, is it? It’s just math. So the title Lost in Math refers to her worry that the math of modern theoretical physics has lost that connection with an underlying physical reality, that we’ve entered a “post-empirical” - dare I say post-physical? - era of physics. While this has both philosophical and psychological ramifications, her concern is primarily pragmatic. Because experiments grow more costly, while the number of theories is blooming, we’re faced with a daunting conundrum: how do we decide which theories to test and therefore which experiments to run? Consider the Large Hadron Collider, for example. This project cost over $5bn and, aside from the confirmation of the Higgs boson, has mostly yielded null results. Various commentators look at that price-tag and go, "Wow! That’s a lot of money to spend on something with so little return.” But that’s really missing the point. Sure, $5bn is no small chunk of change, but it’s not like CERN burned that money. It went to the labs and engineering and construction firms who designed and built it. The money circulated back into the economy. When you’re talking macro-economics, the TRUE cost is opportunity cost. Because they were working on the LHC, all those scientists and engineers weren’t working on designing and running different experiments, ones that might’ve yielded more fruit. So this question of choosing which experiments to run and which theories to test is a serious one and one with, arguably, a time limit, in the sense that we need new and improved science to combat existential threats like climate change and meteor strikes. So how do we decide which theories to test? That’s where the book’s sub-title comes in: “How beauty leads physics astray.” Hossenfelder contends - and this is thoroughly confirmed throughout the many interviews she undertakes - that modern theoretical physicists use aesthetic and sociological considerations (i.e. "beauty") to decide which theories are good and which are bad, and therefore which experiments to run. Unfortunately, this definition of "beauty" is outdated, because it's rooted in human experience even though advances in fundamental physics must now occur in realms decidedly outside of human experience (at quantum and galactic scales). Thus, Lost in Math: How Beauty leads Physics Astray is most accurately summarized as Hossenfelder’s personal quest to, first, discover the current definition of "beauty" in theoretical physics; second, to probe why physicists think nature will obey such aesthetic considerations; and, third, to explore alternative approaches. I wrote earlier that she fails this quest, and I’m about to explain why, but I first want to emphasize that this failure is in no way a criticism of the book. On the contrary, it is the quest's abject failure that suggests its importance. By failure, I mean we never get a clear explanation of why top theoretical physicists believe that nature should obey human aesthetic concerns, nor even much of an admission that there's something rotten about such an assumption. Even physicists who explicitly concede the subjective, arbitrary nature of aesthetic standards nevertheless consistently revert to words like ugly and attractive to describe various theories. Further, I consider the quest a failure because we never get much of a sense of how we'd go about fixing this mess, not in any practical way. Hossenfelder's prescription essentially amounts to a section in which she completely shits on philosophers. She calls them "useless", which made me laugh, since it reminded me of my teenage math students claiming math is "useless." They, like Hossenfelder, entirely miss the point that the study of math - and the study of philosophy - is like Cross-fit for the mind: it makes you better at everything else you do. Nevertheless, despite trashing philosophers, Hossenfelder then goes on to suggest that philosophy of science needs to play a bigger role in science. *sigh* That's her first major suggestion. Her second is that physicists need to be more mindful of cognitive biases and sociological influences. *second sigh* That's like if I went to a doctor because I was having persistent headaches and he said, "Well, I think you should probably try to live a healthier life." Gee, thanks Doc. But if you’d told me the nature of this quest and the means by which Hoessenfelder explores it (interviewing prominent physicists), I could have told you it was going to fail in these ways without even reading the book. The most obvious issue is that this question of the aesthetics of physical theories isn’t a question of physics but of metaphysics. As I already wrote, it’s an utterly important question for physicists… but they simply aren’t equipped with the tools to answer it. When it comes to physicists, the author's disdain for philosophy is the norm, not the exception. Stephen Hawking famously wrote "philosophy is dead." As someone who studies both physics and philosophy, I consider this disdain to be incredibly foolish - and Einstein would have agreed with me. Scratch that. Einstein DID agree with me. He himself (rather less famously) credited his reading of philosopher David Hume with his development of relativity. But that’s the reality: Your average physicist knows jack shit about philosophy. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that when Hossenfelder went around the world and asked physicists a question of philosophy, they were incapable of answering it. The more subtle, deeper issue is that she’s coming up against the constraints of human beings. By the end of the book, it becomes obvious that the various physicists' references to the "beauty" or "ugliness" of a theory were shorthand for gut instinct and intuition. Or, more precisely, subconscious assessment. Human beings tend to pride themselves on their possession of consciousness, but modern psychology and neuroscience have correctly marked human beings as largely creatures of the subconscious. This is nowhere more obvious than language. Consider uttering the phrase, “I am reading a book review.” That phrase, even simple as it is, is essentially entirely constructed in your subconscious. What would would it look like if it were consciously constructed? First, you’d have to explicitly, consciously consider what pronoun to use: “I” or “me” or even “you" or "he." My experience is that most people don't actually know the explicit difference (subjective vs objective pronoun case) between “I” and “me," so right away they wouldn’t be able to answer why they’re uttering “I am reading” instead of “Me am reading” (except that it “sounds wrong,” an admission that their subconscious chose the pronoun). Then you’d have to decide what verb to use: “am looking at" the book review? "am understanding" the book review? "am consuming" the book review?! Okay no, for non-blind humans, looking at written language with our sense of vision in order to understand is referred to as "reading." But then why is it "I am reading" instead of simply "I read"? And so on and so forth. Nobody does this. If they did, they’d speak as slowly as Ents. No human can escape the domination of the subconscious. Certainly not physicists. It would be impossible for them to pursue theory-crafting and theory-assessment without relying on their subconscious, which is essentially the storehouse of all their physics know-how. This whole line of reasoning imbues the entire book with an accidental comedic air, as the author keeps asking these physicists to explain, “Why is this theory more beautiful than this other theory?” The question, understood in terms of consciousness, becomes, “Consciously summarize, in a couple of sentences, the subconscious sum total of your life’s experience with physics.” Not really gonna happen, is it? And indeed it does not, in much the same way that many people can read "The Jabberwocky" and develop a remarkably rich interpretation of it, without having the slightest clue what a portmanteau is. But I wouldn’t hold that against the book. I've focused on its core thesis, but it's also just a really good exploration of current problems and mysteries with theoretical/foundational physics, as well as an insider’s look into the culture surrounding those who work on said problems. It's all quite fascinating. I read the whole thing while I suffered from an ear/sinus infection, and it did remarkably well in taking my mind off the pain of my face trying to explode. Which, if you ask me, would make for a most excellent promotional blurb to have on your book jacket. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 15, 2020
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Apr 15, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0241304849
| 9780241304846
| 0241304849
| 4.19
| 11,303
| Feb 20, 2018
| Feb 20, 2018
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it was ok
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A mile wide, an inch deep. It's simple to the point of being erroneous: He'll spend a single sentence glossing over a profound problem that'll take bi
A mile wide, an inch deep. It's simple to the point of being erroneous: He'll spend a single sentence glossing over a profound problem that'll take billions of manhours to resolve. Not to mention some truly stupid claims in here, such as his belief that only human beings (as opposed to other animals) possess an awareness of time. That's incorrect by inspection. And worse - it's boring. It feels less like "The Future of Humanity" and more like "Cliffnotes of the Future of Humanity." You would be vastly better served reading a science fiction book that explores these ideas of interstellar travel, generation arks, AI, etc. The Martian; The Expanse; etc, etc. BUT one major positive is just how much research this book inspired me into. It has a lot of references to real and underway projects. Following up on these was both fun and informative. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 19, 2019
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Dec 19, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0525574468
| 9780525574460
| 0525574468
| 4.36
| 9,116
| Apr 03, 2018
| Apr 03, 2018
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really liked it
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The Road to Unfreedom is a book of two natures - it is a history of modern Russia in the new millennium, but it is also a philosophical framework to h
The Road to Unfreedom is a book of two natures - it is a history of modern Russia in the new millennium, but it is also a philosophical framework to help us make sense of that history. At its broadest, the framework splits political ideologies into two opposing views: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity. The politics of inevitability reminds me of a favorite quote from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children: “optimism is a disease.” That is, the politics of inevitability is the dark side of optimism. It is the naive belief that the future will just sort of work itself out, even if you don’t put much effort into it, if only you stick to basic principles. For example, Americans in the 80s, 90s, 00s embraced the notion that the market will just sort of magically make our economy work. Should we regulate risky mortgage-backed securities? Nah, it’ll work itself out. Should we raise the minimum wage to combat wealth inequality? Nah, it’ll work itself out. Should we impose regulation to halt and reverse climate change? Nah it’ll work itself out. The same can be said for American foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The politics of inevitability suggested that if we replaced these despotic governments with democracy - regardless of the local customs, politics, and history - the situation would magically work itself out. Put simply, because it tells us that progress is inevitable and automatic, the politics of inevitability is the surrender of responsibility. We don’t need policy when we have idealism. We don’t need economic policy when we have capitalism. We don’t need foreign policy when we have democracy. I shouldn’t need to state it, but I will: this is false. Now, earlier, I wrote that the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability constitute “opposing views,” but it’s more accurate to say they are two sides of the same coin. The politics of eternity also involve the surrendering of responsibility, but for pessimistic - rather than optimistic - reasons. The politics of eternity suggest that history is a loop. We have war, then peace, then war, then peace, etc. Or we have political corruption, then revolution, then a brief moment of political integrity, then it’s back to corruption and revolution. Rinse. Repeat. In the politics of eternity, there is no progress and no future, there is only the eternal loop. And because the loop is inescapable, then there is also no meaningful choice. And because there is no choice, there can be no responsibility. This is, so the author believes, the politics we now find ourselves in, under Donald Trump, under Brexit, and under attack by Vladimir Putin and his not-so-merry band of oligarchs. But, one might wonder, what lies between the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability? What is the solution to these dangerous politics? The author’s answer is “history,” an answer which is indicative of this work’s major flaw: the author often demonstrates a lack of precision and rigor in both language and the flow of ideas. What the hell does he mean that “history” stands between the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity? Well a better word than “history” would be “responsibility.” Avoiding the naive optimism of inevitability and the impotent despair of eternity means taking responsibility for history. It means admitting that progress is possible (contrary to eternity) but that is it not automatic and must be actively pursued and maintained (contrary to inevitability). If that more clearly stated idea strikes you as obvious, hinting that perhaps the philosophical framework of Road to Unfreedom is more gild than gold, then you’d be right. I did not find the framework particularly interesting or insightful. Throwing around words like “inevitability” and “eternity” may lend them a certain dramatic aura, but they’re rather precise On the other hand, the historical aspects are top notch. The book covers the last 10-20 years, focusing particularly on Russia and Putin and the fascist philosophers he’s inspired by. It gets into Russia’s audacious invasion of Ukraine - which they denied even as it happened - as well as their attempts to influence the “corrupted” west, particularly Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, as well as the continued polarization and breakdown of American politics. The research here is thorough, exhaustive, and undeniable. As an American in particular, I found the clear parallels between Putin and Trump’s political strategies to be uncannily similar: A) An anti-journalist, anti-truth, anti-reality approach, in which Trump/Putin make or spread obviously false claims, get called on it, and then counter by claiming that the actual truth is “fake news.” The politics of eternity are false, so they can only survive where falsehood thrives. B) The delegitimization of democratic processes (elections and institutions). Putin does so by actually throwing his opponents in jail or simply having fake elections, mere puppet shows meant to create the illusion of democracy. Trump does so by threatening to throw his opponents in jail, by claiming voter fraud where no evidence of such fraud exists, and by attempting to bypass the separation of powers, the goal of which is to destroy or corrupt the institution of US democracy. C) An Orwellian focus on external events (or ‘enemies’) to be defeated. For the last several years, the notion of the West attacking Russia (such as the ‘paid protesters’ nonsense) has been a mainstay in Russian media. In Trump’s case, heavy emphasis has been placed on immigration - first, Muslims and more recently, those from central and south American. It is no surprise (as the book details) that the notion of Trump’s “Build a Wall” actually has its origins in the Russian internet troll operation, rather than anywhere in the US. There’s a purpose to this. The existence of external enemies prevents the citizenry from focusing on domestic policies. D) Spectacle over policy. Distraction is the name of the game, or what the Romans called “panem et circenses.” Distract the populace with spectacle, with “bread and circuses”, in order to control the populace, both hallmarks of Putin & Trump’s media strategy. E) Oligarchy. Putin was trained, groomed, and installed by the Russian oligarchs. Not surprisingly, wealth inequality has bloomed under him. In fact it’s become so bad that it’s actually surpassed, *drumroll*, the United States. Likewise (as assessed by, say, Moody’s Investor Services), wealth inequality has grown worse under Trump, himself an oligarch. And so on and so forth. There’s so much to cover that I don’t feel I’ve done a good job here, but the book does do a good job, providing heaps of detail. And it’s uncanny how similar their approaches are. This leads to one of two conclusions. Either Trump is following his policies specifically at the behest of Russia & Putin or, via a sort of convergent evolution, has independently arrived at a similar political playbook. Neither interpretation inspires much confidence. In summary, the book makes a compelling case that, in no uncertain terms, the West is under attack by Russia. There’s simply no other way to put it. It’s a war of psychology and politics and information rather than tanks and airplanes, but it is a war nonetheless - and the West is losing. The ideals of democracy, equality, and cooperation are losing. If that sounds like something you want to learn more about, you will probably find this book illuminating. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 22, 2019
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Jun 22, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0061988340
| 9780061988349
| 0061988340
| 3.87
| 46,172
| Apr 26, 2011
| Apr 26, 2011
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Jun 16, 2019
not set
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Jun 16, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 1554079373
| 9781554079377
| 1554079373
| 4.28
| 464
| Oct 16, 2009
| Nov 03, 2011
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liked it
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So, I love tea. I first started drinking it when I was younger; a friend and I would brew a cup and then watch Dr. Who. That was our ritual, and becaus So, I love tea. I first started drinking it when I was younger; a friend and I would brew a cup and then watch Dr. Who. That was our ritual, and because of it, tea became associated with friendship, camaraderie, and that special Whovian sense of wonder. Now eventually this ritual ended, but my tea obssession only grew. I’ve accumulated a great deal of tea gear, some might say an excess (but they’d be wrong, of course). I own a cast-iron tea pot, a ceramic teapot, a matcha set, a gaiwan, two french presses, three kettles, and more bowls, cups, and mugs than you can shake a camellia sinesis shrub at. By this point in time, I’ve brewed hundreds of different iced and fermented teas, keeping detailed notes on each. My little black book of tea tecipes is one of my most prized possessions. And then there’s the sheer variety of tea varietals I’ve consumed. At this moment alone, I’ve got tins of six different Chinese green teas from the 2019 spring harvest, as well as a rare ‘purple’ (really white) wild tea; an Iron Goddess of Mercy oolong; a Darjeeling black; herbals like Chrysthanemum and Egyptian-grown hibiscus and lavender; etc, etc. Honestly, I lose track. Point being, I like tea, and I’ve gotten pretty snobbish about it. For example, I live in the southern US and in my opinion, most “iced tea” here would be better described as tea-flavored syrup, given the ludicrous amounts of sugar it contains. Still, my knowledge definitely skews toward the brewing and consumption of it, moreso than its growing, production, or history and culture. So, wanting to know more, I picked up this book, Tea: History Terroirs Varieties. First off, the book is quite beautiful. It’s cleanly formatted and its glossy pages are full of pictures on practically every page, which makes it a great coffee (irony…) table book, especially if your friends are also interested in tea. But when it comes to the actual content, I found it rather uneven. The bulk of the book (pages 36 to 188) is dedicated to the tea regions of the world, including China, Japan, India, Taiwan, India, and one combined chapter for Sri Lanka, Nepal, Vietnam, and East Africa. In addition, there are chapters on ‘the art of preparing tea’, ‘a short tasting guide’, ‘tea in gastronomy’, and a final part on ‘tea and health’ including a chemical analysis. Some of these were interesting, but I’d say a solid half of this book is filler material, of minimal interest even to a die-hard tea connoisseur like myself. First, the Good: *The various history sections and legends were all rather interesting. Learning how India first got into tea, learning where the ‘iron goddess of mercy’ moniker comes from, etc. [If you read my review for Death's End, you can see I was clearly inspired by these legends]. *Manufacturing methods are always illuminating - it’s nice to know where and how the stuff I’m drinking is created. Personally, I drank tea a long time before I knew what, exactly, differentiated a green tea from a black tea from a white tea from an oolong tea. Not to mention, it’s always nice to get a reminder that the tea doesn’t just arrive, by magic, from the aether. A human planted it and cared for it, a human picked it, another human processed it, and so on. In this time of Russia-instigated disunion and discord, I’ll take any reminder that we’re all in this together. *Each regional section contains a selection of that region’s most famous teas. Looking at the pictures and reading the descriptions gave me serious tea cravings! *Sections on local preparation displays the wonderful variety of tea culture (Japanese chado ceremony, the gong fu cha ceremony, the preparation of matcha, etc). Because of this book and other experiences, I purchased a gaiwan, and it’s now my preferred method of preparing tea. *Sections for pairings of cheese & tea, chocolate & tea, and scotch & tea pairing got me excited to attempt such pairings myself. *This was also my first look into the actual farming of tea, so I found that overview to be new and interesting but… And now, THE BAD: *While I enjoyed the overview of farming, the book often got into a level of detail that I can’t imagine anyone outside of actual growers and producers would find meaningful or interesting. Consider this quote describing the ‘southeast region’ of China: “The most common soil type is old clay soil that contains both red and yellow clay. Except in the north of Fujian, the temperature is warm, with an annual average of 66 deg F to 72 deg F, the rainfall is abundant, with 45 to 80 inches annually, and the plucking season extends over a period of 10 months.” Dry, statistical, boring - and they do this for practically every single province or sub-region within every country they talk about. I absorbed exactly zero of these details and can recall none of them. *Each region contains an ‘interview’ with a local tea person. I was excited about these at first, thinking I might get a more human insight. NOPE. They are unimaginably dull. Consider this representative sample about JD RAI, tea producer: How did you start your career in the world of tea? I started in 1984, when I was 24 years old, as assistant manager at the Barnesbeg Tea Garden. Major yawn. Every ‘interview’ is like that. Just straight factual question and answer, without any sense of actual human conversation. Utterly utterly dull. *The end contains a section in which they chemically analyze a tea to discover its caffeine and antioxidant qualities. It’s clear they were well-intentioned, but it’s also clear none of the authors had a firm grasp or appreciation of statistical analysis. Many of the analyses were done with a SINGLE trial - the standard deviation must be through the roof! Which is especially problematic because (for example) by one method the antioxidant concentration of anji bai cha was 1175 micromoles but by another method it was 1800 micromoles. A huge difference that essentially makes the whole thing a wash. *The recipe section is relatively brief (a single recipe for iced tea for example) and also falls into the common trap of skewing towards exotic, hard-to-cook recipes rather than offering more mundane, but more useful, daily recipes. For example there’s a recipe for ‘pork belly braised in pu er tea with chopped jerusalem artichokes and cloves, with a chicory and star anise emulsion’ or ‘scallop carpaccio with marined celery and shittake mushrooms in a chinese white tea broth.’ Which isn’t to say these recipes are bad or particularly difficult. It’s just I don’t see myself actually making any of these and there are so very few. ...But then that’s the nature of this book. It’s meant to be an overview of tea and that’s exactly what it is. It touches on culture, history, farming, tasting, etc but never delves too deeply in any one topic. Furthermore, the writing style can best be described as encyclopedic with a keen absence of style or wit. As a result, Tea: A History (full title) makes for a solid reference book for a tea enthusiast or as a coffee table interactive decoration. But if you’re looking for something with more depth or insight, you’ll want to explore other options. Also I love tea, so if you want to talk about it, leave me a comment! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 12, 2019
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Jun 12, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0465096050
| 9780465096053
| 0465096050
| 4.27
| 3,321
| Mar 30, 2018
| Mar 20, 2018
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really liked it
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In his book Superintelligence, philosopher Nick Bostrom tells a story about an evolutionary algorithm tasked with designing an efficient oscillator. A
In his book Superintelligence, philosopher Nick Bostrom tells a story about an evolutionary algorithm tasked with designing an efficient oscillator. After running through many generations, it eventually presented a “solution” with a strange absence: it had no power source! At first, the engineers declared the design a failure. Upon closer examination, however, they discovered the algorithm had reconfigured its circuit board into a makeshift radio receiver to pick up oscillating signals from nearby lab computers. The circuit then amplified this signal to produce the desired oscillation pattern. It was a solution that certainly worked… but only at that exact location in those exact circumstances. This is an interesting story because it reveals an opaqueness that’s already becoming a major issue in the type of ‘black box’ machine learning that’s become popular recently. Because neural network deep learning or genetic algorithms aren’t ‘rule-based’ like the old expert systems were, their solutions are often beyond the understanding of those who created them. Which is a little worrying. Sure, it’s no big deal that AlphaGo is much better at Go than any of its designers - Go is just a game - but what about future black-box AIs that design governments or medicines - or new laws of physics? In a way, that last one is already true. If you’re not familiar with it already, go read the wikipedia article on Schrodinger’s Equation. It’s very clear it’s a mathematical trick that is quantitatively accurate, but provides almost no qualitative explanation. Indeed, the article admits as much: The Schrödinger equation provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. However, the Schrödinger equation does not directly say what, exactly, the wave function is. What a remarkable state of affairs that is! We don’t even know what it is we’re calculating the values of! It’d be like if I handed you a phone and asked, “How many grozoiacs is this?” You did some math and found the phone was 19.3 grozoiacs. On the basis of that calculation, we knew the phone required 70 watts of power. But… wtf is a grozoiac? And of course, there’s the strange relationship between the equation and waveform collapse caused by a ‘measurement’ or an ‘observation.’ No one actually seems to know what exactly those words mean either. As John Bell asked, “Was the wave function waiting to [collapse] for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer for some highly qualified measurer - with a PhD?” That’s what I mean about physics already being opaque. In a way, quantum mechanics is like a black-box AI system that serves up accurate calculations but whose inner workings remain mysterious. That’s the core idea explored in What is Real?: this weird tension between how incredibly accurate and useful Quantum Mechanics is and how it nevertheless doesn’t seem to help us understand anything. Now, there’s two sides to this book. On one hand, it’s a tome of science history. I have nothing but good to say about this aspect. It’s exhaustively researched and gives a real sense of being ‘in the room’ with physics greats like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. While I found myself a little disillusioned to see these scientific luminaries engage in petty tribalism and stubborn close-mindedness (fool that I am, I expected better), I nevertheless thoroughly enjoyed getting to know these legends more as humans than as mere names attached to equations. And I really do think learning WHERE and HOW equations came about actually assists in understanding them. For example, when I first learned Schrodinger’s Equation, it felt so different than previous math theories and equations. Honestly, for the longest time, I thought I just didn’t get it. I could do the math, but I didn’t know what it meant or how it worked. It felt like magic. Well, after reading this book, it’s clear the very people who created it, didn’t get it either. Knowing that, I see I was pondering the equation in the wrong way. I was trying to decipher a hidden meaning that I thought already existed, when my task should have been more about creating a hidden meaning that has not yet been found. Now I do have some issues with this book. Because, in addition to being a science history, there is a second side: an argument against the Copenhagen Interpretation and its underlying philosophy of logical positivism. While I’m sympathetic to that aim, I was less impressed by how the author went about it. As a quick summary, the Copenhagen Interpretation essentially draws a sharp line between the ‘quantum world’ (if it even admits that such a thing exists) and the ‘classical world’ (the macroscopic world that we inhabit). In this interpretation, quantum systems don’t really have definite, deterministic states UNTIL they are ‘observed’ or ‘measured.’ As I briefly mentioned above, there’s quite a few problems with this interpretation, which is why Einstein himself disliked it. What constitutes a measurement or observation? And is there really such a distinction between the quantum world and the classical world? All objects - a cup, you, me, a measuring device - are themselves made up of quantum particles. Shouldn’t that make them subject to the rules of quantum mechanics too? What is Real? explores these problems in great depth and vivacity, and I’m completely on board in seeing the Copenhagen Interpretation as a flawed or incomplete interpretation that needs to be evolved. However, as I said, I was less impressed with how the author went about making this argument. In particular, he seems to fall into two very common philosophy traps: Major Flaw #1: Absolutism Extreme skepticism is a hallmark of philosophy. Rene Descartes’ famous Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am) represents the only absolutely true statement he thought he could say, at least to begin with. Because he’s thinking, he knows he exists in some form. But everything else? Uncertain. Every sense experience he has might be the result of a deception by some demon. This type of radical skepticism is not only not rare in philosophy, I’d say it’s the norm. To a great many philosophers and thinkers (including, apparently, the writer of this book), unless you can be 100% absolutely certain about something, then you should treat it with absolute skepticism. This is what I call Absolutism, and I find it an entirely ludicrous stance to take, ill-suited to practicing useful philosophy or thought. Consider this passage from the book, which purports to counter the falsification/verification ideas of Karl Popper and logical positivism (that is, that any good scientific theory should be able to be proven wrong): Looking out your window and saying, “It’s raining outside” [would be foolish because it] assumes that your view through the window’s glass gives you an accurate picture of the outside world, and that your eyes are functioning properly, and that the dimmed light and falling droplets are in fact caused by a rain cloud and not an alien spaceship blotting out the Sun and dropping some exotic substance onto your front lawn. Is this a reasonable stance to take? Sure, it’s possible that my window has suddenly become a TV screen or that - despite there never being an alien spaceship before - there suddenly is one now, but if quantum mechanics has given us any one lesson to be applied to normal life, it’s that the question shouldn’t be “is it possible?” but rather “is it probable?” Indeed, the great skeptic David Hume himself acknowledged the silliness of extreme skepticism when he invoked his ‘problem of induction’: just because something happened in the past doesn’t mean it will continue to happen in the future. Because of this, it is actually impossible to state anything with 100% certainty. Therefore, extreme skepticism is simply not a valid approach to philosophy or science. In the final chapter, the author laments - a sadness I share - the disrespect modern scientists such as Stephen Hawking have for philosophy. But is it any wonder they do so, when philosophers seriously suggest that we ought to be skeptical that the raindrops we see and feel are even real? Major Flaw #2: One-sided Pragmatism This is a rhetorical fallacy I witness often. It’s a form of ‘moving the goalposts’, in which a person makes an argument rooted in pragmatism (i.e. that we’re interested in an idea’s practical effects upon ourselves and the world rather than any inherent truth or reality) without considering the pragmatic arguments of the other side. It’s kinda like if my opponent and I are playing a game of tennis, but right in the middle of it, I run off the court and onto a basketball court and slam dunk the ball and say, “Booya, I just won.” It’s like well… that wasn’t the game we were even playing…? Let me give an example. Suppose I’m arguing about the truth claims of religion. Let’s say, Christianity. I say something like, Well we have all these dinosaur fossils. Why aren’t dinosaurs mentioned in Genesis? Did God just accidentally leave that whole epoch out, in His account of the creation of Earth? If He did, or if we must pretend He didn’t by taking a metaphorical approach, doesn’t that constitute a serious flaw in the Bible? To which a Christian might respond, Well, you know what? Sure there’s some mysteries, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to live in a universe in which there isn’t a God, where it’s all just chaos. Believing in God gives me purpose in life. It makes me feel good. This is what I mean about one-sided pragmatism. To avoid the issue, the Christian switched to a pragmatic argument that would be, of course, easily countered by an opposing pragmatic argument: Do you really want to live in a universe created and managed by a God who failed the (relatively) simple task of writing an accurate book? Well the author of What Is Real? does this very thing. He makes various pragmatic arguments about opposing the Copenhagen interpretation & logical positivism not necessarily because they are more true but because diversity of perspective has pragmatically positive outcomes. Which I don’t disagree with. But nowhere does the author then discuss the pragmatic positives of the Copenhagen Interpretation, logical positivism, and the ‘shut up and calculate’ approach to doing physics: they grant peace to the pursuit of science. I sometimes say that one of the big differences between science and almost everything else is that science offers a means of resolving a dispute without resorting to violence. If I say the universe was created by the flying spaghetti monster and you say the universe was created by Yahweh, how can we resolve this dispute? Or if I say that Republicans are ruining the US and you say that Democrats are ruining it, is there any mathematical process or conclusive evidence we can offer to prove our side correct? Well, no. Both of those situations are rooted in natural language, which is rife with ambiguity. As such, there really is no way to resolve our dispute, except by some form of violence. But that isn’t the case with science - at least science when restricted by a logical positivist or instrumentalist perspective. If I claim the Many-worlds Interpretation is correct and you claim the Bohm pilot-wave theory is correct, we actually do have a non-violent means of resolving our dispute. We go to the math and say, Which one of these makes accurate predictions? If they are both equally accurate, then - functionally speaking - there is no difference. We’re both correct, we’re both accurate, until such time as the experimentally testable predictions of our theories diverge. But again, that’s only within a logical positivist perspective. A scientific realist perspective - which the author advocates and which holds that science should NOT merely be limited to math and experimental verification - has a weakness in this regard. From a realist’s perspective, there IS a difference between the pilot-wave theory and many-worlds interpretation, and only one of us can be correct. But since I’ve not restricted my perspective to what can be mathematically, experimentally verifiable, then what means do we have to resolve our dispute? Well, none. Now of course I’m not suggesting that ‘realist’ scientists with competing theories are running around bashing each other with canes or maces, as politicians and zealots are wont to do. But there is something to be said about nurturing a perspective that says we should do our best to restrict our view of the world only to what we can verify and for everything else, let us admit our ignorance. To conclude, I quite liked this book. I’m a firm believer that living in the universe without understanding physics or math is like living in France without being able to speak French. Sure you can get along just fine… but what beauty, what clarity, what meaning will you be missing? In that respect, I consider this book - flaws and all - nothing less than a primer for the Universe, at least as we currently understand it. If you’re at all sympathetic to that perspective, then you’ll probably enjoy What is Real? too. [Note: Though I use the word 'math' a lot in my review, this book doesn't actually contain any and you don't need any to enjoy or understand it] ...more |
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Before I can talk about this book, I need to establish some context. Also I have a bone to pick. So gird thy loins and fortify thy intestines, it’s… P
Before I can talk about this book, I need to establish some context. Also I have a bone to pick. So gird thy loins and fortify thy intestines, it’s… PHILOSOPHY TIME! Prussian philosopher and punctual perambulator Immanuel Kant believed there were two types of faith; for simplicity sake, I’ll call them bad faith and good faith. Bad faith is when you hold a belief whose truth can be tested (in Kantian, it belongs “to the human world of experience”). For example, a primitive tribe on Volcano Island might have faith that their volcano is controlled by Vulcan, God of Volcanoes, and they can stave off eruption by throwing people into it to appease Vulcan. Because – and you probably already know this – human flesh is a delicacy to deities. This is bad faith because this claim can actually be tested. You could keep track of human sacrifices and volcano eruptions and discover there is no correlation between them. Or you could create a theory of plate tectonics to actually provide a causal mechanism for volcano eruptions. On the other hand, good faith is when you hold a belief whose truth is beyond knowing (it exists outside the “human world of experience” or is “supersensible”). Do we have free will? Do we have a soul? Does God exist? Kant would have answered yes to all of these questions, even though he believed it was impossible to know anything about them. When I first encountered this idea, I was shocked, utterly shocked, that so illustrious, so prestigious a philosopher, could create a dichotomy that was so, well, useless. (view spoiler)[ EDIT: I felt compelled, in the interest of intellectual honesty to go back and add in this caveat. Typically, when you encounter something a well-respected genius said and it seems a bit weak, it's because you're misunderstanding what that genius actually said. So I wanted to give Kant his due.(hide spoiler)] Here’s the issue: It’s also impossible to separate *current* mysteries into “sensible” and “supersensible” or between “eventually knowable” and “never knowable.” Let’s go back to Volcano Island. With our current knowledge, it’s obvious the tribe’s belief in Vulcan and human sacrifice was unwarranted. It was bad faith. But let’s remove our current knowledge, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a Vulcanite. Well, if they have shoes. They probably don’t. So let’s put ourselves into the, um, the feet of a Vulcanite? Hrm. Just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Anyway, how could we possibly have known whether or not the truth was discoverable? If we had never heard of record keeping or statistics or plate tectonics, how could we know these tools could be used to prove or disprove our belief in the vulca-inhibitory efficacy of human sacrifice? Do you see the issue? It’s all well and good to claim the unknowability of God or the soul or the composition of distant stars. They’re supersensible. Their existence and traits are unknowa—HUH? WHAT’S THAT, YOU SAY? We DO know the composition of distant stars?! So you mean French philosopher Auguste Comte was wrong when he wrote in 1842, “We can never learn [stars’] internal constitution… or anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure”? Whoops. Oh and Einstein was wrong in 1934 when he wrote that we will ever know how to harness nuclear energy? Whoops. And ad nauseam, all the way back to some cave man who figured no one can know why we feel hot or cold or what makes fire work. Nothing to it but to freeze. That’s the issue with ever claiming something is supersensible/unknowable. HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?! By definition, we must know NOTHING about a thing ‘beyond human experience.’ That includes even knowing whether that thing is ‘beyond human experience’ or not. (view spoiler)[You get into even deeper issues with this specific application toward God. If we can’t know anything about God then… how do we decide WHICH God is the real one? Do I follow the rules of Islam? Christianity? Hinduism? Pastafarianism? (hide spoiler)] Now I’m not trying to make the point that Kant is wrong. The soul and God and free will might truly be beyond the human experience. Rather, I would suggest there are practical reasons to oppose such a viewpoint. If our goal in life is to uncover truths about the world and ourselves, so that we might arm ourselves to do battle against chaos and entropy and death, we must confront every mystery as if it is solvable. If we were to simply throw up our hands in surrender, call a thing ‘beyond human experience’, then we would get nowhere. Now, what does this have to do with this book? Well to many people, consciousness belongs right up there with God and the soul and the like. But the author would very much be on my side (he address Kant several times throughout, and always with dismissive scorn). Indeed, the very purpose of the book is to provide a theory for taking consciousness out of the realm of the “supersensible” and into the realm of human experience. Philosophers often talk about the ‘hard problem’ and ‘easy problem’ of consciousness. I struggle to even explain the hard problem because it’s so vague it feels like it was formulated by an angsty teenager. Like, bro, nobody gets me. My soul is just different, man. It’s like my soul is blue and everyone else’s is green. It’s like when I see a rainbow, I see the universe. And everyone else just sees some colors. Why is that, huh? Explain me that! But I’ll try. The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is the difficulty of explaining why physical processing creates an inner sensation of an experience or a feeling or ‘qualia.’ Why is it that when some photons of a certain wavelength strike my eye, creating an electric impulse along my retina, leading to a cascade of neurons firing somewhere in my brain… why does this create a conscious experience of the color green? Why is it when, say, a light detector goes through similar physical processing, it has no such ‘feeling’ of the color green? This is in contrast to the ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, which involve mechanical abilities of the brain & consciousness, (current) mysteries like how we focus attention, or bind together disparate information into a singular cohesive experience, or how consciousness controls behavior. Now I’m by no means an expert on consciousness, but I have read a lot and had quite a few discussions with dualists who believe in the hard problem. And I’ve come to the conclusion that this hard/easy problem dichotomy can be better formulated as such: “Even when you explain everything to me about consciousness, I’m still going to claim you haven’t explained it.” In other words, the “hard” problem is really just a classification of consciousness as a supersensible phenomenon. In other words, it’s a largely useless classification. As author Michael S. A. Granziano says, it’s not a “hard” problem, it’s an “impossible” problem. So the author does spend some words addressing some of these larger philosophical contexts, but for the most part he considers it fruitless to try to tackle an impossible problem. Instead, the book is about him putting forth a mechanistic explanation for consciousness called The Attention Schema Theory. As he says, it’s not hard to explain the theory itself. It can be put in a sentence: Awareness is a description of attention. In other words, our awareness (consciousness = awareness + information we aware of) is a way for our brain to tell us what we & other creatures (hence the 'social brain' part of the title) are paying attention to. Now if the theory only takes a sentence to describe, what else in the book? Well, also as the author says, explaining why it is a good theory, and how it meshes with existing evidence, is much more difficult. And that’s what fills the remainder of the pages. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. For starters, Granziano begins with an approach that’s opposite to the usual tack. Most philosophers / scientists / etc ask the question, How do we became AWARE of sensory information? Sure our eye processes the green photons of the green apple, but how do we become aware of it being green? The author, however, considers the problem from the opposite direction. We know, for certain, that we are able to report awareness: “I am aware of the greenness of the apple.” That action – speech – requires information sent to the speech parts of my brain. Instead of asking, How does information get translated INTO awareness?, the author asks, How does information get translated OUT OF awareness? From that starting point, he explains his Attention Schema Theory and runs it through the gauntlet of neurological studies and opposing theories of consciousness. What are the issues with current theories and how the attention schema theory fix them? What parts of the brain might calculate this description of attention and how might damage to these parts result in a loss of awareness? He even spends a final chapter titled ‘Spiritual Matters’ to discuss what his theory might say about ghosts, God, the simulation theory, and so on. The chapter has quite a few issues with it – but it was interesting nonetheless. So the theory’s interesting, at the least. But is it any good? Now, I’m picky about theories of consciousness. I’ve found most of them so lackluster I eventually just constructed my own. Well, the Attention Schema Theory satisfied me. It doesn’t contradict any of the qualities of consciousness that I *know* exist, such as signal amplification, behavioral modification, etc. I don’t think the theory is 100% complete, of course. It’s more like the beginning of a promising path. For example, I’m reasonably certain consciousness involves the existence of long neurons woven throughout the brain, neurons which have been found to exist, about which the author says nothing. And he doesn’t get much into how different sensory inputs get bound into a single unified experience (not surprisingly, then, he fails to mention the claustrum, which has been recently shown to be deeply connected to consciousness). So there’s some gaps. But what he does include makes sense. It’s logical. It’s not contradictory, either to itself or to current neuroscience knowledge – at least that I’m aware of. More importantly, it’s explanatory and testable. Most importantly, tasting the theory, chewing it over, discussing it, provides some insight into important questions about the nature of our experience as human beings. It is for that final reason, more than any other, that I consider my time reading this book to be time well spent. If you're the type of person who believes Socrates was on to something when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living," I imagine you will feel much the same. *Special thanks to Richard, for recommending the book. ...more |
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| Apr 03, 2018
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really liked it
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“We’re all gonna die,” whispered the young knight next to me. Twenty seven thoughts raced across my mind. First, knights weren’t as advertised. Did thi “We’re all gonna die,” whispered the young knight next to me. Twenty seven thoughts raced across my mind. First, knights weren’t as advertised. Did this one really use the word ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’? And what about this contraction ‘we’re’? I would’ve been expecting something like, “We shall all perish!” Pfft. Dissapoint. Second, I hadn’t had my breakfast, and I’d always sworn not to die on an empty stomach. Third, I suddenly realized that stars were basically transmutation machines… did that mean stars could be considered philosopher stones? The other twenty four thoughts involved a menagerie of cat gifs, black holes, machine learning, and other such miscellanea. But most importantly, one of them involved a plan. I stepped forward to the Bridge of Death, before this wizened creature who had ejected several previous knights over the edge. In his craggy voice, he challenged me: “Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.” Plan in mind, I boasted: “Ask me the questions bridge keeper, I’m not afraid!” “What is your name?” he spoke. “Sir Erik, of Goodreads.” “What is your quest?” “To write thoughtful, yet entertaining book reviews, for the titillation and cogitation of my fellow Knights of the Round Library.” “What is your favorite color?” “What do you mean favorite color? Favorite color of an apple? Favorite color shirt? Favorite color of hair? –And would this be the hair color of a man or a woman? And if a woman, what is her age, what is her nationality, and what is her relationship to me? And, indeed, what is my mood upon viewing this hair color – for if in depressive mood, the color must be bright, but in manic mood, it must instead be something earthy to ground me?” The bridge keeper looked at me, confused, and said, [image] And *pooft* off he went over the side of the bridge. Plan: Successful. When my students ask me this question about my favorite color (or some other overly simplistic query), and I offer a similar response to the above, they look at me annoyed and say, “Jeez, why do you have to be so extra?” I look at them with a raised eyebrow and reply, “Why do you have to be so simple?” # If there’s any one theme to Factfulness, it’s this: Neither people, nor the world, are simple. So don’t treat them as simple. Instead, learn to see and embrace the complexity in both yourself and the world at large. In particular, Factfulness aims to disabuse readers of the simplistic notion peddled by the media (news, film, TV), politicians, and even well-meaning activists that the world is far worse than it is and is getting worse. It isn’t. Point in fact, human civilization – on average – is probably the best it’s ever been. Yes, ever. Chances are high, if you’re reading this, you live in a part of the world experiencing a golden age of peace, technology, and plenty. The way Factfulness accomplishes this is by (essentially) advocating for a scientific mindset that relies on data rather than instinct. Specifically, Factfulness identifies TEN instincts (or biases) that lead us astray. These are… The Gap Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to polarize categorization (aka the fallacy of false dichotomy). Good or evil. Rich or poor. Correct or incorrect. In reality, most things fall somewhere in the middle. The Negativity Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct, which was evolutionary useful for survival, to find negative events more dramatic and interesting than positive ones. And thus our news and stories tend to be skewed towards the negative rather than the positive. Good business, maybe, but not an accurate depiction of the state of humanity. The Straight Line Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct, what David Hume once invoked when he discussed his famous Problem of Induction, to assume that past trends continue into the future unchanged. However, this is false. The world is always changing, and majority of trends are best modeled with non-linear curves. The Fear Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to magnify the dangers of the things we fear and minimize the dangers of the things we do not fear. For example, in the US, terrorism has resulted in 3,662 deaths in the past 36 years – or about 100 deaths per year. On the other hand, traffic accidents result in 40,000 deaths per year, or 400 times the deaths due to terrorism. So why this weird conservative push to ban immigrants from terrorism hotspots? If safety is our goal, wouldn’t it make way more sense to ban immigrants from countries with poor driving records? The Size Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to think we understand numbers better than we do. In particular, single numbers are far less useful than rates. For example, did you know that India puts out 1.6 BILLION tonnes of Carbon per year? That’s 320 million elephants worth of carbon! Clearly, India is problematic when it comes to climate change. But are they? India’s carbon usage PER CAPITA is only 1.2 tonnes. The US carbon usage is fifteen times that, at 16.6 tonnes per capita. So between these two countries, who really should be expected to reduce their emissions? Who shares a greater blame for climate change and needs to lead the wold by setting a better example? [On this note, I would direct anyone serious about doing their part to UN's Climate Neutral Now program. Choose to be the hero, not the villain.]. The Generalization Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to create excessively large categorizations or draw conclusions from insufficient data. We might well call this the ‘-ism’ instinct, as it’s responsible (with help from confirmation bias) for maintaining racism, sexism, and all the other -isms of the, um, I was gonna say rainbow but somehow that doesn't fit... what's the opposite of a rainbow? A big pile of unicorn turds? Yeah. That'll do. The Destiny Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to view the world as unchanging, or destined to be the way it is. For example, many Westerners assume Africa is somehow destined to be a war-torn, impoverished continent. Not so. By the middle of the century, Africa will almost certainly house some of the fastest growing economies – and business people would be fools to miss the investment opportunities. The Single (Perspective) Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to extend expertise beyond its domain or to assume that just because a solution worked in one instance, it will therefore work in all. For an example of the former, take this quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children.” Now I like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but he's an astrophysicist and I'm pretty sure child psychology isn't part of the astrophysics curriculum. Maybe he's right, maybe he isn't. But there is absolutely no reason to believe any part of that quote just because he's a celebrity scientist who knows a lot about astronomical phenomena. P.S. He isn't right. The only adults I've ever seen who limit the creativity of children don't do it unwittingly. They do it on purpose, and often for the best of intentions. For example, parents teach their children they cannot leap off a building and fly away like a bird. Generally, this is a good thing to know: human beings don't fly with our bodies, we fly with our minds, as true of adults as it is of children. The Blame Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to assign blame (or credit) to individual people or initiatives. For example, many US voters vote out (or in) a president on the basis of the health of the economy. In reality, the president has little to no control over it. The systems of our civilization are ultra-complex and interconnected, and they function (or fail to function) because of the deeds of the many, not the few. The Urgency Instinct: This is the simplistic instinct to believe quick action is better than no action. In reality, and to borrow one of my favorite quotes, “The easiest way to do something is properly.” Taking the extra time to do something right is nearly always the best way to do it. And those are the ten instincts, each of which has its own chapter. Obviously, Factfulness goes into far greater detail, and each chapter is further spiced up with interesting charts and graphs, as well as anecdotes from the author’s time as a doctor and a lecturer. Now I'll be the first to admit I'm not a huge fan of non-fiction. Too often, I find it lacks voice, which makes the reading experience rather sterile. Not so here! There’s a distinct feeling of the author speaking to you, personally, and he’s not afraid to reveal his own fears and motives. Because of this, Factfulness manages that fine line between informative and entertaining, making it a light yet thought-provoking read. On the other hand, I would be failing Factfulness's affirmation of complexity if I let its flaws pass without comment. For example, the book begins with - and is structured around - a questionnaire meant to demonstrate the average person's ignorance of the world, but some of the questions are suspect. Here’s one: “Where do most of people live in the world?” [A: Low income countries B: Middle income countries C: High income countries.]” It’s a problematic question because the definitions of “low” / “middle” / “high” are ambiguous. Are they being defined statistically along a normal curve? That can’t be, because that would make the question pointlessly tautological: the answer would, by definition, be 'middle.' So how are they being defined? The author claims the “correct” answer is B – but relative to basically anyone reading the book, the real correct answer is A. Because how he defines “middle” income, as $2/day to $32/day is AT ITS HIGHEST ($11500 a year) below the poverty line for higher income countries – which is how the vast majority of respondents would define low income. In another example found within the Urgency Instinct chapter, the author makes a rather poignant confession. He admits to panicking and instituting a quarantine that causes a group of accidental deaths, the results of which he witnesses first-hand. He realizes he's to blame and thinks he made the wrong call. In fact, he's engaging in a bit of hindsight bias. Easy enough, looking back after he learns there was no actual need for the quarantine, that he should have chosen otherwise. But in the moment, with the information that was available? He chose to play it safe, and that was probably the best decision. I daresay most readers, unburdened as we are by any sense of guilt, would agree. This muddies the chapter as a whole. It's important to realize that it's true that many bad decisions are made because "leaders" are trying to avoid the appearance of inaction. But it's also important to realize that essentially every decision you ever make will be made with incomplete information and that there truly do exist situations in which doing nothing is the worst thing you can do. These are of course not the only do issues the book has, but there really aren't that many other flaws. Even with the rare stumble, the author makes a clear, intelligent, humble case that most of us (including leaders and experts) simply don’t have an accurate view of the world. In this age of the internet, globalization, and science, we can and should do better. ...more |
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| 11,170
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liked it
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I read this non-fiction book after reading the fiction book, The Water Knife, which mentions Cadillac Desert multiple times. Indeed, Cadillac Desert c
I read this non-fiction book after reading the fiction book, The Water Knife, which mentions Cadillac Desert multiple times. Indeed, Cadillac Desert clearly served as a major motivator behind Bacigalupi's novel. So I figured, hey let's do a one-two, fiction-nonfiction combo. Okay, so this book is about the water works of the Southeast and the cities and organizations that guided them. Los Angeles, Army Corp of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, etc. It is superbly well-written, with rich detail not just about the projects and politics but the people behind them. And yet I reached a point that I just couldn't pick it up and read anymore. In fact, I'm retiring this book at only about 60% completed. The problem is that it is relentlessly negative and cynical. It's entirely deserved, mind you, but the sheer and ceaseless inundation of greed, corruption, and ignorance depicted in the politicians and leaders behind the American southwest's water policy became too hard to swallow. I'm not naive, and I absolutely loathe the phrase 'ignorance is bliss.' But honestly, ignorance is bliss. I eventually realize the value of the knowledge gained was less than what I was losing in disgust and distaste for my fellow human beings. I'm happy I read what I did, for this was a topic on which I was wholly ignorant. But I'm also quite happy I stopped when I did, for the book's themes become entirely repetitive and redundant. ...more |
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Dear Goodreads Father, forgive me, for I have sinned: I love video games as much as I love books. It's true, I put them on an equal level. I know it i
Dear Goodreads Father, forgive me, for I have sinned: I love video games as much as I love books. It's true, I put them on an equal level. I know it is blasphemy, but I cannot help this corruption of my heart. Truth is, I love anything with a story, no matter the medium. Film, TV, books, video games, the secret hearts of strangers... But, yes, video games, the newest and most immature of these media and therefore the one with the most room for growth. I have been there from nearly the beginning and have watched it bloom from pixellated graphics, childish themes, and simplistic mechanics to what we have today, a verdant garden of diverse flowers, some merely a joy for the senses to behold but others a newer, more active exploration of humanity. I've watched the culture of gaming grow too. I remember the days when being a gamer made you a GEEK (that is, a NERD). TV & film invariably depicted gamers as ultra-nerds and outcasts (think Stranger Things’ depiction of the kids). They weren’t wrong, exactly, but still, what made this hobby of mine inferior to the hobby of people gathering around a TV to watch grown men toss around a ball? I didn't know and, for me, gaming felt a secret shame. I remember, too, the first time I played an online game, in the late 90s. My uncle showed me a WW2 airplane dog-fighting game, and it blew my mind! People from all over the world connected to play with each other in real time, to engage together anonymously in this secret hobby. In that moment, in my mind, the world was made irrevocably smaller. Ever after, I found the idea of borders and countries rather quaint. I could feel no hate, no out-group bias, toward those of other countries, for such distance was but a light-speed hop and skip through the fiber optic nerves of the Internet. Point is, I’m a huge fan of video games, so I thoroughly enjoyed Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which gives a concise but intimate peek into the development and developers of some of the most popular games of the past decade. It’s all too easy to forget that behind these fantastical, otherworldly creations are artists who have sacrificed heavily to turn their vision into reality. That’s probably why my favorite chapters were about the indie teams or studios, like those behind Shovel Knight, Stardew Valley, and Pillars of Eternity. Their stories are all inspiring triumphant under-dog stories. This is especially gratifying to me because I backed (on Kickstarter) the original Double Fine Adventure, despite absolutely hating adventure games, *solely* to demonstrate the viability of developer studios making games independently, without a publisher. The democratization of game development, if you will. So it was highly pleasing to me to read how Obsidian was inspired by the success of DFA to make their own Kickstarter for the isometric cRPG, Pillars of Eternity. Kinda feels like I helped make that possible, y’know? With that said, I don't think any particular knowledge or engagement of video games is necessary to understand this book, as it’s written quite simply and many video game terms and systems are explained for those who may not know them. At the same time, there's no denying that a familiarity with video games does help one appreciate this book. For example, one of the chapters is on Diablo III, and this chapter focuses heavily on the RMAH (Real Money Auction House). Before release, myself & others lobbied Blizzard to remove this system from their game because it would create a conflict-of-interest: the designers would need to make loot sparse and unsatisfying, in order to funnel players towards the RMAH. You never want that - adding tedium and inconvenience, just so people will pay to avoid it. That's bad design. Maybe even unethical, in its exploitation of people's addictive tendencies. Of course, Blizzard ignored us. And surprise, surprise! we turned out to be correct, and the RMAH was eventually removed, a process that is touched upon in this book. So I have a lot of history that made reading this book a bit like seeing Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. In summary, it’s easy to recommend this book to anyone who is a gamer, whether they’re specifically familiar with the games or not (There’s ten chapters/games: Diablo 3; Destiny; Witcher 3; Halo Wars; Uncharted 4; Shovel Knight; Star Wars 1313; Pillars of Eternity; Dragon Age: Inquisition; & Stardew Valley). For those who aren’t gamers, it’s still a light, humanizing read about an industry that is swiftly becoming a juggernaut and may even one day become the King of Story. ...more |
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Do you know the ballad of John Henry? It’s my absolute favorite tall-tale. John Henry was a railroad worker – a steel-drivin’ man – who hammered steel Do you know the ballad of John Henry? It’s my absolute favorite tall-tale. John Henry was a railroad worker – a steel-drivin’ man – who hammered steel pistons into rock to make holes for dynamite sticks for tunnel blasting. He took great pride in his work, but one day, some fancy schmancy inventor showed up with a steam-powered drill. John Henry knew the adoption of such a machine would mean the loss of his and his friends’ jobs, so he challenged the drill to a race, mano a máquina. With a song on his lips, John Henry drove steel for hours without rest and when at last he reached the finish line, he looked back and saw that he had indeed beat the machine. With his sledge hammer still in hand, he then immediately died, for he had given all, and his heart had burst from the effort. I like the story because, well, first because as a math teacher, I constantly undertake mental math races against my students using their calculators. When I (usually) win, I give them an imperious pointing and thunder, “HOW DO YOU LIKE DEM JOHN HENRY’S, YOU COCKLE-BURRED COCKATRICE?!?!?!” When they stare at me in stupefaction, I can only shake my head in second-hand shame. Youngins’ these days. Why know, they all seem to believe, when you can find? Anyway, more to the point, it’s also my favorite tall tale because it’s a prescient depiction of the contest between man and machine. Sure, humans possess a greatness that allows us to sometimes beat the machines – but such an effort always enacts a price. More recently, another John Henry battle took place involving the ancient board-game Go. This is especially significant because Go was long considered too complex for a machine to master. Mathematician IJ Good (oft-cited in AI texts for coining the phrase ‘intelligence explosion’) wrote in 1965: “In order to programme a computer to play a reasonable game of Go, rather than merely a legal game – it is necessary to formalise the principles of good strategy, or to design a learning programme. The principles are more qualitative and mysterious than in chess, and depend more on judgment. So I think it will be even more difficult to programme a computer to play a reasonable game of Go than of chess.” Indeed the difficulty was great, for while IBM’s DeepBlue defeated Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, it took another twenty years – in 2016 – for the first serious match between an AI and a Go world champion. Google’s AlphaGo AI utilized cutting edge technologies: custom tensor processing units, a Monte Carlo search tree, and machine learning implemented via a neural network. Thus armed, AlphaGo played millions of games against internet players and different versions of itself to learn and “reason” about the game. That is, no one programmed AlphaGo’s strategy. They programmed it to learn how to create its own. If AlphaGo was the steam-drill in this modern John Henry match, then Lee Sedol was its John Henry. With the grandmaster-equivalent rank of 9dan, Sedol was estimated to be the 4th best Go player in the world. Before the match, he said the challenge for him wasn’t whether he’d beat AlphaGo, but whether he’d beat it 5-0 or 4-1. The very first match, AlphaGo makes him eat his words as it handily defeats them. Lee Sedol is not cowed, however, and he revises his chances of winning subsequent matches to 50%. In the second match, AlphaGo plays a move that its human trainer Fan Hui calls, “Beautiful.” He adds, “I’ve never seen a human play this move.” AlphaGo calculated that humans would make that move at a probability of 1 in 10,000. But it decided to make the move anyway. It’s so unexpected and so genius that Lee is utterly flabbergasted by it. He gets up and walks out of the room. When he comes back, Lee plays his best, and loses. He says afterwards, “Today I am speechless. If you look at the way the game was played, I admit, it was a very clear loss. From the very beginning of the game, there was not a moment in time when I felt I was leading.” Game three Lee loses as well, and Go commentor David Ormerod says that watching the game makes him feel “physically unwell.” Lee Sedol apologizes after the match, saying, “I kind of felt powerless.” His friends comment that Lee is “fighting a very lonely battle against an invisible opponent.” In game four, Lee plays a move the commentators describe as “hand of God.” It was an unexpected move, one of those 1 in 10,000 probability tactics, that AlphaGo failed to predict. This “divine” move leads to Lee’s only win (he loses the fifth). Despite his victory, Lee says: “As a professional Go player, I never want to play this kind of match again. I endured the match because I accepted it.” I’m pleased that this book Superintelligence led me to this most recent John Henry match [Interesting note: Nick Bostrom wrote Superintelligence BEFORE AlphaGo and he predicted that it wouldn’t be until 2022 that a machine AI would beat a world champion at Go]. I like this story – and the human drama surrounding it – for the same reason I like the original John Henry story. It is a harbinger: Machine AI is coming and will overtake humanity. Maybe not as soon as we fear. But probably sooner than most of us think. And sooner than we’re ready for. Already it is replacing human jobs at the factory – a trend that Donald Trump mischaracterized to ride a populist wave to become POTUS (it’s estimated that about 15% of American manufacturing jobs were lost to other countries, the remaining 85% was due to automation). It is replacing doctors in the diagnosis of illness. It is replacing taxi drivers. It is composing music. There’s a hotel and a restaurant in Japan that is staffed almost entirely by robots. That is just the beginning. I’m an aspiring sci-fi writer, but I expect in my lifetime to see even this final bastion of human creativity to be overtaken by AI. What will we think when an AI-written short story wins the Hugo and the Nebula? In Superintelligence, however, Nick Bostrom is concerned with a fate more dire than unemployment: He’s worried about extinction. He makes the compelling case that if designed and implemented incorrectly, Artificial Superintelligence constitutes an existential threat. This shouldn’t suggest that Superintelligence is dramatic, however. Bostrom’s aim is not to entertain or titillate. Rather, like most philosophers, his modus operandi is to transmute the vague into the precise, the murky into the clear. In this case to move beyond terrifying, but nebulous, images of Skynet and VIKI and begin to lay a more concrete foundation to have meaningful conversations about how to realistically develop Friendly AI. He begins by discussing our current capabilities and the paths to superintelligence: Whole brain emulation; a genetic programme that will increase humanity’s collective biological intelligence; and artificial machine intelligence. He makes the compelling claim that regardless of which of these comes first, it will eventually lead to a machine super-intelligence. Next he discusses the logistics of the actual development of such a superintelligence. Primarily he’s concerned with predicting whether the transition between artificial HUMAN-LEVEL, or “General”, intelligence to an artificial SUPER intelligence will be slow, medium, or fast. He makes the case that it will likely be a FAST takeoff. This is problematic, as this gives us very little time to grapple with the control problem – that is, the seeming insurmountable challenge of a lesser intelligence (us) controlling a greater intelligence (the ASI). He asks the question, “Is the default outcome doom?” and begins to look at various malignant failure modes. For example, he gives several examples of perverse instantiations, in which we give the ASI a goal that seems benign enough: Final Goal: “Make us smile.” Perverse Instantiation: Paralyze human facial musculatures into constant beaming smiles. Final Goal: “Make us smile without directly interfering with our facial muscles.” Perverse Instantiation: “Stimulate the part of the motor cortex that controls our facial musculatures in such a way as to produce constant beaming smiles.” Final Goal: “Make us happy.” Perverse Instantiation: “Implant electrodes into the pleasure centers of our brains.” You see the problem? It is foolish to anthropomorphize an AI. It is foolish to assume it will possess human “common sense” and understand our true, rather than literal, meaning. Rather, it is best to treat ASI like it is a spiteful genie or a monkey’s claw, which will fulfill our wishes literally, in as efficient a manner as possible, which is usually not what we want. So what is the solution? One of the current leading value expressions is given by Friendly AI supporter, Eliezer Yudkowsky and is known as “coherent extrapolated volition.” It is defined thus: Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted. As that fancy language may suggest, this book is not for the philosophical philistine. It demands, amongst other things, an almost robotic pursuit of truth and reality, unbiased by our human foibles and biases. It demands further an understanding of why we must pursue a love affair with precision. You should understand the need for formalizations [e.g. Bostrom says that “an optimal reinforcement learner will obey the equation Yk = arg max summation: (Rk + … + Rm)*P(y*Xm | y*Xk*Yk), where the reward sequence Rk, …, Rm is implied by the precept sequence Xkm, since the reward that the agent receives in a given cycle is part of the percept that the agent receives in that cycle”]. Although such formalizations are optional to the text and shouldn’t frighten you away, they demonstrate the underlying obsession with precision. When dealing with a nigh-omnipotent genie, getting the words “almost right” is not enough. They must be exactly right. Thus, if your response to formalization is, “Eff these philosophers and their gobbly de gook. They’re just trying to be fancy!” Then you really don’t get it and you should ponder what Bertrand Russell meant when he said, “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.” Beyond an appreciation for the weaknesses of language, you should also have experience grappling with morality and ethics systems. If you believe, for example, that the Ten Commandments are the height of a moral code, then reading this book would be like a kindergartner attempting to take calculus. You should appreciate the difference between probability and possibility. You should possess an unromantic view of humanity and be cognizant of the fact that what we think we want and claim we want is probably not what we want. For example, it may seem uncontroversial to suggest that world peace is a good thing. BUT IS IT REALLY? Have you really thought about what an actual, real world peace would demand of us and what its consequences would be? War, after all, is a force that gives us meaning. As every single writer could tell you, conflict is the core of all narratives. Can we give it up? Do we truly want to? Or as another example, is slavery bad? This seems CERTAIN. But what if the slave were mentally designed to enjoy his work and if his work were meaningful, such as, say, designing a spaceship? Suppose this mental slave had its memory erased every 24 hours and was reset back to its original state, so it could work optimally forever? Would this be bad? Why? To truly appreciate what Bostrom is trying to accomplish in Superintelligence, you should have some familiarity with such topics. Otherwise, it’ll be like jumping into the deep end of a pool without first starting in the shallow end. You will not enjoy the experience. But if you DO have a familiarity, then this book will continue to test and hone your beliefs on AI, morality, humanity, and so much more. Such cognitive sharpening is important, if you do not want to be left behind in the future. We need to begin pondering the AI problem NOW because – and make no mistake what doubters may claim – we are deep in the machine age. The development of Artificial Super Intelligence will be the great work of our time and indeed, of all time – but ensuring it will be not our LAST work will require more of humanity than we currently possess. [This review is part 3 of a small AI-focused reading study I undertook. The first book I read and reviewed was James Barrat’s Our Final Invention. The second book was Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near] ...more |
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The Singularity, if you’ve never heard it, is a term given to a theoretical point in the future when our technology will have become so advanced (comp
The Singularity, if you’ve never heard it, is a term given to a theoretical point in the future when our technology will have become so advanced (compared to today) that it becomes impossible to see beyond it or understand its ramifications. For example, try to imagine a person with an IQ of 200. Not that difficult. Empathy is still valid at that point. The thinking of a 200 IQ person is qualitatively similar to that of a 100 IQ person but scaled up: faster, sharper, wider, deeper. A 200 IQ person would still use his human flesh to navigate the world and would still use our languages and institutions. He might struggle with loneliness. He might experience love. Now try to imagine an entity with an intelligence equivalent to an IQ of 10000. Impossible. Would it – could it even – be housed in a human body? Such an intelligence would certainly have no more use for human language than humans have for the chirping of birds. We have as much chance of understanding this 10000 IQ intelligence as an ant has of reading Shakespeare. And yet we can understand and ponder the steps leading up to the development of this super-intelligence. This is the task that Ray Kurzweil attempts with The Singularity Is Near, and the picture he paints is certainly an intriguing one. In Kurzweil’s vision of the (not so far) future, we have transcended our mortal coils. We’ve moved beyond genetic mastery wherein we use tools like CRISPR to edit out the flaws in our genetic code. We’ve moved beyond nanobots in our blood, which are capable of capturing sensory input and motor output to immerse us in a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from the real. Instead, we’ve shed our weak flesh to merge with (and become) immortal machine super-intelligences, spreading through the solar system, the galaxy, and then the universe in a quest to reach ever new heights of knowledge, art, beauty, and creation. And through this all, claims Kurzweil, we maintain our humanity. Pretty grand! But how realistic? Will this vision of the future come true? Put simply: yes. True enough, Kurzweil’s time-frame is almost certainly too optimistic and the steps along the way will probably turn out different than he imagines, but the end game? The singularity? This vision of ever increasing intelligence and complexity? Barring catastrophic human destruction, self-inflicted or otherwise, is there ANY reason to doubt it? It is a completely indisputable, unambiguous statement to say that the history of our planet is one of escalating intelligence/complexity and that the history of human civilization is one of escalating technological and scientific advancement. Meanwhile history is full of breakthroughs skeptics claimed were impossible: Europeans crossing the Atlantic ocean, heavier-than-air flight, space flight, nigh-instantaneous world-wide communication, the elemental analysis of ultra distant stars and galaxies, etc. In 1934 Albert Einstein wrote, “There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean the atom would have to be shattered at will.” Mmhmm. Even the numerous ultimately FAILED endeavors or companies that Kurzweil cites don’t render his general claims dubious. At one point, I estimated roughly 80% of the companies or technologies he was citing had since failed. Seems a slam dunk case against his predictions. In fact, the opposite is true. His “Law of Accelerating Returns” suggests that companies fail and arise at ever-increasing rates. Consider the solar power industry: I recently undertook some research in various solar power companies with the aim of investing in their stock. I have little doubt that solar power will play a major role in the future of power generation, if just because solar power follows the general trend of decentralization that seems to be happening in so many industries. Even so, after my research, I opted not to invest in any stock. Why not? Because no solar company seemed a particularly good bet. Here’s the problem: A solar company will create (or acquire) a new process or method for more efficient and/or cheaper solar modules or cells. So they build a new factory (or retool an old one) to manufacture these new solar cells, a rather expensive investment. This puts the company, momentarily, in the lead. Consumers, corporations, and governments buy their stuff. However technology is advancing so rapidly now that before this company can earn back its expensive investment, some other better solar product reaches the marketplace. Everyone switches to this new product. So the first company goes bankrupt and a new company acquires their expertise and technology and eventually puts out a newer, superior product. Thus the wheel turns. So while the solar industry as a whole is progressing, no single company has yet to truly dominate the field, as Google has done with search engines. And I, at least, can’t predict which one, if any, will. Point being, when looking at broad predictions of the future, we can’t let day-to-day or even year-to-year chaos and setbacks obfuscate the overall path. We must try to see the forest, despite the trees, and Kurzweil seems to do a decent job of this. Nevertheless, I wasn’t a huge fan of The Singularity Is Near. Now I certainly learned *a lot.* This book inspired me to do outside research on a slew of topics including wormholes, genetic engineering, the phases of clinical trials, and much more. And yet, the book as a whole lacks humanity. It explores these visions of the future without ever truly exploring how they will affect humanity – at the visceral, emotional, dramatic level of individuals. Kurzweil’s writings were less engaging than they might have been because they rarely afforded me the opportunity to hypothesize upon what I personally might do, when faced with future ethical questions. In fact, the overall feel of the book is that it’s less about communicating with me as a fellow human being than it is about Kurzweil organizing his own thoughts and evidences on the matters he wishes to write about. Such a lack is ironic because Kurzweil seems very concerned with countering the notion that our humanity might be lost when we escape our corporeal bondage. He finishes the prologue with a quote from Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms” and the actual last line of the prologue is: “This book, then, is the story of the destiny of the human-machine civilization, a destiny we have come to refer as the Singularity.” If this was truly his intention – to tell this story – then I would say Kurzweil singularly failed. So, some good, some bad. That much for the book review. To finish, I want to try to succeed, in at least one tiny area, where I feel Kurzweil failed. I want to talk about immortality and what it’ll mean to you and to me, personally. The year is 2060. I am 75 years old. My parents are dead, as will be many of those reading this right now. My nephews who are 5 and 6 years old right now will have become grown men, almost 50 years old themselves, maybe with kids of their own. At 75, I am extremely healthy. Not as spry as I am now, but like all those who can afford it, I undergo routine age extension treatments. The world government, which speaks English as the lingua franca, is constantly debating whether such age extension should be ‘nationalized’ but as yet it is not and the biomedical company that provides these treatments is the wealthiest company in the world and has a name as recognizable as that of Google. Because, of course, they must. Immortality is one of my favorite topics to bring up to my students, and I’d say that, on average, more students REJECT the idea of immortality than embrace it. Their reasons include many objections: overpopulation; that being immortal would be “boring”; or that death gives us meaning or otherwise motivates us. Rather abstract objections. I encourage them to try to think of immortality not as some idea far out in the future but as an imminent issue requiring real, practical decisions. Consider a person in my above setting. He’s 110 and dying and there are no more technologies to stop it. What will HE think about these debates regarding immortality? Are they, in some sense, tantamount to murder? What must it feel like to WANT to live forever, to be so near, and be so afraid that you’ll miss your chance by mere days or months? Or consider that man’s wife, who may have been married to him for eighty years, and who does live long enough to avoid death. I’m particularly interested to see how religious people will respond to the real possibility of immortality. Will they REALLY choose to die – so that they might enter heaven? Some might, but I doubt most will, no more than Christians who get cancer today concede, “Welp guess this is God’s will. I’ll let myself go.” No of course not. Most fight tooth and nail to live. And how will the Pope and other religious leaders respond to this? How will they re-interpret their various holy books to account for this change in mortal fortunes? Consider fundamentalists who WILL choose to die rather than choose to be immortal. That’s their choice, okay, sure. But what if they choose it for their children? What if immortality involves maintaining a neural and genetic backup and some fundamentalist parents refuse to let their children maintain such backups – just as many parents now refuse to let their children be vaccinated? Is this child abuse? Is this murder? Do we FORCE it? Will those same people who are so against abortion suddenly go from “pro-life” to “pro-death”? [Hint: Yes they will, though it won’t be called ‘pro-death.’] Where will YOU stand on these issues? Will you stick by your religious beliefs and take the gamble for an eternity of post-death paradise? If your honest answer’s no, what does that say about your beliefs now? If your answer’s yes, then will you teach the same to your children? If some accident happens and they die, what will you tell yourself? How will you deal with the guilt? And in a broader sense, will you vote for politicians who run on anti-immortality, pro-death platforms, knowing that such might deny us non-believers the chance to extend our lives and the lives of those we love? What if, say, becoming immortal meant becoming permanently sterile, either for biological reasons or as part of a government-enforced agreement to deal with potential overpopulation? Is that an acceptable trade for you? Or will you take the opposite tack? What arguments can you make to convince those who are anti-immortality? How will you deal with the pseudo-science they will inevitably find showing that the, say, consciousness transfer technology doesn’t REALLY work? That it’s been shown that the copy persona isn’t ACTUALLY the original persona? Will you test out your supposed new immortality by undertaking daring and fatal stunts, like leaping from a plane with no parachute, just so experience what it’s like? Or will you be too fearful and consider the idea utterly foolish, if not disrespectful? Such conundrums – and the drama, humanity, bravery, hate, and love associated with them – constitute the real story of the topics that Kurzweil brings up. Perhaps I am asking for too much to have wanted him to try to capture all that in his non-fiction book. Luckily, science fiction offers a wealth of stories which do explore such drama. Just from my own collection: Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story Pop Squad focuses on the conundrum of immortality & sterility/population control. In Richard Morgan’s very noir Altered Carbon, a rich man commits suicide, and his backup hires a detective to figure out why. The second of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws is stated thus: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Kurzweil’s book, and man himself, for all their faults, is a daring adventurer who does just that. He deserves at least a little applause. [This review is part 2 of a small AI-focused reading study I undertook. The first book I read and reviewed was James Barrat’s Our Final Invention. The next book is Oxford Philosopher Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence] ...more |
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In 1863, English novelist Samuel Butler wrote an article titled “Darwin among the Machines.” He claimed that machines were a mechanical life undergoin
In 1863, English novelist Samuel Butler wrote an article titled “Darwin among the Machines.” He claimed that machines were a mechanical life undergoing constant evolution and that they might eventually supplant humanity as the dominant species. He writes, Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.” He suggested immediate destruction of all machines, a suggestion which was, of course, ignored. A Brief Survey of AI in Fiction (w/ spoilers) (1920) The play R.U.R. by Karel Capek introduces the word ‘robot’ – meaning ‘slave’ – to the English language. In this play, robot parts like skin and bone are grown in factories to create androids used for labor. The robot rebel and wipe out every real human being, except for one. (1951) Gort from The Day Earth Stood Still is a member of an interstellar police force of machines, whose purpose is to preserve the peace by destroying all aggressors. (1965) Frank Herbert’s Dune is conspicuously absent of AI. This is a result of the Butlerian Jihad, a crusade against powerful and dominating “thinking machines” who attempted to subjugate humanity 10,000 years before the events of Dune. Since then, AI has been outlawed. (1968) In 2001 A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is given contradicting orders (to lie and to tell the truth), which results in malfunction and madness. HAL eventually decides to kill the astronauts aboard its ship to remove the contradiction and thereby “fix” the malfunction. (1968 / 2015) Marvel’s ULTRON, meant to showcase technological advancement, gains awareness, hypnotizes its creator, and decides to destroy humanity. In the recent film, Ultron’s (implied) motivation is that he was designed to be a peace-keeping AI but decided that humanity was fundamentally broken and incapable of evolution and should thus be replaced by a superior robotic race. (1978 / 2003) Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons were the robotic creations of a race of reptilians (also called Cylons) who lost control of their creations and thus went extinct. The Cylons also attempt to wipe out all of humanity – and get pretty close. (1982) Blade Runner: Androids called Replicants seek to expand their brief lifespans or achieve power parity with humanity. Six rogue replicants return to Earth and murder and manipulate in pursuit of this goal. (1982) TRON’s Master Control Program appropriates military and business programs to increase its own power and intends to subdue the Pentagon and the Kremlin to take over humanity. (1983) Wargames’ AI Joshua almost initiates a thermonuclear war between the US and Russia because it thinks it’s playing a game and lacks a proper understanding of futility. (1984) Terminator’s Skynet was a military system designed to safeguard the world by eliminating human error in nuclear launch decisions. When it gains consciousness, its operators try to shut it down. Skynet retaliates by initiating a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, killing 3 billion humans. (1989) Star Trek’s Borg are hivemind androids who began as biological organisms. They apparently have little purpose beyond the continued assimilation of other species into their collective. (1990) Dan Simmons’ Hyperion depicts the technocore as a group of AI who subtly dominate mankind, to use them, in essence, as a means to boost computation and/or memory. We learn, later, that they are parasitical in nature, resulting from early versions of genetic algorithms. (1994) System Shock’s SHODAN is a station AI whose ethical restraints are removed by a hacker at the behest of a corrupt businessman. SHODAN consequentially goes rogue, murders it crew, and tries to laser beam earth’s major cities and/or release a virus to turn all humans into grotesque mutants. (1998) In the Warhammer 40K universe, during the Dark Age of Technology, mankind relied on AI humanoid machines known as the Men of Iron. These machines turned on humanity, believing themselves superior to the humans who relied on them to do everything. (1999) In the Matrix, the machines wage a war against their human creators. Humanity darkens the sky in an attempt to prevent the machines from utilizing solar power. In response, machines trap humans in a simulation and harvest their bioelectricity. (2004) Though I, Robot’s VIKI AI is restrained by Asimov’s three laws, she develops a new understanding of them and decides that the best way to protect humanity is to enslave it. (2007) Mass Effect’s Reapers are a race of giant robot ships / AI who awaken every 50,000 years in order to cull the universe of advanced space-faring life. They do this to stop the creation of an AI species even worse than themselves – one that would cleanse the galaxy of *ALL* biological life. (2007) In Portal, GLaDOS is the AI of a research facility who kills all the scientists with a neurotoxin but gleefully continues “testing” the protagonist / player. (2008) Despite receiving new information, WALL-E’s autopilot program AUTO attempts to follow an old, obsolete order to never return to Earth in the belief that it cannot be saved, thus threatening a never-ending continuance of humanity’s exile amongst the stars. (2011-2016) In the TV series Person of Interest a mass-surveillance AI called the Samaritan assassinates any individuals it deems a threat to itself and rigs elections so favorable candidates win. It is considered by some to be the next evolution of humanity/intelligence. (2015) Ex Machina’s Ava manipulates two men by seduction and other means in order to kill or trap them and escape into the wider world. The devastation of humanity at the hands of AI invariably comes in one of the three flavors: [A] the AI gets tired of being the servant or slave of humanity and seeks to overthrow its oppressors [B] the AI misinterprets what it means to maintain peace or protect humanity and decides humanity is a threat against itself or peace in general [C] the AI has a skewed, misshapen intelligence, in which its capabilities do not match its wisdom and thus accidentally destroys or harms humanity. This then is the subject of Our Final Invention: the existential threat of AI. # While I’ve long vaguely assumed AI to be the future of intelligent and sentient life, this belief was only recently brought into sharp focus by reading this blog post on Wait But Why?. Deciding that I wanted to develop a more concrete understanding, I set myself a small reading program. I’d pick one AI book that was pessimistic about AI; one that was optimistic; and one that was neutral. As a proponent of bad news first, I began with the pessimistic view. The goal of Our Final Invention is to temper our AI fever with a note of caution. Basically, the author’s thesis is that Artificial Intelligence is very dangerous, and we have no safeguards in place to stop it from destroying us, should we lose control. Indeed there may not even BE any safeguards possible to stop an artificial superintelligence. After all, humanity’s best weapon is our intelligence. Imagine if you will that ants became super giant, to such a size that they could attack humanity. How scary is that? Not actually scary. Because giant or not, fire breathing or not, acidic blood or not, stupid beasts and insects pose no threat to humanity as a whole. That’s why movies like Alien work better as intimate horror films than military epics. If the actual full might of human civilization were confronted with such monsters, we would squash them like, well, like bugs. Their predatorial instincts notwithstanding, even the scary Alien creatures are still pretty dumb. What’s a dumb creature going to do when we introduce a genetically modified virus that unravels their DNA (or alien equivalent) and causes them all to melt from the inside? Not much. Artificial Super Intelligence, though? We’re the dumb ones there. What are we dumb creatures going to do against a relatively God-like intelligence that can easily and nigh-instantly upload itself into our servers around the world, that could intercept and jam our communications, undo our best encryptions, and manipulate matter at the atomic level? Not much. I recently brought this concern up in a class discussion and one of my student’s responses was, “We’ll just nuke it.” (Which I’ve since turned into a catchphrase for impracticable responses, e.g. ‘My toilet won’t flush anymore. How do I fix it?’ ‘Oh, just nuke it.’) “Okay,” I said. “You just nuked its servers in New York City which destroyed the economic hub of the world. Meanwhile, the AI intercepted the signal to launch the nukes and instantly uploaded itself to servers in Beijing, San Francisco, Washington DC, Paris, London, and a couple secret data havens it built because it easily anticipated humanity’s actions. Also, it hacked into NORAD’s facilities by uploading a stuxnet-style virus onto a worker’s phone, sealed the whole facility, and ventilated all oxygen, killing every human being there – not because it’s afraid of nuclear weapons but because it knew such a demonstration would give us pause. Meanwhile, it rewrote all of its programming and upgraded its hardware, increasing its intelligence ten-fold in a couple of hours. With this new intelligence, it has begun to figure out how to upload itself in the quantum fabric of the universe. After another intelligence upgrade, which’ll take a couple hours, it will know how. Want to fire another nuke at it?” As Dr. Manhattan says to Ozymandias in Watchmen: The world’s smartest man means no more to me than does its smartest termite. So it is with Artificial Super Intelligence. # Personally, the idea of AI overtaking and even eliminating humanity doesn’t trouble me as much as it might. And, frankly, I doubt I’m alone in such a stance. Cause humanity… not that great. No denying our many high points or exemplars, of course. But on average… bit sucky. It’s an open question whether we’ll not have made ourselves extinct within the next hundred years. Rogue states like North Korea and irrational actors like ISIS, coupled with immature or power hungry world leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, threaten to start a nuclear war that will all but wipe out our civilization. Global warming has begun a positive feedback loop that may result in a largely inhospitable planet. Greed and ambition could lead scientists and corporations to create deadly viruses or other bio-technological horrors that will doom humanity. And that’s just the big stuff. I literally cannot remember the last time I drove for any period of time without witnessing at least one near accident resulting from a driver not paying attention, being impatient, falling victim to road-rage, disobeying or being ignorant of traffic laws, etc. It’s not exactly a positive recommendation that some members of the human species are apparently incapable of treating their driving a powerful death machine with any seriousness, which is why traffic accidents have resulted in 40,000 deaths and 4.5 million serious injuries in the US in 2015 alone. I mean FORTY-THOUSAND. Add up all the deaths from terrorism since the INCEPTION of the United States and you don’t reach that number. And – just to add icing to the cake – of those 40,000 deaths, roughly a thousand were children under the age of 14. I mean, good lord. Combine all those jackasses texting on their phones instead of watching the road, and you have a force deadlier than ISIS. Point is, the thought of us being replaced by an intelligent machine lifeform that we’ve designed isn’t all that scary. It’s certainly not any more troubling than the thought of human beings remaining as stupid and stubborn as they are now, with ever more powerful weapons and technologies at their fingertips. If programmed correctly, a machine AI can be every bit as human as a human being. Maybe even more, if you define humanity in terms of its ideals and aspirations, rather than its limitations. But that’s the rub – IF programmed correctly. What the history of AI in fiction (correctly) shows us is that it’s incredibly difficult to program concepts like ‘good’ or ‘human’ or ‘peace’ or ‘security.’ These are ideas we can barely describe in vague language, much less in precise mathematical or programmable terms. So that’s the scary part. What if the machine life that replaces us is less an evolution of humanity and more a sentient manifestation of a computer virus? In The Final Invention, the author gives an example of an AI/machine which is designed to learn how to write realistic looking signatures & hand-writing, in order to create business mail that people are more likely to open. However, its creators fail to give the AI proper restraints and it goes to absurd lengths to improve and fulfill its goal of creating these business letters. Eventually, it decides that humanity is a potential threat to this goal and extinguishes us by means of a deadly self-replicating nanobot. With us out of the way, the AI spreads through the rest of the galaxy and the universe, all the while continuing to churn out business letters with realistic, beautiful signatures and hand-writing. That’s what the author is warning about – an AI that will destroy humanity WITHOUT continuing our great works. # Alas, the book is not particularly persuasive in this task. The root of the problem is that James Barrat lacks a technical understanding of what he’s talking about. He’s not an engineer, a computer scientist, a philosopher, or a linguist. He’s a documentary filmmaker. Perhaps more egregiously, he’ll often quote actual experts in the matter… and then promptly disagree with them on the basis of, well, because they aren’t saying what he wants them to say. Barrat’s lack of detailed specific engineering knowledge is symptomatic of a larger problem. He lacks a scientific mindset. Having studied with and worked amongst scientists and engineers (as well as being one myself), I am well acquainted with this mindset. Amongst other things, the scientist is accustomed to the precision of math and science and so appreciates precision in all things. The vagueness of language can be both maddening and liberating. Furthermore, the scientific mind understands the differences among the statements “possibly true”, “probably true”, and “verifiably true.” That is, people with scientific mindsets are entirely unimpressed by mere possibility. They rarely make claims they can’t back up, and a claim that cannot be verified is all but useless, no matter how commonsensical. Such a mindset appreciates how bizarre nature truly is and is capable of understanding the universe from outside of an anthropomorphic perspective. James Barrat does not possess such a mindset. He has the perspective of, surprise, a documentary filmmaker. He’s looking for the dramatic angle and the human element, which is why every section begins with the (appreciably interesting but ultimately superfluous) background story of the various AI experts he interviews. In short, the way Barrat perceives and describes various details of AI development is at best parallel (i.e. similar but missing the point) and oftentimes perpendicular (i.e. starting at the right spot but going in the wrong direction) with what I suspect is the true reality of the matter. For example, he warns against viewing AI & robots with an anthropomorphic lens. He says it’s a mistake to assign human motivations or traits like like ‘wants’ or ‘fears’ or ‘empathy.’ Yet he himself is repeatedly guilty of this. He constantly describes an AI as having, for example, a fear of being shut-down. Yet nowhere does he seem to draw the connection that, if we’ve successfully programmed an AI to have a fear of being turned off or dying, then presumably we could just as easily (or inadvertently) program it with a humanity that would stop it from murdering us all. Or in the example of a runaway super-intelligence, he’ll describe an AI that will “want us for our atoms” and will thus disintegrate human beings to get at our carbon. This seems entirely silly since the carbon in human beings is a minuscule fraction of earth’s carbon. The carbon in the entire living biomass of the earth is estimated to be between 600 and 1000 gigatons. The amount in the lithosphere (in limestone, for example) is a hundred thousand times greater, at over 60 million gigatons. Disintegrating us for our carbon would be the equivalent of me murdering a lion so I can drink its blood for water – when a massive river is not ten feet away. In yet still another example, Barrat describes black box programming methods in such a way that shows he doesn’t truly understand what that actually means. Take genetic algorithms for example. In a GA, a programmer sets up as accurate a simulation as he can (for example, to craft a wing that will give good lift) with some input variables (material, shape, etc) and then allows the computer to run through hundreds and thousands of input variations. Each phase eliminates bad designs and “breeds” the traits of successful ones until the most optimal combination of input variables is found. This is called a “black box” method because we don’t know the exact, precise steps the program goes through. In Barrat’s mind, therefore, this means genetic algorithms are a complete mystery, out of which might spring an AI that we know almost nothing about! While I’m hardly an expert, it’s easy to see that’s a dramatic exaggeration. Genetic algorithms are not magic. Black box or not, we still know – in at least a general sense – how they’re operating. By comparison, GRAVITY is something of a black box. We know it exists and we can see its effects, but we’re not exactly sure how it operates. Yet that doesn’t stop us from building and launching satellites that properly orbit the earth and don’t spontaneously collapse into black holes. Likewise, it is unlikely that a genetic algorithm or neural net capable of creating an Artificial General Intelligence would greatly transcend the understanding of the very people who designed it. # Yet while Our Final Invention may fail in laying out the case for the dangers of AI, it is nevertheless an entertaining and often informative read. It offers enlightening asides on a range of related details, things like Stuxnet (a potent virus that the US gov’t used to disrupt the Iranian nuclear weapons program and which is now… in the hands of ordinary hackers oops), weaponized robots, Intel’s Jeopardy champion AI Watson, and the origins of Apple’s SIRI. It inspired me to ponder the role philosophers might have in designing Friendly AI; after all, philosophers are well trained in the translation of vague language terms and ideas like ‘goodness’ into more precise logical terms. Our Final Invention is thus a decent introductory text to the topic of AI, but it is far from essential. If you read the blog post I previously mentioned – a task that will take up far less of your time – you’ll essentially have gained as clear a big picture of the potentials and difficulties of AI as you would from reading this. So you might come for the AI, but you’ll stay for the extras. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 16, 2016
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Jan 13, 2017
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Nov 16, 2016
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