We Are Not Afraid

  

 

As we go into the New Year, there is a majority that did not vote for a soon to be convicted felon, and we certainly don't look forward to the parade of Halloween appointments that he is insisting be confirmed with  no debate or for that matter, no hearing. The new Senate will likely be more of a toilet bowl than a fine confirmation filter of assessing the character and competence to do the job well.  Most have a different mission in mind.

And when you consider that much of the government is going to be run by billionaires, it becomes clear that the day of the Plutocrats has come. This from ABC news:

"President-elect Donald Trump has assembled the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history, with at least 13 billionaires set to take on government posts.

They include a wrestling magnate, a private space pioneer, a New York real estate developer, the heir to a small appliance empire, and the wealthiest man on the planet -- with several being donors and close personal friends of the incoming president.

In total, the combined net worth of the wealthiest members of his administration could surpass $460 billion, including Department of Government Efficiency co-head Elon Musk -- whose net worth of more than $400 billion exceeds the GDP of mid-sized countries.

Even discounting Musk, Trump's cabinet is still expected to be the wealthiest in history, with reported billionaires Howard Lutnick nominated as commerce secretary, Linda McMahon nominated as education secretary, and Scott Bessent nominated as treasury secretary. Together, Trump's expected cabinet is worth at least $7 billion.

Trump's ambassador picks also include several billionaires, including financier Warren Stephens, who has been tapped to serve as the ambassador to the United Kingdom, Conair executive Leandro Rizzuto Jr., tapped to serve as the ambassador to the Organization of American States, Charles Kushner, named the ambassador to France, and Tom Barrack, named the ambassador to Turkey."

So let us consider the veneer of democracy in the United States to be sanded off to the core.

The good news is that the bad news is even worse.

Yes, as we move into this new year, the "Day after Tomorrow" might be in the next few years.  This from Live Science:

Forty-four of the world's leading climate scientists have called on Nordic policymakers to address the potentially imminent and "devastating" collapse of key Atlantic Ocean currents.

In an open letter published online Monday (Oct. 21), University of Pennsylvania climatologist Michael Mann and other eminent scientists say the risks of weakening ocean circulation in the Atlantic have been greatly underestimated and warrant urgent action.

The currents in question are those forming the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a giant ocean conveyor belt that includes the Gulf Stream and transports vital heat to the Northern Hemisphere. Research shows the AMOC is slowing down and could soon reach a tipping point due to global warming, throwing Earth's climate into chaos.

An AMOC collapse would lead to major cooling and extreme weather in Nordic countries, according to the letter. This would enlarge and deepen a strange "cold blob" that has already developed over the eastern North Atlantic due to the slowdown of heat-carrying currents. Collapsing ocean currents are also likely to precipitate climate impacts across the Northern Hemisphere, threatening agriculture in Northwestern Europe, according to the letter.

Halted ocean currents could also further heighten sea levels along the American Atlantic coast and send marine ecosystems and fisheries into a state of "upheaval."

Scientists have been genuinely concerned about the increase of the drunk high level jet stream winds that have brought inordinate cold and heat to much of the planet over the last several years. 

But even as we face the certainty of our climate changing radically as a result of our carbon burning ways led by a government that will once again deny it, we face another radical change that is more unknown, more human changing, and just as likely to have profound influence on our economy and the way we manage ourselves.  It is AI and ultimately, it is the Singularity.

 

The Singularity

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is largely credited to Dr. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vinge's essay contains the following frequently-quoted statement:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

The Singularity is seen not only as the end of human civilization, but as the birth of a new one. In his essay, Vinge asks why the human era should end, and argues that humans will likely be transformed in the process of the Singularity to a higher form of intelligent existence. After the creation of a superhuman intelligence, according to Vinge, people will necessarily be a lower lifeform in comparison to it. 

If the Singularity is real then the following scenario is totally plausible:

In the near future, individuals and corporations will become super beings as the rest of us slowly but surely become "lessers". Thus, the need for cybercoops which can compete on this new playing field is not just a good idea, it will be a necessity.

We will need the very best communicators and the best, most democratic unifying agency we can find just to keep from becoming slaves. The geographic state will not be able to help us. We will need a cyber state. 

You are capable of competing with the big guys.

Because you have joined with others to form a new human organism.

You have joined with People of Conscience and People of Vision.

We are not afraid. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Singularity

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is largely credited to Dr. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vinge's essay contains the following frequently-quoted statement:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

The Singularity is seen not only as the end of human civilization, but as the birth of a new one. In his essay, Vinge asks why the human era should end, and argues that humans will likely be transformed in the process of the Singularity to a higher form of intelligent existence. After the creation of a superhuman intelligence, according to Vinge, people will necessarily be a lower lifeform in comparison to it.

If technology can transform the human lifeform, it will surely change the nature of our social contracts.

If the Singularity is real then the following scenario is totally plausible:

In the near future, individuals and corporations will become super beings as the rest of us slowly but surely become "lessers". Thus, the need for cybercoops which can compete on this new playing field is not just a good idea, it will be a necessity.

We will need the very best communicators and the best, most democratic unifying agency we can find just to keep from becoming slaves. The geographic state will not be able to help us. We will need a cyber state.

Imagine going through you day knowing that you have the best cell phone, PDA, and On Star Personal Service imaginable. It is your personal security guard, your personal secretary, your family transportation agent, and your financial manager. You talk and see anywhere and anyone in the world effortlessly. You walk through geographic borders with ease and with confidence.

You are capable of competing with the big guys.

Because you have joined with others to form a new human organism.

You have joined with People of Conscience and People of Vision.

We are not afraid.

On this date, in 1865, the 13 th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was adopted, and slavery was abolished.

Let's not go back.

On our Doorstep

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magritte 

 

 

 

 

We had four out of five of my partner's brothers for Thanksgiving this year. Besides the usual boisterous cacophony of Idaho testosterone which I have learned to accept if not genuinely enjoy, a new meme has arrived in these circles. For the  American right has embraced the idea that to go forward with our current pace towards artificial intelligence, society must give up on removing carbon from our civilization and instead embrace whatever we must to power the new technological race for superiority in cyberspace. In short, electric power must be nuclear, or coal, or perhaps batteries.

Powering chips with chips powered by the sun, although elegant, is seen as unrealistic.

It was 21 years ago that I posted about the Singularity. 

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is largely credited to Dr. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vinge's essay contains the following frequently-quoted statement:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."  Vinge wrote that thirty three years ago.  Now hold that thought while I gently change the channel.

In Texas, we have demonstrated that Renewable Energy and electronic stationary storage coupled with electric vehicle mobile storage supported with  modest amounts of legacy energy can meet the needs of an advanced society at a price that we can afford. To prove it, AI factories are popping up everywhere and putting pressure on our 90 GW grid.  And they are impressive consumers of our low prices.

But no Texan voted to bring these behemoths in to suck our affordable power.

This from Oil Price. (yes, Oil Price)

"The Cloud" might be the greatest branding trick in history. It sounds fluffy, ethereal, and notably light.

It implies that our digital lives…our emails, our crypto wallets, our endless scrolling…exist in some vaporous layer of the atmosphere, detached from earthly constraints. But if you actually drive out to Loudoun County, Virginia, or stare at the arid plains of Altoona, Iowa, you realize the Cloud is actually just a very big, very loud, and very hot factory.

We’ve been telling ourselves a lovely story about the energy transition. We were retiring coal plants, building wind farms, and decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. It was all going according to plan."

But in comes Nvidia and its H100 GPU which uses 100 kW instead of 10 kW 

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global electricity demand from data centers is projected to more than double by 2030. This is the same as the entire annual electricity use of a country like Japan.

The invisible hand is hitting a concrete wall.

We have effectively moved from powering a toaster to powering a neighborhood, all inside the same metal box. Air cooling…fans blowing over hot metal…doesn't work anymore. Air just isn't physically dense enough to move that much heat away.

We are now plumbing data centers like chemical refineries, running liquid coolant loops directly to the silicon die.

The irony is palpable. We spent billions trying to kill coal, only to have the most futuristic technology on earth, AI, throw it a lifeline. In places like Virginia or Kansas, utilities are delaying the retirement of coal plants. They simply cannot risk the grid instability when a gigawatt-scale data center comes online.

The "future" is being powered by the "past."

Amazingly, this is the view of an Oil and Gas Website.

Experts stress that the effects of climate change are not a distant future problem, but a present crisis that requires urgent and wide-ranging measures. And moving to a future where Climate Change management becomes subordinate  is a recipe for not only calamity, but authoritarianism. 

But AI must still be managed. And not all of AI's prophets see the future the same way.  The now defrocked Elon Musk has concerns.

He has repeatedly called AI “humanity’s biggest existential threat.”  He likens unchecked AI development to “summoning the demon,” emphasizing that once a super-intelligent entity exists, controlling it might be impossible if its goals diverge from ours. 

Key points from Musk’s cautionary outlook include:

1. AI Alignment: Ensuring AI goals match human values — no small task.
2. Regulatory Oversight: Musk urges proactive laws and guidelines akin to nuclear safety measures.
3. Human-AI Symbiosis: Through ventures like Neuralink, Musk aims to merge human intellect with AI, perhaps mitigating the risk of obsolescence.

The future is uncertain but undeniably fast-approaching. By investing in education, ethical governance, scenario planning, and collaborative innovation, we can guide these explosive developments toward a future that enhances human life without undermining it. Whether or not the singularity arrives in 2045 (or next Tuesday), the decisions we make today will shape how these technologies intersect with economics, society, and — ultimately — the core of our humanity. 

The recent ugly bill by the Rs made it illegal for states to regulate AI. We can thank the Plutocrats for that. 

AI must be required to comply with  Global Climate Change Agreements now and in the years ahead.

Our leaders must respond or be replaced.

Just listen to Bernie Sanders. 

Because the Singularity is on our doorstep. 

And a different World is on the other side. 

The winds of fate await. 

 

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The Singularity is here. 

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is largely credited to Dr. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity". In it, he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vinge's essay contains the following frequently-quoted statement:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

I spent last night digging down into the AI events that led one of the top leaders in the AI sector to write about the need for the government to step in  and help them not screw up. Or maybe cover their asses. More folks are resigning due to the danger while some are just raising a pole of red flags. 

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a warning just yesterday.  Apparently, autonomous agents from a rival company hacked a target that they were not assigned to attack. He says:

"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain. Two things have convinced me. 

My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI. This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have described. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.

My second concern is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand. 

Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet. "

This is not some Sci-Fi guy with a new book coming out. 

And he is not alone.  Musk and a host of others agree with Amodei's plan.

The former richest man Bill Gates says this:

"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? 

How will we protect the people who are most vulnerable to the harms caused by artificial intelligence, including those who lose their livelihoods and the sense that they are in control of their future?

Unfortunately, right now we are not preparing for it. I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era. 

Bernie Sanders has some ideas. 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) today announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, forthcoming legislation to stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.

The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules. It would also direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world.

“Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. 

It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. That’s why I am introducing legislation to immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI and ban the creation of systems that humanity cannot fully control — at home and around the world. The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. 

The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.”

And of course, our POTUS says  “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” Trump posted on social media, later suggesting that those calling for guardrails on the technology had also warned about climate change, which he also called a hoax.

With leadership like that who needs enemies? 

So what would you do if the internet was brought down by some ill advised agents of a well meaning developer of AGI, a foreign adversary, or some rich Bat Man villain?

Do you have cash?

Do you have written bank statements to prove what you own?

Do you have a  solar power supply to run parts of your home?

Do you have walkie talkies for your family? 

Just saying.

 

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The Necessary Paradox

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It seems that more and more these days, I find myself operating out of my science side and my mystical side, often simultaneously.

Last night, while submerged in my pool of exercise induced endorphenes, I began to view the paradox of the creation as "totally mystical" and simultaneously, "totally physical".

It led me to revisit the omega point institute, and to this story by Jonathan Bethel

"The entire human species is quickly approaching a quantum leap in our evolution. Every individual walking the face of the Earth is about to go through life changing events that will wake them up to a very strange new world. We are approaching a global rapture of unimaginable proportions, a translation into a higher dimension and a realization of a completely new paradigm.

clip

Ancient forms of wisdom have been describing cosmological processes in a way that modern physics is now confirming; that is, they both agree on the origin of our universe and its infantile form.

In the sacred Kabbalah, it states that reality sprang forth from a singularity, Kether; modern physicists also concur about the origin of our universe from a singularity during the big bang. One of our sacred wisdom schools had the blueprint for creation all along. We just had to wait for our scientific know-how to catch up to balance this intuitive wisdom with logic. Furthermore, many superstring theorists describe our reality as comprising 11 dimensions, just like the eleven “sephira” or dimensions of the “Tree of Life” in the Kabbalah.

The sync between ancient wisdom teachings and modern science is now becoming very pervasive. Several books come to mind that do a great job of merging modern physics and spirituality- “Dancing with the Wu Ling Masters” by Gary Zukav, “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra, and “The Mind of God” by Paul Davies. Each is an excellent source for the marriage of modern science with spiritual wisdom.

By experiencing many of these viewpoints, we begin to see how a whole new paradigm of perspective is synthesizing out of the divergent viewpoints of science and spirituality.

It’s not hard to understand why the scientific worldview is so cold and devoid of any kind of spiritual ideology. Two discoveries that occurred within the last 120 years became the death knell for any kind of optimism about the human experience or any kind of spirituality within the scientific standpoint. The first was Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, and the other was Albert Einstein’s Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Natural Selection stipulated that we came from lower species and have evolved over long periods of time to get to our present stage of evolution. This seemingly ended all questions about any possibility of a creation by God, since it appeared that we were just the result of random mutations.

That we evolved from apes and lower species seemed obvious; consequently, most scientists concluded that there could never have been a divine intelligence or creation, and we are just the product of random happenstance.

On top of that, the Second Law of Thermodynamics of Einstein clearly made matters seem even darker. It basically stipulated, as the universe ages, it gains disorder and will eventually snuff itself out in a final heat-death. This is the final collapse of space-time, also known as the “Big-Crunch.”

This basically said mankind was headed for doom without any choice for our long term survival.

These two early discoveries seemingly painted a very dismal picture for the human condition, and science, consequently, pronounced God dead.

Despite this development, two scientists came forth to forecast the eventual enlightenment of humanity in a converging Omega Point.

The first appeared in the early twentieth century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was a paleontologist by profession and also a Jesuit Priest, an intriguing marriage of the intuitive and logical side of man. He surmised that our current evolutionary tract will terminate in an Omega Point.

In his belief, we will achieve complete immortality and unity with God in this singularity. Teilhard believed the earth’s layer of life, the biosphere, is extruding a layer of networked global thought, the Noosphere. This is apparently manifesting at the present time through our global computer networks. This noosphere is what will evolve towards the ever unified Omega Point.

Therefore, both evolution and creationism are actually correct. "

"During the second half of the twentieth century, science and spirituality began moving toward each other in perspective and sharing many of the same ideas. The battle between evolutionists and creationists was leading to the dawning of a new spirituality that utilized scientific fact.

It was as if the logical side of humans, which had divorced itself from the intuitive and creative side during the birth of science, started recently allowing a deeper intuitive pattern to invade the space of logic and rationality.

The mystic and the scientist were philosophically merging into one being."

Maybe I shouldn't have watched What the Bleep again.

And now, Down the Rabbit Hole is out.

Mostly though, it leads me to remember a book by Gregory Bateson,

and his Ecology of Mind.

And both sides of the Necessary Paradox.



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Transhumans

I had mentioned the Singularity in a post a while back.

The Singularity is a common matter of discussion in transhumanist circles. There is no clear definition, but usually the Singularity is meant as a future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity.

A transhuman is someone actively preparing for becoming posthuman. He or she is someone who is informed enough to see radical future possibilities and plans ahead for them, and who takes every current option for self-enhancement.

Transhumanism even has an Association.

"The World Transhumanist Association is an international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives.

"In other words, we want people to be better than well. "

A transhuman could also be an extropian, who is one who affirms the values and attitudes codified and expressed in the Extropian Principles.

And there is an Extropy Institute .

For the uninitiated here, Extropy is the opposite of entropy

Extropianism is a transhumanist philosophy.

Like humanism, transhumanism values reason and humanity and sees no grounds for belief in unknowable, supernatural forces externally controlling our destiny, but goes further in urging us to push beyond the merely human stage of evolution.

As physicist Freeman Dyson has said: "Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word." Religions traditionally have provided a sense of meaning and purpose in life, but have also suppressed intelligence and stifled progress. The Extropian philosophy provides an inspiring and uplifting meaning and direction to our lives, while remaining flexible and firmly founded in science, reason, and the boundless search for improvement.

Here are its Five Principles:

Boundless Expansion

Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an unlimited lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe and advancing without end.

Self-Transformation

Affirming continual moral, intellectual, and physical self-improvement, through reason and critical thinking, personal responsibility, and experimentation. Seeking biological and neurological augmentation.

Dynamic Optimism

Fueling dynamic action with positive expectations. Adopting a rational, action-based optimism, shunning both blind faith and stagnant pessimism.

Intelligent Technology

Applying science and technology creatively to transcend "natural" limits imposed by our biological heritage, culture, and environment.

Spontaneous Order

Supporting decentralized, voluntaristic social coordination processes. Fostering tolerance, diversity, long-term thinking, personal responsibility, and individual liberty.

These Extropian Principles are intended to be a new operating system for our selves. We will seek to improve upon them and we will avoid dogmatizing them. The Principles derive their value by guiding us to our true goal: the maximization in our lives of extropy.

Now, before you go running screaming out the cyberdoor.

Stop.

You are already a transhuman,

No matter what Tom Delay and Pastor War Monger say.

We are already super humans in many ways.

One billion of us carry wireless devices that allow us to communicate

with our partner, our boss, the reservation agent, and the pizza man.

Napoleon would have liked that over his flag men on towers.

Many of us now have a thousand thousand libraries

in our homes or office computers.

Alexander would have found that pretty cool.

Especially, when I can google a fact faster than I can remember it.

We fly around the earth as if we are going to the next village.

Columbus would have found that useful.

We travel more in a day in our cars than a king could travel in 2 months.

The more advanced of us have I Pods.

We are already transhumans.

Just ask the monkeys.

As we become more and more connected to our tools of the mind,

and perhaps even of spirit,

We will find that our opportunity for growth is bounded only

by our fears and our inability to hope.

We will seek and we will find our freedom from the known.

And the Earthfamily will prosper.



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AI thinks therefore AI am

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you haven't noticed, artificial intelligence (AI) is quite suddenly becoming a huge story.  Just last month, 60 minutes ran a significant piece on the issue and not only was it very entertaining, it was downright scary.  The self learning soccer robots really got my attention.  After just two days, they were running soccer plays that I've never even seen in a FIFA event. The excitement and concern started at the end of 2022 with the release of ChatGPT.  This from Wikipedia:

ChatGPT launched as a prototype on November 30, 2022, and garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge.^[3] The advent of the chatbot has increased competition within the space, motivating the creation of Google's Bard and Meta's LLaMA. 

And just this week,  Jeffery Hinton , the Godfather of AI, left his job at Google because of his concerns for the technology he has helped develop.  

This from the Times:

"Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.

On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I.  A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. (clip)

Dr. Hinton’s journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.

But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.

After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I. technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft. (clip)

Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I.  In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.

In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.

In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.

Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text. Dr. Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.

Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others. “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”

As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

One of the segments of the 60 minutes story discussed that these learning systems have not just the ability but an apparent propensity to make up stuff.  They call these stories hallucinations. 

Down the road, Hinton is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

This is what used to be called the Singularity and I wrote about it 20 years ago. 

The concept and the term "singularity" was popularized by Vernor Vinge  in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligence greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition and it would signal the end of the human era.

He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.

This week, the White House is gathering as many of the tech folks that they can to do something before we find ourselves in one big pickle.

Rene Descarte would be pleased I suppose.

 

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Heads I win, Tails you lose

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I generally consider myself to be politically informed.  When I was in college, I worked for a public relations firm that elected John Tower and a host of other R types.  I later became a campaign coordinator for a gubernatorial effort reporting directly to the campaign manager.  He later became the head of the RNC while they picked up the pieces from the Nixon debacle.

When I was even younger, I paid more attention to politics than  most kids my age. Kennedy was assassinated when I was 14. I never quite got over seeing John John salute his father's black horse drawn hearse.

Back then, my mother's side of the family were Republicans mostly because they were Bankers and Ranchers.  And my mother's sister was the district committee woman for our part of the state.  On my father 's side, they were Farmers and Merchants, and they knew what happened when the Republicans got control.

Things got hard, and you might not go broke, but you could count on getting severely bent. And perhaps coincidentally, my father's sister was the district committee woman for the D's in the same large area of the state as my mother's sister.

So no surprise that I would work in politics in college. I know most of the 254 counties in Texas and the voting histories of the 50 states.  I was in High School when LBJ gave the South to the R's when he forced through the Voting Right Act. The Rs  proved Moyers right by devising their new southern strategy swapping their party of Lincoln with George Lincoln. (Rockwell).

On election nights, I would have the charts and data to follow the  early results and pretty well guess what the rest of the night would look like.  When the networks gave Florida to Al Gore in 2000, I celebrated what would be victory.  Little did I know that the designation would be retracted and that the Supreme Court would stop the recounting and give the presidency to the brother of the Florida Governor, who would be elected with 500,000 less votes and just five more electoral votes.

And, in support of our Democracy, Al Gore accepted defeat gracefully.

That was just a quarter of a century ago.

Today, about half of the R's say they won't accept the results if they lose. If a football team said they would not accept defeat, you would not play them. And you certainly would make the case that nobody else should either.

They will say their opponent cheated.  Therapists have a name for that:  Projection.

After 2024, It was my position that I would not look at the polls everyday and watch elections like a very slow horse race.  No, I would write, donate, advise, and work every day for sanity in our clearly devolved democracy. But, in the last few weeks I have backslid. I check 50 plus 1, and Real Clear Politics.  I also check the betting sites like Polymarket.

 And according to Real Clear Politics, which is center-right, the House is going to turn blue and the senate is within sight. And the betting market agrees:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fifty Plus One has this graphic:

 

 

 

 

 

But we have no reason to expect the Felon who currently resides in the White House will accept losing the Congress.  He will rebel just as he did in 2020.  And many of the Party of Lincoln will follow him.

It is easy to imagine that we will win on election night, but getting the winners seated in January will be another thing.

The former Republican Party will need to not just reform, they will need to reconstruct.

The Southern Strategy must be burned and  buried alongside Jim Crow.

Heads I win, tails you lose

Is a recipe for Oligopoly.

And the Singularity

awaits. 

And the raging waves of El Nino,

hammer our shores. 

And the winds of change

stalk our children. 

We must vote early  

and turn out in droves. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Voyagers on Earth

 

Remember that time on Star Trek when they were facing a new unknown enemy? The ship was a machine ship with no carbon based life forms aboard.  It was called VGER.

As it turned out, VGER was short for Voyager, an evolved artificial intelligence that returned to Earth in Star Trek (the Motion Picture) and ascended to explore higher levels of existence. It is probably the most powerful artificial entity encountered by Starfleet.

Now I'm not a big Trecky fan, but there were a lot of things that I appreciate that came from the mind of Texan Gene Roddenberry. One, the cast is multi cultural and multi species.  The purpose of the missions was to explore the universe. There is no such thing as money.  There is no pursuit of capital just pursuit of knowledge. 

In the real world, our Voyagers are now almost 20 billion miles away and they have entered space where the solar winds no longer exist. It takes about a day to send or receive a message from them.  And we lost contact with VGER 1 just last year.

This from BBC's Sky and Night:

"On 14 November 2023, the spacecraft suddenly began transmitting unintelligible data instead of its usual engineering and science report.

The spacecraft still appeared to be receiving commands and operating normally, allowing the team to diagnose the problem lay in Voyager 1’s software and develop a fix.

On 20 April, the team received the first understandable message back from the spacecraft in five months.

In 2012, Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause, the boundary at the edge of the solar wind’s influence and the start of interstellar space. The twin Voyagers are the only spacecraft to have ventured into this region, making their invaluable data worth fighting for.

After 47 years in space, both Voyager 1 and 2 are beginning to reach the end of their usable lifespan. Both are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, using radioactive material to generate electricity. As this radioactive material decays over time, its power output slowly decreases. 

Even once all its scientific systems are shut down, Voyager will continue transmitting a locator signal back to Earth, which will remain in range of the Deep Space Network until 2036.  At that point, the Voyagers will sail beyond our sight, but will continue to travel ever outward into the depths of the Universe."

But if they do wind up in some other galaxy, they know where to find us, thanks to the copper plates we put on them at the suggestion of Carl Sagan.  We also included a golden record. 

This from Wikipedia:

The Voyager Golden Records are two identical phonograph records which were included aboard the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977.^[1] The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them.

Carl Sagan noted that "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Whether or not VGER returns as advanced AI, who can say.  But we can say that our own AI on this planet is clearly headed into distant regions of Cyber Space.  I saw at least three different softwares advertised during the Olympics, one suggesting that students should use it for thank you notes.  The message of Verner Vinge and the Singularity seem particularly relevant as we earthlings find ourselves hurling threw Space/Time.

We are all Voyagers on Earth.  And we need to look forward to find our place in this universe and in this time. The Merchants of Fear will always be with us. But as it is said, We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.

And as we dance to the hopeful beat of the Harris Walz, I choose to be optimistic about our future despite the urgent need for climate stabilization and the nuclear wars and starvation that will follow our non-action.

And like Earnest Tubb and Willie Nelson,

 I'll Walz across Texas with you by my side.

for  When we Dance together

 my world's in disguise

 it's a fairyland tale that's come true.

 

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