human

The Trouble With Predictions.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

We like predictions, particularly if we like the outcomes. We all want the winning lottery ticket because we want that outcome for a small investment. As individuals, we like to beat the odds. Collectively it breaks up into groups who want certain outcomes, and wars have been fought and continue to be fought over certain outcomes.

In fact, in conversation with a friend over coffee a few days ago I mentioned that in watching a documentary series on chimpanzees, their social groups have territory that they patrol and fight over, which include the richest fruit trees. In this regard we are not too different, we simply fight over other things. If we fought over trees, our world would likely be much different, more lush, with what we would consider less progress.

When I summarized the technological singularity, I didn’t really mention the other predictive models out there about other things because the technological singularity was a focal point. That’s the trouble with predictions. They have a tendency to omit other data. Let’s go with the 2045 technological singularity prediction, based predominantly on technology. What other factors will impact humanity by 2045?

There’s population, which I was surprised to find has decreased in growth rate. By 2045, though, we should have a global population of about 9 billion people – but here’s where it gets interesting.

Many factors contribute to the waxing and waning of the world’s population, such as migration, mortality, longevity and other major demographic metrics. Focusing on fertility, however, helps to illuminate why the total number of humans on Earth seems set to fall. Demographers define fertility as the average total number of live births per female individual in a region or country. (In the accompanying graphics, the term “woman” is used to encompass anyone assigned female at birth.) The U.S.’s present fertility rate, for example, is about 1.7; China’s is 1.2. Demographers consider a fertility rate of 2.1 to be the replacement rate—that is, the required number of offspring, on average, for a population to hold steady. Today birth rates in the wealthiest countries are below the replacement rate. About 50 percent of all nations fall below the replacement rate, and in 2022 the region with the lowest fertility rate (0.8) was Hong Kong.

Katie Peek, “Global Population Growth Is Slowing Down. Here’s One Reason Why“, Scientific American, December 7, 2022, (emphasis mine)

For simplification, we look at only the fertility metrics. Migration prediction is a mess because of laws and lines drawn on maps long ago. The data, however, demonstrates a decline and yet in the same article we see something interesting along those lines, which points to a need for migration.

High-income nations now have the lowest birth rates, and the lowest-income nations currently have the highest birth rates. “The gap has continued to widen between wealthy nations and poorer ones,” says Jennifer Sciubba, a social scientist at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who has written about these planetary-scale demographic shifts. “But longer term,” she says, “we’re moving toward convergence.” In other words, this disparity among nations’ birth rates isn’t a permanent chasm. It’s a temporary divide that will narrow over the coming decades.

Katie Peek, “Global Population Growth Is Slowing Down. Here’s One Reason Why“, Scientific American, December 7, 2022, (emphasis mine)

How could we move toward that convergence without migration, particularly with economic disparity increasing even as we claim global poverty is diminishing? The global economics of nations has a role to play here as well. It’s not hard to see how the global population by itself might be around 9 billion in 2045, but where will those people live, and how will they live?

Let’s factor in something else, such as sea water levels. We attribute much of it to climate change. Pumping water out of aquifers faster than they can replenish is also a factor. I also stumbled across a few articles about how trees seemingly bend the laws of physics in storing water, and since a tree is roughly 50% water by mass, every time we cut down a tree half of it’s mass is released into the atmosphere as water.

It is interesting to note that as we cut down trees, we not only affect the ratio of gases in the air, a living thing by itself, but also release that moisture into the atmosphere where it will likely end up in the ocean that will contribute to sea level rise. How much is that? I don’t know, but since we have been doing it for generations I expect that it has been a significant amount.

Where do we find water to irrigate new tree growth when we plant them? Rains, the local aquifer, etc. Planting trees may well pull moisture out of the air, but does it do so at a rate greater than we pump water out of the ground to irrigate them?

And how much water do we store in our bodies? Roughly 60% of our body is water, and assuming a 75kg (approximately 165 pounds) person, each person would have about 45 liters (12 gallons) per human. We also store water. When we get buried, it goes into the local aquifer, when we get cremated, it goes into the atmosphere.

To maintain that level of water in our systems, which we conveniently find all over in plastic bottles these days, we need 3.7 litres (men) or 2.7 litres (women) per day. With a population of over 8 billion at this time, that’s a lot of water, and desalinization seems a great idea for assuring a better replenishment of the aquifers we’re pumping water out of. Yet we are bound by our own economics in this regard, about how cost-effective it is to do these things, particularly in less economically advantaged nations.

Oh, and we’re looking at increasing to 9 billion humans around 2045, but that number is based on fertility alone. There are a lot of other factors, which include water – which is also another factor.

Toss in politics and geography of materials for technology, it’s hard to look at a prediction like that of the technological singularity and be a bit boggled by the hubris. Now, if we could get all this data from all these silos to interact in ways that are cross-disciplinary, which an artificial intelligence could be good at, we might get less imperfect predictions.

That might be a great use of AI.

Artificial Extinction.

~ Taran ~ 13 Comments

The discussion regarding artificial intelligence continues, with the latest round of cautionary notes making the rounds. Media outlets are covering it, like CNBC’s “A.I. poses human extinction risk on par with nuclear war, Sam Altman and other tech leaders warn“.

Different versions of that article written by different organizations are all over right now, but it derives from one statement on artificial intelligence:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Center for AI Safety, Open Letter, undated.

It seems a bit much. Granted, depending on how we use AI we could be on the precipice of a variety of unpredictable catastrophes, and while pandemics and nuclear war definitely poses direct physical risks, artificial intelligence poses more indirect risks. I’d offer that can make it more dangerous.

In the context of what I’ve been writing about, we’re looking at what we feed our heads with. We’re looking at social media being gamed to cause confusion. These are dangerous things. Garbage in, Garbage out doesn’t just apply to computers – it applies to us.

More tangibly, though, it can adversely impact our way(s) of life. We talk about the jobs it will replace, with no real plan on how to employ those displaced. Do people want jobs? I think that’s the wrong question that we got stuck with in the old paint on society’s canvas. The more appropriate question is, “How will people survive?”, and that’s a question that we overlook because of the assumption that if people want to survive, they will want to work.

Is it corporate interest that is concerned about artificial intelligence? Likely not, they like building safe spaces for themselves. Sundar Pichai mentioned having more lawyers, yet a lawyer got himself into trouble when he used ChatGPT to write court filings:

“The Court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance,” Castel wrote in a previous order on May 4. “A submission filed by plaintiff’s counsel in opposition to a motion to dismiss is replete with citations to non-existent cases… Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations.”

The filings included not only names of made-up cases but also a series of exhibits with “excerpts” from the bogus decisions. For example, the fake Varghese v. China Southern Airlines opinion cited several precedents that don’t exist.”

“Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”“, Jon Brodkin, ArsTechnica, May 30th 2023

It’s a good thing there are a few people out there relying on facts instead of artificial intelligence, or we might stray into a world of fiction where those that control the large language models and general artificial intelligences that will come later will create it.

Authoritarian governments could manipulate machine learning and deep learning to assure everyone’s on the same page in the same version of the same book quite easily, with a little tweaking. Why write propaganda when you can have a predictive text algorithm with a thesaurus of propaganda strapped to it’s chest? Maybe in certain parts of Taliban controlled Afghanistan, it will detect that the user is female and give it a different set of propaganda, telling the user to stay home and stop playing with keyboards.

It’s not hard to imagine all of this. It is a big deal, but in parts of the world like Trinidad and Tobago, you don’t see much about it because there’s no real artificial intelligence here, even as local newspaper headlines indicate real intelligence in government might be a good idea. The latest article I found on it in local newspapers online is from 2019, but fortunately we have TechNewsTT around discussing it. Odd how that didn’t come up in a Google search of “AI Trinidad and Tobago”.

There are many parts of the world where artificial intelligence is completely off the radar as people try to simply get by.

The real threat of any form of artificial intelligence isn’t as tangible as nuclear war or pandemics to people. It’s how it will change our way(s) of life, how we’ll provide for families.

Even the media only points at that we want to see, since the revenue model is built around that. The odds are good that we have many blind spots that the media doesn’t show us even now, in a world where everyone who can afford it has a camera and the ability to share information with the world – but it gets lost in the shuffle of social media algorithms if it’s not something that is organically popular.

This is going to change societies around the globe. It’s going to change global society, where the access to large language models may become as important as the Internet itself was – and we had, and still have, digital divides.

Is the question who will be left behind, or who will survive? We’ve propped our civilizations up with all manner of things that are not withstanding the previous changes in technology, and this is a definite leap beyond that.

How do you see the next generations going about their lives? They will be looking for direction, and presently, I don’t know that we have any advice. That means they won’t be prepared.

But then, neither were we, really.

Broken Time.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

This space was going to be intentionally left blank as I spend some time on Memorial Day, but then this I was reminded by a vibrating watch that I had to write something here – a reminder.

Reminders allow us to remember to do things, which is also a fitting thing to write about given that it is Memorial Day.

The day itself sits comfortably on American calendars, itself a technology from the Roman Empire era. It allowed scheduling and organization. In time, it enforced scheduling and organization and to some today, it is a tyranny. Deadlines make wooshing sounds as they rush by.

The technology that I was reminded by is voluntary, I set it up and of course it doesn’t have settings to take public holidays off – and if it did, it might not work because where I am located, Memorial Day is not a public holiday. The world outside of the United States trudges on.

Much of the reminders I get these days are involuntary. Some software company wants to update something just about every time I touch a different device. The poor woman at the optical center who wants to remind me of needing to check my eyesight this year calls while I’m in the middle of talking to someone.

Reminders can be interruptions, as the reminder was today for me.

When I was younger, I recall seeing those older than myself sit quiet for periods of time, lost in thought or memory – or both. It was an inordinate amount of time, I thought, to be so long without motion and observation. As I grew older, I learned the time is never enough, there’s always something that shakes us from the moments of deep thought, of reflection, of revisiting events, of studying problems and possible solutions, or simply taking a moment to be human.

We don’t talk about the time it takes to be ‘simply human’ that much, and we have neatly shoved it into the realm of the introverts that the extroverts scream outside of. It’s necessary, and while technology pushes the frontiers of productivity employers push the frontier of the clock, tapping their watches insistently as they look at us.

The difference between a reminder and an interruption is the importance of the what you are doing versus what you needed to be reminded of. If you’re rushing to get online to check for an email about a deathly sick relative, that interruption from Microsoft is likely a very negative experience.

“You’ll upgrade my operating system to the next version of Windows for free? That news on Aunt Samantha can wait! Screw that lady!”, simply doesn’t seem to be something would think in such a situation.

It does seem that in my lifetime, we get interrupted more than reminded. That could also simply be my anecdotal experience as I grow older, but it does seem to me that Pavlov might have a lot to write about these days.

Artificial Intimacy

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

One of the weirdest things that has come out of this technology hype over something marketed as artificial intelligence is that a SnapChat influencer has launched an ‘AI’ version of herself that will be your girlfriend for $1/minute.

Probably the funniest part is that her name is phonetically the same as Karen. So you can have an artificial Karen as your girlfriend for only $1 a minute.

Still, it’s disturbing enough that men and possibly women would pay her in the first place. Sort of like a lot of the OnlyFans stuff that I keep hearing about.

Someone capitalizing on their looks is really nothing new. I don’t know much about her other than she’s not bad looking. She has people paying for a knock off version of herself, so I suppose there’s a market – but why is there a market for pseudo-intimacy?

It’s not as if the planet hasn’t become more populated with people. Where once you could throw a rock and hit someone, now you can throw an elbow and hit at least one person.

The even weirder thing is that another company, in completely unrelated news, seems to be working on custom chat-bots that could be used for much the same thing: Deep Fakes as a Service (DFaaS). It’s coming from China, too, one of the more populated nations on the planet… but it’s likely not looking at the Chinese market too much.

These technologies are basically Bayesian probability deciding from words in a dictionary on how to respond. Attach a pretty moving image, and tada – you’ve gotten to the emotional equivalent of a robotic stripper with a great vocabulary.

Technology And Arts

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Sisyphean TechnologyPeople in technology of my era and later are strange creatures that delve into the depths of understanding the cold and relentless logic of systems that they create and maintain. We see the same in other fields, in Law, in Medicine, Accounting and so many others.

Today, as Lessig wrote, ‘Code is Law‘, and Law wrestles with technology even as technology works to circumvent existing Law. Law, as a freshman student will tell you, is not Ethics – it is an attempt at the codification of Ethics in a society. That distinction is important yet routinely forgotten by many – and that’s where some empowered by technology have an ax to grind. Others are just in it for the money, or for some political agenda.

One of the problems we face, as a global society of screen-watchers, is that we have separate silos of technology and arts – where technology is often used as a platform for the liberal arts.