science

Study Claims Human Writers and Artists Pollute More Than AI.

~ Taran ~ 4 Comments

The second I came across the study, “The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans“, I knew that there had to be flaws in the study.

The premise of the study seemed weird from the start: What would be the point of it? Why is it that someone thought to compare the carbon footprints of humans and AI for generating images and text? What burning question was trying to be answered?

Is the argument to be that there should be less humans? The way things are going on the planet, that almost seems plausible – people warring and killing people could say, “We’re reducing the carbon footprint of humanity!”, get some carbon credits for it and feel good about their contributions – except if protests around the world are any indicator, that may not sell well.

The answer is likely that since people have been pointing out that the carbon footprint of generative AI is high, they want to be able to have a rebuttal. But there are some questions.

To calculate the carbon footprint of a person writing, we consider the per capita emissions of individuals in different countries. For instance, the emission footprint of a US resident is approximately 15 metric tons CO2e per year22, which translates to roughly 1.7 kg CO2e per hour. Assuming that a person’s emissions while writing are consistent with their overall annual impact, we estimate that the carbon footprint for a US resident producing a page of text (250 words) is approximately 1400 g CO2e. In contrast, a resident of India has an annual impact of 1.9 metric tons22, equating to around 180 g CO2e per page. In this analysis, we use the US and India as examples of countries with the highest and lowest per capita impact among large countries (over 300 M population).

“The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans“, Bill Tomlinson, Rebecca W. Black, Donald J. Patterson & Andrew W. Torrance, Scientific Reports, 14 Feb 2024

What they don’t take into account – to the detriment of we lowly human writers – is that the physical act of writing so many words an hour is not all of writing. In fact, all of writing – real writing – requires the lifetime of sensory inputs as well as thought up to that point. Words don’t just fall out of humans.

This point is important because it’s also true of generative AI. Generative AI is certainly trained on large datasets, but those datasets have come from… where? They therefore inherit the human writer carbon footprint, which would be higher since they have stolen used materials that humans created to feed the training model. Further, every human involved in that process, as well as the maintenance of the system, adds to the carbon footprint. Then there are the materials in the GPUs, the integration, etc.

NVIDIA even has a page on the materials that go into GPUs.

So sure, maybe in generating a few thousand words – we presently call that ‘slop’ – it can do someone’s homework or help one write a monotonous study (they did use ChatGPT3), that carbon footprint might seem to be lower, but overall I’d say that it was actually higher than the average human overall.

Because we humans, in having our average carbon footprint, do other things that raise it: we drive to work, we use electricity to power devices pitched to us to increase our productivity, we cook meals, etc. All of that – all of that – is being added into the mix as if it has no value.

Before generative AI came around, nobody pointed at writers and said, “Those people just have this carbon footprint and they don’t do anything. We should create a generative AI that does it.”. In fact, nobody actually asked for any of that. Then, to have work written by writers sucked into a learning model to be used to generate text to create more slop – of questionable quality, of dubious value, being generated to spam the Internet with – and I apologize to real Spam – less nutritional value and taste.

AI art is much the same, I imagine, but I can’t really draw to save my life and have had the good fortune not to have to. I wrote something about using AI art in blogs that explains my usage, but I would never tell my visual art friends that AI has a lower carbon footprint.

The whole study seems funded by some company that wants a rebuttal to carbon footprints. It is, at best, very limited in how it views the carbon footprints of both we lowly humans and our esteemed ‘colleagues’, generative AI. At worst, it’s meant to prop up propaganda marketing for AI and the people who make the point that on top of the human carbon footprint, generative AI adds significantly more.

Unless, of course, this is a study to demonstrate that we need fewer people and we should do something about it – which some governments are doing right now, unfortunately.

AI From A Half Century Perspective.

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

When I read the Forbes article, “Why These 50 Over 50 Founders Say Beware Of AI ‘Hallucination‘”, I chuckled a bit. I happen to be over 50 and felt the ageism creeping onto my shoulders like a damp bathrobe in technology in the United States.

The kids don’t want to hear what the grizzled veterans of technology have to say, just as when we were kids we didn’t want to listen to those who had callouses from punch cards, and yet we respected them.

So Forbes found 50 founders over 50 and they said pretty much the same thing we were told when we started out: With great [computational] power comes great moral responsibility.

Some of us took that seriously. Some of us did not. If we’re honest and we look around a bit, maybe collectively we didn’t do so good with that. Very few of us have had the opportunity to do something with our abilities and skills largely because the market drives everything, what people want drives the market, and the marketers drive what people want. As a byproduct of that, people are still buying Microsoft 365 subscriptions even though they could be using LibreOffice at no costs.

Governments in the developing world have their budgets eaten that way, and that sells more hardware because Microsoft has done many good things but it also keeps requiring people to buy new computers. So they can sell more software. Meanwhile, those budgets are incompatible with the issues with the developing world – but if you do just one more update it will all be improved and the world will be a better place.

Colonel Sherman T. Potter, a character from M*A*S*H, who taught me the value of saying, “Horse Puckey!”

Horsepuckey.

People make bad decisions. Governments make worse decisions. Technology, driven by both, hasn’t been a moral compass.

The article is good. It hits the high points of much of my confirmation bias. It also does not jive with the realities of the world we live in because as much as people will want to say that the issues of artificial intelligence are technology issues, they are only symptoms of our human problem. If technology could wag the dog, maybe the world would be a better place – but technology does not and it’s hubris to think otherwise.

There are people who have used science and technology to make the world better. Nikola Tesla’s cheap sale of patents to Westinghouse gave us 3 phase electricity. Dr. Jonas Salk didn’t patent the polio vaccine. Sir Frederick G Banting , Charles H Best and JJR Macleod sold the patents to insulin to the University of Toronto for $1 each, with Banting famously saying, “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”

Most people don’t know these names. Most people these days have their ears filled with Musk and Zuckerburg who have not done anything even near what those important people did with science and technology. We do have Linus Torvalds, who made an operating system free to the world, but most people don’t know about him.

Computational power now has become such a beast untethered from the morality because our moral compasses don’t point to making the world a better place, apparently.

And this from someone over 50.

Learning models for these artificial intelligences come from publicly available data possibly without the permission of the authors. We don’t know what’s used other than vague stuff that gets thrown at us, even as people toss about the phrase ‘Median human’ as if it means anything other than the commodification of human ‘productivity’. As if we were horses and we generate horsepower. Few of you have seen a horse in person these days, I’m pretty sure. And these companies turn around and charge people money to use their artificial intelligences even as they look at replacing them in the workplace.

The family of Henrietta Lacks is still wondering about morality in medicine which, lest we forget, is just another branch of human technology – science which has become technology with stem cells commoditized.

Computational power giving great responsibility is true, yet if it is true, it does seem to exist in a vacuum.


Science Meets Science Fiction: Giving AI Senses.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

At present, the only information that these stabs at artificial intelligence get is through our curation. Some subset of humanity decides what goes into the training models and tweaks the algorithms, and then we get them to spit out gobs of text, images, and even video.

Personally, I’ve never seen much value in all of that since we produce human intelligence cheaply, with less of a carbon footprint and, if done right, more pleasurably. The increase in global population demonstrates that developing an intelligence like a human would be a bit redundant.

One of the best ways of explaining this is through Science Fiction – this quotation from Battlestar Galactica, where Brother Cavil (a Cylon, an artificial intelligence) is griping about how he was created.

“In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? …

I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. …

I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to – I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly because I have to – I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I’m a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I’m trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!”

‘Brother Cavil’, written by Ronald D. Moore, BattleStar Galactica Series

Why would we want to simply replicate the senses we ourselves are stuck with? If you think about it, much of our modern knowledge comes from extending our senses by detecting things and representing them to our actual senses. X-rays are read by radiologists every day. Radar. Sonar.

Fox News has an article, “Artificial intelligence won’t likely reach human-like levels without this one key component, study finds“, and it refers to the sensor output but doesn’t get to the actual source. A bit of digging, and I found that TechExplore gave it up.

“In a paper published in Science Robotics, Professor Tony Prescott and Dr. Stuart Wilson from the University’s Department of Computer Science, say that AI systems are unlikely to resemble real brain processing no matter how large their neural networks or the datasets used to train them might become, if they remain disembodied.”

“AI unlikely to gain human-like cognition, unless connected to real world through robots, says study“, University of Sheffield, TechXplore, June 12, 2023.

The actual paper is, “Understanding brain functional architecture through robotics“, and is unfortunately paywalled by Science.org.

The point is some smart Professors figured out what science fiction already had, but their premise is scientific whereas Science Fiction’s premise as I quote above was empathic. I could probably find at least 10 more in a day, and hundreds within a week. Maybe even thousands of science fiction references in a month.

Who wouldn’t want to be able to watch a star go supernova without harm?

But there’s much more to it than that. What if we could have an intelligent partner that could help us deal with stuff that is well beyond our senses, yet can communicate with us?

That’s the stuff of science fiction, and maybe soon, the stuff of science.

But then, where would we fit in?

Science Fiction in Latin America.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

When I read the image to the left from over at Classics of Fiction about the New Prehistory, I was surprised that I didn’t know about the lack of science fiction roots in Hispanic countries. It opened a door. Science fiction fires the imagination for applying science and technology to issues, so this is important.

At the first CARDICIS, way back when, I thought I’d been invited by mistake. Suddenly I found myself in St. Lucia at a conference about ICT (or in Spanish, TIC) and culture. There was, for the first time as they said, real time translation allowing people from the Caribbean and South American region to speak to each other.

The core of this was wrapped around the metaphor of cooking, and food is certainly something that we all share around the world since we need to eat. It was a great conference, and I learned a lot about the region, barring US and UK territories and the Bahamas.

The Caribbean is poorly defined any way you look at it, and one can argue it’s by design. European territories were never designed to be independent, and it shows even now. CARICOM members include nations from the South American continent (Suriname, Guyana and Belize), and those nations all have something in common: They don’t speak Spanish. I don’t know how that happened, but it happened.

Geographically, the countries considered in the Caribbean are not the same, and within the Caribbean itself there are islands of isolation in language. By land mass or population, though, the majority of nations in the Caribbean speak Spanish, French, English and Dutch in descending order, and these islands come from the European influences which, to this day, define who does what with who.

After CARDICIS, I spent a lot of time in South America and the Caribbean in places where English was not the native language. I even became conversational in Spanish during that time, though I fear that part of my brain goes on vacation now and then. I enjoyed getting to understand how people lived throughout the region, and yet here’s this gaping hole in my knowledge that I knew nothing about.

It was never a question, so I never sought an answer. So I started digging in.

Science Fiction in Latin America

Science fiction (SF) is not a literary form native to the region, but many Latin American writers have utilized its creative freedom to reflect local settings and concerns. The definition of science fiction is particularly fluid in Latin America, where it overlaps considerably with horror, mystery, fantasy, and other genres…

Science Fiction in Latin America, Encyclopedia.com, accessed on 26th May 2023.

I had no clue, but in the books I read in Spanish I never did read any science fiction. Thinking back to when I picked them up in my travels, availability could have been a factor, though my focus at the time was trying to understand how people lived.

“La gente real” is a common enough phrase but one I picked up in Nicaragua. The real people. Not what you see in the tourist brochures, the news, or what your friend who visited that all inclusive hotel thinks about the people who made their stay comfortable.

So this was a new thing to research, and since I’m procrastinating about a particular part of what I’m writing, I drilled in this morning. The thing about science fiction is that there’s science involved. It’s not exactly a big secret with the name being stuck in the title of the genre, but science and technology are not that far apart. In fact, technology is best described as science practically applied. So science fiction would go hand in hand with ICT.

I recalled conversations I had over the years with many of my Spanish speaking friends, and not once did we really cover common ground in science fiction aside from stale Star Trek and Star Wars stuff. Those are so ubiquitous that a billion years from now errant signals will reach a planet with intelligent life who will think Yoda is a demi-god and that Captain Kirk is a reason to bolster their planetary defenses. They may eventually get here and find some plastic light sabers and phasers to help prop up that mythos in their culture. There’s a book idea.

And then I remembered using the word, “Grok” to one of my friends in Costa Rica, who was (and probably still is) an Argentinean Penguinista, steeped in the Linux command line. She didn’t know what it meant, and I attributed that to language. I do recall explaining the origin from Stranger in a Strange Land and Robert Heinlein, but she had not read that book and I thought little of it.

Latin America has it’s own science fiction, and I had somehow completely missed that.

“The man could feel his eyes filling with tears. Before him stood a spaceship, a gigantic metallic disk that seemed to be made of two immense plates joined at the edges.” These first words of Argentine Eduardo Goligorsky’s “The Last Refuge” could open any American or European science fiction story. However, the rest of the story largely deviates from Western models of sci-fi in its overt treatment of political themes, as “The Last Refuge” quite openly critiques authoritarianism. The story’s protagonist, Guillermo Maidana, must escape an authoritarian society that proclaims itself as the “the last refuge of Western civilization,” directly referencing Argentine dictator Juan Carlos Onganía’s paternalistic crusade against communism. Maidana’s crime? Possessing a photo album of historic technological and scientific achievements…

…Despite its clear relevance to political themes across the region, Latin American sci-fi does not receive the credit it is due inside or outside Latin America. Historically, the literary establishment across Latin American has not taken sci-fi seriously. In Mexico, literary contests and publications “did not think it was sufficiently literary, so it was frowned upon,” said Schaffler. Likewise, the Argentine cultural establishment looked down on Argentine scientists in general. “Scientists’ opinion has as much weight as that of rock stars or sports idols,” Capanna explained. Even when sci-fi did enter the mainstream, popular audiences often believed that imported sci-fi was somehow “purer.”…”

“Looking to Las Estrellas: The Political Role of Latin American Science Fiction“, Kendrick Foster, Harvard Political Review, April 13th, 2020.

There’s a lot of text between the elipses in this last quote, and I encourage people to go read the article if they’re interested in this topic. I had no idea about all of this.

Science fiction in many ways drives technology. Technology today emulates science fiction of yesteryear. Many people won’t remember Dick Tracy’s watch where he could video chat with people. Many more people don’t even know who Dick Tracy is. Somewhere on this planet, right now, someone’s trying to build a light saber. Tricorders and tablets, artificial intelligences and those presented in science fiction…

The last article gives a big hint about the difference in focuses, and it likely has to do with the situations in Latin America itself, which are painfully political as we see here in Trinidad and Tobago. With an influx of Venezuelans taking the jobs nobody in Trinidad and Tobago seemed to want, Venezuelans are making their way into Trinidad and Tobago culture. It’s a drum that people beat every now and then about the Venezuelan influx, but Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela have a long standing relationship – enough so that 1920s calypsonian King Radio sang Matilda long before Belafonte recorded anything.

There’s certainly a lot of space to think about this, but I sadly have not read any Latin American science fiction. The intentionality, be it “make the world a better place through science” or “get rid of authoritarian society” all drives the imagination that drives technology… and is something maybe we should be paying a little more attention to.

I wonder now about French, Dutch…

The Flooding Saga Of Mosquito Creek

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Will They Ever Finish The Goodineaux Bridge Repairs?Mosquito Creek, in Southwestern Trinidad, could be a comedy of errors committed by a confederacy of dunces over decades. To locals who have to trek through it daily, it is much the same without the comedy. It has moved from drama to the mundane, a tribute to how things do not get done in Trinidad and Tobago.

And recently, the flooding. In fact, I’m tired of writing about this over the years – the picture is from 2010, which is by no means when this all started – I just happened to have the picture. And the reason I write this? A video that I have been tagged in on Facebook so many times that I tire of responding to it.

The video proffers a solution to flooding on Mosquito Creek that is not expedient, that is flawed in that it doesn’t actually resolve anything other than adding a few man-made reefs to the equation. That it is so popular is a testament, I suppose, to the cultural inertia regarding projects done by any government: Plans cannot be changed.

But plans need to change. The roadway exists between marsh and sea, with the Godineaux river entering the Gulf of Paria. And flooding, dear reader, is about flow rates.

We’ve all experienced a clogged drain – where water enters by faucet faster than it can exit the drain. The sink floods. It’s this level of thinking that has people coming up with things that they think are solutions, but they don’t seem to understand the greater issues involved.

First and foremost, the road is not a natural addition. Use over the decades has compacted soil underneath, which means that water cannot naturally flow between the marsh and the sea. When it does, we call it flooding only because we built an easy road for expediency that has increasingly become more painful to use and maintain.

The right answer is to do an overpass there and allow the water to do what it does: enter and leave the mangrove. Why is this important? Because the Godineaux River cannot always push water out – it’s a clogged drain – and for those of you with a fairly modern sink, you might find under your faucet the overflow. The mangrove to sea path is the natural overflow. This is just basic science applied with common sense, something that the Environmental Management Agency and Ministry of Works and Transport should have on tap through at least one person that is listened to. Lo, this is not the case.

So what happens when we get heavy rains in poorly developed areas (they are) that tries to get out to sea in that path? Blocked by the road, the water has no choice but to go onto the road. Thus, flooding.

Plus, too often do we forget that drainage in Wet Season has to be balanced by water retention during dry season. Streamlining waterways will make for drier soil during dry season, and this turns to dust and dust blows away. Soil erosion by wind, and farmers have less water for their crops.

As Trinidad and Tobago has developed haphazardly, where Town and Country operate at a pace that snails laugh at, people do their own development without thought to the bigger picture. Even with approvals, some suspected to be assisted by a bit of grease to the wheel, you’d think that the EMA and Town and Country would require retention ponds to balanced reclaimed land. One would think.

So while we complain about a major artery of traffic for South West Trinidad, the real problem is much more complex. The solutions are simple.

Sufficient retention ponds along waterways to accommodate flooding. The road on Mosquito Creek Creek should either be rerouted or made into an overpass to let things flow more naturally below the road – not that we’re particularly good at building and maintaining roads in Trinidad and Tobago. And what does this require?

It requires people with common sense and a working knowledge of science to be in the right places, focused on the greater good instead of the personal good or expedient. Ultimately, that seems to be the real failure.