Futapy

HW 9

per http://informationcomputingandthefuture.blogspot.com/p/hw9.html

A1) The Observer Effect:

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

Quantum Tunneling:

The Butterfly Effect:

External perturbations:

Existentialism - Why Care (About the Future):

The care horizon (note: I could not find anything on this specifically; maybe I wasn't using the right search terms):

A2) Relative to the topic of "AI performance indistinguishable from or better than that of a human", a working project title but maybe not the final title:



3) On the topic "AI performance indistinguishable from or better than that of a human":


4.1) Read Vernor Vinge's  "Technological Singularity." Critique and comment. What do you think of the singularity concept?

This is very true: "The competitive advantage -- economic, military, even artistic -- of every advance in automation is so compelling that forbidding such things merely assures that someone else will get them first."

On Intelligence Amplification: "Every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence." This has happened over the last 30 years; I have witnessed it. A university grad today has at her fingertips vastly more knowledge than anyone prior to the early 1990s, who had themselves studied for years but had no way to easily reference new information outside of paper publications. Anecdotally I remember about 1996 or so telling an older coworker exactly how to set up a modem on an AIX-based computer, having found out myself moments before with an AltaVista search. That was a defining moment for me, and I was fortunate to have just those skills at just that time in my career, which Vinge would agree is an example of IA.

"We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light." - True. I believe I discussed this in the assignment above under the "100 years" heading. I wrote that before reading this, and hope it can be my commentary on the singularity concept.

4.2) What do you think of Ray Kurzweil's views on the singularity?

Per "https://www.kurzweilai.net/futurism-ray-kurzweil-claims-singularity-will-happen-by-2045", he says "We’re going to get more neo-cortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music, we’re going to be sexier. We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree". I don't see that happening in my nearly-adult children and their friends; THEY think they are funnier and better at music but they aren't, and the entire notion of sexy to them is as abstract. This generation sure isn't fooling around like the boomers and the gen-Xers. However the entire concept of a singularity, of a super-human intelligence designing an even more super-human intelligence, is possible. I don't think it is currently practical, as current model training runs cost millions of dollars and consume vast amounts of power, but Moore's law hasn't abated and these costs will inevitably shrink.

4.3) What do you think of Ray Kurzweil the person?  (We'll discuss Kurzweil in due course.)

I have no idea. I googled Ray Kurzweil Controversy and got this page which looks like the results of a futurists slap-fight. I've witnessed some economist slap-fights and they are every bit as entertaining and inconsequential.

5)  a.b.

It is now Friday night and I have simply had no time to do this, between this homework, my day job, and other very important life events that I hope I won't have to discuss but may need to shortly. My job has been an every-day job for the last few weeks due to the financial fallout of the winter event of Feb 2021 - I'd be happy to discuss. This is literally the first day I've taken off in 3 weeks straight, and I get this weekend off too! We are over the major hump for the next 3 weeks, so will be able to take some days off to work on the project next week. My plan is to use your advice of the note-card topics and rearrange them into a "GPT-3 and large generic language models, what they are and how we got here and what are the immediate implications, for dummies" sort of paper and accompanying slide presentation. I've been storing links of note - which is easy now that Google News feeds me "articles I may be interested in" based on my previous searches; it is doing the research for me! "you may have missed this fascinating article about your topic" shows up daily on my phone! Anyway; I'm spent - and if I lose a few points for not having done enough on my project this week by the end of Friday, so be it. I apologize. I may need to ditch next week's homework entirely to free up time for the project - in fact, after having reviewed the course info again, I'm pretty sure I'm going to adopt a strategy of strategic lateness of regularly scheduled homework in order to make sure that the project and presentation are in decent shape. Better to lose 50 points on a couple of assignments than miss out on 400 for lack of adequate project / presentation cycles.

EDIT 2021-04-08 (yes this is late but kind of done) I have now organized all of my links in a Google doc under the following broad categories that could easily be turned into a couple minutes of slides each:

6) Right now, I plan for my presentation to be a narrative slideshow, the structure of which will be very similar to the paper. I promise not to simply read my paper as the presentation. I have found my tendency is to try to cram too much information into a presentation so the challenge will be what to leave out, but I understand the target is 20 minutes. I will plan it as if I were giving a presentation to the local ham radio club - here is one I did just before the pandemic hit on various power related topics :)

7) Fill out a very brief survey about HW9.

DONE.


8) Grad students only: continue with the book you obtained. Read the next 20 pages. State the book title, author, and page numbers you have read. Discuss the pages, explaining what you agree with, disagree with, and how your views compare with those of other reviewers on Amazon or elsewhere.

Predictions / 30 Great Minds on the Future pages 118-137; essays about and predictions by J. K. Galbraith and Daniel Goleman. Galbraith was an influential liberal economist throughout the later portion of the 20th century, advising the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He wrote The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, at one time influential books that had waned in influence and popularity by the turn of the century with the rise of the Reagan doctrine of trickle-down economics. He sees the class divisions in our country as an inescapable outcome of a country grown rich, where the poor become a voting minority and are increasingly under-represented by a government of the rich who consider their success a result of their superior character or intelligence, and he rejects the notion that rewarding the affluent will result in social progress. His prediction for the coming century is more of a hope, that the income gap be narrowed in our country by improving the condition of the currently deprived. He advocates for what is now called a universal basic income with the idealistic statement “A rich country can guarantee income to the deprived. If some do not work, so be it. The rich are also known on occasion to prefer leisure.” He advocates compassion for deprived humans in the larger world no matter where they are, and a strengthened United Nations with the power to suspend sovereignty in countries destroying their people. He laments the International Monetary Fund which bails out those most responsible for the excesses and wild swings of market capitalism. He cautions that no economist can take leave of the threat imposed by the nuclear stockpiles capable of ending life as we know it, still ready and waiting the authority of an insane politician or their military delegates.

On a personal note I agree with Galbraith that the most effective government for the most number of people is a strong democratic state, where the people are free to choose and remove leaders that further or hinder the goals of society as they see fit. I have seen a dramatic and intentional weakening of this notion of the state over my lifetime, perhaps from internal forces and perhaps as a result of sabotage by outside state actors. Nevertheless, our ability to have an effective voice in our government in the age of powerful political parties with the stated desire to weaken the very government they control concerns me greatly; we are slipping steadily away from the basic tenant of strong democratic self-rule which will lead to the type of power vacuum that seems to be inevitably filled by corrupt authoritarians in other countries.

Daniel Goleman is a “great mind” of a different era at the edge of the 21st century. After completing a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard he became a popular visiting lecturer there. He wrote the book Emotional Intelligence published in 1995, subsequently translated into 30 languages and selling four million copies worldwide at the time of writing. Goleman has found himself in great demand on the business lecture circuit after asserting that emotional intelligence consisting of competencies such as initiative, self confidence, relationship abilities, and the drive to improve are better predictors of success than IQ. One of his insights from neuroscience is that the parts of the brain responsible for these traits learns in an entirely different way from the parts responsible for technical skills; classrooms and books are “next to useless for learning how to behave in a more emotionally intelligent fashion”; habit change, practice and repetition are required. His prediction, prefaced with “You can plan for a hundred years, but you don’t know what will happen in the next moment”, is that “developed societies will expand the mandate of schools to include the education of the emotions”. He cites a consistent downward trend in the abilities of our children over time in areas of self-management and social skills, and notes the corresponding upwards trend in the rates of homicide, suicide and rape among teenagers. He describes my situation perfectly; the increased competitiveness of the global marketplace has left parents working harder and longer and with less time for their children than previous generations. He predicts that schools are the only vehicle left that can adequately convey emotional intelligence such as impulse control, anger management, motivation, empathy, collaboration and working out disagreements positively. He leaves with the prediction “Empathy will hold as valued as place in the curriculum as algebra.”

While I can’t claim mastery by any means, I am extremely concerned for my older children who seem to be severely behind in the listed emotional intelligence traits. Particularly in the year of their life lost to the pandemic – my older son’s culmination of high school and first year of university were spent on the couch, and my younger child has withdrawn to a bedroom the vast majority of the time – will undoubtedly leave scars for a lifetime. Prior to that we have made the mistake that raising our children in the relatively unpopulated countryside would be a good experience for them; it is clear on reflection that this has limited their social interaction and ability to learn these traits. I wonder now about location and emotional intelligence as a driver of broader demographic and political trends; this would nicely explain the uncooperative nature of many of my rural neighbors and the political attitudes that represent them.

The role of optimism in effecting our future notwithstanding, after reading the last few essays and predictions I think a more appropriate title might have been Wishful Thinking of 30 Great Minds on the Future.