The Next 80 Years

Just finished the first two books of William Gibson’s latest planned trilogy: The Peripheral and Agency. Both are typically well written with plots and characters that briskly move a complicated story forward. Gibson has been ahead of his time since his 1984 sci-fi novel, Neuromancer launched the cyberpunk world of computer hacking anti-heroes. The new “jackpot” books are built around figures in the future (just prior and after 2100) using quantum entanglement to exchange information with people living earlier in this century. (Wikiquote describes the jackpot as “an ‘androgenic, systemic, multiplex’ cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century.”) The future period is in the aftermath of the jackpot, where whats left of humanity, after it was far too late, took climate change seriously. The earlier times (in the first book, 2032 and in the second 2017) take place when it was already far too late but we hadn’t yet changed how we live.

Gibson nailed it. To expand in my own words, these are the next 80 years.

It’s hard to know where to draw the line of when humans began degrading the world with the way we live. Was it with language, a bigger brain, fire and tools allowing homo sapiens to raise above mere animal abilities of tooth and claw? Or with the emergence of agriculture, where we began consuming our environment and changing the very face of the earth? Certainly with the industrial revolution and the utilization of hundreds of millions of years of buried sunlight in the form of hydrocarbons. Finally, with post-industrial, global capitalism, our consumption of the environment, and resultant waste dumped into it, increased exponentially.

This year, 2023, we have seen what must be – to anyone not totally fuddled by the paid climate change deniers – the many faces of climate change. Going well beyond mere weather extremes, it includes pandemics, drought, desertification, death of pollinators, failed crops and food shortages, unquenchable mega-fires, soot-filled air, regular “once-in-a-century” floods, climate-fueled illnesses (from hotter temperatures, swifter passage of pathogens and toxins), spreading invasive destructive and disease-causing pests, disappearing habitats, mass extinctions, ocean temperatures rising, over-fishing, death of reefs, melting ice and glaciers, garbage filled oceans and even whales attacking boats. Along with these are related violence and conflicts over mass migration, diminished water supplies, precious metals and growing domestic and global inequalities. Our own version of the Four Horses are saddling up.

Calling the tune is the oligarchy that benefit from the current form of global capitalism. They have been doing everything possible since big oil hid awareness of the implications of hydrocarbon use for the climate in order to maintain profits. They and their fellow mega-profit-maximizers have funded political elements resisting all efforts to challenge their power and seek even modest change in the dynamics of increased inequality and degradation of the environment. These political elements seek to divert attention away from the possibilities of real change by pushing backward-looking nationalism, racism, and fabricated cultural divisions meant to magnify the otherwise rational discontent with the world in which most of us now live into fear and rage directed at anyone but the rich and powerful. Thus many of those who might most benefit from change have nevertheless been convinced to accept outrageous lies and authoritarianism in its various guises.

There are few good guys among the world’s mega-corporations. The media platforms promulgate hate and directed misinformation. The new tech industries offering their magic are actually plunging us ever further into the technological singularity where fundamental change in our made-world runs ahead of our ability to understand and control it (AI and energy-intensive black crypto are certainly examples). And my iPhone, I must admit, is another opiate assuring us that we are up-to-date and in control of something (at the cost of far away miners dying in deep pits of rare earths.)

But we humans are likely to simply get used to the new normal exemplified by 2023. As long as it doesn’t happen to us it’ll remain just those things briefly floating into the media highlights. And so it is likely to go for the next 10, 15, 20 years until the cumulative changes chaotically coalesce into the widespread collapse of food chains (and not just for us), emptied aquifers, mass starvation, whole areas made unlivable by pervasive wet-bulb temperatures beyond 95o and the wars and domestic violence fueled when those who have nothing to loose try to get what remains from others. Then we descend into 40-60 years of continued catastrophe. Gibson called this the jackpot, I suppose somewhat ironically as everything comes due at once. He seems somewhat optimistic that, at some point, the economic and political elites will come to feel threatened enough – if only from the wholesale lost of customers – to look to the science and technology of green energy, carbon capture and revitalization of what’s left of the natural environment to reverse the effects of climate change. Surely, even now, such technology exists and is getting better all the time, but just not “economic” in the judgement of those who still make lots of money from hydrocarbons and those they have enlisted in their “anti-woke” crusades. So we will suck every last bit of hydrocarbons out of the earth before we change our approach enough to make a difference.

One can hope. Those living in the places where climate change is already threatening their lives, especially in the tropics, are trying to adapt and, if that is not possible, leave. We in the West have the biggest cushion. But we are too heading into bad times.

The Cosmic Reset

In an early episode of the original Star Trek, aliens put Kirk on a rugged planet to duel with the captain of a rival Gorn ship. Kirk wins as the dinosaur-like Gorn was intelligent but really slow.

On Earth, dinosaurs never became intelligent. Arising 240 million years ago, they survived some 175 million years and for 135 million of those were the dominant land animal. By the time they became extinct, dinosaurs had perfected two ways of living: eating plants or eating each other. The plant eaters were excellent at converting plant matter into animal bulk and could grow very large. The carnivores were very good at using tooth and claw to eat the vegetarians. Some carnivores – such as the raptors – may have hunted in pacts and perhaps had some wolf-like intelligence. But in general, brain power doesn’t seem to have been on the dinosaurs’ primary evolutionary path.

Mammals arose just 10-15 million years after the dinosaurs. But for most of their first 160 million years, they lived underfoot as squirrel-sized, nocturnal plant eaters and insectivores. For this life style, relatively larger brains gave an evolutionary advantage. So under the feet of the dinosaurs, mammals got smart. Still, even with their brains, they could not compete with tooth and claw.

Enter the six-mile wide asteroid that found the earth 66 million years ago. That asteroid – nudged out of its distant orbit by a chance encounter with another rock or after swinging too close to Jupiter or Saturn – had travelled silently on its way for perhaps a million years to arrive just seconds before the earth moved just beyond it in its own orbit. When it hit, it set the earth on fire and after it had burned away, caused a long dark winter that left most creatures dead and many extinct, including the non-avian dinosaurs. This disaster was, however, good news for the mammals. Perhaps because they were small, lived underground and could eat anything, some survived (along with birds, who are smart flying dinosaurs). Within a million years, the earth had recovered and mammals were the dominant large land animal. Some of those eventually evolved even further in reliance on brains, eventually producing us.

That asteroid wiped the slate clean, resetting the course of animal evolution in favor of the brain and intelligence. There is no reason to assume that an additional 66 million years would have led the dinosaurs towards the Gorn as in 175 million, it had not done so. It’s as if the universe has a bias in favor of intelligence and sent a “do-over” to set things right.

Interlude: Unconscious Artificial Intelligence?

I’ve been considering the nature and role of consciousness for some years. Along the way, I’ve wondered about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and whether at some point it might become conscious. My conclusion has been that however complex and “intelligent” an AI would become, that would not produce consciousness. Consciousness requires life and – as at must include at least some degree of self-awareness – it could only be the property of an individual organism with some organized “self.” Machine intelligence might be constructed – coded – to simulate self (and thus pass the Turing Test) but this would nevertheless not be an awareness of self. (Even now, AIs and robots can be quite “clever.” A recent visitor to a Tokyo hotel asked the robot concierge how much it cost. It replied “I’m priceless.” Cute.) However elaborate the mind – in the case of the most advanced AI’s built with neural networks this might be quite sophisticated, even to the point that the human programmers might not be able to replicate its internal processes – consciousness is an additional property beyond mere complexity and processing power. In the first season of HBO’s Westworld, android “hosts” become conscious through the repeated experience of pain and loss. But of course, to feel such emotions, one must first experience them as such. Quantity (of coded processing operations) does not equal qualia. Qualitative experiences are only possible if one is already conscious.

But human beings not only possess a conscious mind but also an unconscious one. Most brain processes – even those that at some point enter consciousness – originate and work away unconsciously. We all have the experience of dreaming and also of doing things quite competently, without any awareness of having done them. (We may, for example, drive a familiar daily route and get to our destination without remembering details of the ride.) The brain processing of the unconscious mind may indeed be replicated by advanced machine intelligence. As AI becomes more complex, given the power of electronic circuits and the complexity of coded learning via neutral networks, the processing capacity of machine intelligence may well exceed human despite not becoming conscious. They would also, perhaps, exceed human ability to understand what they are “thinking” (or even “dreaming”). It was Stephen Hawking who most famously warned of the dangers of such AIs. He warned that we need to be attentive to their management.

So, though AIs may never become conscious or self-aware, they may nevertheless run autonomously along routes enabled by the algorithms coded into their machine DNA and come to “conclusions” we humans might find inconvenient or dangerous. (They might for example decide that human activity is injurious to the planet – which it seems it is – and seek to correct the disease.) Limits should be included in the most basic AI coding and algorithms. Isaac Asimov thought of this some time ago. His Three Laws of Robotics make a good start:

First Law – A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law – A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law – A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

To these he later added a zeroith law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

This last might be might turn out to be a doubled-edged sword.

Next week I will return to  Notes on "A History of Political Theory"

A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: Part One

Sometime ago, I wrote in this space an Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book. For several years before and since, I have been pondering consciousness, cosmology and quantum physics in what I like to think follows in the tradition of natural philosophy. While I am not a scientist, I believe that the ultimate questions are essentially unanswerable but – following Saint Thomas’ finger – the proper subject of a reasoning intellect. It seems to me that the most fundamental question remains one that has haunted all philosophical and religious traditions: why is there anything? Science alone cannot shed light on this. Current science points to a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Today’s quantum physics and cosmology can say much about the first few moments after that event and the subsequent evolution of the universe and life. But we cannot say much about where the Big Bang came from and even less about why it might have occurred. Nor can we explain – without positing an infinity of less comfortable parallel universes – why our universe seems so right for us.

So the ultimate questions – why should there be anything, why should there be us – remain unanswered. It would seem that nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation. That there was nothing and always would be nothing would require nothing to be done or said about it. That nothing somehow gave way to something, anything, would have required a departure from the most simple state of nothing to greater complexity. The universe, in which we find ourselves a part, exists, it is something. Furthermore, it seems to have been fine-tuned insofar as it expresses a particular set of physical laws that seem designed to make life and intelligence inevitable. We live in a Goldilocks’ reality, not too cold, not too hot, but just right for us. The apparent design that gave rise to our existence must inevitably imply a designer.

But granting all this, this still leaves two fundamental questions. Where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. The possible answers to the first question appear to converge on two possibilities, that the designer always was – i.e., that something always existed and there never was nothing – or that there was an original act of creation (or self-creation) that led to the existence of the designer. Both of these “explanations” essentially define what we might call God. One of them must be true.

The second question, why did the designer enact the particular act of creation that led to us, could have a myriad of answers. It might have been from boredom – as an eternity of nothing but self might eventually wear thin – perhaps in the form of a cosmic-scale version of a computer SimUniverse. It could be the night’s sleep of a very rationally-minded dreamer. It could be an experiment of some kind, or a simulation set to explore possible design parameters. It could be an act of love. Whatever the possible reason, the act of creation implied a kind of consciousness (even of the sleeper) and some version of a conscious choice. The designer must have been a conscious entity, perhaps even consciousness in its rare form. Whether the designer always was or was somehow created, the form it had or took was consciousness. In either case, consciousness was primordial, coming before the creation of our universe, before matter, before the Big Bang. The primordial consciousness – what might be called God – was the designer.

A fascinating aside about following this chain of thought is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the designer was or felt constrained to create a universe capable of being apprehended by scientific reason. The universe is not just some stage set on which we players play our parts but an intricate mechanism that obeys its own complex, intrinsic laws. This suggests that the designer was using – for whatever reason – a given toolbox that provided the means to form the particular set of physical parameters manifested in the Big Bang.

Still, why us? What are we and what were we made for? I lean toward the notion that the cosmic consciousness designed a reality that it could then enter, whether out of loneliness, curiosity, love or some combination of these. 

TBC... 

Westworld’s Consciousness Riff

The HBO remake of Westworld is superior TV in a number of ways. But its most intriguing aspect may be its foundational riff on what makes up consciousness. The basic premise is that recursive experience plus an emotional occurrence that anchors memory – especially an episode of painful loss – ignites (self) consciousness. Intriguing, yet not finally convincing. The ability to experience emotion itself requires consciousness – one must be aware of feeling such-and-such. Westworld’s premise begs the question of where that awareness comes from.

There seems to be no a priori reason to suppose that machines cannot be intelligent. It may be useful to think about intelligence as existing in more or less distinct forms. Generically, intelligence might be defined as the ability to acquire, process and apply knowledge. (Animals have varying degrees of this kind of intelligence and so may plants.) Machines have the ability to store and process information. Machine intelligence is the orderly processing of information according to governing rules (software). Both the information and the rules are externally derived and stored within the machine. The machine itself may be contained in discrete units or widely distributed (the cloud). Machines can learn – by adding and elaborating rules based on previous cycles of processing – but they can’t process information without instructions stored in memory. Cloud intelligence is machine intelligence taken to a higher level by accessing massive information from many data sources using more and many powerful processors and sophisticated software with built in “learning routines.”

Human intelligence is what we human beings have. It is what we know as manifested in thought and action. Our knowledge is stored in two places, our heads and in our culture. Culture is contained in language, traditions, techniques, art and artifacts, beliefs and whatever else carries collective knowledge across time and generations. The basic unit of human intelligence, however, remains the individual mind, which itself can be thought of as an organically based “machine.” But there seems to be a ghost in the human machine that we experience as consciousness. Mere machines cannot feel emotion – or pleasure and pain – no matter how massive the memory and computing power. And the movies Matrix and Terminator aside, machines do not inherently strive for self-preservation. Machines are not alive nor do they have “souls.” Whether because humans are organic life forms evolved over hundreds of millions of years after having crossed-over somehow from an inorganic strata or from deeper principle of the universe, we feel and experience pleasure and pain. Why is the unknown. Westworld, for all its brave speculation, sidesteps this question.

What does the Turing Test test?

Saw the movie Ex Machina. The outside shots, filmed in Valldalen, Norway, are are simply gorgeous. Good flick and provoked some ruminating (avoiding plot details).

There seems no a priori reason to suppose that machine intelligence cannot reach the point of passing the Turing test. A complex enough programed machine able to “learn” from extracting patterns from massive data and using them to interact with humans should be able to “exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.” One can imagine such a machine as pictured in the movie.

But what does the Turing test really test. An “artificial intelligence” might be able to interpret and respond to the full range of human behavior and simulate the same. It might be able to “read” a conscious human better than an actual human might by picking up on subtle physical manifestations (as stored in its memory). With a large enough data base behind it and a multitude of “learned” behaviors it might convince a human that it was indeed intelligent and even self-aware. But would it be? Would the ability to simulate human behavior completely enough to appear human actually be human or entail consciousness? If programed with a sub-routine causing it to seek to persist (i.e., resist termination), would it be a self seeking self-preservation? Would programing allowing it to read human emotions and respond “appropriately” with simulated emotion mean it actually felt such emotions?

Would a machine intelligence able to simulate human behavior and emotions actually be able to love, hate, feel empathy and act with an awareness of itself and, perhaps more importantly, of an Other? Or might there still be something missing?

Smoked a cigar on my favorite bench while considering all this and watched some ants going about their business. Ants are extremely complex biological machines acting and reacting within their environment with purpose and an overall drive to self-perpetuate (both as individuals and as a collective). They may be conscious even if not self aware. Or is a certain basic self-awareness something that goes with being alive? Would even a very complex machine ever be alive even if very “intelligent?”

My guess is that machine intelligence – even if very complex and advanced and equipped with a self-referential sub-program allowing algorithmic analysis of itself – would not be conscious or alive. Thus not capable of emotion and therefore what we might call coldly rational. Is this why Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and others are concerned about AI?

New Letters for the DNA Alphabet

Scientists recently created a life form – using a living bacteria as a starting point – with two extra letters in the DNA alphabet. The DNA of all living creatures on earth is made up of four such letters – the nucleotides A, C, G and T. They pair up – A with T and C with G – to form DNA “words” that direct protein construction and the development and maintenance of every living organism. These scientists added two synthetic nucleotides thus adding two new letters to the genetic code. They note that this opens up the possibility of creating new DNA-based “nanomaterials and proteins with exotic abilities.”

This discovery may be the hidden sleeper of recent scientific developments. When one considers that all of life as we know it – and which we have not even yet discovered all the forms – is built up of long strings of two-letter genetic words, adding a new letter – and why stop there – could open up vast vistas of new products and even new life forms. It may give brand new meaning to “genetically modified.” Cultures that grow rather than construct their technology is a common motif in science fiction. There may be careers out there for those who can write genetic code as we now write computer code.

Light Music

Been reading Light Music, a 2002 sci-fi novel by Kathleen Goonan. Like most good science fiction, it takes some central bit of science or technology and extrapolates it. Light Music contemplates a juxtaposition between string theory and consciousness. Now string theory has taken some hits recently as analysis of the Higgs field seems to rule out the simpler, more elegant, versions of supersymetry. But Goonan paints a picture of consciousness, residing somewhere in the extra tiny dimensions postulated by supersymetry, as a kind of energy acting on the universe through matter as a kind of string vibration, a kind of music, as photons of light are vibrations of electro-magnetism. Thus Light Music. Very interesting speculations.

In this space, I've suggested that consciousness is primordial, that it does not rise from matter, or any particular organization of matter, but may indeed be prior. That consciousness – our individual experience of it – may be bound up with light, which is its “speed.” So picture consciousness as vibrations in (of?) spaces too small for us to observe – at or even smaller than the Planck length – intersecting the fields and particles of matter and energy we can measure and manifesting as observation. Yes, a “ghost” in the machine, taking the form of mind when the organic substrate is complex enough to give rise to such. Collapsing the wave function and exercising choice, self-generating music out of our individual being, a lifetime symphony.

Just another rumination.

Time to Found the Foundation?

Seventy years ago, Isaac Asimov's fictional character Hari Seldon invented the "science of psychohistory."  Psychohistory was a mathematical approach to predict and shape the future by influencing the course of events through manipulating the probabilistic laws of mass action.  A form of "mathematical sociology" modeled on mathematical economics, Seldon based psychohistory on his "discovery" that there existed formula and equations that could encapsulate societal dynamics and provide solutions to problems.  He used it to seek to manage the long term history of a human society that had spread throughout our Galaxy.  He foresaw a time of cyclical disintegration and sought to use his "science" and the two "Foundations" founded upon it to use the equations to tweak events and reduce the time of recovery.

Paul Krugman claims that his discovery of the fictional mathematical history is what led him to study economics.  Indeed, "psychohistory"  shares the economist assumption that society moves in cycles and that good times alternate with bad ones.  Like economics, Seldon's science could be used to try to extend the good and shorten the bad.  There was also a deeper tie between the two, the view that the best economy - and the society it was based upon - worked through the central mechanisms of individual choice and freedom in a free market of exchange. 

Democracy and capitalism do seem to be the most effective way to maximize social and economic  good in the long run.  Any society that limits either - that doesn't have both - will sooner or later limit its own ability to sustain itself.  In other words - in this optimistic view - democracy combined with free market capitalism are mutually re-enforcing and sure to win over all competitors in the long run.  The short run may be another matter.  And as Seldon foresaw, the short run may last a long time. 

I mention all this because it occurs to me that the key element of Asimov's fictional science - as it is for economics - is the assumption that there are formulas for understanding what is happening to us, predicting the future and undertaking actions to manage that future.  In other words, there are solutions to the complex equations that are determining events.  Furthermore, these solutions have as their aim - if not their immediate means - perfecting implementation of democratic governance and free market exchange.  Though economics traditionally postulated an "invisible hand," since Keynes it has been understood that a "free market" does not mean an untended one.  It is also understood that total government control of an economy is not efficient.  The best solution seems to require the intersection of democratic government and free markets, where the good of the whole society as determined by the body of citizens impacts the actions and interactions of individuals and groups seeking to maximize their own benefit.

So the question becomes, are there formula or possibly even equations for analyzing our evolving global society as the fictional Seldon foresaw?  Should we stop arguing about climate change, ideology, history and everything else and instead start looking for ways to identify and manage the trends and the likely futures we can foresee?  Is it time to found the Foundation?