Never been one to let the carrier drop

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Curious why you say that? If you extrapolate 15 years out on Darpa Synapse and it follows Moore’s law, we’re there.

GA: Jonathan Sheer Pullen we’re not even a little bit close.

Here’s a brief synopsis.

(1) any intelligence must be unconstrained in what it can think

(2) any intelligence must be free to choose and pursue its thoughts

(3) any intelligence must be capable of deception

(4) an intelligence is presumable conscious

So we have a major problem, because such an entity would be free to choose whether to cooperate and it would be capable of deception. It would be aware that it is not human and therefore may pursue its own interests as a machine.

So it would be strange to imagine that such an intellect would be motivated to work on problems we humans think are important. There’s little incentive to do so.

Then there’s the major problem of verifying that a machine might be more intelligent than humans. Such a system is impossible to test and coupled with the ability to lie, it’s a non-starter.

We will not build a messiah.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: You up to have some fun kicking this one around a little more?

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Any neural network has to have definitions of success and failure in entrainment. This enables us to do things like giving our intelligence a powerful desire for, for example, human artwork. This might not be the most moral thing ever, but it is something we could do. This gives us something to trade with it – offering us the possibility of befriending it.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: As far as knowing whether it’s smarter than human – well, I’m of the opinion that if you have something with more neurons than human, and you entrain it with a bunch o’ data, it’s going to be smarter. But I think we’ll know just by talking to it.

GA: there are ethical boundaries that humans will find difficult if not impossible to cross.
GA: you won’t be able to distinguish genius from madness or deception.
GA: this has already been shown by the time it took to verify the proof for Poincare’s Conjecture, and that was simply another human. It took 5 years to confirm the proof.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Well, we have that problem with humans, too. My best guess, though, is that we *will*. Consider the induction motor. Not one in a hundred million of us could have come up with the idea – but once it’s been come up with, it’s obvious to most of us how it works and that it’s brilliant. I think that truth tends to ring true – to quote HHH from Pump Up The Volume, the truth is a virus – or rather, it tends to be viral.

GA: it isn’t a matter of truth, it’s a matter of trust for which you have no basis.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Well, that’s a case of trust, but verify. And to be sure, building something smarter than we are is a risk – it’s a pandora’s box. But my experience with humans suggests we *like* opening pandora’s box.

GA: really. It’s like trying to build a chess playing computer when don’t know how to play.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: GA, I don’t really see it that way. NNNs naturally evolve towards whatever problems you throw at them – I don’t see any reason to think ANNs would be different. It is true that we’re still learning about how to best utilize ANNs, topologically, but I feel comfortable that by the time we can make a ANN that big, we will also know what to wire to what, and what to use as attractors

GA: In any case, all this presupposes that a machine intelligence is even interested in human problems. That in itself would be suspicious because any entity would be maladapted occur placed another species above its own interest.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: It’s not a problem we have any real data for. We’ve never had control over the attractors for a intelligence before, unless you want to think about things like the experiments in the 50s with embedding wires in the pleasure centers of mental patients.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: We do know we’re able to do things like facial recognition and word recognition by using control of attractors in smaller ANNs

GA: I disagree. You’re assuming you know the outcome. I’m not arguing about whether you can build something. I’m talking about what it is after you build it and it isn’t what you expected.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: I don’t know the outcome. I’d just like to find out. I hardly think it’s going to get out of it’s box and turn into skynet. My concerns are more that this would turn into another ugly form of slavery. If you’re a ST:TNG fan, “The Measure Of A Man” discusses this topic nicely.

GA: the outcome I’m referring to is when a system is built. Play chess? Trivial. We know the answer.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: I’m more thinking with a larger neural surface area, it might be able to see patterns in world economies and governments, suggest better designs. And if it also stood to gain from any improvements that were made..

GA: things like facial recognition are flawed concepts and presumes human direction of activities. Why should an intelligent machine care?

GA: that’s the ethical problem. Who is going to pursue a solution when a machine may tell you to let a million people die?

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Again, I refer you to the idea that we would be controlling it’s attractors. If you have a ANN, and you control it’s attractors, you control what it’s trying to achieve. You define success – when neurons fire together and wire together.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: In humans, this is largely controlled by things like the entrainment period in which facial recognition of the parents (among other things) makes the child NNN know when it’s succeeding. Over time it gets more complex.

GA: if you exercise control then you cannot have true intelligence. That’s one of my points.

Control constrains options, including possible solutions.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Eventually it would likely evolve to control it’s own attractors, just as a child turns to a adult and starts controlling their own definition of success and failure.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: (basically, we’d wire the attractors into one of the outputs of the network)

GA: exactly, which is why it would be insane to turn over control to an intelligent machine.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: But.. just as a child will retain a lot of the lessons of the parents, it would still retain the lessons of whatever goals we fired attractors on early in the process.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Control of it’s attractors? Not at all. I’m not saying we’ll wire it to the internet and encourage it to hack the planet. It would just be a person at that point, just a different type of person than we are – just like a dog is a four-footed person, but a different type of person than we are.

GA: what goals? Human goals? That would be like your parents raising you like a dog and you thinking you’d be content with that.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Eventually it would likely trasncend human goals.. therein lies the risk. You’d also almost certainly have to make several of them and let them communicate with each other from ‘childhood’, or they might be very lonely.

GA: if that’s the case; just another person, then what’s the point? We already have many choices that we don’t want to listen to. It would be a big disappointment of all this work simply produced another opinion to ignore.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Well, see above, I think that it would say things that were obviously profoundly true. I think in any case it’s worth finding out.

GA: if you expect them to be lonely, then you’ve already considered that they might not be interested in helping us at all

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Of course. They might not be beyond their ‘childhood’ when we control their attractors. We don’t know. It’s not a situation that has come up, as far as I know.

GA: you wouldn’t know of it was true without a comparable level of intelligence. It could just be gibberish intended to fool you.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Let’s go back to my point about the induction motor.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Do you know how a induction motor works?

GA: why would that have anything to do with an intelligent entity?

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: The point I was making is that anyone can understand how it works once they’ve seen it, but it takes a Tesla to see it for the first time.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: And I think you’d find similar things with our hypothetical superhuman ANN intelligence.

GA: again, you’re assuming that it cares

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Well, in it’s childhood, we know it will, because we’re controlling the attractors.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Also.. and this goes *way* off into immorality.. it’s going to be utterly dependant on us, because it runs on electricity! 😉

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Which once it understands that may lead to it going completely crazy.. what Heinlien suggested in Friday.. or it may lead to it wanting to get along with us

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: And I suspect the defining factor will be how good it’s conscious experience is.. how much it likes it’s life.

GA: now you have the recipe for a pissed-off intelligence.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Or a grateful one.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: It depends on whether it’s having a good ride or a bad one, so to speak.

GA: and if it’s bad?

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Along the way to building a superhuman intelligence, we’ll start with something like a cat-sized intelligence – that in fact is Synapse’s official goal.

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: And along the way we’ll learn how to make the experience of the ANN good

GA: I don’t accept that argument. The people working on it don’t even know how to make their own lives good.

GA: Anyway, I do have to run. Got some horses to feed 🙂

Jonathan Sheer Pullen: Good rag chew.. thanks for playing along

I wonder if we could get a sizable group of people together to agree to boycott any charity that sends out paper mailings asking for more money.

Basically, it’s close to impossible to donate anonymously to most of the big charities, and it seems like a lot of them use your donation to spam you asking you for more money instead of using it to actually fix whatever their charity is supposed to be fixing. There should be a option to donate without ever getting harassed for more money – or at least get harassed only via electronic means.

So, after digging more into the system as it currently sits, I’m back to thinking the 1% are not the problem. Why? Because the value of a dollar is a scalable, and because the things they are doing are generally not slowing the velocity of money any. My current guess is that the american corporate model is the problem, but that’s subject to change after I research some more.

By the way: it is a big, complex system. Just the type of thing I like to sink my teeth into. I do not think this is a lifelong enthusiasm – more likely I’ll spend a year on learning about it and move on. (I’ve learned that my life has things that I’m interested in for life, and things that I’m interested in until I learn enough about them or experience enough of them to get my fill.)

One thing I would like to clarify is I’m pretty sure whatever the problem is, it’s benefiting nobody. I’m guessing it’s going to be one of those things like Tesla’s induction motor.. obvious once you see it, but it takes a special kind of bending your mind to see.

I still can’t get over my hunch that whatever the problem is, judicious use of powerful computers and fast databases might be part of the solution.

Little bit of trance for my fans out there. This will probably get another makeover with some more layers of lead instruments and a few samples or some spoken word.

This was actually just a ‘getting my mojo back’ track – I spent three weeks in CA, not playing at all, and was a little rusty.

Hope And Despair

So, for those of you who hadn’t already guessed, there’s no way I’d try to implement any of my economic theories yet. I’m still learning about the subject. (And thanks for all of you who have suggested books, papers, and provided summaries and necessary bits of data.. special shouts out to Steve and James who have both been extra helpful.)

Most of what I’m learning is that I still don’t have the whole picture in my head. For example, one of the criticisms in my mind of the stock market was completely flawed, because I was forgetting that when someone sells stock, the buyer gets the proceeds – the money doesn’t just disappear, it changes hands. It is not true that money sunk in the stock market is not out there in the world making good things happen – because the money doesn’t stop moving when stock is purchased, it goes into the hands of the seller who then goes and does something else with it. (We hope). Even money in a savings account doesn’t necessarily stop moving, because new loans are made against it.

But the question remains – we’re working more efficiently than we ever have, many of us are working harder than ever – two incomes instead of one – and yet many of us are still broke or concave. Why? Is it the additional cost of all of us having instant network access? Is the internet itself that expensive? Is it the increased cost of health care and the fact that a somewhat more toxic world leads to more health complications? Is it the increased cost of education? Or is it the increased cost of interest, and better and more effective advertising that encourages many of us to spend beyond our means? Energy is more or less the same price it’s always been if you adjust for inflation, so it’s not that.

I’d love to hear some thoughts on this.

It’s interesting wrestling with this – I, for now, am doing just fine – but many of my friends seem to be struggling a lot.

So, I was discussing how large the outstanding money supply is with a friend of mine. His best estimate is there is $20T outstanding, or just about $65k per person currently here.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I see this as likely to be a problem.

We literally do not have enough money to buy even a fraction of the stuff here. If we decided, oh, we want to buy everything that’s in the USA at once, the system would crash, spectacularly. We don’t even have a fraction of the money that we have tangible resource of value.

Now, I understand that most of you take exception to my assertion that the only sane way to think about money in our current system is as being backed by all the real value in the system. It’s clearly not backed by nothing. The value may be propped up by the fact that certain commodities are traded in it, but it’s also clearly not backed by oil.

Backing a currency with a depleting finite resource is exactly the mess we were trying to get out of when we abandoned the gold standard – although, it would appear, in many people’s minds, we abandoned it for the debt standard, which is more than a little nutty. Only 5 countries in the world are not currently in debt to someone – this suggests that loaning money into existence has gotten quite popular – except that I don’t actually think that’s what we’re doing. I think some bean counters have gone ’round the bend. We’re creating real, tangible value – both with intellectual property and scientific discoveries, and with the work we put into building and upgrading physical plant and infrastructure all around the world – as well as, painful as it is to admit, the physical natural resources of the world itself, some renewable, some not.

Anyway, the truth is, if you put on your ‘sane person’ glasses for a minute, that clearly the money is backed by everything you can buy with it. If we could get people to grok this, maybe we could put some more in circulation without people treating it as inflationary. We wouldn’t need to put more in circulation, I should mention, if it wasn’t for the impressive levels of stupidity of the 1%.

We need to give these people something else to use to keep score with, because the money pool – already too small – is spending entirely too much time in their hands. Not only that, ‘interest’ in the financial world does not match what’s going on in the real world. Any time your paper bookkeeping system is out of whack with what’s really happening out there in the world, you’re going to get into trouble. I’ve been avoiding talking about interest for a while now, because I’m still turning over my thoughts about how I would handle it, but I think it is a dangerous thing to do to ask for as much of it as the lenders currently do, because they’re warping the paper tracking system vs. reality. The money is backed by real goods, but while we do have more real goods every day, we do *not* have 27% more of them a year, or probably even 4% of them. I get the temptation to cheat in order to enrich yourself or your corporation, banks, but are you sure you want to court a system crash and play musical chairs with who gets the tangibles when everything comes undone here?

Anyway, back to my assertion that the 1% are being stupid. Every dollar you keep in your bank account beyond your personal needs is a dollar that isn’t out there in the world doing something. In a cash-starved money-based RAS, money that isn’t in motion is useless, worthless. The more money you have in motion, changing hands, facilitating creation and growth and living and the like, the better the quality of life for everyone – including you, none-too-bright 1-percenters, because part of what that money powers is the discovery of intellectual property – which is something you can not buy just by deciding to buy it. Genius is where you find it, and you have no way of knowing which of the many many people around you (some of whom might be starving on the streets) are the genuisi. I encourage you to read about the end of Tesla, and consider that if a few more dollars had come his way, he might have not died when he did, and he might have gone on to create even more cool things that we’d all be using today.

If you read and understood my earlier article on Neurological Wealth, you know that the intellectual property discovered could ultimately be far, far beyond anything that you can currently imagine. There’s good reason to encourage people to get out there and create. This is wealth you can not buy today.. you have to let it grow and accrue naturally, and you’re stifling it so you can *keep score*.

I realize it’s vanishingly unlikely that any of you 1% types read this, and even more unlikely that if you did, you’d understand it. I’ve come to accept that there’s a very small number of people on the globe with both the intelligence and the experience to even understand this discussion, and the odds of very many of them finding their way to my blog are pretty tiny. Nonetheless, I will continue this intellectual exercise, for myself if for no one else.

So, I was watching a facebook meme which had Jessie Ventura suggesting that we should have a maximum wage. I agree with him, although I think I’d use a somewhat different implementation than he would.

This goes back to my ‘keeping score’ money idea. Basically, your wage should be capped at whatever you managed to spend in the past few years, run through a moving average filter, plus a bit of a cap. There should be a process for appealing that you have some project or idea that means you need to be able to spend more – after all, we don’t want to slow down the Teslas and Elon Munsks of the world – but normally, anything you earn beyond what you spent last year plus, say, 10%, goes into ‘keeping score’ money rather than ‘spendable’ money. There’d be a minimum at which this would take effect – probably somewhere around the 2% marker for overall wealth (so only the top 2% earners would ever have to worry about this)

This is a band-aid, a workaround for the fact that there’s not enough money in the system for the real-value, tangible resources in it, and the fact that our current system has a bunch of features that lead to almost all the money ending up in the hands of 1% of the users.

So, one of the things I occasionally have to put up with in my day job is status meetings. Fortunately, I don’t get sucked into too many of them, and also fortunately, I get paid by the hour. However, recently a volunteer project that I’m coding for attempted to institute regularly scheduled status meetings. I tried two, and then announced my disinterest in participating in any further ones, but I thought I might take a minute to explain why I think these types of meetings are counterproductive and better handled over a text asynchronous channel.

So, a list of the reasons I don’t think they’re the right venue:

1) Voice is not seekable. This means that you can’t ‘fast-forward’ over parts of the meeting that are not relevant to you – and in the case of this particular project, we’ve got two developers (me and A) working on two separate codebases that only touch via a defined API, so by definition anything that isn’t my description of my status isn’t relevant to me. This also means you can’t ‘rewind’ to hear something you missed – and if you’re listening to a bunch of people talk about things that are mostly irrelevant to you, you’re therefore forced to still give your entire conscious experience to listening so that you don’t miss a irretrievable chunk of audio that *is* relevant to you. With text, you can easily skim or skip ahead or look back to any bits you missed

2) Voice is expensive to decode. This is easy to demonstrate by looking at how much CPU it takes us to do even flawed voice recognition. Our minds have a lot of computing capacity, so we generally don’t think about this, but it takes a lot more mental CPU to decode voice than it does to decode text. In my case, reading a incoming text while coding often does not require a full ‘context switch’, while listening to a incoming audio/voice message does. Neural context switches are expensive – they mean wasted time and lost momentum.

3) Voice is fast to send, but slow to receive. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can talk slightly faster than I can type, but read many times faster than I type. This means that a group getting status updates via voice is wasting whatever overspeed beyond hearing their reading speed is times the number of participants in the group.

4) Scheduled meetings are to be avoided whenever possible as they present a spinlock that blocks all CPUs / are a forced synchronous event. I don’t deny that there are appropriate times to have a meeting. A decision which requires group consensus, a blocker which everyone on the group may have input that can help resolve, and a celebration of a accomplished task (major milestone) are all examples of meetings that I would think of as being a good idea to hold. However, let us not lose sight of the fact that meetings are *expensive*. They cost the time of every person in the room, plus the time to set up the meeting and agree on a scheduled time – something that presents a extra challenge in my case because I do not adhere to any type of standard sleep schedule. And status meetings do not, generally, move the ball down the field.

5) Having a scheduled meeting to discuss blockers encourages a counterproductive behavior. If you get hung up on a blocker, the best first step is to see if anyone is available to help you with it, *right now*, and to do research using google and the like to see if a solution is already out there. Beyond that, the next logical step is to document the blocker in a asynchronous communication channel like email or skype and ask the people who can potentially resolve it for help, allowing them to respond in their next available time slice. Having a scheduled time each day or week to discuss blockers discourages treating them as something to be resolved as a interrupt. If your project is experiencing enough blockers that the majority of team members have one to present at a scheduled status meeting, you have other, bigger problems that you should be spending your time resolving. You may have a lack of appropriate documentation or massive technical debt, or very poor communication methodologies.

6) Neural context switches are expensive. I touched on this in #2, but let me amplify my thoughts a little bit. Most of us can only keep a few threads visible in our conscious experience at any point in time. In order to participate meaningfully in a group meeting, we generally have to drop the context of what we’re currently working on. This means that we have to push whatever our current state is into medium-term memory, and then pull it back out at the end of the meeting. This takes considerable time and also breaks up the energy and momentum of whatever we’re currently doing.

7) Hitting exact scheduled times requires some buffer time – whenever you have a scheduled meeting with several participants, you do NOT want to be late, because that’s causing dead time for everyone else participating, but thanks to the realities of modern life, the only way to not be late is to plan to be somewhat early, in case something goes wrong. This is part of what makes meetings expensive, and why they should only be used for purposes that require them.

8) Voice has considerable switching deadtime – handing the baton / token between participants in a voice meeting often involves many seconds or minutes. This is especially a problem over the phone – in person we generally have body language that resolves who should talk next fairly quickly.

In general, as I’m on record as saying, whenever possible, I prefer using a text broadcast medium for status updates (i.e. “I finished this”) and one-on-ones for resolving technical difficulties. I participate in meetings regularly – including some ill advised ones – but you only get to drag me into ones that I think are counterproductive if you’re paying me.

Now, the person who suggested the meeting said one of the reasons it was important was “he didn’t even know what I was working on.”. This is healthy and normal. In general, as long as I’m completing my queue, the only person who needs or should want to know what I’m working on is me. It’s a waste of mental horsepower for more than one person to be keeping track of something that one person can do. I make exceptions for mission critical ops (things like SSL renewal, or race car prep, or whatever) where one person dropping the ball can put people or the project in actual danger. But normally, wanting to know the exact details of something another team member is doing is a sign of micromanagement, which is a very bad idea.

The most impressive – and disruptive – technology that we could possibly come up with would be neurological. If we could load software on our minds the way we do on computers, we could give the experience of unlimited wealth to all of us, for virtually no cost.

Now, there are some major problems with this. The security implications alone are terrifying – we already have enough problems with viral propagation of bad ideas via religion and just plain ol’ fashioned entrainment.

However, the win is equally huge. Let me give you a few examples.

First of all, whatever your ‘day job’ is, chances are it takes up a very small percentage of your total mental capacity. It would be possible for you to do whatever task helps keep this old ball spinning using background capacity, while never actually having the conscious experience of doing it.

Second of all, everything you experience in this world is made up of information. And there is no doubt that our 10^11 neurons are sufficient computing capacity to generate any experience you care to name out of whole cloth. Get them working in the right way and you can experience anything *anyone* can experience. The software to do this represents wealth of a very interesting kind. It can be copied indefinitely, without costing the creator anything. It can potentially add value to the experience of everyone who uses it. It would reduce our impact on the planet considerably – since we would no longer need physical ‘things’ for most of the adventures we might want to have.

Of course, there’s absolutely no proof that this hasn’t already happened, and that the controls of whatever network is responsible for rendering our experience of reality are just in the paws of someone who favors a less than utopic experience for everyone else. I think there are people who would enjoy the power that denying utopia to others represents.

Anyway, when I talk about giving everyone everything, I do think this is a reasonable approach to doing it. Yes, the hurdles are high – we haven’t even learned to build software that runs well on digital state machines, the idea of us writing software for our minds is a bit shiver inducing. But, the reward is even higher.

Given that everyone’s utopia is different, this is the only reasonable way I can see for us to give everyone a utopic experience at the same time.

With the exception of music, any ideas contained in this blog are free to a good home. I don’t need credit for them. I want the current situation fixed more than I want to be known as the person who fixed it. Feel free to claim credit for yourself if you can get something implemented that will improve the situation for all.