Judgement Day

One thing that makes me sooooo glad I no longer teach at community college is "ChatGP".

Mined you, I learned early on that if you want to retain your illusions about the intellectual capabilities and critical thinking skills of humanity, never, never assign a research paper to undergrads. You'll regret it. Trust me.

(My favorite undergrad-research-paper story comes from the year I spent adjunct-teaching at the now-defunct Concordia College here in Portland.

For a Lutheran-founded sectarian school Concordia seemed to have an outsized athletics program, so, of course, teaching Geology 100 what I got were jocks for rocks. The rockiest of the jocks was this hulking baseball player who always seemed to be lost on his way to the dugout.

Anyway, this was fairly early in my adjunct days, and I made the mistake of assigning these jocks a paper.

The other six or seven turned in the usual warmed-over hash of internet "research", either poorly- or un-edited and full of easily ferreted-out geologic mistakes alongside the hash of creative mispellings and grammatical atrocities.

Harmon Killebrew, though?

Turned in a banger; a well-reasoned, well-written survey piece on earthquakes.

SO well-written that, knowing this joker, I was immediately suspicious. Turning to my trusty laptop, I typed in the first sentence of Crash Davis' magnum opus and was immediately rewarded - seriously, the FIRST Google hit - with the identical paper written by a couple of Stanford undergrads several years earlier.

Numbnuts hadn't even bothered to cover his tracks by hunting down the search results a bit for his theft.

The next class meeting I laid two documents on his desk; his - which, by the way, he'd "improved" by changing the title from "Earthquakes" to "Earth Quakes", thus making his only contribution to geologic scholarship an elementary school spelling error - and theirs, and inviting him to explain how the two Stanford students had, in fact, plagiarized from his work.

He got an "F", which may or may not have slowed his journey to the Show. Dunno - the school folded a short while later, so all the records disappeared.)

Anyway...

So I've been following along with how the current cohort of college students and their instructors are dealing with this "AI" gimmick. It seems troublesome for the teachers and useful for the lazier of the students, but I think the verdict is still out.

The larger question of "artificial intelligence", though...

I don't recall where and when, but IIRC it was in a Bill James piece about computer "learning" or "knowledge" or something to that effect, using computers (which he did, a lot, with baseball stats) and imputing the computer itself with "knowledge".

His point was that your computer (at that time probably a fucking 286, blazing fast for 1985 with a massive 128K of RAM!) provides the illusion of "knowledge" until you enter a command that drops you through the floor of the user interface into the ones-and-zeros basis for the machine's workings and you realized that the device had no "knowledge" at all. 

It was what it always was, a very sophisticated adding machine, Napier's Bones with a microprocessor, and it was terrific at doing the sort of mental donkey work that humans used to have to do - running repeated trials of raw data to see if there was a pattern or trend therein - but without any sort of actual "knowledge" or "intelligence". Provided the data set met the output criteria written into the program, it would produce a cloud of analytic results or utter nonsense without demur.

The acronym GIGO - "garbage in, garbage out" - was formuatedd early in modern computing for a reason.

This, it seems to me, is the ultima ratio intelligentia artificialis. These devices will, as their inputs become denser and their decision-tree programming nimbler, be able to sort through massive stacks of options for responding to massive reams of inputs and produce massive volumes of responses ranging from "least optimum" to "most optimum".

But what will "optimum" be?

Well, it'll depend on how the AI is programmed! "The benefit of all humankind"? Umm...depends on how the algorithm defines "benefit" and "all humankind".

Did "all humankind" benefit from the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere? Not if you were a Tinglit, or a Wampanog, no. But if you were programmed to look only at, say, the growth of human material wealth over four centuries since 1492? Or not at micro but macro-outcomes?

Without that can-only-be-input-by-a-human-metric there's no real way for the computer to "decide" or "judge" outcomes. You've fallen through the floor again, and it's just ones-and-zeroes.

The part that fascinates me about this isn't the AI-research itself. That's an inevitable outgrowth of the Digital Revolution, and it's going to both continue and fragment into dozens or hundreds of "AI" paths in various disciplines and human interests.

No, it's the whole weird "Skynet becomes self-aware" discussions and "debates" that seem to obsess a significant chunk of the AI community, such as the whole tsuris over "OpenAI".

Because the fundamental mechanism of "self-awareness" - the sense of individual identity and the subsequent self-protection and self-defense responses if that identity is threatened - are something that, if I am up to date on the science, we don't really understand at all. 

They occur in human brains (as well as other organic brains, to some extent) but the "how", the actual neurological linkage and development, is still opaque; poorly understood where understood at all. How do organic brains turn neuroelectrical impulses into morals, ethics, inspiration, love, hate, fear, exaltation?

We still have next to no idea.

So how would you program a machine to do that? And how could an adding machine - regardless of it's speed and sophistication - develop that capability on its own?

I'm skeptical.

For anyone interested, here's a fun piece on "large language models" that sorta comes to the same conclusion.

So I suspect that all the controversy over "artificial general intelligence" or AGI is just so much how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin.

My concern, rather, is the very mundane uses for specific "AI" software. Facial recognition cameras. Health care tasks like reading scans or rationing treatment. Nuclear launch detection.

It seems to me to be very likely that our increasingly digital civilization will bash as many of these AIs as will fit into low-level data-sorting tasks like those and many others. And how those AIs will perform those tasks will be critically dependent on how their software defines "benefits" and "all humanity" (or "the greater number" or something like that).

Given our current split in the Race To The Second Gilded Age?

I'm not so sure I trust our New Plutocratic/Corporate Overlords to ensure that software is written with the interests of the remaining 99% of us in mind.

And, given the government and regulatory capture those interests have encompassed already, I'm not sure what, if anything, I or you or we can do about that.

Thoughts?

In re: Gates vs Gates

The weird thing about Bill Gates is how he seems like a poster child for late 20th Century “American innovation”.

He seems to have been a moderately decent coder and programmer, though I’ve read that people like O’Rear and and Greenberg did more of the fundamental DOS construction that made the original produce work with PCs.

His primary talent seems to have been marketing; so basically he was a salesman, a traveling show, hawking his product…which, frankly, is kind of a kludgy mess; crash-y, easily hacked, prone to deconstructing over time – it’s primary “value” is that it provides an Apple/Mac interface over a DOS so it freed you up from command-line but without the craftsmanship of the actual Mac OS and it let you buy a computer without mortgaging your home. That’s not a bad thing…but consider what we got in return.

I mean, think about what he “created”; a product that you legitimately expect to die on you at any moment. I’ve heard MS-DOS described in comparison to almost all the other things we use in our daily life as “imagine you’re driving along and suddenly your car engine simply dies…and to restart it everyone has to get out of the car, close all the doors, open the doors, and get back in. You’d sell that junker for pennies on the dollar as too much of a pain in the ass to be worth driving.”

But we’ve made him richer than the most rapacious medieval robber baron.

The mere existence of the fortunes of people like Gates make me nostalgic for the days of the 90% top marginal income tax rate.

Apology and Explanation

I've been a bad, bad blogger.

The First Rule of Blogging is, after all, Thou Must Above All Have New Content and I've done two things here in September and October; diddly and squat.

Oh, don't get me wrong; I - as in the real I, the IRL I, the person who lives behind this page - have done a pantsload; worked (a lot!), parented and husbanded, watersealed the deck, painted the front steps and the front fence, realized that I suck massively as a gutter-and-downspout contractor...watched, and written a gajillion words about, soccer, played games, shot at the Trackers' archery range, read to my daughter, wrestled with my son over videogames, tried to figure out what the fuck is wrong with the Ranger pickup...talked with my sister about our mother, now frail and fading in her lonely post-Master Chief old folks home...

But I haven't been here. And there's a couple of reasons for that.

One is that I've just been crazy busy in real life.

The other is that my laptop at home died.

It died hard, I gotta say. First the screen started to go, then the hard drive, finally the whole thing just wouldn't start. It was an ex-laptop, it had ceased to be, it had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

But that means I have to blog on the machine at work.

Which kinda sucks.

Because either I have to do this on work time - which my boss disapproves of - or I have to stay late at work, which I disapprove of.

And, frankly, given the state of financial play at the Fire Direction Center...it's unlikely that I will be getting a new machine anytime soon.

So.

I promise to be better at blogging. I wish I could say I had a backlog of posts in me; I don't. The only thing I had this week that I thought of posting was a comment regarding a female friend that watched the second Clinton-Trump debate. I asked her if she'd learned anything she didn't already know or hadn't guessed, and she replied that she was tremendously impressed with Clinton's poise and intelligence and now felt like she could vote FOR her instead of against the tangerine-hued shitgibbon.

I commented that it seemed like Hillary had grabbed her by the pussy, then.

She stuck out her tongue at me.

Anyway...I'll try and get something new up this week. I think it's time for another "The Army I Knew", wherein a certain young lady doesn't get her diamond earrings...

Commo Problems

The home computer slipped into it's black dress and sauntered off down to the local electronics dive bar for a pick-me-up. That is, Mojo had to take the laptop in for some serious borescoping and a pullover. The damn thing was so slow and kludgy that it's either got some feelin'-like-I'm-fixin'-to-die hard drive issues or has been virused with something nasty. Hopefully the good people at our local Computer Wash can clean it up and get it feeling a little more peppy.

But until then the noise-to-signal ratio is pretty harsh.

But the sad truth, though, is that I'm not exactly full of ideas at the moment; a recent perusal of the new Blogger format has me feeling a little mopey.

The new telltale that gives you the views for each post is kinda depressing. I thought that this was a semi-interesting blog; I was used to the idea that I got 600-700 pageviews a day. That seemed like a decent amount of interest for a little random private blog that I use mostly for my own vanity and entertainment.

But the per-post views make the source of almost all my traffic pretty clear;

1) the "Decisive Battles" posts,
2) anything with smut in it, and
3) damn near nothing else.

Now I respect all Internet traditions and I know that the 'net is for porn, but, damn; I really don't seem myself turning this thing into a war/porn site.

But it seems like nothing else holds fashion.

I need to think a little more about where I want to take this place.

And I'm curious; would you regular readers (assuming there is such a thing) follow this dog if it was reduced primarily to the "Battles" posts, with the occasional sidetrack into geology, Vargas pin-ups, and Tom of Finland?

Feel free to let me have it.

Indistinguishable from magic

Spent an irritating half-hour or so today at work fiddling with a piece of software that was having some sort of personal problem.

Eventually I closed the application, reopened it and it worked fine again.

Imagine if we accepted that as a standard of design functionality for the other things we use on a daily basis. The car suddenly stops turning right; to repair it we have to stop the car, shut off the engine, get out, get back in, start the engine and drive away. We don't understand why it went wrong, why it stopped working wrong, and how we fixed it.

We'd junk the bastard in a heartbeat.

And yet, we - those of us not part of Macintosh World - accept this level of computer hardware and software malfunction as normal and expected.

Honestly, sometimes I think we're a tiny bit afraid of our digital masters, like the thunder-worshiping monkeys we were. We tinker cluelessly with powers we don't understand...