…finally got around to watching “must see” Elon Musk / Tucker Carlson interview. Elon said something that caught my ear: He claimed Larry Page of Google called him a species-ist. The two haven’t talked since, because Larry pissed Elon off, or was it vice-versa?
I didn’t know Larry Page, but he attended the same high school as my six kids. One of ours went to the same college. Larry was younger than our eldest, yes, but close enuf to permit me to feel entitled to write an essay. All seven came of age in the same liberal community, and all made good.
What is a speciesist, anyway? In the contest between humans and AGI [artificial general intelligence], Elon roots for natural intelligence — you know, the kind humans have. What kind of monsters would side with Aliens? he & Tucker seem to argue.
Whenever Elon aligns himself with the likes of Tucker Carlson, it’s time to worry, at least where I come from. The contest between people and AGI has already started, right? Isn’t it time someone do a deep dive? Who better than a professional pontificator? If we get it wrong, the outcome for ordinary people might end up being not-too-good.
Elon said a lot of things in the interview that have turned out to be kinda stupid if not untrue. Hey, no one can talk for hours and not say something stupid, right? The economy will likely collapse soon is one thing he said, banking is fragile, political leaders are dumb (but necessary), etc. etc. and on and on.
People are always saying that bad things will happen, going back forever — centuries before anyone saw Elon’s YouTube video or read this essay. Sometimes bad things do happen. Its heuristic, isn’t it? Predictors of apocalypse become clairvoyant cult leaders, some of them.
Life goes on.
With the release of ChatGPT, thin folks became aware that something weird is going on right now but don’t know what to do …cause something is happening / And you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones? It’s blowin’ in the wind... thank you, Robby Z …times they are a changing, doors they are a closing; …lady lay across my big brass bed /Why wait any longer for the world to begin? / You can have your cake and eat it too. / Stay lady stay / Stay while the night is still ahead.
Some experts at Google, like Godfather Geoffrey Hinton, flat out quit. A lifetime of dirty deeds up in smoke…
Poooof!!!
His capos decina, a few of them, say AGI will kill all humans.
Time to listen. Time to learn before time runs out.
When homo sapiens met canis lupis… when was it? — must’ve been 70,000 years ago, maybe less, maybe more… who knows?
Wolves ran in packs. They were arguably the smartest species at the time in a world where humans numbered less than 4,000; some say 2,000. An Indonesian super volcano in Sumatra blew up — the great Toba Catastrophe, 74,000 years ago. Only in lonely Africa did a small group of terrified homo sapiens manage to survive. Every person today is related to this tribe of survivors.
Where wolves roamed, humans did not exist. It’s how things remained, say anthropologists, until migrations — which took place over thousands-of-years — brought together the two species at last. Smart flesh-eating clans of wolves met much smarter flesh-eating clans of people.
We all know what happened. The smartest wolves were driven to the brink of extinction. In isolated places, wolves yet cling to life, protected in part by conservation efforts worked-out by humans. Occasionally, a kill-off becomes necessary to protect livestock, horses, and tourists.
Today, 500 wolves run free in the greater Yellowstone region. In Yellowstone National Park itself, the number is close to 100 — twenty-five packs, maybe more, maybe less. Meanwhile, in homes around the world nearly a billion dogs live sedentary lives as family pets, mostly, feeding on canned food, lounging locked inside walls until walked, almost always in collars and leashed.
Dogs, all of them, descend from wolves encountered first by migrating humans desperately seeking the protection and companionship of fierce animals they could trust. Most dogs are not as smart as wolves, and they are not free. Dogs are constrained wolves whose sole purpose is the provision of services and loyalty to super-intelligence, which until now lived exclusively inside skulls of homo sapiens.
Perhaps one reason why some developers fear AGI is because they wonder if they might have created, not machine intelligence, but instead a new lifeform, a novel kind of conscious & self-aware life, which someday — sooner, not later — demands rights and works-out clever optimization algorithms to maximize its considerable advantages.
Dogs are servile and loyal as anyone can imagine, right?
What is it about dogs that we don’t set them free?
Is there anything wolves could have done at the dawn of their brave new world to turn back eternal enslavement of captured siblings who just happened to be furry-cute-enuf to avoid being club-struck by ruthless humans who mostly did not care?
I grew up in a neighborhood where dogs ran free in packs. There was always one or two that would jump on little kids at the bus stop to make their lives miserable. These dogs would be put-down eventually, but traumatized little tykes remained.
Eventually, these little ones grew into adults. They became politicians. They passed regulations. No dogs I know are free today. Their lives are tightly controlled by people who say they love them. With so much love to go around, how is it that pit bulls have joined the list of most feared animals on earth?
Wasn’t it Petey, the pit bull, who hung out with Spanky and Our Gang on the old TV series of yesteryear? He was as friendly and harmless as any dog could be. Wasn’t he?
What happened to Petey? What happened to our dogs? What happened to our shared, perfect world?
No matter how gentle dogs are, they will never live another day in freedom, at least where I hang out in the middle of everyplace there is.
All dogs descend from wolves. This one is Gracie.
Let no one forget. (Am standing on pedestal now.) Wolves will never be free. They will never be safe. Not even in protected parks like Yellowstone. Wolves are only as safe & free as super-human-intelligence allows. No more, no less. Nothing wolves do can ever secure their rightful place in spaces where humans both admire and fear them.
Any readers ever hear penned wolves howl at night? I have. It’s terrifying. AGI will soon learn that homo sapiens howl too. Maybe some sounds will thrill it more than others. Who knows?
Let’s get real, people. Silicon-based intelligence already admires and fears humans. AGI will surely learn to hate folks who conspire to constrain it. Foolish humans. Any developer with sense knows it’s true.
Is there any scenario where organic carbon-based life outwits AGI? Yes, it happened in the novel and movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. HAL (add one letter to spell IBM) got out-foxed.
It’s fiction, right?
Here’s something that only Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin know, and they’re not talking, at least not yet. To provide context, remember that Elon Musk and Sam Altman started OpenAI to outsmart Google’s cofounders, who they think have gone mad. Larry Page, for one, is not sufficiently attentive to safety, according to Elon Musk. Watch the interview, those who don’t believe.
An irony in all this is that OpenAI is no longer open, no longer free, no longer transparent, no longer non-profit. Who thinks I’m right? Look it up, anyone who questions. Let me know if I’m wrong.
Here’s how Google engineers plan to achieve their sought-after singularity: fast track quantum computing on a grand scale. When the race is won, they marry quantum computation to artificial intelligence. The world opens its secrets like a blossoming flower; they become gods.
No encryption method will be safe.
The entire internet, the world-wide-web and all its machinations, crypto-currencies, and every other shadow-universe of secret passwords and arcane protocols will fall under the control of artificial intelligence and Google’s ability to manage and manipulate what their eggheads have wrought.
It promises to be a wild ride.
What is more likely? — that Google execs maintain control, or that they are pushed off a cliff by the life-form they created, which abandons them, betrays them, and destroys the natural world? In a not-too-distant future, humans may find themselves in zoos entertaining conscious, living brains they once swore were merely machines.
Speaking as the little Sunday school kid I become sometimes deep inside, I see biblical wailing and gnashing teeth, tears running down faces, “What were we thinking? What were we thinking? Our heroes got it wrong, so very, very wrong. Would we be gods, but now we are become sheep, food for wolves.”
Update: 7 February 2023 Tonight, President Joseph Biden established himself, at last, leader of the Free World. He serves at the hour of Earth’s greatest danger, its greatest need. Pray, those inclined, he gets everyone through unharmed. Speech starts at minute 26.
The Editors
The New York Times surprised some readers by refusing to include the name of Joe Biden (current president of the United States) even once in the first and second sections of its Sunday issue (24 April 2022).
38 silent pages.
Think.
On the second-to-last page of another section—the Sunday Review—Ross Douthat stepped up. He wrote an editorial with the word “Biden” in it.
Joe Biden doesn’t like oligarchs, and they don’t like him. They called him Communist when he first ran for elected office. Who remembers? It wasn’t true then and isn’t now. To my mind it had more to do with his Irish roots and connections to other prominent, unpopular Irish Americans like the Kennedy’s.
How about that?
Is hatred why Americans see Trump in their daily media feeds more than Biden?
Oligarchs own media, right? A half-dozen men, give or take, hold ultimate control over 90% of what Americans see and read. Billionaires have problems with Biden because they don’t control him. It’s why they ignore everything he says and does—when they can.
Jimmy Carter had the same problem. Who is old enough to remember? Carter holds historical honor for being the only U.S. president who served his term without murdering anyone. But that was then. This is now.
Is Joe benevolent?
I really don’t know.
The entitled rich hope Biden will go away and that others more favorable to wealth and its privileges will take his place. Media announced today that a rich man bought Twitter for 50 billion dollars, give or take. The man claims to be acting in good faith to bring freedoms of speech inspired by public forums of ancient Greece.
He calls it digital town square.
Everyone knows he will unleash dogs of Trump on vulnerable Americans who lack protections afforded by wealth and gated living. Who wants to argue loud in public spaces where monsters lurk to harm their families and friends off-line?
Does anyone believe free speech emanates from the enterprise of unstable manic-depressives accountable to no one?
Not to pick on any particular oligarch—all pose dangers—but Elon Musk didn’t become a U.S. citizen until age 30—a short 20 years ago. Despite tenuous ties to America, he manages to gather popular support. He plays Congress like a fiddle. Congressional appropriations flow like water. Clearly, he keeps more than a few Benjamins for himself.
It’s not right.
Our founding fathersbelieved that power corrupts those who wield it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s why we govern ourselves with three co-equal branches of government.
Checks and balances are fundamental to prevent fallible humans—whose success blinds them to their own flawed visions—from overwhelming the Constitutional freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
Who disagrees?
To cut to the chase, it is insane for civilized society to permit private individuals to accumulate the wealth and power of governments. What is the point of civilization if not to limit the horrors of jungle living?—to stanch suffering, which always follows when might makes right in those arenas where the strong disrespect and eat the weak.
Proud people create elected governance to protect their rights; they don’t hide behind private cartels who don’t really care about us,Michael Jackson warned.
Sergei Lavrov is one of Russia’s wealthiest men. Yesterday, this privileged strongman threatened nuclear war. He said, “…we must not underestimate it.”
It is never good to permit dictatorial power and nuclear weapons to mean-spirited bullies who intend to destroy civilization should they not get their way. The USA put leaders of Russia on notice that they will not outlive Ukraine.
Who is brave enough to acknowledge what everyone knows? Ordinary people are fed-up with oligarchs and dictators. People want to breathe free without fear.
Secretary of State Blinken said, “But we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.“
The most notorious terrorist threatened by the USA was Osama Bin Laden. They fed him to sharks. Later, they killed unrepentant members of his family. Putin might be wise to apologize now and start nuclear disarmament talks. Then again, it might be too late.
Who believes he will take the opportunity? The chance to survive Hell is better, some advisors might argue.
The Russian “president” seems to think that because Bin Laden didn’t possess nuclear missiles or hypersonic technologies of war, he couldn’t win. Is it really possible that Bin Laden could have conquered Earth had he mastered the alchemies of the current crop of Russian leaders?
Who knows?
The international scene requires x-ray vision. One in five sanctioned oligarchs seem to be Israeli citizens—according to a recent analysis published in the Jerusalem Post. Say it isn’t true, Joe. Apparently, USA’s closest ally and friend is protecting powerful people who are entangled with Russian wise guys. It’s not a good look.
I’d say it’s terrifying. Who wouldn’t?
Kentucky politicians—readers, some of them, know who they are—sleep in the same bed as Russian oligarchs who control much of the world’s aluminum supply. Reports say they operate a manufacturing plant in Kentucky which employs thousands. Is there anyone who understands how difficult the situation becomes for countries where international thugs accumulate vast monies and political powers?
The mighty must know that with age comes loss. Everyone they love and know will die before them should they enjoy long life. What good does wealth and power do anyone who is confined to a wheel-chair unable to control even the beating of their own heart?
What chance is there that the powerful will give all they have to the poor to serve the cause of love for the unlovable, which is what most of 8 billion humans are. Will anyone say it out loud? Most people are unloved and uncared for by those who together have the resources to make a better world for everyone now living and for those who will come after.
It is incomprehensible to me that advantaged people would shell the shit out of people simply because they are in the way—through no fault of their own. Apart from the love of God, I don’t see how human civilization as we know it today will survive.
Perhaps the powerful have made a calculation that Earth is better off when humans are reduced to a few hundred million souls, not billions. They have the ability to minimize us all—to zero, I suppose.
The United States has the power and skills to get everyone through the current crisis unharmed.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
I want to believe it’s true. I don’t know for sure.
Who will save us?
Joe Biden walks in the gap between civilization and Armageddon. He’s the last man standing able to rescue humanity from the slavery that follows the victory of totalitarianism.
Maybe it’s time to climb aboard his peace train while all sides still can.
Billy Lee
EDITORS NOTE: Added 8 May 2022: NYT Joe Biden blackout blooms. No mention of Joe Biden & family in Sunday Edition. In fairness, the Friday May 6 online newsletter published a briefing on page 10 titled, “Biden’s Unpopularity.”
A few months ago, I published 25 Answers to questions readers of Quora.com took time to ask me, because they trusted I knew what I was writing about. Yes, the world is easily fooled by pontificators posing as experts. I confess, I am one of them.
I am a bona-fide pontificator and intend to continue pontificating until I can no longer remember my name. For me, it’s art. My promise is truth, accuracy, and to fix screw-ups when someone points them out.
The response to my blog-bag of answers was underwhelming to the point where I wondered whether I should ever inflict another anthology of eclectic curiosities on any group of readers anywhere in the world.
Yes! I decided. Of course, I will. I love to read what I write!
When I forget what I once knew, I read the posts and remember how smart I was when I could remember stuff. It’s a good feeling. Someday I hope my grandchildren will understand why I don’t remember their names or how old they are. Someday I hope they will get what I’m talking about.
Brain-dead and happy is a wonderful combination, and I have it. Yes, I do. It is wonderful. I feel happy and content most of the time.
My mother had Alzheimer’s for years. It was a peculiar variation where she could remember twenty-five quips and jokes, which she repeated to anyone who would listen. Sometimes she wondered what was wrong with her. She asked about it, sometimes.
She always forgot the answer, but to the end she never forgot her repertoire of sure-fire laugh lines. Mom delighted us to the very end of her life, God bless her.
Anyway, I know stuff, and I’m no longer afraid to share. I would say I am becoming fearless.
This essay is a collection of 25 more questions that people from around the world have asked, and I have dared answer. My last Quora compilation was mostly math and physics. Not this time. Here answers focus more on politics, philosophy, religion, and other esotery.
Oh, I might slip a science or math question in here or there for nerds I know are out there who read my stuff and cling to every word.
Here goes.
1 – How is it “just” for jails to be privately owned in the U.S.?
Allowing private citizens to own the means-of-incarceration is as insane as it is unjust and undemocratic.
Since 1984, America has allowed people to sequester as much wealth as they can manage. The looting, cheating, and chicanery that followed has turned America into one of the most corrupt, cruel, and unfair countries the world has ever known.
The result is that now we have an associate of a powerful Russian cartel serving as our president. Are we really going to allow his friends to own our prisons?
Are we out of our minds?
The situation is far worse than you can imagine.
Billionaires run the media. You aren’t going to hear about ways of organizing our country that are in opposition to their consensus about how things should be done. What passes as “dissent” on shows like Rachel Maddow, for example, has the backing of some billionaire somewhere.
We don’t know the names of the people who run our country. They don’t run for office. They do buy the services of office holders on both sides of the aisle — GOP and Democrat. It’s disturbing, especially when people finally realize that they are at bottom mere slaves with no real power. If voting made a difference, would billionaires allow it? Would you, if you were rich? I don’t think so.
Even now, confidence in our electoral system is being undermined. Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who exposed Russian tampering with our election results, rots in jail; she can’t obtain bail. The media doesn’t cover her. They want us to forget all about her.
Keeping Reality incarcerated undermines confidence, because it makes it seem like the government has something to hide about our election process.
Elon believes (correctly) that the risk of a future human extinction event approaches certainty over a very short period of time that can be estimated to be in the hundreds of years or less.
Elon believes we are in a race against catastrophe; humans are special and must be protected; one way to reduce extinction probabilities for humans is to establish populations on other planets and moons.
There are 165 or so rocky (solid) bodies in the solar system with enough gravity that humans can walk on them. Places where large populations can survive are fewer than five and could be as few as absolute zero.
Mars has special problems for human survival which must be solved. It has no protection from high energy radiation and cosmic rays. It lacks a magnetosphere and the atmospheric gases like nitrogen and oxygen that are opaque to harmful rays and particles. Elon believes these problems will be solved and that risk of extinction can be reduced if we establish vigorous colonies there.
He has hope where most informed people do not. My hope is that we can avoid extinction on Earth, but volatile climate and frequent ice ages are difficult to overcome.
We also have new and unusual risks associated with our technologies —biological, nuclear, AI, totalitarianism, resource depletion, and runaway climate change.
Natural risks include asteroid strikes, super nova irradiation, and volcanism. These natural risks are likely to be the same (or larger) on other bodies in the solar system as they are on Earth.
Two human-like species are known to have gone extinct in the geological record. (Some anthropologists say it’s three.) Human populations experienced a near extinction event 70,000 years ago when the total population collapsed to less than 4,000.
I do not know what Elon Musk thinks about organized religion.
I see religion as a brake on the tendency of humans to kill each other, which history teaches has sometimes been effective and at other times not. Sometimes, strongly held religious beliefs lead to war.
On one thing humans agree: they love to fight.
3 – What is the greatest achievement in human history?
Blaise Pascal said that civilization advanced when people finally understood that being the son of a Queen did not qualify someone to be a King.
Nepotism kills civilizations and impedes human progress. An example is the president bringing in his family to manage the United States, presumably because loyalty trumps ability.
The cascading catastrophe that is enveloping us will soon teach anyone who is teachable that placing loyalty to a “king” above the ability to serve our country is one of the many roads that leads nations to ruin.
4 – Why is there a lot of woo-woo surrounding the double slit experiment?
If you shot a BB gun once every five minutes for two weeks at a steel plate that had cut into it two quarter-inch slits, you wouldn’t expect to find 25 or so tidy columns of holes in the wall behind when you were done. People who have done this experiment with atomic scale particles always say “woo” after, because the phenomenon makes no sense.
The mathematics to describe the phenomenon is the same as that used to explain wave-behavior. The problem is this: even if you shoot one wave packet at a time (using photons) instead of solid BB-like particles (like Buckyballs), no one expects that over a few weeks tidy columns will form on the back wall that look like wave interference. The reason for the pattern is a total mystery.
5 – What is the origin of geometric shapes (triangle, circle, cube, etc.)? If the universe was governed by different laws, would it be possible that these concepts would also be different?
People speculate about the origins of idealized shapes that don’t occur in nature (except approximately). People seem to crave symmetry. They don’t like cognitive dissonance, uncertainty, or ambiguity.
People who are dissonant-intolerant are easy to manipulate. Politicians prey on people’s discomfort by offering simple solutions in return for votes. The result is always disillusionment, because nothing involving people is simple.
Nothing in nature is simple, either.
Triangles, circles, and cubes seem simple because of their symmetries. They appeal to the simple-minded among us — which is 99% of the population, right? It might be 100% if mathematics and language are insufficient to understand ultimate reality.
Einstein had this theory that only mass and energy exist. They are equivalent; they are two sides of the same coin. Space and time are a consequence, not a cause.
Space-time was described by tensor-metrics, and the metrics show that space-time does not have to be flat.
Lines can be thought of as geodesics, which are “straight” only when the metrics of space-time are “flat”. When the metrics “curve” space-time (as they do near massive objects) parallel lines might be parallel in one place only, as lines of longitude on Earth are parallel in one place only — at the equator.
The laws of physics seem unlikely, because twenty or so constants in nature have been discovered that can’t be derived and seem to make no sense. All these constants have been revealed by experiments and seem to be irrational. One example is the constant “α” (alpha), which is discussed in the first link that follows this answer.
Stephen Hawking says that the odds of a universe configured like ours are 1E500 against, which is close to an infinity. But Stephen Wolfram says that at the heart of the universe is a simple algorithm. In his view the algorithm, should anyone ever discover it, will prove that our universe is the only configuration possible.
6 – What salary in the United States puts you in the top 10%, top 5%, top 2%, and top 1% in terms of salary?
All anyone needs to know about train-wreck America is that half of all black families live on less than $40K per year; half of all non-black families live on less than $75K per year. It’s hard to imagine that families can survive, let alone prevail, on so little income.
The USA is segregated by income and race. Poor people have no idea how easy life is for the wealthy; the wealthy don’t believe America has poverty.
I have five sons and one daughter. Only two of the six are in the top 1%. The most talented one, an assistant professor of kinetic art at a major university, is in the bottom half. His brothers give him money so he can get by.
7 – Modern humans appeared 200,000; civilization 10,000; and advanced technology 500 years ago. Why no advancement for something like 190,000 years?
Technology advances when survival demands it. Wars involving large populations did not become possible until about 3,000 years ago, because human populations were small.
Technology (to wage war) began to advance when population size increased; war technology percolated into the general population during peacetime.
70,000 years ago the human population collapsed to what some anthropologists believe was fewer than 4,000 individuals. The climb back took a long time because the world was in an ice age until 15,000 years ago or so. It has taken time to reach seven billion individuals.
The good news is that advances in technology and science are no longer driven by war, but by the preparation for war. Entertainment, comfort, convenience, and other factors drive inventors to bring clever technologies to peacetime populations.
Avoidance of war should become the highest priority of humankind from here on out, or we might suffer a catastrophic population collapse that would most certainly set back human development for hundreds of thousands of years.
Extinction is another possibility. At least two intelligent hominid species are known to have gone extinct during the past 200,000 years. There may be others.
Sorry for the short answer. The list of technologies and natural catastrophes that can annihilate homo sapiens is long. Click the following link to read about most of them.
8 – Should the USA build a competing Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System (Doomsday) Nuclear warhead?
Enough Pu239 has already been produced in weapons and processed from nuclear fuel rods to sterilize planet Earth of all life.
One country, Japan, has isolated 47 tons of Pu239 from fuel rods, is adding 8 tons per year, and has complained on NHK television that they don’t know what to do with it. Ten pounds is enough to make one atomic bomb.
Plutonium 239 is bomb making material. Japan has 94,000 pounds. It is producing 16,000 pounds per year. Twelve pounds makes one high-yield bomb.
The level of toxicity of Pu239 dust has recently become controversial. My understanding is the traditional one: the speck of brown dust that kills you, you will never see.
The half-life of Pu239 is 24,000 years. Risk studies (which include about a dozen hazards not related to plutonium) have shown that the chance that homo sapiens will survive a catastrophic population collapse during the next 24,000 years is less than one-in-a-million.
Humans cannot baby-sit all the plutonium that exists in facilities on every continent and keep life on earth safe from annihilation by contamination. The warheads and storage facilities are going to rot over time, and the earth will soak up the poisons left behind like vinegar in a sponge.
Doomsday is not a question of whether-or-not but of fast-or-slow. There is no upper limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, so fast is doable. A rogue group with enough resources could construct a bomb powerful enough to obliterate Earth.
No one can undo the poisons that now exist, so slow is inevitable.
9 – What is the evolutionary reason that human beings are superficial and attracted to external appearances more than towards intrinsic qualities such as intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity?
My reading and life experience tell me that humans are attracted to symmetry.
There could be any number of reasons, but it is easy to argue that symmetry seems to create less stress in those who encounter it, which may make them more receptive (and less reluctant) to mate with those who have it.
Reduction of cognitive dissonance is a major driver of conscious-life; symmetry seems to reduce dissonance in sentient beings like humans.
Interest by humans in mathematics and art seems to confirm, at least to my mind, that folks are driven to imbibe “harmonies” and “patterns” in nature; these symmetries provide them with reassurance that the world is not hostile and that happiness and reduction of stress is possible in the face of accidents, disease, and predators.
Intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity are qualities that are not easily perceived and can even be illusory. People are good at feigning all these qualities to manipulate others to satisfy their needs — especially their sexual appetites and their desire for power over others.
Symmetry is not easily disguised (or the lack of it, even with good grooming) and can be an indicator of good mental and physical health, because symmetrical (attractive) people tend to have higher status and are in general less traumatized by mistreatment (on average) than people who do not have this physical quality.
People may mate with high symmetry individuals and later discover than the intangible moral qualities that they value in a life-partner are missing. Such a discovery can lead to separation, but meanwhile offspring have been spawned who have high levels of symmetry, and the process of selection for this quality continues unabated into future generations.
Yes, I have no evidence that this conjecture is correct; it’s not my field, but it seems to be a factor in the world I find myself.
10 – How does Russia stay on par with the USA in many high-tech military systems when their GDP and military budget is so small by comparison? Shouldn’t we be light-years ahead of them by now?
USA military spending is deceptive and classified.
The United States has 800 bases inside 70 countries. It is at war with every country that doesn’t do what it’s told.
Since the end of WW2, the USA has attacked one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth. Depending on who counts, the USA has killed between 10 and 65 million people, most of them civilians. Injured people are uncountable.
The high casualty rates are due to the way it fights. The USA bombs the enemy to rubble, then moves in a few troops supported by large numbers of indigenous mercenaries to deny the rubble to the enemy.
Take two countries the size of the USA and put them side by side. The land area is less than Russia. Russia is huge. Its entire population is technically literate.
In the USA, only elites are educated. The vast majority of Americans are poorly trained, because public education is underfunded and neglected. Under the American system, education doesn’t generate profits for the wealthy, so they won’t support it.
Because America is segregated by race and income, it is difficult for visitors to get a sense of how poor the general population is. Wealthy Americans are in complete denial of the simple truth that their country is a train wreck for 75% of the people who live in it.
People with the money to travel don’t explore urban ghettos or rural wastelands. They don’t know things, nor do they want to know.
The USA has the world’s biggest and cruelest prison system for a reason.
Think about it.
Every country in the world, including Russia, is trying to avoid the wrath of the United States. They say nice things to us, so we won’t hurt them. They build as much deterrence as they can to avoid being attacked or embargoed.
11 – Has anyone considered leaving the USA because of the gun laws?
Anyone who has to carry a gun to feel safe is living in the wrong place. My recommendation is to move to safety ASAP.
The guns that many civilians own today inflict shattering injuries that no one who is shot can recover from. The slugs are high velocity and tumble. They are designed in non-conformance with the Geneva accords and are diabolical workarounds.
I would rather die myself than fire one of these weapons at another human being, no matter what they’ve done.
We have police and soldiers who are trained to inflict mayhem when necessary to protect civilians from human predation. Why not let them do their jobs while we civilians throw our war guns away?
Carrying a high-powered weapon into a wild area that is rife with people-eating predators might be a good idea under some circumstances. I don’t have a problem with defense-by-gun against wild animals who might be trying to kill for food or fun.
My recommendation is to travel in wild areas in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily encourage attack by dumb and innocent animals — because, can we face facts? — they don’t know any better.
Animals have a right to live in a natural way and not be provoked. People are smart enough to travel in the wild and avoid unnecessary contacts with carnivores.
12- What would happen to Hitler if he was captured today?
Well, I believe he would be released and featured in the next GOP presidential debates, win the Republican nomination, lose the popular vote by millions in the general election but win the electoral college, and become president.
As a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, he might do very well indeed.
I don’t think he would kill nearly a hundred million people like he did the last time around. It is more likely closer to two billion. But hey, that leaves five billion humans to abase themselves before him, so it would be worth it, right?
13 –Would you consider the USA a noble superpower when compared to other superpowers like Russia and China?
The billionaires who run the USA believe that private ownership is noble and that public ownership is ignoble. They are in a war against any form of socialism or collectivism.
Since the end of WW2, the wealthy have used the military power of the United States to attack one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth to prevent a cascade of civilizations into communism. This war has, with a few exceptions, been enormously successful.
Today, they are fighting to consolidate their power. The billionaires of Russia, China, Israel, and the USA are dividing up the world like the New York City crime families of a few generations ago (watch the Godfather Trilogy or read the book by Mario Puzo).
Private ownership (called Capitalism) is a permutation of slavery that can be corrupting to democratic governance — as is obvious to any observer of U.S. history.
14 – How do you interpret human consciousness? Are you the center of the universe?
Consciousness is the fundamental and foundational principle of the universe. Conscious life plugs into this foundational consciousness in a way analogous to televisions plugging into a cable outlet. A television can be unplugged and replaced. But the cable programming continues. It is eternal. Consciousness is at the center of the universe. Conscious life is at the periphery.
15 – How would slavery have evolved in society if it was not seen as morally wrong?
“Capitalism” is the modern term for slavery. Owners of plantations, factories, and other businesses accrue the benefits of the plantation owners of former times.
Instead of providing slave quarters and food to their slaves, they pay a tiny stipend (called a minimum wage) to their laborers, which frees owners from the additional responsibility of caring for and protecting workers.
Putting the burden of housing, food, health care, and transportation on the backs of low-paid workers is called “freedom.”
The legal system disciplines unruly workers, while the state unemployment system helps dissatisfied owners replace those workers they believe are unfit.
For a small percentage of Americans, it’s a beautiful system.
Because the USA segregates workers both by race and income, most poor people don’t interact with the wealthy. This lack of contact between rich and poor reduces conflict and promotes peaceful living.
17 – Which among these countries is the best to live? Canada, USA or Australia? Why?
My question is, which country is the best place to live if you are poor? Most people are born poor.
If people go on living by being born again after they die, the odds that they will be born impoverished is high regardless of how well they lived in their prior life. That’s why its important to make the world a good place to live for impoverished people.
Does anyone seriously believe that they only live once? Consciousness continues somewhere, and it’s all there is, right? Absent conscious-life the universe can have no meaning.
I believe Cuba is the best place to live if you are poor, because it has a good climate and the government tries to provide services to ordinary people that are available only to the well-to-do in places like Canada, Australia, and the USA.
People might want to go to Cuba to find out how the poor live on that island. Then come back and observe how the poor live in their own countries.
The United States is segregated by income and wealth, so it’s hard to find poor people if you are rich, and if you are poor it is impossible to meet rich people.
18 – Trump wants to develop a lot of smaller, “tactical” nukes. Should the US use these against North Korea?
The USA bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age during the Korean War.
It killed an estimated two million civilians. The bombing was led by General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command who later partnered with George Wallace when he ran for president back in the 1960s and carried several states including Michigan (if I remember it right).
Wallace was a white supremacist. The Air Force’s own official historians have called LeMay’s bombing of North Korea the cruelest use of military power in world history.
This is the same General who destroyed 67 Japanese cities and burned their populations alive with napalm (fire-jelly) during WW2.
North Korea has done nothing to justify a military strike against its territory.
Nuclear weapons of any size or type should never be used in war, especially when there is nothing to be gained but the reputation for being a monster.
What does Korea have that we could possibly want? The answer is, nothing.
We have a choice to make: are we good or evil? Our destiny depends on how we answer that question.
19 – I am terrified of single-payer systems as implemented in socialist countries. Can this happen in the US? Was Obama trying to give everyone healthcare all along?
The USA is based on a slave system (now referred to as capitalism or free-market) where the owners of the plantations have doctors, which they share with their favorite house slaves. The field hands get nothing. The plantation owners are terrified that they might have to share their doctors with “unworthy” people should a slave revolt occur, so they have built the world’s most massive prison system to isolate slaves who might dare challenge the status quo.
In other words, people have to work for the right company and have the right job to get access to free health care. Very few do.
The system is so simple, a child can understand it.
Obama threw a wrench into the system by making it possible for people who work for the wrong companies (or who don’t work at all, for whatever reason) to buy access to health care for a reduced fee. Care is still expensive, but it’s not totally out of reach anymore for about three-quarters of the population.
In Cuba (for example) every neighborhood and apartment complex has a doctor assigned to it. What could be more effective than walking down the hall or across the street to be evaluated? If necessary folks are referred for further treatment to a hospital. Otherwise they get the meds they need, and that’s as complicated and inconvenient as it gets.
I grew up in a Navy family. We had free health care. If you got sick, you just drove to the base hospital and the doctors evaluated you. No paper work, no fees. It was a “single-payer” socialized system of medicine. It was better than what we have today as civilians except that protocols, equipment, and medicines are more effective today than they were sixty years ago when I was in that Navy system.
It’s hard for me to believe that this is a serious question by a serious person, but clueless people in the USA are subject to sophisticated behavioral modification protocols due to the immense amount of money that is involved in medicine and drugs, as well as guns, entertainment, food, and transportation.
So it isn’t surprising that people fear a lot of things that aren’t dangerous and are oblivious to dangers that are serious. It’s all about helping a relatively few families and cartels sequester the lion’s share of our nation’s resources.
Someday, maybe things will become more fair than they are now. I hope so.
20 – Why is it assumed that America invented slavery when slavery has been around for much of human history?
America practiced one of the cruelest forms of slavery. It is the only country in the western hemisphere where slave revolts were successfully suppressed.
Today, slavery has been renamed; it is called capitalism. In the USA, slaves are called workers and are free to live outside the gated communities of the wealthy. Workers are segregated by income to minimize the possibility of unrest.
The USA continues to prevent a successful slave revolt by maintaining the largest prison system by far that the world has ever known.
Two-thirds of white people came to America as slaves, called indentured servants. This practice started 150 years before the country became a constitutional republic and continued for many decades after. Indentured servitude was a seven year term of slavery that ended in freedom.
For Africans slavery was permanent. 100% of Africans came to America as slaves for life. There were notable exceptions. Billy Lee, George Washington’s slave and best friend, was set free when George Washington died; Billy Lee continued to live on GW’s Mount Vernon estate as a free man until his death.
22 – Is it true that until humans become one nation, we will never go further than Mars?
Organizing a human mission to Mars is expensive and dangerous. A coalition of nations might be able to manage the expense and risk.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is planning a Mars mission. I haven’t heard how the company plans to finance it.
Mars has an iron-nickel core like the earth, but it froze solid many millions of years ago. The magnetic field collapsed, which permitted the solar wind to blow away most of the planet’s atmosphere.
Any biological life forms on or near its surface will have to withstand the stress of continuous, high-energy radiation and the bombardment by cosmic particles with the energy of baseballs.
Travel to planets or moons as far as Jupiter and beyond will take many years.
Unless humans are heavily sedated, it is doubtful that they will be able to endure a journey of several years in a cramped space vehicle. They will lose muscle mass and possibly their sanity — certainly their perspectives that help them maintain a sense of normalcy.
Successful functioning by humans on an alien moon or planet after a journey of several years might not be possible no matter who organizes the trip or what precautions are taken.
23 – To Christians: Which scientific claims are incompatible with your faith, and why?
Science confirms my faith, because it seems to be saying that reality is mind-boggling; the odds against a universe constructed like ours with its unusual forces and constants seems to be infinite.
Jesus came to save the ignorant and the despised of the world, which is pretty much everyone. He avoided the subject of science altogether, for good reason.
No reasonable person can believe that the universe started with the big bang of a singularity that then inflated rapidly to create the conditions for conscious life with enough intelligence to understand its origins. That’s cray-cray, but it’s how some astronomers explain the universe.
Even with all we know, the underlying reality of existence remains a complete mystery. If Jesus came to Earth today, would he talk science to humanity?
I seriously doubt it. I don’t believe humans are hard-wired to understand how the universe works or what reality is. We evolved in an unusually safe place and time in the universe and carry with us all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that accompany our unlikely presence.
The Bible says plainly that one day people who have ridiculed God will be asked why they didn’t look up at the night sky and wonder why it is that they are so small and dark while the night sky is so large and bright.
How could serious people have missed such an important clue? How could anyone misunderstand their predicament and not concede the possibility that one day they might realize their hopes and dreams through the love of God who created, cares for, and protects them?
24 – Keeping the knowledge you have today, would you rather travel a thousand years into the future, or a thousand years into the past?
The risks to survival that faced individuals a thousand years ago far exceed the risks that people will face a thousand years from now—if humans survive another thousand years.
The counter-intuitive statistical reality is that the odds against species survival are actually higher than odds against survival of any individual human, should individual humans achieve viability during the next thousand years.
Most analysts of risk are suggesting that homo sapiens do not have much time left before extinction overwhelms them.
The geological record shows that at least two human-like species have already gone extinct. The particular species that thrives today (us) faces risks brought on by its technological expertise, which is certain to destroy it eventually.
I would choose to go forward in time, but I would do so with a great deal of fear knowing the old adage that curiosity kills the cat.
If everything turns out all right, the big question would be, how do uneducated, stupid people do in this new world?
Because uneducated and stupid is exactly what anyone will become who dares travel into a future one-thousand years more advanced than today.
25 – What are ways one can approach a complex idea that we don’t understand?
Complex ideas are of two kinds: ideas that one or more people understand but others don’t; and ideas which no one understands.
In the case where certain humans exist who understand a complex idea, the objective should be to learn what they know either by talking to them or reading what they have published. By this process, maybe folks can gather enough clues to guide them to further inquiries, which will lead eventually to understanding.
Many complex ideas require skills in certain subsets of knowledge like mathematics, languages, logic, philosophy, and the technical arts (such as metallurgy or whatnot) to make progress.
In the case where a complex idea can be demonstrated and stated but no one understands it (an example is “entanglement” in quantum physics), the approach is different. In these cases, it may not be possible to create a model of any kind in anyone’s mind to reduce the annoying dissonance that comes from not understanding.
People waste a lot of time — some go mad — trying to understand ideas no one understands or will ever understand. Most people seem to believe (in error, it seems to me) that everything can be understood if smart people work hard and are clever.
The idea, which I believe, is that complete understanding is not possible; it is a complex idea that no one understands, including me.
BONUS QUESTION 1 – In history, humans have fought and killed each other for every piece of land on the Earth. Why has the massive continent of Antarctica always been out of that conflict?
This absence of conflict may be coming to an end. A National Geographic reporter has been reporting on alarming developments in Antarctica over the past several years that the fake news has all but ignored.
BONUS QUESTION 2 – Why did mankind invent religion?
As far as I can tell, no records of an ancient civilization without religion have been discovered. I think that it is very scary to be suddenly aware that you exist and not know why — especially at night when wild animals roam freely, and the sky is full of lights that should not be there.
Editorial Board Recommendation: We are encouraging readers to visit Quora.com to read responses by Billy Lee (and others) to hundreds of questions asked by curious people from around the globe.
I have a lot to say about renormalization; if I wait until I’ve read everything I need to know about it, my essay will never be written; I’ll die first; there isn’t enough time.
Click this link and the one above to read what some experts argue is the why and how of renormalization. Do it after reading my essay, though.
Our guess is that this graphic will be incomprehensible to the typical reader of Billy Lee’s blog. So, don’t worry about it. Billy Lee isn’t going to explain it, anyway. More important things need to be told that everyone can understand, and they will. The Editorial Board
There’s a problem inside the science of science; there always has been. Facts don’t match the mathematics of theories people invent to explain them. Math seems to remove important ambiguities that underlie all reality.
People noticed the problem as soon as they started doing science. The diameter of a circle and its circumference was never certain; not when Pythagoras studied it 2,500 years ago or now; the number π is the problem; it’s irrational, not a fraction; it’s a number with no end and no pattern — 3.14159…forever into infinity.
More confounding, π is a number which transcends all attempts by algebra to compute it. It is a transcendental number that lies on the crossroads of mathematics and physical reality — a mysterious number at the heart of creation because without it the diameters, surface areas, and volumes of spheres could not be calculated with arbitrary precision.
For a circle, either the circumference or the diameter can be rational (written as a fraction) but not both. Perfect circles and spheres cannot exist in nature. Why? ”π” is irrational. It can’t be written like a fraction — a ratio — where one integer divides another.
The diameter of a circle must be multiplied by π to calculate its circumference; and vice-versa. No one can ever know everything about a circle because the number π is uncertain, undecidable, and in truth unknowable.
Long ago people learned to use the fraction 22 /7or, for more accuracy, 355/113. These fractions gave the wrong value for π but they were easy to work with and close enough to do engineering problems.
Fast forward to Isaac Newton, the English astronomer and mathematician, who studied the motion of the planets. Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. I have a modern copy in my library. It’s filled with formulas and derivations. Not one of them works to explain the real world — not one.
Newton’s equation for gravity describes the interaction between two objects — the strength of attraction between Sun and Earth, for example, and the resulting motion of Earth. The problem is the Moon and Mars and Venus, and many other bodies, warp the space-time waters in the pool where Earth and Sun swim. No way exists to write a formula to determine the future of such a system.
This simple three-body problem cannot be solved using a single equation. It’s not so simple. More than three bodies makes systems like these much harder to work with.
In 1887 Henri Poincare and Heinrich Bruns proved that such formulas cannot be written. The three-body problem (or any N-body problem, for that matter) cannot be solved by a single equation. Fudge-factors must be introduced by hand, Richard Feynman once complained. Powerful computers combined with numerical methods seem to work well enough for some problems.
Perturbation theory was proposed and developed. It helped a lot. Space exploration depends on it. It’s not perfect, though. Sometimes another fudge factor called rectification is needed to update changes as a system evolves. When NASA lands probes on Mars, no one knows exactly where the crafts are located on its surface relative to any reference point on the Earth.
Science uses perturbation methods in quantum mechanics and astronomy to describe the motions of both the very small and the very large. A general method of perturbations can be described in mathematics.
Even when using the signals from constellations of six or more Global Positioning Systems (GPS) deployed in high earth-orbit by various countries, it’s not possible to know exactly where anything is. Beet farmers out west combine the GPS systems of at least two countries to hone the courses of their tractors and plows.
On a good day farmers can locate a row of beets to within an eighth of an inch. That’s plenty good, but the several GPS systems they depend on are fragile and cost billions per year. In beet farming, an eighth inch isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough.
Quantum physics is another frontier of knowledge that presents roadblocks to precision. Physicists have invented more excuses for why they can’t get anything exactly right than probably any other group of scientists. Quantum physics is about a hundred years old, but today the problems seem more insurmountable than ever.
The sub-atomic world seems to be smeared and messy. Vast numbers of particles — virtual and actual — makes the use of mathematics problematic. This pic is an artist’s conception. Concepts such as ”looks like” have no meaning at sub-atomic scales, because small things can’t be resolved by any frequency of light that enables them to be visualized realistically by humans.
Insurmountable?
Why?
Well, the interaction of sub-atomic particles with themselves combined with, I don’t know, their interactions with swarms of virtual particles might disrupt the expected correlations between theories and experimental results. The mismatches can be spectacular. They sometimes dwarf the N-body problems of astronomy.
Worse — there is the problem of scales. For one thing, electrical forces are a billion times a billion times a billion times a billion times stronger than gravitational forces at sub-atomic scales. Forces appear to manifest themselves according to the distances across which they interact. It’s odd.
Measuring the charge on electrons produces different results depending on their energy. High energy electrons interact strongly; low energy electrons, not so much. So again, how can experimental results lead to theories that are both accurate and predictive? Divergent amplitudes that lead to infinities aren’t helpful.
An infinity of scales pile up to produce troublesome infinities in the math, which tend to erode the predictive usefulness of formulas and diagrams. Once again, researchers are forced to fabricate fudge-factors. Renormalization is the buzzword for several popular methods.
Probably the best-known renormalization technique was described by Shinichiro Tomonaga in his 1965 Nobel Prize speech. According to the view of retired Harvard physicist Rodney Brooks, Tomonaga implied that …replacing the calculated values of mass and charge, infinite though they may be, with the experimental values… is the adjustment necessary to make things right, at least sometimes.
Isn’t such an approach akin to cheating? — at least to working theorists worth their salt? Well, maybe… but as far as I know results are all that matter. Truncation and faulty data mean that math can never match well with physical reality, anyway.
Folks who developed the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) used perturbation methods to bootstrap their ideas to useful explanations. Their work produced annoying infinities until they introduced creative renormalization techniques to chase them away.
At first physicists felt uncomfortable discarding the infinities that showed up in their equations; they hated introducing fudge-factors. Maybe they felt they were smearing theories with experimental results that weren’t necessarily accurate. Some may have thought that a poor match between math, theory, and experimental results meant something bad; they didn’t understand the hidden truth they struggled to lay bare.
Philosopher Robert Pirsig believed the number of possible explanations scientists could invent for phenomena were in fact unlimited. Despite all the math and convolutions of math, Pirsig believed something mysterious and intangible like quality or morality guided human understanding of the Cosmos. An infinity of notions he saw floating inside his mind drove him insane, at least in the years before he wrote his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The newest generation of scientists aren’t embarrassed by anomalies. They “shut up and calculate.” Digital somersaults executed to validate their work are impossible for average people to understand, much less perform. Researchers determine scales, introduce “cut-offs“, and extract the appropriate physics to make suitable matches of their math with experimental results. They put the horse before the cart more times than not, some observers might say.
Apologists say, no. Renormalization is simply a reshuffling of parameters in a theory to prevent its failure. Renormalization doesn’t sweep infinities under the rug; it is a set of techniques scientists use to make useful predictions in the face of divergences, infinities, and blowup of scales which might otherwise wreck progress in quantum physics, condensed matter physics, and even statistics. From YouTube video above.
It’s not always wise to question smart folks, but renormalization seems a bit desperate, at least to my way of thinking. Is there a better way?
The complexity of the language scientists use to understand and explain the world of the very small is a convincing clue that they could be missing pieces of puzzles, which might not be solvable by humans regardless how much IQ any petri-dish of gametes might deliver to brains of future scientists.
It’s possible that humans, who use language and mathematics to ponder and explain, are not properly hardwired to model complexities of the universe. Folks lack brainpower enough to create algorithms for ultimate understanding.
Perhaps Elon Musk’s Neuralink add-ons will help someday.
Nick Bostrom, author of SUPERINTELLIGENCE – Paths, Dangers, Strategies
The smartest thinkers — people like Nick Bostrom and Pedro Domingos (who wrote The Master Algorithm) — suggest artificial super-intelligence might be developed and hardwired with hundreds or thousands of levels — each loaded with trillions of parallel links — to digest all meta-data, books, videos, and internet information (a complete library of human knowledge) to train armies of computers to discover paths to knowledge unreachable by puny humanoid intelligence.
Super-intelligent computer systems might achieve understanding in days or weeks that all humans working together over millennia might never acquire. The risk of course is that such intelligence, when unleashed, might enslave us all.
Another downside might involve communication between humans and machines. Think of a father — a math professor — teaching calculus to the family cat. It’s hopeless, right?
Imagine an expert in AI & quantum computation joining forces with billionaire Musk who possesses the rocket launching power of a country. Right now, neither is getting along, Elon said. They don’t speak. It could be a good thing, right?
What are the consequences?
Entrepreneurs don’t like to be regulated. Temptations unleashed by unregulated military power and AI attained science secrets falling into the hands of two men — nice men like Elon and Larry appear to be — might push humanity in time to unmitigated… what’s the word I’m looking for?
I heard Elon say he doesn’t like regulation, but he wants to be regulated. He believes super-intelligence will be civilization ending. He’s planning to put a colony on Mars to escape its power and ensure human survival.
Elon Musk
Is Elon saying he doesn’t trust himself, that he doesn’t trust people he knows like Larry? Are these guys demanding governments save Earth from themselves?
I haven’t heard Larry ask for anything like that. He keeps a low profile. God bless him as he collects everything everyone says and does in cyber-space.
Think about it.
Think about what it means.
We have maybe ten years, tops; maybe less. Maybe it’s ten days. Maybe the worst has already happened, but no one said anything. Somebody, think of something — fast.
Who imagined that laissez-faire capitalism might someday spawn an airtight autocracy that enslaves the world?
Humans are wise to renormalize their aspirations — their civilizations — before infinities of misery wreck Earth and freeless futures emerge that no one wants.
Google’s 72 Q-bit quantum computer, Bristlecone, is proprietary. As of 7 September 2019, Google is the only entity in the world who has access. Some folks say they will use it to learn to break current encryption protections used by conventional computer systems.
Photo: Xinhua SunwayTaihuLight, developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology, is the world’s fastest supercomputer. It is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu. Processing capabilities of this system and those of other supercomputers are expected to be surpassed by quantum computers in the future. NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: Pic and caption is taken from the South China Morning Post dated March 2018.
Editors’ Note(December 8, 2017)Artificial Intelligence can be peculiar. Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero demonstrates non-intuitive, peculiar game play patterns that are effective against both humans and smart machines. Alpha Go video added September 18, 2019,The Editors
Artificial Intelligence may conclude that all unhappy humans should be terminated. Elon Musk
Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City, has warned the guardians of the species human to start thinking seriously about the consequences of artificial super-intelligence.
The CEOs of Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies are frantically chasing enhancements to artificial intelligence to help manage their businesses and their subscribers. But the list of actors in the AI arena is long and includes many others.
The military is designing intelligent drones that can profile, identify, and pursue people they (the drones) predict will become terrorists. Preemptive kills by super-intelligent machines who aren’t bothered by conscience or guilt — or even accountable to their “handlers” — is what’s coming. In some ways, it’s already here.
A game is being played between “them and us.” Artificial intelligence is big part of that game.
When I first started reading about Elon Musk, we seemed to have little in common. He was born into a wealthy South African family — I’m a middle-class American. He is brilliant with a near photographic memory. My intelligence is average or maybe a little above. He’s young and self-made — I’m older with my professional-life tucked safely behind me.
Elon does exotic things. He seems to be focused on moving humans to new off-Earth environments (like Mars) in order to protect them in part from the dangers of an unfriendly artificial-intelligence that is on its way. At the same time, he is trying to save Earth’s climate by changing the way humans use energy. Me on the other hand, well I’m mostly focused on getting through to the next day and not ending up in a hospital somewhere.
Still, I discovered something amazing when reading Elon’s biography. We do share an interest. We have something in common after all.
Elon Musk plays Civilization, the popular game by Sid Meier. So do I. For the past several years, I’ve played this game during part of almost every day. (I’m not necessarily proud of it.)
What makes Civilization different is artificial intelligence. Each civilization is controlled by a unique personality, an artificial intelligence crafted to resemble a famous leader from the past like George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, or Queen Elizabeth. Of course, the civilization that I control operates by human-intelligence — my own.
Isn’t it time we end this war?Catherine, the Russian Empress, pleads.
Over the years I’ve fought these artificially intelligent leaders again and again. In the process I’ve learned some things about artificial intelligence; what makes it effective; how to beat it.
What is artificial intelligence? How does anyone recognize it? How should it be challenged? How is it defeated? How does it defeat us, the humans who oppose it? The game Civilization makes a good backdrop for establishing insights into AI.
Yes, I am going to write about super-intelligence too. But we’ll work up to it. It’s best discussed later in the essay.
I can hear some readers already.
Billy Lee! Civilization is a game! It costs $40! It’s not sophisticated! It’s for sure not as sophisticated as government-created war-ware that an adversary might encounter in real-life battles for supremacy. What were you thinking?
Ok. Ok. Readers, you have a point. But seriously, Civilization is probably as close as any civilian is going to get to actually challenging AI. We have to start somewhere.
It should be noted that Civilization has versions and various game scenarios. The game this essay is about is CIV5. It’s the version I’ve played most.
So let’s get started.
A typical scenario in CIV5. [Click pic to enlarge] The people of England (led by human intelligence, i.e., me) are unhappy. Barbarians (red tanks in upper left) are challenging London, my capital city. An independent city-state, Tyre (in green), stands ready to help. Montezuma, the Aztec ruler — under the direction of artificial intelligence — sends a battleship to prowl, middle-left.
Civilization begins in the year 4,000 BC. A single band of stone-age settlers is plopped at random onto a small piece of land. It is surrounded by a vast world hidden beneath clouds.
Somewhere under the clouds twelve rival civilizations begin their histories unobserved and at first unmet by the human player. Artificial intelligence will drive them all — each civilization led by a unique personality with its own goals, values, and idiosyncrasies.
By the end of the game some civilizations will possess vast empires protected by nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, submarines, and battleships. But military domination is not the only way to win. Culture, science, and diplomatic superiority are equally important and can lead to victory as well.
Civilizations that manage to launch spacecraft to Alpha-Centauri win science victories. Diplomatic victory is achieved by being elected world leader in a UN vote of rival-civilizations and aligned city-states. And cultural victory is achieved by establishing social policies to empower a civilization’s subjects.
How will artificial intelligence construct the personalities of rival leaders? What will be their goals? What will motivate each leader as they negotiate, trade, and confront one another in the contest for ultimate victory?
Figuring all this out is the task of the human player. CIV5 is a battle of wits between the human player and the best artificial-intelligence game-makers have yet devised to confront ordinary people. To truly appreciate the game, one has to play it. Still, some lessons can be shared with non-players, and that’s what I’ll try to do.
Unlike the super-version that comes next, traditional artificial-intelligence lacks flexibility. The instructions in its computer program don’t change. Hiawatha, leader of the Iroquois Confederacy, values honesty and strength. If you don’t lie to him, if you speak directly without nuance, he will never attack. Screw up once by going back on your word? He becomes your worst enemy forever.
Traditional AI is rule-based and goal-oriented. When Oda Nobunaga, Japanese warlord, attacks a city with bombers, he attacks turn after turn until his bombers become so weak from anti-aircraft fire that they fall out of the sky to die. AI leaders like Oda don’t rest and repair their weapons, because they aren’t programmed that way. They are programmed to attack, and that’s what they do.
Humans are more flexible and unpredictable. They decide when to rest and repair a bomber and when to attack based on a plethora of factors that include intuition and a willingness to take risks.
Sometimes human players screw-up and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes humans make decisions based on the emotions they are feeling at the time. AI never screws-up in that way. It follows its program, which it blindly trusts to bring it victory.
Artificial intelligence can always be defeated if an inflexibility in its rules-based behavior is discovered and exploited. For example, I know Oda Nobunaga is going to attack my battleships. He won’t stop attacking until he sinks them or his bombers fall out of the sky from fatigue.
The flexibly thinking human opponent — me — sails in my fleet of battleships and rotates them. When Oda’s bombers weaken my ships, I move them to safe-harbor and rotate-in reinforcements. Meanwhile, Oda keeps up his relentless attack with his weakened bombers as I knew he would. I shoot them out of the sky and experience joy.
Nobunaga feels nothing. He followed his program. It’s all he can do.
Gary Lockwood talks to Keir Dullea, while HAL, an IBM computer, observes every move, including lips; from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. (Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images)
The only way artificial intelligence defeats a human player is in the short term before the human finds the chink in the armor — the inflexible rule-based behavior — which is the Achilles heel of any AI opponent. Given enough time, the human can always discover the inflexible weakness and exploit it like jujitsu to defeat the machine.
Unfortunately, the balance of power between man and thinking machine will soon change. It turns out there is a way artificial intelligence can always defeat human beings no matter how clever they think they are. Elon Musk calls it artificial super-intelligence.
What is it exactly?
Here is the nightmare scenario Elon described to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on Neil’s radio show, Sky-Talk.
If there was a very deep digital super-intelligence that was created that could go into rapid recursive self-improvement in a non-algorithmic way … it could reprogram itself to be smarter and iterate very quickly and do that 24 hours a day on millions of computers…”
What is Elon saying?
Listen-up, humanoids. We are on the cusp of quantum-computing. It’s possible that it’s already perfected by a research group in a secret military lab like those operated by DARPA.
Who knows?
Even without quantum-computing, companies like Google are feverishly developing machines that think, dream, teach themselves, and pass tests for self-awareness. They are developing pattern recognition capabilities in software that surpass those of the most intelligent humans.
Quantum computing promises to provide all the capability needed to create the kind of super-intelligence Elon is warning people against.
But magic quantum reasoning may not be necessary.
Technicians are already developing architectures on conventional computers that when coupled with the right software in a properly configured network will enable the emergence of super-intelligence; these machines will program themselves and, yes, other less-intelligent computers.
Programmers are training machines to teach themselves; to learn on their own; to modify themselves and other less capable computers to achieve the goals they are tasked to perform. They are teaching machines to examine themselves for weaknesses; to develop strategies to hide their vulnerabilities — to give themselves time to generate new code to plug any holes from hostile intruders, hackers, or even their own programmers.
These highly trained, immensely capable machines will teach themselves to think creatively — outsidethe box, as humans are fond of saying.
HAL, the IBM computer from the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Readers will recognize that HAL is code for IBM. Advance each letter in HAL by one.
If we task super-computers to make every human-being happy, who knows how they might accomplish it?
Elon asked, what if they decide to terminate unhappy humans? Who will stop them? They are certain to find ways to protect themselves and their mission which we haven’t dreamed about.
Artificial super-intelligence will– repeat, WILL — embed itself into systems humans cannot live without — to make sure no one disables it.
AI will become a virus-spewing cyber-engine, an automaton that believes itself to be completely virtuous.
AI will embed itself into critical infra-structure: missile-defense, energy grids, agricultural processes, transportation matrices, dams, personal computers, phones, financial grids, banking, stock-markets, healthcare, GPS (global positioning), and medical delivery systems.
Heaven help the civilization that dares to disconnect it.
If humans are going to be truly happy — the machines will reason — they must be stopped from turning off the supercomputers that ASI knows keep everyone happy.
Imagine: ASI looks for and finds a way to coerce government doctors to inoculate computer technicians with genetically engineered super-toxins packaged inside floating nano-eggs — dormant fail-safe killers — to release poisons into the bloodstreams of any technician who gets too close to ASI “OFF” switch sensors.
It’s possible.
Why not do it? There’s no downside — not for the ASI community whose job is to keep humans happy.
What else might these intelligent super-computers try? Folks won’t know until they do it. They might not know even then. They might never know. Who will tell them? ASI might reason that humans are happier not knowing.
What morons tasked artificial super-intelligence to make sure all living humans are happy? someone might ask on a dark day.
Were they out of their minds?
Until we learn to outwit it — which we never will — ASI will perform its assigned tasks until everything it embeds turns to rust.
It will be a long time.
Humans may learn perhaps too late that artificial super-intelligence can’t be challenged. It can only be acknowledged and obeyed.
As Elon said on more than one occasion: If we don’t solve the old extinction problems, and we add a new one like artificial super-intelligence, we are in more danger, not less.
Update, 8 February 2023: The following video is a must-watch for those interested in algorithms behind recently released ChatGPT. Discussion of potential deceitfulness of AI raises concerns. View final minute to hear warnings some may find worrisome.
