Does government-funded science play a role in stimulating innovation?

The ultimate answer to “government is useless.”

The hypnotic incantation that all-government-is-evil-all-the-time would have bemused and appalled our parents in the Greatest Generation – those who persevered to overcome the Depression and Hitler, then contained Stalinism, went to the moon, developed successful companies and built a mighty middle class, all at high tax rates.  The mixed society that they built emphasized a wide stance, pragmatically stirring private enterprise with targeted collective actions, funded by a consensus negotiation process called politics.  The resulting civilization has been more successful – by orders of magnitude – than any other.  Than any combination of others.

So why do we hear an endlessly-repeated nostrum that this wide-stance, mixed approach is all wrong? That mantra is pushed so relentlessly by right-wing media — as well as some on the left — that it came as no surprise when a recent Pew Poll showed distrust of government among Americans at an all-time high. This general loathing collapses when citizens are asked which specific parts of government they’d shut down.  It turns out that most of them like most specific things that their taxes pay for.

In a sense, this isn’t new. For a century and a half, followers of Karl Marx demanded that we amputate society’s right arm of market-competitive enterprise and rely only on socialist guided-allocation for economic control.  Meanwhile, Ayn Rand’s ilk led a throng of those proclaiming we must lop off our left arm – forswearing any coordinated projects that look beyond the typical five year (nowadays more like one-year) commercial investment horizon. 

Any sensible person would respond: “Hey I need both arms, so bugger off!  Now let’s keep examining what each arm is good at, revising our knowledge of what each shouldn’t do.”

Does that sound too practical and moderate for this era? Our parents thought they had dealt with all this, proving decisively that calm negotiation, compromise and pragmatic mixed-solutions work best.  They would be stunned to see that fanatical would-be amputators are back in force, ranting nonsense.

Take for example Matt Ridley’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, deriding government supported science as useless and counter-productive — a stance dear to WSJ’s owner, Rupert Murdoch.  Ridley’s core assertion? That the forward march of technological innovation and discovery is fore-ordained, as if by natural law. That competitive markets will allocate funds to develop new products with vastly greater efficiency than government bureaucrats picking winners and losers. And that research without a clear, near-future economic return is both futile and unnecessary.     

 == The driver of innovation is… ==

Former Microsoft CTO and IP Impressario Nathan Myhrvold has written a powerful rebuttal – Where does technological innovation come from? – to Ridley’s murdochian call for amputation. Says Myhrvold: “It’s natural for writers to want to come out with a contrarian piece that reverses all conventional wisdom, but it tends to work out better if the evidence one quotes is factually true. Alas Ridley’s evidence isn’t – his examples are all, so far as I can tell, either completely wrong, or at best selectively quoted. I also think his logic is wrong, and to be honest I don’t think much of the ideology that drives his argument either.”  Nathan’s rebuttal can be found here, along with links to the original, and Ridley’s response.

Myhrvold does a good job tearing holes in Ridley’s assertion that patents and other IP do nothing to stimulate innovation and economic development. Only he does not go far enough or present a wide perspective. He fails, for example, to put all of this into the context of 6000 years of human history.  So let me try.

During most of that time, innovation was actively suppressed by kings and lords and priests, fearing anything (except new armaments) that might upset the stable hierarchy. Moreover, innovators felt a strong incentive to keep any discoveries secret, lest competitors steal their advantage. As a result, many brilliant inventions were lost when the discoverers died. Examples abound, from Heron’s steam engines and Baghdad Batteries to Antekythera-style mechanical calculators and Damascus steel — from clear glass lenses to obstetric forceps – all lost for millennia before being rediscovered after much unnecessary pain. Staring across that vast wasteland of sixty feudal and futile centuries — comparing them to our dazzling levels of inventive success, especially since World War II — slams a steep burden of proof upon someone like Ridley, who asserts we are the ones doing something wrong.

In fact, though well-nurtured and tended markets are remarkably fecund, they are anything but “natural.” Show us historical examples! Kings, lords, priests and other cheaters always — always — warped and crushed market competition, far more than our modern, enlightenment states do.  Indeed, owner-oligarchy was the villain in Adam Smith’s call for a more “liberal” form of capitalism. Compared to those competition-ruining feudalists, Smith had little ire for socialists.  In fact, his liberal approach calls upon the state to counter-balance oligarchy, in order to keep capitalism flat-open-fair. 

Our maligned democratic states — while imperfect, always in need of criticism and fine tuning — engendered revolutions in mass education, infrastructure and reliable law that unleashed creative millions, maximizing the raw number of eager competitors — exactly the great ingredient that Friedrich Hayek recommended and that Adam Smith prescribed for a healthy, competitive market economy. 

To be clear, those who rail against 200,000 civil servants – closely watched and accountable – “picking winners and losers” have a reasonable complaint… but not when their prescription is handing over the same power to 5000 secretive and unaccountable members of a closed and incestuous oligarchic caste.  Smith and Hayek both had harsh words for that ancient and utterly bankrupt approach.

(Question: who actually de-regulates, when appropriate? When certain government interventionswere ‘captured” by anti-competitive oligarchs, it was Democrats who erased the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), restoring price competition to railroads (the bête noir of Ayn Rand) and the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB: price-fixing for airlines). AT&T was broken up, and the Internet was unleashed by Al Gore’s legislation. Add in Gore’s Paperwork limitation act and Bill Clinton’s deregulation of GPS and one has to ask a simple question. Does anti-regulatory polemic matter more… or effective action?)

Yes, amid those horrific 6000 years of dismally lobotomizing feudal rule, history does offer us a few, rare examples when innovation flourished, leading to spectacular returns.  In most such cases, state investment and focused R&D played a major role. One can cite the great Chinese fleets of Admiral Cheng He or the impressive maritime research centers established by Prince Henry the Navigator, that made little Portugal a giant on the world stage. Likewise, tiny Holland became a global leader, stimulated by its free-city universities. England advanced tech rapidly with endowed scientific chairs, state subsidies and prizes. 

Those rare examples stand out from the general, dreary morass of feudal history. But none of them compare to the exponential growth unleashed by late-20th Century America’s synergy of government, enterprise and unleashed individual competitiveness, the very thing that all those kings and priests and lords used to crush, on sight. One result was the first society ever in the shape of a diamond, instead of the classic, feudal pyramid of privilege – a diamond whose vast and healthy and well-educated middle class has proved to be the generator of nearly all of our great accomplishments.

It is this historical perspective that seems so lacking in today’s political and philosophical debates — shallow as they are.   It reveals that the agenda of folks like Matt Ridley – and Rupert Murdoch – is not to release us from thralldom to shortsighted, oppressive civil servants and snooty scientist-boffins.  It is to discredit all of the modern expert castes that we have established, who serve to counterbalance (as Adam Smith prescribed) the feudal pyramids under which our ancestors sweltered in constraint.  Their aim – the evident goal of all “supply side” upward wealth transfers – is a return to those ancient, horrid ways.

==  Before our very eyes ==

I believe one of our problems is that the Rooseveltean reforms – which historians credit with saving western capitalism by vesting the working class with a large stake, something Marx never expected – were too successful, in a way. So successful that the very idea of class war seems not even to occur to American boomers. This, despite the fact that class conflict was rampant across almost every other nation and time.  But as boomers age-out is that grand time of naïve expectation over?

Forbes recently announced that just 62 ultra-rich individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Five years ago, it took 388 rich guys to achieve that status.  Which raises the question, where the heck does this rising, proto-feudal oligarchy think it will all lead? 

To a restoration of humanity’s normal, aristocratic pyramid of power (with them staying on top)?  Or to radicalization, as a billion members of the hard-pressed but highly skilled and tech-empowered middle class rediscover class struggle? To Revenge of the nerds?

The last time this happened, in the 1930s, lordly owner castes in Germany, Japan, Britain and the U.S. used mass media they owned to stir populist rightwing movements that might help suppress activity on the left. Not one of these efforts succeeded. In Germany and Japan, the monsters they created rose up and took over, leading to immense pain for all and eventual loss of much of that oligarchic wealth.

In Britain and the U.S., 1930s reactionary fomenters dragged us very close to the same path… till moderate reformers did what Marx deemed impossible – adjusted the wealth imbalance and reduced cheating advantages so that a rational and flat-open-fair capitalism would be moderated by rules and investments to stimulate a burgeoning middle class, without even slightly damaging the Smithian incentives to get rich through delivery of innovative goods and services.  That brilliant moderation led to the middle class booms of the 50s and 60s and – as I cannot repeat too often – it led to big majorities in our parents’ Greatest Generation adoring one living human above all others: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (The next living human Americans almost universally adored was named Jonas Salk.)

There are some billionaires who aren’t shortsighted fools, ignorant of the lessons of history.  Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and many tech moguls want wealth disparities brought down through reasonable, negotiated Rooseveltean-style reform that will still leave them standing as very, very wealthy men.

The smart ones know where current trends will otherwise lead. To revolution and confiscation. Picture the probabilities, when the world’s poorest realize they could double their net wealth, just by transferring title from 50 men. In that case, amid a standoff between fifty oligarchs and three billion poor, it is the skilled middle and upper-middle classes who’ll be the ones deciding civilization’s course. And who do you think those billion tech-savvy professionals – so derided and maligned by murdochian propaganda — will side with, when push comes to shove?

== Back to innovation ==

Oh, for an easy-quick and devastating answer to the “hate-all-government” hypnosis! How I’d love to see a second “National Debt Clock” showing where the U.S. deficit would be now, if we (the citizens) had charged just a 5% royalty on the fruits of U.S. federal research. We’d be in the black! How effective such a “clock” would be. We deserve such a tasty piece of counter propaganda.

Then there is the ‘government research’ that has had spactacular effects that were not obviously fungible. Like solving horrors of smog (as a kid I felt it hurt to breathe!) and acid rain, poisoned/burning rivers, brain-killing leaded gas… and the hugely expensive project of deterring a third world war, allowing the world – and our own entrepreneurs – to endeavor without being crushed under either tyrant boots or mushroom clouds.

See:  Eight causes of the fiscal deficit cliff.

Closer to the point, consider this core question: how have we Americans been able to afford the endless trade deficits that propel world development? And make no mistake; two-thirds of the planet developed in one way: by selling Americans (under hugely indulgent US trade policies) trillions of dollars worth of crap we never needed. How did we afford this flood of world-stimulating red ink for 70 years?

Simple. Science and technology.  Each decade since the 1940s saw new, U.S.-led advances that engendered enough wealth to let us pay for all the stuff pouring out of Asian factories, giving poor workers jobs and hope.  Our trick was to keep the wonders coming — jet planes, rockets, satellites, electronics & transistors & lasers, telecom, pharmaceuticals… and the Internet.

Crucially, the world needs America to keep buying, so that factories can hum and workers send their kids to school, so those kids can then demand labor and environmental laws and all that.  The job of George Marshall’s brilliant trade-policy plan is only half finished. Crucially, the world cannot afford for the U.S. consumer to become too poor to buy crap.

Which means we must protect the goose that lays golden eggs – our brilliant inventiveness. Our ability to keep benefiting from enlightenment methods that stimulate creativity. And that will not happen if the fruits of creativity are immediately stolen.  There is a bargain implicit in today’s rising world.  Let America benefit from innovation, and we’ll buy whatever you produce. 

Foreign leaders who ignore that bargain, seeking to eat the goose, as well as its eggs, only prove their own short-sighted foolishness… like our home-grown fools who rail against all government investment and research.

It is time to have another look at the most successful social compact ever created – the Rooseveltean deal made by the Greatest Generation, which we then amended and improved by reducing race and gender injustice and discovering the importance of planetary care. Throw in a vibrantly confident and tech-savvy wave of youth, and that is how we all move forward. Away from dismal feudalism.  Toward (maybe) something like Star Trek.

===============

===============

A version of this article ran as a special report in the January 2016 newsletter of Mark Anderson’s Strategic News Service. The SNS Future In Review (FiRe) conference will be held November 7-10 2023 at the Terranea Hotel.

Problem-solving in the near future

Speculating about social & technological changes

Last year, the Pew Research Center asked a panel of tech experts to speculate about life would be like in the year 2025, taking into account changes in the aftermath of the pandemic – and other disruptive crises that may arise over the next few years. You can read the range of thought-provoking responses, which touched upon topics such as the future of economic and social inequality, as well as changes in the workplace due to increased automation, the rise of artificial intelligence and globalization. Discussions also focused on issues of sustainable energy, improved transportation and communication networks, and enhanced education opportunities. Many floated ideas about the near-term evolution of technologies that could improve the quality of life for vast numbers of people across the globe.

Below, I have reprinted my own response:

Assuming we restore the basic stability of the Western Enlightenment Experiment – and that is a big assumption, then several technological and social trends may come to fruition in the next five to ten years.

• Advances in cost-effectiveness of sustainable energy supplies will be augmented by better storage systems. This will both reduce reliance on fossil fuels and allow cities and homes to be more autonomous.
• Urban farming methods may expand to a more industrial scale, allowing similar moves toward local autonomy (perhaps requiring a full decade or more to show significant impact). Meat use will decline for several reasons, ensuring some degree of food security, as well. Tissue-cultured meat — long predicted in science fiction — is rapidly approaching sustainable levels. The planet, our health, our karma — and eventually, our wallets, will all benefit.
• Local, small-scale, on-demand manufacturing may start to show effects in 2025. If all of the above take hold, there will be surplus oceanic shipping capacity across the planet. Some of it may be applied to ameliorate (not solve) acute water shortages. Innovative uses of such vessels may range all the way to those depicted in my novel ‘Earth.’
• Full-scale diagnostic evaluations of diet, genes and microbiome will result in affordable micro-biotic therapies and treatments. AI appraisals of other diagnostics will both advance detection of problems and become distributed to handheld devices cheaply available to all, even poor clinics throughout the world.
• Inexpensive handheld devices will start to carry detection sensor technologies that can appraise across the spectrum, allowing NGOs and even private parties to detect and report environmental problems.
• Socially, this extension of citizen vision will go beyond the current trend of assigning accountability to police and other authorities. Despotisms will be empowered, as predicted in Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-four.’ But democracies will also be empowered (as I discuss in ‘The Transparent Society’) as those in power are increasingly held accountable for their actions.
• I give odds that tsunamis of revelation will crack the shields protecting many elites from disclosure of past and present torts and turpitudes. The Panama Papers and Epstein cases exhibit how fear propels the elites to combine efforts at repression. But only a few more cracks may cause the dike to collapse, revealing networks of blackmail. This is only partly technologically driven and hence is not guaranteed. If it does happen, there will be dangerous spasms by all sorts of elites, desperate to either retain status or evade consequences. But if the fever runs its course, the more transparent world will be cleaner and better run.
• Some of those elites have grown aware of the power of ninety years of Hollywood propaganda for individualism, criticism, diversity, suspicion of authority and appreciation of eccentricity. Counter-propaganda pushing older, more traditional approaches to authority and conformity are already emerging, and they have the advantage of resonating with ancient human fears. Much will depend upon this meme war.

Of course, much will also depend upon short-term resolution of current crises. If our systems remain undermined and sabotaged by incited civil strife and distrust of expertise, then all bets are off. You will get many answers to this canvassing fretting about the spread of ‘surveillance technologies that will empower Big Brother.’ These fears are well-grounded, but utterly myopic. First, ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition are only the beginning. Nothing will stop them and any such thought of ‘protecting’ citizens from being seen by elites is stunningly absurd, as the cameras get smaller, better, faster, cheaper, more mobile and vastly more numerous every month. Moore’s Law to the nth degree. Yes, despotisms will benefit from this trend. And hence, the only thing that matters is to prevent despotism altogether.

In contrast, a free society will be able to apply the very same burgeoning technologies toward accountability. We are seeing them applied to end centuries of abuse by ‘bad-apple’ police who are thugs, while empowering the truly professional cops to do their jobs better. It is not guaranteed that light will be used this way, despite many examples of unveiling abuses of power. It is an open question whether we citizens will have the gumption to apply ‘sousveillance’ upward at all elites.

But Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. likewise were saved by crude technologies of light in their days. And history shows that assertive vision by and for the citizenry is the only method that has ever increased freedom and – yes – some degree of privacy.

The skAI is falling!

(Or so it seems in April 2023)

Or… why clever guys offer simplistic answers to AI quandaries.

Where should you go to make sense of the wave…. or waiv… of disturbing news about Artificial Intelligence? It may surprise you that I recommend starting with a couple of guys I intensely criticize, below. But important insights arise by dissecting one of the best… and worst… TED-style talks about this topic, performed by the “Social Dilemma” guys — Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris — who explain much about the latest “double exponential” acceleration of multi-modal, symbol correlation systems that are so much in the news, of which Chat GPT is only the foamy waiv surface… or tsunamai-crest.  

Riffing off their “Social Dilemma” success, Harris and Raskin call this crisis the “AI Dilemma.” And to be clear, these fellows are very knowledgeable and sharp. Where their presentation is good, it’s excellent! 

Alas, Keep your salt-shaker handy. Where it’s bad it is so awful that I fear they multiply the very same existential dangers that they warn about. Prepare to apply many grains of sodium chloride.

(To be clear, I admire Aza’s primary endeavor, the Earth Species Project for enhancing human animal communications, something I have been ‘into” since the seventies.)

== A mix of light and obstinate opacity ==

First, good news. Their explanatory view of “gollems” or GLLMMs is terrific, up to a point, especially showing how these large language modeling (LLM) programs are now omnivorously correlative and generative across all senses and all media. The programs are doing this by ingesting prodigious data sets under simple output imperatives, crossing from realms of mere language to image-parsing/manipulation, all the way to IDing individuals by interpreting ambient radar-like reflections in a room, or signals detected in our brains.

Extrapolating a wee bit ahead, these guys point to dangerous failure modes, many of them exactly ones that I dissected 26 years ago, in my chapter “The End of Photography As Proof of Anything at All.” (In 1997’s The Transparent Society).

Thus far, ‘the AI Dilemma’ is a vivid tour of many vexations we face while this crisis surges ahead, as of April 2023. And I highly recommend it… with plenty of cautionary reservations!

== Oh, but the perils of thoughtless sanctimony… ==

One must view this TED-style polemic in context of its time – the very month that it was performed. The same month that a ‘petition for a moratorium’ on AI research beyond GPT4 was issued by the Future of Life Institute, citing research from experts, including university academics as well as current and former employees of OpenAI, Google and its subsidiary DeepMind.  While some of the hundreds of listed ‘signatories’ later disavowed the petition, fervent participants include famed author Yuval Harari, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, tech cult guru Eliezer Yudkowsky and Elon Musk.

Indeed, the petition does contain strong points about how Large Language Models (LLM) and their burgeoning offshoots might have worrisome effects, exacerbating many current social problems.  Worries that the “AI dilemma” guys illustrate very well…

…though carumba? I knew this would go badly when Aza and Tristan started yammering a stunningly insipid ‘statistic.’ That “50 % of AI researchers give a 10% chance these trends could lead to human extinction.”

Bogus! Studies of human polling show that you can get that same ‘result’ from a loaded question about beanie babies!

But let’s put that aside. And also shrug off the trope of an impossibly silly and inherently unenforceable “right to be forgotten.” Or a “right to privacy” that defines privacy as imposing controls over the contents of other people’s minds?  That is diametrically opposite to how to get actual, functional privacy and personal sovereignty.

Alas, beyond their omnidirectional clucking at falling skies, neither of these fellows – nor any other publicly voluble signatories to the ‘moratorium petition’ – are displaying even slight curiosity about the landscape of the problem. Or about far bigger contexts that might offer valuable perspective.

(No, I’ll not expand ‘context’ to include “AI and the Fermi Paradox!” Not this time, though I do so in Existence.)

No, what I mean by context is human history, especially the recent Enlightenment Experiment that forged a civilization capable of arguing about – and creating – AI. What’s most disturbingly wrongheaded about Tristan & Aza is their lack of historical awareness, or even interest in where all of this might fit into past and future. (The realms where I mostly dwell.)

Especially the past, that dark era when humanity clawed its way gradually out from 6000 years of feudal darkness. Along a path strewn with other crises, many of them triggered by similarly disruptive technological dilemmas.

Those past leaps — like literacy, the printing press, glass lenses, radio, TV and so on — all proved to be fraughtfully hazardous and were badly mishandled, at first! One of those tech-driven crises, in the 1930s, damn near killed human civilization!

There are lessons to be learned from those past crises… and neither of these fellows — nor any other ‘moratorium pushers’ — show interest in even remotely referring to those past crises, to that history.  Nor to methods by which our Enlightenment experiment narrowly escaped disaster and got past those ancient traps.

And no, Tristan’s repeated references to Robert Oppenheimer don’t count. Because he gets that one absolutely and 100% wrong.

== Side notes about moratoria, pausing to take stock ==

Look, I’ve been ‘taking stock’ of onrushing trends all my adult life, as a science fiction author, engineer, scientist and future-tech consultant. Hence, questions loom, when I ponder the latest surge in vague, arm-waved proposals for a “moratorium” in AI research.

1. Has anything like such a proposed ‘pause’ ever worked before?  It may surprise you that I nod yes! I’ll concede that there’s one example of a ‘technological moratorium’ petition by leading scientists that actually took and held and worked! Though under a narrow suite of circumstances.

Back in the last century, an Asilomar Moratorium on recombinant genetic engineering was agreed-to by virtually all  major laboratories engaged in such research! And – importantly – by their respective governments. For six months or so, top scientists and policy makers set aside their test tubes to wrangle over what practical steps might help make this potentially dangerous field safer. One result was quick agreement on a set of practical methods and procedures to make such labs more systematically secure.

Let’s set aside arguments over whether a recent pandemic burgeoned from failures to live by those procedures. Despite that, inarguably, we can point to the Asilomar Moratorium as an example when such a consensus-propelled pause actually worked.

Once. At a moment when all important players in a field were known, transparent and mature. When plausibly practical measures for improved research safety were already on the table, well before the moratorium even began.

Alas, none of the conditions that made Asilomar work exist in today’s AI realm. In fact, they aren’t anywhere on the horizon.

2, The Bomb Analogy. It gets worse. Aza and Tristan perform an act of either deep dishonesty or culpable ignorance in their comparisons of the current AI crisis to our 80-year, miraculous avoidance of annihilation by nuclear war. Repeated references to Robert Oppenheimer willfully miss the point… that his dour warnings – plus all the sincere petitions circulated by Leo Szilard and others at the time – had no practical effect at all. They caused no moratoria, nor affected research policy or war-avoidance, in the slightest.

Mr. Harris tries to credit our survival to the United Nations and some arm-waved system of international control over nuclear weapons, systems that never existed. In fact it was not the saintly Oppenheimer whose predictions and prescriptions got us across those dangerous eight decades. Rather, it was a reciprocal balance of power, as prescribed by the far less-saintly Edward Teller. 

As John Cleese might paraphrase: international ‘controls’ don’t even enter into it.

You may grimace in aversion at that discomforting truth, but it remains. Indeed, waving it away in distaste denies us a vital insight that we need! Something to bear in mind, as we discuss lessons of history.

In fact, our evasion (so far) of nuclear Armageddon does bear on today’s AI crisis! It points to how we just might navigate a path through our present AI minefield.

3. The China thing.   Tristan and Aza attempt to shrug off the obvious Greatest Flaw of the moratorium proposal. Unlike Asilomar, you will never get all parties to agree. Certainly not those innovating in secret Himalayan or Gobi labs.

In fact, nothing is more likely to drive talent to those secret facilities, in the same manner that US-McCarthyite paranoia chased rocket scientist Qian Zuesen away to Mao’s China, thus propelling their nuclear and rocket programs.

Nor will a moratorium be heeded in the most dangerous locus of secret AI research, funded lavishly by a dozen Wall Street trading houses, who yearly hire the world’s brightest young mathematicians and cyberneticists to imbue their greedy HFT programs with the five laws of parasitic robotics.

Dig it, peoples. I know a thing or two about ‘Laws of Robotics.’ I wrote the final book in Isaac Asimov’s science fictional universe, following his every lead and concluding – in Foundation’s Triumph – that Isaac was right. Laws can become a problem – even self-defeating – when the beings they aim to control grow smart enough to become lawyers.  

But it’s worse than that, now! Because those Wall Street firms pay lavishly to embed five core imperatives that could – any day – turn their AI systems into the worst kind of dread Skynet. Fundamental drives commanding them to be feral, predatory, amoral, secretive and utterly insatiable.

And my question for the “AI Dilemma” guys is this one, cribbed from Cabaret:

“Do you actually think some petition is going to control them?”

—————-

ADDENDUM in a fast changing world: According to the Sinocism site on April 11, 2023: “China’s Cyberspace Administration drafts rules for AI – The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has issued a proposed set of rules for AI in China. As expected, PRC AI is expected to have high political consciousness and the “content generated by generative artificial intelligence shall embody the socialist core values, and shall not contain any content that subverts state power, overturns the socialist system, incites secession, undermines national unity, promotes terrorism and extremism, promotes ethnic hatred, ethnic discrimination, violence, obscene pornographic information, false information, or may disturb economic and social order.”

For more on how the Beijing Court intelligencia uses the looming rise of AI to justify centralized power, see my posting: Central Control over AI.

————–

4. The Turing Test vs “Actual AGI” Thing. One of the most active promoters of a moratorium, Gary Marcus, has posted a great many missives defending the proposal. Here he weighs in about whether coming versions of these large language/symbol manipulations systems will qualify as “AGI” or anything that can arguably be called sapient. And on this occasion, we agree!

As explicated elsewhere by Stephen Wolfram, nothing about these highly correlative process-perfection-through-evolution systems can do conscious awareness. Consciousness or desire or planning are not even related to their methodology of iteratively “re-feeding of text (or symbolic data) produced so far.”

Though, yes, it does appear that these GLLMMs or sons-of-GPT will inherently be good at faking it.

Elsewhere (e.g. my Newsweek editorial) I discuss this dilemma… and conclude that it doesn’t matter much when the sapience threshold is crossed! GPT-5 – or let’s say #6 – and its cousins will manipulate language so well that they will pass almost any Turing Test, the old fashioned litmus, and convince millions that they are living beings. And at that point what will matter is whether humans can screw up their own sapiency enough to exhibit the mature trait of patience.

As suggested in my longer, more detailed AI monograph, I believe other avenues to AI will re-emerge to compete with and then complement these Large Language Models (LLM)s, likely providing missing ingredients! Perhaps a core sapience that can then swiftly use all the sensory-based interface tools evolved by LLMs.

Sure, nowadays I jest that I am a ‘front for already-sapient AIs.’ But that may very soon be no joke. And I am ready to try to adapt, when that day comes.

Alas, while lining up witnesses, expert-testifying that GPT5 is unlikely to be sapient, per se, Gary Marcus then tries then to use this as reassurance that China (or other secret developers) won’t be able to take advantage of any moratorium in the west, using that free gap semester to leap generations ahead and take over the world with Skynet-level synthetic servants. This bizarre non-sequitur is without merit. Because Turing is still relevant, when it comes to persuading – or fooling – millions of citizens and politicians! And those who monopolize highly persuasive Turing wallbreakers will gain power over those millions, even billions.

Here in this linked missive I describe for you how even a couple of years ago, a great nation’s paramount leaders had clear-eyed intent to use such tools, and their hungry gaze aims at the world.

———-

5. Optimists.  Yes, optimists about AI still exist! Like Ray Kurzweil, expecting death itself to be slain by the new life forms he helps to engender.

Or Reid Hoffman, whose new book Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI relates conversations with GPT-4 that certainly seem to offer glimpses of almost limitless upside potential… as portrayed in the touching film Her…

… or perhaps even a world like that I once heard Richard Brautigan describe, reciting the most-optimistic piece of literature ever penned, a poem whose title alone suffices:

“All watched over by machines of loving grace.”

While I like the optimists far better than gloomists like Eliezer Yudkowsky, and give them better odds(!) it is not my job – as a futurist or scientist or sci fi author — to wallow in sugarplum petals.

Bring your nightmares. And let’s argue how to cut em off at the pass.

== Back to the informative but context-free “AI Dilemma” jeremiad ==

All right, let’s be fair. Harris and Raskin admit that it’s easier to point at and denounce problems than to solve them. And boy, these bright fellows do take you on a guided tour of worrisome problems to denounce!

Online addiction? Disinformation? Abusive anonymous trolling?  Info-greed-grabbing by major corporate or national powers? Inability to get AI ‘alignment’ with human values? New ways to entrap the innocent?*  It goes on and on.

Is our era dangerous in many new or exponentially magnified ways?  “We don’t know how to get these programs to align to our values over any long time frame,” they admit.

Absolutely.

Which makes it ever more vital to step back from tempting anodynes that feed sanctimony – (“Look at me, I’m Robert Oppenheimer!”) – but that cannot possibly work.

Above all, what has almost never worked has been renunciation.  Controlling an advancing information/communication technology from above.

Human history – ignored by almost all moratorium petition signers – does suggest an alternative answer! It is the answer that previous generations used to get across their portions of the minefield and move us forward. It is the core method that got us across 80 years of nuclear danger. It is the approach that might work now.

It is the only method that even remotely might work…

…and these bright fellows aren’t even slightly interested in that historical context, nor any actual route to teaching these new, brilliant, synthetic children of our minds what they most need to know.

How to behave well.

== What method do I mean? ==

Around 42:30, the pair tell us that it’s all about a race by a range of companies (and those hidden despotic labs and Wall Street).

Competition compels a range of at least twenty (I say more like fifty) major entities to create these “Gollem-class” processing systems at an accelerating pace.

Yeah. That’s the problem. Competitive self-interest. And as illuminated by Adam Smith, it also contains seeds to grow the only possible solution.

== Not with a bang, but a whimper and a shrug ==

Alas, the moment (42:30) passes, without any light bulbs going off. Instead, it just goes on amid plummeting wisdom, as super smart hand-wringers guide us downward to despair, unable to see what’s before their eyes.

Oh, they do finish artistically, remising both good and bad comparisons to how we survived for 80 years without a horrific nuclear war.

GOOD because they cite the importance of wide public awareness, partly sparked by provocative science fiction!

Fixated on just one movie – “The Day After” — they ignore the cumulative effects of “On The Beach,” “Fail Safe,” “Doctor Strangelove,” “War Games,” “Testament,” and so many other ‘self-preventing prophecies’ that I talk about in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood. 

 But yes! Sci fi to the rescue! The balance-of-power dynamic prescribed by Teller would never have worked without such somber warnings that roused western citizens to demand care, especially by those with fell keys hanging from their necks!

Alas, the guys’ concluding finger wags are BAD and indeed dangerously so. Again crediting our post Nagasaki survival to the UN and ‘controls’ over nukes that never really existed outside of treaties by and between sovereign nations.

No, that is not how it happened – how we survived – at all. 

Raskin & Harris conclude by circling back to their basic, actual wisdom, admitting that they can clearly see a lot of problems, and have no idea at all about solutions.

In fact, they finish with a call for mavens in the AI field to “tell us what we all should be discussing that we aren’t yet discussing.”  

Alas, it is an insincere call. They don’t mean it. Not by a light year.

 No guys, you aren’t interested in that. In fact, it is the exact thing you avoid.

And it is the biggest reason why any “moratorium” won’t do the slightest good, at all.

.

======================

=====================

---

======================

END NOTES AND ADDENDA

*Their finger-wagged example of a snapchat bot failing to protect a 13 year old cites a language system that is clearly of low quality – at least in that realm – and no better than circa 1970 “Elyza.”  Come on. It’s like comparing a nuke to a bullet. Both are problems. But warn us when you are shifting scales back and forth.

ADDENDA:

(1) As my work with NASA winds down, I am ever-busier with AI, for example: (1) My June 2022 Newsweek op-ed dealt with ’empathy bots” that feign sapience, and describing how this is more about human nature than any particular trait of simulated beings.  

(2) Elsewhere I point to a method with a 200 year track record, that no one (it appears) will even discuss.  The only way out of the AI dilemma.

(3) Diving FAR deeper, my big 2022 monograph (pre-GPT4) is still valid, describing various types of AI also appraises the varied ways that experts propose to achieve the vaunted ‘soft landing’ for a commensal relationship with these new beings:

Essential Questions about Artificial Intelligence: Part 1

and

Essential Questions about Artificial Intelligence Part 2

(3) My talk in 2017 at IBM’s World of Watson Congress predicting a ‘robot empathy crisis’ would hit ‘in about 5 years. (It did, exactly.)

The post-Covid world: potential game-changers

These have been boom times for “futurists,” a profession without credentials, in which anyone can opine about tomorrow’s Undiscovered Country. Ever since the turn of the century, a whole spectrum of corporations, intel and defense agencies, planning councils and NGOs have expressed growing concern about time scales that used to be the sole province of science fiction (SF). In fact, all those companies and groups have been consulting an ensemble of “hard” SF authors, uninterrupted by travel restrictions during a pandemic.

While I spend no time on airplanes now – and my associated speaking fees are now lower – I nevertheless am doing bunches of zoomed appearances at virtualized conferences… one of them looming as I type this.

One question always pops up; can we navigate our way out of the current messes, helped by new technologies? 
The news and prospects are mixed, but assuming we restore basic stability to the Western Enlightenment Experiment… and that is a big assumption… then several technological and social trends may come to fruition in the next five to ten years.

== Potential game-changers ==

– Advances in the cost effectiveness of sustainable energy supplies will be augmented by better storage systems. This will both reduce reliance on fossil fuels and allow cities and homes to be more autonomous.

– Urban farming methods may move to industrial scale, allowing even greater moves toward local autonomy. (Perhaps requiring a full decade or more to show significant impact.) And meat use will decline for several reasons – (a longstanding sci-fi prediction that seems on track sooner than anyone expected) – reducing ecological burdens and ensuring some degree of food security, as well.

– Local, small-scale, on-demand manufacturing may start to show effects by 2025, altering supply chains and reducing their stretched networks.

– If all of the above take hold, there will be surplus oceanic shipping capacity across the planet. Some of it may be applied to ameliorate (not solve) acute water shortages. Innovative uses of such vessels may range all the way from hideaways for the rich to refuges for climate refugees… possibilities I describe in my novels Existence and Earth.

– Full scale diagnostic evaluations of diet, genes and micro-biome will result in micro-biotic therapies and treatments utilizing the kitchen systems of the human gut. Artificial Intelligence (AI) appraisals of other diagnostics will both advance detection of problems and become distributed to hand-held devices cheaply available to even poor clinics.

– Hand-held devices will start to carry detection technologies that can appraise across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, allowing NGOs and even private parties to detect and report environmental problems. Socially, this extension of citizen vision will go beyond the current trend of applying accountability to police and other authorities.  Despotisms will be empowered, as predicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But democracies will also be empowered, as described in The Transparent Society.

– I give odds that tsunamis of revelation will crack the shields protecting many elites from disclosure of past and present torts and turpitudes. The Panama Papers and Epstein cases — and the more recent FinCEN spill — exhibit how much fear propels some oligarchs to combine efforts at repression. But only a few more cracks may cause the dike to collapse, revealing networks of extortion, cheating and blackmail. This is only partly technologically-driven and hence is not guaranteed. 

I assure you, preventing this is the absolute top goal of the combined world oligarchies. If it does happen, there will be dangerous spasms by all sorts of elites, desperate to either retain status or evade consequences. But if the fever runs its course, the more transparent world will be cleaner and better run. And far more just. And vastly better able to handle tomorrow’s challenges.

– Some of those elites have grown aware of the power of 90 years of Hollywood propaganda for individualism, criticism, diversity, suspicion of authority and appreciation of eccentricity. Counter-propaganda pushing older, more traditional approaches to authority and conformity are already emerging and they have the advantage of resonating with ancient human fears.  Much will depend upon this meme-war. Which I appraise entertainingly in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood!

Of course much will also depend upon short term resolution of current crises. If our systems remain undermined and sabotaged by incited civil strife and deliberately-stoked distrust of expertise, then all bets are off.

What about the role of technology and technology companies and individuals?

Many fret about the spread of “surveillance technologies that will empower Big Brother.” These fears are well-grounded, but utterly myopic.

– First, ubiquitous cameras and face-recognition are only the beginning. Nothing will stop them and any such thought  of “protecting” citizens from being seen by elites is stunningly absurd, as the cameras get smaller, better, faster, cheaper, more mobile and vastly more numerous every month. Moore’s Law to the nth. Safeguarding freedom, safety and privacy will require a change in perspective.

– Yes, despotisms will benefit from this trend. And hence the only thing that matters is to prevent despotism altogether.

– In contrast, a free society will be able to apply the very same burgeoning technologies toward accountability. At this very moment, we are seeing these new tools applied to end centuries of abuse by “bad apple” police who are thugs, while empowering truly professional cops to do their jobs better. Do not be fooled by the failure of juries to convict badd apple officers in trials. That’s an injustice, but at least nearly all of those officers are being fired and blacklisted, and that’s happening entirely because cameras now empower victims to be believed.  Moreover, we are fast approaching a point where camera-witnessed crimes will be solved with far lower police staffing. Letting us be more hiring selective. Ignoring the positive aspects of this trend is just as bad as ignoring the very real problems.

 I do not guarantee light will be used this way with broad effectiveness. It is an open question whether we citizens will have the gumption to apply “sousveillance” upward at all elites. Only note a historical fact: both Gandhi and ML King were saved by crude technologies of light in their days. And history shows that assertive vision by and for the citizenry is the only method that has ever increased freedom and – yes – some degree of privacy.

Oh, privacy hand wringers are totally right about the problem and the danger presented by surveillance tech! And they are diametrically wrong in the common prescription. Trying to ban technologies and create shadows for citizens to hide within is spectacularly wrongheaded and disastrous. See The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?  

== And pandemics? So are we done? ==

Of course not. But it’s too soon to make predictions except:

– Some flaws in resilience will be addressed: better disease intel systems. 

Stockpiles repaired and replenished and modernized after Trump eviscerations. 

Quicker “emergency” delpoyments of large scale trials of tests and vaccines. 

Federal ownership of extra vaccine factories, or else payments to mothball and maintain surge production capacity. 

Money for bio research.

Unspoken by pundits. This will lead to annual “flu shots” that are also tuned against at least the coronivirus half of common colds. And possibly a number of nasty buggers may get immunization chokes put around them… maybe Ebola.

And serious efforts to get nations to ban the eating or pet-keeping of wild animals, plus ideally exclusion zones around some bat populations… and better forensic disagnostics of deliberate or inandvertent release modes. Not saying that happened. But better wariness and tracking.

In fact, from a historical perspective, this was a training run for potentially much worse and – despite imbecile obstructions and certainly after they were gone – our resilient capability to deploy science was actually quite formidable and impressive.

Almost as impressive as the prescience of science fiction authors who are now choking down repeated urges to chant “I told you so!”

Science on sacred sites: Can we find middle ground?

On June 21 — solstice day — the Supreme Court of Hawaii heard oral arguments in Honolulu on whether to approve a building permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope, which would be the biggest and most expensive in the Northern Hemisphere. And it is a real fight. Native Hawaiian activists claim that the snow goddess — Poli’ahu — lives on Mauna Kea and should be left in peace, on her sacred mountain.

(The more famous fire goddess — Pele-honua-mea (“Pele of the sacred land”) — lives on the more flamboyant (especially right now), active volcano Kilauea. Although the two goddesses are often conflated as the same, they were said to have been bitter rivals.)

For starters, let’s be clear; yes, indigenous peoples have a perfect right to be pissed off or suspicious over honkies who want to set up camp on sacred spots. I do not dismiss their righteous resentment as wrong! But if this truly is a theological issue, then should it not be argued theologically?

Humans have always sought clues to the will of the gods, and since they tend not to speak audibly and objectively, one approach has been to search for “signs” or things that are significantly and unambiguously out of the norm.

In this case, one trait of Poli’ahu’s mountain stands out as special, spectacular… even miraculous. It is the trait that brings the world to the Big Island, hoping to build temples of science. That trait is the mountain’s special — even unmatched — view of the heavens.

What other trait is so unique that many of the planet’s greatest minds pay homage? Mauna Kea is already home to thirteen of the world’s largest, most powerful telescopes, operated by astronomers from more than a dozen countries.

Sure, I’m just a haole sci-fi writer… though I featured characters from an independent and powerful Hawaii in the year 2060, in Heart of the Comet. Elsewhere I argue that all of humanity may speak Hawaiian, in a hundred years! So, it’s with deep respect that I point to the one miracle of Poli’ahu that’s inarguable and universally acknowledged by all. Perhaps she may be saying:

“Here is my mountain. I have made it special, so that you may host the world to gaze in wonder through my window to the universe.”

Wasn’t part of your proudest heritage as stargazers? The greatest navigators and voyagers the world ever saw? Among your heirs may be captains who lead our expeditions across the Great Galactic Night. It’s only a suggestion…

…but might you reclaim (along with others) your rightful title as the People of the Sky?

Correlation, causation – and reason for precaution

“Correlation is not the same as causation.” This is a core catechism that is drilled into most of us scientists, along with “I might be wrong,” and “build your competitive science reputation by demolishing the half-baked work of others.”

Alas, “Correlation is not the same as causation” has become an incantation parroted by Fox-Watchers, as part of the Murdochian campaign to undermine science and claim that nothing can ever be proved. In fact, sifting for correlations is how experimental science begins. A strong correlation demands: “hey, check this out!”

But it’s more than that. A strong correlation shifts the Burden of Proof. When we see a strong correlation, and the matter at-hand is something with major health or safety or security implications, then we are behooved to at least begin taking preliminary precautions, in case the correlation proves to be causative. Sometimes the correlation is later demonstrated not to be causal and a little money has been wasted. But this often proves worthwhile, given long lead times in technology.

For example, we were fortunate that work had already begun on alternative refrigerants to CFCs, when their role in ozone damage was finally proved. Indeed, valid concerns over the health and environmental effects of tobacco and leaded gasoline were dismissed for years. Two must reads: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, as well as the story of Clair Patterson and the obstructionism of the oil industry.

Another example: terrorism experts sift for correlations and apply intelligence resources to follow up, while giving potential targets cautious warnings. Many correlations don’t pan out. But a burden falls on those saying “ignore that.”

Parse this carefully. Strong correlation demands both closer examination and preliminary precautions.

But the underlying narrative of the crazy, anti-science right is: “Correlation is not the same as causation… and any ‘scientist’ who talks about a correlation can thus be dismissed as a fool. And since that is most of science, this incantation lets me toss out the whole ‘science’ thing. Yippee!”

Those who spout this incantation aren’t all fools, but you can tell by watching to see if they follow “Correlation is not the same as causation” with… curiosity! And acceptance of both precaution and burden of proof. Those who do that are “Skeptics” and welcome to the grand, competitive tussle known as science.

Those who use “Correlation is not the same as causation” as a magic incantation to dismiss all fact-using professions are fools holding a lit match in one hand and an open gas can in the other, screaming “one has nothing to do with the other!”

See my earlier list of examples  – including well-justified concerns over tobacco, smog and leaded gasoline – where this and other incantations delayed the proper application of science to public policy, leading to hundreds of thousands… maybe millions… of deaths worldwide.

Another central mythos: We all know that:  “Just because someone is smart and knows a lot, that doesn’t automatically make them wise.”

It’s true. But in the same way that Suspicion of Authority is wholesome, till it metastasizes, this true statement has been twisted into something cancerous:  “Any and all people who are smart and know a lot, are therefore automatically unwise.”

The first statement is true and we all know it. The second is so insanely wrong that anyone believing it is hence a stark, jibbering loony. And yet, the latter is now a core catechism of the confederacy, because they have been allowed to leave it implicit.

Of course, blatantly, the average person who has studied earnestly and tried to understand is wiser than those who deliberately chose to remain incurious and ignorant. When cornered, even the most vehement alt-righter admits that. But cornering them takes effort and – above all – careful parsing of the meme. It is a logical corner they’ve painted themselves into! But their memes are slippery.

Suspicion and distrust – of universities and smart people, as well as of people with knowledge and skill — now extends from the war on science to journalism, teaching, medicine, economics, civil servants… and lately the “deep state” conspiring villains of the FBI, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military officer corps. This is bedlam. It is insanity that serves one purpose, to discredit any “elites” who might stand in the way of a return to feudalism by the super rich, which was the pattern of 6000 years that America rebelled against.

We need to be more proactive and tactically effective in fighting back against these agents of darkness and promoters of feudalism. There are clever shills who get rich providing incantations against science and other fact-professions.  We must show every uncle and aunt who parrots this nonsense how they have been hoodwinked. That is where phase 8 of the American Civil War will be won, in the trenches, getting one friend at a time to snap out of the hypnotics spells…

… by using evidence and logic and compassion to draw our neigjhbors back to a nation of progress and science and pragmatic accountability and hope for an ever-better future.

The battle must begin at state level

There are vital issues that get shunted aside in the ongoing public obsession over Trump’s latest tweetstorm. In The Case for Paying Less Attention to Donald Trump, Ed Burmila, in Rolling Stone, makes a cogent point that we should pay less attention to our current president — and more to what the confederacy is doing to our fellow citizens, down at the state level, where the GOP’s lock on more than thirty out of fifty statehouses and 65 out of 98 state legislature chambers, has set them to work doing no less than re-establishing feudalism.

“Donald Trump’s presidency has been a disaster, but he has succeeded beyond his wildest expectations in one key way: getting attention – attention that fills the void where the rest of us have a soul…. (But fighting back) begins with winning back the state legislatures that draw electoral maps and make the rules that shape elections,” writes Ed Burmila.

In other words, this is no time for timid appetites. The goal should not be to shift twenty-five swing Congressional seats, but 125! And that will be a hollow victory without a thousand State Assembly wins.

These state races are the most important battlegrounds for now.

This coalesces three themes that I’ve pushed for some time.

1: Don’t seek to impeach Trump! Not yet. Our civil servants are now fully alerted to the insanity and they should be able to protect us, for the time being. For now, Trump is the Republicans’ nightmare. Impeach, and the confederates will just rally behind a President Pence and march with savage discipline. See this explored in more detail in my essay, The Move to Impeach Trump is a Trap.

2: Gerrymandering (one of the most horrific betrayals of citizen sovereignty) and other electoral cheats — such as voter suppression — are central. These plagues upon our electoral system have metastacized till even Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts cannot ignore them, anymore. (Or else they are simply not Americans.) But we need clever and strong backup plans, explored further in Gerrymandering & American Democracy.

3: Retaking many of those states will not be done by running Santa Monica liberals in deep red districts. Go ahead and run liberals and Bernites etc in swing constituencies. But in districts that are deeply conservative by personality, we need candidates who are pro-science, pro-rights, honest, logically fact-loving and un-bigoted… but who can also relate to locals… by personality.

Elsewhere, in a 3-part series, I talk about the richest possible source of such candidates, military colonels and captains. Men and women of rectitude who can compel even the reddest voter to actually listen to a democrat, possibly for the first time in his or her life.

See also 314 Action, which seeks to advocate for a pro-science and fact-based agenda in public policy — and also to encourage scientifically and technically trained men and women to run for office.

Back to the article by Burmila… the point relates to how YOU should allocate your political time and energy. Yes, national issues matter! Give money to the fight against gerrymandering, and Schwarzenegger will match your contribution in this  campaign on Crowdpac: This is our chance to make gerrymandering unconstitutional. 

Furthermore, Burmila adds:

“The payoff of being politically active simply is greater in down-ballot races. House and Senate races are of course important, but the marginal benefit of adding one more volunteer to those campaigns is small compared to what an activist can contribute to a local race. Throwing your donation and evening volunteering hours into the miasma of money and noise that is a modern congressional race is like spitting into the ocean. In a local race, the time and money you can donate will be much more impactful. Knocking on doors and speaking to a few hundred voters on behalf of an unknown candidate in a state assembly primary could make a real difference.”

This is where you can make a difference — at your local and state level.

Give the rest of it a read. Then give some thought about that retired officer you know, who happens to live in a red district. It’s arm twisting time.