The Hope Police in Fact and Fiction

Peter Watts:

I recently read Terri Favro’s upcoming book on the history and future of robotics, sent to me by a publisher hungry for blurbs. It’s a fun read— I had no trouble obliging them— but I couldn’t avoid an almost oppressive sense of— well, of optimism hanging over the whole thing. Favro states outright, for example, that she’s decided to love the Internet of Things; those who eye it with suspicion she compares to old fogies who stick with their clunky coal-burning furnace and knob-and-tube wiring as the rest of the world moves into a bright sunny future. She praises algorithms that analyze your behavior and autonomously order retail goods on your behalf, just in case you’re not consuming enough on your own: “We’ll be giving up our privacy, but gaining the surprise and delight that comes with something new always waiting for us at the door” she gushes (sliding past the surprise and delight we’ll feel when our Visa bill loads up with purchases we never made). “How many of us can resist the lure of the new?” Favro does pay lip service to the potential hackability of this Internet of Things— concedes that her networked fridge might be compromised, for example— but goes on to say “…to do what, exactly? Replace my lactose-free low-fat milk with table cream? Sabotage my diet by substituting chocolate for rapini?”

Maybe, yeah. Or maybe your insurance company might come snooping around in the hopes your eating habits might give them an excuse to reject that claim for medical treatments you might have avoided if you’d “lived more responsibly”. Maybe some botnet will talk your fridge and a million others into cranking up their internal temperatures to 20ºC during the day, then bringing them all back down to a nice innocuous 5º just before you get home from work. (Salmonella in just a few percent of those affected could overwhelm hospitals and take out our medical response capacity overnight.) And while Favro at least admits to the danger of Evil Russian Hackers, she never once mentions that our own governments will in all likelihood be rooting around in our fridges and TVs and smart bulbs, cruising the Internet Of Things while whistling that perennial favorite If You Got Nothin’ to Hide You Got Nothin’ to Fear…

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=7809

Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own | Alicia Patterson Foundation

Some fascinating work on AI from the early 80s, combining rule systems with genetic algorithms:

In 1981, Eurisko, a computer program that arguably displays the rudiments of such skills, easily won the Traveller tournament, becoming the top-ranked player in the United States and an honorary Admiral in the Traveller navy. Eurisko had designed its fleet according to principles it discovered itself -with some help from its inventor, Douglas B. Lenat, an assistant professor in Stanford University’s artificial-intelligence program.

“I never did actually play Traveller by hand,” Lenat said, three years later. “I don’t think I even watched anybody play it. I simply talked to people about it and then had the program go off and design a fleet…When I went into the tournament that was the first time that I had ever played the game.”

Eurisko’s fleet was so obviously superior to those of its human opponents that most of them surrendered after the first few minutes of battle; one resigned without firing a shot.

Eurisko makes its discoveries by starting with a set of elementary concepts, given to it by a human programmer. Then, through a process not unlike genetic evolution, it modifies and combines them into more complex ideas. As structures develop, the most useful and interesting ones-judged according to standards encoded in the program-survive.

At the time of the Traveller tournament, Lenat had already used a forerunner of Eurisko to grow mathematical concepts, getting the program to rediscover arithmetic and some theorems in elementary number theory. Now the structures Lenat wanted to see evolve were Traveller fleets. He provided the program with descriptions of 146 Traveller concepts, some of them as basic as Acceleration, Agility, Weapon, Damage, and even Game Playing and Game. Others were more specific: Beam Laser, Meson Gun, Meson Screen, and Computer Radiation Damage.

https://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own

Worrying destabilization of Antarctic glacier

“The size of the cavity is surprising, and as it melts, it’s causing the glacier to retreat,” said Pietro Milillo, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the paper’s lead author. He said the ice shelf encompassing the Florida-sized glacier is retreating at a rate in excess of 650 feet per year, and that most of the melting that led to the void occurred during the past three years.

Previous research showed that meltwater from Thwaites accounts for about 4 percent of the global sea level rise, said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved with the new study.

If the loss of ice becomes so severe that the glacier collapses — something computer models predict could happen in 50 to 100 years — sea levels would rise by two feet. That’s enough to inundate coastal cities across the globe.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/hole-opens-under-antarctic-glacier-big-enough-fit-two-thirds-ncna965696

The Expert Efficiency of Elizabeth Warren’s Populist Campaign | The New Yorker

I’m rather leaning toward Warren in the primaries. ‘Part of what has distinguished Warren’s story is that it has a different frame of reference, in which politics is not an argument over the cultural aftermath of the sixties but over the influence won by wealth in the eighties, which from certain vantage points can seem the only American story worth telling.’

The word “corruption” rarely appears in Warren’s academic work, but the seed of the idea is present there. The work that made Warren famous began at the outset of the Reagan era, when she and two colleagues at the University of Texas—the demographer Theresa Sullivan, who would become the president of the University of Virginia, and the Texas law professor Jay Westbrook—decided to study why more Americans seemed to be going bankrupt. The use of credit cards had exploded, and mortgages had grown more complex, and the line from politicians and the financial industry was that Americans had become imprudent, taking on more debt to buy more things than they could really afford. Warren, Sullivan, and Westbrook spent years travelling to bankruptcy courts across the country to retrieve case records. They found, Westbrook told me, “files filled with these agonizing letters. ‘This is so embarrassing.’ ‘I’m so upset.’ ‘I hate myself.’ ” The vast majority of the “bankrupts” turned out to be middle-class people who were victims of health-care calamities or job loss.

I asked Westbrook whether, as young law professors, they had understood the credit industry to be corrupt. He said it took them a while to come to this conclusion. In 1995, when Congress was considering a revision to the bankruptcy code, Warren, then at the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed to assemble an expert analysis on bankruptcy. But the process was usurped by the credit-card industry, which drafted a bill that eventually became the core of a law, signed by President Bush, in 2005. Among other provisions, it held that debtors are required to continue to pay the courts even if they have no assets to liquidate. “The tide of blame-the-unlucky combined with relentless lobbying and campaign contributions finally overwhelmed Congress,” Warren wrote of this experience. She had become a Democrat by then, and a credit-debt expert, both in Washington and on “Dr. Phil,” where she talked about the “tricks and traps” by which the credit industry manipulates its customers. When the housing bubble burst, in 2008, it had some of the same dynamics that she, Westbrook, and Sullivan had pinpointed almost thirty years before.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/what-kind-of-populist-is-elizabeth-warren

What Modern Monetary Theory Is and Why Leftists Love It

Modern monetary theory has been coming up a lot here in the early stages of the Democratic primaries. It’s not at all clear to me that it’s a safe or sane approach, but there are certainly economists who believe it is. Here are a few articles on the subject:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a34n54/modern-monetary-theory-explained

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/deficits-and-the-printing-press-somewhat-wonkish/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/modern-monetary-theory-is-an-unconventional-take-on-economic-strategy/2012/02/15/gIQAR8uPMR_story.html

The People’s Republic of Walmart

This book hasn’t quite come out yet, but it sounds extremely interesting. You can hear Cory Doctorow give his take on it here (2:45 – 2:48).

Since the demise of the USSR, the mantle of the largest planned economies in the world has been taken up by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and other multinational corporations

For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us?

An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s-republic-of-walmart