The first essay title captures the error: "AI Mistakes Are Very Different from Human Mistakes" (color emphasis theirs). The only possible "AI Mistake" is made by humans in supposing the output from a LLM engine has any meaning at all. The original words in the training material had meaning because they were written by humans who see words as representing ideas, but that connection was lost in -- nay, rather it never made it into -- the training. All the LLM engine ever saw was sequences of words (jumbles of letters), there never was any meaning associated with those words or sequences of letters, so the LLM engine never ever had any idea of what an idea or fact is, and no place in its program to put any such thing as an idea. Its output never had any connection to real-world objects and facts, so there is no possibility of error.
This difference is ontological, rooted in the very nature of the two different entities in view: Humans are first sensory engines, taking in touch and vision and smell and sound, and only secondarily a brain behind that attaching particular sounds and images with a concept of ideas associated with real-world objects and facts. None of that ever existed in the LLM engine, all it ever sees is sequences of letters, which it learns how to reproduce in acceptable sequences, and not in unacceptable sequences. There are no facts in its univeerse, it has no place to model facts, and no sensation of different sights and sounds and smells and feelings to put together a model of the universe as objects that exist and do things independent of itself. It doesn't even have a "self" to be independent from. It is nothing more than a processor of meaningless sequences of letters.
When we speak of "mistakes" we are referring to a discrepancy between the representation of facts and the facts themselves. A human communication has meaning because the words have meanings, they represent real-world objects and actions or attributes of those objects, or else imagined objects or actions that differ only slightly from their real-world counterparts, like a horse with wings like a bird, or with a single horn like a rhinoceros (but on the top of its head like a goat), or a combination of the head and shoulders of a man plus the body and legs of a horse, stuff like that which is imaginable because it is so like the real objects in the real world. The LLM engine cannot make mistakes like that because it has no internal representation of the real world at all. The only mistakes are humans seeing the similarity between what the LLM engine outputs and what we ourselves (and mostly other humans) would output as text or speech when describing the real world, and supposing the computer had a similar origin rooted in the real world.
Human beings are hard-wired (created) to want to attach meaning to random sensory perceptions, and to random splatters of ink on paper or pixels on a screen. It is a natural inclination, used when we teach a child the shape of the letters of the alphabet, and to "sound out" each letter to form words, and we show them pictures of real-world objects that those words represent, and we expose them to the real world objects represented by those pictures and words. The children learn to think in words, but never apart from the real-world objects denoted by those words.
At one time I was the USA delegate to an international committee, and the British delegate (our host) told a story over dinner about four guys from four different countries sitting around a dinner table as we were:
The Britt held up a fork and said "Take this fork. You Germans call it a 'gabel' and you Spanish call it 'tenedor' and you French call it 'forchette,' but we English call it a 'fork' because that is what it is!"We all were fluent in several languages, so the guy's parochial attitude was very funny, but it illustrates the ontological connection we make between words and the real-world objects they refer to. There is no such connection in the LLM engine, so what it says cannot have any meaning at all -- except in the mind of the reader. When the LLM engine "hallucinates" (emits a sentence that does not correspond to real-world facts), that this not a "mistake" nor an error nor a "hallucination" as we understand those words, but merely the computer doing what it was programmed to do, emit a sequence of letters and words that fits the probabilistic data it was trained on. The mistake is the human reading those words and supposing they mean what we humans understand those words to mean, when they actually have no meaning at all.
"Intelligence" is making connections between ideas that are not obvious. The LLM engine has no ideas to connect, so there is no intelligence at all in what is called "AI", only a superficial connection in the minds of the readers attaching a meaning to words that was totally absent from the processing done inside the computer. It's what we humans are hard-wired to do, and we do it when we see something resembling text created by an intelligent human, but it's not intelligent behavior behind that text, and we have no right to suppose it could be either "true" (an accurate representation of real-world facts) or a mistake. It's just a random jumble of letters filtered by probabilistic sequence rules, rules determined by examining billions of words scraped off the internet but totally disconnected from any semblance of meaning.
If the output from one of the LLM engines appears to be intelligent, it's only because its training is very good at reproducing sequences of words it has already seen, or (as the developers readily admit) slight variations from the training data. The original words in the training data was written by intelligent humans as a factual (or perhaps, but much less often, lying, but the computer has no way of knowing) representation of the facts of the real world. It's those slight variations -- recall that the LLM engine has no concept of fact nor objects in any such thing as "the real world" so it cannot lie or make a mistake or "hallucinate," it only reproduces slight variations on the training data, without any knowledge or understanding of any facts of the real world that these words may or may not correspond to -- those variations are seen by human readers as "hallucinations" or "mistakes" but they are not mistakes at all, just the computer doing what it was programmed to do. The original training data was written by humans to represent the facts of the real world (or not), but none of those facts made it into the training, only the sequences of letters making up (to the computer) meaningless words. Variations on meaningless words are no less (nor more) meaningless that the unvaried text.
So the LLM engine never makes any mistakes at all. The only mistakes are the otherwise intelligent people reading that output and pretending it is a representation of the real world which can be true or false. And that output is (intentionally) so close to what an intelligent person would -- and actually did, in most cases -- post on the internet, that it seems like the computer is intelligently describing the real world, when in fact it has no such idea in mind, and no mind to hold such an idea, only jumbles of letters filtered to resemble the intelligent human-written text in the training data.
The first of the three essays, the authors believe the developers' hype instead of doing their own analysis. Because it looks like human-written intelligent text, it must be so, nevermind that all the generated text so far resembles text that could exist among the billions of words scraped off the internet to become the LLM engine training data. It doesn't take much cleverness to devise a test that does not exist in that training data (see for example, my essay "A Turing Test to Defeat ChatGPT").
The second essay builds of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which presupposes that the robots are capable of inferential thinking. If the only text the LLM engine ever generates is (slight variants of) the training data, the presupposition is false, and the best anyone can hope for is governmental regulation and a "Fourth Law" which itself presupposes that the AI engine does in fact have an internal model of the Real World, so that it makes sense of speak of "deception" as a functiion of the AI's inner working, and not merely PR from the developers.
The third essay is the least coherent, imagining that the word "intelligence" in both SETI (Search for Extra-Terestrial Intelligence) and AGI (man-made Artificial General Intelligence) gives them a common ground. It is nonsense, as the authors sort of admit. Fortunately, the developers of the LLM engine form of "AI" are going in the wrong direction, so AGI is not likely to happen in the next two or three decades, if ever. Perhaps it may become a problem for our grandchildren, who almost surely will not be reading any pontifications as old as today's essays.
They start with "Happy Q-Day," the presumed end of the world as we know it when quantum computers unlock all the passwords protecting all the supposed secret stuff on the internet. It reads rather like "Y2K" alarmism. Early in 1999 I asked the local power company about the effect of Y2K on the power grid. This was before their lawyers told them to not answer, so the guy explained to me that the grid is controlled by "phase angle," not by computers. An old-style hydro or diesel generator when lightly loaded will run faster so the sine-wave power curve will lead the grid, which draws more power out of the generator, which slows it back down, thus maintaining equilibrium, no computers involved. 25 years later DC transmission lines and the requirement to buy back excess solar panel power from customers makes it a different story. Everybody else I asked back then, they said "We're OK, but I don't know about our suppliers." I knew then (about the end of summer) that Y2K would be a non-problem. And that's what happened. The only problem I ever heard about was one New England state, which issued a bunch of antique license plates to the first cars registered in the new year.
IF they ever make a quantum computer with enough Q-bits to actually solve password factoring, and IF the cost and size ever gets down below a room full of freezing equipment and millions of dollars -- probably not in this decade or next -- then we will still have had plenty of time to replace all the RSA passwords with quantum-safe passwords. So maybe BitCoin cannot be updated directly, but there is plenty of time to replace it and for everybody to transfer their digital funds to the updated scheme. If the whole digital currency scam doesn't implode for other reasons before then.
Skipping over a nonsensical daydream about the "weight of the internet" supposedly based on Eistein's mass/energy equation, there is a puff piece on how "RISC changes everything." Back when the first RISC (for Reduced Instruction Set Computer) chips came out, I discovered what I called "the RISC penalty" -- that large (especially C++) programs actually ran slower on RISC machines. Moore's Law eventually solved that problem. Mostly. If you get the transistors small enough, you can put enough of them close together to make the RISC computer run faster than the old CISC (Complex Instruction Set ) architectures. Nobody mentions that the first computer chips were all RISC because there wasn't enough space on the early chips to put in complex instructions.
Another mindless (female-written) piece praising an early computer language called "Forth" which she imagines will come in and compensate for the destruction of large computers and the internet by some supposed apocalypse. The problem is that Forth is a very low-level language, and you cannot write very large programs in low-level languages in reasonable time. All the small programs have already been written, the only programs left to write are very large and only run on very large computers (like the smart phone in your pocket), so they must be written in very high level languages like HTML. The high-density chips needed to run these very large programs are fabricated in very expensive factories, which might truly go down in World War III, but the older (larger) transistors are made in a lot of factories left behind (they are still used to make automotive and Internet-of-Things chips), so nothing so small that Forth is the only viable language is likely to be made, any more than it is today. Forth is like organic farms: labor intensive and suitable for high-cost, low adoption products, affordable only by users with more dollars than sense.
Another female-written piece describes the efforts to digitize the molecular interactions in a tiny nematode worm with fewer than a thousand cells and a 302-neuron nervous system. They are about at the stage where cellular biology was when Darwin proposed his Origin of the Species, you know, cells are blobs of protoplasm. 160 years later we know a lot more, but there is probably orders of magnitude more that we don't know than we do. The author quotes several scientists who are cautious about saying anything more ambitious than that.
Steven Levy is one of the better tech writers in the world, but he's getting old, so he's reduced to writing for WIRED. He still knows how to ask the hard questions (most WIRED authors do not), but his analysis is getting less insightful the deeper he delves into so-called AI. This month's article profiles a company that imagines themselves to build an "ethical AI" while still using the same Large Language Model as ChatGPT and the other AI efforts. They call it Claude. In the next-last page Levy gets around to questioning the premise:
I asked Claude what distinguishes it from its peers. Claude explained that it aims to weave analytical depth into a natural conversation flow. "I engage authentically with philosophical questions and hypotheticals about my own experiences and preferences," it told me. (My own experiences and preferences??? Dude, you are code inside a computer.)Later he hints at the possibility that the people designing Claude might be deceiving themselves:
This is the ultimate doomer nightmare -- machines that pretend they are of loving grace while harboring toxic behaviors that don't get discovered until it's too late.At the bottom line, Steven Levy is still a True Believer. He does not have enough theoretical background to understand why the AI premise cannot succeed, so he ends up acknowledging that AGI [artificial general intelligence] "if it does come..." The company founder and CEO is rather more optimistic:
...declaring that in two or so years Claude and its peers will surpass people in every cognitive task.I'm not worried. They still train these engines on text produced by people, vast amounts of it, so that no one person or group can recognize that its output is nothing more than a copy of something it found on the internet, no actual creativity required. That's a cognitive thing that people can do well, but computers can do it better -- as we can easily see. But it's not very intelligent, it's just word-order probability, without even understanding what the words really mean. Computers can be taught to think (they were doing that when I was in grad school four decades ago), but it requires smarter people to do that. Modern programmers are too lazy for that.
One of the articles told us about an internet-based publishing system,
replacing peer review with religiously prejudiced moderators -- yes, they
actually banned Robert Gentry for pointing out that some science is better
explained by a Creator. Science is not done by killing the messenger, it
is done by disproving (using scientific methods) his message. I read somewhere
(probably not in this article) that some Koreans tried to claim that they
had invented room-temperature superconductivity, but nobody else could
reproduce the results. That's science (not religion) at work. You shouldn't
believe anything posted on arXiv.org, it doesn't stand the test.
That's WIRED for you.
Not writing from the American culture (think: 500 years of being taught
ethics based on moral absolutes), this author is free to see villainous
behavior everywhere, fueled by "millions of dollars" in sponsorship deals
as well as theft and foul play -- the Tour de France bike race is widely
watched everywhere except the USA, and the book is full of technical details
related to that sport and that particular annual race -- so (inner turmoil
excepted) it's a pretty good read.
99% of the library books in the "Mystery" section are murder mysteries, so that the murder is implicit in the word "mystery" as applied to modern fiction. I'm pretty sure that is due to the post-Christian nature of modern society, which knows of no afterlife, no joys of Heaven to be attained at one's death, with the result that the ultimate crime is murder, and the ultimate ("cruel and unusual") punishment is execution. That's why the jury duty I was excused from earlier this week was distinguished from normal jury duties as "special" because it's a murder trial.
Two of the books in my current load from the library are not about murder. Both are billed as "humor" but there are no dead people to be avenged, no killer to be discovered, just odd circumstances. One of them actually better qualifies as "Sci-Fi" (a violation of the laws of physics) rather than a mystery at all. The lead character became invisible (physically impossible, but a popular fiction theme), and the only unresolved question answered in the last chapter was how he would escape the villainous people who want to use his invisibility to commit crime.
Crime was the theme of the book: the lead character is introduced in the first line as a liar and a thief. Being invisible makes his crime rather simpler in many ways, but it has unforseen consequences, which the author does a good job of exploring. He also makes some interesting social commentary early in the book, much in the spirit of my review of Bollywood cinema (see my "Liars Lie" blog post nine years ago), frex...
It isn't true that all small business has been driven out of New York City by high rents and high taxes and high crime rates and a workforce whose only skill is pilferage. All small business has been driven out of Manhattan by the above, but many thousands of these little companies still exist in Queens and Brooklyn, where they can draw from the labor pool on Long Island, people at the competency level of the smiling Burger King kid who gets your order right the second time.A few short chapters later, he introduces the villain of the story, a dirty cop, in the same spirit:
A restaurant can be a very satisfying business... It gave you, as well, a loyal -- or at least fearful -- kitchen staff of illegals, always available for some extra little chore like repainting the apartment or standing in line at the Motor Vehicle or breaking some [sexual assaulting] wisenheimer's leg. It also made a nice supplement to your NYPD sergeant's salary (acting lieutenant, Organized Crime Detail) in your piece of the legit profit, of course, but more importantly in the skim. And it helped make your personal and financial affairs so complex and fuzzy that the shooflys could never quite get enough of a handle on you to drag you before the corruption board.The abject morality of the story's characters is neatly summarized in the last paragraph of the previous chapter, where another of the villains, a lawyer for the tobacco industry, does his own little bit of inner turmoil:
"Of course," Mordon said, and thought, I'm lying. He knows I'm lying. I know he knows I'm lying. But does he know I know he knows I'm lying? And does it make any difference?This is not the ethics that made this country rich and powerful. In 1995 (the copyright date) his New York is a whole generation ahead the rest of this country in dragging the American morals down to where we must necessarily be, so that there is no mention of the USA in Armageddon (that is, the USA is no longer a superpower). It can happen in our lifetime.
The background ethics in this story is a necessary part of the pervasive
crime in the story, and (hopefully, but probably not) a wake-up call to
the rest of us to repent. Other than that, the story is very readable and
plausible (physics notwithstanding). Smoke by Donald Westlake, I
put him on the list to bring more of his novels home, although that alone
is reason enough for there to be no more on the library shelf. The library
staff here, like everything New York in this novel, is post-Christian.
The formula that the Apostle Paul gives for salvation is rather simpler than all that:
If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. -- Rom.10:9I would say this is not an accurate (modern English) translation of the Greek, because we have all drunk the American Kool-Aid: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (read: "people") are created (nonsensically read: "evolved") equal..." Two hundred years ago the Brits understood the word "Lord" to mean "Boss" as in "He gets to tell us what to do and we must do it." Now the word is a meaningless title (like "Hizzonor"), and in its place the operative word is "freedom" as in "Everybody gets to do anything they want to, and if somebody else gets hurt, that's their problem, not mine." So Paul's confession comes out to be nothing more than a magic word phrase you speak once and all your sins (where people get hurt), past, present and future, are forgiven with no change in behavior.
A decade ago CT reported on some research in sub-Saharan African nations, some of which experienced Catholic missionaries during their colonial period, and others had Protestant (see my comments in "God Is Good for You"). The Protestant legacy there -- like that in the USA -- left countries far more educated and wealthier than the Catholics did. There's a reason for that. The Catholics preached a gospel of indulgences (pay your tithes, say your "Hail Mary"s and you go to Heaven. The Protestants also preached a gospel of indulgences (except they were free, no action nor behavior change needed) with a single difference: many of the Protestants taught that people should read the Bible and obey it, and the Bible (but not the sermons from the pulpit) includes a bunch of Do's and Don'ts that people are expected to obey, and people did that. God's indwelling Spirit enables the behavior change, and God still forgives all the past and the occasional present failures, but the future is perfect.
The behavior change is essential. Without it, if everybody went to Heaven
still sinning, then other people would continue to suffer harm and loss,
and Heaven wouldn't be Heaven for the rest of us. There is no heart
transplant at the Pearly Gates in the Bible, the only heart transplant
happens when you accept Jesus as Boss, with the right to tell you what
to do. Little mistakes, you get your feet washed. But if you are not moving
in the direction of total obedience, if you have not already arrived there
by the end of your life, God cannot allow you into his Heaven. That message
is in the Bible, to be read and obeyed by all who believe, but it does
not get preached, neither from Catholic nor from Protestant pulpits.
I showed up earlier this week, and it turned out only to be a registration process, a couple of questionaires, the big one with a dozen or more pages was apparently designed to weed out potential jurors whose decision could be predicted before the trial -- obviously the DA wants to eliminate jurors who would vote to acquit, and the defense attorney wants to eliminate the other side. I'm probably disqualified on any one of a half-dozen questions, for example something like (I don't remember the exact words) "Do you have negative feelings for police? If so, explain." The only time I was ever assaulted as an adult was here in Grants Pass, and the investigating cop wrote me up as the perp. I think the DA at that time decided he'd never get a conviction, but he dawdled over it for several weeks, during which time I was unable to know what was happening. Now I have a police record for an "arrest" with no way to clear my name. Every time I think about the incident, I resolve to never again cooperate with (speak to) the police for any reason, on Fifth Amendment grounds. My answer to their question was shorter (leaving out the non-cooperate part) to fit in the space. Although I did say "different circumstances" in relation to this trial, I expect them to disqualify me. No big deal, since Covid I have been wearing a mask in all enclosed public places -- and I don't even get a cold any more, except the one time I took it off to eat in a restaurant -- and the jury sits in two rows of crowded chairs during the trial (no "social distance"), so jury duty would have an undesirable health effect on me.
Another question had a much more profound implication. They wanted to know if I had ever taken training in any of a half dozen or so categories, none of which I remember except the middle one: "Religion." Maybe they think that religious nuts would be more hostile to lawbreakers (or perhaps to "oppressive" police work), although I answered numerous questions more specific to such hostility as "No." But the more I think about it, the more it annoys me than anybody who ever went to Sunday School would be automatically disqualified. That means that any such person -- including myself -- if we were ever on trial for any reason at all, would be denied a fair trial by a "jury of [our] peers" including people of faith who believe that "All law is God's Law." Of course God is bigger than any human jury, and "The heart of the King is in the hand of the LORD, Who turns it any way He wants to." But religious discrimination like that should be unlawful -- as indeed it is!
Oh well, the last six months I have been continually reminded that Ore-gone is "a fly-over state" where quality products and services are not available, now also including Justice. Many decades ago I decided that "America has the finest justice that money can buy: I didn'tpay for any, so I didn't get any." Now even more so in Ore-gone.
Postscript, It's now after hours at the end of the second week, and nobody called. Nobody dismissed me from jury duty. They still have Monday morning during voir dire (its Latin meaning is different from the French I learned in school), when either lawyer can toss me out for any reason or no reason. I guess the questionaire is only to inform their questions at that time. Hey, jurors can bring any verdict they choose for any or no reason (it's called "nullification" because they can effectively nullify the law or the evidence or even the judge's instructions) but at least there are 12 and they have to agree, and (usually) the truth is easier for all 12 to agree on than "no reason". Anyway, if the jury can do it, and the judge can do it, why not the lawyers. The lawyers are not even required to tell the truth in their in-trial questions -- an example a question that is a lie: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" I don't know about lawyers in a real court, but on TV they lie all the time.
Statistically I have a 7% chance of getting chosen (14 jurors out of 200 candidates), perhaps only 1% after all the disqualifying questiions are considered. Einstein famously once said "God doesn't roll dice" -- which is true: "The heart of the king is in the hand of the LORD..." Maybe God has something He wants me to say to another juror (which is the only time a juror is allowed to talk). Or maybe this exercise had no purpose other than allowing me to think about the process and post it here. Yeah, that must be it.
Second postscript, Monday morning. I don't remember much of what was on those questionaires -- and they did not give me a copy; I thought to ask, but their apparent non-communicative policy suggested that asking would be futile -- perhaps they asked my preferred communication medium, and if they did, I most certainly said snail mail. I go to the Post Office once a week (unless I'm expecting something of high priority, like today) so... Nothing today from the County.
It occurs to me that the defendant in this case is entitled to a jury of his "peers" and (by reason of my religious education) I am definitely not one of his peers, so I suppose that the defense attorney should have the right to exclude me, but if this is a boilerplate (standard form) question, that gives the DA the opportunity to exclude my peers when I am the defendant. It's ugly, any way you look at it, about what one might expect in a Blue state (dominated by the political party most hostile to my Christian faith, it gets colored blue on the network election night results map).
I went. Less than a half-dozen people were notified not to come. After a delay of nearly three hours, we finally filed into the courtroom. I asked about social distance, and the bailiff asked the judge and he said no. Everybody was very careful to be polite and inoffensive, but the judge was not in a mood to excuse anybody who did not claim whatever hardship would actually affect his or her impartiality. One guy owns a small carpentry (cabinets) shop, and his guys would not be able to proceed without him there to give them their work and direction, and he needed to be there to get new business, and if there's nothing for them to do and he couldn't pay them, he'd have a hard time replacing them after the trial, but he was not excused. I've been there, but California only chooses jurors from voter rolls, and I only registered to vote on the last day when there was somebody to vote for, then de-registered immediately after voting, so I never got called up.
The defense attorney got the first shot at "challenging" jurors, and after addressing maybe a half-dozen potentials that she had marked her copy of their questionaires -- I think one woman was excused by reason of being sick and tending to a sick sister -- the attorney gave a general call for hardship cases, and I raised my hand, and asked about social distance again. She wanted to make it all about whether the stress would impair my ability to reason objectively, and I tried to say that my objectivity was not at stake, my health is, and even that is only statistical. I wear a mask and if nobody coughs or sneezes on me, no problem. Maybe I get sick (and die) before the trial is over, maybe not. I mentioned (I forget why, perhaps a God thing) that if I'd known about the lack of social distance when they offered the age exemption, I would have taken it. She: "Are you over 70?" Me: "Yes." Judge: "Excused for cause." In other words, not for financial or health hardship, but because the law specifies an age exemption. Whatever.
My opinion of the quality of justice in Oregon is not improved over
six
paragraphs (ten days) ago.
Rex Stout is written in the first person, but it seems to be more in the style of Watson's Sherlock (very little inner turmoil), perhaps also because most of it is a hundred years old, before there was such a thing as "Chick Lit". Unfortunately, the last of the three (by copyright date) was well into the modern era, with increased inner turmoil, especially involving politics (Watergate). I read fiction as a low cognitive burden, when I'm too tired to work but not yet sleepy enough to turn off the light, religion and politics don't qualify; I almost didn't finish it. If there were any more (later) Rex Stout novels on the shelf, they'd stay there. In another week or two I'll be done with this library's fiction. The holdings have deteriorated substantially since I first started here eight years ago, perhaps because they are now supported by tax revenues. It's a "Blue State" (left-wing politics, which favors female interests) and a "fly-over" state, in which quality products and services are much less available.
sigh
Well, I also seem to be deteriorating, now within two or three years
(by age) of when both my parents started losing their marbles. God can
do anything he wants to, so maybe He'll take me quick (like my sister),
or maybe I'll stay compos mentis longer (one guy in Sunday School
is still sharp at ninety-something), God only knows.
First you need to understand that every living person consumes a certain amount of natural and/or artificial resources just staying alive. Some of those resources grow on trees, but they are not trees in every person's back yard. Most of it involves substantial labor and processing and transportation to get it from its natural state to the form and place we need it to be so we can eat it. In the distant historical past, everybody grew or gathered or killed their own food, and most of their waking hours were consumed doing that. Then factory farms were invented, so that only a few people could grow -- and eventually process -- and transport a lot of food to people who were thus freed up to do other things. The growers and processors and truckers need to be paid, so money was invented to pay them. Money does not grow on trees, so everybody needs to do something useful that somebody else is willing pay for, thereby to earn enough money to buy the resources we all consume in living. When the growers and processors and truckers get efficient enough, they have money left over to spend on other things.
Where does everybody else's money come from? Somebody must create wealth. The government can print money, but that destroys wealth. We need people making things out of nothing (or at least taking them out of the ground like farmers and miners do) to create wealth. This is very hard to do well, so very few people are successful at doing it, but they earn a lot of money, which they deserve because they are creating wealth that the rest of us can use up. This is basic Econ 101, how the world works.
Why are there no women creating huge amounts of wealth? Probably because they don't want to. Not many guys want to either. That's why we pay so much to the ones who do want to. They get very rich, and they earned it. Anybody can do it -- if they want to. Most of us add a small value to somebody else's creation, and we get paid accordingly. Some people beg or steal the wealth they need to live on, and in a very rich country like the USA, we can afford that, because we have so many people creating more wealth than they need. You cannot steal wealth that has not been created by somebody else.
So now we have WIRED's "Global Editorial Director"
-- who is a woman, because only women complain about what they don't want
to fix -- saying "women like money, and we're coming to take some of yours."
In other words, she wants to steal it rather than earn it. Thieves never
become very rich, that only comes from creating wealth = goods and services
that other people want to pay for. She is editor of a magazine that is
losing subscribers, because she does not know how to create something the
lots of people want to pay for. WIRED magazine was
sort of like that when (guys) invented it, but they sold it to a publishing
conglomerate that did not understand the industry nor the readers. It stopped
creating wealth, leaving only (female) whiners to complain about it. Magazines
in general are not what people want to pay for, at least not this century.
Basically a couple India immigrants (Indian names, but living in Seattle area) decided to do a "feature film" movie using off-the-shelf "AI" tools. The tools are programmed by programmers to resemble videos that real people produce, but they only work well for a couple minutes. This article explains some of the hurdles the producers had to jump over to make a longer flick.
The only "intelligence" in the software is explicitly (or implicitly)
programmed by the developers, who were aiming it at YouTube creators. This
article concludes with the hopeful prediction that future tools will better
serve feature-length production. Unstated is the fact that Bollywood flicks
lack the kind of originality that you see in American films -- which are
done by (actually) intelligent human screen-writers and directors -- so
the programmers can conceivably write code that does that. Computers can
only be as intelligent as the programmers program them to be, which is
substantially less than the programmers themselves, and in the case of
"AI" software, is rather less than ordinary college graduates. Good enough
for the India domestic market, but not America (nor even American exports).
As you know, I'm already heavy into Scripture. I don't have a single favorite verse, but if somebody were to ask, I might answer "2 Tim.3:16" because it effectively nullifies the question. "ALL Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for" [all kinds of good stuff]. Ten months of every year I read through the Psalms, one each day, and the other two months (both 31-day months) I do the 31 chapters of Proverbs. I'm not much into poetry, so it's pretty tough going, and my Hebrew is falling off, so I make allowances... Then, after that exercise, I work through the Bible. I tried once or twice to do the whole Bible in a year, but it covered too much material each day for any of it to stick, so I went back to a chapter a day, Genesis to Revelation. A couple years ago I finished the second time through in the original Hebrew and Greek, and decided it might be more helpful if I alternated Old Testament and New, and maybe even divided each in half, alternating first and second halves (the OT historical books vs prophecy, and the NT historical books vs epistles). I recently finished Ecclesiastes and started Romans (having already done Genesis and Matthew, both pretty easy reading; Ecclesiastes is poetry and rather nihilistic, but I'm surprised at how few words in Romans I need to look up in the dictionary at the back). I'm down to a half chapter or less, which seems to help with understanding.
Yesterday I did the first half of Rom.3, which ended with an unconditional condemnation of "The end justifies the means" argument, and I got to thinking about a single unexplained word in the last Lord Peter Wimsey novel I finished last week: "Rimmon." It's an obscure reference to 2Kings 5:18, where the prophet Elisha blesses the (former) leper Naaman who asked permission to bow (but not worship) in the heathen temple because it was his job to be there for his boss to lean on in that place. In the modern context it was used as an "end justifies the means" argument for an otherwise devout Christian woman working for Wimsey (he paid otherwise unsupported women as secretaries and gofers) doing something "illegal" in support of his getting an innocent women acquitted in a murder trial. Endland was already becoming post-Christian at the time Dorothy Sayers wrote this novel, but she obviously expected her readers to understand the one-word reference (as did I!) and to agree with the unsound logical inference (as I did not). Naaman was not asking permission to sin, but only to be in a place and position that might be misunderstood as sin. I don't know about British law from a hundred years ago. but Sayers made clear in her reporting of Wimsey setting out the task, that this woman (if caught) could go to jail. He was telling her to do it, just don't get caught, same as the immoral advice our own King SCOTUS gave to every schoolchild in America beginning in the mid-1980s when they took the statement of moral absolutes off public schoolroom walls.
Today I finished Romans chapter 3, and despite the fond belief of most American pastors (Feelers every one of them), Paul is very much in favor of moral absolutes and God's Law:
Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law. -- [Rom.3:31 oNIV]
Also yesterday, the title of Psalm of the day, Psalm 9, which I
read as "To the chief musician, upon the death of [a] son, a psalm for
David," and then noticed that the interlinear gloss did not translate the
two words "death [of]" and "son," leaving them as names. So I looked in
the NIV, and they translated it as I did. It doesn't make much sense, because
the Psalm is David thanking God for rescue from his enemies, so the NIV
text turned the whole phrase into a title of the tune this Psalm was to
be sung to. Poetry is pretty obscure in its own time, and 3000 years has
not helped much. David was a hard-core Feeler (which I am not even slightly)
and most of his psalms either ask God's help against enemies, or else thank
God for such help, and (with a few exceptions noted here in my blog when
it's happening) I mostly don't have any enemies. These Psalms are for the
majority of God's people around the world who do have enemies. I'm OK with
that.
People with a job to do don't have time to read. I'm getting old and slowing down. I have not stopped working, but the all-nighters are fewer and and I often run out of gas before the end of the day. I'm not sleepy enough to go to sleep, and sitting in front of the boob toob provokes hand-to-mouth exercises that put on unnecessary weight. Last August I hit a 10- or 20-year weight low, mostly by working long hours and eating one meal at the end of the day. That was 38 pounds down from an all-time high about a year ago, when I decided to get more intentional. I'm slipping -- perhaps it is the cold of winter -- but I'm back up 15 pounds. So I'm trying to read more and watch movies less.
Anyway, women read more than men -- "Them what can, do; them what can't, teach." And those who can't teach, read books and watch movies or (yuk!) TV. Men are mostly Doers, women read more.
Male authors, seeing the far larger market for Chick Lit, do a good job of imitating female authors. The brief plot summary on the inside front jacket usually gives some clues: "Psycho-thriller" and "secrets from the past" are both code for inner turmoil. Chapters beginning with the first-person pronoun "I" likewise. You can do inner turmoil in third-person narrative, but it's much more natural by self-disclosure.
Dorothy Sayers wrote a hundred years ago, when male tastes dominated the market, and she did a pretty good imitation of a male author. I saw Lord Peter Wimsey on TV when I was a kid, so I saw her name on the library shelf -- only four or five books! -- and she beats out all the other female authors in readability (I suppose that's why there are dozens of her books not on the shelf), but the one I just finished, she didn't do so well. I probably won't go back for any more.
Irrelevance seems to be part and parcel of growing old. I mostly can't
stand what passes for music in church either, and I can't find any buyers
for my programming skills. sigh
As TV shows go, Protectors was more tolerable than most, but I don't
think I'll bother with any more. I gave up on "Elementary" (see "Feminazi
Sherlock Holmes" two months ago) about the second or third episode
in the third season. TV is like that, lower budget than movies, so much
lower quality screen writing.
In his opening paragraph he says,
...it is estimated that autonomy reduce [car] crashes since 94% of serious crashes are due to human error.That's only true if the autonomous vehicle crashes are not due to human error. What nonsense! Every car in the world, autonomous or not, is designed and manufactured by humans -- or by robots designed and manufactured and programmed by humans -- and those humans make just as many mistakes as the ones driving the vehicles, perhaps even more because the autonomous vehicles are controlled by millions of lines of code that imports unverified (possibly malicious) "open source" library code, and/or by trillions of "machine learned" parameters mostly trained on unsupervised data, and which not even the vendors know how they make their artificially "intelligent" decisions.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is so important for the lawyers and computer gurus to absolve (themselves and) their vehicles of any fault when people die in those crashes. Why? Follow the money. A couple pages later,
To realize the consumer and commercial benefits of autonomous driving, auto OEMs and suppliers may need to develop new sales and business strategies, ...He goes on to mention "new technological capabilities and address concerns about safety" but the business issues -- read "money" -- come first. On the matter of safety, he mentions ISO 26262, which he tells us is an international safety standard that "does not fully cover the safety requirements of AV features..." because autonomous vehicles "are not fully specifiable, while ISO 26262 implicitly assumes that all functionality is specified. He seems to think that it should be watered down so that the inherently unspecifiable responses to random traffic conditions do not figure in the safety standards. We train human drivers to be able to cope with whatever they find on the road, why should we trust an autonomous vehicle that is completely unspecified in that arena?
In summary, due to the technical, legal, and other challenges just described, achieving level 5 autonomy remains at least five to 10 years away."Level 5" is the top of an obsolete 5-level scale for grading degrees of autonomy. I say "obsolete" because none of the perpetrators refer to it any more. Anything requiring a human to fill in for less than fully autonomous driving is unrealistic: either the human is fully in control, or their attention is diverted eslewhere so that they cannot recover from whatever situation is deemed too complex for the robot to deal with. Not only is level-5 the only form of autonomy anybody considers, there are commercial robot taxis on the streets of San Francisco (and probably other cities) today with no human in control at all. The only way this can happen at all is by blatantly disregarding safety considerations, just as programmers are increasingly doing all over the computer industry.
Because some forty years ago King SCOTUS decreed that the only ethical standard ever taught to American school children must be removed from schoolroom walls, thereby giving those (and all subsequent) kids implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder -- just don't get caught, and nobody ever expects to get caught, even though some of them regularly are -- and those kids are now running American businesses and governments, and are programming the robots driving the autonomous vehicles already on the nation's streets and highways. And if "Formal Safety Standards" ever get defined to cover those vehicles, they will absolve the perpetrators of the inevitable car crashes of all fault. Like Ford's Pinto, the manufacturers will deem litigation less costly than getting it right in the first place.
Until some celebrity's kid gets run over, and finds a high-power lawyer
to go after the manufacturer, and the jury sets aside the new laws for
a high-priced punitive damages award. Juries can do that (it's called "nullification"
which means they can return any verdict they can agree on, without regard
to the law or the facts or the judge's instructions, effectively "nullifying"
those rules. And that will be the end of autonomous vehicles driven by
computers programmed by people. And there are no other programmers, not
now, not ever.
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