Author: Mark Davis

Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.

Evolving Visions of Chaotic Futures

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FlutterbysMost artificial intelligence researchers think unlikely the notion that a robot apocalypse or some kind of technological singularity is coming anytime soon. I’ve said as much, too. Guessing about the likelihood of distant futures is fraught with uncertainty; current trends are almost impossible to extrapolate.

But if we must, what are the best ways for guessing about the future? In the late 1950s the Delphi method was developed. Get a group of experts on a given topic and have them answer questions anonymously. Then iteratively publish back the group results and ask for feedback and revisions. Similar methods have been developed for face-to-face group decision making, like Kevin O’Connor’s approach to generating ideas in The Map of Innovation: generate ideas and give participants votes equaling a third of the number of unique ideas. Keep iterating until there is a consensus. More broadly, such methods are called “nominal group techniques.”

Most recently, the notion of prediction markets has been applied to internal and external decision making. In prediction markets,  a similar voting strategy is used but based on either fake or real money, forcing participants towards a risk-averse allocation of assets.

Interestingly, we know that optimal inference based on past experience can be codified using algorithmic information theory, but the fundamental problem with any kind of probabilistic argument is that much change that we observe in society is non-linear with respect to its underlying drivers and that the signals needed are imperfect. As the mildly misanthropic Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, the only place where prediction takes on smooth statistical regularity is in Las Vegas, which is why one shouldn’t bother to gamble.… Read the rest

Purple Flowers

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Pacific GroveI’ve got Ligeti’s Lontano running—vast sheaves of tones, building and yielding like the striated dark bands in the edge sands of a beach—while the sun sets through clouds and fern pines. The shadows on the windows are swarming minnows rising and falling before the dense mass of new rain like a Great Wall to the west.

I just returned from an overnighter to Monterey, running out from Cannery Row along the complex purple-flowered walls of Pacific Grove, yelping harbor seals cooking along the rocks and thin spits of sand, their voices mixing with the endless baby wails of seabirds as evening set in.

And Prince is dead. I seem to be commemorating dead people these days. I thought he was an interesting oddity in the earliest years of MTV with his soul moves, but didn’t really find a degree of respect for his talents until I was in the Peace Corps and on leave to the capital city of Fiji, Suva, over summer break (December-ish, 1990). I had nothing better to do than to wander the streets, meet-up and drink with whoever was available, and go to the air-conditioned movie theater whenever I could afford it. I saw Graffiti Bridge probably four times and, by the second showing, had revised my opinion of Prince to that of a great innovator. The music was both like and unlike anything I had heard, rippling with tempo changes and rapid polyrhythms, sharp synchronization and dense harmonies. The movie was, however, terrible.

Like Bowie’s Quicksand and Velvet Underground’s Candy Says, I memorialize Cream and Kiss, and, perhaps the most impressive, Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of Nothing Compares 2 U. It still brings tears.… Read the rest

Build Up That Wall

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No, I’m not endorsing the construction of additional walls between the United States and Mexico. There are plenty of those and they may be of questionable value. Instead, it is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday and I’m quoting from Christopher Hitchens (who shared his birthday with Jefferson) in repurposing and inverting Reagan’s famous request of Gorbachev. Hitch promoted the Jeffersonian ideal of separating out the civic from the religious:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

from Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

A rather remarkable continuation of Enlightenment concepts that derive, typically, from a notion of “natural rights” and, even in the Virginia Statue, from religious concepts: “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free.” With the following paragraphs noting that human rulers are fallible and have tended to create false religions down through time, apparently regardless of God’s wishes.

Natural rights are an interesting idea that re-occurs in the Declaration of Independence and were also championed by George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The notion that natural rights did not extend to slaves was something that Jefferson was conflicted about, according to Hitchens, until the end of his life, with the issue of state’s rights a pragmatic basis for opposition to an institution that he both profited from and found morally repugnant.… Read the rest

The Linguistics of Hate

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keep-calm-and-hate-corpus-linguisticsRight-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and Social dominance orientation (SDO) are measures of personality traits and tendencies. To measure them, you ask people to rate statements like:

Superior groups should dominate inferior groups

The withdrawal from tradition will turn out to be a fatal fault one day

People rate their opinions on these questions using a 1 to 5 scale from Definitely Disagree to Strongly Agree. These scales have their detractors but they also demonstrate some useful and stable reliability across cultures.

Note that while both of these measures tend to be higher in American self-described “conservatives,” they also can be higher for leftist authoritarians and they may even pop up for subsets of attitudes among Western social liberals about certain topics like religion. Haters abound.

I used the R packages twitterR, textminer, wordcloud, SnowballC, and a few others and grabbed a few thousand tweets that contained the #DonaldJTrump hashtag. A quick scan of them showed the standard properties of tweets like repetition through retweeting, heavy use of hashtags, and, of course, the use of the #DonaldJTrump as part of anti-Trump sentiments (something about a cocaine-use video). But, filtering them down, there were definite standouts that seemed to support a RWA/SDO orientation. Here are some examples:

The last great leader of the White Race was #trump #trump2016 #donaldjtrump #DonaldTrump2016 #donaldtrump”

Just a wuss who cant handle the defeat so he cries to GOP for brokered Convention. # Trump #DonaldJTrump

I am a PROUD Supporter of #DonaldJTrump for the Highest Office in the land. If you don’t like it, LEAVE!

#trump army it’s time, we stand up for family, they threaten trumps family they threaten us, lock and load, push the vote…

Not surprising, but the density of them shows a real aggressiveness that somewhat shocked me.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes: Section 11 (Chapter 8)

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Against SuperheroesThe twin horns, the god dilemma. In retrospect, for that period and the aberrancy that flowed through my mind, there remained a small piece of me that was grounded in the sad derelicts of my moral constructions. Could I simply be moral because I was a god? Or was the moral order external to me making me irrelevant. Irrelevant or arbitrary. I reflect now, under some control, on my perverse desires during that period (really they never left me but were just suppressed and—what is the term?—sublimated into other actions). But perhaps that is the very nature of the trajectory I was on: the breakdown and atomization of my soul or personality, and the reconstruction of it like some child emerging from the jungle, biting fellow kindergartners, until the rough edges of her being are chiseled off by running the complex maze of sharp-cornered lessons. I had been reborn and was still the wolf child.

The mythologies I was trained in tell me only sometimes about the growth of gods from childhood. Endymion, Bellerophon, Baal and Anat, they all emerge without any sense of tempest in their birth or any period of maturation. Even Jesus was born, revered, and then was spreading the word of his own godliness without any explication about the transitional period. I can only imagine the difficulty of raising that boy, whether he was arrogant towards his mother and stepfather or was stinking of zen, as the Japanese would say, so holier than thou that mother and father just suppressed contempt until the little carpenter was old enough to be thrust out into the world.

There was an intensity to the feeling and beliefs during the transformation, a rising up of what might be translated as pride, but a pride that was baseless, having been sucked of all the historical content of achievements and accolades that might result in pride.… Read the rest

The Retiring Mind, Part III: Autonomy

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Retiring Mind IIIRobert Gordon’s book on the end of industrial revolutions recently came out. I’ve been arguing for a while that the coming robot apocalypse might be Industrial Revolution IV. But the Dismal Science continues to point out uncomfortable facts in opposition to my suggestion.

So I had to test the beginning of the end (or the beginning of the beginning?) when my Tesla P90D with autosteer, summon mode, automatic parking, and ludicrous mode arrived to take the place of my three-year-old P85:… Read the rest

On Woo-Woo and Schrödinger’s Cat

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schrodingers-cat-walks-into-a-bar-memeMichael Shermer and Sam Harris got together with an audience at Caltech to beat up on Deepak Chopra and a “storyteller” named Jean Houston in The Future of God debate hosted by ABC News. And Deepak got uncharacteristically angry back behind his crystal-embellished eyewear, especially at Shermer’s assertion that Deepak is just talking “woo-woo.”

But is there any basis for the woo-woo that Deepak is weaving? As it turns out, he is building on some fairly impressive work by Stuart Hameroff, MD, of University of Arizona and Sir Roger Penrose of Oxford University. Under development for more than 25 years, this work has most recently been summed up in their 2014 paper, “Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory” available for free (but not the commentaries, alas). Deepak was even invited to comment on the paper in Physics of Life Reviews, though the content of his commentary was challenged as being somewhat orthogonal or contradictory to the main argument.

To start somewhere near the beginning, Penrose became obsessed with the limits of computation in the late 80s. The Halting Problem sums up his concerns about the idea that human minds can possibly be isomorphic with computational devices. There seems to be something that allows for breaking free of the limits of “mere” Turing Complete computation to Penrose. Whatever that something is, it should be physical and reside within the structure of the brain itself. Hameroff and Penrose would also like that something to explain consciousness and all of its confusing manifestations, for surely consciousness is part of that brain operation.

Now, to get at some necessary and sufficient sorts of explanations for this new model requires looking at Hameroff’s medical speciality: anesthesiology.… Read the rest

The Goldilocks Complexity Zone

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FractalSince my time in the early 90s at Santa Fe Institute, I’ve been fascinated by the informational physics of complex systems. What are the requirements of an abstract system that is capable of complex behavior? How do our intuitions about complex behavior or form match up with mathematical approaches to describing complexity? For instance, we might consider a snowflake complex, but it is also regular in it’s structure, driven by an interaction between crystal growth and the surrounding air. The classic examples of coastlines and fractal self-symmetry also seem complex but are not capable of complex behavior.

So what is a good way of thinking about complexity? There is actually a good range of ideas about how to characterize complexity. Seth Lloyd rounds up many of them, here. The intuition that drives many of them is that complexity seems to be associated with distributions of relationships and objects that are somehow juxtapositioned between a single state and a uniformly random set of states. Complex things, be they living organisms or computers running algorithms, should exist in a Goldilocks zone when each part is examined and those parts are somehow summed up to a single measure.

We can easily construct a complexity measure that captures some of these intuitions. Let’s look at three strings of characters:

x = aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

y = menlqphsfyjubaoitwzrvcgxdkbwohqyxplerz

z = the fox met the hare and the fox saw the hare

Now we would likely all agree that y and z are more complex than x, and I suspect most would agree that y looks like gibberish compared with z. Of course, y could be a sequence of weirdly coded measurements or something, or encrypted such that the message appears random.… Read the rest

Bayesianism and Properly Basic Belief

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Kircher-Diagram_of_the_names_of_GodXu and Tenebaum, in Word Learning as Bayesian Inference (Psychological Review, 2007), develop a very simple Bayesian model of how children (and even adults) build semantic associations based on accumulated evidence. In short, they find contrastive elimination approaches as well as connectionist methods unable to explain the patterns that are observed. Specifically, the most salient problem with these other methods is that they lack the rapid transition that is seen when three exemplars are presented for a class of objects associated with a word versus one exemplar. Adults and kids (the former even more so) just get word meanings faster than those other models can easily show. Moreover, a space of contending hypotheses that are weighted according to their Bayesian statistics, provides an escape from the all-or-nothing of hypothesis elimination and some of the “soft” commitment properties that connectionist models provide.

The mathematical trick for the rapid transition is rather interesting. They formulate a “size principle” that weights the likelihood of a given hypothesis (this object is most similar to a “feb,” for instance, rather than the many other object sets that are available) according to a scaling that is exponential in the number of exposures. Hence the rapid transition:

Hypotheses with smaller extensions assign greater probability than do larger hypotheses to the same data, and they assign exponentially greater probability as the number of consistent examples increases.

It should be noted that they don’t claim that the psychological or brain machinery implements exactly this algorithm. As is usual in these matters, it is instead likely that whatever machinery is involved, it simply has at least these properties. It may very well be that connectionist architectures can do the same but that existing approaches to connectionism simply don’t do it quite the right way.… Read the rest