Category: Technology

Rise, Teleonomatons!

Mark Davis2 Comments

My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

A Manifold of Non-Tiresome Heavens

Mark Davis1 Comment

It’s the rage these days to wax indignant over the rise of authoritarian figures around the world. From Trump to Putin, Victor Orban, and the right-wing parties of Europe, the fear is that our experiment in post-World War II and then post-Cold War liberalism is at risk of being distorted and abraded by a desire for cultural uniformity. A common refrain is that the visibility of and legal restructuring around LGBTQ+ and ethnic/minority communities, as well as a sprinkling of environmentalism, is moving so quickly that a slight majority of the electorate wants to stand in the path of change “yelling stop,” to paraphrase Bill Buckley. Ripple effects then will break down the slow-built institutions that define contemporary liberal democracies and soon we have concentration camps for dissenters.

In America, there are nostalgic swoons for Ronald Reagan and some idealized middle-class heaven from the economic growth-phase of the 1950s when everyone went to church and the worst swear word was “golly gee!” The uniformity and comfort that people felt about their roles in their communities combined with a bedrock belief in family, faith, and devotion to country that was as reliable as America’s continuous economic growth. It was good to be alive and all the backward peoples of the world would maybe someday catch up if they didn’t all die of famine first.

But I can never quite understand what those who lean authoritarian want for their future world? I call most of the hypothetical visions “tiresome heavens” because they reflect the old joke of how Christian heaven must be a monotonous, uniform place. Just sit around in perfect blissful union with one’s Creator. Nothing really to do, no stressors, no wants, no struggles; it is a transcendent promise that is more geologic than human.… Read the rest

Begging the Pseudo-Question

Mark Davis2 Comments

 

I recently got involved in an “audiophile” online discussion thread replete with devious trolling, commenter bans, incivility—the works. I do this from time to time because raucous argumentation forces one to think in tactical and strategic ways that are not the norm in everyday life. I also learn new things. In this case, I went on several quests, hunting down papers on the ability of Chinese language speakers to disambiguate tones in Gaussian noise, how distortion artifacts impact our perception of spatialization in binaural audio presentations, and even Rayleigh wave detection by sand scorpions (I actually worked on a simulator for that as a late undergrad). One of the key disagreements in the thread was over the notion of “science.” There were several perspectives on this, with the first one being that science requires experimentation and therefore using scientifically-derived tools for investigating the performance of audio equipment does not amount to science. This is obviously a shrugger and a distraction. The other primary perspective is always that science is in constant revision and there may be new insights that prove this-or-that subtle hearing capability since human hearing is just sooooo amazing. We are sooooo amazing.

There’s a bit of a Two Cultures-like tension in this universe of audio equipment aficionados: while engineering and science brings them audio gear, they want it to be poetic and ineffable and the work of mastery based in genius rather than Fast Fourier Transforms. Graphs are boring. Listening is beautiful.

Part of the reason for the disagreement is clearly that we just don’t have shared meanings about concepts like science. We circle around them and try to triangulate using metaphors, analogies, and explore the logical consequences of limits and extensions to their meaning.… Read the rest

Inferred Modular Superparrots

Mark DavisLeave a comment

The buzz about ChatGPT and related efforts has been surprisingly resistant to the standard deflationary pressure of the Gartner hype cycle. Quantum computing definitely fizzled but appears to be moving towards the plateau of productivity with recent expansions of the number of practical qubits available by IBM and Origin in China, as well as additional government funding out of national security interests and fears. But ChatGPT attracted more sustained attention because people can play with it easily without needing to understand something like Shor’s algorithm for factoring integers. Instead, you just feed it a prompt and are amazed that it writes so well. And related image generators are delightful (as above) and may represent a true displacement of creative professionals even at this early stage, with video hallucinators evolving rapidly too.

But are Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT doing much more than stitching together recorded fragments of texts ingested from an internet-scale corpus of text? Are they inferring patterns that are in any way beyond just being stochastic parrots? And why would scaling up a system result in qualitative new capabilities, if there are any at all?

Some new work covered in Quanta Magazine has some intriguing suggestions that there is a bit more going on in LLMs, although the subtitle contains the word “understanding” that I think is premature. At heart is the idea that as networks scale up given ordering rules that are not highly uniform or correlated they tend to break up into collections of subnetworks that are distinct (substitute “graphs” for networks if you are a specialist). The theory, then, is that the ingest of sufficient magnitudes of text into a sufficiently large network and the error-minimization involved in tuning that network to match output to input also segregates groupings that the Quanta author and researchers at Princeton and DeepMind refer to as skills.… Read the rest

Humility is Pervasive

Mark Davis2 Comments

We are having an intimate holiday season with food, family, and small adventures along the Oregon coast. There were hints of Christmas with presents and music, as well as new Yule poetry that celebrates the cycles of the ocean in a natural dialogue with the seasonal flow: “King tides pull the world upward / … / Whales coast through gabled waters…” And then there are the swirling culture wars out there somewhere trying to deny us our diverse ideas and new traditions. We don’t worry much about their misdirection, but find the lack of creativity disheartening. Why not learn and invent new ways of thinking about society and culture?

Rabbi David Wolpe at Harvard Divinity has a more historical and intellectualized take on modern life in the Atlantic where he tries to collapse all the complexity of modern political instincts into an amalgam about insufficient humility about our own ideas and capabilities. I like critiquing these kinds of intellectual histories because I am humble enough to doubt that singular ideas can explain all the myriad ways of flourishing in human history. “The Return of the Pagans” maps the contemporary left with their environmental worship—and the right with heroic icons like Donald Trump—to something like the Greco-Roman idolization of beauty, power, wealth, and creativity. It is the invention of monotheism that focused the ancient mind on a singular divinity that we poor humans can always prostrate our tiny plans before. Elon Musk shouldn’t strain to get to Mars. Tech Bros shouldn’t accelerate technological change without deep humility about the impact on society. The ultra-wealthy used to be more concerned for using their wealth for good. Everyone should instead contemplate their imperfect sin-nature in the face of perfection.… Read the rest

Reverse Engineering the Future

Mark Davis1 Comment

I’ve been enjoying streaming Apple TV+’s Foundation based on Asimov’s classic books. The show is very different from the high-altitude narrative of the books and, frankly, I couldn’t see it being very engaging if it had been rendered the way the books were written. The central premise of predictability of vast civilizations via “psychohistory” always struck me as outlandish, even as a teen. From my limited understanding of actual history it seemed strange that anything that happened in the past fit anything but the roughest of patterns. I nevertheless still read all the “intellectual history” books that come out in the hope that there are underlying veins that explain the surface rocks strewn chaotically across the past. Cousin marriage bans leads to the rise of individualism? Geography is the key? People want to mimic one another? Economic inequality is the actual key?

Each case is built on some theoretical insight that is stabilized by a broad empirical scaffolding. Each sells some books and gets some play in TED and book reviews. But then they seem to pass away out of public awareness because the fad is over and there are always new ideas bubbling up. But maybe that’s because they can’t help us predict the future exactly (well, Piketty perhaps…see below). But what can?

The mysterious world of stocks and bonds is an area where there seems to be no end to speculation (figuratively and literally) about ways to game the system and make money, or even to understand macroeconomic trends. It’s not that economics doesn’t have some empirical powers, it’s just that it still doesn’t have the kind of reliability that we expect from the physical sciences.… Read the rest

Oh, the Humanities!

Mark Davis1 Comment

I often laugh out loud at Ross Douthat’s New York Times columns that worry over strange spiritualisms taking over America, or try to unravel cultural knots that he always suggests might best be resolved by Catholicism (or even one of those lesser faiths), but I did enjoy his take today on the perishing of the humanities in America’s universities and colleges. I routinely read into the 18th and 19th centuries as an exploration of how language was once used. I read analytically, that is. Plots are picked apart. Characterization is considered. Clausal embedding is almost always more ornate than contemporary writing where such elaborations are pretentious or, at least, overwrought. I also (try to) read original versions of Balzac or Flaubert as an exercise in improving my French. What is less interesting to me are the class conflicts, racism, and gender roles from those bygone days. People are rotten enough today; I hardly need a reminder that we were always rotten and had reinforcing institutions and traditions overlaying that malaise.

But is there a threat to a decline in the participation in the humanities and a shift to STEM fields among university students? The argument is that it impacts our understanding of history and the drivers that got us here today. Perhaps it also diminishes our knowledge of logic and reason when philosophy is subtracted from the curriculum. Or just that the student never learns to articulate complex ideas and arguments.

An alternative to Douthat’s calls for monastic recitation and memorization as a grounding for the transmission of ideas is to make it more relevant to the STEM fields that have money and mindshare. In other words, inveigle the humanities into STEM; don’t fight, infiltrate.… Read the rest

Vaguely Effective Altruism

Mark DavisLeave a comment

In “Killing John Galt” in my new collection, Entanglements, the first-person narrator muses that:

Reaching the moon was easy but conquering poverty was impossible. Watching Sonya’s animated hopefulness—perfection!—almost made me want to call Winborn and recommend that he just pay more taxes with the same money. Let the organizations and bureaucrats build institutions that could chisel away at the edifice, slowly and steadily; look at giant statistical outcomes to guide changes in policy over time. It would convert the problem from individual heroism into a technocratic game. I could play that game, running regression models and factor analytic comparisons to tease out what was and what was not working effectively. Social change then became policy management.

With the plunge of Effective Altruism (EA) from its hubristic trajectory across the sun of cryptocurrency, how and why to do good by wealthy people has become a renewed topic for discussion. At the New York Times, for instance, we have the regularly vague Ross Douthat complaining that if every oil magnate wants their money applied to just saving kids from malaria we would have fewer quaint state parks. Perhaps more interesting at the same publication is Ezra Klein’s discussion of the goals and limits of EA as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. There is plenty of room for a spectrum of responses to the basic problem of how to give away money, but the key concept of “effectiveness” is what forces EA and EA-adjacent proponents to analyze their approaches and goals towards making the world a better place. Historically, much large-scale giving was intended to create a legacy for the industrialist families (Carnegie-Mellon University, Rockefeller Foundation, … ahem, Sackler Institute and related organizations).… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

The Retiring Mind, Part VII: Sustainability

Mark Davis1 Comment

“How efficient can I get?” is a question I often ask myself. For almost a decade now my family has been working towards greater energy, water, and waste efficiency with a goal towards something like sustainability. It began with electric and hybrid cars and then, by 2013, we remodeled a house following a green sustainable model. All of the existing cabinetry, surfaces (as best could be done), and fixtures were non-destructively excised and passed to Habitat for Humanity. Nearly 10kW of photovoltaics were fixed to several roof surfaces. The only limitation was the HOA and CC&Rs of our California community that mandated a fairly uniform lawn requirement, thus limiting water conservation options. We could have battled for it, but the housing development itself spent north of $200K per year on gardening services, so it seemed an uphill fight to deviate from their idealized and fairly lush landscape plans.

So when remodeling our 1930s-era house in New Mexico, we went even further. In addition to 8kW of photovoltaics that push us easily into electricity producer over the course of a year, we added rainwater capture and reuse for watering a largely xeric collection of decorative landscaping plants plus some small food garden plots. The water system is not nearly as reliable as the PV systems, though even those have had some issues. I’ll get to pros and cons as I build out the basic designs further along. But I can certainly say that on balance the effort has been a net positive.

So, first, some design details.

Let’s start with the solar system. The 8kW of PVs are in two sections. 5kW is on a south facing roofline of our casita/office. We call it Chateau Derrière and it attaches to the previously unattached garage that dates to the 1930s and is comprised of stacked rock and a stick roof.… Read the rest