Bill Joy to the World: The Downside of Technology December 31, 2007January 6, 2017 ANOTHER GRAND YEAR So long as you measure your income in fractions of a million or more (and have no conscience), this chart should make you feel terrific. It takes just a minute to absorb. THE THINKING MAN’S CHESS Tim Bonham: ‘Allen Brand wrote: ‘You might also find it interesting to note that the Big Blue programmers actually cheated to claim the win over the world champion. They changed the program after every game!’ It’s Deep Blue, not Big Blue. And it was Garry Kasparov, reigning world champion, whom it beat in a game in 1997. And how can this be called cheating when the rules specifically allowed it? It’s common for ALL chess players to adjust their playing style before playing the same opponent the next time – that’s called learning from experience.’ ☞ Ah, but wouldn’t it have been even more impressive if Deep Blue had learned from experience unassisted by humans? That day is likely coming. Mark L.: ‘Hey, a topic I am actually an expert in for a change….computer chess programming. I have written and even made money off of chess playing programs (one I wrote was called Grandmaster Chess, although it was a little before programs could play at Grandmaster level). The strongest programs in the world now have chess ratings hundreds of points higher than the strongest humans. Here is some data. The rating for ‘Rybka‘ on an off-the-shelf, four-processor computer is over 3100. Gary Kasparov, a past world champion, had a rating of about 2800. Recent matches between chess programs and humans have been very one-sided, with the computer crushing the humans, including world champions. Anyone interested in programming chess can find more information at talkchess.com or chessprogramming.wikispaces.com. It is a fun hobby, both stimulating and creative. And in the future, maybe we can program our own brains to beat the machines – for a while at least! (BTW – There are now ‘free style’ chess matches where people can use any technology they want to help them play. The winners are always humans who use computers. The human-computer combo is much stronger than computers alone.)’ Monty Goolsby: ‘Perhaps you could introduce your readers to Arimaa, a chess-type game that appears to be computer resistant. And maybe discuss why computers are bad Contract Bridge players.’ ☞ ‘Cause they’re no dummies? AND AFTER THEY BEAT US AT CHESS? John Seiffer (pt 2): ‘I know you’re an optimist and all that, but when you want to see the dark side of technology read Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of Sun Micro Systems, he’s no techno-slouch. The actual future is probably somewhere in the middle. I think one has to pick the approach that motivates one to act properly in the present.’ ☞ Consider this sobering passage that Joy excerpts from one of Ray Kurzweil’s books: . . . It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals. ☞ Joy continues: In the [Kurzweil] book, you don’t discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski – the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber’s next target. Kaczynski’s actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it. . . . Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials. In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. ☞ I won’t quote any more – but it gets worse. (Read it for yourself.) We live in interesting times. This coming year should be as interesting as they get. Here’s wishing you a healthy, happy, prosperous – progressive – 2008.
Give Mama a Llama December 28, 2007January 6, 2017 GIVE MAMA A LLAMA Listen, I’m sure you’re tapped out. But if you or your kids want to change a Third World family’s life, here‘s yet another imagination-capturing way to do it. And what a great way to start off what will be, I have every hope, a great New Year. Heifer International has been helping families in 125 countries since 1944. The basic idea: give a family some rabbits and some training, and before you know it, they have lots of rabbits, rabbit meat to nourish themselves and sell their neighbors, a small rabbit business, maybe a roadside ‘Hares & Pears’ franchise leading to a listing on the Ghana exchange . . . I am getting carried away, and have not even gotten to the pigs, the ducks – the heifers – the bees or, yes, the llamas. GIVE PAPA HOME CINEMA Don Tingle: ‘You wrote, ‘Or you could spend $50 or so and watch this 4-disc DVD set rapt in wonder in the comfort of your media room. (I hope someday to have a media room.)’ On seeing that, let me suggest that you not get a ‘media room’ when you can make one yourself for a whole lot less! First, plug your DVD player into your stereo. Even a small bookshelf type stereo will give better sound that most TVs (or get a new amp with a zillion output channels and a zillion speakers – personally I can live with good stereo sound rather than 7.1 surround sound – most of the back speakers are just street noise anyway). Then, check out the reviews of projectors on ProjectorCentral.com. They review projectors and provide really great and independent ratings to help you choose. The Panasonic and Sanyo projectors are consistently highly rated, though other brands have crept up in ratings this year. The only other choice you need to make is 720P or 1080P. The difference being that the 1080P gives the full High Definition signal (for ~$2500), but the 720P projectors are less than $1500 and IMHO give very good picture quality. I have a couple of 720P projectors (one for movies at home and one for teaching workshops on the road) and bought one for our local film co-op. The Panasonic and Sanyo models are my favorites because they can be set on a shelf at the back of a regular sized room and have adjustments that allow you to center the picture on your screen without having to physically move the projector. Makes ‘installation’ a breeze. One cable (HDMI) from your DVD player and you are in business. On screens – you don’t really need one. If you have a plain white wall you can get a great picture. If you paint the wall a light grey color, you actually get a better picture. Or you can get a simple screen that you pull down from the ceiling (i.e. pull down in front of a painting hanging on that wall) for less than $200. Close the curtains and turn off the lights and you’ll have a great home theater without the hassles of professional installation and the costs that come with it.’ THE FORTUNATE POOR Some of you had bones to pick with Bob C’s Christmas Eve message: Jeff Schwarz: ‘Why is Bob so angry at the poor? Throw in sales tax and SS tax and the poor are paying a higher proportion of their income in taxes than the rich and powerful. Also, some of the things he says are false. For instance, back in the mid-90s, Congress instructed the IRS to emphasize going after people who receive the Earned Income Credit.’ COMPUTERS THAT THINK Allen Brand: ‘One of your readers wrote: ‘When IBM’s Deep Blue won that chess match against a human expert (whose name escapes me at the moment) the expert was really playing against the team of human programmers who wrote the software, not against the computer.’ You might also find it interesting to note that the Big Blue programmers actually cheated to claim the win over the world champion. They changed the program after every game!’ ☞ But once computers are, say, 32 times more powerful, in eight or ten years – as Kurzweil persuasively predicts – they might not have to change the program as often. The program may even ‘learn’ to change itself.
Sunshine December 27, 2007March 10, 2017 I hope you had a terrific Christmas . . . and I mean that in the most heartfelt secular humanist way. I did. I was surrounded by terrific nieces and nephews. I formed what I truly believe was a meaningful bond with our twelfth (give or take), Patrick, age 1, who seemed genuinely to respond to my humor. I got everything I asked Santa for except world peace and an end to the writers’ strike, without which I am in excruciating limbo. Help! I am clueless to the unfolding of the Darling Family fortunes, Chuck‘s exploits, The Office romance, and – my God – Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy and Tracy Jordan . . . what have they been doing? I admit it, I love TiVo-enabled commercial-free television. And that’s as good a lead-in as any to today’s topic. Today’s topic is WORLD-CHANGING TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS. That’s what television was . . . TELEVISION Bob Novick: ‘Aaron Sorkin’s play is HIGHLY HIGHLY exaggerated if not outright lies. Farnsworth won the court decision and was awarded one million dollars (in the 1930s). It was the only patent suit that RCA had lost up until that time. There are major inaccuracies in the play – this site lists them in detail. Philo T. Farnsworth truly was the father of television.’ ☞ One of the books Sorkin based his play on, The Last Lone Inventor, by Evan Schwartz, makes that case. But a Brit reviewing it on Amazon, says no. (‘The American audience will love this highly readable popularist book. This is flag-waving entertaining stuff. Enjoy it, but please try to understand that this is not the whole story.’) I still loved the play, and this after-reading just adds to the fascination. And that’s what cheap solar energy would be . . . SOLAR ENERGY In the winter of 1974 I had a cover story in NEW YORK Magazine about the potential for solar energy. I knew it was important – OPEC and Mideast oil were all anyone could think about (except Detroit’s executives, who would spend the next three decades in denial) – but I was surprised to learn my piece was going to be the cover. It seemed a bit of a stretch to have the piece in NEW YORK at all, let alone the cover. What was famed editor Clay Felker thinking? It turned out he was thinking, ‘Let’s sell some magazines!’ He put a gorgeous model in a bikini absorbing rays on a float in the middle of a swimming pool. In February. I’m not certain how well the issue sold, but finally, nearly 35 years later, solar energy is becoming sexy on its own. You could (for example) have done very well buying First Solar (FSLR) at 24 when it went public a year ago (I missed it); less well shorting a few shares as I did this fall at $160 (it closed yesterday at $281, up more than tenfold). Although this stings a bit as an investor, I’m delighted to think we are finally at the point, or nearly so, that solar panel film can produce electricity at competitive prices. To say I am not expert in this field would be an understatement on the order of ‘the sun is rather hot.’ But according to this, FSLR’s cost of producing a watt of solar power was $1.16 recently . . . and according to this, a privately owned competitor called Nanosolar has begun selling its panels for 99 cents a watt, which (according to this) it manufactures for 30 cents . . . which puts the cost of solar below the cost of coal. This is great for humanity, but not necessarily good for FSLR. If your competition can sell your product for less than it costs you to make your product, you could have a problem. Then again, who knows what tech advances FSLR may have up its sleeve or what economies of scale it might achieve (or whether these reports are even accurate). And the market for competitively priced solar power will be so vast, a lot of inefficiencies may be forgiven along the way. So to be clear, I am not suggesting you short FSLR – or anything else. As I have often argued (here, for example), shorting stocks is, ordinarily, a really bad idea . . . a proposition I test out every so often on your behalf just to be sure it’s still true. [Another bad idea I am testing out for you (think of me as the dummy in one of those crash tests that ultimately help to keep the rest of us safe): selling naked FSLR calls (a terrible idea, because, as with shorting, you have a potentially unlimited loss; but unlike shorting, you have a smaller potential gain if you’re right). I am doing this because the excitement over FSLR is such that today, with the stock at $281, someone paid me $76 for the right to buy FSLR from me at $300 any time through January 17, 2009. That way, if it crashes, they lose ‘only’ $76 (which I get to keep); but if it goes to the moon, they make (and I lose), $1 for each dollar the stock has risen above $376. So it’s a way for me to short the stock at $376, in effect, when it’s selling at $280. What I give up for that cushion is anything beyond a $76-a-share gain.] Important note: I am not winking when I say this is a really dumb thing to do unless you have a lot of experience in the market and even more experience knowing your own psychology. And even then it may well be a dumb thing to do, as my experience will likely shortly prove. # THE MAIN THING: CAN YOU IMAGINE? WE’RE GETTING CLOSE TO A BIG STEP TOWARD CLEAN, AFFORDABLE ENERGY. Don’t Sell Humanity Short Quite Yet.
A Christmas Eve Message December 24, 2007March 10, 2017 CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR I loved this movie: a great (largely true) story, great acting, great dialog; funny, sexy, gripping, enlightening, important, relevant. THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION I loved this play: the story of the invention of television. Of course, seeing a play on Broadway costs about $1,000 more than seeing a movie (airfare, cabs, hotel, and the ticket). But if you’re in New York anyway, well . . . it’s still expensive. FMD The subhead’s in Christmas colors (though still more red than green), because we got an early gift Friday from Goldman Sachs. Some of us originally bought First Marblehead, which makes private student loans, at around $25. We watched it go up to $56 earlier this year, at which point I ran items headlined, ‘Don’t Sell Your FMD.’ By which I meant (in case you missed the subtlety): ‘Do Sell Your FMD. And Then Buy It Back December 20 at $11.’ FMD fell as low as $11.01 Thursday. Friday, Goldman Sachs arranged to buy up to 19.99% of the company and provide a $1 billion line of credit, sending the stock up to $18.76 (and giving Goldman a one-day 66% paper gain on its investment). If the stock ever gets back to $56 and beyond, Goldman will have looked pretty smart. The risk is that the shorts are right and Goldman is wrong and that there’s no big money to be made providing student loans – or that if there is, First Marblehead is not properly positioned to make it. To me – with money I can truly afford to lose (and now, on paper, partially have) – the big picture is that there probably will continue to be a huge and growing market for private student loans . . . and that First Marblehead has more expertise than its competitors at underwriting those loans, so is best positioned to make it. WM This is a separate disaster, down to $14 on Friday from $35 where I suggested it. I hope it, too, may one day bounce back. But it’s different. The crazy lending practices that abetted the housing bubble were real – and chickens are coming home to roost. (By contrast, nothing specific has happened to erode the long-term value of student loans, so far as I know. Years from now, students will owe their balances; their parents, who co-signed for the loans, will still be on the hook; and, at least under current law, even bankruptcy won’t extinguish the debt. So if college grads have decent income prospects, lenders may over time be repaid – the current financial crisis notwithstanding.) The banks won’t go under as a result of the mortgage crisis; but the current shareholders of some banks could find themselves wiped out. I hope that will not include the shareholders of Washington Mutual, because I still have my shares, but the crisis is far from being played out. As with FMD, we’ll just have to wait and see. AII Our warrants closed Friday at $3.10, more than double what we paid for them. (I just figured I’d throw that in to make myself feel better.) GREEN GUMMI BEARS Dai: ‘I typed ‘green gummi bears’ into the firefox window and unfortunately the site that popped up was yours. Upon reading your article, I was infuriated. To put it mildly, I LOVE gummi bears, and I can go through 10 bags a week because I only eat the green and white ones. THE GREEN GUMMI BEARS ARE THE BEST. I crave them and buy bags and only eat the green ones. This Christmas I received a 5lb bag of ONLY green gummi bears, which is the best present I have ever received. I just wanted to inform you, that the REAL gummi bear makers, not the care bear but HARIBO, make green ones strawberry, which is the best brand – so before you go and make an economic statement using gummi bears as your example – please do a little more research for the gummi bear fanatics of the world. Thank you and have a happy holiday.’ ☞ Well, leaving aside the fact that you opened your Christmas present early, which already calls your character into question, I refer you to the second hit that shows up when I search on ‘green gummi bears,’ which is this one, a taste-off that hardly paints Haribo’s green gummi (‘the least flavorful of them all’) in an award-winning light. ☺ (It frightens me that I inserted a smiley face, but ’tis the season and all that. I just can’t help myself. Ho, ho, ho.) A CHRISTMAS EVE MESSAGE All right, a two-days-before-Christmas-Eve message, when he sent it, but still: Bob C.: ‘Indeed, it is a grand time to be rich in America, but it isn’t so bad to be poor in America, either. Consider that the poor don’t have to buy liability insurance. Who in their right mind would sue a poor person? Have you ever been involved with an accident with a person too poor to carry automobile liability insurance? No fun. The poor don’t have to have health insurance. They show up at the Emergency Room and can’t be turned away. Those of us that do have health insurance have high premiums reflecting the non-payers. Their children get preferential treatment in applying for scholarships and financial aid at educational institutions. They can get free food from food banks largely manned by ‘rich’ volunteers. I’ve been there and rarely do I see poor people working as volunteers. The poor pay little or no income tax. If they are liable for any tax, they could easily disregard it because the IRS wouldn’t pursue the debt in favor of going after the big pocket accounts. I would also guess that the poor would vote for the Democratic Party, because it is more likely to propose laws offering hand-outs and tax increases for the working, tax paying stiffs. As Grover Cleveland noted, ‘Once the coffers of the federal government are opened to the public, there will be no shutting them down.’ I suspect that I will be labeled ‘mean-spirited,’ which is getting to be trite; but I was irritated seeing the subject phrase so often in your interesting daily column.’ ☞ I guess it’s a balance. You seem to feel things have swung too far in favor of the poor and working poor. Reasonable people can disagree – and obviously do. I would point out, though, that emergency room care for your children really is not the same as having a doctor you can go to with an appointment for annual checkups and preventive care and all the rest. And lining up for free food at a food bank – while I expect we’re both pleased America doesn’t allow people to starve in the streets – isn’t so appealing that many people actually are content making this their long-term strategy. (On top of that, please note that no Democrat I know of has proposed raising middle class taxes.) Your view IS best served by voting Republican. Mine, by voting Democrat. Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. Happy Holidays!
The 140-Degree Latte December 21, 2007March 10, 2017 Ralph Sierra: ‘We’re really holding car manufacturers’ feet to the fire – giving them 12 years to increase gas mileage 7.5 MPG! Gee, do you think they can do it?’ ☞ One could cry thinking of the short-sightedness of Detroit’s executives over the last three decades and what it’s cost our country generally and their shareholders specifically. Even assuming there would have been no way to market ‘fuel economy’ more successfully anywhere in the world (why limit our sales to the U.S.?) – and why do we accept that assumption? – surely they could have known after the oil shock of 1973 that someday fuel efficiency would rule. How hard would it have been to lead the world in this research and technology, keeping ever-better versions of it on the shelf until that day came? Were Toyota and Honda in 1973 or 1983 or even 1993 so much larger and richer than GM and Ford that they could afford this investment but we couldn’t? And while we’re crying, what does it say about our democracy that we couldn’t do the obvious, way back in 1973 or 1983 or even 1993? Namely: impose a dime-a-year increase in the gas tax, every cent of which used to lower the income tax . . . thereby to tax things we wanted to discourage (oil consumption, pollution) and cut taxes on the things we wanted to encourage (work and investment). The tax could have been announced in 1973 but not kicked in for five years to give people time to adjust. And it could have been voluntary. All people would have had to do to avoid it: buy more fuel efficient vehicles. If they chose not to, they’d pay more for gas but get the income tax cut. So there I was, 33 years ago, terrified, interviewing the Secretary of the Treasury in his gigantic office, asking him what he thought of that idea. ‘Withering’ would not begin to describe the contempt in his voice when he said, even then, ‘Well, of course we should do that.’ Yes, well? ‘But it’s not politically feasible.’ The voters just won’t got for it. (Even the tiny 4.3-cent hike Clinton/Gore tacked on was met with howls – it could cost a family $30 each year! Confiscatory! Family-wrecking!) And so here we are. But if we had somehow found the will and the wisdom to take this path in the mid-Seventies, we’d have marginally increased returns from work and investment, while providing a clear market-driven signal to consumers and manufacturers to pay more attention to fuel efficiency. Our cars would get twice the mileage they do today . . . we’d be burning that much less fuel into the air . . . that many fewer billions of dollars a week into thin air. Our balance of trade deficit would be much less bad. We’d be a stronger, richer, healthier nation. Onward and upward, but it’s hard not to think back and imagine what could have been. PLUS, IT WON’T SCALD YOUR THIGHS AS BADLY IF YOU DROP IT A frighteningly bright acquaintance, Lindsay Leveen, puts out an email each Thursday he calls Thermo Thursday. It’s always titled, ‘Thank God It’s Thursday,’ except that in place of God he always has some other G – in this week’s case, ‘Grande.’ Thermo Thursday TGIT – Thank Grande It’s Thursday We are not talking about the Rio Grande but the mid-size coffee serving at Starbucks. Yes Starbucks has Short, Tall, Grande and Venti sizes for their coffee and lattes. (Here.) The Grande is a 16 oz size. (Here.) . . . I was recently in the local Starbuck when I overheard the patron in front of me ask for a 140 degree latte. Being a thermo expert I of course had to ask the Barista what this meant. The barista replied that the milk in the 140 degree is warmed less than the normal 160 degrees. Of course my mind started doing mental arithmetic as to how much energy Starbucks could save if all patrons became green and asked for the 140 degree grande non fat latte with one Splenda and no foam single cupped. Yes there are over 15,000 Starbucks stores and Starbucks has yearly revenues of nearly ten billion dollars. They must sell something like 3 billion grande equivalent drinks a year. Twenty degrees difference on a drink that weighs a pound using a specific heat of 1.0 means 60 billion BTUs could be saved. Each of the Starbuck espresso machines is powered by electricity. There are 3412 BTUs in a kilowatt hour. The added warmth of the drinks therefore equals 19.096 million kilowatt hours. The average heat rate of a coal fired power plant, the most common form of power plant in the world is about 10,000 BTU per kilowatt hour. This means about 1.25 pounds of coal needs to be burned to generate a kilowatt hour, so the 19 million kilowatt hours required 23.870 million pounds of coal. Coal is about 50% carbon the rest is ash and moisture with a little hydrogen. Therefore 11,935,000 pounds of carbon are emitted each year to increase the temperature of the grande cups of Starbucks from 140 degrees to 160 degrees. This is almost 6,000 tons of carbon. Expressed as carbon dioxide we have to multiply the amount of carbon by 3.67 and we have that Starbucks is emitting and additional 21,881 tons a year of carbon dioxide simply because the average patron did not request the 140 degree grande non fat latte with one Splenda and no foam single cupped option. This is about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 4,000 cars emit in a year. Of course just driving to Starbucks to get the 140 degree grande non fat latte with one Splenda and no foam single cupped drink causes an untold amount of carbon emissions. ☞ Lindsay is famous for this kind of hard-nosed calculation. Check out his website for more. Hydrogen cars? ‘A total hoax,’ he says. ‘The overall efficiency of producing, compressing, and using the hydrogen in a fuel cell is 46.9%. This is not much greater than the 40% efficiency of the Prius hybrid and well below the efficiency of a diesel hybrid. Researchers at MIT have reported that diesel with hybrid is more green than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.’ KURZWEIL You haven’t watched it yet? I totally get how busy you are. But you want some quality family time this weekend? Watch it with them. There’ll always be another football game. Enjoy.
They Hate That December 20, 2007March 10, 2017 2020 ‘FORESIGHT’ So Congress has passed a bill requiring the average car manufactured in 2020 to get significantly less mileage (35 mpg versus about 45 mpg) than my neighbor’s big, comfy Prius gets today. Wow! That’s showing ’em! And all we had to give President Bush and the Republicans to go along was a continuation of billions of dollars in annual oil company tax breaks. I’m sorry, but we need to do way better than this – and I hope that with a Democratic President and wider margin in Congress – we will. Department of odds and ends . . . CANCELING CHARGES Charlie McChesney: ‘After trying to cancel a recurring charge. have you (or the others) called and/or written to your credit card company and told them to stop paying and refund the past charges? I believe they will go to bat for you and should refund at least three months worth of the charges that were paid after you tried to cancel the charges. They have done this for me.’ F.T.C.: ‘As you can see by my e-mail address, I work for the Federal Trade Commission. I have read some of your posts about problems you and others have had with Symantec and other computer related services, especially with cancellation. I would like to encourage you and others to file your complaints with the FTC. My agency maintains a consumer complaint database and it’s used extensively in our case selection. Filing complaints on-line is quite easy. Here is the link. If you post this information for your readers, I’d appreciate it if you would not identify me.’ ☞ It’s also occurred to me to set up a web site called ClassActionIncubator. As you’ll see, I haven’t figured out yet how to do more than claim the domain and insert a couple of lines of text. But one day you — and an eager trial attorney or two – might go there to post (or read) horror stories organized by perpetrator. (It occurs to me there must already be sites like this? I have spent $10 registering the domain for nothing? Please let me know if there are.) KURZWEIL Gabriel Kaplan: ‘My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago at the age of 31, which she beat by having a double mastectomy. My 16-month old daughter has a 50% of having the same aggressive cancer gene, BRAC1. Kurzweil gives me hope that in twenty years there will be much better alternatives to dealing with the cancer risk. It was a fascinating listen that gave me added peace of mind.’ Fred Brosi: ‘The theme of personification of computers in some of the responses to Kurzweil’s predictions remind me of an email tag line I saw long ago: ‘Don’t anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.” BEWARE THOSE WHO HAVE FOUND THE TRUTH Ted U.: ‘Your correspondent Randy Wolman may well be correct in attributing the quotation ‘Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run from those who have found it’ to Vaclav Havel. But a very similar line (‘Trust those who seek the truth. Beware of those who have found it’) is often attributed to Andre Gide, who, if that attribution is correct, would have priority, and another (‘Grant me the company of those who seek the truth. And God deliver me from those who have found it’) has been attributed to a much earlier personage, namely, Isaac Newton. I have not done any checking on the accuracy of any of these attributions, but it would be interesting to know just which one (or ones) are correct.’
Chickens Coming Home to Roost on Spaceship Earth December 19, 2007March 10, 2017 GIVE THEM THE WORLD Here is the astonishing BBC Planet Earth series on DVD or HD DVD or (Geez – couldn’t someone impose a little discipline here?) Blu-ray DVD. You could spend $15,000 going to the Arctic, waiting silently in one spot for weeks hoping to see a polar bear emerge from hibernation and slide down the hill, followed by her cubs. But that would mean taking time off work, depleting your retirement fund, and possibly losing an appendage to frostbite. Or you could spend $50 or so and watch this 4-disc DVD set rapt in wonder in the comfort of your media room. (I hope someday to have a media room.) First the technorapture of Kurzweil’s video, and now this. THE 2000 YEAR OLD MAN Paul deLespinasse: ‘Thanks for running my comment [yesterday], and for the other interesting Kurzweil comments. Are you familiar with Time Enough For Love, by Robert A. Heinlein? Lazarus Long, its central character, has lived for over 2000 years. The novel suggests some of the benefits and downsides to living very long lives. It may be Heinlein’s best work – I like it better every time I read it, whereas his other leading candidate for ‘best’ (Stranger in a Strange Land) goes down every time.’ GREENER PLUGS This sounds promising. A universal converter smart enough to use only the power it needs. Something to look forward to next Christmas. SYMANTEC FALLS Mozy is working fine for my on-line storage. I’m trying to find a week or two to work on canceling my Symantec charges. One of you wrote in to note that Symantec’s stock has been downgraded. And yet it still sells at 47 times earnings. It’s going to need an entirely new culture to deserve anywhere close to that multiple. CANCELING QUICKEN ON-LINE BACKUP Joe Cherner: ‘You haven’t lived until you try to cancel Quicken Backup ($9.95/mo). Took me three hours, but I think I did it.’ THE HOUSING CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST This (thanks James) is pretty stark. From the Modesto Bee, in California: Another foreclosure record was set in November as 1,336 properties were offered to the highest bidder on the courthouse steps in Modesto, Merced and Stockton. Now here’s the real surprise: Only 17 of them sold, despite lenders offering deeply discounted prices. . . . It seems that even a lender willing to accept $301,500 on a $537,000 mortgage couldn’t attract a buyer. MORE HOUSING CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST Steven Willey passes along Herb Greenberg’s column. (Executive summary: the worst is yet to come.)
A Grand Time to Make $1 Billion Teaching Computers to Write Software December 18, 2007January 6, 2017 A GRAND TIME TO BE RICH AND POWERFUL IN AMERICA Thanks to James Musters for sending me this link: . . . The average Forbes 400 member has $3.8 billion. . . . We have a record 482 billionaires – and record foreclosures. We have a record 482 billionaires – and a record 47 million people without any health insurance. Since 2000, we have added 184 billionaires – and 5 million more people living below the poverty line. The official poverty threshold for one person was a ridiculously low $10,294 in 2006. That won’t get you two pounds of caviar ($9,800) and 25 cigars ($730) on the Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index. The $20,614 family-of-four poverty threshold is lower than the cost of three months of home flower arrangements ($24,525). Wealth is being redistributed from poorer to richer. . . . It’s time for Congress to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy and close the loophole letting billionaire hedge fund speculators pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries. Inequality has roared back to 1920s levels. It was bad for our nation then. It’s bad for our nation now. ☞ And still the Republicans seek to eliminate the estate tax on billionheirs. KURZWEIL FOR FREE AND IN COLOR Bruce Stephenson: ‘The Kurzweil C-SPAN interview video is actually available on-line for free (though it requires RealPlayer), here.’ ☞ I repeat this because I think you’ll really be fascinated. COMPUTERS WRITING SOFTWARE Peter Kaczowka yesterday suggested, ‘We may be near the limits of what computers can do, because of the limitations of their human programmers.’ Peter’s credentials are astonishing, and yet to me this had the ring of all those infamous (if sometimes apocryphal) quotes doubting the future of technology. (‘There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.’ – Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment, in 1977.) So, to Peter’s comment on the difficulty of humans programming computers, I asked, But can’t computers themselves take over much of the job of writing software? (If not now,one day soon?) Jonathan Edwards: ‘In a word, no. Kurzweil’s vision may someday come to pass. But in my opinion if it does, it will be after a radical change in the basic structure of computers themselves – the hardware will have to look much more like a biological brain than it does at present. And the problem then will not be getting a computer that can ‘think,’ it will be figuring out how to build one that thinks about the things you want it to think about, rather than following its own interests. (Your humble correspondent has undergraduate degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics from Brown University and a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky; has been employed in the software industry for 23 years; and wrote his first computer program [to play tic-tac-toe] in 7th grade.)’ Paul deLespinasse: ‘Kaczowka has made the best statement about the stupidity of computers that I have ever seen. Although all of my credentials are in political science, I taught a few computer science classes every year during the second half of my 36 year career at Adrian College, and I did a lecture every year about the dangers of personifying computers and of exaggerating their ‘intelligence.’ As Kaczowka notes, the only sign of intelligence that can be found in computers is that of the people who designed and built them, and of the people who wrote the software that runs on them. When “Deep Blue” won that chess match against a human expert (whose name escapes me at the moment) the expert was really playing against the team of human programmers who wrote the software, not against the computer. ‘It is true that a computer can write software, sort of. I myself have written a short program that produced hundreds of lines of code that would have been very tedious to do by hand, but they were very repetitive lines that varied only in small but systematic details which I furnished to the program as data. But the computer did not really write the program and did nothing creative – it simply followed my instructions blindly. (The most dangerous thing about computers is that people who don’t know anything about how they work tend to personify them, and that the more we personify computers the more plausible it becomes to machinify people – to think of ourselves and others as mere machines with no cosmic significance.)’ Ron Goldthwaite: ‘Yes, software can be written … or evolved … to write software. The most common method is John Koza’s ‘Genetic Programming,’ which he popularized (and patented) in the early 1990’s using the odd programming language LISP to facilitate the arbitrary shuffling of program parts which the genetics-inspired recombinations require. This technique is effective in some specific application areas, but not all (and LISP is no longer necessary). A quick Google search reminded me of this Salon discussion, which is a good general overview including this summary: ‘Software programs that evolve using genetic programming techniques are often convoluted, bizarrely multilayered creations, nothing like the software a human might write.’ I’m an evolutionary biologist and recognize this as a necessary result of evolutionary dynamics. My wife is a software engineer (Sun, Oracle, etc) and would fire any programmer producing such code and expecting to maintain it through its life-cycle. It’s unreadable and unfixable. And intrinsically unreliable. That’s only different in degree from our current software. But a large enough quantitative difference can become qualitative.’ John Leonarz: ‘Years ago I had the opportunity to work with the great software theorist, Dave Parnas, whose observation on artificial intelligence is still pertinent: Artificial intelligence is to real intelligence as artificial flowers are to real flowers: at a distance there is a resemblance, but the closer you look the more clearly you realize the utter inadequacy of the artificial.’ ☞ All fair enough. But I think you will find the Kurzeil video compelling. Technoprogress of the last 50 years has been astounding, and the pace of that progress, he says, just accelerates . . . exponentially. The implications – even as regards your own mortality – are dazzling. * [Mark Centuori: ‘On the subject of predictions, I strongly recommend William A. Sherden’s The Fortune Seller’s: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions. It is a bit dated example-wise but the overall message is timeless (and not math-heavy). The first chapter is online here.’]
More Kurzweil December 17, 2007January 6, 2017 JUSTICE IS BLIND (BUT REPUBLICAN) From the McClatchy newspaper chain: WASHINGTON – The Justice Department’s voting rights chief stepped down Friday amid allegations that he’d used the position to aid a Republican strategy to suppress African-American votes. . . . SEX AMONG OCTUPI Nick Altenbernd: ‘In between quadrupling and 16-tupling (sesidecitupling, I think) is octupling, not sextupling [as per Friday’s column]. You’re obsessing about that orgasm button again.’ ☞ Agh! You are so right! KURZWEIL FOR FREE AND IN COLOR Bruce Stephenson: ‘The Kurzweil C-SPAN interview video is actually available on-line for free (though it requires RealPlayer), here.’ ☞ The full-length video. Although there was something pretty wonderful about just listening to it, freeing your imagination to soar into . . . TECHNORAPTURE Ken Doran: ‘Reading Friday’s column, the word that occurred to me was technorapture. I was hoping that I had invented it, but Brother Google informs me otherwise, at least as to first invention. Those who toss it around seem to have something with more religious overtones in mind, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appropriate it with our own spin.’ AN OPPOSING VIEW Peter Kaczowka: ‘I am an admirer of Ray Kurzweil, and I realize he’s smart. In fact, I worked five years for a ‘Peter S,’ who had previously worked closely with Kurzweil on his reading machine for the blind. Peter S told me I was the best software engineer he had ever known, which presumably included himself and Kurzweil. I may not be as smart as Kurzweil, and I only have a lowly Dartmouth Math BA (1972) compared to a MIT PhD which both Kurzweil and Peter S have. But I am considered a better engineer, so I feel qualified to judge Ray’s statements. ‘I spent five years writing medical imaging software. I attended the Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) convention every year, spoke to radiologists and engineers. My software is used in medical image viewing systems from GE, Fuji, all the major medical equipment vendors. More than half of all medical image viewing stations now sold worldwide run my software. I thus feel qualified to say that modern medical technology is overrated, particularly diagnostic imaging. Radiologists and technologists tend to agree, derisively calling them ‘scams’ instead of ‘scans’. It is Sales and Marketing people that generate the false hype, also true for pharmaceuticals. ‘I am prouder of my DVR software work from 2000-2004 at a company bought by Motorola. If you now buy a DirecTV HD DVR it is running my software. (The DVR itself runs Linux. Imagine that, your DVR is more sophisticated than your Windows PC!) I authored two US patents (Google ‘Peter Kaczowka’), which relate to ‘whole home DVR,’ the ability to watch your single DVR from any TV set in the house, connected by the cable. According to this, that feature will be available from DirecTV in the future. ‘So I am (or was) a technologist. I worked with technologists for 30 years, and I got tired of their self-aggrandizing hyperbole. Psychologists call it ‘cognitive dissonance’: the tendency to see one’s own actions in the best light. I call it hubris. ‘Predictions of the wonderful things that technology will do have been consistently overly optimistic. That is particularly for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Kurzweil’s own field. Here are some wrong predictions by experts: – in the late 60s Marvin Minsky of MIT predicted that within 20 years we would have computers that out-performed humans. Minsky was an adviser on Kubrick’s movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. It is now after 2001, and are we on Jupiter’s moons? Can you talk to your computer? Can your computer read lips? When 2001 came out in 1969, suppose you had predicted that in 2001 ‘people will mainly communicate with computers by rolling a ball on a table, thus moving a graphic cursor on the screen, and clicking a button after said cursor is over the chosen task’? – my ex-wife’s uncle led all speech recognition work at the NSA, from 1950 until the 90s, when he told me ‘in 1950 we were sure that within 20 years, we would have full vocabulary, speaker-independent voice recognition. We now think that may never happen.’ (This means the NSA may be listening to our phone calls but their computers can’t decipher them. I find that reassuring.) – regarding the promise of nuclear energy, Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission said ‘It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter’ [New York Times, August 7, 1955] ‘Sadly, computers are stupid. They require extraordinary effort, from the smartest programmers, in order to perform the simplest tasks. Given their crude functionality, that computers can be used at all is a tribute to the genius of their human users, not their programmers. Simply put, all software sucks, because writing it is extremely hard, and beyond the capability of most humans. We may be near the limits of what computers can do, because of the limitations of their human programmers. Ray Kurzweil probably did not do much programming himself, spending his time managing, theorizing, writing white papers instead, or he might realize that. Maybe he believes other, better programmers (like me) can do it, but we can’t. [But can’t computers themselves take over much of the job of writing software? – A.T.] ‘PS – I am not the only one dubious about Kurzweil’s predictions. Google ‘Kurzweil incorrect predictions‘ and you will see many dissenters, including this one. ‘PPS – Regarding mapping the human genome, which you use as an example of modern technological wonders: note that all the mapping did was read the base-pairs; it did not decipher what they do. Since then scientists have learned that a given gene sequence does not even guarantee what protein will be produced. Also, the ‘garbage’ genes that were thought to not encode information, in fact do. Worse, apparently long sequences of ‘garbage’ genes combine with ‘regular’ genes to determine what proteins get produced. Because of that, we may never be able to decipher the genetic code. It may be unbreakable, like a 30,000 bit encryption scheme. ‘In other words, sequencing the human genome was also a grossly overrated achievement. But the hype accomplished its purpose: billions of dollars pour into genetic research, and the technologists get paid to play :-). ‘Sorry for this long mail, but it was cathartic.’ ☞ And interesting! But if I have my choice between believing in Biblical miracles and technological miracles, I’ll go with the latter, if only because I’ve seen so many of them. ‘We may be near the limits of what computers can do?’ Not bloody likely.
Oh, Boy December 14, 2007March 25, 2012 I always thought I would miss immortality by about 50 years – which really pissed me off. I know, lots of people say they wouldn’t WANT to live forever, but I sure would, if only because it will take that long to successfully cancel my Norton Anti-Virus subscription. It’s just immensely frustrating to think that after a 13 billion-year evolutionary run-up, all leading to this, I would miss it by, like, 15 minutes. My conception has long been that technology is on such an astonishing exponential trajectory – we’ve begun mapping the human genome, for crying out loud! Oh, look, we’ve finished! – that one day soon we’d be able to download our consciousnesses into a brain bank, basically, where we’d be able to do almost all the things we do now . . . email our friends, watch Seinfeld reruns, order movies on demand, play web boggle, go for virtual treks to Machu Pichu . . . a world in which the big addiction would be not cocaine or meth but the orgasm button. (In a brain bank, you wouldn’t literally press buttons. But how far are we now from being able to send electrical impulses from our brains? Not very far.) Class warfare would be primarily between the virtual humans, like me, with 500 years of compound interest enhancing my vast fortune, and the physical humans, like some 25-year-old with an actual screw driver. I’d have $50 trillion (a good chunk of it in Borealis stock); but he would have the ability to disconnect me. Well, now comes great, life-changing news. Not news in the sense that ‘it just happened today.’ News in the sense that most of us just don’t yet fully grasp where we’re headed and how close we are to getting there. Some of you are long-time Ray Kurzweil fans and could have written this same column a year ago (or ten). But most of you, like me, have probably only heard of Kurzweil, admired his accomplishments . . . (Thirty-one years ago, he made a machine that could read text to the blind – Stevie Wonder bought the first one, which was almost as large as he was. Today, Kurzweil’s latest version fits in your pocket and is 1,000 times more capable.) . . . seen his books on a friend’s shelf . . . but never really took the time to plunge in. Well, here is a three-hour audio of Ray Kurzweil on C-SPAN last year that will cost you $1.95 to download and will – here I am searching for an adequate incentive – well, reveal the future of everything. And while I’m obviously exaggerating a bit, Kurzweil’s track record of predictions is so long and sharp – and derive from the kinds of common sense observations that make them so completely understandable – I am not exaggerating very much. Here are two of the things I learned, and then I will shut up and leave you to spend Saturday afternoon with Dr. Kurzweil: First, just to whet your appetite: as stunning as the pace of change and technological advance was these past 50 years (think, for example, how far computers and telephones have advanced), the progress will be about 32 times greater over the next 50. We are at the very beginning of an explosion in technological advance. (The thing about 32, of course, is not that it’s meant to be more precise than a round number, like 30 or 35; but that Dr. Kurzweil inhabits the world of doublings, quadruplings, octuplings, 16-tuplings, 32-tuplings, and so on, so that 32 is a round number, well suited to ballpark estimates.) Second, and here is the main event: in about 15 years, we will have advanced to the point that adult life expectancy is increasing by more than one full year per year. So if you can hang on for the next 15 years, your life expectancy at that point would begin to increase. And your physical and mental capabilities may actually begin to improve. I like this idea very much. Needless to say, there are a hundred, ‘but . . . but . . . buts’ forming on your lips. Most of them are addressed by Dr. Kurzweil and will leave you, at the least, I think, intrigued. My apologies to those of you to whom all this is old hat. To me, who have always been quite serious about ‘just missing’ a future where our consciousnesses basically live on forever, this was as exciting a three hours as I’ve ever spent. Watch – now I’ll get hit by a bus.