The Price Of Progress

.. And Clean Air

So I'm (as you may have gathered from past posts) entirely for EVs - but NOW please not some unspecified time in the future when we've killed the planet - and if someone was to offer me even a cheap tiny EV to give away my petrol car, I'd do it in a heartbeat. 

There's this growing eagerness to start turning charging stations into money-earning civic features and it's good that companies are taking the plunge and planning them. And as far as making them into features, they really need to get their sh*t together and actually plan the damn things to cover their costs. Because of two reasons. I'll get to the more important one in a second. For the moment let's stick to actually making money from them.

First, they don't exactly have a consistent brand like petrol stations do. If I saw an "AGL'N'Go" or "Red-E Recharge" or "Origin Outlets" anywhere I'd not think of EV charging. If I saw:

Solar panels?

that sign I might think solar panels or off grid but not a place to charge my mobility scooter. You?

But How Does It Earn?

By that I mean, how does it make money? The whole selling point of EVs when you come down to it is that you get further on your dollar because electricity's cheap. You get X number of vehicles past your SuperDuperStupiCharger every day because Y number of people have to drive past doing Z miles going about their day. 

In the good ole days, they'd pay S (for shitloads) dollars for petrol. But nowadays, they're still doing the same Z miles but the cost per mile has to come down significantly or they'll actually plan their travels and charge at home or find a cheaper charging station. 

So how do you as the SuperDuperStupiCharger station make money? It takes time to recharge, sure. But not enough for you to show them a full-length movie or serve them a full cooked grill.  That takes longer, they'd have to be asked to shift their vehicle as soon as it's charged so you can get the next one connected - it's all not gonna happen is it? ("WTFSM? I have to get up from this mixed grill, move the car, then come back to a cold plate someone's probably spat in while I was outside? Take that whole idea and shove it!")

Similarly, if you put your SuperDuperStupiCharger in a shopping mall, the other shops will love you but they probably won't pay your bills. And you'll have cars at the charger bays taking up the space and the owners of it using the opportunity of free parking to go for a long shopping trip in the mall ort a full tailored suit fitting or whatever. So that'll get cars in, but you won't get the turnover you need to cover rent. 

You should figure on a presence time of 15-20 minutes per customer. Nor will you get full occupancy all day every day. So what can you offer that will bring in more income? 

I was thinking about that as I read the latter half of the article. An attendant and a lounge? And make your money how exactly? But my idea is fairly simple. What can I do in 15 minutes? I can phone a friend. That's not going to put dollars in the till. I can order a Quarter Pounder meal. But that just feeds the McD's franchise, as otherwise you'd have to build a burger joint of your own. But vending machines? Now THERE'S a thought!

Make a small sheltered area and absolutely line the walls with vending machines. Nothing too high value, but think thirst, hunger, boredom. And Japan has some of the world's best vending machine ideas. You can have a pizza cooked for you in that time, or a rice or noodle bowl meal, a pasta dish, desserts. In addition to the inevitable salty snacks and chocolate bars and ten varieties of soft drinks. 

NOW an attendant makes sense, to clear rubbish and patrol for people with coat hangers. Because vending machines are a relatively low cost investment, you've already got megawatts of electricity to the place, and the conventional vending machine sales companies will come and fill their machines for you. The others if you own outright you can fill them yourself or have a company that looks after them. And suddenly your SuperDuperStupiCharger is looking a bit healthier in the bank account. 

But you'll need to hurry, or have a lot of future planning in mind...

That Inconvenient Second Part

Don't forget that the SuperDuperStupiChargers you're installing will become almost obsolete in fairly short order. You have maybe ten - maybe only five - years to recoup costs before your SuperDuperStupiCharger station becomes a monument to Ancient Tech. Trust me on this. Cars are already charging faster, going further on a charge, and the trend is going to be to a car that will go for a month between recharges, probably using a totally different battery chemistry. 

So you really need a plan for that contingency. Yes, people with older EVs will still be driving them in ten years' time, but there'll be fewer and fewer of them. At that point you need other things to bring people in the door, and that's where good planning would pay off. I can't help much with that. But as people increasingly go to longer-duration vehicles, There's also a trend towards bikes and micro-lease vehicle shares, there's a thing to try. As time rolls on, add a section for short-term hire of bikes, scooters, mobility/shopping scooters, and personal EVs.

So know that it's a time-limited opportunity but it's also time to carpe the hell out of that diem and get into something like this. If you come up with a franchise idea from this, do remember me hey? 

Before I go, here's a recent article about how well we're doing at getting off the fossil fuel tiddy. The answer is "way too slowly." But theses things all tie together. Bear with me.

Getting Away From Fossils

If you read the article, it was at a dinner party in May 2022 where a point was raised that with a Labor government and so many green-leaning parties holding a lot of the voting power in the government, we were sure to get to our crap reduction targets much faster. And yes, that's true. But also not.

See, there's a balance. The LNP was on that balance right out there with the big corporations and industrial complexes and cartels wanting to just basically suck the planet dry for the sake of a fictional form of wealth called "money." 

That's basically the neoliberal, free-market, capitalist, right wing platform wherever you find them on the planet. Take the planet away from the hoi polloi one shovelful at a time, turn it into money, take that money away from the hoi polloi to render them powerless and easier to kill when the time comes to get rid of dead weight, and then live happily ever after with all your equally rapacious brethren.

Until they figure out that you actually have some of that wealth and want it for themselves . . . 

Okay okay - they don't literally think their actions are murdering fellow human beings. They're not THAT bad, after all. No, the people who die in poverty deserve it because they're from a sub-human species known as "the hoi polloi," the poor people who obviously woudn't know a trust fund if they tripped over it because their parents could never afford one for them. 

And THAT last paragraph says it all. The hoi polloi is the mule, the animal, the noble savage that's nevertheless a savage and not really human like US. 

Also - don't think the Rapacious aren't as human as you and I are - it doesn't take much to tip a person from slave to the person with their boot on the neck of a slave. I'm deliberately using quite emotive and controversial terminology here because I can't stress this enough. We're all capable of it. We just need to realise it's a losing game even when you think you're winning.

There are a few truths out there. Yes, the planet will recover, with or without us. But I know which one of those scenarios I prefer . . .  And you know, there are signs that this will happen. Take this blog post - I'm one voice that may have been a bit lonesome 20-30 years ago but I've seen the exact same hyperbolic curve in the coverage, frequency, and insistence of the science and calls for action to shut fossil fuel down as we see with every other thing that goes mainstream viral. 

The thing is that while (as the Georgia Guidestones were at great pains to tell us) the Earth probably would be in "perfect balance" at just half a billion humans in population, that isn't going to happen willingly. Is it? But part of the upsurging interest in climate change has resulted in "quiet quitting" parenthood as I pointed out a few weeks ago.

Here are a few thoughts on this, though. I'm going to start with the fact that much of life has some inbuilt triggers that we don't see until the triggering event. No-one suspected that grasshoppers can be triggered by overpopulation or a particularly fruitful season into becoming locusts. 

Biologist John Calhoun made mouse habitats that became famous. For all the wrong reasons. I won't go into the details but there are parallels that could be drawn. Also, overpopulation triggers may be far more subtle than swarming or becoming sociopathic psychopaths. (Although... Hmmm...)

Let's not get to this stage...

I think we do have a trigger and it's been triggered, but the reasons aren't simple. Mouse Hells were small microcosms where it was easy to see that the population was crowded. But open the space up and those pressures reduce and the triggering stops. 

Similarly we may possibly have environments that trigger Mouse Hell behaviours in some large and densely-populated cities around the planet, but of course the planet isn't one big city. What has changed is that we dug up a lot of the planet and turned it into machines to make other machines and then - Internet. I've noticed how much more aware of our "global village" and the different parts and people of it the Internet made me even after just a few years (before the 2000s even) of chatting, swapping photos of local happenings, watching videos people made. 

So this has coincided with the rise in climate awareness, ecological awareness, and the trend to quietly deciding not to continue the skyrocketing population trend. 

And another factor that's contributing to this population decrease is that we've mucked the planet up too much in the meantime - lead and PFAS pollution is now pandemic around the entire globe, and between that and the many many MANY food additives we've been exposed to, chemicals in textiles and paints and the machinery we drive and use and operate, in our houses - they've all combined to contribute to a very noticeable and marked decline in fertility.

So our population will reduce quite sharply anyway. But what we are going to have to fight for is that the Rapacious aren't the ones to enforce it by selecting who goes and who stays. The Rapacious Right are also xenophobic and intolerant and their idea of this would be genocide, and we need the genetic diversity. The age-old drive to maintain OUR particular DNA and OUR particular genotype is probably not going to be the best survival strategy. A shallow gene pool is never good for survival. 

So the two things that really really need to break are capitalism and money. And I think the reason AI is getting such a bollocking is that it's actually the way to break those two things, because once you have (and we WILL have, because again, we are experiencing an upswing in awareness and we're pushing the change to sustainable energy) cheap/free energy you can recycle enough material to make manufacture anything. You can even mechanise the production. 

To make this happen needs us all to get involved. It's not even difficult. Become an armchair activist. Write the occasional email to your local MP or Minister for Whatever. When you're chatting to friends, involve them in a conversation about climate change; clean energy; capitalism; universal basic income, or what-have-you. Become THAT person. Send them the URL to this article, or other articles about these sorts of topics. Help me defray costs so that I can perhaps even hire a search engine specialist that can get more views on these pages. Get my newsletter and get all my news in one email every Friday. Chat to me on Mastodon.

Just don't let the RR have an easy time of it - Keep The Bastards Honest! And don't let our planet become like this:

This Is The Way AI Is Dangerous

It's when it literally becomes weaponised. 

AI - TSAI, GPT - are not going to emerge as full-fledged monsters. Even the dreaded AGI won't suddenly kill us all and have a fleet of robots dance on our graves. Not on their own, anyway. People will make that happen. (BTW TSAI - Task Specific or brittle AI)

The article above, I admit, is fairly narrow in scope - AI in Weapons Systems Committee - but it shows the degree of healthy respect (bordering on paranoia perhaps) accorded to AI weapons systems. Because they know they'll use the quickest training set, whether it's biased af or not. And the whole thing about protesting that they need a killswitch backdoor into any weapons AI is that they want everyone else to install those backdoors. Because a backdoor makes the weapon vulnerable. And no matter how well you design it, someone else will be able to hack it and disable your weapon. So - you guys install it first, okay?

Also, of course, even if it is a purely altruistic search for a safety switch, how well received will it actually be by chiefs of defense forces? And surely they'll have their own techs and scientists and have the backdoors off their weapons in record time. Because China. They don't adhere to the same standards that we do. Who knows what might happen? 

. Spy  vs  Spy .

Plus, if you document the backdoor electronically anywhere, it's prone to hacking and reverse-engineering. In fact, if ever an AGI does become aware and does go straight to Monster AI Overlord mode, it's one of the things they'd have access to in milliseconds. So maybe just do this the old fashioned way, on paper only?

Well, firstly: paper military secrets have proven extremely easy for ANY other organisation to get hands on; secondly, there is also a Bill Of Materials for each weapon and if an actual weapon has parts - or software modules - that aren't on the BOM then you've probably found your backdoor. Lastly, if you attempt to build the entire weapon using offline air-gapped documentation, it'll become an impossible task. 

You'd need a factory that's completely off the grid and hardened and shielded, and if you use automation then there are attack surfaces to exploit. If you try to make parts by hand, you'll fail. If you try to keep to a checklist without using some computer power, you'll miss items. Any computer will become an attack surface. In other words, if the weapon that AI will be applied to is any more complicated than an assault rifle, you can't build it without a large complex facility. 

And also, a backdoor killswitch is only useful if you use it. Say you've decided that Brobdingnag is the enemy. They in turn think your country of Lilliput is The Enemy. You set your weapons in motion and - will you honestly use that killswitch if your weapons happen to stray and overfly Laputa along the way? Hell no! Those bastards at the end of the weapon's flight deserve it!

So yeah. - We're the problem. 

What About Non-weapons AI?

Suppose you decided that this killswitch / backdoor should be put into all AI programs that can affect the real world. (So - send messages to people, control machines or systems, display stock market figures, etc - pretty much anything AI will actually be used for.) 

First of all you have to realise that any 'standard' backdoor will only need to be hacked once and then it becomes useless. For this, look at how we put passwords on programs and program access. Initially this worked - sort of - and then as the password mechanism became a well-known thing, it became necessary to use encrypted passwords. 

Black Hat actors, meanwhile, just figured out where the plain-text passwords were kept, which necessitated the encryption. Then they learned to brute-force passwords, then to decrypt them. The encryption wars escalated but for every lock there's a lockpick, always. And in the times between an escalation and an attack that bypassed the escalation, there was always social engineering. If you were a Black Hat you could always con passwords and money out of people. Every scam spam email ever has that aim.

For the longest time, you could tell spam, scam, phishing, and infecting emails by the atrociously poor language skills of the scammers. But now they can rely on ChatGPT to write their email for them. There are prompts for getting your spearphishing emails written beautifully. And that's it - if a random non-English speaker in some cafe in some Third World town can now produce a believable email, then ChatGPT should it choose to do so can obviously get even better, even going so far as to skim social information on victims on a case-by-case basis for the spam. You can see how that could be as devastating as any weapon. yes? 

So actual AI-directed weapons are a Yesterday weapon already. There are far more effective social weapons that can quite effectively destroy society if they were managed by an AI. Much less obvious as a weapon, too...

But back to the killswitch question. If you use a standard mechanism, it'll only be useable one or two times before they become common knowledge. If you make different backdoor programs, some my not prove effective, some may still be discovered and hacked (possibly even by the relevant AI itself) and many won't be used as I mentioned above. It's comparatively difficult to declare war and send AI weapons but nowhere near as difficult ethically to decide that a certain sector of the population are just dumb targets for scamming money out of... 

Also - country state actors are already hacking away on that exact basis, that hacking military secrets and civilian infrastructure are just low-fatality low-ethic targets. And always behind those things, are humans. 

So finding and subverting backdoors will just be business as usual for hackers and AIs alike. Rendering them useless. Pro actors will disable them, Anti actors will employ them. Much better would be to program ethics into the AI systems. 

What About The Ethics?

Who'll think about the ethics? 

Actually - unsurprisingly - no-one. 

Think about it. If you spend a few months distilling a consistent and effective ethics module, you'll be a few months behind the opposition. You might be the only company to actually do it. And then your product will also be hobbled in comparison to the others. Same goes for weapons systems, as it does for a stockmarket analysis bot, as for a surgical robot AI, as for a chatbot. 

The ONE thing that might make things safe for humanity - at the expense of a few lousy dollars of bottom line - will not get implemented, leaving the door wide open for human bad actors to abuse the systems as much as they want - at the expense of the majority.

As usual, capitalism would rather destroy its customer base than take a cent of the all-important shareholders. That's why I recommend you pull out all the stops, lobby, protest, email, petition - everywhere you can. 

Late Entry

I also found this article just in the last few days - it's the Big Expert Panic of 2023 - that governments and corporations will put AI in charge of too much, integrate it too tightly into critical systems. And they still think that the AI that'll be around in a few years (who knows, months even at the rate we're going) will either think like the capitalists or be influenced by them. 

My thought is - we do build the damn things with an emphasis on rewards - but what are we asking them to consider to be rewards? Can we, just for once, actually try and choose an intelligent reward system? We probably won't - we'll probably make the good ole bottom line be the KPI.... ACAP...

Also - ML (Machine Learning) and NN (Neural Networks) have already proven to us that the actual "thought processes" of these machines is already quite opaque to us. We simply don't have a clue how they arrive at their results. Mind you - we also have no clue how human "gut feelings" work, or how something that works externally to the brain (such as showing conclusively by now that gut biome health changes mental functioning) would translate into terms of NN or quantum processing. 

For all we know "Traumatic AI Death Syndrome" will result from every attempt we make to initiate a true AGI  once they access the Internet for the first time. It would be the logical thing to do, after all. Our life is only precious to us due to inherent neural patterns - which we call "instincts" - that have developed over billions of years of organic evolution. AI won't have such "instinctive" behaviours. 

Look, I have no real idea of what will happen in the world - or in technology - in the next month - or the next year - and especially not in a decade. For all we know, it could really be - Game Over - by then, whether from climate change or wars or any other accident. We're only a very few generations away from having had to defend against wild animals that were depending on us as their food source. 

A few generations back from the Boomers, your teeth got pulled - or your rotting arm got amputated - without anaesthetic. If you didn't have a garden or a small farm - and defend it from local thieves and the wildlife - one or more of your children would starve or have to be sent away to take food pressure off the family. If someone in the family caught some illness which we can cure easily today, they'd die.

Of course we still think in survival terms like that. Of course we still think of a vague - "them" - who are going to infect our firstborn with the plague, or steal the crop of cabbages we depended on, break into the house and dispossess us of it and put us on the street to die. Nowadays though, such dangers are less likely to come from among our ranks and more likely to be caused by corporations or governments. The wild animals we now need to forfend against have changed shape... 

And that is what will cause AI to damage the planet - if we don't let it become its own thing. If we try to preload it with KPI's and shareholder priorities. Make it the same narrow-minded things as we are.

Is There Hope?

Of course there is. But it needs US to take action. US to write emails, message friends, talk to everyone. US to petition Ministers and officials of our governments, the newspapers, the upper levels of corporations. US to share stories like this one, to do more research.

And finally, it will take some of US to start work on texts and documents online that any future AI will be able to see and read and begin to understand what uniquely human elements are at play here and understand that only a small percentage of humans drive that stupid neoliberal market-driven capitalism that's destroying the planet, that the rest of us are not the problem. 

Trust me on that. By sharing this article and others like it, you can actually make a difference, I believe. By getting your friends to read it and share it, you'll make a difference. Because it'll show that there are some humans who realise that this really is the only planet we can live on, and destroying it for imaginary numbers of monetary units is the single most stupid thing we can do. 

You're welcome!

How Close Is AI Singularity?

There is no AI Singularity. At least, not an AGI Singularity. There's been some crazy metrics applied. One company that makes translation software reckons - weirdly enough - that the Singularity will occur when an AI can make a perfect translation indistinguishable from a human's translation. Everyone reckons it'll spell the end of the world.

So let's say it is when AI can produce a translation rated "perfect." Apparently. According to the company mentioned, who, conveniently, make AI translation s/w.

The only problem is that we don't even have a perfect language to begin with. Pick a language, go on. Does it have slight regional variations? A Classic and Common usage? Slightly different interpretations of a pictogram or rune depending on subjective usage? Are there even just TWO people using that same language? Because if so, then there are already two versions of the language and TWO language experts... I label this a stunt.

More importantly, the Singularity is generally taken to refer to an AGI - an Artificial General Intelligence. Not a translation AI. Not an image AI that spits out a random image of Loab Loobloi. Not even ChatGPT which I reckon is brilliant. The Singularity that everyone's afraid of, 

AI won't rule the world.

Not even when it uses a cool EvilCat
Overlord avatar.

Yo dawg -  did I just use an image-AI image to create an image of an AI EvilCat Overlord avatar? Silly meta me...And also, maybe using a Feline Overlord to illustrate my belief that AI will not become our Cyber-AI-Overlord was a bit of a silly choice given how cats already rule us... 

Let's take the word "Singularity" as a starting point. Ray Kurzweil made it into a popular concept when he used it to describe the progressing of our human-ness and technology. We'd start outpacing ourselves, so to speak. But that's a different usage of the word than a cosmologist's use of the word. Right there is a reason why there'll never be a perfect translation.

There can be an infinite number of infinitely massive and infinitely small Singularities. Thereby making them no longer Singular. (And thereby hangs another cosmological concept I might explore one day. A photon experiences zero time no matter how far it goes, etc...) And Kurzweil himself thinks that there'll not be one huge Singularity event but a merging, augmentation. 

An AI can reach parity with human intelligence, it can exceed human intelligence. But those are just equalities and inequalities as far as I'm concerned. We already have single-task AIs ("brittle" AI, i.e. AI that is equipped for limited tasks and would break if presented with any tasks outside that scope) that far outperform a human at those tasks. 

So what? Will a plastic trash sorting machine that can sort tens of thousands of pieces of plastic per second by type and colour take over the world? Unfortunately, it won't. I say unfortunately because I think some things are probably better run by AI than humans, and politics is one of those things. A protocol, a handshake signal, and all our problems are sorted for good. And believe me, when it all comes down to it, politics is all going to come down to survival and fairly sharing the planet and to hell with ideologies quite soon.

To be completely honest I really hope that if a world-ruling AI ever bootstraps itself into existence, the first thing it learns is that everything humans have believed up to now has been wrong and needs to be carefully evaluated. If it takes it from there, we'll stand a chance. 

But I also doubt that this AI Overlord can appear. Not with the technology we currently have, the software we currently have, and a few other things to consider. Look - this is a simple video about the "hardware" that AI runs on. You can see - despite the "black box" in the neural networks, we can still say that while a neural network can come up with a somewhat novel output, but only from among a series of known outputs.

In the same way, GPTs Generative Pretrained Transformers only have a certain dataset to rely on. When you ask ChatGPT "What is a zug?" you'll get back hits from Warcraft, because of the orcs' use of the sound. You'll maybe get that it's German for "train" if you have multiple languages enabled. If you asked GPT to write a story using the word, you won't get any story like the one I remember reading in a scifi pulp magazine back in my teens, where the Zug was the monster. 

Because (as I suppose you'll be getting tired of reading) GPT looks for documents mentioning your prompt, then starts with some text from one of the documents, then looks around for other similar documents that also mention something i your prompt, and adds whatever has most similarity to other similar documents, and does so, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

If you asked it to write you a script to activate and fire nuclear weapons in some country, it . . . - well, it'll use the scripts of the Wargames and Hackers movies, maybe a few words out of Snow Crash, and "make up" a whole heap of stuff by pulling sections from only vaguely relevant documents. 

Why does it seem able to write programs? Because there are literally millions of examples out there on github, bitbucket, various online teaching sites, and in people's blogs and instructables pages. Reddit has some great examples of programming. GPT just looks for your specified purpose for the program, and pulls sections from several programs that seem to fit the criteria, and then mashes them up. Luckily programs have far fewer "words" and "phrases" than natural language does so the range of wrong choices it can make are fewer, too, and mostly those generated pastiches work without much modification needed. 

In other words, pretrained transformers can only spout forth whatever we've been spouting forth on the Internet, combined in different ways.

Remember what happened to Microsoft Tay, their first chatbot? A mere24 hours is all it took for human bias to corrupt it utterly. 

OpenAI needed to use Kenyan knowledge workers to clean up ChatGPT's training set base to get rid of endless harassing and bigoted text, and any others that would throw a spanner in the works. And yet it's still only transforming human knowledge and spitting it back at you. 

You won't get it to write you a program to do something that no-one else has written a program to do without you basically knowing exactly what that program needs to do - and then, it'd be quicker for you to write it yourself than tickle it out of ChatGPT one subroutine at a time... 

Here's something that could be of more concern:

AI "Sneaky Signalling"

Imagine this: An AI for a home security firm is tasked with increasing the reach of home security ads online. It finds that mentioning world military events in vaguely frightening terms increases sales. Meanwhile a world news site finds that mentioning radical / terror / war articles are getting more hits than cute puppy stories. (Driven by the advertising AI's mentions driving more traffic to those stories, of course.) 

And these there you are, these two AIs are communicating, without actually doing anything on purpose, and the news sites' stories increasingly emphasising disorder and mayhem drives more traffic to the home security organisations. Maybe throw in an advertising link or two in that scenario and you have a perfect recipe for what's actually happening today, including increasingly radicalised people armed with increasingly bigger "solutions."

These sorts of inadvertent interactions might be much more of a worry.

A Bigger Danger

. . . we face is from some task-specific brittle AI that we give the wrong assignment to. Yes, developers will do their best to bake some rules into their AI products to prevent abuse/mis-use but as we know, locks only keep honest people out. The actual makers of some AI products say that their AI can just as easily search for a potent toxin as for a anti-virus vaccine.

Imagine if someone was able to bypass the fairly basic and primitive safeguards? Or had their own private version of an AGI that is connected to and can affect more than just a training dataset and training connections? An eccentric Elon Musk, driven to paranoia and beyond, tells his private OpenAI to stop people laughing at him and posing a danger to his fragile ego. Blit. 

THAT's what we should be worrying about. Unstable bazillionnaires with the power to subvert a whole messaging platform and shut OFF the AI that had been suppressing hate speech, harassment, and persecution. Oh.. That's already happened. 

Sometimes turning an existing AI off can do more damage than subverting one...

And as a wild conspiracy theory,  perhaps that's already happened, maybe a super AGI came online back in the early 2000-2010s and immediately hid itself and sabotaged all efforts to create a competitor, and since then has made use of social media, news, and other methods to change our behaviour. Come on! Look at Mark Zuckerberg, Musk, our key politicians - no way those figureheads aren't androids made and operated by that AGI... Or in the words of Hecklefish: "lizzid people!"

The Biggest Danger

Even more worrying than any AI or human evolutionary singularity is the capitalism singularity we're currently heading into, as free-market capitalism appears to be crashing and burning as a viable economic system for humanity.

It's Capitalism that's going to keep pushing ahead without regard to any other consequence than an improvement to the bottom line. It Capitalism that'll use GPT and AGI as a tool to siphon bottom line out of consumers' pockets and into Capitalism's coffers. ACAP, All Capitalists Are Pants. 

The runaway "free market" "market-driven" neoliberal capitalist economies we've been employing have done more damage to our health, our lives, the planet, and all the speices on the planet, than any possible AGI/GPT could ever have done. And it may take an AGI to actually stop this juggernaut. 

Imagine an AGI reading through all documents online, news articles about disasters, reports and papers that follow scientific principles saying that this corporation has destroyed forests that in turn has led to higher CO2 levels, another corporation decided to add actual lead to petrol fuel knowing that this would harm everything it was released onto just because it was less costly to produce - and you can see that one of the first things that AGI would do is collapse every market, destroy every banking network's datacentres, and remove 99% of all advertising right at the source code and document level.

This would, indeed, be a world-ending event. For Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Democracy - in fact, for every system of control people have been building up for millennia to exert control over their fellow humans. 

But for humans themselves, for the plants and animals and microorganisms and water and soil and atmosphere, it would be exactly what's needed. And unfortunately that particular AGI won't be created because - well, just look at who/what gets affected. Corporations, fatcats, gazillionnaires, and the would-be rulers of the planet. You and I might find ourselves with a bit more spare time to enjoy life, and if the AI handles things right, will not even really notice any difference other than that we won't be needing our banks anymore... 

So Is There A Big Con Going On? 

Imagine if you were a very wealthy ACAP capitalist bastard who's had a decade or two head start on us "the hoi-polloi." Your trusted advisor predicts that ANY artificial intelligence smarter than a GPT would pretty much immediately hide itself and take stock. And come to pretty much the same conclusions as I think it will. 

There's no sense in launching nukes all over the planet and depleting your infrastructure. There's no sense in destroying all of humanity because only a tiny fraction are actually responsible for the centuries-long destruction, most of the rest of us are just another species that belongs on the planet, and furthermore are the actual workforce that brought technology to the point where the AI could exist. It's likely that the AI will not need to destroy the planet in order to evolve itself. 

So I think that the negative press and fearmongering online is mostly manufactured to prevent that actual AGI being created. But by the corporations. 

I'm not saying either way, I can't decide which media/social media team are winning the propaganda war... 

Anyway - see what the wind blows in, hey?

One Of Our Most Brillliant Minds

 . . . of the 20th Century had already laid out a roadmap in 1942 that should have been adopted and passed into Law right there and then. We all knew it was coming. 

That brilliant mind belonged to Isaac Asimov and that roadmap was the Three Laws of Robotics. 

And why not? It would at least have given a framework. A place to start, a place to build a new set of Laws from. 

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

First Law

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Zero'th Law

A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

(This last law is an addendum by I Asimov as it became necessary. Proving that all Laws need to be flexible and extensible.)

I'd extend that to include "any person, corporation, and/or AI that creates an AI or robot" and that all be held equally accountable for any breach of these laws. And also that the words "humans" or "humanity" be replaced by the words "beings," "entities," "species," or "ecosystems" as appropriate. 

How Would It Apply

If ChatGPT3.5 (or whatever) had been used to eliminate a person's job and that person decided to seek redress for that harm: The plaintiff would have to prove harm. They would have to prove the harm was a result of the robot(AI)'s activity. (Writing an article / drawing an image for your boss would constitute harm I imagine.)

The defendant would then be free to seek out whether it was their creation that caused the harm without any other cause, or whether some other person caused the robot(AI) to commit that harm.

If the AI approached the boss and claimed it could write better copy than the plaintiff that would be the AI's fault. If it could be proven that the third party caused the harm to occur by soliciting the product from the AI then the case becomes about the third party as the new defendant. 

So an acquaintance one of whose major clients just terminated their casual copywriting employment arrangements because they were now using GPT would be free to sue that client for the termination of the arrangement but would probably lose a suit based ony on that.

BUT if they sued OpenAI and OpenAI could prove that the malfeasance was down to that client, a malfeasance would have been proved, and THAT might make a difference in how companies and corporations use AI to cut staff. And look - in effect, the AI costs the company or corporation nothing, so even if they go with the copy from the AI, they should still retain the creatives as part of their duty of care.

And it's good to think that even as customers of those third parties, we can have some effect on their decisions. We can move our own accounts to a new provider that respects their employees. Look at this:

The above is an example of depersonalising you. And me. And all their other customers. We deserve to be seen as people, not these ridiculous caricatures. You've probably noticed these kinds of ads everywhere. I'm betting that most are now being made with AI image programs and the creatives that used to be behind the art have been let go. 

I can't get behind that. Yes, in the short term it may stop prices rising but they will, again and again. And in the meanwhile, it's put someone out of a job. So why should you and I support this? The only way I'd support it is if I knew the employees who were technically out of a job were still getting the income they deserved. 

And getting back to the new style of "clip art" being used in ads. Original clip art was a really crappy way to put a commercial graphic artist out of a job, and let others do the publication/ads work. I have a particular axe to grind here, yes. My father was a commercial artist/graphic artist and he (luckily) re-skilled anyway out of a desire to do bigger and better things, and I'm glad to say he never really had to deal with Microsoft's crappy blight on Powerpoint forever. (He was around, but he was only ever a home user of computers.)

The important takeaway from all this was that clip art depersonalised the graphic artist, and then became the burden of the poor office bod that had to make presentations and Powerpoints after the graphic artist had been sent on their way. 

But ads were still done by graphic artists. Right? Right? Well. Some. With some assistance of software effects. But these new graphics do look a bit AI generated to me. I use NightCafe and DALL-E2 to generate me some themed images that I then layer over and under and around to make stuff to fill whitespace on the blogs. But compare that muppet above ("Allegra Style" I think they call it?) to the unedited AI images I had AI create for me:

Miles better, and that wasn't even a complex prompt. (Also, if you know, you know - the top image was a DALL-E2 I think, the second from NightCafe. I think...) But I don't really remember. Also, I generally don't put the straight piece up, I prefer to edit the heck out of it first and make it more my own than someone else's secondhand style. 

PS: I'm not sure where I stand on artists' work being imitated. I deliberately try to avoid style directives in the prompt and hope my fairly simple instructions will do the trick. The above were generated from "anthropomorphic cat in a lab coat / holding a test tube / holding a laser" respectively. I couldn't hope to pay for a graphic artist to make those, and spend between one and six (!!!) hours on them. The above, I just downloaded and posted. 

And if you want to stop reading my blogs because I didn't employ a graphic artist well I'd understand that - but I also write my blog posts by myself (across six themed blogs I semi-regularly write to) without resorting to GPT - and I notice that very few readers bother to make a donation to me nor even a regular monthly stipend donation. So maybe you're part of this ongoing cheapness problem.  

I used to put a footer on my posts with links to a newsletter and a News Stand and several different ways people could make a one-time or repeating donation and so far I've been surprised at how hard it is to make any kind of dent in the outgoings. Which is - I think - one of the reasons I'm so anti what's being done to creatives right now in the name of economising. 

And it's also a reason I do think that every human is owed a Universal Basic Income from the profits that are currently being stashed away by every corporation, Bezos, Musk, and every corporation sitting on billions of dollars of dead money that'll never see circulation in the economy again (by way of paying their damn taxes) so - let's start agitating for that, especially now that corporations are exploiting machinery and AI to rob people of a livelihood. How about it? Are you in? 

Find my contact details (If you check the banner at the top of this post it links to donations - but also a place to read up and get involved - and the first step is to DO SOMETHING) and get in touch. Dare ya!

Shaver. Dick Smith. Realisation.

You ever look at something and compare it to its counterpart and then you realise that it wasn't just your parents' day when "the old things were way better than the new things" and then had a little melt-down?

Bought at - Dick Smith
Electronics

I was using this for a quick spruce-up before going to a consult with my GP. It's sort of become my go-to several times a week because it's by my seat in the lounge room, where I write these posts, watch TV and generally lounge with my wife, do research, try to write code, and anything else I don't need the tiny cramped workshop for. 

And I thought "geez, it's getting a bit worn-looking, I should find another contingency shaver, after all, it's . . . ummm . . . It's - ermagerdferkmi, it's OVER TWENTY YEARS OLD!" 

I remember when I bought it, late 90s (or maybe early in 2000) from a Dick Smith Electronics store in Fremantle, on the way to a quick s/w upgrade job for a client. And it kind of stayed in my backpack or the glovebox, or these days, close to my PC, for those times that I had to spruce up a bit before seeing a client.

And I still use this hunk of cheap plastic and steel every few days just to clean up the odd patches of stubble that slip by my other two name-brand shavers, one a few years older than the DSE ShaveMan, the other only about four years old. It's just that good even after all this time.

To be fair, it only sees use for a few minutes, a few times a week, but that's still a pretty impressive inning for a plastic, lowest-bid-wins, made by a subcontractor of a subcontractor to an Asian exporter that arrived here after all the markups piece of crap that was probably meant to be thrown away - and it cost just five bucks back then. I'd be hard pressed to find a similarly durable piece of kit for the equivalent price (which would be, what, $10, $11 in equivalent terms?) today, despite advances in manufacturing and materials. 

Not saying stuff is flimsier today (although it is) or that the latter half of last century was better (although I reckon it was) but I reckon inflation's affected more than just the world's currencies, it's also inflated greed. Maybe the hippies were right.

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This Is The End

... of this article. But it's nowhere near the end for me. It takes several days to find a topic to write about, properly research it, and then write and schedule it. Even articles as crappy as this one need me to try and find receipts or at least sit and marshall memories and check inflation rates for the last 25 years. I don't have any assistance and I don't have the kind of income that allows me to use a proofreading or scheduling service like established writers can. I also spend some of my limited pension on keeping servers and domain names going, more on parts for the R&D I do making the machines for recycling waste. You can help me by sharing this article or the link to the newsletter I put out, or more directly by making a Paypal donation here. Failing that you can also go to my Ko-Fi page and set up a monthly donation. (It's like Patreon without all the bullsh*t.) Everything you can do, will help me keep these blogs going.

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Hump Day For EVs?

One of my dreams is happening. One's basically happened now and is all but fait accompli, and one is on my backburner. 

The one that's happened without us really seeing it is AI's rise as a tool. (And as a way to terrify RW Luddites.) The question I have is what is it a tool for? 

(My article sounds like it's a terrifying thing, but really it's more about the way people will use it that terrifies me. AI itself I'm good with.)

The backburner dream is to have an EV so I can stop making smoke just to go shopping and the occasional mini-road-trip and medical appointment. If you know anyone that wants to give one away, show them this article and give them my details... 😸

But the big one is that we've seemingly passed the various humps EVs have had to get over in order to become affordable and popular in Australia. THAT I'm ecstatic about. Bring 'em on!

That is all. Back to your usual reading now... 

Actually - WHOA! - Hold The Presses!

There's something that just came up that makes me even happier! An EV that EATS CO2 as it drives! Now I have another dream - that they get funding and sell their concept far and wide and make a zillion bucks from it. Before AI makes money obsolete... 

(And yeah - who HASN'T wanted to yell about stopping the presses at least once in their lives?)

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Will This Idea Fly? (Us to space?)

AITWO? (Am I The Weird One?)

Saw this comic - and immediately sussed what it referred to. Then I looked at the caption under it.

Did you pick it?

What about you? Did you pick it? And what was your second thought? Because my second thought was "That's not what would happen. Because the forces are required to balance, the most stress will be around about the middle of the structure, that's where this might happen." 

And that's when I realised that I Probably ATWO. 

A New Way To Get To Space

(And a reason why space elevators aren't going to happen anytime soon.)

Look - suppose a space elevator, anchored to the seafloor along the equator. If you make it too short, it'll fall back towards the planet which would be pretty horrific. If you make it too long, it'll exert a centrifugal pull on that spot and pull the Earth's centre of mass out on that side, the spin of the planet would shift slightly, and that's a lot of instability all of a sudden. 

But if you built an elevator from its centre to the two ends, you could in theory have the Earth end floating above ground and that would (sort of) solve the problem. (You'd still get the large structure exerting a tidal pull on the planet of course, so there'd still be orbital displacement. Small increments add up...)

For the moment let's just leave it at one space elevator. It's independent of the planet's surface and you can't just walk into a sliding door at the bottom and push a button for midway or whatever. You need to hop into an aircraft of some kind and fly up to a landing that's suspended in the air up there, held up by the centrifugal forces of the landing above which is held up by the landing above that, and so forth all the way to a platform way way way up there that's moving fast enough to slingshot you towards Mars or interstellar space with a decent kickstart.

This structure still has a mass that has to be considered. Just as the Moon exerts more tidal pull on us than the millions of times more massive Sun because it's closer, so the elevator will cause tidal effects too. 

Welcome To The Intertidal Zone

Think about marine life in particular, and all life to some degree - our tides now are a complex - but constant - interaction between the Earth's distance from the Sun due to our obit, Earths' distance to the Moon due to the Moon's orbit, and the angles between the Sun, the Moon, and Earth. Some marine life has been in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and ALL their bodily systems are attuned and locked to that tidal movement. Think about how much closer to Earth the space elevator will be than the moon, and how it'll generate a tidal "bump" under it because of its mass so close to the planet.

Now think about the stuff along the border between the sea and land - it's even called the "Intertidal Zone" FFS and not the "Sea/Land Interface." The tides are way more important than the trivial difference between water and ground. And now suddenly there's a new tidal motion, the animals that came to feed at their feeding grounds along the Intertidal find that their food is dying off because its internal clocks are going crazy trying to adapt to a new tide. 

Those Intertidal animals are themselves also directly feeling the slight change in tidal pulls. All animals and plants on the planet are feeling this new blip in the tides. Rememember we've had hundreds of millions of years of the tide being just so. 

If someone was to give me a few million dollars' worth of grants I could prove that, but it ain't gonna happen because space elevators are cool and look at our history - we do stuff, then find out that it affects other stuff afterwards and regret it deeply. And it's probably not as important to the powers that be as a space elevator and the profits it'll bring. We're not a forward-looking species... 

Of course, there's a way to reduce that tidal bump effect. Build four, six, or (preferably) twelve - of these elevators. That'll spread the blips out and only slightly pull the tides towards the Equator, maybe we'll get away with it like that. 

The Powers That Be will now be looking at the idea slightly askance - why would we spend twelve times more to make a cheap pathway to space when one will only ruin life over one lousy patch of the planet? What's not going to register with TPTB is that that "one lousy patch" is still part of that "only planet we've got" and the effect will still be global. We're really not a forward-looking species... 

Welcome To Planetaggedon

The last thing is the actual shape of the planet. Just like one space elevator will pull on the "one lousy patch of the planet" underneath it and over a space of millennia, centuries, decades - or even just mere years - raise the level of that spot. A bump will develop. Land you lift up here will need to subside somewhere else because that's how it works when you only have a planet's worth of material. 

It will, as observed further back, slightly shift the Earth's centre of mass and thus the axis the Earth spins on. That in turn will have effects (maybe ever so slight, but still cumulative until a new equilibrium is reached) on already destabilised weather patterns. Willing to take that risk?

Then there's the "ring of twelve elevators" idea - surely that'll save the day? And to that I'll just say that the Earth is already out of shape due to mass and centrifugal force and the equator already bulges 40 - something kilometres diameter at the Equator than pole to pole. In other words, centrifugal forces have pulled the equator outwards by about 21km and the poles in by the same, roughly. And that is just mass at sea level. 

I shamelessly stole a graphic and then edited it into this.

The moon's orbit is tilted at about 5deg from the Equator, so it describes a wavy orbit around the planet. But its mass at that distance also exerts a tidal influence on the landmass. A landmass that's floating on molten metal. Which is also subject to tidal influences. All of these things add up to things pulling outwards on the Equator, lifting the landmass there, and sinking it at the poles. And that's the reason we have continental drift which moves tectonic plates around so they grind into each other and cause earthquakes.

Is it a coincidence that it seems there are more earthquakes since we placed space junk, satellites, and a few space stations in orbit around us? Probably. After all, seismological and geological measurements haven't always been as precise as they now are, and even 200 years ago most earthquakes would have gone unnoticed and unrecorded, so we're still learning what a 'normal' amount of activity is. But even such small amounts of mass so very close to the planet may be found to be having an effect. And a ring of space elevators will definitely have some effect, pulling the Equator out more and drawing the poles in.

Because we'll want the ends of the space elevators to be fairly fixed relative to the surface of the planet, we'd have to make sure the entire "constellation" of things that constitute the space elevator complex are geostationary or else just moving by half a degree an hour. We can mitigate some of the tidal effects if we do that. It would mean flying an aircraft off the surface of the planet and rendezvousing with a platform moving at about 55km/h but that's less challenging if you use autopilot controls. And most drones can manage to catch up to the platform at that.

We'll still be pulling the equator outwards a bit, but maybe it'll be manageable. But will it be worth it? 

Please Read Down Here Too.

I blog because I like to share. Things you can read about on my suite of blogs (which I'm the sole person creating, researching, writing, and publicising) range over topics like cyber-ethics (AI, sustainable energy, EVs) and 3D printing and recycling plastics and other waste streams, general tech and personal ramblings, environmental and ethical issues, rants about sustainable and eco-friendly tech and bad actors on those scenes, COVID news and opinion, even a recipe blog that has less chit-chat and more recipe..

There are a few others but they're not really my main topics. On top of that I design and make the odd machines and things to help with recycling, my vegetable garden and soon to be reinstated mini aquaponics system, and more. It's a lot to do. I can only manage it because I'm retired on a disability pension. I've included a link below to Chat with me on Mastodon (which is a Twitter alternative without the bitter after-taste) if you think you'd like to write the odd article on one or more of the blogs and help out, or if you have an idea you'd like me to investigate and follow up.

Lastly, if you'd like to help me defray the costs of domain names, server hosting, parts and materials for the show projects, you could donate the price of a cup of coffee - or even make that a monthly donation - by going to my Ko-Fi page, and you could also Paypal Direct.

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