The Road to Hell…

It is said that “The road to hell is paved only with good intentions”. Does this folkloric knowledge “hods water” and if so, why and how? Let’s explore this concept with few diagrams and a bit of ideation around them.

Humans (and not only) are born in this reality and are roaming it until they die. During all this time all forms of life must solve one big problem, and that is, how to maintain their “alive” state. This implies solving various problems among others how to find or grow food and keep away from being food for other living beings.

Humans are one of the few species that have mastered collaboration in large groups and this is due to our larger magnitude of the abilities to communicate more efficiently in large groups.

Unfortunately to us this reality is much more complex than we can handle now or ever, even if its “guts” are working by following relatively simple rules (quantum mechanics might look weird but it is make of relatively simple rules). This is simply because of its immensity of states and configurations those simple rules can combine in order to create diversity.

The best we can do is only to ever increase our abilities to more accurately know what the reality is by using Scientific Methods in order to reduce the risk of confusions and mistakes.

In this context some of the errors and mistakes we do are embedded in the processes we use to identify and find solutions to our problems.

In most cases (unless ignorance, fear and hate are predominant drivers) we identify problems and than start with a large amount of compassion, some knowledge about why and how and some hope of being able to help more than ourselves, to help the others (the business component).

The diagram bellow tries to depict the relative importance of those 3 aspects of our fight to solve an issue.

Please understand the difference between the absolute quantity and the relative quantity. This is not a “zero sum game” depiction it is simply the relative (to each other) influence of each of the three factors considered in this case. For example you may say, well my Compassion or Knowledge did not diminish (as the diagram may suggest) and that is true, yet what matters is the relative comparison of the magnitude of all three factors. That is important as our minds (and processes) tend to be impacted by the relative importance and not only by the absolute magnitude of the feature.

As time passes we may get our idea off the ground, we start to gain more understanding and other people start to “buy into it” by investing resources (time or money or hope). It is only natural that now we have (relatively) more focus on acquiring knowledge and try to “sell” it to more people. However this simple “normal” action has the consequence of pushing the Compassion component down in the relative balance between itself and the other two components. An important observation is that in absolute terms the compassion may remain at the same value but the unfortunate reality is that in the relative space it becomes less important.

This phenomena is depicted in the diagram bellow.

Once we have a solution, the business world takes over and the main reason of action is now to “sell” the idea or the product to other people. Now gaining profits take main stage and since we still need a grip on the “how it works” (or the Science component) it is almost inevitable that the Compassion component will be in further relative decline and will slide into the configuration depicted bellow.

Unfortunately this configuration is the one that has the highest probability to create monsters that will end up destroying (almost) all we initially intended. Now is the time when mistakes are hid and coverup of mishaps happens and when BS flourishes.

Twenty six years ago, in 1995, Orson Scott Card wrote once a short called “How Software Companies Die” where he follows on how this process happens in the software application development companies and groups. The article ends with the prophetic phrase “Got to get some better packaging” that is the main indication of BS overdrive of a product. You should read it, is only two pages long and is as relevant today as it was 26 years ago.

OK, fine, you may say, now what? What is the solution to this problem? Eventually a solution that not ends in a bigger disaster by embedding in it the very process we just described.

For most, it would be clear that the solution would be to forever keep an eye on the compassion and humility in the business process. But this is much easier said than done. If you put yourself in the shoes of a business owner or a manager that needs to make it possible for his employees and himself to take a salary home then you can see how this can be more than nerve wreaking it can be almost impossible to overcome.

Given our current state of business with the “dog eats dog” type of competitive environment it is extraordinary that we are still keeping sanity in the society at large. To me, this is one item banking towards the proof that human beings are good in their “normal” state but the environmental constraints can erode that “goodness” to sometimes horrific levels.

And that my friends is “the road to hell”, as you can see it starts with good intentions (at least) most of the times but without a lot of focus on the relative importance of the Compassion, Science and Business components we can all “go to hell” sooner or later.

Let’s try to target to the bellow (or close to) distribution of relative importance of those components that are part of all we do.

One important tool to help us with that is the notion of humble and humility. Too many of us seem to equate humble with weakness when in fact it is one of our greatest strengths. If you are surprised to hear that please read my previews article on humility.

Thank you a lot for reading the article!

Some related articles:

On factual information
Humble and Humility
On how to recognize and fight BS
How Software Companies die (Orson Scott Card)

Google Assistant – AI – potential astronomical RG Factor?

The English mountaineer George Mallory was asked “Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?”, he answered “Because it’s there”. Mallory died at 37 doing what he loved, climbing Everest.

I have the feeling that with AI these days we seem to have an equivalent approach “Why do we want machines to be like people?” and the answer seem to be “Because is possible!”. I really hope we will learn from history and avoid getting lost (or die) climbing the mountain of humanizing machines.

To understand the technological feat of this simple call, made by a machine, with a voice really indistinguishable from a human, you would need to open the hood of the machine learning software driving the AI application and take a look. I guarantee that 99.99% (or more) of the people on earth will have absolutely no clue on how the machine does what it did (provided all this was not just a trick).

I mean this is “rocket science” for most of people out there, so Google needs to be congratulated. Until you start to think…. (yeah thinking can be dangerous sometimes).

So, we hear a machine making a phone call to talk to a human in order to make an appointment. Both parties sounds perfectly human, but the caller is not. Let’s now think what would happen if the business also get a Google business assistant?

Now it really get’s interesting, and wired and, well … wired, and here is why. If you know a bit of computer programming you already know that you can achieve the same final outcome (your computer scheduling an appointment into another computer) by a 1000x simpler and more predictable algorithm by using simple structured text over internet connections.

What struck me is that this unavoidable future (as a businesses are more probable to get the AI before you) where machines talk to machines and pretend to be people is ludicrous. It is in fact this is an equivalent of a Rube Goldberg case of software solutions where the only reason to do it is “Because is possible!”.

For those cases, I usually like to talk about a potential measure of unnecessary complexity as the RG factor from famous (and funny) Rube Goldberg machines.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a computer nerd and I love those things, but I’m also aware of times when we seem to loose our bearing. Thanks to the audio bellow now I’ll have to drop my home phone as a machines can now impersonate anyone and call me for insane reasons.

Should I now start to send passwords over encrypted channels first so that if my wife call’s me I should ask her the password first to make sure I’m not talking to a machine?

What’s next?

May 16, 2018 —— adding some (positive) ideas —–

The only way to try keep the RG factor low for language tools in AI is to use it exclusively for personal use. That is, you train your own natural language to your own machine interface. Both recognition of your voice and speech syntheses (your machine talks back to you in natural language) are valuable tools when it comes to AI use cases.

This means you can “grow in” your personal machine (starting from very early age and continue to improve it until you die. This will minimize the error rate for both speech recognition as well as speech synthesis leading to a flawless interface between humans and their personal machines. An there is where “personal assistant” has a lot of meaning and real use.

This approach allows us to get one step closer to mastering the many-to-many class of communication we basically are unable to engage today.  This will be done by using natural language to communicate with our personal assistants (human <-> personal machine)  and communicate between each other via structured, secure, factual machine to machine channels.

In more lay terms you talk to your machine and get things straight and clarified then your machine talks to other machines out there. The receiving end machine(s) will receive, validate, process the information let’s say to remove redundancy (things you already know) then feed you only what really matters for you and the whole community of intelligent living entities.

The future can be bright. Is all up to us to choose the right path…

TSA

Why a pure market approach to health is not only a bad idea but is simply immoral

There is a blind fight out there between believers in different versions of our health care model. Some are worshiping the mighty market and the others are jumping head on in the communal insurance pool. Who is right? I personally believe both views have huge issues and biases.

It seem that both groups are missing one important fact I’m going to try explain by using a simple graph bellow.

Market based health care model

Let’s put the above graph (the camel graph) in few words. The profit for the health industry, including Drug companies, Hospitals, Doctors and personnel, and to some extent insurance industry makes the biggest bucks out of your health misery!

If you are dead, the industry makes nothing (at least for now…), if you are completely healthy the industry only makes money out of your insurance and your fears. It sells you “maintenance pills” however you have the choice to refuse buying into it.

The insurance though is a totally different matter. To work will, all people should contribute to maximize the common pool and no one or only few should consume out of the pool in order to maximize the profits. One way or another things go down to profits and entitlements. When you have a limit on your insurance people tent to maximize the usage and the health industry pushes for it. That pushes the costs up and lower insurance business profits so they will push down on how may people are insured, how expensive your insurance is and how much you can claim.

Clearly, we want that people which helps us to be healthy, to have a top status reflecting our real top health condition. Unfortunately, when profit is in the middle, things start to get biased towards the dark side.

My solution for this complex problem?

These days, personal automation, will give all individuals a chance to get out of this “rat race” if they choose to understand and believe in it.

There is a bright future waiting for all believers in this solution and will be alive when it will happen. Extends your mind and grab it or else it may grab you instead, if it does it could grab you the wrong way. Sh..t happens in general, but it tend to happen more frequently to the ignorant. Don’t be one.

I stand with you, Orlando, Brussels, Paris, Pakistan, and for all people who lost or had their lives destroyed by madness of extremisms

Orlando Florida US Jun 12, 2016, 50 dead 53 injured. People died and got hurt again, is there a way to stop this from happening?

  • Paris France, Nov 13, 2015, 130 dead and more then 350 injured (source Wikipedia)
  • San Bernardino California US, Dec 2, 2015, 14 dead and 22 injured (source Wikipedia)
  • Brussels Belgium, Mar 22, 2016, 35 dead and more than 300 injured (source Wikipedia)
  • Lahore Pakistan, Mar 27, 2016, 75 dead and more than 300 injured (source Wikipedia)
  • Orlando Florida US Jun 12, 2016, 50 dead 53 injured
  • And then the Sirian Civil War counting to more than 400000 people killed until now with millions pushed to live their lives with mostly nothing
  • And the list is longer, to long…

I would like to extend my condolences to all the people who lost loved ones in all those tragedies.

In total, in less than a year, we lost 130+14+35+75+50=304 people and destroyed or badly impacted the lives of 350+22+300+300+53=more than 1025 people by a handful of other people who’s minds were twisted by extreme ideas. I can’t even imagine what 400000 dead and millions more displaced means for a time we call ourselves “civilized”.

But by simply stopping here, by only feeling sorry for the loss, would not make much difference for the future. We need to start open our eyes minds and harts to the truth no matter how hard is to find it.

Against all the primal instincts which pushes us to answer the violence with violence the path to a solution include quite a different path. It is said that the definition of insanity is to repeat the same thing again and again without changing anything and expecting different results. If that is true it is also an extreme, and we could tame the definition by excluding the “changing anything” to “changing enough” to reach a realistic goal. The thing is, we all find ourselves in various shades of insanity and need to continuously correct our action to stay out of it.

My personal opinion is that one important root cause, if not the most important one, on all our history, but more important these days is our ability to communicate.

The communication process implies extracting information from our minds, filter it, encode it in speech or words, then transport it over various mediums like airwaves (voice), electromagnetic waves, in networks, or solids, to one or more people, the receivers. The receiver(s) will then attempt to decode the information and (attempt to) re-integrate it in their minds. Both the sender and receiver have different mind contexts and each of those steps can and usually will be subject of errors.

My explanation of the communication process, may look “Rube Goldberg”-is but it is darn simple compared to the full fledged phenomena.

We usually do all this in “automatic” mode, paying little attention or no or little attention to all the possibilities for errors and that is where things break down. We assume we “master” communication, when in fact we kind of suck at it and the consequence of this inability is dire.

These days our abilities to transport information has advanced faster than our ability to process the information we receive (and make sense of it) due all the technological advances. Now we are witnessing the first consequences of this imbalance between our abilities to transport information, and our ability to process it. On top of that, we are unable to distinguish between fact and fiction and our ability to listen and understand other cultures has diminished due to of this informational overload.

All this pushes some of us to drawn in the informational flow, and tumble down into the vortex of madness and extremism.

Carl Sagan had this prescient view, he expressed in his last interview with Charlie Rose. Charlie asks, “What’s the danger of all this…?” referring to the Science and Technology in the hands of the public. Carl answers “We arrange the society based on Science and Technology where nobody understand anything about Science and Technology and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow-out in our faces…”  For the full interview (if you didn’t see it yet) check here.

I’m coining this phenomena the “Informageddon” as a derived form of the regular Armageddon, describing a way to screw ourselves big time due our collective madness and stupidity.

Of course, you may say, you can go crazy about it, but nothing would really happen (to others) if there will be no guns. Personally I think we should be able to defend ourselves, however if anyone would own a classic gun can lead to a arms race at the micro social level. All this is good for making bucks on short term but makes no sense on long term. I will discuss more about how to balance the need for self defence and what sort of technology can we use to replace the actual guns. As a Canadian I’m impacted in a slight different way than a US citizen but the problem is actually universal and needs attention.

I’m sure that there is a brighter future ahead of us. Yet the path to it is narrow and not a straight one, but I believe in it. To draw the path to an acceptable future we need to understand the dangers of the new technologies as well as their strengths. As with all other Technological wonders we can use every one of them for both good and bad, the distinction is apparent when we are able to see the big picture on long term.

“In order to be able to harvest the fruits, first we must take care of the roots”

The last two important aspects of the social organization, which can push towards the “Informageddon” are the specialization and competition. Even though both of them are essential for our progress an unhealthy amount or kind of each can hamper the progress.

We can distinguish two types of competition, constructive (or positive) and destructive (or negative). To understand the difference I have to tell you a small story. “Once upon a time there were two neighbours. And they (as with many of us these days) were competing on who had a better life. They both had livestock and were proud of their animals. One day the goat of one of them dies accidentally. In the evening both neighbours pray to God. First one asks God for good health for his family and livestock and wishes the best for his neighbour. He shares some of his goat milk with his neighbour whose goat died . The other neighbour though, prays for his neighbour’s goat to die too so he would not be in the position to be helped as he feels this as humiliating”.

You can see clearly the difference between constructive competition in the first person action and the destructive one from the other person.We can see how for the entire system (the two people together) helping each other leads to a stronger state whereas in the destructive case both would suffer. The problem with the technology is that it speeds up all processes and makes it harder and harder to people to react with long term plans. This inadvertently favours he destructive type of competition.

Please take some time and think how much of the constructive versus destructive competition is promoted more these days? What is the impact on long term of all the secrecy out there and all the actions we are involved in. This is the first step towards a sane future.

For future articles check the “Informageddon” category.

 

Safe flying with Automation

Another 150 souls vanished in little pieces on the slopes of a mountain. Can we prevent such things in future? I believe so and here is how.

All new modern airliners can be flown automatically from take-of to landing. The pilots are there for backup reasons and mostly to alleviate our fear of machines (too intelligent machines maybe). So, how can we use this capabilities without alienating people and with high effectiveness.

We can use the idea of “kill switch” which other industries use where when something bas is spotted you can hit a button to stop a process or in this case to start one.

The main issue in those case is that you can never rely 100% on people. Ill minds can be anywhere as this disaster shown, passengers can go rogue, crew can go rogue and ground personnel can also go rogue. The only way we can solve this is to have anyone, I mean anyone on the plane as passenger, crew member of ground personnel be able to hit a “kill switch” and when that happens the aircraft computers will go in a “land on one of the closest known (pre programmed)” airports and until the aircraft is not safe on the runway nothing in the world can change that in any way.

The aircraft automation will simply land the plane and all the controls on board of the aircraft will simply be ineffective until the aircraft has safely landed on the runway.

The aircraft will send continuously its position parameters and intent to its ground personnel and new destination airport.

Looks a simple use case, but due to the current “psychology” of man must dominate machines some changes should be done to the aircraft in order to allow full automated flights.

Keep in mind that this system must be a specialized one to do one and one thing only, detect a abnormality in the flight path, or being “hinted” by the “kill switch” in order to take over and do a single task only, safely land the aircraft. From the moment it is triggered nothing in the world will be able to disable it or influence it in any way until the aircraft is safely on the ground.

Of course there will be resistance on such a system but I personally feel better if it would exists in the flight I’m on and there is a button just next to my seat which if I push I can get safely on the ground. and yes that will cost me a lot of money but not my life!

red_button

Emergency Automated Landing? or EAL?

About Gemanwings disaster: The Guardian

The technology and us

“New and enhanced abilities (a.k.a technology) combined with low level of understanding of those abilities will always lead to abuse. However the universe (a.k.a Mother Nature) does not care, it selects its future, its called natural selection…. And,… natural selection did not end when Darwin defined it, it still happens…. So better try understand what you hold in your hands before is too late. I’m a strong promoter of technology but the need for “profit without limits” combined with ignorance can be lethal for our society.”

I’ve commented not long ago, on the link posted by one of my FaceBook friends. It was liked to the YouTube video called “Look Up”. An excellent clip of video poetry but partially misguided in my opinion.
I hope to guide people on computer technology and its real abilities with the information I will publicize in the future in this blog and http://timenet-systems.com

In mean time I’m blogging this video clip for future reference.