How Will Robots Treat Us?

I've been thinking a lot about robot intelligence lately, and a quote from Pete Mandik brought something to the forefront of my mind and crystallized my thoughts for me. You can read the full interview here but the part I'm interested in is this:

I think our best guide to what we should think about any future beings that surpass us is to think about our current attitudes to beings that already surpass us. On the individual level, I’m not bothered, that is, I don’t feel the value sucked out of my life, by the knowledge that there are lots of individuals that are smarter than me. On the species level, I don’t feel that humans are devalued by the knowledge that other species are faster runners, better swimmers, etc. I think, then, by analogy, we should try to take similar attitudes to any post-humans (mechanical or biological) that outperform us. We should continue to value our own lives on our own terms. And also, you know, root for them, since they’ll be our children.

 I think his suggestion, that in considering superior beings potential relationships with us we should think about our relationships with the beings already around us, is great. But Pete seems a bit too eager to meet those superior beings for my tastes. I'd like to turn his suggestion in a different direction. Let's think about how those superior beings might treat us, their inferiors, based on examining how we treat the inferior species we're surrounded with. Yeah, you can see where this is going real fast, right? We squish many types of bugs without a second thought. We subject cows, pigs, and chickens to conditions tantamount to torture in preparation to eat them. Our closest and most respected relatives, the apes, we send to space and subject to various medical procedures we wouldn't dream of performing on other humans. Perhaps the best we could hope for, I think, is that whatever superior beings we encounter treat us like we treat cats and dogs, as curiosities to be domesticated and pampered.

I don't think the possibilities are all bad, however. It's possible, especially if our superiors are robots we've programmed, that they actually won't be able to do anything other than what we ask them to do. They also might recognize our strong points and wish to cooperate with us. But I don't like the odds. And I think anyone who longs to hurry along the creation of robots that rival or exceed our abilities is a fool who we ought to try with all our power to stop. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Pete when he suggests that it's going to be very, very hard for us as a society to muster the collective wisdom to slow down the research that is leading in this direction. Especially when that research is backed by a lot of people (and corporations, or are they people too?) with very deep pockets.

Occupy Wall Street and Capitalism

One of the reasons I've let this blog fall silent is that I feel I ought to explain my political beliefs before I comment on certain topics so people know where I stand, and to lay out a case for my impartiality and objectivity. But there is so much ignorant analysis of the Occupy Wall Street protests, I feel compelled to comment on them. Let me simply state that I consider myself Progressive. That is, I believe that there is always a way to make our country work better. Often that involves a stronger government, but just as often it involves trimming government, weakening the government, or exploring alternatives when the government isn't doing things efficiently. Perhaps my political position can be summed up concisely by stating that I think Obama is the best president we've had since Bush 41.

The biggest criticism I've heard of Occupy Wall Street is that many of the protestors are politically ignorant, naive, or incoherent. That anyone would make this criticism shows just how confused we've become about how a democracy works. They're protestors, not academics or politicians or bureaucrats or *gulp* members of the media. Their job isn't to come up with policies to cure our country's ills or even to necessarily be able to coherently define those ills. Their job is to protest and draw attention to a topic.

What has made me sad is how badly and uniformly pundits and purported journalists have failed to do their job and have made the Occupy Wall Street protests necessary. The problems our country is facing is economics 101, stuff I studied in high school, and I've yet to see these so-called experts, including many people with doctoral degrees in economics, even get close to the underlying problem in their analysis.

First, a little background. Free markets are good. We like free markets because they encourage competition. We like competition because it provides us with cheaper goods, it forces companies to innovate, and it generally makes our society more productive. There's a huge problem with free markets, though, one recognized by the father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith: Monoplies.

The logical end point of all free markets is a monopoly, a situation in which one company controls all of a certain product. That is the goal of every company, to either buy all of its competition or to drive them out of the market. Famous monopolies or near-monopolies include Standard Oil Trust, AT&T and Microsoft. Monopolies are very, very bad. When they exist, there is no competition in a given market any more. There is no incentive for a monopolistic company to price it's goods fairly or to innovate. It is almost impossible for a monopoly to fail or go out of business. The government is empowered to break-up monopolies because they can be so toxic to the well-being of our economy.

Related to the monopoly is the oligopoly, a situation in which a small number of businesses dominate a market. I'd give an example, but almost every commodity market in modern-day America is an oligopoly. From soft drinks to energy to car manufacturers to airlines to banks to cell phone carriers to software companies, our modern economic landscape is dominated by either oligopolies or monopolies. Oligopolies aren't necessarily bad, but they often lead to the same problems as monopolies. Those problems are poor price competition, failure to innovate, and companies becoming so entrenched they can't do anything dumb enough to fail. Beginning to sound familiar, right?

Thus the first half of our economic troubles can be summed up by two words: Monopoly and Oligopoly. How often have you heard those on the news lately? Pundits aren't entirely wrong when they talk about companies that are too big to fail being a problem. But that's really only identifying a single symptom of a deeper disease, and their mis-diagnosis explains why they uniformly have almost nothing productive to say about what might be done to fix the problem. Oligopolies and monopolies aren't only problems because the government sometimes has to bail them out, they're problems because they stifle innovation, overprice goods, and inhibit creative destruction (among other things). The later problems are far more dangerous than the first, especially if the government is able to negotiate favorable bailout terms in which most of the bailout funds are re-cupped (which is what happened in 2008).

More analysis to follow.

Inevitable Expenses

Over at the New York Times, Bruce Bartlett has a column on tax burdens across developed countries. His chart shows rather clearly that the US has pretty much the lowest tax burden in the developed world (depending on whether you consider Turkey, Chile and Mexico, the only nations with lower burdens, part of the developed world or not).

He goes on to talk about how, while we all know that death and taxes are inescapable, paying for our health care is also inescapable. In Europe, of course, taxes pay for the lion's share of the health care, while here that is only true for the poor and elderly. The rest of us pay personally, whether directly or in the form of lower salaries. If you combine both of these inescapable costs, our tax+health care burden in United States rises to very near the average for the countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (O.E.C.D.).

But why stop there? There is one other major service that many European countries provide that we normally pay for here in the United States: education. Those that attend college in the United States pay a steep price that can run into six figures for a degree, while in Denmark, for instance, not only is post-secondary education free, but many students also receive a stipend to help with living expenses. And while a whole society benefits if higher education is more readily available, not only because the better educated generally earn more money and pay more taxes, I think that in many European countries the less educated also directly benefit.

After all, our education system consistently ranks as one of the worst in the developed world. It's no secret that while our university system is outstanding, our public K-12 system is in such a shambles that in many areas of the country almost everyone who can afford it sends their children to private schools. And in our current economic downturn, school budgets and teachers' jobs are being cut at unprecedented rates in many states. I know that part of the failure on this level is simply inefficient spending, especially on pensions and on tenured ineffective teachers, but a lot also has to do with the fact that we're not willing to pay for our best and brightest to become teachers, as they do in countries with the best K-12 systems like Singapore and Finland.

I don't think anyone can calculate the combined out-of-pocket expenses and lost opportunity cost our educational system engenders. But I'm absolutely certain that if we could somehow calculate and tabulate it as we have for health care costs, we would find that the education+health care+taxes trio of inevitable expenses born by our citizenry is comparatively much higher than in the chart above.

And if you don't think education is an inevitable expense, try thinking about what would happen if we stopped investing in it altogether.

The point is, whatever some people would have you believe, the overall tax burden is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how efficiently a country divides its resources. Certain things the government does better, and certain things private enterprise does better.

Torture is Wrong (It's Effectiveness is Irrelevant)

Torture has been a hot topic lately. But a disturbingly large portion of the dialogue has been about whether or not it works, whether or not using torture is in the best interests of our country. This article in the Atlantic is a great example of this trend.

Arguments about utility are dangerous things though. Torture is wrong. Full stop. It has no place in a civilized society. Full stop. End of discussion, or at least so it should be.

Otherwise, if we're really going to consider the utility of immoral acts, we can't stop at torture. What about murder? Sure, killing people is wrong, but what if it's useful? It's hard to doubt that America would be a more efficient place if, instead of paying to imprison inmates, we just executed the lot. Maybe we should put together commissions, as well, to determine if it might not be more efficient to round up all those people living on the public dole and see if, at the very least, we couldn't send them to an island somewhere to fend for themselves. I hear Australia is nice this time of year.

Torture is morally wrong. Anyone who employs it is a reprehensible, disgusting war criminal no better than Saddam Hussein. That a sizable portion of the country thinks that the possibility of torturing people should be a topic of debate shows how close we are to undoing the bonds of civilization that hold us together. There are few greater ironies in the world than that torture's supporters in this country are often the same who profess to be concerned about America's moral degredation.

Scott Adams and the Education Complexity Shift

Scott Adams, the comic strip writer behind Dilbert, recently had an editorial in the WSJ and a follow-up blog post about something he calls the Education Complexity Shift. You can read the blog post here.

Now, I think he's wrong on several counts,  but the most important is crystallized by this sentence:

But if you compare teaching history with, for example, teaching a kid how to compare complicated financial alternatives, I'd always choose the skill that has the most practical value. 

Education has become increasingly concerned with things of "practical value". Where to find meaning in life, how to lead a rich and full life, and the difference between right and wrong will never have this so-called practical value. But from what I've seen, our world doesn't suffer from too few people trying to compare complicated financial alternatives (thank you Lehman Brothers, AIG, and most recently the people in the GE tax division) but from too few people trying to do what is best for their country and for their fellow citizens. That is what happens when you let science and progress define the terms of the debate on the merits of a liberal arts education. (And yes, the name of this blog is no mistake.) Specifically, I'm thinking of the way that modern-day Republicans are more intent on making Democrats look bad than on helping our economy grow again, but I also think there's a sense of entitlement in this country that is very disturbing, perhaps best characterized by this example.

But I think Adams is also wrong on a wider level, and it's obvious when he tries to talk about why education used to be important two hundred years ago:

you needed to make school artificially complicated to stretch a student's mind. Once a student's mind was expanded, stressed, stretched and challenged, it became a powerful tool when released back into the relatively simple "real world."

Even back then, the world was by no means simple. Morality and spirituality (and even politics) are the most complicated subjects known to man, and nothing about that has changed in the last two hundred years. That is why a solid education was and remains irreplaceable. But it has also been my experience that the real world is what is simple and it is school that is complex. In the jobs I've had, true, I have had to use many complex software and hardware packages that the schools I attended never had the money to purchase or train me on. But once I learned them, usually in about six months, I was done. I had mastered the job. Like planning the most efficient trip by plane, there was little about those packages that a child couldn't learn. In school, on the other hand, every six months I was freshly presented with a new set of four or five potentially very different classes which were attempts to study different aspects of reality in all its gory detail, dealing with situations both practical and impractical, but absolutely covering a much wider and more complex array of phenomenon than I would ever encounter in my jobs.

Now, I would agree that often in a modern university teachers are more interested in doing research than in teaching and often students don't take advantage of the opportunities for self-improvement presented to them. But these flaws are only going to get worse if people focus only on practical benefits.

Limits of Human Knowledge

While it stands on its own, this discussion is a continuation of this post on an essay by Errol Morris.

At the end of his essay Morris contemplates whether or not there is a limit to human knowledge. He basically frames it as considering whether or not we will ever be able to understand the structure of the universe. His own opinion seems to be that we will not, but his only justification is that he would be disappointed in the architect of creation if creatures as simple as we were able to understand it all.

I think he gets the answer right, but his rational is frankly juvenile. By way of giving a better rational, I've long been fascinated by a very simple question. Is it possible to create a mind, an organism, that can understand itself? To focus on a concrete example, let's look at man. Neglecting temporarily our ability to make sense of the universe, will we ever be able to fully understand how our own minds work? To me, the answer is clearly that we will not, at least not without genetic manipulation which renders us a new species entirely, unrecognizable as homo sapien. Hopefully I at least began to spell out why in this post.

In essence, I think that no single person will ever be able to simultaneously understand all the biochemical interactions in our brain, the way all the different centers of the brain are specialized and interact with each other, and how the physical features and processes of the brain give rise to consciousness, to the fact that there is a way that our experiences feel that seems irreducible to materialistic terms. I think it's quite possible that at some point it may be possible to assemble a thousand biochemists who between therm understand the biochemical pathways of the mind, and similarly for its physiological structure and its philosophic ramifications, but I do not believe that any single individual will ever understand the whole.

But this leads to several other layers to the question. Can mankind as a whole understand how a human's brain works? If we take those three thousand specialists, might their collective knowledge give us an understanding of how the brain works? I think the answer there again is no. If those three thousand specialists got together to try to design a genetic manipulation or a drug to affect the brain in a certain way, my experience in the pharmaceutical industry tells me that to a large degree they would still be shooting in the dark at a series of moving targets, though perhaps in a room in which they had a flashlight or two. Human beings just don't interface as smoothly as collectives like ants or bees, and of course ant collectives aren't nearly sophisticated enough to understand the human brain, or their own collective lives.

But of course, there is another avenue of thought to pursue. These specialists could catalog their knowledge on a computer. If it were a sentient computer, it may even be capable of understanding the whole of the human brain. Of course, to go back to the original question, if we were to build such a sentient computer, this wouldn't mean it understood its own mind, simply our minds. Still, would such a sentient computer be able to understand its own mind? Unfortunately, this is a question that I can't even begin to answer. I'm inclined to think it more likely simply because computer CPU's can be understood by people, whereas brains cannot be understood. But no one yet knows what a sentient computer would require, whether or not its circuits would be of a type we could even build, or perhaps might require a team of thousands each working on a small part of the whole that only they understand. Perhaps the circuits required for true learning or creativity would grow more difficult to comprehend exponentially, so that every improvement that might lead to an understanding the previous iteration couldn't understand itself.

Either way, I think it would be an incredibly bad idea to build such a computer. It could only take two views of its human creators. It could think us irrelevant, or it could think us a waste of energy and space. Best case scenario, it tolerates our existence, worst case it tries to extinguish it. No upside. At all.

So, to go back to Morris's question, while I think a single homo sapien will never understand everything in the universe, I do think we have a chance to understand the general structure of existence. Looking at something like the periodic table, for instance, there is a stunningly beautiful simplicity to its arrangement. The consequences of its structure, most relevant to us in that a molecule like water is so abundant, stable, and conducive to life, are sublime and quickly give rise to a complexity and subtlety that likewise is stunning in both its beauty and rationality. My own opinion is that current efforts in subatomic particles and quantum mechanics have gone off the track somehow. I think that whatever force created the universe created a system, like the periodic table, that is stunningly simply fundamentally, but which quickly gives rise to complexities and consequences (like evolution, consciousness, and creativity) which blossom explosively.

Knowing and Not Knowing

I want to spend some time taking about the concept of anosognosia--not knowing something you should know--developed most fully in part 4 of Morris's essay. I think this is the first place that Morris really falls down and fails to give us any kind of answer to the question of how anosognosia works in what I'd guess is an effort to make his topic seem more interesting. But I think as you actually approach an answer, the topic only gets more interesting.

To start, if we're going to talk about not knowing something we should know, we need first to think about what it means to know something. The average person knows at a minimum tens of thousands of things. Most illustrative, to me, is proper names, perhaps because I am so bad with them. Names of friends, names of relatives, names of actors, names of movies, names of books. In my experience, not infrequently in the course of conversations people want to refer to someone or something but can't remember what that thing is called. Surely this, too, is a case of anosognosia. All the more because often the name that we are searching for comes to us at some later indeterminate time, when we have no use for the name at all.

This raises the question, how do we know things at all? What is going on with these simple memory omissions? Is our brain like a computer, with each fact stored in a discrete location? If so, then when we fail to remember something, have we either forgotten where to find that location or has that location been corrupted? Both of these errors, after all, happen in computers. But neither of those seems an adequate explanation. If the location of the fact is corrupted, then how could we remember that fact later? If we've simply forgotten where that information is stored, then how do we find that location later? The latest research suggests that memories are connections between neurons and that the connections grow stronger with repetition. But to me that doesn't really address the issue. First, it is obvious. Our brain is nothing more than a bunch of connections of neurons, so of course memories have to be connections too. But further, how does the fact that a memory is a connection of neurons really explain how we know facts? What kind of connections of neurons are necessary to remember the name of my Aunt Bea? What kinds are necessary for me to remember that I like the actress Renee Zellweger and the fact that along with remembering her name a mental image of her face comes to mind. And don't even get me started on what connections are necessary to remember how to spell her name. For me, who can't spell, the answer is no connections would ever be sufficient. For me, this is the first interesting aspect of anosognosia: for all our science, picturing how memory works is still a very hazy endeavor.

So anosognosia, actually, is nothing special at all. Almost every fact in our brain is dormant for the majority of our waking moments. And it quickly gets more complicated when you start to add in all the psychological biases we display. We tend not to remember things which we don't want to remember. As much as I might rack my brain to give you some personal examples, I'm a bit too busy not remembering them now. I will assure you, though, that there are many things I've done which I'd rather not remember doing, and there are many things I'm not good at that I've long forgotten the myriad cues and signals that might indicate to me, if I chose to pay attention to them in the first place, that I wasn't good at those tasks. There are positive aspects of people I hate which I will never recall. And there's absolutely no way you could prove whether or not I know these things. In many cases if I've done a good job at repressing a memory so that there are neural connections for that memory but the memory could never ever get into my consciousness, we would really need to define a bit more clearly what we mean by "know".

But where it again starts to get really interesting is when you start to look into areas where the beliefs one holds are complicated. I believe I am a trifle on the lazy side (just a trifle), yet I've always gotten good reviews at every job I've ever worked. Somehow I have to reconcile those two contrary pieces of information. I believe that people ought to earn the lifestyle they want to lead, but I believe that we ought to make some basic provisions for those people who are not equipped by either genetics or society to earn their way, and I'm also aware that many people who do have money have done very little to earn it whether because they obtained the money illicitly, inherited it, or, perhaps, won the lottery. These competing ideas and hundreds if not thousands more are all in my head, in essence vying for dominance.

Is it really any surprise, given all this, that there are people who display varying levels of awareness, indifference, and denial regarding the fact that they've lost the use of their left arm? I don't think so, and I think in trying to persuade us that this is where the big mystery is, Morris does us a disservice.

To me, the big mystery is tied up in these complex net of beliefs. And reading, conversation and writing really bring out how tenuous our knowledge and beliefs are, really illustrate their fluidity. In the course of verbal debates, in the course of trying to present my thoughts in writing, I've often discovered that I don't believe the things I thought I believed. Sometimes I find that I don't believe something which I was going to write a passionate essay in support of, sometimes I find in writing that two ideas I thought were compatible are not, sometimes I find that I actually end up disproving the thesis of my paper. Sometimes in a debate I say something and realize how silly it sounds. Sometimes I read something that just completely and irrefutably contradicts something I had believed.

It's hard for me to describe, especially to someone who might not have occasion to write or debate a lot. Writing and debating have always seemed to me like trials. You have an idea, you need to play with it some, give it a spin, explore it. You believe an author of a book was trying to say one thing, but on talking to others who read the book, on looking more closely at the text, you see you were entirely wrong. There seems something permanently makeshift about my ideas, my beliefs, my mind. And I think that is the way it has to be. We are creatures of the moment. Our mental capacities are extremely limited. We can really only hold one thing in our mind at any time to look at it and think about it. If this is the kind of creature we are and the limitations our mind works under, then how could our beliefs and our knowledge behave any differently?