Friday, November 30, 2007

The ‘Singularity’ occurring now

Let me back up a bit: first, to be clear as to my meaning, a singularity is a point at which predictions cannot be made due to a failure of the model of behavior… a point at which the old rules don’t apply in a big way, so to speak.

Second, this particular singularity isn’t my idea – the author and noted professor Vernor Vinge has become the spokesperson for the looming Technological Singularity

What I’d like to point out is the dead Canary.

Have you been in a bookstore lately? Did you happen to look over the Science Fiction selections? Notice anything peculiar?

There is little if any new technical-type Science Fiction being written. Sure, there are Dragon/Magic/Sword fantasy books, and War/Detective/Alternate-Reality books, but not many plausible looks into the future that so many Science Fiction books used to be based upon…

The crystal ball has gone to static. Science Fiction is dead.

A TV show that I like – classified as Science Fiction – called ‘Firefly’ is a case in point: the show doesn’t even try to paint a realistic image of the future. It’s a western in a very small outer space setting, complete with twanging accents and horses. I love the show, but it sure isn’t Star Trek… In the 60’s, when Star Trek was made, Science Fiction was all about guessing what the future would be like.

Why the sudden change?

Well, on the level of any one individual’s view, we are deluged with new technology every day. Remember Dick Tracy’s cool watch communicator? (Did you even think about how cool your cell-phone is this morning?)

So try this exercise: guess what the exact most successful, not-débuted-yet techno-gismo is going to be next year. Don’t bother to tell me about it – you are, with a 99% probability, wrong anyhow. Why? Because what catches on and what doesn’t are divided by such subtle differences and influences as to make marketers look like weather forecasters.

Yet these devices – the ones that catch on – make up the very pavement of our human culture.

So how can you predict the far future if you can’t even guess what next year is going to be like? Do I exaggerate? Watch ‘The Matrix’ again. Notice anything? What leaps out at me is the huge clunky cell phones that were so state-of-the art when it was filmed.

The next wound to examine is our understanding of current technology. Do you know how to fix your car? Do you remember way back to your childhood, seeing your father working on the family auto?

Manufacturers now assume that you will not need any repair or maintenance information on almost any product. They are for the most part correct. Most people do not have the very specialized knowledge (and tools) needed to work on any modern electronics – and electronics are everywhere now. In your car, in your coffeemaker, for instance.

Plus, if it’s broken, the newer models are typically better performing and cheaper.

Remember ‘Heathkit’ projects? Since the 1920’s, and as late as the 70’s, you could typically buy cool techno-gismos in a build-it-yourself form for cheaper than a finished product – and learn as you went along with the assembly process. Not so much, any more.

Today, electronics are (usually) built by pick-and-place machines (robots, one might say) out of parts you cannot easily see… The other day, I went to our company’s parts bins for a resistor, pulled open a drawer and it was empty… No, not empty – flecks of dust coated the bottom… No, those tiny flecks were the resistors!

Technology is exceeding the average person’s mental grasp at an ever-increasing rate. So too is medical and biological knowledge.

We are living in a world of Science Fiction-like things, ever changing and taxing our ability to understand our very everyday existence. Why would we want to write about more of the same?

Who’s steering this boat? Is that an iceberg in our future?

More to the point – we increasingly depend upon our tools to do the repetitive job of manufacture for us. We also depend upon our software to help design the next widget for us.

We want our tools to avoid stupid mistakes as they work for us. So we add increasingly sophisticated knowledge and sensors to our tools. We also continuously improve the tool’s connections to ourselves and other tools.

At what point does the human become useless to the process? I’d say that at this moment most people are of no use whatsoever in the majority of design and manufacture processes. Unlike the heyday of factory workers, a few select and very specialized experts can run an entire factory… And fewer and fewer are needed each year that passes.

When are the machines going to be smart enough to be aware of this?

It’s not to say that all folks are superfluous, it is more that incredibly smart and educated people are considered more desirable to industry than back-labor grunts.

So… let’s get smarter. Add a bit more brainpower, perhaps? Either bio-technologically or electronically, it will be possible (nay, necessary) very soon. Then maybe we might be able to fix our own cars again…

When we are done altering ourselves thusly, are we still human? Or did the curtain fall, to rise for the next dominant life form – if we are really lucky it will be ‘homo technologicus’. The ‘homo’ part is a bit iffy.

Friday, November 9, 2007

I'd Choose to be Stunned

Non-lethal defense and capture weapons are rapidly becoming more widespread, although they haven’t been welcomed with the glad cries of relief one might have expected from the voices of the media…

The topic interests me because it seems obvious (to me) that there are times when it is necessary to either defend yourself or restrain someone with the minimum of inflicted injury – why we have had to rely on lethal guns and possibly equally deadly clubs up to this point in time is a mystery to me. Science fiction becoming reality (i.e. “Set your Phaser to stun, Mr. Scott…”) is another reason for my intense interest.

The best-known examples are police tasers (http://www.taser.com/Pages/default.aspx) and personal pepper spray, the first being a capture/restraint device and the second a defense against personal attack (in main usage). A more ray gun like and newer development is the “Active Denial”/”Silent Guardian” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System is a fair compendium). Farther down the page we find such interesting items as the LED Incapacitator (a.k.a. the Puke Saber - http://www.intopsys.com/)

The outcry against such non-lethal weapons took me by surprise. Why would anyone be outraged by something intended to reduce the injury and death associated with those situations where restraint, incapacitation or defense was deemed necessary? (an example can be seen in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_spray#_note-13 - which has an associated set of discussions highlighting the negative view of pepper spray). One might think that the troops of the we-are-for peace/end-the-violence-now groups would be selling non-lethal defenses door to door…

Opponents of such non-lethals quickly point to examples of failure of the particular weapon to be non-lethal, or at least non-injurious in a lasting sense. Accepting the numbers as factual, the incident of injury/death for each of these types of weapon (well, the “Active Denial”/”Silent Guardian” weapons haven’t actually seen field use… but human tests have been conducted) are near zero as a probability, and near certainty without (assuming guns and clubs in place of non-lethals).

This not-100%-non-lethal contention is obviously not the whole argument against the existence of such weapons, as any thinking person would quickly choose to be shot with a taser instead of shot with a gun. It’s the whole “is he/she going to shoot me?” likelihood that skews the thinking. After all, most folks are less likely to shoot someone if they are sure that the target person would be injured. An excellent probe into this and other aspects can be found at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/201700_taser30.html

Still, it’s not really believable that ‘less-than-lethal’ weapons used more often could be worse than ‘yup, it’s lethal’ weapons in the same situations.

The next most frequent objection is that (note the change in my naming-reference) less-than-lethal weapons might be used to torture people. No one seems to see how really silly this contention is! If I was going to be tortured, I’d rather it be a controlled electric shock or pepper spray than the good old rubber hoses, clubs, fists, etc… Seriously, although torture is an issue in it’s own right; torture has NO bearing on less-than-lethal weapons! None!

The fact that torture is cited as a rejection criteria is psychologically revealing – the true fear is the idea of such less-than-lethal weapons being used to punish perceived misbehavior without benefit of trial, judge, jury by overzealous authorities or vigilante types.

(The Active Denial system comes with way-early accusations of torture, even though it hasn’t actually been deployed yet - as if one could easily back the truck it comes mounted on into your dungeon for the purpose of tormenting victims. Here’s an example - http://dwb.sacbee.com/content/news/story/9499345p-10423294c.html)

Finally, less-than-lethal weapons represent a formidable amount of power over persons who just might wish to express their opinions by somewhat disruptive civil disobedience… Here’s the true fear revealed – Ghandi wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if his entourage had fled yelping from a ‘pain beam’, or puking their guts out like a bunch of college frat boys on Friday night.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

An Easy REALITY Check

Reading such eyebrow-raising articles as “Pennsylvania Man Claims to Burn Salt Water” (see http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296395,00.html) in the Science News section of the online news, and the Discover Magazine article (Dec 2007) "Water on Fire" nearly makes me weep with frustration.

“Why?” you might ask. “It’s just good for a chuckle…” you might say.

No, it is a symptom – a symptom of the disease that may well kill the great country known as the United States of America.

Science is on a decline; one characterized and accelerated by the basic lack of understanding of what is science and what isn’t.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the press, especially that one author by the name of “Associated Press”. He (or she? “Associated” is somewhat gender-neutral…) doesn’t even seem to have the common sense that an eight year old child might be expected to possess – I mean, if I asked any grade school child to burn some water for me, he or she would probably smile and say “Silly! Water doesn’t burn!”

I suppose Associated thought that he/she was being an (please excuse the way-over-used cliché) out-of-the-box thinker by blindly accepting the scientific value of the implication for free energy from seawater inherent in the proclamation.

Which brings us to Check Point One: “It Ain’t Science If It’s Free Energy”

This covers the 100-mpg carburetor for your gas-guzzler, all of the various forms of electrolysis claiming to be energy-from-water technology, and all of the mystery-magnet perpetual motion machines out there (even the ones powered by spiritual sources).

Wishing for something that is against the basic tenants of thermodynamics to be true – even, even if you cross your fingers, isn’t going to make it so.

Second Checkpoint, you can bet real money that if the headlines contain the phrase “Scientists Say…” (a.k.a. “Experts Say”) that the article will not, in fact, be what the person who happened to be working in a field vaguely scientific or in some way associated with something technical (say, like the janitor working in the laboratory during the interview) actually was trying to explain. Let’s summarize Check Point Two as “Real Scientists Say ‘I Don’t Know For Sure’”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the process of science is one of discovery, as opposed to oracular proclamation of The Truth. That means that any real ‘scientist’ is giving you the best guess we have, but even though the computer model says it won’t rain tomorrow, you’d be smart to bring your umbrella.

This last checkpoint might lead some folks astray. I mean, if scientists aren’t 100% sure, then there’s a chance that Santa really might exist! Yeah, let’s believe in all of our pet favorite fairy tales!! After all, why not?

Any good bookie can tell you – suckers bet against the odds. The real problem here is that folks in general do not really understand the meaning of probability in their day-to-day lives.

My best example is the lottery. I often tell folks that I’d have only a slightly better chance of winning the hoped-for lottery if I actually bought a ticket. This inevitably brings a laugh, and the comment that I can’t win without buying a ticket.

That’s not actually the case, you see. In reality, I might find a ticket – or be given a ticket – and that unpaid-for ticket might be the big winner! Yeah!

What I am trying to convey is the concept that the odds of winning are so very low that reducing them by multiplying the odds of a serendipitous ticket on the ticket-winning odds makes no real difference. A visual example here might help.

I just grabbed the Ohio Lottery ‘Mega Millions’ listed odds for the Big Jackpot, one out of 175,711,536 – or 0.000000005 as rounded off on my calculator. Hey – that’s like -164.8 dB! Uh, sorry – some ‘engineer speak’ slipped in… But back to the visuals: One ticket (for simplicity) out of that stack wins, each ticket is, say 0.02 inches thick which makes the stack of tickets 55 ½ miles high!

Is it clear that the size of something that’s 0.02 inches compared to something that’s 55 ½ miles is close enough to nothing so as not to matter??

Now what if the stack of losing tickets were, say, 5,500 miles tall? Not really any different, right? You’d still be safe calling the relative thickness of the winning ticket ‘zero’. Well, if the odds of getting a free ticket were one out of a hundred, that’s what you’d have…

That’s a lot of verbiage to summarize as Check Point Three: “Science Doesn’t Bet Against The Odds”.

Finally, and very sadly, much touted ‘science’ in the press today is really agenda support. Let me contrast real science with techno-propaganda: a real scientific investigation looks for facts, pro and con, that answer the question “Could reality be like I think it might be?” – and that answer may well be ‘NO’. Techno-propaganda, on the other hand, seeks to prove a specific position.

The key difference is the motivation, a motivation that in the case of techno-propaganda leads to the tendency to exclude/ignore those inconvenient negative points that might prove problematic to the Agenda.

The Check Point Three summary is: “If There’s Money, Beliefs Or Politics At Stake, It Probably Isn’t Real Science”

Notably, those most motivated to report on their results are often the folks with the biggest stake in the actual answer… Foxes are always the first to volunteer for hen house guard duty.

I hope these easy to apply checkpoints help the public, if not the news media, distinguish between real science and fantasy. If any of those agenda-motivated statistics out there happen to be truly representative of the real situation in this country, then we are already in a world of hurt, science-wise! It’s no wonder that 12% of us are poor! (Or is it 22%? Or 9%? Any how, 99% aren’t rich…? Or 96.1% aren’t rich…? Or 93.1%…)