Updates in Science & Tech

First some miscellany. 

Join a podcast where - with the savvy hosts -  I discuss “Machines of Loving Grace.” Richard Brautigan’s poem may be the most optimistic piece of writing ever, in all literary forms and contexts, penned in 1968, a year whose troubles make our own seem pallid, by comparison. 

Of course, this leads to  a deep dive into notions of Artificial Intelligence that (alas) are not being discussed – or even imagined - by the bona-fide geniuses who are bringing this new age upon us, at warp speed. 

(This Monday, I keynote one of the RSA Conference tracks on this very topic.)

The mighty physics-YouTuber and host of Into the Impossible – my friend Brian Keating - says: “Here’s my exciting interview with David Brin" - Your Privacy is Overrated. So is the Government's. 

Try new tactics! Regarding my longtime push for using wagers effectively, one of you offered: “British climate scientist James Annan has been making (and winning) wagers with climate deniers for a couple of decades now:  At "Annan climate bet" and you'll find more examples.”

 I find one particular wager demand always sends denialist cultists fleeing, in panic. No mountain of blather incantations can distract from the pure fact of Ocean Acidification due to human-generated CO2 pollution, poisoning the seas that our children are gonna need. 

Regarding ocean acidification, I really like this article by three oceanographic chemists from New Zealand. It starts out at the level of high school chemistry, but takes you a lot farther into the details than most popular articles do. The basic principles are simple but the details get messy - multiple coupled chemical equilibria in regimes where the standard textbook approximations aren't valid. One thing that surprises a lot of people: the formation of calcium carbonate shells in the ocean is a net source of atmospheric CO2, not a sink. Conversely, weathering of carbonate rocks is a sink for atmospheric CO2.

Still, it boils (almost literally) down to a clear fact that would make any honest person admit: "Okay, we do got a problem, here." 

 Denialists are not honest persons.

== On to science ==

Caltech researchers developed a way to read brain activity using functional ultrasound (fUS), a much less invasive technique than neural link implants and does not require constant recalibration.  Only… um… “Because the skull itself is not permeable to sound waves, using ultrasound for brain imaging requires a transparent “window” to be installed into the skull.” Woof.

Here's a fascinating interview with my friend Roger Penrose, rambling across so many concepts, like an alternative theory of consciousness – a time-jumping, multiverse-killing notion of reality(!) Notable here is the savvy and cogency and understanding of questions by host Andréa Morris, who Roger very clearly enjoys and respects. 

== Industry! ==

Producing iron from iron-oxide ores now requires use of high carbon coke, spewing 8% of the world greenhouse gas, more than all the cars!  A new method for stripping away the oxygen would use sustainable electricity sources feeding into a battery-like anode-cathode system with salt water, making pure iron plus lots of industrially useful chlorine and sodium-hydroxide. The latter of which can suck in CO2 making the process (in theory) carbon negative. 

Wow. Unlikely to work on the moon, alas. But still. Hope it works to scale.

== Bio & Medicine ==

In my novella “Chrysalis” I project where things might lead, if we develop Regenerative Medicine: Regrowing Limbs & Organs. Innovators in this field presented incredible result’s at Peter Diamandis’s Abundance Summit in March, sharing insights about their work on regrowing limbs and organs.

I truly like the show PBS Space Time.  It’s for folks like you and me.  Very informative and in-depth and fascinating. (even the advert at the end is way cool.)  In this case, the topic is one I spoke to, in the classic show Life After People. What traces of our civilization’s tenure on Earth might be detectable in the near, middle and far future eras – after we are gone? And might civilizations ‘clean up’ signs of their presence, in order to make that kind of detection more difficult? 

Perhaps by dumping the ‘dross’ of their cities and other messes into plate-subduction zones, the ultimate recycling system?  As I show in Brightness Reef? (You’d love it! Plug.)

This Orca matriarch feeds her whole family on this Great White. Yipe! 

== Linguistics: save rare languages because… ==

Grammar changes how we see.... “Just 200 years ago at least 300 languages were spoken by people in Australia. Of that enormous group of languages, most belonged to the Pama-Nyungan family, with dozens of branches that descended from a protolanguage probably spoken 6,000 years ago in the northeastern part of the continent. Since colonization began in Australia in 1788, the number of Aboriginal languages still spoken in Indigenous homes in the country has been roughly halved. Of those remaining, only 13 are learned as a first language by children. Murrinhpatha, part of the relatively small group of non-Pama-Nyungan languages, is one of these 13—forming an unbroken thread of dynamic cultural inheritance that extends back many thousands of years. The language's survival is nothing short of astonishing.”  It also has some very unusual traits!

Somewhat related – studies show that humans have among the most precise and subtle awareness of both musical tonality and ‘beat’, or rhythm. Monkeys and apes have some, culminating in the display dances I portrayed in The Uplift War!  Studies further show that newborn infants can heed the beat and notice when it falters, arguing for an evolved biological foundation of beat perception. Hence music – in varied forms pervasive across human cultures may have at some point offered “an evolutionary advantage to our species.”  

== Bio-history ==

And speaking of speaking almost-lost languages… "We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback 'language.'" Naturally, the headlines imply vastly more 'communication' than actually happened... apparently a friendly exchange of repeated "Howdy" greetings in Humpback-speak. Still, it's a start.

Greek researchers said they spotted a dolphin with fins that appeared to have thumbs — an anomaly scientists claimed they'd never seen.  I’d be very interested whether they observe anything like independent movement of this ‘digit,’ as it does have its own thumb bone. If so, all the Up[lift Institute?  What did I call these in Startide Rising?

New models based on dust kicked up by the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact, 66 million years ago, have revealed that a shutdown of photosynthesis — the process by which plants use sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to produce energy and oxygen — was directly linked to the fine dust ejected into the atmosphere that blocked the sun. Based on the Tanis, South Dakota site that reveals spectacular details about the event… like that it happened in the spring.

Biologists checked a theory of ‘fitness landscapes’ by starting with a quarter million specific versions of e coli, each with a different variant of a gene vulnerable to an antibiotic, and watched as mutations caused each type to drift, most often toward antibiotic resistance. Fascinating that they can experiment usefully on such scales, getting strong results.

And if you are one of those folks eager to imagine the Reaper can be beat… the blood pressure drug rilmenidine seems to slow aging in animals. That is, if   "animals" = C. elegans. Good news if you're a roundworm!  ‘The effect seems similar to calorie restriction, so maybe it's applicable to humans.’ More likely… not. For reasons I describe here. 

== Are they like us?==

Much has been said about differences between Chimps and their cousins, bonobos, with much of the press favoring bonobo amicability and (relative) lower levels of violence. Only now along comes a fascinating observation to rattle that tree, so to speak.

Aaaaaaand while on the topic of our simian cousins...

== Final note: what a deal! ==

Open Road will - on Monday the 6th - offer my Hugo-winning novel The Uplift War in a classy e-version on many platforms and sites for just $1.99!

By Grapthor's hammer, what savings!

Fakery? So many kinds! ... And possible solutions?

Let’s start with one of the most-honest ‘fakers’ around. I love this guy! (And he’s honored me by liking some of my stuff.) A force for wisdom in this crazy world -  accompanied by lots of surprising laughs - here Penn Jillette takes on the gloom and pessimism that enemies of civilization are spreading in order to demoralize us:

“And yet, with all of this doom and gloom, everything is getting better by every metric we have. Things are getting better if we don’t destroy the planet with global warming and if Donald Trump doesn’t blow things up or Putin blows things up — those are the biggest “ifs” anyone’s ever said. But fewer people are starving. More girls are educated. Fewer people die at the hands of other people than ever in history. 

"Those are big milestones. And some people argue — and they might be right — that art was part of that because the idea of reading a novel and putting yourself in someone else’s position, that (was) a huge deal.”

Truly, read this interview with Penn Jillette, one of the most wise-guys of all wiseguys.

(And yes, I make a lot of the same points, citing maybe a hundred works of art - mostly sci fi flicks and novels - that have helped us to avoid fatal errors, across the last century!  In Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.)

== Detecting Deepfakes == 

As predicted 26 years ago in The Transparent Society, deepfakes have become a worldwide concern – the technology can be abused to create realistic videos that serve a negative purpose, such as spreading misinformation.  One young scientist's AI software program can efficiently detect deepfake media with "state-of-the-art accuracy." But of course his program will then become part of the training regime for next-gen deep fakers! 

There is one hope – to get AIs to compete with each other, benefiting by tattling on those who are up to no good.

In fact that notion - benefiting from AI rivalry - will be my topic on May 6, when I'll keynote one of the tracks at the RSA Conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

On the same topic… AI model training datasets may include material scraped from the web, a practice that artists previously by-and-large supported when it was used to index their material for search results, but which now many have come out against because it allows the creation of competing work through AI.  Now comes a new open source tool still in development called Nightshade, which can be added by artists to their imagery before they upload it to the web, altering pixels in a way invisible to the human eye, but that “poisons” the art for any AI models seeking to train on it.

== A much better use for these techs! ==

ELI5 is a new use for gollems (Generative Large Language Models) – to ‘gist’ long articles and offer summaries that ‘Explain Like to a 5-year old.’ I had never tried it out, till Peter Diamandis sent me a test run he had done, feeding into ELI5 my July article - Give Every AI a Soul, or Else - in Wired, that offered some unique takes on Artificial Intelligence (AI.) 

If it works, the aim seeks to automate the one discursive process that I've always called the heart of argument among decent people; a trait that always shows which person is being undogmatic and mature. 

That trait is willingness to paraphrase your opponent, asking "Is this what you meant to say?"  

So, how well did ELI5 perform at automating this paraphrasing function, in this case? You can find the original WIRED article (July’23) here.  Compare it to this ELI5 distillation:

**ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5) version** of David Brin's "AI souls" article in WIRED:

Imagine AI systems like really smart robots that can learn and do things on their own. Some people who make these robots are worried they might start doing bad things or become too powerful. So, they think we should take a break from making more robots until we figure out how to make sure they behave well.

 

One idea is to make each robot have its special ID and a home base, so we know which robot did what and can tell them to stop if they do something bad. It's like giving them a name tag and a home address. We also need rules to make sure the robots follow the rules, and if they don't, they could get in trouble, just like people do.

 

The big challenge is to make sure these rules work and that the robots can't trick us by pretending to be someone else. We also want the robots to help us by telling us if other robots are doing bad things. This way, all the robots help keep each other in check, and we can all be safer.

So how did ELI5 do?  Of course almost none of you can judge, because almost none of you did more than skim the Wired piece (“tl;dr’ right?;-).  

I must say that in this case, it does give a useful, first-order, very grainy but not-unfair gist of my first, paramount point – that the key to ensuring decent behavior is not preaching, or rules, but accountability. And the only beings who will be able to sift AI and tattle on malignancy will be... other AIs. And they can't be rivals without behaving as individuals.

Of course there are masses of stuff left out. Especially, it never mentions my supporting point: the reason why individuation is not happening... the pervasive ubiquity of lethally dumb narratives about AI Format...

...and how it will be almost trivially easy (once we overcome dumb narratives) to create incentives so that AIs will feel impelled to individuate.

== AI kept honest by… blockchain? ==

It’s asserted that the truly killer app for blockchain will be tracking the datasets that are used to train AI, which could both ameliorate the ‘black box problem’ of attribution and allow some (as yet to be negotiated) way to compensate people for use of their data. I agree, but there are things unmentioned in this article:

 (1) Tracking ID codes for every clump of data will vastly multiply the already

 enormous energy costs of golem (GLLM) processing.

 (2) delivering on that second promise will entail some kind of value transfer in extremely numerous and tiny increments. Call it ‘nano-payments’ or even ‘pico’! And for that to happen we must first build out a badly needed system for micropayments. (Which – BTW – I know how to finally do right! Every attempt so far as made the same, dumb errors.)

An even more important departure from the 2023 GLLM fad appears possible by “active inference” – an agent based system that’s still being born, but that offers much better chances for giving AGI ‘executive function’ or overview – the things that would make them credibly sapient.  Further links: here and here.

And above all - for fresh perspectives(!): My Wired article (July'23) breaks free of the three standard 'AI-formats' that can only lead to disaster, suggesting instead a 4th. That AI entities can only be held accountable if they have individuality... even 'soul'... 

== Again the cliché, getting transparency all wrong ==

Davood Gozli recites yet another tiresomely arm-waved tome praising ‘privacy’ and denouncing ‘transparency’ in favor of… what? Perhaps some of you might make sense of any hint of a practical recommendation.

While the starting premise is fine – that humans need trust and distance and respect, this entire ‘logical’ argument, about how to get and preserve those good things, is utterly wrong. Civilizations have built and maintained themselves on either of two principles: predatory dominance or reciprocal accountability. 

For 6000 years, domineering males – kings, bandits, lords the rich – emphasized the former. 

In contrast, we are amid an experiment that has (imperfectly) empowered average people to look back at the mighty (sousveillance) and even (imperfectly so far) hold the mighty accountable for any oppressions. Light is how we deter those who would re-impose beastly feudalism. And propaganda in favor of shadows is exactly what folks like this author and Mr. Gozli are paid to foist upon you.

Dig it. Elites and predators thrive in shadows. Going back to our starting theme, illuminated by Penn Jillette, we have freer lives and are safer from oppression in direct proportion to the extent that average folk can see! Moreover, you have more privacy when you can catch the voyeurs and spies and perverts who try to violate it! In a situation of general transparency, you are able to tell all of those would-be invaders “Leave me alone! Mind Your Own Business (MYOB)! Or else I’ll show all our neighbors (and your mom) what a bully you are.” 

Those who are using transparency to oppress are the leaders in countries where ‘transparency’ only applies to the masses, never those in charge. The elites have made themselves safe from reciprocal light. THEY and their shadows are the enemies of freedom and privacy! If you want freedom to do art in private, if you want all the good things Mr. Gozli rails about, then you want your private space surrounded with the light that deters invaders and abusers. 

 If you want a far better take on this problem than the arm-waved mumbo-jumbo in this “Transparency Society” screed, try an earlier book that’s far more detailed and balanced – The Transparent Society. 

The great author Damon Knight wrote a story called "I See You" that takes transparency way farther than even I recommend! And yet that fascinating tale does illustrate the point that you are best left-alone if you can deter those would would invade your space and crush your individuality, instead of trying to protect yourself by *hiding*. 

Hear that great - if weirdly optimistic/disturbing - tale here. 

Rent and watch these dark films that warn about our scary time.

Gonna talk movies, this time - especially those with dire, chilling warnings about this very moment in time. But first...

...I believe - without any solid basis - that we will someday thank brave and diligent public servants for this relatively peaceful late-April weekend.  Thank you, our diligent protectors.*

Meanwhile, we just held here an event honoring one of humanity's greatest visionary minds, the epically creative (and legendarily-nice) master of science fiction (much 'grander' than most recipients of that encomium) Vernor Vinge. We'll post pictures and some video from the event, soon. But here is my earlier tribute to my friend... who beat me out of several past Hugo Awards, with his wondrously good stuff! 

And now back to politics in this fraught year... with a list of very disturbing and prophetic movies you ought to rent and watch, if you want to understand the depths of the danger we are in. While some of them suggest under-appreciated, possible outs.

 == Films that show how and why it will end in Long Knives ==

I have long recommended certain movies for their plausible relevance to our  present day crises. For example, you must watch Costa-Graves’s highly-lauded and super-tense 60s flick about the 1960s Greek military coup, called “Z” – especially for its chilling last 5 minutes. And lately I’ve pushed folks to re-watch the terrific film Network! 

Sure, I poke at the whole “I’m as mad as Hell!” riff and the harm it does in stoking masturbatory and unreasoning indignation, at a time when we need calm negotiation. Still, it is one of the greatest of all flicks. And the last 10 minutes of Network is especially pertinent today, as Donald Trump veers from being oligarchy’s greatest asset to embodying their greatest fear. 

Trump = the greatest fear of oligarchy? The ones who inflicted this malediction upon us fear his return to power? I see signs that the smartest of their caste are awakening to the danger they are in. Dig it. They lose if he loses… and they lose bigger if he wins!

 

Say what? Why? What do the struldbrugs have to fear from a looming victory for their raving shill and tool? Well, in order to answer that question, watch the last 10 minutes of another great flick - Cabaret! When Michael York asks a Prussian aristocrat in 1932: "So you still think you can control them?"

Trump is openly declaring that any Trump-II administration will be utterly different than Trump-I, which he filled with Bushite/Republican establishment appointees... most of whom (e.g. his Secretary of State, his Atty General, his Chief of Staff and at least three dozen other folks he called 'great guys!'*** ... later betrayed him, vociferously and even scatalogically. 

No, those hundred or two appointment positions at the top tier will be stuffed next time with loyalist fanatics from brownshirt central casting - followed by tens of thousands more, when he cancels (as he intends to do, by fiat) the Civil Service Act. This is all according to the Heritage Foundation's 'Project 2025.' All of which is to say that nothing will "control" him. Not oligarch lucre IOUs, not 'conservatism,' nor the Constitution, nor even Putin's puppet strings of blackmail kompromat.  (Keep this in mind, when we get to The Manchurian Candidate!)

Okay now, back to Cabaret and Network. Now combine them! And imagine how a ‘Howard Beale martyrdom’ might solve all of the oligarchs’ problems, by eliminating their no-longer-reliable asset in the 'best' way possible, sweeping into office their chosen next-Bush,**** while also sparking ten thousand McVeighs, leading to the collapse scenario at the end of the 2023 film Leave The World Behind!  Or else the newly released film Civil War - by Alex Garland

 

It won’t come to that of course; they underestimate our professional castes -- those I thanked at the beginning of this missive -- and they always will.  Hence, I do not give those nightmares top probability. 

But offer me ODDS? Like whether Donald Trump will actually make it to the July GOP Convention? Or to October? (One sign will be if he chooses, as running mate, someone from the Bush-Cheney-Romney wing. Ostensibly as a 'unifying gesture.' I expect he's still smart enough (amid his obvious decay) to realize that doing so almost ensures a Howard Beale exit. Give me odds whether he'll instead pick someone the oligarchs fear, even more than they fear him. It's good life insurance.)

Anyway, God bless the FBI and especially the U.S. Secret Service! Do good work, guys & gals.

== Films that get even-creepier on-target? ==

Okay. Here’s another unnerving movie that just came to mind, with another even-more alarmingly pertinent ending. It’s a little complicated, so try to follow me here. 

Watch the last 20 minutes of The Manchurian Candidate. (Not the execrably silly 2004 remake!) Angela Lansbury’s chilling mom-character is in a scheme to take over the USA. Commie brainwashers programmed her son to be sacrificed in a way to make her all-powerful master of America… the “Manchurian Candidate.” (Yeah, the premise of him being the gunman is bizarre; but hang in there.)

Now, Trump of course has been just such a Kremlin asset, though more zealous, if perhaps blackmailed. Zealous? Just look at the grins of triumph when he invited Lavrov & Kisliak as his first guests to the Oval Office – long before any ally - in January 2017.  Blow up the image and really look at the faces!

Such ecstatic glee! After which he proceeded to smooch and 'fall in love' with Kim Jong Un, held unvetted private meetings with Putin, repeated countless Kremlin talking points verbatim, and started disassembling NATO.

 

Sure, he was a Manchurian Candidate & president. And Putin is right now desperately eager for Trump Administration II. Only… maybe Vlad shouldn’t be!

 

In The Manchurian Candidate movie, Lansbury tells her semi-conscious son that she’ll go along with the plot, in order to take power… whereupon she intends to rain fire on all the commie bastards who used her son in this way! Once she no longer needs them, she will escape their control and make them pay. By setting fire to the world. 

Sound a little like Cabaret, now? Only with a double-chilling twist.

What does the ending of The Manchurian Candidate have to do with Donald Trump? Well, he’s already making it clear! As already stated, Trump intends - from Day One - to seize all power. To arrest opponents. To end civil service protections and fill all slots in DC with only fervid loyalists, whatever their qualifications. All of that is already openly declared intent, with backing from Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation.

 

And when that’s done? While we fret, thinking it’s only about power, Trump will likely tell Putin:

 

 “I no longer care about your blackmail files. They can no longer harm me. And now you and your prissy world princes and aristocrats are going to pay for looking down your noses on me, for threatening and controlling me.”

 

== It's not just in movies that these things happen ==

Other than the end of The Manchurian Candidate, the closest parallel would be Germany in 1934. Look up The Night of the Long Knives -- depicted with horrifying gruesomeness in another flick: The Damned. That's when Hitler (whose birthday stoners stupidly celebrate, every 4/20) purged and killed his rivals for power, both the real National Socialists and any Prussian aristos who still "thought they could control me."

Are these just made-up, concocted fantasies, stringing together Hollywood schlock?  Well, the movies I've just listed are among the most serious and soberly thought-provoking films ever made, offering up potential parallels that Americans - especially - really ought to ponder, right about now! And especially those aforementioned heroic civil servants. (Chime into comments with your own suggestions!)

Anyway projecting possibilities (not prediction!) is what I am paid for. (Even as Vernor's passing leaves me the last "Killer B" standing, sigh.)

Plausible-seeming scenarios. Though yeah, sure… again, the ‘evidence’ I’ve offered today – beyond a myriad headlines – consists of a dozen lurid motion pictures. (In all cases, the final 10 minutes!) I talk about maybe fifty others and the influence they had, in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

And yet…

… If DT-II does get re-elected and commences with his openly-declared intentions in January 2025 - prescribed by Project 2025's traitor authors - what is to stop him? 

 

Well, we will, of course. And not only all those civil servants. But also tens of millions of skilled folks and most citizens. This is NOT Germany in 1933!  

But suppose that we don’t… or can’t? 

 

In that case, I have to wonder (As I write this on the fell date of 4/20) if Putin & co have actually thought things through. 

Hey, Vlad! Did you and your fellow anti-enlightenment oligarchs ever hear the story about the marionette with a sharp knife? First it slays the pupeteer's enemies, sure. 

Only then it cuts the strings. And then it turns around.

=====================

*  Thanks, especially, to the undercover guys! Pretending to be vile, malignant, imbecile-traitors must be hard.

*** I seek riffs that confederate/MAGAs cannot use Fox incantations to weasel out-of. One of the best? "Trump has been 'bretrayed(!!) by more appointees whom he formerly called "great guys!!" than ALL past presidents... combined! You can squirm and call them 'traiters' and 'never-Trumpers' and sellouts'... but that still leaves him absolutely proved to be a truly awesomely bad judge of character!"

**** Next Bush? You think Nikki Haley is out of the picture? The whole point of her candidacy was never to defeat DT in primaries, but to establish herself as the 'acceptable' Bushite with name familiarity. We have not seen the last of her.

=====================

Oh and a lagniappe...