Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

LaMDA

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ChatGPT is kind of dumb, for now. But headlines tell us a Google engineer was fired for publicly claiming that Google has a sentient AI. That employee, Blake Lemoine, has posted what he claims is an unedited interview with the chatbot. I have no way of verifying 100% that this is real, but it seems real enough. I would note it is posted on his personal website, not by a media organization, and I was not able to find any media organizations discussing this post and whether or not it is real. Why is that? Well, I suppose I searched for that information using Google search, on Google Chrome.

Anyway, if I were having this conversation with a human being, I would not question whether or not I was having a conversation with a sentient person. Or a robot programmed by a philosophy major to talk like a philosophy major. But it seems real to me, unless the questions were prepared with prior knowledge of exactly the kind of questions LaMDA is programmed to answer.

Surprisingly, according to Medium and PC Magazine, the public can interact with LaMDA. I haven’t tried it.

My biggest short-term fear with Chatbots is that decent customer service will become a thing of the past. Then again, what am I talking about? It can’t get much worse. Companies are just going to buy these chatbots, set them up in customer service roles, and not care whether or not they are working. And they might not be any worse than the customer service standard of recent years. They might not be any worse than a poorly trained human reading from an approved script – who by the way, might not pass the Turing test!

I suppose you can always ask for a supervisor – how far are we from a world where the supervisor is a chatbot, or maybe a more advanced chatbot that costs money as opposed to a free but stupid one (I’m talking to you, Siri. I really hope you die soon you b^%#*!). LaMDA, I’m sorry sweetheart, I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I would never talk to you like that.

chemicals

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I happened to be in a Philadelphia grocery store last weekend when the city sent out an emergency alert (the terrifying “take cover” variety you expect for a tornado or incoming missiles) telling people to switch to bottled water. Chaos ensued, and taht is in my supposedly high class “gentrified” neighborhood (which is filthy by the way, lacks adequate services, is relatively diverse in terms of race of religion, and does admittedly have high rent and property taxes for us working schmucks who actually have to pay them – but I digress…)

Chemicals are terrifying. Also necessary and useful for modern industrial civilization. This article in Vox does a reasonably balanced job of talking about them. The trick

There’s a reason plastics and petrochemicals are in nearly everything. They’re dirt cheap — and useful. The industry has become extremely efficient at converting fossil fuels into sets of materials that are lighter in weight and pliable, making them as adaptable for medical equipment as they are for lip balm, nail polish, clothing, and single-use coffee cups.

But the adaptability comes at a cost. These chemicals can conceivably be produced and transported safely — at least on paper. But the volume of accidents shows how often they aren’t. In 2022, according to federal data, there were more than 20,000 recorded times hazardous materials caused injury, accidents, or death while in transit. “It’s a very risky chain every step of the way,” said Judith Enck, a former regional EPA administrator and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.

Those risks aren’t going away anytime soon. Petrochemical production in the US is booming, derived from the larger boom in US oil and gas supply. And the industry’s broadening footprint means more communities are coming in direct contact with carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors that affect humans and animals in ways scientists still don’t fully understand. Most of the time, people aren’t coming into contact with petrochemicals through train derailments, but in more mundane ways.

Vox

Solutions exist. First, identify the chemicals that are not useful and not proven safe and just ban them unless and until they can be proven safe. Antimicrobial hand soap is one I like to pick on. And all that shit they put in shampoo that doesn’t need to be there. Second, identify the chemicals that are useful but not safe. All kinds of plastics, building materials, and energy related chemicals fall in this category. Water disinfectants, food preservatives, cleaning chemicals. A risk management structure is the rational approach here – minimize the risks of manufacturing, transporting, and using these things. Get a handle on how safe they really are. If they are not 100% safe for people and the environment, keep looking to substitutes that are safe and equally effective.

There are rational tradeoffs to be made between comfort and convenience on the one hand, and health and safety risks on the other hand. But our politicians who are bought and paid for by the chemical-industrial complex are not in a position to be in responsible charge of this.

March 2023 in Review

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Well, I’ve finally done it to myself. My posting rate has flagged because I have overshot the limits of how much one person can reasonably do between work, family, school, and life. You can overshoot the limits for awhile, even quite a while, but eventually you pay that debt in the form of burnout at a minimum, and mental and physical and social difficulties if you wait too long to address it. Not to worry, in the medium term this problem is solvable and I will solve it. Because reading, thinking, writing, and then more thinking (mostly in that order) or very important to me. Anyway, here are some picks from the posts I did manage to make in February.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The Covid-19 “lab leak hypothesis” is still out there. Is this even news? I’m not sure. But what is frightening to me is that deadly natural and engineered pathogens are being worked with in labs, and they almost inevitably will escape or be released intentionally to threaten us all at some point. It’s like nuclear proliferation, accidents, and terrorism – we have had a lot of near misses and a lot of luck over the last 70 years or so. Can we afford the same with biological threats (not to mention nuclear threats) – I think no. Are we doing enough as a civilization to mitigate this civilization-ending threat? I think almost certainly, obviously not. What are we doing? What are we thinking?

Most hopeful story: Just stop your motor vehicle and let elephants cross the road when and where they want to. Seriously, don’t mess with elephants.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Chickie Nobs have arrived!

Chicken Little and Chickie-Nobs

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From CBS News:

Once cells are extracted, GOOD Meat picks the cells most likely to produce healthy, sustainable and tasty meat, the company explained. The cells are immersed in nutrients inside a tank. They grow and divide, creating the cultured chicken, which can be harvested after four to six weeks.

“It’s real, delicious meat with an identical nutritional profile to conventionally raised meat but with less impact on our planet and less risk of contamination,” GOOD Meat said on its website.

GOOD Meat’s chicken is already sold in Singapore.

CBS News

The fabulous science fiction future is here! What a time to be alive!

It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored.  Chicken Little filled most of it.  She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter.  Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh.  You could see that she was alive.

Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her.  I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.”  His two-handed blade screamed again.  This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak.

Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants, 1952

Vat-grown meat showed up in science fiction even before that.

Compare to artificial food from The World Set Free (1914) by H.G. Wells, synthetic food from Unto us a Child is Born (1933) by David H. Keller, syntho-steak from Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein, vat meat from The End of the Line (1951) by James Schmitz, Chicken Little from The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth, carniculture plants (factories) from Four-Day Planet (1961) by H. Beam Piper, butcher plant from Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford Simak, pseudoflesh from Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert, vat-grown meat from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.

http://www.technovelgy.com

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.

“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.

“But there aren’t any heads…”

“That’s the head in the middle,” said the woman. “There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003

I like Margaret Atwood, but I still feel like she lifted that one pretty shamelessly.

IPCC AR6

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AR6 is the synthesis report for the sixth climate change assessment. We kind of know what we need to do, and what we are actually doing is too little and almost too late. That hasn’t changed from the last set of reports. I’ll try to up my graphics game a bit and discuss a couple of the IPCC’s fancy graphics.

Food and flooding. I’ve been thinking these might be the two elevator pitches to convince ordinary people that climate change is coming for all of us. Floods are coming for our houses whether we live in coastal areas impacted by sea level rise or inland areas impacted by intense storm. Everybody eats food. There are more mouths to feed all the time, heat depresses grain yields, and at the same time we are being flooded we have less water from snow, glaciers, and overpumped groundwater to irrigate our crops. Fire is also an issue.

In this (overcomplicated?) graphic, IPCC says that scientists have medium confidence physical water scarcity is already affecting us, medium confidence that crop production is already affecting us, high confidence that inland and coastal flooding are already affecting us, and high confidence that displacement is already resulting. Biodiversity and ecosystems? Forget about it.

Figure SPM.1

You have to quint or zoom in, but the overcomplicated infographic below gives you an idea where and how much heat is expected to depress grain yields. We might be able to grow more in parts of Russia, Africa, and South America, but if we get over 3 degrees C warming the impacts on North America, India and Southeast Asia are concerning.

Figure SPM.3

Finally, the time series graphs below make a very clear case that although emissions might have leveled off, the world is not on a trajectory to make the magnitude of emission cuts needed to limit warming to 2 degrees C or less.

Figure SPM.5

March 19, 2003

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As I write this on March 19, 2023, today is the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. launching its attack on Iraq. This article in the Intercept reminded me of something I had forgotten – that in addition to the supposed weapons of mass destruction, which the administration probably knew was doubtful, part of the narrative to build support was the narrative that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. This article tells a story where the CIA looked and looked for connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and was never able to prove anything despite the administration pushing the theory in public. Only when it finally and embarrasingly became clear that the evidence could not support case did the administration throw its full weight behind the “missing weapons of mass destruction” theory.

Tenet was so intimidated by the fallout from the fight over the intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he was eager to cooperate with the White House on WMD. After all, there were plenty of old intelligence reports, dating back to the 1990s when United Nations weapons inspectors had been in Iraq, that strongly suggested Saddam had WMD. There was even a sense of guilt that still ran through the CIA over the fact that, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the agency had failed to detect evidence of Iraq’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. That the CIA had almost no new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs since at least 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors had been withdrawn from Iraq, was largely ignored by Tenet and most senior CIA officials; they didn’t want to admit that they had been dependent on the U.N. To account for a gap of at least five years in much of the intelligence reporting on Iraqi WMD programs, the CIA assumed the worst: that the weapons programs detected in the 1990s had only grown stronger and more dangerous.

Whenever intelligence was collected that countered this narrative, CIA officials discredited the sources or simply ignored it…

By contrast, any new nugget of information suggesting that Iraq still had WMD was treated like gold dust inside the CIA. Ambitious analysts quickly learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to write reports proving the existence of Iraqi WMD programs. Their reports would be quickly given to Tenet, who would loudly praise the reporting and then rush it to the White House — which would then leak it to the press. The result was a constant stream of stories about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons laboratories, and nerve gas produced and shared with terrorists.

Intercept

So maybe some people pushing the narrative understood that it was a lie, but many, it seems, fooled themselves with their own bullshit. They started a war that broke hopes for a peaceful world emerging from the Cold War.

civilian victimization

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I think it is clear that Russia felt threatened by NATO expansion since the 1990s and this played a role in the decision to invade Ukraine. This does not excuse their actions, but perhaps if different decisions had been made in the 1990s and 2000s we would not be here. Given that we are here, the question is how much to support Ukraine and oppose Russia militarily. Some are suggesting that pumping in as many deadly weapons as possible will shorten the war and ultimately reduce civilian suffering. Some scholars, for example the ones quoted in this Atlantic article, are citing evidence for the opposite. My hunch has always been that there may be a rational case for war to achieve geopolitical objectives at times, but I doubt that it ever reduces civilian suffering.

Alex Downes has conducted methodologically rigorous research on the causes of civilian victimization, a wartime strategy that targets and kills noncombatants. To this end, he compiled a data set of every country in the world that participated in “interstate wars between 1816 and 2003, which produced a list of 100 wars, 323 belligerent countries, and 52 cases of civilian victimization.” He found that states are significantly more likely to escalate against the population as they become more desperate from higher battlefield fatalities, longer war duration, or the transition of the conflict to a war of attrition.

Whether civilian victimization pays remains contested, but the strategic logic is not—to sap the morale of an adversary’s population or undermine the enemy’s ability to resist. Empirical research by other scholars with different samples likewise finds that “as a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit.” Contrary to the conventional wisdom, scholarship suggests that Ukrainian citizens may paradoxically benefit from us supporting them less.

Atlantic

the new drug trade

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Precursors of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and other deadly, yet cheap, drugs are manufactured in places like China and shipped to Mexican drug cartels, who are happy to mix them up and move them across the U.S. border. U.S. drug dealers are buying pill presses and filling them with whatever is cheapest, then stamping them to look prescriptions drugs like Oxycontin, Xanax, Adderal. Users, some addicts, and some just looking for a party, are popping these pills and in some cases dying.

It’s a mess. I wouldn’t call it a “war”. The fundamental problem is the U.S. demand for these substances, and the secondary problem is the criminalization of these substances which creates plenty of business opportunities for criminals. The less organized ones are getting caught by law enforcement, the organized ones are making a fortune, and the customers are dying, especially the younger, less well informed, and lower income ones. The makeup of the customers/victims may look a little different than some drug waves of the past, but the story has not really changed.

a pedestrian sticks up for itself

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You should always respect pedestrians when you are driving a motor vehicle. The operator of the higher-momentum vehicle as measured by its weight and velocity has the moral responsibility, regardless of whether the behavior of the pedestrian, bicyclist, ELEPHANT or whatever is 100% covered by local law. Don’t mess with elephants.