Author: Owain Bennallack

Categories
Society Technology

Not waving but drowning beneath grey goo data

A few decades ago, someone or other caught the imagination of nerds by warning about ‘grey goo’ – a sludge of self-replicating nanobots that once they got going would eventually submerge the planet beneath depthless layers of their endlessly churned-out carcasses.

That or they ate the world to the core with their ceaseless reproduction.

Either way, not so much Terminator as a silicon Sperminator.

Now, you might protest that I’ve been a bit vague with my introduction. Who exactly said this? When? Where?

But let’s face it – this is the direction we’re headed.

I vaguely remember the details. Either I’ll have to Google it or you will. And right now – mostly to make a point – I can’t be arsed.

You knock yourself out though if you like. I’ll wait…

…you’re back already? I suppose some of us slip down the Net’s rabbit holes more easily than others, eh?

Anyway, back to grey goo.

No goo zone

Or maybe not as grey goo hasn’t happened yet. So far the only unnatural junk piling up on the planet is what we humans put there.

Yes, okay, mud in some forms is a sort of carbon-based life’s grey goo. I’m thinking rich peaty loams and forest canopy floors. Oil sands.

And yes, we could have a long chat about the evolution of grey goo that eats grey goo and where that would all go in a billion years.

But this isn’t the article for such diversions.

My point is we’ve escaped Goo-meggedon so far. At least in the physical world, which still matters the most but won’t before the century is out.

Let the goo times flow

Back over in Not Real Life however – the light-fast world of data and compute and 4Chan LOLs and our future – things aren’t going so well.

Just two months ago I wrote that soon we’ll have to demonstrate our identities to prove we’re not AI-bots. To authenticate our humanity on everything from Twitter to (eventually) talk radio phone-ins.

But by ‘soon’ I mean I was thinking a few years. Not months.

However ChatGPT has put the vanguard of machine learning into the public’s hands with a global gusto. And the resultant cacophony of coverage and wonder has even outdone Dall-E and Stable Diffusion and the other image-focused AI systems’ debuts earlier this year.

Indeed no sooner than you can say “a gun is a dangerous weapon, don’t point it at anything important and treat it with respect” people are already flooding Internet forums created for human pronouncement and consumption to post ChatGPT’s (stupendous) verbal vomit.

To give just one example, Liam Tung of ZD Net reports:

Stack Overflow, a site where developers can ask and answer coding questions, has temporarily banned the use of text generated from ChatGPT, a chatbot released by Open AI last week.

ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model.

People have quickly discovered that, while it answers prompts in a “human-adjacent” way, there can be flaws in the answers it gives.

Basically, keen Stack Overflowers (I guess? I’m not a local) have been spamming the site with ChatGPT-created content. Which is a problem when even the bot’s creator, OpenAI, stresses its precocious child can deliver “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”

Liam Tung – who may or may not be an organic life form himself – continues sagaciously:

This appears to be a key cause of its impact on Stack Overflow and its users who are seeking correct answers to coding problems.

Additionally, because ChatGPT generates answers so quickly, some users are supplying lots of answers generated by it without parsing them for correctness. 

Oh Liam! In just a few casually typed out / generatively predicted words there, you’ve raised so many questions about the future of knowledge, civilisation, blogging for early retirement, and getting a robot to do one’s schoolwork.

But it’s a common kernel at the heart of all that which we’ll be choking on today.

The goo goo trolls

You see, what has struck me most forcefully in the past fortnight is the sheer volume of data these things are going to create.

So far it’s just everyone and his dog. But soon it will be everyone and their robot. Then their robot’s robot. And so on.

Listen carefully! Do you hear a tap-tapping?

Yes, it’s the sound of Lithuanian troll farms and Texan entrepreneurs alike bashing out code and sending forth bots to drown us all in this calorie-light info-crud in order to earn a few dollars from Google’s Adsense. Or perhaps to tilt us to vote this way or that.

Look, I don’t know their nefarious plans. I’m one of the good guys.

But even as I’ve been pecking away for hours like every other curious pigeon on ChatGPT’s levers in the hope of another crumb of dopamine, it struck me that humanity’s death by AI might be even dumber than I previously suspected.

True, I’ve led the field among very obscure pundits in warning that just getting rid of 90% of low-level knowledge jobs could be more than enough to rupture society. At least for a few decades and a civil war or two.

In other words we don’t need a post-singularity-level evil and scheming AI to explain why, with regret, the human race has to go, as it dangles us over a bubbling vat of metaphorical sulphuric acid.

No, just a cheap and dumb-ass bot that can be copied-and-pasted over the world’s office employment might do the trick.

But what’s clear from even these early skirmishes with ChatGPT is an even more insidious risk – the danger of our emerging ‘other’ reality being rapidly flooded with data goo. ‘Plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical’ gunk – or even mostly right but still exceeding mediocre verbiage – that crowds out what little signal is left in a world that already seems to be turned up to 11 on the noise front.

Holly goo lightly

Of course there will be solutions. Every platform already has its own Deckardian countermeasures seeking to resist or destroy this stuff.

But the models will improve. And it will be ever harder to tell their output from a real person’s most precious shared thoughts.

At best it’s yet another arm’s race that you and I will increasingly be viewing out of a passenger window rather than the cockpit, while software does all the heavy-lifting.

Leaving us wondering if we’re on a nice getaway flight to someplace warm, or actually cooped up inside a missile heading for impact.

Or else I guess it breaks the Internet and we go back to fire and parchment and worrying about the wolves.

(But no we won’t go back. As I wrote previously we’ll sign-in as provably real people and fence this stuff out. But we’ll have to do that, for as long as we can. Nobody wants the wolves again.)

Hah! Stick those 1,153 words in your natural language model’s pipe and smoke them. I won’t go down without a fight.

Categories
Technology

We don’t serve their kind here

I am old enough to remember when pleading emails from Nigerian princes locked out of their multi-million fortunes weren’t just a meme.

They actually showed up in your inbox.

Curiously, the initial giveaway with those emails wasn’t even the craziness of the claim.

(The gist of which was that you, Mr Nobody Orother of Upper Nowheresville, was the only hope this poor man had of releasing his fortune – if only you could wire him £10,000 to facilitate the transfer).

No, what marked the emails out was they were invariably shot through with spelling and grammatical errors.

It seemed odd, given the supposed importance of the communication.

Indeed it seemed odd from the perspective of perpetuating a crime.

Did fluent English-speaking Nigerians refuse to work with fraudsters?

Was there something about fraud that caused a word-perfect email to decay into a tell-tale red-pen-fest for any teacher of 12-year olds?

Had the emails been copied and pasted too many times?

Or was it some elaborate way the fraudsters had to track who’d been sent what email, before the coming of marketing response analytics? The same way publishers will put a spelling mistake into a dictionary to spot and prove a counterfeit?

We never learned, as far as I know.

But at least the incompetence made deleting the emails easy.

Death by botulism

Thirty years on, and armies of impersonators assail us on the Internet.

Or rather, they assail our digital identities as we parade them on Twitter or in the comments of a YouTube video.

Casually called bots, they’re nothing like the Robbie the Robots of 1950’s imagination.

Rather these are one-trick one-track ponies whose sole function appears to be to sing the praises of Putin or else tout crypto.

For now pattern recognition again matches and dispatches them.

But for how long?

Anyone who has played with language prediction models like GPT-3 knows they are becoming scarily good at stringing sentences together.

Indeed while many in the field of AI have been complacently (to my eyes, anyway) shrugging their shoulders at the speedy rise of these potential Turing Test busters, at least one Google employee got the sack for saying his favourite chatbot seemed sentient.

An interesting discussion for another day. (Although not one to have with your GPT-3 bromance buddy if you want to keep your job…)

For the purposes of this post I’m more concerned about the apparently imminent chatbot-singularity.

Ticked off bots

That’s not an official term, incidentally – chatbot-singularity.

It’s a phrase I’ve just coined to describe when as many neural net chatbots as can be pumped out are wandering around the Internet indistinguishable from humans.

Indistinguishable at least to anyone but professional AI-witch hunters.

(Think Blade Runner. But with less film noir and nudity.)

After the chatbot-singularity, it will be really hard to know who is human online. Let alone who is the dog of New Yorker cartoon fame.

And it gets tricksier.

Researchers have been trying to train digital agents for years to start their knowledge (/language) land-grab with a keyboard and mouse.

In other words, before you throw the whole Internet at your natural language model so it can learn how to answer anything (which, yes, is what’s going on and if you’ve not been keeping up then your blown mind is excused) you first let it learn about pointers on screens and QWERTY keyboards.

It’s laborious, but once achieved a natural language model could then be prompted to do active things on the Internet that are again indistinguishable (from the Internet’s perspective) to a human.

You think I exaggerate?

As Lex Fridman recently pointed out in a podcast that covered all this territory, how many times have you ticked a box on a data entry form to ‘prove’ you’re not a robot?

Yes, that’s literally the test.

You supply no proof. Being able to tick the box is proof enough.

I’d say that particular security barrier hasn’t got long left to live.

Papers please

Muse on this for a few minutes and I suspect you’ll end up reaching the same conclusion as me.

Which is that you’re eventually going to have to show your passport or your driver’s license to write a post on Reddit.

Not literally. But in some digital form.

Because Reddit (presumably, though we’ll see how society progresses…) doesn’t want robots writing posts as if they were human.

Which chatbots can pretty much now do. (In fact, they can interview each other, complete with deep fake voice impersonations).

And once they can get themselves email addresses and jump through human-ish hoops with their keyboard and mouse skillz, the walls keeping out their conversations will crumble.

So yeah, after that you’ll need to show you are you.

Probably you’ll authenticate a device at first. Your phone or your laptop. But if you use some other device you’ll have to re-authenticate.

Eventually it’ll be biometric, maybe linked to wearables.

The point is some node on The Internet won’t have to compare the data coming from you to the data from Joe Terminator to decide which of you is flesh-and-blood.

You’ll have proven that at some previous stage in the chain, via your birth certificate or whatever, and you’ll point to the proof to continue.

You and whose army?

What if you want an AI agent to do your bidding?

Isn’t any code that interacts with other code on the Internet a bot from this perspective?

Well yes.

Which means traces of you-proof will probably be encoded into anything you initiate and launch on the Internet.

Perhaps absolutely everything you do digitally.

At a simultaneously more concrete and more trivial level, you’ll also eventually own personality-complete human-like chatbots who know what you like, and do stuff for you. They’ll be knitted to you and your reputation the way the valets of old were tied to their masters.

We’re just too slow and digitally cumbersome for this not to be part of our increasingly digital future.

So people or systems (with the right permissions) will have to be able to see they’re your bots, via the integrated you-proof they carry.

A brave new world where your digital DNA leaves traces everywhere.

Oh, and did a thinking bubble just appear above your head complete with the words Use Case For The Blockchain?

Yes I’m inclined to agree.

Categories
Investing

Take your shot

I have started writing articles for The Motley Fool again and am enjoying flexing that particular mental muscle.

I wrote for the Fool for more than ten years. So I guess it’s a bit like in the movie Warrior when boxer turned High School teacher Joel Edgerton goes back into training at the gym and feels the old rhythms returning.

Only with less abs.

Here’s an extract:

Imagine you were in a fairground tent in 1999 peering into the only working crystal ball this side of The Lord of the Rings.

A suspiciously impoverished fortune teller says you’re seeing 2022. You both gaze in wonder – just like the people you see through the mists of time gazing into their smartphones and computer screens.

The techno-prophets are right! The Internet really will takeover the world!

You sprint home to buy shares in all the technology stocks you can.

Although this being 1999, you must wait for your dial-up modem to connect you to your sort-of-cheap broker, then pay extra because you’re buying US tech firms…

But never mind. You’ve seen and own the future!

Yet over the next three years the Nasdaq tech index will fall more than 75% from its peak – and many of your Dotcom stocks go bust.

Crystal balls indeed.

Read the full article at The Motley Fool.

Categories
Society Technology

Settling up and moving on

We were done with our meal and so I signalled to a waiter to settle up.

A very young woman at a table nearby explained what I’d done to her companion – not unkindly, and without possibly knowing she was within earshot of a highly-sensitive Geiger Counter of a human being:

“Did you see that? Do you know why they do that wiggle with their hands? It’s because they used to have write their name on a piece of paper to pay their bills.”

Thank goodness my postman still calls me ‘young man’.

My vanity and intimations of mortality aside, it’s interesting to think about all these little cultural – or even structural – artefacts that litter our society and environment.

One example is the QWERTY keyboard. Most of us use one every day. After a few years and no-training, sheer repetition turns us into touch typists. Our fingers can reach for a P or the space bar even when we’re tapping away on a keyboard-less desk!

Yet this QWERTY layout is arbitrary from today’s vantage point. It’s a legacy of an arm’s race in the once red hot mechanical typewriter boom.

Indeed popular legend is that the key arrangement was selected not to speed up typing but rather to slow typists down – in order to prevent a typewriter’s hammers from jamming.

Whether true or not, the arrangement of keys has not been selected for the modern world – and yet it’s not going to change in our lifetime in the Latin-writing world.

(The only thing likely to supersede it is voice. How very back to the future).

Another example of this in-the-making is the navigation of virtual realities – or The Metaverse as we must call it nowadays.

Getting from imaginary A-to-B is sure to build off video game controls first pioneered by the likes of Doom and Super Mario 64 in the 1990s. Nobody is going to spend time figuring out whether that’s optimal, when so much of the money-spending adult world knows how to do it already.

Of course some habits or actions do go change or away.

My parents were still reciting their number on picking up their home telephone well into the era of Caller ID and mobile. At some point they stopped. Nobody does that any more.

On the other hand, many of my generation still end their emails with a ‘best’ or a ‘cheers’ and their name. The young people don’t.

You can’t model the future

These changes happen so slowly we seldom see them underway.

But for a striking visual example, check out this video of a Chinese model racing through a clothing shoot for a fast fashion brand:

Two things are happening at once here.

Firstly, the ease of manufacturing and the relentless turnover of disposable fashion means the manufacturer Taobao requires images of thousands of product skus every month. Possibly every week.

The model – a pragmatic woman called Cui Yue – laments they could shoot for 24 hours a day and still not get through the backlog.

Which means everyone involved must move at speed.

Secondly, there’s no film in the photographer’s camera. Instead it’s all digital, which makes the marginal cost of an additional shot extremely near-zero.

Fashion photographers were always click-happy, but this is the old flash-flash-flash cliché on steroids.

As a result Yue seems more like some Boston Dynamics ModelBot than the strutting, stalking models of old. She transitions through a dozen poses in as many seconds, with an economy of movement that would put a ballerina to shame.

She’s like a very pretty C-3PO doing Tai Chi.

Turn, turn, turn

Cui Yue has made peace with her eventual replacement by younger, cheaper women.

And I expect those women will have to accept they’ll be replaced by computer graphics. All those people with cameras and clothes and bottles of water are expensive, even at this pace.

The young historian at the restaurant who explained away my hand wave no doubt paid for her bill – like I did – by touching her phone to a portable card reader, brought to the table by the staff.

All very 2022 and yet probably not long for this world, either.

Waiting for the bill is only slightly less annoying than waiting in a queue at the supermarket in today’s world of self-serve checkouts. There’s a small social payoff at the restaurant, but I don’t think it will save the ritual any more than album covers held back music streaming.

Several startups enable diners to pay and leave whenever they want – just by scanning a QR code either at the start or the end of their visit. You get up and go when you’re done.

But that won’t last long either.

Amazon Fresh stores enable you to pick-up anything you like off the shelves and walk out without any formal settling-up. Doing so at a restaurant would be magnitudes easier.

Everything is changing, all the time. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re from the future.

If you can read this you’re already a relic from the past.

Categories
Society Technology

Saving Star Wars: one deep fake at a time

Hayden Christensen in 2010 and good luck to him.

I have a long-running disagreement with a friend about Deep Fake technology and what we’d currently call meme or TikTok culture.

Within some number of years – whether 20 or 1o0 – I believe everyday consumers will be able to seamlessly insert anyone they want into an existing film in place of the original actors.

There are already lots of iPhone apps that will do this clumsily for a face for ten seconds or so.

But I’m envisaging a more complete removal, insertion, and touch-up job. One that can have you wandering around looking for the Lost Ark instead of Harrison Ford, or for the perfect pair of Jimmy Choo heels instead of having to see Sarah Jessica Parker have all the fun.

I believe when this is possible, everyone will have fun doing it.

However my friend considers it “pointless” and in contrast argues “nobody would want to do that”.

I suggest my friend pays more attention to social media.

A disturbance in The Force

But sure, like all these things the novelty will soon wear off.

For two years in a row my mum was in hilarious uproar just from sticking family faces onto the dancing elves of a digital Christmas card.

Now not even she – the biggest fan of that flash in the pan – can be arsed.

However one can speculate about more finessed implementations of the same technology.

By way of example… egged on by Obi Wan Kenobi, I’m re-watching Star Wars in chronological order on Disney Plus.

And to my shock I’m finding the prequels far less terrible than I’d remembered.

Even – whisper it – mostly pretty good. They’ve not just withstood the test of time. They’ve grown stronger for it.

Maybe it’s that 20 years later the stakes are much lower. Or maybe it’s because a dozen Star Wars spin-offs later, we’re all less reverential.

But today, The Phantom Menace’s pod race is clearly a franchise highlight. The various worlds pop.

For whatever reason even Attack of the Clones is almost watchable.

Almost, because… Hayden Christensen. And Natalie Portman. And the porn film level dialogue. And the wooden 1920s stage-y standing around stating their characters’ development.

All that is still something you have to hold your nose through, like a whirl of broccoli puree in what would otherwise be a wondrous Strawberry Sunday of a movie.

The re-write stuff

Is this awfulness because of George Lucas’ famously dire dialogue?

We’ve all heard how Harrison Ford apparently quipped: “George! You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”

Yet the original Star Wars films made Ford and his wise-cracking Han Solo famous – despite or just maybe because of Lucas.

Ewan McGregor wrings out pearls from Lucas’ placeholder bantha fodder in the prequels, too.

But sadly, Christensen does not.

Now to be fair to him he does come across as an arrogant, illogical, surly and deeply unlikeable teenager – which is mostly how I find late adolescents males these days. So given his character’s arc, perhaps it really was all superb acting on his part.

Even so, the verbal ping-pong-played-underwater-in-treacle between him and Portman pretty much sinks Clones as something you’d do for fun, as opposed to something you’d do because you had to atone for wanking in the confession booth.

Which made me wonder… what about if we could just edit him and Natalie P out of Star Wars?

Replace them?

And release not a Director’s Cut but a Viewer’s Revision?

Saving Private Hayden

At last some tangible upside from humanity’s march towards doom!

Anyone not paying attention to the threat from Deep Fake technology should study the polls concerning people’s views about Trump losing the election, Russia and Ukraine – heck even 9/11.

True, a lot of these dedicated reality denialists already wave aside video and audio proof as fake news.

But the average waverer in the street still mostly believes their eyes.

Within a decade or two, that will change. (Unless we can agree some kind of mandatory encoding for anything tampered with using software, which would be almost everything you see, and perhaps force the encoding on to a verification blockchain, say, so that anyone can it look up. But that’s for another day).

Batten down the hatches when Deep Fake wins over the doubters.

The End of Democracy aside, though, the tech could at least fix Attack of the Clones as a side benefit amid the apocalypse.

Take out Christensen and Portman.

Put in, well almost anyone, even a couple of those aforementioned porn stars. But preferably some sassy actors with a bit of chemistry.

Get Phoebe Waller-Bridge to rewrite the dialogue.

Boom! Suddenly Clones is a great movie.

Would you like Peter Sellers with that?

This kind of digital wart removal will become commonplace, I imagine. At first illegal, but later captured and sanctioned by IP owners whose business model is already mostly remixing someone dead’s bright ideas from 50 years ago, ad nauseam.

In the short-term then, we get a better Star Wars.

But what does it mean for the long-term?

Would movies and other cultural releases be V0.9s – betas – and then be patched for years afterwards?

What about once you throw generative AI into the mix? Would there ever be any big franchises again?

Would studios A/B test 100 versions of the same film with a dozen different actors and avatars before releasing the highest scorer?

Even this is just tip of the iceberg stuff.

Most people today still really don’t guess at how fast and furious the future is going to be.

Post-publication update: Here’s Kermit the Frog envisaged in various movies by the DALL-E natural language driven AI.

Categories
Society

World Cities and aggregation theory

The (Great) Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Ben Thompson of Stratechery fame has a way of explaining the winner-takes-all dynamics of Internet-era platform companies which he calls Aggregation Theory.

It’s worth having a read and a think about if you’re struggling to understand why trillion dollar tech firms are posting 20%+ annual revenue growth, for example – and the supposed law of large numbers be damned.

Ben’s developed the concept since he first semi-accidentally coined it in 2015. He recently applied it to ideas and memes, noting:

…sure, the Internet makes possible a wide range of viewpoints — you can absolutely find critics of Black Lives Matter, COVID policies, or pro-Ukraine policies — but the Internet, thanks to its lack of friction and instant feedback loops, also makes nearly every position but the dominant one untenable.

If everyone believes one thing, the costs of believing something else increase dramatically, making the consensus opinion the only viable option; this is the same dynamic in which publishers become dependent on Google or Facebook, or retailers on Amazon, just because that is where money can be made.

Ben Thompson, The Current Thing, 17 March 2022

I can see where he’s going with this.

A bane of our times is how the proliferation of ideas and the thousand voices blooming potential of the Internet seems to be so much dough going into a doctrinaire cookie cutter that stamps out a couple of ideologically-opposed tribal views about everything from Brexit to Trump to Covid to Climate Change and that’s your lot.

Ben’s mapping of aggregation theory onto this paradox is as good as any other explanation.

All roads lead to Rome

It made me think that aggregation theory could also explain why as the Internet boomed and location became apparently less important, a handful of global cities became all-important.

The way I’ve put it before is that:

The more people can be anywhere, the more they will want to be somewhere.

Relocation, relocation, relocation, 2 September 2020

I think aggregation theory can map straight across to why bright young people migrate to places like London, New York, and Shanghai and to hell with all your regional redevelopment schemes and play-nice art galleries on the docksides of former industrial towns.

Ben argues that:

…centralization is a second order effect of decentralization: when all constraints on content are removed, more power than ever accrues to the entity that is the preferred choice for navigating that content; moreover, that power compounds on itself in a virtuous feedback loop.

Ben Thompson, The Current Thing, 17 March 2022

Like the factionally-correct doctrines Ben talks about in The Current Thing, moving to London is similarly a no-brainer when it comes to solving the problem of where to live for someone who can choose without constraints.

A city is a platform

Consider these traits of an aggregator, as per Ben’s definition:

  • Direct relationship with users
  • Zero marginal costs for serving users
  • Demand-driven multi-sided networks with decreasing acquisition costs

I don’t think it’s a stretch to apply that to all cities.

What sets the leading World Cities apart is their ability to create bigger and better ‘multi-sided networks to drive demand’ – and hence reduce the CAC of tempting a new graduate to plug into the World City’s network versus an inferior one down the train line.

It’s up to you New York

Of course this isn’t really saying anything especially new.

Cities scale – we know this.

Venture capital networks in Silicon Valley beget more venture capitalists – and more entrepreneurs.

Paris was full of artists in the 1920s and Berlin was in the 1930s.

And so on.

Yet I think there’s something about the true rootlessness possible in 21st Century life that amplifies the literal attractiveness of a city.

Like how gravity is the weakest force, but strongest gravity always wins.

Many pundits envisage our untethered lives will be increasingly lived up mountains or floating across the Atlantic or whatnot. At least when we’re not hamming it up in the metaverse.

But I doubt it.

The attractions of a World City may be relatively weak versus their heyday, considering you can now get nearly everything – artsy movies, kink, the latest thoughts from brilliant minds, speciality drinks – via a wire(less)…

…except in comparison to the even-weaker attractions of all the also-ran cities.

Weak beats weaker, so gets stronger. And everything aggregates.

Categories
Technology

First they came for the big beefy blokes

Around 500 years ago, humans began to be replaced by machines. If it wasn’t happening to you then it was progress beyond imagination.

It gave us cars, The Beatles, the moon landings, the iPhone, and a global population of 7.9 billion.

(And, um, the Facebook newsfeed.)

If it was happening to you then it probably sucked. But soon enough a new generation came along who never knew otherwise and maybe history remembered you as a machine-smashing Luddite just to rub it in.

Strong men were replaced by winches and cherry-pickers.

Guys who could handle themselves with a pike after 20 years of practice were shot dead by a 17-year old firing a rifle for the first time.

Weavers, natch, got replaced by weaving machines.

My father used to tell somewhat guiltily of how back in the punched card days of computers he’d spent a month learning how the old boys rolled steel – by eye – in a giant factory where caravan-sized vats of the molten stuff sloshed around.

He’d been tasked with replacing them all with a computer programme.

Which he then did.

Jobseeker’s allowance

For some reason smart people don’t think this can happen to them.

Are human brains really so special?

And does an Artificial Intelligence (AI) really need to do everything, or does it just need to do enough to do you and me out of a job?

A factory robot can’t learn ballet, but it can do more than enough to replace three or four assembly line workers.

An Amazon store festooned with cameras and sensors can do away with checkout staff, even if it can’t write an opera.

Why shouldn’t specialised AIs brute force their way through law, doctoring, computer programming, architecture…?

Rather chillingly, an AI is now even telling jokes, of a kind.

Those same smart people – one of whom, wearing another hat, I will do my best to pretend to be another day – will tell you that any of these instances is too limited to lead to a sentient AI.

Or that it is just pattern-matching (basically fancy search and replacing) or that its ability to learn is limited by compute, or that such stuff that an AI can do still isn’t very impressive anyway.

Well maybe not, but ‘still’ is having to do a lot of heavy lifting there.

How long have you got for ‘still’ to pass? The universe will wait for processing power to catch up. The machines are infinitely patient.

Source: Ark Invest

Besides we probably don’t need a super-sentient AI to take over the world in order for AI to be an existential threat to mankind.

Just humdrum AIs that each do one thing better than any human employee taking 90% of the jobs might start a revolution.

We can pull the triggers and bash the heads just fine for ourselves. We’re plenty good for that.

Whose line is it anyway?

The current approach to machine learning – the one making headlines for winning at Go and protein folding and all the rest of it – is (generously) only a couple of decades old.

As recently as my undergraduate degree (which sadly isn’t that recent, but I’m not that old) the field of AI hadn’t gone anywhere for 30 years and we were taught how to programme an AI by structuring logic from the ground up.

That approach was about as successful as anyone who has tried to reason with a six-month old baby would expect it to be.

Today though you let your machine learning routine of choice run rampant over as much data as you can give it for as long as you can afford, allowing it to mutate thousands or millions of times, and remorselessly kill anything that doesn’t come up with the goods.

Eventually you might end up with something that can deliver the output you want. Sort of indistinguishably from magic.

You can then put it to work doing its business forever after.

Sure, only one kind of output from one kind of data, more or less.

But I’m not convinced the same part of my brain that appreciates the colour blue is typing this article, either.

Perhaps there’s some mathematical hard limit to the interaction of compute, data sets, and the amount of energy available in our corner of the universe.

And perhaps that will stop something that sees, listens, talks, drives, and cracks jokes like us from emerging – whatever the fuck it’s actually doing inside its undead brain. The latter being left to philosophers to figure out.

Maybe by then all the philosophers will be algorithms, anyway.

I think, therefore it can

I propose a new Turing test.

If a purported being’s self-generated defence of its intelligence is indistinguishable from our own defence of our own intelligence, then the machine can think. In at least one way.

Watch this space!

And look out Jerry Seinfeld.

Categories
Technology

Nike buys the future of NFTs: when not if

Once upon a time, sprawling public companies ‘diworseified’ into vineyards and ill-capitalised finance divisions when they had too much money to spend.

But that’s soooo 1980s.

Now if you’re a leader of a big public company, the go-to move – and a great way to rile up anyone over 35-years old – is to purchase a digital assets start-up.

Only this morning a friend of mine (himself extremely tech savvy but on the wrong side of 45) rolled his eyes at news that Nike had just purchased an NFT collectibles studio for an undisclosed sum.

According to TechCrunch, the purchase of RTFKT:

… comes at an opportune time for the studio; RTFKT is currently behind one of the most talked-about NFT project drops of the month – a sweeping avatar partnership with artist Takashi Murakami called CloneX.

Since its initial drop less than three weeks ago, the project has already seen nearly $65 million in transaction volume according to crypto tracker CryptoSlam.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The startup raised an $8 million seed round back in May led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the company at $33.3 million.

TechCrunch, 13 December 2021

My friend is dismayed by this direction of travel.

“I assumed at some point that shit would get real, even for Gen-Omicron!” he bemoaned.

Together in electric dreams

My friend is destined to a remaining lifetime of disappointment, at least on this front.

(The relative prospects for his hairline are more positive, if I recall his father’s head of hair correctly).

Because why would anybody expect “shit to become more real”?

Ever?

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81. I whiled away hours making an asterisk jump over the character ‘A’, and programming the computers in WH Smiths to print OWAIN WAS HERE all down the screen.

How quickly we forget.

By 1991 I was chatting in real-time to computer science students in Hyderabad, India, via a multi-user text game.

Yet my father – an IT professional of two decades standing by that point – still couldn’t see why he’d ever need a non-work email address.

Today my girlfriend does all her work on Zoom and shops almost entirely online, while my friend’s kids pester him for v-bucks.

Needless to say my friend told me the latter by messaging on a smartphone.

We’re on a road to nowhere

The only direction of travel for humanity for the past 40 years has been more digital and more virtual and less ‘real’. (A term which will pretty soon become meaningless in this context.)

And technology can – as far as we’re aware – improve indefinitely, at least on human timescales.

Short of some great filter party-pooping, why would anyone expect this trend to reverse?

Extrapolating, our future will eventually mostly be ‘unreal’. All that’s up for debate is the timeframe.

In that context, Nike buying an NFT collectible studio is hardly something to roll your eyes at – unless you question its timing.

Especially as we don’t know the price.

Given the publicity generated by irate Boomers swapping links to the news story, this kind of acquisition might even pay for itself in PR terms right now.

Keep on (make) believing

Of course knowing the price often makes things worse when it comes to evaluating the NFT space.

I’ve found that people who rail against a $11.75 million cryptopunk by ranting about the spurious ephemeral nature of NFTs don’t put up too much protest if you ask them how they’d feel if the same cryptopunk cost $11.75 (and no millions!)

Their complaint is not really about the technology. It’s sticker shock at the pricing.

Understandable. I can’t imagine many of today’s blockbuster NFTs will keep their value long-term, either.

And by the same token (boom boom), most of the bullish mania around blockchain is driven by insane high prices, too.

I’d guesstimate that 99% of crypto-owners wouldn’t be owners if a Bitcoin still cost $0.001, for instance.

And that includes me.

But none of this price discussion says anything about whether NFTs – unique digital assets – are an important technology with a big future.

You might not fancy sporting your own unique digital sneakers in a game like Fortnite. But your grandkids won’t think twice.

In our mostly virtual destiny, do you agree scarce and unique assets would have more value than commodities that are infinitely replicable?

You do?

(Because how could they not? Even if only by a little bit).

Then congratulations, you’re also an NFT believer. You can stop being so angry now.

Categories
Nature Society

Delta foxtrot

A couple of weeks ago I WhatsApp-ed a few of my diehard virus-obsessed friends to ask them: “Why is the UK so crap at Covid?”

After all, we’re at the forefront of the world when it comes to vaccinations.

And we’d been stuck in some form of lockdown longer than most countries, too – with restrictions just extended again beyond 19 June.

Yet it already seemed we were on the cusp of a third (fourth? fifth?) wave of Covid.

I’d been concerned enough by the numbers to move my second jab forward by five weeks.

Better to look silly than sorry.

Case studies

That new-wave thesis has since been borne out in the curves:

We’re on the up and up again (Source: World in Data)

Our long lockdown over winter and into spring – plus the hugely successful vaccine rollout – had flattened the last wave by mid-May.

And yet here we are rising again as other countries flatline.

Various theories were put forward by my friends, from weaker guidance adherence at home (allegedly) to tougher restrictions abroad (supposedly).

I don’t buy any of that. To me this is clearly the Delta variant at work.

Always the sick man of Europe

In the past week the rest of the world seems to have woken up to the threat of Delta – or at least the stock markets have.

Yet we’re also hearing the same stuff we’ve heard throughout the pandemic as to why Delta won’t spread across Europe, or surge in the US.

Apparently it’s a British thing because it’s – um – currently in Britain? Yeah we’ve seen that movie before.

The one constant in this pandemic has been wishful thinking, and I’m finally immune to that.

It’s very likely that all those countries in the graphs above will see a resurgence of Covid over the next few weeks. Poorer countries with few vaccinations will be hit worse.

Israel, the other super-vaccinated country, has also seen cases rise in the past fortnight, incidentally.

Of course the pandemic has made us all look silly at one time or another. For instance while I definitely acknowledged the threat in March 2020, I didn’t believe the virus would prove so enduring.

I also feared the economic impact of lockdowns would be far more visible – mostly because I couldn’t have imagined the level of emergency government support and intervention we’ve seen, even in the US.

So perhaps I’m wrong and Delta’s proliferation in the UK is down to some particularly unfortunate set of circumstances here.

Oh, and – um – in India.

Yeah, perhaps not.

Deaths down despite Delta

Happily there is one good bit of good news, and it isn’t wishful thinking.

By and large vaccinations do stop you going to hospital with Covid, let alone dying.

There’s some lag in the data as always (because deaths don’t happen for a bit) but this UK Delta wave isn’t killing as many so far:

(Source: Our World in Data)

True, it’s sobering to think that 15 deaths a day would have been seen as terrible news in January 2020 – and to remember that every death is someone’s lost life and the loss of a loved one.

But deaths were running as high as 1,200 a day in early 2021. We’re in a far better spot right now.

Cases aren’t anything like as high as early 2021 yet, so more deaths will surely follow.

But a crude extrapolation might put us at about 150-200 deaths a day if things got so bad as January 2021.

(And they shouldn’t get so bad, given that more than 80% of people have been vaccinated. Vaccinations must act as some sort of transmission firewall, however imperfect.)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks determined to fully re-open the economy, despite Delta. In PMQs today he even used the unofficial term ‘Freedom Day’ for the rescheduled end of restrictions on 19 July.

So it seems we will finally see what “letting it rip” looks like.

Probably a lot of us getting Covid as it becomes a perpetual low-level irritant.

But hopefully not much more dying.

Clearly we can’t keep hiding from the virus forever.

And after the vaccines there’s arguably nothing else left to wait for – except perhaps even better vaccines.

On the other hand, the rest of the world is about to go through Delta. Brewing-up new variants while doing so.

This isn’t over until it’s over – everywhere.

Categories
Society

Crying out for a 0% corporation tax rate

You don’t need to look far to feel bad about late-stage capitalism in 2021.

The sky-high executive salaries.

The crazy valuations on certain product-less, profit-less, SPAC-enabled stock market listings.

Dogecoin.

However we citizens also need to shoulder some of the blame for the ruinous reputation of the system that sustains us.

In particular, well-off middle-class people in the West need to stop drifting through life on the gilded conveyor belt of the market economy, while simultaneously ranting that corporations are evil and cheering when company taxes go up but their income tax doesn’t.

Such hypocrisy extends in every direction, of course.

I could moan about Guardian readers shopping in the departure malls of Heathrow Terminal 5 telling each other ‘capitalism’ is cooking the planet until the cows come home (or more specifically, until the cow comes to their destination mini-break hotel, in the shape of a formerly CH₄ -spewing chateaubriand…) but never wondering if they really needed a third holiday overseas this year, let alone one that lies directly beyond the slowly submerging Maldives.

But I won’t. Let’s just stick with taxes.

Because we’re all taxed more when corporation tax rises.

Just in a more boneheaded way.

Communism versus capitalism

Quick reminder.

Communism believes that people who struggled to remember their gym kit at school on a Wednesday are best-equipped to determine what society needs. Aided and abetted by a one-party system that soon becomes entirely preoccupied with its own survival.

In contrast, capitalism hands the power – and much of the rewards – to the savviest and greediest members of society. That doesn’t sound too promising (and it isn’t) except their self-interest means they’ll typically try to sell something that consumers actually desire, as opposed to putting in an order for another 100,000 tractors for the Volgograd oblast because they owe their brother-in-law a favour.

In other words, at its best capitalism figures out what we need and how to get it to us.

We the people outsource planning, production, and fulfilment to profit-seeking companies.

And – notwithstanding a huge amount of waste, noise, red herrings, and the occasional fraud – those companies deliver, as best they can.

Which is why you’re reading this on an Apple Mac and not a Sovietski 1992 teletype prompter with a pedal-powered CPU.

Who pays corporation tax?

The point is, capitalism mostly makes things we want.

I’m not saying it makes what we should want. That’s a discussion for another day.

But it’s a fair generalisation to say that the successful firms are those that supply the most popular goods and services at the keenest price.

Given this, isn’t it obvious how absurd it is to tax companies at all?

Company A produces a vacuum cleaner that everyone wants to own. It’s sexy, collects dirt like a third-term Tory administration, and lasts longer, too. The company makes as many as it can, as fast as it (prudently and profitably) can.

As a result it gets thwacked with a tax on its profits, reducing the cash it has left at the end of the year.

Company B produces a terrible vacuum cleaner that people have to be tricked into buying. It’s expensive, and it leaves your carpets dirtier than it found them. The company makes no money.

As a result it’s rewarded by our system, by being charged no tax penalty at all.

Why would we tax the company making the things we want – and so directly shrinking it – while giving the loser a break?

If anything we should tax loss-making companies!

You win, you lose

If its profits weren’t taxed, Company A would have more money left to redeploy at the end of the year. Like this, its shareholders and executives would be rightly rewarded for their success.

Instead, the State docks it hard for producing what we want.

Now, there are ways for smart companies to get around this – if their aim is genuinely to grow as much as possible to meet demand.

Amazon is a good example.

Amazon was decried for years as a money-burning chimera, by so-called analysts who somehow missed it was taking over the world on the back of its supposedly dismal business performance.

What Amazon was really doing, of course, was reinvesting everything into expansion and efficiency. By the time the £9.84 you spent on weird soap bombs for gran for Christmas reached the bottom line, there was not a penny of profit to be seen. Yet Amazon kept on growing. You could even track its escalating scale and success in its soaring cash generation figures.

This solution – pre-spend what would be taxable profits before you’re taxed on them anyway – is fine, in so far as it goes.

But we don’t really want capital allocation decisions to be distorted by tax policy.

There are loads of reasons why not, but to give just one – a profitless company can’t pay dividends. Pension fund managers and others who lean on income to meet their obligations must instead sell shares to generate cash. Which is in theory no problem, but in practice for many a problem. It introduces friction and cost, too.

Far better to let every company show its true profitability without fearing it’ll be taxed, and to let it do with the cash what it wants.

In most cases that will include reinvesting to produce more of what we want, which is how it’s making those profits in the first place.

Tax the rich

None of this is to say we don’t need taxes.

Nor that the profits created by companies are somehow ring-fenced from taxation.

No, there’s a very simple way to tax them, which is at the point they leave the company.

That’s typically via wages, dividends, and stock options.

By all means tax salaries, dividends, and capital gains (we do). Increase the rates if you deem it best for the wider good.

I’m not a neoliberal zealot who thinks all taxation is unjustifiable theft.

I’m just saying we should do our justifiable thieving at the point where the money has left the corporation to which we’ve outsourced the meeting of our needs and wants.

At that point it definitely won’t be spent on new factories or superior analytics or employee-enhancing office plants.

It will instead be going on hot tubs and handbags for its owners.

Fine, tax it.

The withdrawal method

Corporation tax makes no sense. In the UK it only came into being in 1965. It seems sex wasn’t the only messy invention of the 1960s.

Indeed I suspect company profits are taxed mostly because they sit there looking so taxable.

Or rather, they were sitting there. This isn’t even true any more, in the era of multinational tax arbitrage.

Probably better today to tax overseas companies operating on your shores via sales and income taxes (on salaries), and to tax shareholders when they extract profits.

Beats trying to fight a pan-global hydra.

Taxing matters

Of course, there are also problems with a 0% corporation tax rate.

When personal tax rates were very high in corporatist Britain, all kinds of middling managers drove around in expensive company cars.

Various personal expenses were put through the company’s books, rather than paid out of a fat cat’s post-tax salary.

It’s an issue.

Nevertheless I stand by the principle.

Taxing company profits in a capitalist society is like paying a cash bung to get a job done in a communist one.

Which of course happened.

Because… people!