Changing My Mind on AI

This report by kottke on the advances in AI, particularly the advances in learning, makes me change my mind.  I've been relatively conservative on my expectations for AI.  I remember back in the late 80's getting excited by the possibility of using AI to make "person " determinations for payment limitation purposes.  That evaporated under the pressure of other demands on time and resources and the wide gap between us program specialists and the private consultant types we were talking to.

Over the years I've followed with some interest the progress of chess playing software, which finally beat the best human player a few years ago.  But the slowest of the progress and the narrow limits of the field meant to me I should take the dramatic predictions of the future of AI with a big dose of salt.

But now I've changed.  Why?  Because of the advance in AI in learning how to do AI. If I understand it, the key is setting a desired criteria--what it means to "win" a chess game--provide starting conditions and letting the computer teach itself, by playing itself repeatedly and changing the program used based on the outcome--if a difference in the program brings the outcome closer to the desired criteria, incorporate it.

So the important thing is the improved strategy for AI, and presumably a strategy which can be applied to any situation where you can identify a desired criteria, a definite outcome.  It's "learning how to learn" applied to software. 

[Update: a piece in Technology Review on the subject. Perhaps a bit more balanced than the Kottke piece.]

How Times Have Changed: Test Data

The Times had an article on the theft by three Homeland Security employees of a set of personal data of DHS employees.

What were they going to do with the data?

Well, they were going to write software, or rather copy  and modify the IG's software for managing IG cases and sell it to other IG's.  And the stolen data was going to be used to test the software as they developed it.

What a change in 30 years.  Back in the 1980's and early 90's I very casually moved around sets of live data saved from county office systems to serve as the basis for testing new software.  While we had the Privacy Act requirements, we weren't really conscious of privacy restrictions and security.  Consequently I, and others, could do then what would be firing offenses today.

USDA Attorneys

Politico reports on a problem with USDA attorneys: conflict between the union and their new leader.  (I didn't realize the attorneys had a union.  I wonder if it's a heritage from New Deal days.  Some of the attorneys then were notably left-wing, even communist, so likely they'd be activists on their own behalf as well as the rural poor.)

Looking on the Bright Side

I've the Pollyana gene, no doubt inherited from my mother.  In that spirit I'd like to remind people that things have been bad before.  Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reposts a Kansas City Star reprint of a 1973 Art Buchwald column, providing a list of canned excuses to be used by defenders of Richard Nixon.  The content and logic apply as well for today's defenders of our President. 

Bottomline, we survived Tricky Dick regardless of the damage he did to our institutions; we'll survive Don the Despicable.

Trump Stumps Computers?

From the ever-reliable Kevin Drum, as the end to a post on AI advances:

"Alternatively, this merely represents the Donald Trump effect. News articles in 2017 are stuffed with bizarre Trump quotes, and even the best machine translation software probably chokes when it tries to make sense of them. When it comes to bafflegab, humans are still the world champs."

Republicans Favor Drunks?

Vox notes that the Senate tax bill cuts taxes on alcohol by 16 percent.

IMHO that's the wrong way to go.  Taxes should be raised, simply because alcohol is dangerous to society.  That's one principle the founding fathers believed in, witness the whiskey tax.

The Lessons of 1999

Somewhere I got this link to the Sixty Minutes piece on Amazon from 1999.  Pelley's ambivalence about Amazon shows up.  He and a Wall Street type are amazed that it's more valuable than Sears. And the standard of value cited for Internet companies is Yahoo.

(I note I was one of the 2 million new Amazon customers in 1998.)

Newbie Farmers Risk Life and Limb?

From the Rural Blog:
"Bill Field, who has tracked farm fatalities for almost 40 years, says that almost a quarter of Indiana's farm fatalities over the past four years were on hobby farms, Rick Callahan reports for the Associated Press.

USDA map; click on the image to enlarge it

Part of the problem is that hobby farmers tend to be amateurs who were lured to farming from other careers, and don't have the experience to avoid common farm accidents

We Used To Be a Lily-White Nation

I exaggerate, of course, but...

I write of the "public nation", as opposed to the "real nation".  The "public nation" is the nation reflected in the culture, the America which Trump wants to make great again, the America which liberals think is evolving to fulfill the promises of past history.  Maybe I'll write more on the concept sometime, but this is mostly based on my personal history:

Take 1946 as an example: blacks (Negroes in the proper parlance of the time) were not seen on television--there wasn't much then.  They weren't in sports, not visibly.  Not in pro basketball, not in pro baseball, not in pro football, not in horse racing to name the major sports then. They were in evidence in track and field and in boxing (Joe Louis).

Negroes weren't in movies, much, other than as servants.  They weren't in national politics, a couple representatives (William Dawson and Clayton Powell).  Probably the most powerful Negro was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Declension

Back in the day you could tell by the name whether the name was the first name or the last name.  And you could tell whether the person was male or female.  No longer.

Our Democracy

From a Brad DeLong post:

• 178.4 million people are represented by the 48 senators who caucus with the Democrats.
• 144.1 million people are represented by the 52 senators who caucus with the Republicans.
• 65.9 million people voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tim Kaine to be their president and vice president
• 63.0 million people voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence to be their president and vice president.

When Was the "Back-to-the Land Movement?"

Even academics don't know their history--there was a significant movement of people from cities back to the rural areas during the depression. So I beg to differ with the bolded quote from Jstor.

If historic recipes are a form of folklore, what do the cookbooks from the American communes of the 1960s and 1970s tell us about the communards and their influence? Quite a bit, writes Stephanie Hartman. Her survey of these cookbooks points out that our current interest in the slow food movement and “clean” eating are offshoots of that original back-to-the-land movement. The cookbooks created by communes were often informed by a counter-cultural critique of industrial food practices.

Just another instance of the boomers self-absorption, I guess.

Jobs, Automation: Craft Brewing and Women's Cheesemaking

Had lunch Wed in a Herndon strip mall, next door to a craft brewery which throughout our lunch had a long line of people buying their new release.  That's new, at least new to me.  Back in the day we had a bunch of companies each brewing their own brand.  Then the whole industry consolidated into a couple/three big conglomerates, killing most of the brand names.  Then we saw the gradual growth of micro-breweries, and then a rapid expansion.  See this page for statistics from the brewers association.  It's going so fast wikipedia can't keep up.

Meanwhile the paper (NYTimes?) recently had an article on women farmers making cheese.  Also a new thing. And finally today the Post has a piece on new young farmers, who are described as being part of what I'd call the "food movement" (i.e., small, organic, community supported ag).

Seems to me in the recent debate over AI and the likelihood of robots replacing humans in all jobs we forget the ability of humans to invent new desires and to invest their time in uneconomic ways.  Can we create robots which are irrational?

Nuclear War II

An excerpt from an interview with Sen. Cardin, as a followup to my previous post:

And the nuclear command structure, which was developed during the Cold War for two nuclear superpowers with the concept of mutual destruction if either party decided to use it—that premise is no longer valid, because the chances of a nuclear conflict are more with a North Korea-type country than it is with a Russia or China-type country.
So, we could now have a more deliberative process under the presidential command for the use of nuclear weapons, and I think Congress is looking for a way to assert itself in that regard.

On the Pence Rule; A Different Possibility

Search Twitter for the Pence Rule and you'll find that most tweets are critical, and more assume it's a rule against temptation, rather like Ulysses having himself bound to the mast so he could safely view the Sirens.

I don't know Pence's original explanation of his rule, but it strikes me there's another interpretation:  as a defense against misleading appearances and false allegations.

The usual interpretation in effect deprecates men as weak-willed and passion-ridden figures; the alternative view deprecates women and the general public as prone to lies and to believing lies.  Why can't both be true?  I don't know if Pence is Calvinist, but it sounds like the Pence Rule is.

Of course, as said in The African Queen, we're supposed to rise above our nature.

Did Carter Have To Sell His Peanut Farm?

I saw that statement made today, probably on twitter.  It didn't sound right to me so I did googled "Jimmy Carters peanut farm".

From the first hit, I conclude that Carter put the farm into a trust called Carter Farms, managed by a trustee. So yes, he did, but the connotations of the statement mislead.

The "Medicane" as Symptom of Warming

See this Grist piece.

Who knew the Mediterranean could have hurricanes?

On Nuclear War

Back in the day we were very concerned about nuclear war.  First strike, second strike, security of deterrents, all were important subjects, to be explored by academics and movie makers.  The concern then was that the Soviet Union would do a first strike, a strike sufficient to destroy our ability to retaliate.

Since 1989 we've lost the edge on that concern.  But because our nuclear forces are getting obsolete, and because North Korea is developing the missile/Hbomb combination needed to attack the US, we're seeing a resumption of the discussion, including in the Post today.

Personally I'm supportive of the argument.  I don't see Russia or China as the sort of power which aims for global dominance (based on what we've learned since 1989, it seems the USSR never really aimed for that dominance) and other powers, like North Korea, see nuclear warfare as a deterrent.

So yes, I'd cut our forces back.