Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
How can you make a future-proofed ethical judgement?  Well, opinions
differ on that.  

We might say — it’s traditional — there’s a timeless divine ethics. 
The will of God was present at the Creation and will endure beyond
Armageddon.   We mortals must always fall short of timeless moral
perfection due to original sin, and also due to the worldly sinners
of the wicked society around us. But if we candidly open our heart
to God, we’ll be forgiven our failings.  Even if we are, say, the
pious Christian captain of an African slave ship.  If we confess our
unworthiness and the Creator forgives us, then we’ve done the best
we can.



Or else (we might say), although things may look pretty bad at any
particular moment, there is a higher ethics toward which mankind
itself progresses — the “arc toward justice.”  We’ll get there, if
we have faith in democracy.  So I may have done rather a lot of dire
harm, myself — maybe I was a well-meaning social worker who sent
gays to get shock treatment. But I did my duty in pursuit of a
higher social good.  These regrettable excesses are historical
accidents.  I voted properly. I meant well.  

I’m making fun here, but Vaclav Havel, who I respect a lot, had a
timeless ethics.  Havel writes about the crappy buildings made by a
tyrannical society, which often fall down and kill some random,
innocent young woman.  Havel describes how bogus it is to make
facile, hasty excuses for that endemic, inhumane shabbiness, which
deprives real people of a lifetime.  Havel demands of his readers
that they should face truth. Do they make complex, mealy-mouthed
excuses to continue their daily lives in miserable fear?  Or can
they stop being cowards, and rise up to become free, because they
abandon the deceit and the delusion? 

A great moral teacher, Vaclav Havel.  But he thought right and wrong
were eternal values.  I don’t believe that.  I don’t think the
evidence supports it.
  

    

Another ethical position is one of cynical moral relativism.  “LOL
Nothing Matters.” I have issues with this one myself, because it’s
the closest one to my heart.  I understand that it tempts me to
justify myself, and not in a good way.

I’m not Vaclav Havel from Prague, but I am from Texas. Let’s suppose
I say that there is no moral difference between the people in
contemporary Galveston, Texas (a city  I know well) and the
Karankawa Native Americans of the 1700s, who also lived in Galveston
Island. 

The Karankawa tribal people enjoyed the many beauties of their
native Galveston Island. They also liked to tie up passing
strangers, slice pieces off them, roast the human meat on sticks,
and eat their cooked flesh in front of the still-living victims.  

I think my fellow Texans would do well by knowing about our
predecessors the Karankawas.  I’m Texan, too, but I’m not entirely
prepared to blandly excuse the Karankawas.  I rather think that
sadistic cannibalism of living victims was pretty bad behavior. 
Worse, that ritual of theirs was was meant to look and feel bad. 
That ritual was a form of intimidation and terror, practiced with a
cruel intent, a malignant purpose.

But I can also say that, if I’d been a Karankawa in Texas in the
1700s, I likely would have gone along with the mainstream.  I would
have failed at the wild moral visionary leap needed to think that it
was somehow wrong and bad to eat weird strangers.   

I think I might have noticed the issue. Because it’s a rather
typical Well State of the World issue, the kind of abstract,
our-there thing that we discuss ourselves.  I likely might have
offered some modest technical advice about not slicing through a
victim’s artery, since  eating people alive isn’t merely about
crudely devouring them.  No, it isn’t.  It’s behavior that makes a
higher point. It’s a public performance and a form of political
theater.  Technically, we would want to pull up our socks about the
designer details of our grisly cannibal rituals. If you’re gonna do
it, do it right.
  

    

I do give myself that much credit as a Karankawa moral philosopher,
but I’m not sure it’s fair to ask for any more insight from any
Karankawa.  Or from ourselves, either.   

I would properly expect condemnation and punishment if I ate some
victim tomorrow.  Because that would be pretty bad. I also think
that the Karankawas sensed that they were being wicked.  They did 
horrible things for political effect, to impress, intimidate and
repel dangerous foreigners.  They expected the same treatment from
their own enemies.  Those were cruel times.  The Karankawas didn’t
survive those times.  Too bad for them, our predecessors. 
  

    

It’s easy to use the Karankawa people as a rhetorical punching-bag,
because they lack any Internet access.  They can’t form a social
media group on 4Chan and flame back at us.

So let’s suppose that a Karankawa woman invents a time machine and
appears in our present day, freshly blood-smeared from her grisly
cannibal feasts.  She can talk, she wants to justify herself.  Is
she a bad person?

In this ethical thought experiment, are we supposed to arrest her? 
Has she even broken any law of ours?  What did she do that is so
wrong?  

If this happened more than once, I think we’d invent some robust set
of trans-temporal extenuating circumstances. We would probably tell
her to knock it off with her cannibalism, but we wouldn’t absolutely
condemn her as some utter ghoul and horrid gremlin, forever beyond
our pale.  We’d invent some kind of historical “truth and
reconciliation” system for her, and her family, and her people.  

“Oh.  Did you eat those shipmates of Cabeza de Vaca?  Look, we get
it about you eating conquistadors — we’re not too cool about
Columbus, ourselves, not any more.  Here’s a halfway house where we
can manage the catering for you.  Let’s meet halfway.”

If such an ethics makes any sense, then maybe would invent such an
ethics right now. Not “cosmopolitan,” but cosmo-temporal.   If we
had such a method of ethics, it would likely improve our  harsh,
too-certain treatment of our own contemporaries.
  

    
Although it makes for some uncomfortable conclusions, I think you do
have to judge people in the context of their time, culture, and
society.

An uncomfortable example: in Nazi Germany, we have to distinguish
between people who persecuted Jews because they were driven by evil
and those who persecuted Jews because everyone was doing it and
society at large sanctioned it.

Humans are social animals, full stop.

If, as seems likely, our civilization experiences a collapse due to
climate change, people in the future will certainly regard most of
us as evil.  But I drive a CO2-spewing car to work because everyone
is doing it and because there's no other practical way to get to my
office.
  

    
Also, you drive a CO-spewing car because you don't have clear
alternatives. That will change. Even if the USA has renewed its
commitment to the burn, globally the handwriting is on the wall. And
I expect that one positive effect of US intransigence re climate
change is that the rest of the world will double down on its
commitment to reduce emissions, in large part by moving to cleaner
forms of energy. If, globally, there's a move away from the burn,
the USA will eventually follow.

Consider this:
https://www.curbed.com/2017/2/6/13428414/car-buying-electric-vehicles-uber-lyf
t
  

    
I almost went for an electric car last time, but I don't have
anywhere to plug it in (no garage).
  

    
Soon enough you'll sell your car hop on a low-cost autonomous
vehicle for your commute. Uber says so. Get ready.
  

    
Via email from Alberto Cottica Re: bruces Karankawa parable,
especially #55

What is moral judgment for?

If it is an evolutionary device to improve in-group collaboration by
spotting and neutralising free riders, then Mark is exactly right in
#55. By doing what they did, 18th century Karankawas and Nazi
Germans were being team players, as per the roles defined by their
particular teams. 

There is some support for this view among evolutionary biologists,
especially the cultural evolution (Henrich, E.O. Wilson etc.). But I
am not sure this is a comfortable position in the light of Bruce's
stated uneasiness with cynical moral relativism in #52. For what
it's worth, I totally get where he is coming from.
  

    
I just completed a survey with questions about the impact of the
Internet and digital technology on well-being, and found myself
answering optimistically, despite the fog of fake news propaganda,
intrusions by malevolent hackers, ascendance of cyberwar, terrorist
recruitment via social media, etc.  I argue that we're in a
transition re technology, which is evolving faster than most puny
humans can comprehend. Some future-focused philosophers talk about
accelerating change and singularity, where computer intelligence
will surpass human intelligence, i.e. a case where we never, as a
species, catch up (which I already discussed a bit in
<inkwell.vue.503.48>). How this strikes you depends on your
definition of intelligence.

Back in the 90s I recall a discussion with my partner at the time,
Paco Xander Nathan, and our friend Donna Kidwell. We were talking
about wearable computers, and we were realizing that we were already
cyborgs - we were persistently enhanced by digital technology. The
term I started using back then was "cyborganic." We've had since
then a mainstreaming of cyborgization - practically everybody has a
pocket computer ("smartphone") with capabilities 'way beyond what we
had in 1993.  Most learn what they need to know to make use of the
equipment, but the real evolution comes when humans have deeper
comprehension of their digital extensions. 
  

    
https://www.politico.eu/article/latvia-a-disappearing-nation-migration-populat
ion-decline/

Here's an article on Latvia, which is Estonia's sister Baltic nation
and on the southern Estonian border.  Latvia's not doing well. 
People just leave, mostly for other countries of the EU that aren't
as moribund.

Estonia's also losing population, but not at Latvia's ominous speed.
I wish I had a good map of the planet's depopulating areas. There
are more of those than people understand.
  

    
I kinda doubt that a moral judgement has to be "for" anything.  This
is an instrumental argument.  Should we scrap morality if it doesn't
conform to a biologist's current ideas of evolutionary theory? 
That's putting ourselves in the Ebenezer Scrooge camp.  Scrooge was
a big fan of Malthus and in "A Christmas Carol" he's always going on
about "reducing the surplus population."
  

    
Bruce, do you think SF authors have an outsized responsiblity to help
refine our public understanding of Artifical Intelligence?

Consider "Dude, you broke the future!"    By Charlie Stross:

<http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-
future.html>

Like Ted Chiang's buzzfeed article, I think Charlie Stoss' rant is
helping us push back against a fairly narrow concept of AI.

<https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-
its-runaway?utm_term=.efJw9ElRD#.milEJmexg>

But it seems to me that if we look carefully at the technical
underpinnings of what might constitute Artificial Intelligence, we might
well conclude that 'Old, Slow AI' actaully pre-dates the Law of
Corporations by quite a bit.
  

    
Via email from Kieran O'Neill:

As a (kind of) response to Bruce's request for a depopulation map:

http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/

(It only goes up to 2015, but it's a pretty useful interactive
visualisation.)
  

    
 
John Papola

<37>

You say "competitive business does the best job of providing a
SYSTEMATIC check on bad behavior". How? Can you provide real life
examples that we've witnessed in modern history? 

>Government scale and scope has grown over the same time period of
people’s concern over inequality in the US.

Whoa.

Well, while the military/prison budget has certainly grown in scale
and scope, public education and the social safety net have been
eviscerated. It's kind of a mixed bag, wouldn't you say?

anyway....

So the government's growth in scale and scope is responsible for
"people's concern" over inequality? How about the inequality,
itself? Is that the fault of "big gov'ment", too? I'm confused,
especially since you tell us in the next sentence that you're
"unconcerned about inequality for its own sake". If so, why did you
even mention it? I would observe that reduction in government lead
directly to the Great Recession of 2008. I'm also curious how you
could be unconcerned with the current state of wealth inequality,
something I consider obscene and dangerous to the fabric of society.

"Business good: government bad", just doesn't cut it as a basis for
any kind of argument. It's far too simplistic. 

Doesn't business, as currently organized, demand quarterly growth?
Isn't that synonymous with promoting consumption of global resources
for profit? How can that be good?

>Governments lie us into war.

Really. Cui bono? Who has the most motivation to promote perpetual
conflict? I would say arms merchants and war profiteers, which are
businesses, are they not, seeking blind growth, while forsaking all
other values? Yet you place all the blame on the politicians, as
opposed to those who buy the politicians. Something is missing. 

many posts slipped in  

  
 

 

 
  

    
*He’s good with the sensibility of the global moment, Dan Hill,
although, being a design critic, he seems to be pretty unhappy with
pretty much all of it pretty much all the time.

*A downright lyrical paragraph in one of his recent essays here,
even though it's just a list.



https://medium.com/butwhatwasthequestion/the-battle-for-the-infrastructure-of-
everyday-life-6c9b0572e57f

Yet all of this, as powerful as it is, remains secondary to the
everyday experience of living in our cities. Art lags behind, unable
to capture the visceral quotidian experience of Uber, TaskRabbit,
Snapchat, Giphy, Pokémon Go (which has already Been and Pokémon
Gone), Helsinki’s autonomous shuttles and Singapore’s self-driving
taxis, Japanese sushi-delivery robots and Domino’s Pizza delivery
drones, American security-guard robots upended in shopping-mall
fountains, South Korean robotic mannequins, ‘conversations’ with AI
personal assistants over email, shouting at Amazon Alexa,
‘holographic’ assistants at airports, Microsoft chatbots becoming
racist and genocidal on Twitter, Chinese chatbots vanishing after
spurning the Communist Party, 4Chan, 3D printed handguns and Google
Tango phones 3D-mapping spaces, Russian election-hacking multiplied
by Cambridge Analytica and the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,
Icelandic crowdsourced constitutions, Dutch police training eagles
to take down illegal drones, Bitcoin hard forks, Ethereum hacks … In
other words, a quick flick across the home page of The
Verge or TechCrunch. Art in general has not found a foothold in
these new times.
  

    

"As a (kind of) response to Bruce's request for a depopulation map:

http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/

"(It only goes up to 2015, but it's a pretty useful interactive
visualisation.)"

*That is indeed a remarkably interesting and pretty set of data
visualizations, but what I'm looking for is a map of areas that have
lost population -- where people used to live, but now there are much
fewer left.  Puerto Rico's a new one, but war and disaster is just
one cause of this relative abandonment of certain regions. 
Sometimes it's seen as "regional economic decline," but if a whole
bunch of people just leave, of course you're gonna see "economic
decline" -- there's nothing left to be economic about.
  

    
Life expectancy has declined in the US for the past two years. 
There were improvements in heart disease and cancer, but "accidental
death" (read mostly narcotics) and suicide have more than made up
for it.  It'll be interesting to see if the American death rate
increases this year as well.  

It's like the decline in American life expectancy in the early 1990s
-- Americans just weren't all that practically upset about a cohort
of fags and junkies dropping dead from AIDS, and the people dropping
dead now from oxycontin and raw despair seem to be catching a
similar Yankee social Darwinism.  Health care may be plenty
expensive in the USA, but life is cheap; a week doesn't go by
without a gun massacre, but they're part of the American background
noise now, like traffic injuries.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fueled-by-drug-crisis-u
s-life-expectancy-declines-for-a-second-straight-year/2017/12/20/2e3f8dea-e596
-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html
  

    
Trying to synthesize e-Stonian residency, Asgard and
atemporality...it occurs to me that, not only are there no maps for
these territories, there are no allegiances to the Flatland world we
have left, as we venture forth into new territories...

It just does not matter any more if you are a citizen of Estonia,
USA, Denmark, Outer Mongolia....because that is not where you live
anymore, anyway.

Millenials and Z'ers live in their screens...3 for the Millenials, 5
for the Z'ers according to current cultural anthropologists.

Us old dogs, pop in and out. I try and limit my online time to no
more than an hour a day. But that's just me...I rarely turn my phone
on, except to make a call. And have, happily, gotten into the habit
of forgetting to take it with me at all. And I do not feel
"untethered". 

And "tethered" is a good world for our modern angst.  We are
digitally tethered in so many ways, as to give the false impression
that everything is just fine. "I'm connected, and that is all that
matters". 

To WHAT!!! My feet are still on the ground, there is still the
problem of no air, food or water in a collapsing environmental
ecology, where all this tethering is taking place. 

In the '80's we had tree-huggers. In the '20's we may well see cell
phone tower huggers.
  

    
> Yankee social Darwinism

Yup. In the US, people who are dropping dead in large numbers are
assumed to be life's losers and not worth worrying about.  There's
been much coverage of the opiate crisis in the news, and some of it
has done an excellent job of contextualizing the distress in
historical and economic terms.  But I think for a lot of people,
it's still stuff happening in places they've never been to people
they don't know who are probably stupid (and thus deserve it).
  

    
It's interesting to read that well-articulated defense of
libertarianism/classical liberalism. That's pretty much where I was
30 years ago.

I think the problem with it is that it does not account for the
disruptive power of technology (particularly machine learning and
robotics) that is doing the following 1) rapidly reducing the need
for and value of human labor in many fields, and giving workers less
and less bargaining power in the labor market 2) optimizing
(maximizing) profit, particularly short term profit 3) commodifying
the individual's attention and emotions/neurological responses 4)
rapidly developing algorithms that are modifying our behavior,
usually without our knowledge and 5) doing all this without any
effective accountability.

A government bureaucracy can limit our choices and impose its will
through the crude mechanism of law. But I submit that our daily
lives are now influenced far more by Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.
than by the FAA or the IRS. 

And then there is the corporation itself, which is essentially a new
kind of life form (first developed around 1600). Stross calls it a
(non digital) form of Artificial Intelligence. It optimizes for its
continued growth, and any benefits humans receive are only insofar
as they further that.
  

    
That social darwinism reference surfaces the overriding problem, and
it's a problem of the heart. It's a bodhisattva challenge for those
who have that perspective, the health of all society is as important
as the health of any individual; we can cooperate in sharing
resources vs hoarding and exploitation by some at the expense of
others. Papola's libertarians would argue that cooperation and
sharing can't and shouldn't be coerced by legislation and
enforcement, then you have the problem of the wolves raiding the
sheep unguarded, until there's no sheep left, only hungry wolves.
  

    
The topic arose, but we haven’t said much about “deep learning” as
yet.  I’m not an “AI” enthusiast.  I don’t think that deep learners
are much at all like “intelligence.”  I think our debate there has
severe problems, and most things said about it to date are
near-irrelevant.  Science fiction may have been in love with this
topic since the 1950s, but I’m not sure that we have much to offer
right now.

But here’s a chess game featuring Google’s “AlphaZero,” a deep
learner that taught itself the game of chess in only four days. 
AlphaZero has no database, no records at all of any human game of
chess.  Then AlphaZero takes on “Stockfish,” the strongest computer
player in the world — much stronger than any human player, of
course.

I’m no chess analyst.  The way the chess experts on Youtube analyze
the play of AlphaZero, I’m unhappy with that.  These human analysts
imagine that AlphaZero is thinking through the consequences of the
moves much like they do, but AlphaGo seems to me to be doing
something other than calculating positions.  It’s weighing the whole
chessboard with its networks of fake neurons, like dropping steel
weights onto a sheet of rubber.  AlphaZero plays positionally, it
cares nothing for the power of the pieces: if this, then that. 
AlphaZero oozes into a winning position, like the turret eyes of a
chameleon focussing on a fly.  

I saw all the ten AlphaZero games against the hapless Stockfish —
(okay, Stockfish is just a computer, so it didn’t suffer the burning
humiliation of a defeated champion, and thank goodness, because
Stockfish was crushed).  But AlphaZero, quite mindlessly, stifles
Stockfish in this game, which is the best that I saw among the ten. 


The attack of AlphaZero is suffocating. It removes the functional
capacity of the opponent’s pieces.  It’s “zugzwang.”  Stockfish
still has ten chess pieces left out of sixteen, but none of them can
do anything on the chessboard that’s worth doing.

Okay, it’s easy to get overawed by this demonstration of tremendous
deep-learning potency (especially if you’re a crap chess player like
me, because I’d never win a game against either of these machines in
ten lifetimes).  I also think it’s proper to describe deep learning
as “brittle” and “narrow,”  it’s not some panacea for every
challenging problem.  

But that is a machine that learned chess in just four days.  It
plays in blithe ignorance of centuries of human effort, and wins.
That is uncanny.  I’m an AI skeptic, and I felt a genuine chill,
looking at that.

https://youtu.be/lFXJWPhDsSY
  

    
Googling "deep learning illegal in EU" will turn up some interesting
articles on the subject.  The gist is that deep learning algorithms
can't explain their decisions, nor can humans figure out how those
decisions were arrived at, so using them for things with legal
and/or financial consequences may well be ruled illegal.
  

    
That is interesting. How do we gauge the results of what we cannot
understand or follow?--this is an enormous thicket for those who
care about the repercussions of laws and their effects on humans, on
the biosphere. 

I recently had a conversation with a Harvard cryptographer about the
mostly-invisible biasses built into algorithms. Her current work is
on investigating the interaction of algorithm-made decisions and
social justice.

I've only just caught up on this conversation in one long read, and
will ask a question that goes back to earlier posts. I've read the
"Letter from Talinn" in a recent New Yorker, which raised my
interest in that very different ecology of the digital landscape.
The article had a fair bit of information about Estonia in general,
including what sounds a real parity for women in governance there.
In Bruce's description of Dubai, there was allusion to the one
Minister of Happiness and to some generally better situation for
women than in other Arab countries. But this leads me to wonder more
about the details. Perhaps women's progress and the actuality of
their lives is not so very visible for a man visiting Dubai, I
realize, but I'm curious what else you might be able to report here.


It does seem to me that the status and social compact surrounding
women's standing (legal, educational, and in the vast, less
formalized contexts) and how that may or may not be changing is one
of the rather large features of the world's human landscape these
days. It is also part and parcel with all other ways we have divided
ourselves up into Us/Them nexuses (nationalism, plutocrats, ethnic/
cultural/ religious identities, etc.) all of which are central
problems as they exist, and as they are being exploited, in the dire
state of the world in general.