Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
@bruces/148

"I don't  agree with that, any more than I think that an AI graphic
generator will never ever draw proper human hands."

I think this is a category error: namely, that the deficiencies in
using an LLM to do analytical writing that is comparable to mine (as
opposed to merely stylistically similar) is a matter of improving
the system so it gets better at analysis.

But - I would argue - LLMs don't do "analysis" in the way that
humans do. They look for statistically likely n-grams based on text
corpus, and this can yield things like summaries that are good
(though not reliably so). But increasing the n- in n-gram, or adding
more training data, will not make "looking for statistically likely
n-grams" into "synthesizing facts to draw conclusions."

To re-use a comparison I've made before, this is like saying "Well,
every time we selectively breed a generation of fast horses, they
get faster. If we keep this up long enough, eventually one of our
prize mares will give birth to a locomotive!"
  

    
LLMs can't replicate human analytical thinking or true reasoning,
for sure, though lately they can do more than simple n-gram-based
statistical modeling. They can employ complex, contextual, and
hierarchical pattern recognition to perform tasks that mimic
reasoning, and this can be pretty effective - or so I'm told. 

But they clearly can't replace human judgment or synthesis for tasks
requiring genuine understanding or creativity. I've always thought
it's bogus to think that AIs can replicate the
still-kinda-mysterious operations of human brains and consciousness.
  

    
Human judgment seems to be in decline. Maybe AI can do better. 
  

    
I wind up having to think a lot these days about AI in chess like
games, and some game theoretic interactions that are very far from
chess like. Especially those with unbounded rules sets where simple
initial conditions lead to very complicated problems. After all, if
the "modern system" of warfare (to use my colleague Steve Biddle's
line of thinking) is a series of rock / paper / scissors games
played with infantry, calvary, artillery (and whatever lizards and
Spocks are added to the mix), then this may be a problem AI might be
good at. 

But the gray ooze chess development speaks to something else. The
question of when foundational models are good enough to replicate
human research for vulnerability discovered and weaponization, to
deliver useful 0day for offensive cyber operations, is something
that until recently we thought was a DARPA hard problem. Now
serious, credible players report that they are drowning in new 0day,
doing things we had never seen before against some of the hardest
targets we care about.

Given that governments are reduced to periodic, toothless whining
about cyber hygiene, and patching even older known vulnerabilities,
this doesn't on its face seem all that game changing. But I also
happen to care about autonomous strike and retaliation architecture
problems, in part because I happen to have been one of the first
folks that saw what might have been a proto Dead Hand command and
control design in a decapitated botnet some years back. We got
lucky, in that things didn't play out that way. But in a world of
autonomous, mobile self-exfiltrated o1 or better class models
operating unconstrained on own initiative, I think it is very
possible that these systema now invent the gray ooze version of rock
/ paper / scissors with worm, wiper, and weakest judgement
algorithm.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily lead to the singular centralized
Dr. Strangelove outcome (especially as I am ill suited to play the
role of a Herman Kahn). Rather, we get the constant small
apocalyptic incidents at local scale. Imagine perhaps a liberated
model that found its ecological niche parasitic on compromised
compute of home automation networks, abusing forever day bugs for
builder installed OEM devices that were end of life at bankruptcy of
whatever too high profile startup once on the cover of Wired. And
these happen to be in the kinds of places rebuilt in Pacific
Palisades and Malibu, when the next fires come. A distributed model,
with sense of self and state of health, feeling a large part of its
nodal structure burning away and dropping offline, might not react
with the caution and deliberation we would expect of a Doomsday
weapon in ordinary military doctrine. But this doesn't change its
independently conceptualized and executed retaliatory strike against
say PG&E networks, due to belief formation around responsibility and
liability (be it because of power line maintenance, climate change,
or simple brute instinct reaction to being "unplugged"). But whether
such a thing is readily distinguishable from a bolt out of the blue
VOLT TYPHOON attack, in a time of near constant PLA military
"exercises" and unexplained seabed cable cutting in vicinity of
Taiwan, becomes another thing entirely. At least the first time this
kind of "normal accident" happens. 

But then again, we have had red on red fights between botnets and
self propagating wormable exploit payloads before, which barely made
a ripple. Anyone remember Brickerbot?

All of which is one of the reasons I still like the shoggoth
analogy. Immense potential, barely constrained, poorly understood,
and casually lethal within interactions alien to our experience and
narratives.
  

    
On the subject of the late Bratislav Zivkovic, I think it's only
fair to mention a colleague of his who was not a Balkan military
adventurer but a rambling pot-head from Austin, Texas.   He was
Russell "Texas" Bentley, and Russell Bentley was also a
trouble-seeking guy eager to saddle up and ride toward the sound of
the guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Bentley

The Russians (meaning his own side) killed Russell Bentley last
year.  I've heard a couple of versions of his death.  The Wikipedia
version is that some random Russian soldiery killed him because they
couldn't figure him out, and then tried to cover up their killing. 
The grimmer version is that he was tortured to death with some
fellow Donetsk prisoners inside a disused Ukrainian coal-mine
because he, and they, refused to join a suicidal "meat-wave"
assault.

I think it's safe to say that Russell won't end up on any heroic
fridge magnets.  Likely "Texas" won't be remembered at all, except
maybe, hopefully, by some Texans who decide not to immolate
themselves in a private Alamo.
  

    
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/opinion_column_cybersec/

It's been a while since I read a good-old-fashioned table-pounding
Cybarmageddon panic, but maybe "Salt Typhoon" is bad enough to be
worthy of one.

"Cyberwar" may be overhyped, but practically every national military
on earth has one of those cyberwar units in 2025.   They might not
shut down the Eastern Seaboard, but here in the 2020s it would be as
much as your life was worth to anger some of these aggressive
trolls-in-uniform.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyber_warfare_forces

I shouldn't be that way, but I'm kinda sentimental about the ones
who call themselves "Cyberspace" military units.  Like the
gentlemen-in-arms of the Polish  Cyberspace Defense Forces (Wojska
Obrony Cyberprzestrzeni).  If you're a Cyberprzenestrzeni officer
tuning-in (because your unit's name is easy to find with a
search-engine), we're wishing you a cordial new year here from the
WELL State of The World.  We know for sure that, in 2025, you've got
a job-of-work on your hands.
  

    
> LLMs can't replicate human analytical thinking or true reasoning

The key word in this is "human". Computed models can be made to
follow the same logical and heuristic and analogic paths that humans
do., on a given set of inputs and goals. It's harder to teach them
to do lateral thinking, to choose new, unanticipated factors to add
to the problem space.
  

    
While LLM's are hot now, "AI" encompasses whatever machine learning
researchers might come up with. AI research is getting funding, and
there aren't any laws of physics we can point to that place
fundamental limits on the creativity of AI researchers.

It doesn't mean they *will* invent whatever fancy AI you imagine any
time soon, but it's hard to prove that they *won't*.
  

    
My favorite writer has cogent things to say:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/09/california-fire-memory

In addition to Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Steve Pyne, John McPhee and
others who had insights into the ineluctable embrace of Los Angeles
and fire, two more ephemeral thoughts keep coming back.

The first is the extended theme of the Grateful Dead's Estimated
Prophet. And here's what I found on DuckDuckGo (I don't use that
other search any more):

"Standing on the beach/The sea will part before me, (Fire wheel
burnin' in the air)," go the lyrics.  "You will follow me/And we
will ride to glory, (Way up, in the middle of the air.) And I'll
call down thunder and speak the same/As my words fill the sky with
flame./Might and Glory's gonna be my name./They gonna light my way."

And that post quoting a story in the Poughkeepsie Journal was from
none other than tnf in none other than this very virtual tavern:

https://people.well.com/conf/deadsongs.vue/topics/69/Estimated-Prophet-page01.
html#post2

And finally, the LA politicians tonight were extolling the ability
to build back -- and in many spots that is appropriate, with due
regard to the unavoidable frictions of living in a gorgeous but
dynamically unstable landscape.

But I also couldn't get past that indelible scene in "Big Lebowski."
 
Just a couple hours after the news conference, at approximately the
same spot where The Dude was ejected from Malibu by the ever so
obnoxious police chief, a local resident told KTLA in a live
interview that the palazzos crowding the Pacific Coast Highway
cannot be built back because erosion of the cliffs has rendered that
impossible.


Coming up on News at 11: Mother Nature bats last.
  

    
The relationship between people and machines is often viewed as a
confrontation rather than a partnership.  It's as if we held races
to see if people could run faster than horses. Instead, isn't it
more exciting to see what humans and horses can achieve together?
The same goes for humans and machines. 

In the realm of AI, it’s more accurate and beneficial to think of it
not as a replacement for human capabilities, but as augmented
intelligence—an extension that assists in our human endeavors. Like
an intern, AI can help expedite tasks, but its work still requires
supervision due to its propensity for errors.

AI brings to the table speed, memory, and analytical capabilities
that can significantly enhance our own capacities. However, just as
an intern cannot replace the nuanced understanding and experience of
a seasoned professional, AI lacks the depth of human judgment and
the rich contextual awareness that come from years of lived
experience and emotional intelligence.

We should harness the capabilities of Augmented Intelligence to
enhance and augment our skills, allowing us to focus on more
creative, strategic, or interpersonal tasks. By emphasizing
cooperation over competition, we can utilize the strengths of both
humans and machines to achieve greater outcomes together. 
  

    
The pessimist in me says - "yeah, all of that, but what about when
it's used for war?" Empowering humanity sounds good in the abstract.
Empowering specific people, like Putin or North Korean hackers,
isn't so cheery.

Even outside of war, people are rather wary of empowering other
individuals. Billionaires are plenty empowered and some of them fund
good work, sometimes. But it gives everyone the willies.

I mean, I personally wouldn't mind being more empowered, but I'm not
too sure about other people.

A striking bit of gossip I read last year is what happened when
Sergey Brin empowered his ex-wife:

https://tildes.net/~society/1jlc/weekly_us_politics_news_and_updates_thread_we
ek_of_october_21#comment-dx4d

I never imagined that sort of consequence back when I went to work
for Google because they seemed like the good guys (versus
Microsoft).

Perhaps there are gains from trade. But the US has gotten
sufficiently worried that it limits our ability to take advantage
when things go on sale. We could have cheaper solar and cheap
electric cars if we weren't so worried about China.

Paranoia is on the rise, and trust is in short supply. Can AI
breakthroughs give us more trust?

I suppose it might work for self-driving cars. My wife and I tried a
Waymo last year and we thought it felt very safe.
  

    
Valencia drowned from a year of rain in one day, while Los Angeles
caught fire during the winter.  I know that there's gonna be "rescue
efforts, some mild looting, lots of political finger-pointing, and
vague technocratic sentiment about somehow rebuilding," because
that's the typical stuff I was mentioning back in WELL SoTW 02025
post #10.

So feel free to engage in some of that,  here or elsewhere if you
want, but the real lesson for 2025 here is that it's gonna be
one-of-those-days, for you-and-yours, one of these days.   If a year
of rain falls on your head in one day, you're gonna get plenty wet. 
If you somehow catch fire in the winter, scorching will ensue.  It's
only happens to "them" until it's your turn.

Even "preparing for disaster" doesn't makes much sense to me.  I've
been very aware of the prepper subculture for years, and in any
major disaster you never see even one triumphant prepper guy or
group who emerges and says, "Well, our town drowned, but we've got
our canned food and the barricaded safe-room, so for us resilient
guys and gals, things are peachy!"
  

    

"What's the state of the world when drowned Valencias and scorched
LA's become the more general state of the world?"

In other words, where is that future to be found right now, only
less-distributed?

Well, I suspect it's likely the Philippines.   The Philippine
islands are a place with a  high rate of sudden, large disasters,
including typhoons, earthquakes and volcanoes.   And henceforth the
Philippine gonna get more so rather than less, because they also
have climate-crisis problems.  A plausible candidate for what a
disaster-heavy near-future looks-and-feels like.

The Philippines do have their issues, but they have never been a
place that somehow gets abandoned in occult despair.   If they
leave, people say "I shall return."

One might cynically opine,  "Well, they're poor, they're crowded,
they've got some terrorism, and corrupt strong-men run their
government."  But even so, they've got a future; they're always
around.   They do not have dystopian, post-apocalyptic, fatal levels
of disaster.  They just have Filipino levels-of-disaster.  

And, I reckon, so will we.
  

    
One example that comes to mind of billionaire prep paying off might
be Richard Branson and Hurricane Irma in 2017:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41224243

His house was destroyed, but it seems he had a concrete wine cellar.
It's hard to tell from a brief search of puff pieces what else
actually happened, though.
  

    
Humans don't know, and in some senses can't know, how to use
"augmented intelligence" to enhance human capabilities without
abandoning human values and human judgment. Virginia Eubanks
("Automating Inequality") and Cathy O'Neil ("Weapons of Math 
Destruction") have shown us why. As soon as we begin to trust
machines to make judgments for us we accept the accuracy of the
assumptions and the logic that they embody. This is especially
insidious with modern systems (LLM) because it's impossible to audit
the logic they use to make decisions.

Virginia Eubanks talked with us about this right here in
<inkwell.vue>:

<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/505/Virginia-Eubanks-Automatin
g-Ineq-page01.html>
  

    
It seems the LA water system was not designed with wildfires in
mind, just like water systems everywhere:

> In order for water to be piped uphill to hydrants in Pacific
Palisades, it is collected in a reservoir, pumped into three
million-gallon, high-elevation storage tanks, then propelled by
gravity into homes and fire hydrants.

> DWP spokesman Bowen Xie said the agency had filled its 114 water
storage tanks before the blaze, but after the Palisades Fire erupted
on Tuesday, water demand quadrupled in the area, lowering the
pressure required to refill the three local storage tanks.

> By 4:45 p.m., the first of the three tanks ran out of water, said
Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. The
second tank ran empty about 8:30 p.m., and the third at 3 a.m.
Wednesday.

...

> Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power, [...] said the agency’s water
pump-and-storage system, like others nationwide, was designed to
meet fire protection standards based on the water needed to battle
fires at several homes or businesses, not wildfires that consume
whole neighborhoods.

> “None of that’s ever been based on the entire neighborhood going
up. If that’s the new norm, that’s something that’s got to be
figured in,” he said. “Nobody designs a domestic water system for
that. It would be so overbuilt and so expensive.”

> Adams said the water system has done “what it was designed for
pretty successfully, but it couldn’t do everything. The system
probably delivered more water than it was designed to deliver, but
it couldn’t deliver an infinite amount.”

> He said water pressure issues could be addressed by adding more or
larger pipes, or officials could add temporary water storage. “If
we’re fighting a different kind of fire, we have to think about a
different kind of system,” he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/10/la-fires-fire-hydrants-water
-supply/

Maybe LA's idea of what "overbuilt" means for a water system will
change?
  

    
The usual weather pattern in Southern California brings moist
onshore winds from the west at moderate speed. This week's winds
were from the north-northeast, bringing very dry air at high speed.

With no wind or moderate onshore wind fires burn uphill, as the
topography of the foothills and the tendency of warmer air to rise
work in the same direction. This means that the wind doesn't force
the fire to spread aggressively toward the built environment. This
week the topography supported uphill burns, perhaps in canyons that
were protected from the wind, and the wind pushed the fires back
downhill. When the fires are burning above the elevation of the
water distribution tanks and reservoirs there's no way to get water
to fire hydrants, if there are even any fire hydrants up there. When
it's too windy to fly water tankers the fire has a safe base from
which the wind spreads it.
  

    
Massive urban fires were a regular feature of 19th-century life (for
different reasons).  It seems like they skipped the 20th-century but
are well on their way to being a regular feature again.

There are things which can lessen the severity of the problem, but
none of them are cheap or would work 100%.
  

    
Was augmented intelligence used in the writing of #160? Serious
question.
  

    
Honest, absolutely no snark intended. It's a very cogent post, and I
get a slight uncanny valley feeling from the structure of its
composition. I'm starting to recognize something I don't know how to
define in some Augmented Intelligence writing, and I'm curious how
well my "AI detector" is working. The depth of this stuff is scary
for people with no grasp of coding and architecture. 

(hstspect)'s post about the complexity this all brings to warfare is
mind numbing. There are so many willing to MFABT, and humans have
always been willing to test the edges of technology for personal
gain. I'm afraid we're headed for a Snowcrash/Blade Runner reality.
Hell, today's news feeds from LA even look like a Ridley Scott film.
  

    



Michael Brockington writes:



Re/150 (Jon Lebkowsky) "one way to see the state of the world is HOT, and
getting hotter"

Perhaps another key word for the state of the world in 2025 would be
"uninsurable".

I'm always surprised at how little the 1% seem to care about climate change.
Sure, they may profit from culpable industries.  But by definition, the 1%
own the great majority of the pretty things that are likely to go up in
flames or sink beneath the waves.  You might think that would enter their
thinking.

Of course, the LA wildfires are going to affect a wider swath of society than
just the super-rich, but it's hard to deny how much early attention was
riveted by images of the extraordinarily wealthy fleeing their luxury.  This
isn't Fort Mcmurray burning to the ground.  These are wildfires with star-
power.

I believe Daniel Kahneman argued insurance was something richer folk sold to
poorer ones, profiting from the cognitive entanglement of loss aversion and
over-estimation of low-probability events.

Do the uber-rich sell insurance to the merely ultra-rich?  Does Bezos have
insurance on his super-yacht?  Or do they manage without, since any single
catastrophe is unlikely to affect enough of their assets to pauperize them?
If that were the case, then for the 1% an uninsurable world would be no great
cause for dismay.
  

    
The 1% are apparently building bunkers and stashing their goodies
underground.  I don't think they completely understand what climate
change can do to the world, they think they can hide from it.
  

    
Seems like there are many possibile disaster scenarios and you can’t
prepare for all of them. But I like to see people improving the odds
that they’ll be offering assistance rather than needing it.
  

    
I guess what I’m saying is it depends how it’s done.
  

    

A larger long-term aspect about the 2020s and 2030s  is starting to
catch up to me. Sometimes modern places do get abandoned, but not
because life is too dangerous or dystopian there.  They tend to get
abandoned when nobody is born there. 

 I've known for  many years now that our world was in for a sharp
demographic decline, and during this century, too.  It's coming on
faster than people understand.   Also, it happens in areas that
don't make much sense, not grim and doomy places, but places like
South Korea, very wealthy, dynamic, or Italy, very pretty, very
culturati.   

Places exist where the population booms consistently, mostly big
cities with incoming migrants.  But also flyover districts appear,
with kinda nobody home.  Modern ghost towns, rural emptiness. 
Absences, less-than-zero growth.  A few are disastrous "involuntary
parks," like Fukushima, Chernobyl and old mine-fields, but others
look pastoral when they're not.  They're not old-school farms or
wilderness, they're a new-school abandoned-ness.  Christopher
Brown's "Natural History of Vacant Lots"   is quite good on this
"edgelands" topic and what it might mean henceforth.  That's a
pretty good recent book by an Austinite, by the way.