We, Robot and I

We, Robot and I

The whole issue of AI, Artificial Intelligence, Strong Artificial Intelligence, and its possible emotional relationship to humans seems to be gathering steam. A recent BBC news article http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36387734 has provided some great new insights into just what is going on today in the field. A lot of different opinions have begun to surface. If you choose to look into this report please follow the various links, especially the one that talks about the 15 important landmarks in the field since 1943.

Those who don’t read Sci-Fi or have not watched Star Trek, The Next Generation, may have missed out on a lot of this 70 year odyssey. This long running TV series starring Patrick Stewart dealt with very serious scientific topics every few episodes. It all began with Alan Turing and his cohorts in 1943. They knew full well that literally anything was possible via the process of computing given the right machinery. Included in that understanding were ‘Black Box’ programs, programs that were self-teaching and self-evolving. Such programs have already been put to use. The curious thing about such programs is that the programmers who write them don’t know how they work or what is really inside them. The idea that computers can only do what they are programmed to do is simply not true.

People are now seriously thinking about such things as: Should robots be given the vote? Could one love a robot? Does one have the right to switch off a robot? Is that murder? Ask a serious computer game player how he or she feels about the characters. With VR, virtual reality, now here and available at a reasonable price, the line between the external world and the virtual world is becoming blurred. So too is the line between the natural creature and the artificial creature.

I have many friends who believe these questions and ideas are the height of silliness, preposterous in the extreme, and are unwilling to even talk about them. However, how about the following: your dog—where did he come from? How do you feel about him? Occasionally we do have to ‘switch’ them off, and it is a very traumatic and highly emotional experience. I have a friend who fruitlessly spent $5000 he could ill afford to cure his dog of cancer. The dog may be made of flesh and bone just like us but he is just as surely made by us from wolves as robots are made from metal, plastic, and silicon. We have never been confronted with the voting question for dogs for the simple reason that the dogs have never brought up the subject, and probably won’t, given their nature. But the same may not be true of sufficiently intelligent robots. And oh, by the way, who said that robots have to be made of metal and silicon?

Not to belabor the relationship between humans and non-humans too much but I must mention elephants. We all know that we did not modify them in some way or other for our convenience and use but it turns out that their intelligence has been a blessing for us and a mixed blessing for them. My wife and I met a very charming elephant and his companion in Thailand in the 90s. We were taken for a long ride in the jungle and through the river. The animal and his companion, Jumba and Mumba, were introduced to each other as very young children. They grew up together and are inseparable. Each day the elephant and his human companion spend their six to eight hours together working, eating, bathing, and playing. At age forty or so the elephant is retired to a life of ease but his lifelong companion will stay with him to the end.

Another elephant at that same compound near Ching Mai makes his or her living painting pictures. The pictures are quite good—most depict elephant themes—and they sell for quite high prices. This animal was not taught—it had a natural talent—and is not instructed in any way.

The movie, Ex Machina, is a powerful look at this whole question. This simple Indy film won an academy award this year (2016). I have watched it five times and find something new in it each time. It is basically a dramatization of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sandbox experiment which sought to determine if powerful AI could be confined until made safe. Spoiler alert: It could not!

Dying

Dying—Dying is no fun. It’s not particularly easy, but everybody does it. It’s the one time in your life when the people around you ought to do what you ask of them. In the midst of serious illness our loved ones and our medical helpers are concentrating on keeping us going, making us well, if possible, and often subjecting us to treatments we know are not appropriate. When we know full well that we are dying it’s time to get our help from the practitioners of palliative care, a recognized medical specialty.

What follows is a very personal statement and maybe ought not to be on a public bulletin board but it deals with a subject that we all begin to think a lot about as we grow older. I’m 90 plus and most of my friends are of an age too. I fly model airplanes with a group of about twelve or fifteen pals who call themselves the ROMEO club (Retired Old Men Eating Out). Lately we’ve been losing an average of about two a year to the fellow with the scythe. It keeps us on our mettle to recruit replacements who are only in their seventies, will hang around for a few years and have the energy and strength to chase out into the brush to retrieve our occasionally crashed aircraft.

I could go on at length with personal anecdotes connected with so many of my dear friends who are gone now but I really want this testament to be about the dearest person in my life, my wife, Barbara. Her death was an enduring and indelible lesson and reminder to all who knew her on how to live a full and rewarding life and how to leave it with unspeakably beautiful grace.

Barbara had been ill with breast cancer and osteoporosis for several years before 2012. This had not slowed her down much and we had some wonderful times in those last years in spite of the medical episodes she had had to endure—operations and hospitalizations. We even took a Holland America cruise about seven months prior to her death in 2012 and enjoyed partying and associating with our university and church friends during that year. In fact, she insisted I attend an astronomy conference in Hawaii in early June of 2012 during which time our son came out from Ohio for a week to look after her. They had a great time going out for meals and socializing, as did I 2300 miles to the west.

I am not too fit myself and we had some hilarious adventures in those final months that we managed to laugh at. I remember one night she fell in the bathroom and couldn’t get up even though she was uninjured. The two of us managed to get her near the bed and then we struggled mightily to try to get her up onto the bed. Our positions were so ridiculous and we got to laughing so hard that we thought we might have to call 911 for assistance just to get to bed. We finally made it.

The cancer had been in remission for nearly ten years but on a routine visit to the oncologist in January of 2012 we discovered from the blood work that the markers, which had been near zero, were on the rise. The doctor offered the option of resuming radiation and chemo treatment but Barbara said, “No.”  She pointed out that she had had a wonderful and full life and was ready for the last chapter. He agreed of course and gave her all the support she needed.

The clock ticked on and we continued to enjoy life and one another’s company, then on June the 18^th, 2012, she awoke in great pain. She said we had better call the doctor. It was just before 7 a.m. I sent him an email and he called back by phone within a few minutes and asked if he should send an ambulance. Barbara said “No,” we could make it in the car just fine. She put on an old nightgown and a well-worn robe and walked out to the car with the aid of a cane. She never looked back. I knew that she knew she would never see the home again that she loved so much and that had nurtured our relationship for 44 years. Barbara knew how to move on. It was just like when we were married in Charleston, South Carolina in1946. She was 19, living in Chicago where she was born and had lived every day of her life to that point, and I was 20 and in the Navy. I called her from a phone on our ship in dry dock and said “Come on down we’re going to get married.” She came and never looked back.

There was a wheel chair at the door of Mercy Hospital to greet us.

She spent three days in the hospital. Tests and x-rays revealed widespread bone cancer. On about the second day while I was present in the room she was assisted by a nurse into the bathroom. After a few minutes I heard an audible snap and she cried out “I’ve broken my arm.” She had indeed while holding on to the bar next to the toilet. X-rays were taken and the orthopedic surgeon offered to operate and set the break. She declined the treatment and her arm was placed in a sling. The next day with all of us sitting in her room (the oncologist, her G.P, and I), the doctor asked if she would like to go to hospice. She said “Yes,” and he made a call on his cell phone. Fortunately a room was available at San Diego Hospice, one of the finest institutions I’ve ever seen, and she was moved that very afternoon.

Barbara spent ten days at the hospice before dying at 1:50 p.m. on June 29, 2012. During that stay she had many welcome visitors, including a lovely lady who played the Irish harp. When the aroma therapist stopped by and asked if she would like try that Barbara said “Sure, if it’s free. It can’t hurt.” I recall that the eight year old twin daughters of a cousin of mine made a couple of visits and brought her pictures they had painted. I know they had fun playing on the lawn just outside the door of Barbara’s room.

…

Barbara on her way to Hawaii aboard the QM II

“She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes; …

…

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!”

Lord Byron

Just off Kensington High

Just off Kensington High

I arrived in England in the summer of 1966 with a wife, two children, 13 bags and an ice axe to commence my studies for a PhD at Imperial College.  I hasten to add, the ice axe was being delivered to an acquaintance of a friend in the States. I was not into climbing mountains, or at least had given it up at that time in my life. Our first order of business was to find living quarters. Schools for our 15 year old and 5 year old boys came second. That task, unexpectedly, turned out to be a not inconsiderable job in itself.

We looked at a number of places in the Kensington area that were within walking distance or easy commute to Imperial College located just south of Hyde Park and the Albert Hall. It’s a pretty ritzy area but I was on the Navy’s dime and we felt we could afford it. After a week or so of looking we felt very fortunate to find a flat (‘apartment’ in Americanese) in a lovely old six story Victorian building just off Kensington High on Allen Street. In fact this grand structure was called Allen House. You can inspect it to this very day on Google Earth if you like. I’ve included a screenshot which shows that it hasn’t changed a jot since that far off time. 

 

The flat was on the northwest side of the building in front on the fourth floor. Those windows at the very top of the picture on the left are ours. The master bedroom window looked down on an alley that ran behind the shops on Kensington High Street; in particular we had a view of the back entrance to Sainsbury’s grocery and meat market. Barbara said it took some getting used to seeing the sides of beef being thrown out onto the alley from the delivery trucks and later dragged into the rear door of the shop. Don’t get me wrong Sainsbury’s is a good chain. We traded there regularly.

Straight across Allen Street to the west was a Chinese restaurant facing out onto Kensington High. We used to gaze down at the roof of this building which seemed to have far more than its share of pigeons in residence. We never ate there. We weren’t sure if those pigeons might not be serving some financial purpose to the owners of the food establishment below. Someone had told us that you should not eat London pigeons. They were not good for you.

We had been warned by the U.S, Navy authorities down on Audley Street in the center of London that we should use the Navy-provided rental agreement form for any rental or lease agreements we should undertake. Good advice. After we returned home in 1968 dear Mrs. McGarvy-Munn, the owner, spent years through her solicitor trying to collect property tax expenses from us. Thank goodness for the Navy rental form. Before we could take possession a surveyor appeared on the premises and began to list in a large book everything in the place including the light switches. In the kitchen he noted jelly glasses on the shelf as crystal ware. We had to sign this and were expected to pay up for anything lost, worn or damaged when we left. In a way this was a relief because it insured that we would never attempt to clean anything very well.

Back to the negotiations for this elegant domicile: Barbara later came to call it “a magnificent ruin.” All the flats in Allen House were privately owned, condo style, and I’m sure, except for ours, were well maintained. We couldn’t be sure of that since, as foreigners, we were never invited into any of our neighbor’s places. Strangely, I never saw the aforementioned lady but my wife surely did. Mrs. McGarvy-Munn was asked what the heating consisted of. She said, “Central heating. It comes out of the walls.” To our extreme discomfort that turned out to be untrue. The flat had about six rooms including two bedrooms, a formal parlor, a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and maid’s quarters in the back. That room went to our 15 year old. The parlor had a magnificent chandelier with many hundreds of dangly crystals which we were strictly admonished not to touch. The parlor was furnished with gilt formal furniture of about 1880 vintage upon which we never dared to sit. The side board piece with its gilt framed mirror served as a repository for the wire mesh enclosed soda water bottle that was traditionally refilled by a vendor who was supposed to visit on occasion. The kitchen was another matter. The linoleum was so worn that the holes in it were an actual tripping hazard. The refrigerator worked but was only hip high and held very little. It was a good thing milk was delivered daily, and that Safeway was just across Kensington High with Sainsbury’s just below. The ragged carpet in the long hall that ran the length of the apartment presented the same hazard as the kitchen linoleum. Although promised the dear lady never came through on any of our requests for new linoleum and hall carpet.

The approaching winter turned out to be quite cold, so without heat we were forced to buy some small electric space heaters to make up for the phantom central heat. These were quite high wattage with very high velocity fans. They were about the size of a toaster and believe it or not could actually warm a room. We were most thankful for that. On one occasion while I was at the University and the children were at school Barbara decided to finally really get warmed up, got in the tub and let the warm water fill to the overflow. While relaxing and luxuriating she heard a banging on the door, an unusual occurrence since we didn’t know anyone. When she finally did get to the door it turned out to be John, the building porter, wanting to know if she was all right. It seems that water was dribbling down the outside of the building from our flat. The tub overflow led directly out to what was once a lead pipe sticking out into empty space. This had been sawed off long ago flush to the brick wall by thieves who were about their business of stealing lead.

Barbara didn’t smoke – well, one every now and then to promote regularity. Besides, it was nice to have some cigarettes around for guests, should any ever show up. Everyone in England seemed to be smokers in those days so we kept a supply. We got them at the Navy PX down town and kept them on an upper shelf in our bedroom closet. They were hard to keep on hand even though we seldom used them ourselves and we had very few smoking guests. I don’t know how she did it, she was quite a short person, but Mrs. McGarvy-Munn would use her illicitly retained key to enter our place while Barbara was out and steal the cigarettes.

One last anecdote about our landlady: She claimed to be a dear and close friend of the late Queen Consort to George V, Mary of Teck. Queen Mary had died just 13 years prior to our coming to England. We could never know if this was true but it made a good story.

All was not harsh discomfort at Allen House. There was always John the porter. We became quite fond of him. And then there was the milk man who came every morning early with his hand drawn electric powered milk wagon. Our five year old would dash down to the street and give the milk man a hand in distributing the bottles to the various flats.

As I recall the lift (‘elevator’ in Americanese) was one of those cage affairs which allows full view in or out in all four directions and has the staircase winding alongside in view of the lift passengers. It may have been water-powered; many were at the turn of the century. In fact I was inspired to write this account while reading a Maisie Dobbs mystery novel (Jacqueline Winspear) in which the heroine finally acquires a flat in Pimlico which had just such a lift. Pimlico is a district not far from Kensington. 

Living in Allen House had other benefits. It was near Kensington Palace. Our youngest son who attended school at Kensington Cathedral got to play near the statue of Peter Pan at the Round Pond in Hyde Park after school. In fact, he starred as Peter Pan in a school produced performance. His mother made his costume from potato sacks. I walked the back streets to Imperial College passing through what I recall as Thackeray Square. The William Makepeace Thackeray house had the familiar London landmark blue plaque near the door. This inspired me to finally get around to reading about Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair.

You could probably not live ‘up market’ off Kensington High today: times have changed.

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox! Who the heck is Fermi?

EnricoFermi (1901 –1954) was an Italian born physicist who pioneered the development of controlled nuclear fission. His name has been attached to many important things – Fermi-Dirac quantum statistics for one, for which he got the Nobel Prize in 1936. In fact the entire visible universe is made up of Fermions and Bosons. How’s that for putting your stamp on things? He had the job of creating the first controlled nuclear power pile under the stadium stands at the University of Chicago in 1942. The principal nuclear particle research facility of the United States, the Fermi Lab near Chicago, is named in his honor. Enough of that: he was very famous and really a very nice guy. Although he didn’t live very long he got started early and got a lot done in his short life.

A very important facet of his brilliant career began when he joined the group at Los Alamos to work on the development of the atomic bomb in 1943. Three other scientists, well known to most of us, were also hard at work at Los Alamos and were involved at the birth of the Fermi Paradox some years later. These three men were Edward Teller of H-Bomb fame; Emil Konopinski, nuclear physicist; and our own beloved Herb York, variously first head of the Lawrence Livermore Labs, founding Chancellor of UCSD, professor of physics, and Ambassador to Geneva to negotiate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The ethnic origins of these four give a clue as to why America does science so well: Fermi, Italian; Teller, Hungarian; Konopinski, Polish; and York, Mohawk Indian. We remember three of these men with great admiration but Edward Teller fell from grace in the physics community after he threw J. Robert Oppenheimer under the bus at a Senate hearing in 1954, kick starting the McCarthy witch hunting era.

The Paradox – One day in 1950 at Los Alamos these four were on their way to lunch. Without preamble Fermi spoke up, “Where are they?” The others knew immediately what he was referring to. They had discussed it before. It seems the Universe is vast, as many as 400 billion stars in just our own Milky Way galaxy and there are hundreds of billions more galaxies out there. It seemed inconceivable that not only life but intelligent life must have appeared many times over among these almost uncountable stars. Back in 1950 we had no evidence of planets around distant stars as we have today but scientists assumed that processes similar to those that created our own planetary system must exist around other stars. And indeed we now know that nearly all stars have planetary systems.

Though the average citizen has probably not paid much attention to these three little words, they have rattled around the scientific and speculative community for the nearly seven decades. Literally thousands of scientific and quasi-scientific papers have been written on the subject. The SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project has been on going for a very long time. Some agree it’s a good idea; others disagree. That’s not the point. Considerable astronomical resources and brainpower have been searching diligently for evidence of ET, and all these erudite scientists have been wondering ‘where are they’ and why haven’t we found any evidence of their presence.

Here are some of the factors in the question. The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Life has been on earth only about one billion years and the human species, as we know it, has been around for less than a million. One has to realize that this is but a momentary blink in the time scale of the existence of the universe. For life to have appeared, however unlikely that might be assumed, it must have appeared literally millions if not billions of times on the planets of suitable stars in our own galaxy. And we are indeed finding today that there are a great many suitable stars. Keep in mind, if we assume a very low probability of intelligent life, maybe on just a mere million planets, these million planets having some sort of intelligent life may seem a lot, but it is only 0.00025% of the total number. Life may exist in literally billions of planetary systems just here in the Milky Way, intelligent life on just a tiny fraction – only a million.

We being around here at all to ponder these interesting speculations is the result of a pretty low probability event, the meteor strike in Mexico, the Chicxulub impactor, which wiped out the dinosaurs. This was a highly unlikely occurrence that gave mammals a chance to thrive and for humans to evolve. We also tend to forget that the age of dinosaurs was a very very long period, far longer than the period that mammals have had since. Maybe a species of dinosaurs such as the velociraptor would have evolved into a truly sentient and technically competent species. What we know about crows today, a close relative of the dinosaurs, and their intelligence give us cause to think it could happen. We’ll never know.

The next important factors are the distance between stars and the velocity of light, the ultimate maximum speed. Like it or not, Einstein’s limit on velocity of anything is probably the most certain fact in the realm of physics. Distances between stars are measured in light-years, how far light can travel in one year. The nearest stars are of the order of a few light years distant but most of what we see in the sky at night are thousands of light-years away. Sending any material object from one star to another is a prodigiously difficult undertaking. Even achieving 1% of the speed of light is hard to conceive. That would certainly stand in the way of much traffic between the stars.

Scientists who are concerned with evolution and the development of civilizations, etc. have opined that a sentient race may arise and become extinct in a blink of time – a few million years at most. This would mean that having two or more technically adept civilizations coexisting within any sort of reach of each other might be highly unlikely.

Since the invention of lasers the early radio telescope efforts of SETI (which are still underway however) may be totally obsolete. At one time scientists worried that the leakage of I Love Lucy into interstellar space would alert some malevolent ETs to our presence and result in our obliteration. Not to worry; recent calculations seem to confirm that there isn’t enough energy in such broadcasts to be detected outside our local region. Some assume that very advanced races would communicate using point-to-point means employing, not radio, but light. We might be looking with the wrong technology. But the leakage of laser radiation between the stars is highly unlikely. We use lasers for precisely the reason of economy - all the radiation gets to its intended goal. Setting up laser SETI systems would be a fool's errand.

Other theories abound. One says we are being quarantined because of our warlike nature; another, natural evolution removes interest for interstellar exchanges, and so on.

There is a considerable community of serious scientists that say that it is dangerous to try to make contact with possible interstellar civilizations whose motives we could not possible guess. Best left alone!

All of these ideas and efforts leave out what I like to think of as the elephant in the living room that no one seems to have noticed – Artificial Intelligence – Machines. Surely no one has missed the recent news that 1000 scientists have signed a letter protesting the development of autonomous weaponry, really a first step towards AI. In a recent conversation with a well known author and scientist I opined that machine evolution could advance very rapidly once they achieve any sort of sentience, achieving super intelligence in a hundred years. His response was, “A hundred days, not a hundred years.” Why would we assume a sentient machine would be a nice guy like Star Trek’s Data? Maybe she (?) would be more like Ava of the recent British thriller, Ex Machina.

Here’s a thought. Maybe the universe is populated by machines that neither love nor hate us and, at the moment, are not in need of the resources represented by our planet and us. Have a nice day.

Loss of the Emmons

If you followed he link on the Emmons you would have discovered that it was sunk by Japanese kamikazes shortly her arrival off Okinawa with the loss of nearly half the crew.