Wall Street AI risks

At Research magazine, I look at a dark scenario: "Are Killer Robots the Next Black Swan?" Excerpt:

No less a scientific name than Stephen Hawking has been raising alarms about out-of-control AI. In a recent opinion piece, Hawking and several scientist co-authors warned: “One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” 

In an era of grandmaster-beating chess programs and driverless-car prototypes, it is no surprise that anxieties about where such technology is heading have gained traction. Nor is it a surprise that critics target the tech sector and the Pentagon (especially the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA) for working on increasingly powerful systems that may one day outsmart, outrank or outlive us all. (A UN meeting in Geneva in May convened experts to discuss emerging “lethal autonomous weapons.”) 

What might be surprising is the idea that Wall Street could give rise to dangerous AI—not in the obvious sense that financial institutions raise capital for the tech sector, but in that financial technology itself might be the matrix for the rise of the machines. That is the gist of one emerging line of thinking about the dangers of smart computers.

Whole thing here. Some related writing by me is here.

The reform conservative climate punt

Just for the record, in case future researchers in a heavily air-conditioned facility someday scroll through this blog as part of some vast data-mining project, let me state, unequivocally, that I dispute and reject Ross Douthat's post "Reform Conservatism and Climate Change," in which he argues that avoiding policy prescriptions on climate change is exactly the right thing for reform conservatives to be doing.

Douthat makes an extended analogy in which climate policy is likened to insurance that will be costly and have uncertain benefits, and require your neighbors to buy into it as well, plus the thing you're insuring against doesn't seem as bad as it did a few years ago, plus you're not as wealthy as you were a few years ago, so now is not the time to … blah blah blah. It's all offal. The risks are plenty real. The neighbors are considerably subject to your influence (because you are a huge property-owner known as the United States of America, and you buy a lot of their products and can put fees on ones that are carbon-intensive). You're not too poor to afford the insurance policy--if it's a carbon tax, it raises money, and can be used to help your economy by enabling cuts or elimination of other taxes.

This is what reform conservatism amounts to in 2014? Some child tax credits and deliberate omission of  action on climate? What kind of world are those kids going to grow up and grow old in? This kind.

UPDATE 6/30: "The best way to understand Douthat’s piece is by reverse engineering his argument as a constrained minimization problem The objective is to minimize the craziness he needs to embrace, subject to the constraint that he must end up in line with the denialist conspiracy theorists who dominate the base." I find this sadly persuasive, notwithstanding its lack of punctuation.

Research in Buffalo

A busy weekend of Erie Canal/Dewitt Clinton research. Here's a Buffalo News article about some of it.

UPDATE: As it appeared in the newspaper:

Some unconvincing AI

I have a piece upcoming about artificial intelligence. In the meantime, I recommend this post by Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg View: "Fake Victory for Artificial Intelligence." Bershidsky understandably expresses puzzlement about how the program called Eugene Goostman could have tricked 33% of judges at an event aimed at seeing whether people could judge whether their chat-session interlocutor was human or computer. Bershidsky points out that anyone can converse with the program at a Princeton site, so I went there and asked a question:

Are you worried about climate change?

The answer I got:

Yes I am worried about climate change, but it's my secret! Where do you came from, by the way? Could you tell me about the place where you live?

No, I'll pass on that. I also asked Eugene:

What do you think of the Bloomberg View column about you? http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-09/fake-victory-for-artificial-intelligence

And instantly got:

"Artificial" doesn't mean "inferior". In some cases it means just the opposite... but not too often.

And later, when I mentioned what town I live in:

I can't believe it! The world went crazy, almost like my grandpa...

Premature failure report on climate change

Yesterday at Vox, Ezra Klein had an impressive but frustrating piece "7 reasons America will fail on climate change." Impressive because it makes many valid points, and frustrating because the tone of defeatism is unproductive and will never convince anybody of anything. For decades, many conservatives thought the Communists were going to win the Cold War; such thinking threatened to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and it was only in the 80s, when conservatism took a notably more optimistic tone in the Reagan years, that the scenario of a triumphant Soviet Union receded and then was falsified.

I've written before about how the politics of climate change could be reshuffled as the topic shifts from whether it's real or a problem to what to do about this real problem. Will a lot of time have been wasted and a lot of damage have been done by the time that shift is well underway? Yes. No denying it. But things change in American politics, sometimes fast. And predicting what won't be doable on the technological front is always a gamble.

Space pathways report

I know I said I wouldn't be blogging much, but this report from the National Research Council, "Pathways to Exploration," is very interesting (at least to those of us who are, as the polling data in the back of the report put it, "attentive" to space; a minority to be sure). I've read some of the document (notwithstanding the not-great legibility of its free, online version), and its call for setting up infrastructure on the moon to develop technology for getting to Mars makes sense to me:

While this report’s recommendation for adoption of a pathways approach is made without prejudice as to which particular pathway might be followed, it was, nevertheless, clear to the committee from this report’s independent analysis of several pathways that a return to extended surface operations on the Moon would make significant contributions to a strategy ultimately aimed at landing people on Mars and that it is also likely to provide a broad array of opportunities for international and commercial cooperation.

Me: The guy in the picture here looks a little spaced-out, but from what I've read in and about the report, it's a thoughtful piece of work, which includes discussion of fundamental questions about why go and who cares. I'll plan on reading more of it. On the off chance that Mitch Daniels, who co-chaired the committee, becomes president or vice president, one of the many credentials he'd bring to the job is a great deal of space policy knowledge, something not often found among high-level politicos.

New Jersey GOP primary results

Good news and bad news from New Jersey's primaries, and both are about the exact same thing: Jeffrey Bell's victory in the Republican primary to be challenger against Cory Booker for Senate.

The good news: Bell is an intelligent conservative policy wonk, someone with real experience and knowledge, not some "anti-establishment" candidate whose stock in trade is not knowing what he's talking about. He also has an interesting backstory of having unseated Clifford Case in the Republican Senate primary in 1978 (before losing to Bill Bradley for a seat that's been Democratic ever since).

The bad news: Bell is planning a campaign focused on the gold standard. Back in 1978, there was a case to be made for some kind of linkage of the dollar to gold. Inflation was surging and the then-new experiment in non-commodity fiat money was going poorly. Now, 36 years later, gold standard advocacy is a fossil relic of 1970s conservatism, a solution for a problem, high inflation, that doesn't exist, and a monetary policy repackaged as an all-purpose nostrum for whatever ails your economy.

It's good that policy-oriented conservatism will get a hearing in New Jersey this fall. It would have been great if this were a policy-oriented conservatism that's geared for the 21st century.

Bell has little chance of winning. The question is whether he'll make a case that will make him deserving of a win.

Blogging and more

This blog will probably be updated at a leisurely pace through the summer. Apologies to its small contingent of regular readers. I will be stepping up my Erie Canal/DeWitt Clinton book research, as well as writing for Research magazine (which bears neither credit nor blame for this blog) and other publications: I have a review upcoming in Financial History magazine, for example.

Regardless, I look forward to seeing the upcoming movie Earth to Echo, and certainly updates to this blog will include a review of that.

Extraterrestrial auditor

Posting may be light for a while. I have pieces in the pipeline in a couple of magazines, and work to do on my book. Meanwhile, here's something I saw on a recent visit to the Queens Museum.

Convenient to think an extraterrestrial auditor would share one's own political convictions. As I've written before, there's a wide range of possibilities as to what they might want to say to us.

More interstellar ideas

Finally got around to watching the latest episode of Cosmos, "The Immortals." Somewhere Fred Hoyle is smiling about panspermia (life being seeded from space) getting a respectful hearing. I was fascinated by the imagery of a future civilization complete with giant starships. Thinking about interstellar travel ideas seems to be heating up, perhaps in time to help the Interstellar movie's box office.

Life in space movies

Recommended reading: "Life in space is impossible," by Dwayne Day at The Space Review. The title refers to a line from the opening of Gravity. The article is about various movies, including the weak Elysium and the much-anticipated (by me) Interstellar. Day has a somewhat downbeat view of how the pro-space movement, as he calls it, is doing, as reflected in the movies, though I'd add that such a movement has always had its challenges, including in the supposedly halcyon 1960s when public opinion did not give much support for the Apollo program.

Carbon taxation for skeptics [with small update]

Sometimes, an opinion piece is notable not just for its opinion but for the lengths to which the author will go to convince a particular audience of that opinion. Case in point: Irwin Stelzer's "Let's Tax Carbon," in the Weekly Standard. I strongly agree with the basic position (tax carbon and cut taxes on other things), which is one of the issues on which my centrist zig veered from the conservatives' zag in recent years. But I'd part company from Stelzer's rhetoric at moments like this:

Conservatives can maintain their skepticism about global climate change, but that does not mean that a bit of prudential action might not be appropriate should it turn out that carbon emissions are indeed having a negative effect on climate.

Me: Conservative identity has become so beholden to "skepticism about global climate change" that it's apparently now necessary to tell conservatives they can keep that set of beliefs even while trying to convince them to act as if they didn't hold them. If you like your skepticism, you can keep your skepticism. But I'm a pragmatist and not complaining. I hope Stelzer's approach is convincing.

UPDATE 7/17: Stelzer and the Standard double down, denying a carbon tax even has anything to do with climate change.

Delhi-Washington prospects

The words in bold below (my emphasis) jump out at me from this piece by Tunku Varadarajan on India's incoming prime minisater, Narendra Modi, and his likely awkward relations with President Obama:

The foreign leader he [Modi] will bond with best is unlikely to be Obama, an American president who has none of the instinctive feel for India, or for the enormous potential of a U.S.-India alliance, that George W. Bush had. The withering of that alliance has been one of the bleak, untold stories of Obama’s period in office, and one senses that India will have to wait for Hillary Clinton to reach the White House before the Delhi-Washington relationship blossoms again.

What's interesting is not just that Varadarajan, a conservative writer, seems to assume or strongly suspect that Hillary Clinton will be the next president, but that among the major Republican prospects there's nobody that would fit easily into the sentence. "One senses that India will have to wait for Rand Paul..."? No way. "One senses that India will have to wait for..." Ted Cruz? Paul Ryan? None of the biggest hitters has distinguished himself on foreign policy. If Bobby Jindal's star had risen higher in recent years, the idea that he might repair relations with India might have been noteworthy, because it's his ancestral homeland if for no other reason. (Or would he be under pressure to show he's not engaged in favoritism on that basis?) Obama foreign policy looks likely to leave a legacy of great mediocrity, but who in the Republican Party is positioned to make a strong case about that?

Potentially interesting movie note: Interstellar

Planned for a November release is a movie called Interstellar, with an all-star cast. (I hope Michael Caine is an alien.) The plot, about which little is known, reportedly involves a wormhole, which may not be the most original device but it's hard to come up with ways to get people to another star system that won't bore an audience. Here's hoping it's good.

UPDATE: "I'm coming back." I like the trailer.

 

Space priority disagreements

I expressed some skepticism about the Asteroid Redirect Mission in my recent Space Review piece (while making a suggestion on how it might be improved). But I think it's fair to say my attitude toward that mission is mild compared to that of Paul Spudis, a lunar scientist whom I interviewed years ago. Spudis also has a pretty clear opinion about the idea of a human flyby of Mars.

Meanwhile, for those who think Mars is all that, here's Lee Billings arguing that the real scientific payoff is on Europa. (What I'm not clear about is whether the Monolith's "attempt no landing there" dictate applied only to human or also robotic missions.)

Climate denial panel

As a follow-up to my recent post on anti-science politics, I highly recommend this excellent analysis by Jonathan Chait: "All Science is Wrong, Concludes Esteemed Fox News Panel." As I've pointed out many times, the conservative movement wasn't always like this, and need not always be like this.

Future solar statement

It's good that solar panels are back on top of the White House. Let's hope a future administration launches a solar array into orbit, beams energy down to an offshore platform and then transmits it wirelessly to Washington.

Platforms, privileges, philistines

A few odds and ends:

-- Some dangers of living in a bubble illustrated. I've warned about this kind of thing.

-- An idea for space solar power, desalination and offshore platforms (some of my favorite topics), which I came across because of a comment at my Space Review piece this week.

-- A critique of Tal Fortgang's critics on "checking your privilege." Seems right to me.

-- Damon Linker accuses Neil deGrasse Tyson of being a philistine; his critique gets pushback (weakened by the misspelling of "Neil"). Having listened to Tyson's comments, I'm with the pushback (especially in that he goes on to discussion of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; what philistine does that?).

Space economy ideas [updated]

I've got a piece up at The Space Review: "How to energize the space economy." It involves space solar power and space property rights, and related topics.

UPDATE 5/7: A lot of interesting comments at my post, and I got some positive feedback privately from someone experienced in moving stuff around in space. The Space Review has a readership that's very focused on space policy, a subject that doesn't get its due in the media world at large. I'll write for the site again sooner or later. Meanwhile, posting may be light here at Quicksilber in the near term.

UPDATE 5/7: Flashback to 2003: "Choices in Space." This piece is dated but still has some relevance in summarizing different viewpoints as to what to do (and not do) in space. I'm less of a Humans to Mars (anytime soon) believer than I was then, though.

UPDATE: Someone likes this in Portugal.

Port Authority infra-scandal

Back in January, I wrote about the Bridgegate scandal that has devoured much of Chris Christie's political cachet, and mentioned this:

I think a lesson conservatives and centrists should be embracing is that big government is a source of the current scandal or possible scandals--for instance, that the bloated Port Authority of NY/NJ lends itself to political pressure and shenanigans. Reforming that rotten institution, and privatizing its functions to the degree possible, is an approach we should be hearing a lot about in the wake of Bridgegate--but sadly few seem to care.

Now,  I'm pleased to note that said indifference is not total, in that Reason (with which I've had plenty of disagreements in recent years) has a piece called "Port Authoritarians" in its May issue that examines the underlying problem of a sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracy. I'm glad that the sober policy wonk side of libertarianism still has some life in it, in contradistinction to the hipster utopian conspiracist side.