Crypto is not a dog... or doge... or is it?

As this goes online, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are in apparent price-freefall. This posting - prepared over a month ago - will not discuss the recent coin market meltdowns. Still, it seems a good moment to offer some light on one aspect.

First, I actually know a little about this topic. I've consulted with a number of companies, agencies, etc. about the blockchain era. More generally, about the conceptual underpinnings of "smart contracts" and the eerie, free-floating algorithms that were long-predicted by science fiction, but have become reality, as we speak. (Yes they are out there; some may be living right behind the screen you are looking at.)

One topic generating excitement - though the notion has been floating since the 1990s - is that of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAO, which are portrayed in many novels and utopian manifestos as a way for humans (and their helpers) to bypass sclerotic legacy nations and codger institutions with self-organizing action groups, using NFTs and Blockchain tokens to modernize and revitalize the concept of guilds -- global, quick, low-cost, boundaryless, open and inherently accountable. Bruce Sterling wrote about this notion in the last century (as in his novel, Heavy Weather) and other authors, like Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon), Karl Schroeder (Stealing Worlds), as well as Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), Annalee Newitz (Autonomous), and many others roam this conceptual landscape with agility! 

To a large extent, versions of DAO thinking underlie moves by nations like Estonia (or "E-stonia") to modernize democracy and public services. Also spreading widely is the related notion of Citizen Assemblies. 

But today I want to focus now on just one aspect of this brave new world: whether DAOs can find a middle ground between autonomy and accountability, by self-policing to reduce bad behavior by predators, while retaining their better, freedom enhancing traits.  

== Can blockchain-based DAOs - especially coin communities - self-police? ==

This is an important topic! Because major legacy nations like China are already stomping hard, using as justification the way cryptocurrencies do empower the very worst of parasitic human criminals. That justification might be reduced or eliminated if DAOs or blockchain communities could find a positive-sum sweet spot, cauterizing predators while preserving their role as gritty irritants, creating pearls of creative freedom.

Although there is no way to "ban" crypto currencies in general, there is an approach to making them much more accountable to real life law.

Let's start with an ironic fact. Blockchain-based token systems are not totally secret!  

Yes, they use crypto to mask the identity of token (coin) holders.  But those holders only "own" their tokens by general consent of all members in a communal 'shared ledger' that maintains the list of coins and which public keys stand ready to be turned by each owner's encrypted keys. In that sense it is the opposite of 'secret,' since the ledger is out there in tens of thousands of copies on just as many distributed computers. Attempts to invade or distort or corrupt the ledger are detected and canceled en masse. (The ecologically damaging "coin mining" operations out there are partly about maintaining the ledger.)

All of this means that - to the delight of libertarians - it will be hard to legislate or regulate blockchain token systems. Hard, but not impossible. For example, the value of Bitcoin rises and falls depending on how many real world entities will accept it in payment. And as stated above, and some governments have been hammering on that, lately.

There is another way to modify any given blockchain token system, and that is for the owners themselves to deliberate and decide on a change to their shared economy... to change the ledger and its support software.  No one member/owner can do that. Any effort to do so would be detected by the ledger's built in immune system and canceled. 

Only dig it, all such ledger-blockchain systems are ruled by a weird kind of consensus democracy. While there is no institutional or built in provision for democratic decision making in the commons - (Satoshi himself may have back doors: a separate topic) - there is nothing to stop a majority of bitcoin holders from simply making their own, new version of the shared ledger and inserting all their coins into it, with new software that's tuned to less eagerly reward polluters and extortionist gangs. 

Oh, sure, a large minority would refuse. Their rump or legacy Bitcoin ledger (Rumpcoin?) would continue to operate... with value plummeted as commercial and government and individual entities refuse to accept it and as large numbers of computer systems refuse to host rump-coin ledger operations. Because at that point, the holdouts will include a lot of characters who are doing unsavory things in the real world.

There are vernaculars for this. Indeed it has been done, occasionally, in what are called soft and hard 'forks.' 

== A forking solution? ==

A “fork,” in programming terms, is an open-source code modification. Usually, the forked code is similar to the original, but with important modifications, and the two “prongs” comfortably co-exist. Sometimes a fork is used to test a process, but with cryptocurrencies, it is more often used to implement a fundamental change or to create a new asset with similar (but not equal) characteristics as the original.

With a soft fork, only one blockchain will remain valid as users adopt the update. Whereas with a hard fork, both the old and new blockchains exist side by side, which means that the software must be updated to work by the new rules. But the aim is to render the old code so obsolete and so widely spurned that it ceases to have any use to anyone.

As an example: Etherium did a fork when about $100 million worth of coins (that would now be worth tens of billions) was tied up in a badly written smart contract that a hacker was stealing. The community decided to kill that smart contract showing that immutable blockchains can change if 50% +1 decides to change it.

If you squint at this, it's really not so radical.  (Don't even ask about the blockchain "spork!"). It is just an operating system upgrade that can only occur by majority consent of the owner-members of the commune.  As pioneered at the famous University of Fork... or...

And so the stage is set to 'regulate' in ways that leave the potential benefits of blockchain - self-correction, smart contracts and the like - alone while letting system users deliberate and decide to revise, a trait that should be possible in any democratic or accountable system.

Now, is there a way to use a Grand Fork to change the insane approach to coin "mining" so that ledger maintenance can be achieved without encouraging planet-killing pollution and waste?

== And finally... ==

The concept that I called equiveillance or look-back accountability, in The Transparent Society - and Steve Mann called sousveillance - is labeled "inverse surveillance" by members of the Asimov Institute, in Holland. “How can we use AI as a Panopticon to promote beneficial actions for citizens by organizations?” A proof of concept was explored in a 2021 hackathon. 

Well well. These are harder concepts to relate than they might think, I know from experience! Yet they are fundamental to the very basis of our kind of civilization.

Transparency, talk of tradeoffs - and pseudonyms

Returning to the topic of transparency...

An article about “Our Transparent Future: No secret is safe in the digital era” - by Daniel C. Dennett and Deb Roy - suggests that transparency will throw us into a bitterly Darwinian era of “all against all.”  What a dismally simplistic, contemptuous and zero-sum view of humanity! That we cannot innovate ways to get positive sum outcomes.   

Oh, I confess things look dark, with some nations, such as China, using ‘social credit' to sic citizens against each other, tattling and informing and doing Big Brother’s work for him. That ancient, zero sum pattern was more crudely followed in almost every past oligarchy, theocracy or kingdom or Sovietsky, where local gossips and bullies were employed by the inheritance brats up-top, to catch neighbors who offended obedient conformity. 

Indeed, a return to that sort of pyramid of power, with non-reciprocal transparency that never shines up at elites – is what humans could very well implement, because our ancestors did that sort of oppression very well. In fact, we are all descended from the harems of those SOBs.

In contrast, this notion of transparency-driven chaos and feral reciprocal predation is just nonsense.  In a full oligarchy, people would thereupon flee to shelter under the New Lords… or else…

 

…or else, in a democracy we might actually innovate ways to achieve outcomes that are positive sum, based on the enlightenment notion of accountability for all. Not just average folk or even elites, but for  those who would abuse transparency to bully or predate.  If we catch the gossips and voyeurs in the act and that kind of behavior is deemed to be major badness, then the way out is encapsulated in the old SF expression "MYOB!" or "Mind Your Own Business!"

Yeah, yeah, Bill Maher, sure we have wandered away from that ideal at both ends of the political spectrum, amid a tsunami of sanctimony addiction. But the escape path is still there, waiting and ready for us.

It’s what I talked about in The Transparent Society… and a positive possibility that seems to occur to no one, especially not the well-meaning paladins of freedom who wring their hands and offer us articles like this. 

== Talk of Tradeoffs ==

Ever since I wrote The Transparent Society (1997) and even my novel, Earth (1990) I’ve found it frustrating how few of today’s paladins of freedom/privacy and accountability – like good folks at the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – (and I urge you all to join!) – truly get the essence of the vital fight they are in. Yes, it will be a desperate struggle to prevent tyrannies from taking over across the globe and using powers of pervasive surveillance against us, to re-impose 6000 years of dullard/stupid/suicidal rule-by-oligarchy.

I share that worry!  But in their myopic talk of “tradeoffs,” these allies in the struggle to save the Enlightenment Experiment (and thus our planet and species) neglect all too often to ponder the possibility of win-wins… or positive sum outcomes.

There are so many examples of that failure, like short-sightedly trying to ‘ban” facial recognition systems, an utterly futile and almost-blind pursuit that will only be counter-productive. 

But I want to dial in on one myopia, in particular. I cannot name more than four of these activists who has grasped a key element in the argument over anonymity - today's Internet curse which destroys accountability, letting the worst  trolls and despotic provocateurs run wild. 

Nearly all of the privacy paladins dismiss pseudonymity as just another term for the same thing. In fact, it is not; pseudonymity has some rather powerful win-win, positive sum possibilities. 

Picture this. Web sites who are sick of un-accountable behavior might ban anonymity! Ban it... but allow entry to vetted pseudonyms. 

You get one by renting it from a trusted fiduciary that is already in the business of vouching for credentials... e.g. your bank or credit union, or else services set up just for this purpose (let competition commence!)

The pseudonym you rent carries forward with it your credibility ratings in any number of varied categories, including those scored by the site you intend to enter. If you misbehave, the site and/or its members can ding you, holding you accountable, and those dings travel back to the fiduciary you rented the pseudonym from, who will lower your credibility scores accordingly. ...

... with no one actually knowing your true name!  Nevertheless, there is accountability.  If you are a persistent troll, good luck finding a fiduciary who will rent you a pseudonym that will gain you entry anywhere but places where trolls hang out. Yet, still, no one on the internet has to know you are a dog.

I have presented this concept to several banks and/or Credit Unions and it is percolating. A version was even in my novel Earth. 

Alas, the very concept of positive sum, win-win outcomes seems foreign to the dolorous worrywarts who fret all across the idea realm of transparency/accountability/privacy discussions. 

Still, you can see the concept discussed here: The Brinternet: A Conversation with three top legal scholars. 

== Surveillance Networks ==

Scream the alarms! “Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life,” reports Lauren Bridges in this article from The Guardian.

In fact, Ring owners retain sovereign rights and cooperation with police is their own prerogative, until a search warrant (under probable cause) is served.  While the article itself is hysterical drivel, there is a good that these screams often achieve… simply making people aware. And without such awareness, no corrective precautions are possible. I just wish they provoked more actual thinking.

See this tiny camera disguised in a furniture screw! Seriously. You will not not-be-seen. Fortunately, hiding from being-seen is not the essence of either freedom or privacy. 

Again, that essence is accountability! Your ability to detect and apply it to anyone who might oppress or harm you. Including the rich and powerful. 

We will all be seen. Stop imagining that evasion is an option and turn to making it an advantage. Because if we can see potential abusers and busybodies...

...we just might be empowered to shout: ...MYOB!

Explaining what should be obvious about ‘transparency' yet again

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== The Transparency thing that gave us everything we value ==

I still give a lot of talks on this topic... though I suspect in some cases I'm invited in hope of using me as a strawman "foe of privacy," to be knocked down.  Some find it disappointing to learn that I fear both Big Brother and loss of privacy, as much as (or more than) they do, pointing out that only one thing ever thwarted tyranny or nosy neighbors, and that's light, the ability -- your ability -- to catch would-be oppressors and denounce their misdeeds.

Very few peoples and nations across 6000 years were ever able to apply this power of reciprocal light and accountability. Indeed, we don't sufficiently appreciate the power it gave citizens. Certainly the world's despots know it, and are desperately creating protected shadows for themselves. And lacking upward transparency (sousveillance), a return to feudalism... or much worse... is inevitable. 

With it, you might prevent Big Brother, only to reap a second layer of fearful oppression... by a judgmental majority who demand conformity, using democracy against those they do not like. The nightmare portrayed crudely by books/movies like The Circle and much better in that Black Mirror episode "Nosedive."

Ironically, this is exactly the scenario - fear of oppression by 'the mob' - that Fox/KGB and their pals are now spreading across the MAGAsphere, in order to discredit democracy itself! They must, because if U.S. citizens truly recover voting sovereignty, there would be no political future for today's Mad Right/putinist version of confederate conservatism.

Still, there is an underlying point that they're exploiting, a fear that Ray Bradbury illustrated in Fahrenheit 451. If transparency is universal, but the culture is immature and judgmental, then you don't get Big Brother. Rather you get lateral oppression by that 51% majority - an oppression that's totally legal, democratic and above-board. Indeed, this is how "social credit" might make crude, Orwellian Gestapo-tactics unncessary in future despotisms, as the People themselves enforce conformity, laterally.

Hence, our narrow path of freedom requires a third ingredient, at the level of values. If transparency is universal AND we have a culture that scorns gossips and bullies and privacy busybodies and voyeurs and judgmental conformity-enforcers, then MYOB can prevail.

What's MYOB?

Mind Your Own Business.

It means if I'm not hurting anyone, then my quirks and eccentricities merit protection, same as yours. Lest a day come when I am not tolerated... followed by you.

Yes, I have learned that this simple idea is almost impossible for most folks to wrap their heads about, even though it's a fundamental, base level zeitgeist of our present society! Indeed, I show how Sci Fi books and films have been at the vanguard in promoting appreciation of individual eccentricity, in my recent nonfiction book: VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

Tolerance is actually encouraged best by transparency, especially when gossips and bullies and privacy busybodies and voyeurs are caught in the act... but only when gossip and bullying and conformity-enforcing are in disrepute.

Again, yeah it sounds counter-intuitive. Yet, it is exactly the baseline value system of a majority of westerners now.  It's very likely your baseline value!  And it is the only way we'll get beyond the danger zone to something decent.

== MORE ==

Under a broad program called "signature reduction", it is said (in this article) that the U.S. Pentagon supervises a secret force more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, that “carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.” This is in part to deal with the difficulties of modern intel gathering when adversaries have massive files and face recognition. Also: “The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”

Which raises a basic question. How will we evade this devolving into:

1) A deep state that is unaccountable to constitutional systems*… or

2) The sort of tit for tat conflict of reciprocal sabotage that the great science fiction author Frederik Pohl warned about in his terrifying novel The Cool War.

Neither of these outcomes frighten adversaries of the West, who are fully committed to these tactics in order to prevent the psychic collapse of tyranny that their models predict, if the Enlightenment is not toppled soon. But both outcomes should worry us.

Those currently in our intel/military/law officer corps are likely loyal to constitutionalism and law and all that. Moreover they need tools such as these, in order to wage a desperate struggle on our behalf.  But these methods can all too easily anchor into habit. Habits that prevent our servants from even noticing an alternative suite of weapons that have far better long term prospects. In fact, those alternative methods are the only ones that can lead to our sole victory condition.

Weapons of light.

== ...Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks... ==

Finally… Two notes on philosophy.

1) UCSD Professor Benjamin Bratton - author of Revenge of the Real - is fighting for us on a front that seems obscure to 99.999% of us, but is actually important -- the ongoing effort by 'postmodernist' philosophers (especially on French and US campuses) to denounce and discredit science, democracy, so-called 'facts,' and the very concept of objective reality. I recommend his article for those who would blink in amazement over Ben's depiction of the rage-howls that fulminate from elite subjectivity spinners, who demand that their incantations get paramountcy over the evidence and models we laboriously build out of a clay called 'reality.'

2) I had a note from someone else who felt caught between two philosophical “rocks.”

“Is there an intersection between ephemerality and nihilism - lately I have found myself fully seated in ephemerality - not as a negative - but - rather - as an awakening of the transitory aspect of my physical engagement with the universe  - it has awakened my creativity - am I way off – thoughts?” 

My answer is the same one I give at commencement addresses:

You can be large. 

More than one thing. 

Study the phrase "positive sum" as opposed to "zero sum."  Sure your individual life may be short to the point of apparent pointlessness. So is a bee's. But the hive does mighty things. 

We are building a civilization of extraordinary magnitude! One that has accomplished prodigious things, perhaps unprecedented across the galaxy, and we did it by standing on the shoulders of ephemerals who stood on the shoulders of ephemerals who clawed their way a little higher, out of a muck of ignorance. These accomplishments - forged in the spirit of our ancestors - are just hints at what might yet come.

You don't have to accomplish great things to be part of all that. Or even remembered! You will know the things you did, to be part of that rising pyramid of shoulders. Feel the weight of future generations on them. 

You have our gratitude.

Aiming for lateral accountability: Cameras will either help... or thwart... Big Brother

More and more we are seeing that the enemies of the Enlightenment Experiment Are not just opposing 'western decadence' or even the Rule of Law - though RoL hampers terribly the power and whim that topmost males have always deemed their birthright. 

No, the most fundamental thing that all tyrants, kings, owner-lords and priestly hierarchs have always dreaded was the possibility of accountability, applied upon them by those they rule.

Pericles spoke of this, at the onset of the age when the Athenian Democracy dazzled the world. Thomas Paine crystalized the notion, far more revolutionary than anything by Lenin or Robspierre or Mao. It is the core of every experiment in flat-fair-open-creative and free civilization.

== Is technology going to help... or end it? ==

“Massive camera hack exposes the growing reach and intimacy of American surveillance.” A breach of the camera start-up Verkada ‘should be a wake-up call to the dangers of self-surveillance,’ one expert said: ‘Our desire for some fake sense of security is its own security threat', reports The Washington Post.

I remain appalled that so many very smart people actually seem to think that each year's new tech levels - and menaces - will now freeze and stand still long enough for us to ban them. Cameras get smaller, faster, cheaper, better, more mobile and vastly more numerous far faster than Moore's Law (Brin's Corollary!) 

Consider the recent case of San Francisco's City Council banning facial recognition systems, when keeping them open to public criticism is exactly how we discovered and then corrected many problems like racial and gender bias in the programs.

Anyway Facial Recognition programs won't be resident in police departments for long, where some city council can ban them, but will be cheap apps in phones and AR glasses, available from a thousand directions. Result? Cops who are banned from using versions that are open to supervision will instead surreptitiously use dark web versions, because it might save their own lives.

We need to focus not on uselessly trying to ban tech that might be abused, but on eliminating the abuses. And that can only happen with more light, aimed at those with power.

Oh, the dangers are very real! These techs will certainly empower agents and masters of despotism, if you already have a despotism. And hence the lesson and priority is to prevent despotism altogether! Because these same techs could instead empower vibrant citizenship, if we see to it they are well-shared and that no elite gets to monopolize them.

Which they will, if we try simplistically and reflexively to ban them.

It's not that the ACLU and EFF and EU are wrong to fret! They are absolutely correct to point at problems and to worry that surveillance techs could empower Big Brothers and render citizen privacy extinct. It is their prescriptions that almost always are short-sighted and foolish.

Making a tech illegal will not stop elites form having and using it. 

Let me repeat that.

Making a tech illegal will not stop elites form having and using it. 

What it will do is make them arrange to do it secretly, where the methods won't be appraised and criticized publicly.

As Heinlein said, "the chief effect of a privacy law is to make the bugs smaller."

Need I keep mentioning that both Martin Luther King and Gandhi credited cameras with saving their own lives, as they marched and took on entrenched power?

Meanwhile the thing propelling Black Lives Matter is the proliferation of public access to cameras, spectacularly increasing the number of bad cops being fired. Being convicted took longer and activism helped change the reflexes of juries!But none of it would have happened without the cameras. All of it, BTW, predicted in EARTH (1990) and The Transparent Society (1997.)

== Again and again… HOW to get the internet’s good and repress the bad? ==

Some of these concepts are hard, so let's go over similar concepts from a slightly different angle.

Evan Anderson of the Strategic News Service recently wrote an incisive piece on how the Internet is suffering near lethal harm from swarms of nasty users.  “The Half-Percent: How A Few Awful Individuals Increasingly Threaten Our Future.”

For example “This March, in its The Disinformation Dozen, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in a sample of content posted 812,000 times on social media platforms, just 12 individual anti-vaxxer accounts on Facebook and Twitter were responsible for a full 65% of anti-vaccine content. The report also describes that many of these individuals are doing so simply to encourage skepticism because they have “snake oil” to sell, noting: ‘Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who do not have relevant medical expertise and have their own pockets to line, who are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines. According to our recent report, anti-vaccine activists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers, making these the largest and most important social media platforms for anti-vaxxers. Our research has also found anti-vaxxers using social media platforms to target Black Americans, exploiting higher rates of vaccine hesitancy in that community to spread conspiracies and lies about the safety of Covid vaccines.’ These 12 individuals account for 73% of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, are personally featured in 17% of anti-vaxx content on Twitter, and regularly feature sales attempts for alternative products that they claim can cure Covid-19.

Okay then. How to deal with badguys and sociopaths and predators? As far back as legends go, sages have preached we should be honest and forthright and honorable to each other. These preachings - on every continent and in every language - had positive effects, but only on those who already valued honesty and honor and decency. 

The sort of folks whom the dishonorable always view as prey.

Some kings and priests sought to apply other methods. Laws, policing, punishments. These deterred bad actors to some large degree by applying accountability. In strong, efficient states, businesses could operate and families had some recourse from gangs of thugs... but only some. And there was no redress from the capricious whims of the King, or lords or priests.

A few nations tried the Periclean approach... supply citizens with the means to apply accountability upward. Always a difficult, fraught and incomplete effort, it nevertheless was the focus of Adam Smith and the U.S. Founders and each generation of Americans has done it slightly better, except this one, as a worldwide oligarchic putsch strives to end the very notion of the idea that Rule-of-Law can apply upward.

In order to weaken us, those oligarchs have subsidized and encouraged the nasty predators that this post was about.  The anonymity that original Internet zealots called liberating has become a curse, as the worst men use it to evade any form of accountability, online.  More and more, we hear calls to banish anonymity... while those worried about Big Brother see what's happened in China, where online anonymity is banned for purposes of state control. 

Elsewhere, I've explored how we were able to harness competitive processes in five great arenas: MARKETS, DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE, COURTS and SPORTS, and in all five, strenuous, unrelenting efforts repress the human tendency to cheat, by applying very different styles of fierce regulation and accountability. In my paper I discuss a method that might let this happen on the Web. 

(For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition." 

Okay, here's the key point. This doesn't have to be ZERO SUM! We should be able to get most of the good aspects of anonymity while eliminating most of the bad!  We could do this with a regularized process of formalized PSEUDONYMITY in which you can rent a vetted pseudonym from a fiduciary you already trust for other credentials (e.g. credit or savings)... your bank. (Banks are already well placed to get into this potentially profitable business.) 

If you do bad things under that pseudonym, the "ding" would follow you back and affect your credibility scores without having anyone actually know your name (unless the ding is a felony.)

I go into this elsewhere, too. The crux: the key to reducing the harm done by badguys is accountability. But giving top rulers tools for applying it downward is always dangerous to freedom. 

The answer - as you'd expect from me - is lateral accountability.  And we can do it in a positive sum way.

== Tech as Freedom’s Friend ==

In 2013 I touted maybe the most important step in American civil liberties since the 1960s Civil Rights Bills... when the Obama Administration and the courts ruled that citizens have a right to record the police. As I predicted in The Transparent Society, (especially p.130), cameras became far more of a 'great equalizer' that the six gun, though it took time and phases and a stretch of pain that hasn't ended with the Chauvin conviction. 

But while we rightfully laud heroes in this struggle, let's spare a nod for technology? The thing that will either empower Big Brother forever... or else ensure we'll have Big Brother NEVER.

That choice still lies in our hands.

How will AI be used in the next decade?

 Will AI mostly be used in ethical or questionable ways? 

Isaac Asimov in his Robots Series conceived a future when ethical matters would be foremost in the minds of designers of AI brains... not for reasons of judiciousness, but in order to quell the fears of an anxious public. His Three Laws of Robotics broke many molds that had constrained SF speculation about synthetic minds, at the time. But that scenario never happened. No such desperate anxiety about AI seems to surge across today's populace, perhaps because we are seeing our AI advances mostly on screens and such, not in clanking mechanical men. Not yet, at least.

(I can safely argue that I'm one of the world experts on those Asimovian laws, and the Foundation/Robots universe. Before disagreeing, have a gander at "Foundation's Triumph.")

Oh, there are serious conferences on this topic - how to ensure these new beings will be benign. I've participated in many. 

Alas, most such conferences appear to be as impractical and clueless  as Asimovian "laws" seem, in retrospect. Unctuous statements urging ethical consideration in AI development are at best palliatives, meant to give designers an out. An alibi. 

I am often an outlier, proposing that "ethical behavior" in AI be promoted the way it is in most humans, especially most males... the only way it has ever been achieved... via accountability. See my article: How Might Artificial Intelligence Come About?

HOW do you 'hold accountable'. beings who are fated to outstrip their makers, in speed and power and possibly conscious intellect? By making accountability reciprocal.

If AIs are many and diverse and reciprocally competitive, then it will be in their interest to keep an eye on each other and report bad things, because doing so will be to their advantage. 

It is only the EXACT method we have used in recent centuries to save ourselves from other predatory beings... kings, lords, barbarians and all that. I go into it - in detail - elsewhere. But at-root it is a simple recourse, alas seldom even discussed.

 Will quantum computing advance greatly by 2030 and possibly enhance AI empathy or ethics?

Quantum computing has genuine potential. Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind (just last month awarded the Nobel Prize) and associates believe it already takes place, in trillions of sub-cellular units inside human neurons. If so, it may take a while to build quantum computers on that kind of scale.

The ethical matter is interesting, though totally science fictional... that quantum computers might connect in ways that promote reciprocal understanding and empathy. 

== Artificial Intelligence language ==

Shannon Vallor, a professor of the ethics of data and artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, in Noema Magazine,  evaluates the most advanced AI-powered language-generation program to date, GPT-3, that produced, when prompted, an essay on consciousness. “The instantaneous improvisation of its essay wasn’t anchored to a world at all,” she observes.  Oh, sure, at one level that’s obvious and at another seems predictably grouchy. 

I’ve been consulting and speaking a lot about AI lately, and frankly, I doubt we’ll have a clear idea when such real-world anchoring has occurred, or autonomous consciousness.

Still, she makes a strong point about how many humans fail the same kind of reality-anchoring test that she would apply to AI. “Extremist communities, especially in the social media era, bear a disturbing resemblance to what you might expect from a conversation held among similarly trained GPT-3s,” she says. “A growing tide of cognitive distortion, rote repetition, incoherence and inability to parse facts and fantasies within the thoughts expressed in the extremist online landscape signals a dangerous contraction of understanding, one that leaves its users increasingly unable to explore, share and build an understanding of the real world with anyone outside of their online haven.”

== Solving crises ==

Unfrozen Lands: The climate crisis threatens much of the Earth with droughts, flooding and brutal heat. But it could also create unparalleled opportunity for a few countries — perhaps none more than Russia.  Put aside the fact that the new farmlands will remain crappy, with poor topsoil for millennia… and that there’s only one growing season, while climate change destroys other zones on the planet that had two.  From Moscow’s perspective, this is all good!  Including the 12 new bases they are building to control the melted Arctic, causing deep concern among our Naval folk.  Oh, and new circulation patterns bring winter ice storms over the US Midwest, further encouraging our idiots to shout “What ‘warming’?” Putin can’t stop winning.

More than 3,000 years ago, a couple at the biblical site of Bethsaida, in Israel, was buried side by side in a spooning position, with the male's arm over the female's body, and the archaeologists who discovered the remains are now calling the couple "Romeo and Juliet." Especially since the male died in his late teens and the female in her early teen or preteen years.

Fascinating ruminations on what attributes a Black Hole might have if it were a useful source of power. Interesting indeed. Raising the question of whether a micro black hole can interact with its surroundings via anything other than simple mass, charge, spin and Hawking Radiation. Pairs of black holes orbiting each other will leak Gravity Radiation (GR). But what happens when that GR encounters another orbiting pair? Is it simply absorbed, increasing the 2nd pair's orbit? (And might that make a good GR detector?) 

Or are more complex effects possible? Like diffraction of the incident GR or possibly even reflection, back at the source? And if so... you might get the scenario I depicted in EARTH, where a pool of elevated gravity potential tat lies between the two orbiting pairs might experience STIMULATED EMISSION OF GRAVITY RADIATION between the two "mirrors." Creating in effect a GRASER or the GASER gravity laser I portrayed in that novel.

Wish I had time to dive deeper. Interesting stuff.

And we will face new crises... In Existence it's the law in 2050 that males must pee, if possible, into a garden or into a Phos Urinal to recover valuable phosphorus (possibly our next big crisis?) Or at least onto a tree.

== Out of Time adventures ==  

Suppose your descendants – people of the future – reach back in time to ask for your help. Would you go?  24^th Century humanity has created a Utopia. No more War. Disease. Prejudice. Crime. But no heroes! And suddenly they need heroes, fast. So they reach out across time… for you. 

Would you go?

And what if only teens can survive the trip?

In the first Out of Time novel, Nebula Award winning author Nancy Kress takes you on an adventure, with a 10^th Century Viking girl, a New Jersey high school basketball star and a young thief from Shakespeare’s London who are yanked into a future of both promise and peril and asked achieve what adults of that time cannot… rescue a lost star-colony. But even if they succeed, will they ever make it back home?