Hawking vs the Terminator! Plus BASIC at 50! Blood Moons! Americans are weird! Plus… more science!

Stephen Hawking, plus physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek and AI expert Stuart Russell, have penned an editorial -- Transcending Complacency on Super-Intelligent Machines -- urging caution in research aimed at creating artificial intelligences. As if Hollywood has not already wagged that finger at us, plenty of times, already!

To be clear, Hawking does not (as many in media have misquoted him) say that AI in itself would be humanity's "worst mistake." He very clearly states that the mistake would be paying too little attention to our responsibilities in the creation process. Taking insufficient care to get it right.

I know many members of the AI research community and this topic is widely discussed. But how do you take 'precautions' to keep new cybernetic minds friendly, when 
(1) we don't know which of six very different, general types of approaches to this problem might eventually bear fruit and 
(2) it is clear that the one method that cannot work is "laws of robotics" of Asimov fame.

I explore all six approaches in various works of fiction and nonfiction. One of the six approaches -- the one least-studied, of course -- offers what I deem our best hope for a "soft landing," in which human civilization and some recognizable version of our species would remain confidently in command of its own destiny.

At the opposite extreme is this possibility: AI might arrive that's deliberately designed to be predatory, parasitical, ruthless and destructive, in its very core and purpose. Alas, this is exactly the approach that is receiving more funding - and in secret - than all other forms of AI combined. And no, I am not talking about the military!

== How it all got started ==

Let's move back to a much earlier stretch of this road. A fun article in Time Magazine (online) celebrates the 50th anniversary of the clunky but epochal programming language BASIC. Computer pioneer Harry McCracken traces the history of BASIC, how it was designed to provide a portal for average students to access programming, and how it helped to launch both the PC revolution and the Microsoft empire.

McCracken cites my famous (or infamous) SALON article -- Why Johnny Can't Code -- about the demise of programming language accessibility in our modern computers -- how this had a tragic and harmful side-effect, eliminating from school textbooks the shared experience of introductory programming exercises that -- for one decade or so -- exposed millions of gen-Xers to small tastes of programming. Far more than almost any millennials receive.

And no, I was not praising BASIC as a language, but rather the notion that there should be SOME kind of “lingua franca” included in all computers and tablets etc. For a decade, Basic was so universally available that textbook publishers put simple programming exercises in most standard math and science texts. Teachers assigned them, and thus, a far higher fraction of students gained a little experience fiddling with 12 line programs that would make a pixel move… and thus knew, in their guts, that every dot on every screen obeys an algorithm. That it’s not magic, it only looks that way. Apple and Microsoft and RedHat could meet and settle this in a day --after which textbook publishers and teachers could go back to assigning marvelous little computer exercises, a great way to introduce millions of kids to… the basics.

For those who want the simplest way to re-access BASIC, one of the readers of my "Johnny Can't Code" article went ahead and provided a turnkey, web-accessed module that you can use instantly to run old (or new) programs.

Have a look at "QuiteBasic"… one of the coolest things any of my readers were ever inspired to produce.

Alas, word has not reached the textbook committees. In a modern era when computers run everything, far fewer kids are exposed to programming than in the 1980s and 1990s. Are you really okay with that?

== Speaking of tech anniversaries ==

John Naughton, published a fascinating article for the Observer, "25 things you might not know about the web on its 25th birthday." The big picture perspectives are important, but one especially stands out to me:

Number 18 -- The web needs a micro-payment system. "In addition to being just a read-only system, the other initial drawback of the web was that it did not have a mechanism for rewarding people who published on it. That was because no efficient online payment system existed for securely processing very small transactions at large volumes. (Credit-card systems are too expensive and clumsy for small transactions.) But the absence of a micro-payment system led to the evolution of the web in a dysfunctional way: companies offered "free" services that had a hidden and undeclared cost, namely the exploitation of the personal data of users. This led to the grossly tilted playing field that we have today, in which online companies get users to do most of the work while only the companies reap the financial rewards."

I've been working for some time on innovations that (in collaboration with others) could utterly transform the web (and incidentally save the profession of journalism) by making micro payments workable and effective. Got patents too!  That and $3.65 will get you a small cappuccino.

== Is the West - especially America - just weird? ==

A large fraction of social science research has focused on the most-accessible supply of survey and test subjects -- westerners and especially Americans -- under the assumption that "we're all the same under the skin."Hence tests that dive below obvious cultural biases ought to show what's basically human. But lo and behold, it seems that westerners and especially Americans are "weird" compared to almost all other cultures, in ways exposed by simple Prisoners' Dilemma type games and many others that study - say - individuality.

In fact, anyone who compares western - and especially American - values, processes, history and so on, compared to almost any other culture that ever existed, would have been able to tell you that. (Californians are even weirder! Ask Robert Heinlein.) The question is: "weird" as in dangerously unhinged? Or in the sense of "our one chance to escape the traps that mired every other civilization into a pit of dashed hopes and potential?" The jury is still out.

== Art and theology? ==

Speaking of cryptic time messages… Charles Smith (and some others) pointed out a fascinating aspect of The centerpiece image in Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings… "Apparently, Michelangelo placed god and various angels within what is clearly the outline of a human brain. Am I imagining this? Maybe, but I doubt it. Having dissected many cadavers, he knew his anatomy. He was trying to tell us something about the human mind and its relationship to the idea of god… the idea that man created god in his own image."

It's even better. The deity's legs are sticking out through the cerebellum and his hand of creation emerges from the prefrontal lobes.

Aw heck, let's stay with "theology" for a while, this time in quotation marks because it is the raging foolish kind. Mega best-sellers are out there proclaiming portent in the "blood moon."

Astronomers apply no significance to the way lunar eclipses - or 'blood moons" - sometimes come in groups of four or "tetrads. But that has not prevented a spate of blood moon mysticism. The four eclipses in this tetrad occur on April 15 (last month) and Oct. 8, 2014, and April 4 and Sept. 28 next year… all of them occurring during Jewish holidays! Which has provoked a bunch of Christian (not Jewish) mystical last-days mongering. Both of the ones in April occur during Passover, and the ones in October occur during the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles.

I'll leave it to you to find these sites (Google "blood moon prophecy") but at one level it is just more of the dopey millennialism I talk about here… wherein meme-pushers sell the sanctimony drug-high of in-group "knowledge" to a portion of the public who do not like the very idea of the Future and yearn for it to just go away.

In this case, the "coincidental" overlap of lunar eclipses with Jewish holidays is not "one-in-tens-of-thousands(!)" but almost one-to-one. Because the Jewish High Holy Days are defined as starting on the full moon - the exact time when lunar eclipses occur. Also, lunar eclipses always happen near the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when the moon's orbit is most closely aligned with the Earth-Sun plane. Hence, of course clusters of full lunar eclipses will line up with those two holidays. It is not "coincidence" or a "sign" but rather a matter of deliberate design… exploited by these "blood moon" predators, preying on the gullible.

The good news? This will pass. Alas, it will be replaced by the next nonsense, then the next. Till we persuade our neighbors to stop hating tomorrow.

== Science Miscellany ==

University of Washington (UW) graduate Thomas Larson is developing a lens that will turn any smartphone or tablet computer into a handheld microscope that magnifies by 150 times.

Ten ways 3D printing could change space exploration.

Wow. A supernova that just happened to be magnified by a gravitational lens of an intervening galaxy.

Fascinating. We assumed all brain neurons needed uniform sheaths of myelin to perform well. Apparently not!

Ancient shrimp had a cardiovascular system 520 millions years ago, earlier than any other known creature. The fossil dates back to a period when the "Cambrian Explosion" was taking off. Possibly the one time aliens DID meddle with our planet… by flushing a toilet here?

Interesting question: Could playfulness be embedded in the universe?

Fascinating news about the importance of the Y Chromosome. Huh.  Maybe males aren't about to go away, after all.  Sorry about that.

Will Johnny Code Again?

Partly in response to my famous challenge on Salon “Why Johnny Can’t Code” -- denouncing the disappearance of basic, introductory coding languages from our personal computing devices -- several groups have done wonderful things to help bring back at least a simple, reliable way for kids to learn programming.

For example, Quitebasic.com is a cool, easy, accessible Basic site, offering a simple and obvious entry and display system, usable via any mere browser, ease-of-use and applicability to simple textbook exercises. Quitebasic is instantly ready to use. with a very plainly separated coding area, palette and results screens.

Just last week I spoke at Microsoft Research and brought this topic up again (along with many others; it was a wonderful audience of 200 or so brilliant people). So they are aware of the "basic" problem.

Given today's lavish available memories and cyber-power, they could tuck into the corner of Windows a turn-key system so simple and universal it might tempt textbook publishers to bring back "Try it in BASIC” exercises that used to ease millions of kids into ten-line programs that showed them that exciting, world-changing epiphany….

...The moment when they realized: "Wow! Every pixel is created by an algorithm!"


And now some coincidental news: Just today I was shown a new BASIC system for the iPhone and iPad that attempts to chip away at the problem. Have a look at techBASIC.

This is the sort of thing - rather than 140 character lobotomizations - that we need to be encouraging for kids.  Before we become a society of dunces.

=== More about Your Existence ===

Here's an excerpt from Existence that's been eliciting some yucks... and yucks (!) from readers:

"E-calculi— gut bacteria transformed to function as tiny computers, powered by excess food. Have a problem? Unleash trillions of tiny, parallel processors occupying your own intestine! Speed them up by eating more! And they produce Vitamin C! 

"At first, Tor thought this must be a hoax. It sounded like a comedy routine from Monty Phytoplankton. She wondered how the computed output finally emerged."

If that weren't enough to entice you to race out, buy the hardcover and tell your friends, then how about this from the LA Times review: "Whodunits are a sure thing in publishing — just about everyone loves a good mystery — but Brin's multifaceted novel proves that another question resonates just as powerfully with most people: Are we alone in the universe?" 

And this by Simon Bisson on ZDNet: "Science fiction is as much a literature of the moment as it is of the future….

...This book, then, is both a warning and an encouragement: a novel that engages with the world we're building and tries to show us a way to become a mature civilization rather than a raggle-taggle band of individuals. Technology has libertarian roots, but in the end we build the tools that construct a civil society. 

"In Existence Brin shows us the world our technology is building, and then poses one of the biggest questions: what is it all for?

"What we're left with in Existence is one of those rare SF novels that needs to be on every technologist's desk, alongside John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, Charles Stross's Rule 34, and Brin's own Earth. We may not be able to see our future, but in Existence we get a picture of a possible — even a plausible — tomorrow."

=== Experts line up against High Frequency Stock Trading ===

This from one of the smartest and most on-target tech economy sages around - Mark Anderson, of the Strategic News Service: 

“At a time when bankers are already at the bottom of the reputational heap, it now seems that their ration of scorn has jumped again. Not only are the worst of them greedy, it turns out, and dangerous, and unrepentant, and unwilling to pay for their mistakes, and undesiring of the most obviously needed reforms - but they are also building systems so complex that even they cannot manage them.


"We already knew that retail investors were no longer safe on the trading playground, but now we've learned that neither are the big bullies who made the new rules. Having already heard that about half of the volume of the NY Stock Exchange was in what is now called High Frequency Trading (HFT), this week I've learned that that figure is probably conservative, and that as much as 80% of the trades may be program-driven.

"What kind of zoo is this? A practice ground for Chaos Theory? Is this the centerpiece of capitalism? When the NYSE not only encourages HFT, but profits by selling colocation of servers at exorbitant rates to allow HFT practitioners that extra picosecond of advantage - you know that the wheels are about to come off."

Of course, I have my own "crackpot" or rather far-seeing reason for wanting this HFT lunacy to stop.  It is the surest road to "Skynet"... to the emergence - in secret and without the slightest oversight or public scrutiny, of AI that is programmed from the start to be predatory, parasitical, voracious, insatiable, amoral and relentlessly sociopathic.

=== And Finally... 

I have a few shout-outs to members of the brilliant Contrary Brin community, some of whom I met in person during my recent book tour, and some of whom I'd like to ask a favor!  I'll say more in the first "comment" below.

Making a better world, is not just about politics:

It has been some time since I took a departure from political and social commentary, diving back into the topics that should interest us... cool advances in science, engineering art and the general notion of problem solving.

Which reminds me to remind you to include the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century in your holiday shopping. A very attractive volume that is beautiful in its own right. But also the most dynamically modernist volume in the can-do spirit of the old Whole Earth Catalog.

And see a more specialized (but excellent) tome: Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials, by Michael Michaud.

Of course, if you'd like to shake up that Star Wars fan of yours, there is always Star Wars on Trial...

Speaking of forward-looking notions, the New Scientist Magazine ran a sort of Futurological Congress, soliciting brief 50 year forecasts from many (though obviously not all!) of the visionary seers out there.

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An education related breakthrough: An on-line course in the literature of science fiction, organized with a historical perspective as a parallel experience to the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction, now is posted on the K.U. Continuing Education website. The course is a project of AboutSF and was created by Thomas Seay, the AboutSF coordinator. Note that one can view the syllabus and the lessons, etc., by clicking on the appropriate links on the left side. Jim James Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction ku.edu/~sfcenter "Let's save the world through science fiction" (alt address: http://tinyurl.com/yl2kkg)

More about using SF to teach. (Note, I helped to establish AboutSF and was one of its founding donors.) If any of you out there would like to help in an international effort to help kids (and science fiction) by using SF as a stimulating tool for waking up young minds, see the Reading for the Future Project.

Other do-gooder endeavors:

Have a look at the Natural Capital Institute, that began in 2002 as an offshoot of Paul Hawken’s work and writings, in particular his books Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism. Shades of EARTH...

See also my article: Proxy Activism for ways you can easily make a difference...

------ SOME SNIPPETS ----

Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are losing population. This "demonstrably downward" trend could damage dozens of commercially important crops, since three-quarters of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization.

Researchers say that the combined use of alternative energies for which we already have reliable technology "could replace all fossil fuel power plants." And that the use of hydrogen for vehicle fuel is a bad idea in most cases - as using electricity directly in vehicles (stored in batteries) rather than to generate hydrogen is three times cheaper.

Silicon Valley firms are driving a sizzling $11 billion worldwide market in solar energy, part of a rapidly expanding alternative-energy economy.

New LED lamps capable of 70 lumens per watt may cut our light-based electrical bill ultimately by more than 90 percent. And Toyota has said that replacing a car's lights with LEDs would be equivalent to getting an extra 20 percent mileage through reducing vehicle weight.

A team found a ‘brain gene’ that appears to have entered the human lineage about 1.1 million years ago, and that has a modern form, or allele, that appeared about 37,000 years ago -- right before Neanderthals became extinct. Leading to the notion that modern Homo sapiens and so-called Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe. Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift -- a gene that helped them develop superior brains. An interesting turnaround!

And my "subvocal" from EARTH is on its way: A new device being created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University uses electrodes attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as a person silently mouths words and phrases. Using this data, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words. The system is then able to translate.

--- AND FINALLY, SOME RESULTS OF MY “BASIC RANT” ---

Swedish programmer Nikko Strom read my Salon Magazine cover story “Why Johnny Can’t Code” and was among the few who seem to have actually “got it”... that even obsolete BASIC is better than nothing... which is what millions of kids now have as a programming language on their so-called “computers” which can no longer compute!. (How did we ever let that come to pass? And why has no one commented on it till now?)

Many students (like my own kids) still have textbooks with “Try It In Basic” exercises... that zero percent of them are even able to try! Make that one or two percent... who have savvy professionals or super-nerds to help them download and decipher obscure interpreters. A travesty, when it would be so easy to just create a simple web site that...

Well, to see how easy, see Strom’s QUITE BASIC web site, which he created quickly, in direct response to my article. Wonderfully intuitive and easy to use, it is designed to ease any student through copying down a few lines of a BASIC program and not only trying it out (with a handy graphics “canvas”) but also STEP through the program, watching variables change, one line at a time! (Something I suggested in the Salon article.) Allowing the brighter students to mentally follow along, envisioning each and every incremental stage and KNOWING that it’s all about algorithms and human-made commands, not magic.

Now if only a million high school math and physics teachers could be told; with this web site, all those BASIC demos and exercises in the older texts are no longer useless! (I’m as proud of this as I am of my recent patent... and it may do more good, it seems.)

Interested in seeing another fine effort - somewhat differently done - toward a similar goal? BASIC-256 is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises.

I frankly cannot tell which approach is better for the purpose at hand. Which is to re-establish BASIC as a “lingua franca” that’s available to everybody, every person who has a modern computer with web access.

Again, the aim is not to PRECLUDE other, perhaps much better alternatives, like Python or JavaScript. I am not some retro-kook, ranting that old Basic is better than later programming languages! Indeed, I know that it is inefficient at performing high-volume or sophisticated tasks!

Again, the purpose is to restore a very simple universality that textbook publishers can rely upon - as they did for a decade - well enough to assign little illustrations in class, and know that all students can then type in a few lines (perhaps the only lines of code that some of them will ever type!) ... and thereby get a little taste of moving a pixel by the power of math ... and by math alone.

Any person who has done that, even once, is less afraid of the wizard, standing behind the curtain. He or she has seen the algorithm and made the computer obey. At least once.


There's a lot more stocked up... stay tuned...

The Age of Miracles & Wonder...

First, another appeal for help.

Some of you may recall that a couple of years ago I called out for aid in finding a SIMPLE BASIC PROGRAM, to run on my son’s PC. Something that would run all those wonderful little programs that he finds in so many older text books. Slowly, unnoticed by almost any techwriters or pundits, BASIC has vanished from all of our computers, which no longer contain a useful programming language accessible by neophytes who want to learn how to code, line by line, like in the old days.

I finally came across “Chipmunk Basic” for the Macintosh, which sufficed for a little while. At least we could plug in a few lines of code and PRINT results.

Only now it’s insufficient. We’d like to make pixels move around on a simulated CRT screen. And we DON’T want to do it using high-level complex stuff like VISUAL BASIC. Old fashioned line coding, iterating to move pixels according to simple algorithms. Is that too much to ask? (Apparently so. In fact, the number of peopls who (last time) simply could not even grasp what I was looking for, and kept recommending complex, high-level stuff, shows what a mental block this is.)

If any of you know of a good line-by-line BASIC that is abso-freaking -lutely easy to understand and use, with a good tutorial included, capable of easy execution making dots move on a “screen,” for either PC or Mac, I’d be very interested.

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Also. Didn’t one of you say you worked for Apple? After a few weeks using OS 10.4, I have to say DANG!

1- it’s great, generally better than OS9.2 (though not in all ways.) And vastly better than Windows.

2- I have a FIST full of suggestions to improve it!

3- I really need an OSX expert who can answer some dumb questions that are frustrating the heck outta me.

Enough on all that. I have a HUGE NEW ESSAY on economic and political philosophy that I’ll be posting soon. Got you salivating? Yum.

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I've, been pondering the state of modernism in The Times We’re In... Especially as the crisis is expressed in art.

For example, I just today played Paul Simon’s epochal album GRACELAND (one of those monster hit albums you just don’t get anymore, when you said “THAT sure was a contribution to Western civ!)

One of the songs - the Boy in the Bubble, contained the following lines --

These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle some--where
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah

The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry
Don't cry

I have long pondered the strange mix of cautionary warning and profound confidence in human adaptability that seems to froth out of these lyrics. I won’t do Simon the disservice of analyzing them to death. I just wonder what it would take to make people feel that way again.

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“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator and writer (106-43 BCE)

Ah... Now that’s more like it. A slumping back into nostalgic grouchiness! By all means, let’s do more of that. More of the things that failed for thousands of years.

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Postscript

World immigrant population, 2005: 191 million
U.S. immigrant population, 2005: 35 million

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