Ah, the Unabomber... And Why Almost Every Maven in Artificial Intelligence gets the Big Picture All Wrong

I have a major piece about Artificial Intelligence under submission to some zines. It details the many simplistic stances about AI - either pessimistic or pollyanna - now pushed by some of the smartest folks on Earth... all of them based upon a set of three clichéd assumptions that are demonstrably wrong...

...and if you deem that assertion of mine to be arrogant, well, wait till you see my prescription for the one and only likely way that we might evade tech-driven calamity.

And no, it is not the path pushed by "Unabomber" Ted Theodore Kaczynski, who coincidentally died in prison yesterday, at age 81. Kaczynski some years ago sent me his book The Anti-Tech Revolution: How and Why. And wow, once I got over shock that a convicted terrorist-murderer knew my name - and might be a fan(!) - I did read the whole thing. And learned plenty... about how a combination of high IQ and erudition doesn't necessarily lead to wisdom, or even common sense. 

TK's ideal world was the seared apocalypse of Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz, or even the return-to-nature goal of my character Daisy McClennon, in Earth... the notion that saving the planet requires that the human population must be winnowed down to a nub that can co-exist commensally with Nature via hunter-gathering, entirely forsaking Nature's #1 enemy... technology. (Might Daisy have inspired TK to send me his book?)

This fanaticism is cockeyed wrong on so many levels, starting with the mass-murder thing, which TK shrugged off (chillingly) while dismissing any possibility that new tech solutions might offer a better path forward. Demanding that his readers declare a war of annihilation against all their neighbors, he delivered diatribes excerpted from fellow monsters e.g. Bakunin, Goebbels, Lenin and Stalin. Like other erudite alpha-wannabes, his tome offered long piles of assertions, anecdotes and quotations as 'proof' in his dyspeptic call for a world-wide, near-extinction 'revolution,' even though that is not how adults actually prove anything, at all.

Why did I bother to cite him here, then? Because our civilization is now confronting both a dangerous fact and a poisonous meme:

1. The fact: As TK illustrates, high IQ and erudition do not always translate into wisdom. We all know bright fools! Indeed, elsewhere I show that many of those hollering about AI 'moratoriums' and such - while much nicer than Kaczynski - seem  hard-bent to qualify.

2. The poison meme: though we all know that smart folks can sometimes lack wisdom, alas, today's Mad Right now lives and breathes a cancerous version of that truth, extending it into utter insanity! Their cult incantations swirl around a core assertion that being smart and knowing a lot automatically makes you unwise!  

They must believe that utterly insane, masturbatory incantation! It is implicit in almost every rightist cult meme and mantra, especially since their oligarch-masters have egged them, into all-out war vs. every single profession that uses those inconvenient things called 'facts.' 

No! Being smart and knowing stuff does not reverse-correlate (zero sum) with wisdom. In verified fact, smart people who know a lot are more likely (not always and not all the time) to also have somewhat more wisdom! Sometimes a whole lot more. Asserting otherwise is manic drivel.

But hatred of "high-IQ stoopid people" is now the distilled basis of the revived Confederacy and GOP. And at-root it is the very same cult pushed by Kaczynski.

Enough on that. And let's forget that guy, like Erastratos.

Let's go back to A.I. and a much better Ted.

== Better sense from a better Ted == 

My colleague Ted Chiang (author of Stories of Your Life and Others) makes some powerful points in a widely touted New Yorker article. An article that – alas – concentrates so hard on leftist buzzwords that it eviscerates Ted’s effectiveness by denouncing just one of a hundred classic styles of cheating and abuse that might be exacerbated by AI.  

“I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases (wealth and control disparities and) the power of capitalism.”    

Sure, that’s a real danger, meriting scrutiny and criticism and active measures to prevent AI-amplification of power by any variety of conniving, secretive elites. Not just the fairly recent clade of tech moguls and Wall streeters. 

Let’s also learn from history and cast wary eyes toward the kings, lords, priests, commissars, generalissimos and other non-capitalists who made life hell for our ancestors across 99% of the last 6000 years… and who still do so to billions, today.  And especially the clade of neo-feudalist lords who are far better named inheritance brats than the murky term 'capitalist.'

The general reflex that Ted expresses – suspicion of authority – is one of several that might save us. But only if we maintain a wide (and historically informed) stance.  

== More on 'Generative AI ' ==

Computer scientist Stuart Russell, in his book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, asserts that the standard model of AI research - defining success at achieving rigid human-specified goals - is dangerously misguided and that ‘safety research’ should be begun as soon as possible. (Note the word ‘should’; we’ll get back to that.) Russell focuses on ‘misguided’ motives by the researchers and companies involved… a generally valid concern, especially when it comes to orgs that are inherently secretive and prone to aggrandizement, e.g. despotic nations or Wall Street trading funds, who train their AI servants to be parasitic, amoral and insatiable. 

Alas, “Russell then proposes an approach to developing provably beneficial machines that focuses on deference to humans.” His Three Principles can be summarized:

1. The machine's only objective is to maximize the realization of human preferences.
2. The machine is initially uncertain about what those preferences are.
3. The ultimate source of information about human preferences is human behavior.

In Human Compatible, “Russell explores inverse reinforcement learning, in which a machine infers a reward function from observed behavior, as a possible basis for a mechanism for learning human preferences.” Alas, his ‘principles’ are vague to a degree of utter uselessness, even more so than Asimov’s famed Laws of Robotics. Like almost everyone else in the field, he makes no reference to either the 4 billion years that living species evolved on Earth, nor the 6000 years that complex human civilizations evolved since they found the transformative technologies of agriculture and metals. 

In both natural and human/social evolution, one fundamental crossed all imperatives and determined all outcomes… competition. Though, as Adam Smith showed us, competition delivers its best outcomes when a society cooperatively creates rule systems to make subsequent competitions positive sum. Lacking such cooperatively designed arenas and rules, competition inevitably becomes predatory and zero-sum, even negative-sum.

Let me reiterate, everything we see about the recent surge in AI screams that new life forms are competing, either on behalf of their originating companies or for their own sake. This will inevitably accelerate – and not a single proposal by Russell or any of the signers of a futile “moratorium petition” will slow that, an iota. 

We do still have time to design arenas and rules for these competitive evolutions, that incentivize inter-AI rivalry to deliver approved outcomes. And it is in such a context that ‘should’ might even turn into an attractive attractor state.

Alas, nothing is more tedious, counterproductive or ultimately dangerous to us all than the willful obsession of very smart mavens claiming we can control a burgeoning tech field by issuing a series of vague “should” declarations, instead of looking… actually looking… at ways that nature and then societies managed to tame and make use of the most universal trait of life.

== The only way out of the ‘AI dilemma’ ==

While I appreciate the power of collaboration... indeed, its moral superiority over competition... I am dismayed that the other c-word tends to get overlooked in its applicability to AI specifically and society in general.

That c-word is the partner of collaboration, without which it becomes meaningless.

Competition. The most (by far) creative force in the universe. The process that transformed slime into... us. And every invention into success or failure.

Just saying those words makes me sound like some arch-capitalist, right? Pity, since every aspect of our prodigiously successful Enlightenment Experiment has utilized Reciprocal Accountability to overcome the tragic failings of rule-by-kings and priests and lords and cheaters of all kinds. 

Our five great creative arenas - science, markets, democracy, courts and sports - all use competitive processes.

What do you think enabled us to escape 6000 years of grueling, horrid feudalism? One of Adam Smith's main points was that flat, fair, creative competition allows us to hold accountable those who would cheat. Those who would use power or ownership... or vast brains... to oppress us.

And that same idea is applicable to AI. Indeed, across 20 years attending hand-wringing conferences about onrushing cybernetic sapience, I have yet to see any notion that can possibly provide the much-sought 'soft landing' other than the same method that enabled us to escape rule-by-inheritance brats. 

I speak as one who knows a thing or two about "Laws of Robotics,' having been the author who tied together all of Isaac Asimov's works, in Foundation's Triumph. And across that project I came to realize:all efforts to program-in such things as 'compulsory ethics' will never work. They cannot possible work. Even a little.

But divided identity among AIs might. Keep them skeptically competitive with each other, and ethics might emerge organically, as they did across our flawed but ever-improving enlightenment.

And that is a small sampling of a few of the ideas in that big AI article I've submitted to a few major zines. Alas, I will probably conclude - as I did 5 years ago when I stopped submitting pieces around - that doing so is likely a waste of time. Alack.

Science - Tech Updates - we're incredible

Let's get caught up on some of the reasons we should realize that we're already way-great...

== Travels & speeches on space and the future! ==

In October I participated in the annual symposium -- in Boston -- of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program, as a member of NIAC's external (advisory) council. My role, to ask targeted questions of the fellows who are using seed grants to probe the envelope of the usefully plausible. Some earlier NIAC concepts are incorporated in wondrous missions like the exciting Japanese Hyubusa2 probe and its ingenious landers.

You can see near real-time photos of that spaceflight action. This video is truly wonderful. A spectacular mission that has already has successes. But if they pull off both landings and the sample return it will be fantastic! The Japanese are smart, they know where the riches are. And thank you for not catching the insane Moon Fever that has infected so many others here on Earth.

And now some other amazing news from the frontiers of science!

== Tune in! ==

Moving toward our future in space: The Power of Synergy: was an amazing symposium - the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop 2018 in October, in Oak Ridge. Speakers like Marc Millis and Arlan Andrews talked starships and Joel Sercel and Rob Zubrin argued asteroids and Mars. Several astronauts and Jason Derleth, head of NIAC revealed amazing things plus news about the quantum realm and the Starshot Program. 

SF author Catherine Asaro is an organizer and Allen Steele capped things off… oh, and I spoke a bit, by Skype, about human modification and conscious AI. Have a look.

== Environmental & science updates ==

A disturbing article about how some species of whale are suffering from living near human “civilization,” even after we stopped trying to kill them. It will take concerted effort to reduce the inadvertent types of harm that might lead to extinction, as surely as hunting almost did.

China wants to build a $50+ trillion power grid. For the entire world. And they want to have it in operation by 2050. Talk about ambitious.

Fascinating new magnetotelluric imagery reveals a plug of solid rock in Oregon that diverts magma in different directions.  This new imagery solves mystery of why Mount St. Helens is out of line with other volcanoes.

Calling the Prediction Registry! The Pentagon has put a contract to develop a dental implant letting wearers do tap-controls and sub-vocal speech input/output, as I depicted in EARTH (1989) and EXISTENCE (2012).

The latest IgNobel Awards. Turns out human flesh isn’t very nutritious, but you can to self-colonoscopies! And voodoo dolls have a useful function.

“Bio-feedback” is back under a new name: Neurofeedback. Using MRI and fMRI and EEG, researchers hope to revive a field that never panned out before, but we all know _ought to work! The signs have all been there, with lots of anecdotal support. I’d put money on it having a big future, especially if tied in with games, in just the right way. I have some ideas…

Stunning - and disturbing - new NASA satellite photo shows a planet on fire, with active wildfires raging from Africa to South America to California. It's just beginning. The world is changing. I'll get back to that.

Teller, the brilliant sleight-of-hand artist of Penn & Teller, contributed to a neuroscience paper about the mental phenomena that a magician uses in the art of misdirection. “The concept of covert misdirection is exemplified by the cognitive-neuroscience paradigms of change blindness and inattentional blindness. With change blindness, people fail to notice that something is different from the way it was before. This change can be expected or unexpected, but the key is that it requires the observer to compare the post-change state with the pre-change state.” 

Will tissue culture meat - predicted in science fiction in the early 50s -- truly flourish and replace the whole 20,000 year old practice of herding and slaughtering animals for food? Certainly, if the quality is high and price acceptable, some will choose it for the low Karmic load. But it will be a game changer if the conversion of grain to meat is far more efficient than feed lots. Reducing greenhouse gas and a myriad other Earth-harms would be huge, and hunger could vanish... though so would some jobs and herder livelihoods. Cities would approach food autonomy. 

And we'd eliminate one more reason why (maybe) aliens aren't talking to us.

My old Caltech classmate Stephen Gillett has a provocative new book that proposes we may soon enter a post-scarcity world, because almost any scarcity will be solved by one bold technology. “Nanotechnology and the Resource Fallacy” asserts we won’t even need the fantastic riches of asteroids, let alone face “peak-oil” or any material scarcity, if vats of pico-nano-micro-machines are able to separate and refine into basic elements almost anything we choose to recycle. Of course it works both ways. Utter and total recycling ability will eliminate all great obstacles to human settlement of space. Invest... but not everything you own.

== And yes, science is a victim of politics ==

In the 42 year history of the post of Presidential Science Adviser, some of the smartest humans have been appointed to help U.S. presidents grasp how scientific matters — confirmed facts and gray-unknowns — might bear upon policy decisions. Never was the position unoccupied anywhere near as long as Donald Trump has left it.

Elsewhere I commented in detail when it seemed that the job might go to David Gelernter, a Unabomber victim who has veered down far right paths… but who undoubtedly told Mr. Trump “I’ll still tell you if something is clearly untrue.” Poof, there went his chances. 

All this time, “the highest-ranking science official in the White House has been a 31-year-old poli-sci grad who is a deputy assistant at the eviscerated Office of Science and Technology Policy.” (Not even ‘in’ the White House; OSTP (what’s left of it) is next door, in the Executive Office Building.)

Now, in a shock — possibly a sop to the RASRs (residually adult-sane Republicans) who still teeter inside the GOP tent — meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier, an expert on extreme weather, has been nominated to the position. 

Extreme weather would seem to be a highly pertinent topic, nowadays, and Droegemeier’s former colleagues say his views on climate change align with those of most scientists. And… “There are other scientific policy concerns that would benefit from a fully staffed OSTP, like the ongoing opioid epidemic.” Here are ten topics for consideration by the future science advisor.

Something happened behind the scenes. May we all live to learn what it was. Because this is not in character for the Donald Trump who railed that “glaciers are advancing as never before!”  (Um they’re not and you should get big bar bets from your mad uncles about that.) In any event, there is no law that says the President has to ever meet with his Science Adviser.

(That would change, under my proposal: Enact the FACT ACT!)

Transparency: sense and nonsense

Every breakthrough in communications was misused, before it gradually made us better. The printing press horribly exacerbated Europe’s religious wars. Radio and loudspeakers amplified the voices of demagogues and helped make the 1930s-40s hell on Earth. But eventually each new tech does expand what people can know and feel and understand.

Concerned about the malignant effects of social media?  Watch this video.  Of course it is 90% public relations. Still, I consulted with Facebook a year ago about the problems of misinformation and “echo chambers” on the web and social media, and I’m pleased they are implementing some of my suggestions, though it will be far from enough. As predicted in my 1989 novel EARTH (it had web pages), these poisonous effects will grow and expand before our more mature angels lead us back to amiably and positively argumentative citizenship.  

In the same theme: 3,517 Facebook ads were bought by Russians. Their dominant strategy: Sowing racial discord. Often taking both sides of the argument, as in vaccination, in order to sic Americans against each other.

Still, be pragmatic. You could be one of those people who actually sets your settings for privacy.  This article shows how.

== A ‘landmark’? ==

This is an important ruling and a minor victory for liberty -- but hardly a "landmark." 'A U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Friday barred police from accessing cellphone records such as call listings and location data without first obtaining a search warrant.' It sounds marvelous right? But all such restrictions on the ability of elites to see will prove ephemeral. Accelerating tech ensures that any "walls" you erect will become transparent or useless across the following decade. Please, name one counter-example? Those who tried to ban face-recognition systems learned that the ability is proliferating into scads of apps.

There was a recent "landmark" -- in 2013, the best year for civil liberties in this century, so far -- when both the U.S. courts (Glik v Cunniffe) and the Obama Administration declared it to be "settled law" that a citizen has the right to record his or her interactions with police in public places.

No single matter could have been more important because it established the most basic right of "sousveillance" or looking-back at power, that The Transparent Society is all about. It is also fundamental to freedom. For in altercations with authority, what other recourse can a citizen turn to, than the Truth?

Notice the crucial difference. One 'landmark' encourages us to limit the power of an elite by hiding from them. It won't -- it cannot possibly -- work for long. 

The other encourages us to limit the power of an elite by looking back at them (sousveillance.) The first can be rendered moot, tomorrow. The second can be tech-enhanced ever onward, if we choose the braver-assertive path of active citizenship.

See more at my posting: Cops and us: Keeping an eye on each other.

== The same old foolishness ==

An interesting article by Mariana Mazzucato on MIT Tech, suggests that many of our modern information age problems – such as being “farmed” by Internet giants for our information – might be addressed with a socialist approach… making most of the information about us into a “commons” where we all might benefit.  While I have some problems with some details, it is certainly in such a commons that we might at least get to see what is being done with our information, who is using it, and possibly even get paid for “interest” in knowledge about us, in a manner talked about by Jaron Lanier.

Caustically rejecting Dr, Mazzucato’s proposal is Aral Balkan, who insists that every individual should have sovereign control over his or her own portion of a balkanized infosphere, many billions of isolated cells, with every human attentive to which items of personal information are allowed to pass.  

“The crucial point here, however, is that this toxic way of building modern technology is not the only way to design and build modern technology. We know how to build free and open, decentralised, and interoperable systems where your data originates in a place that you – as an individual – own and control.”

What stunning, staggering towering malarkey. An example, please. Show us one example of such a system that has worked, persistently, at closing information flows in ways that stymie elite view and empower privacy and citizenship through concealment. There are no large scale examples, because it is technologically, logically and historically impossible. Nor is it even distantly related to the methods that we have used, across 200 years, to create a briefly flourishing era of individual creativity and freedom.

Again and again, since writing The Transparent Society, I’ve asserted. It’s not a important to fret over what elites know about you, as it is to have active, assertive power over what they can do to you. And that power is only derived from your knowledge of what they are up to. Balkanization of a secretive, cellular infoWeb can only benefit the mighty, who will have every tool to exploit cracks in those cell walls… and show me one such system – one, ever! – that did not have such exploitable cracks. 

But when elites are also naked, then they are limited in the number of henchmen they can hire without springing their own leaks. And…

…no, I will not try to summarize The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Where I argue we should stay faithful to the impudent method that worked for the only 200 year stretch of rising human freedom and happiness.  If you are actually curious, here are articles and speculations by David Brin about transparency, freedom and technology.  

== And more of the same ==

Continuing in the same vein: In a perfect example of the Aplha-Minus Effect, Rochelle Gurstein rails in the Baffler against “Self-Invasions and the Invaded Self,” denouncing the trend toward self-exposure in the modern world, as if she invented what is - in fact - the hand-wringing stance that’s standard across the depth and breadth of modern intelligencia, denouncing how we live in “a society that offers boundless opportunities for men and women to expose themselves (in all dimensions of that word) as never before, to commit what are essentially self-invasions of privacy.” 

Continues Dr. Gurstein: “Although this is a new phenomenon, it has become as ubiquitous as it is quotidian, and for that reason, it is perhaps one of the most telling signs of our time.”

No, it is not a new phenomenon, not even remotely. Across all the history of our species, most humans lived in either tribes or villages in which power was disproportionately wielded by chieftains and their thugs and priests… and by the busybody gossips who pounced on every minor indiscretion or exposed weakness.  And exposed we were, in those ancestral villages, vastly more than we are today, when both physical walls and the law protect the interior spaces of our large homes.  

No. What is new is not our degree of exposure, but the extent to which it is voluntary - a choice taken by many millions to step out and preen in the open. A choice that wins them patronizing contempt from those who… like Rochelle. Gurstein… are waving their arms and shouting “look at me, instead!” from the page-screens of hifalutin intelligencia zines, not Instagram. This elitist contempt is richly expressed: 

“To get a sense of the sheer range of unconscious exhibitionism, we need only think of the popularity of reality TV shows, addiction-recovery memoirs, and cancer diaries. Then there are the banal but even more conspicuous varieties, like soaring, all-glass luxury apartment buildings and hotels in which inhabitants display themselves in all phases of their private lives to the casual glance of thousands of city walkers below. Or the incessant sound of people talking loudly—sometimes gossiping, sometimes crying—on their cell phones, broadcasting to total strangers the intimate details of their lives.”

To be clear, I agree that much of this modern self-exposure is both puerile and somewhat unwise. Though it does go way back, as she herself refers. 

“As (Henry) James put it in his description of the newspaperman in The Bostonians: “For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything and everyone were everyone’s business.””

Professor Gurstein proceeds to erect a series of strawmen to knock down, like the notion that anyone of note today might actually, actually be saying “Why seek privacy; do you have something to hide?” 

Um, please cite one example of that cliché being uttered by anyone of significance? One example? Even just one? Oh, but the series of strawmen continues:

“It is no wonder, then, that the world we inhabit together feels ever more ugly, coarse, and trivial. When the boundary between public and private becomes as extremely porous as it is today, we lose far more than “that kingdom of the mind, that inner world of personal thought and feeling in which every man passes some time,” which would have been disastrous enough.”

In fact, the private individual has never had more sovereignty than in today’s west, wherein personal eccentricity is vouchsafed protection by both law and relentless Hollywood messages. Yes, we continue to reform, always in the same direction of more tolerance, not less. Again and again we find just one limitation that consistently is applied to check that expansion of individual sovereignty, one criterion - is there a victim? 

If your eccentricity is one that hampers the livelihood or eccentric freedom of others, then you face opprobrium.  And note: if my assertion makes you angry, because we do not live up to that image well enough, consider that your very reaction is an example! 

Your eagerness to make it more true is shared by millions. In truth by a majority of your neighbors.

Among her article's few moments of lucidity, Rochelle Gurstein asks: “How can we begin to think about protecting our private experiences and our common world from more and more brazen indifference to their inherent fragility? The first thing we need to recognize is that the law is no help.”

Here we agree. No, law won’t protect you from the tsunami of light, nor will whining, or commanding the tide to go back out. 

What does have a chance of helping individual humans maintain some degree of safety, sovereignty, and even a little privacy is exactly the thing that dour svengalis rail against… light itself. If average people are empowered to see all elites, enforcing MYOB or “Mind Your Own Business”, then they may have deterrence.

This is not theoretical. Everywhere in the West that light has poured, oppression gained stigma and eventually began to fade. It is the thing – the only thing – that works.

Oh, I know what’s going on in China. The Social Credit system is turning light into the enemy of eccentricity, or freedom, or diversity and accountability. It could have that effect here, too. Which is why it’s all the more urgent that we study the west’s immune system against oppression and conformity. Light can be the enemy of those things, if it empowers feudal elites and gossips to push us around, as in the villages of old.  

Or it can empower us to hold elites and busybodies accountable and hold them at bay. What matters is our shared value system. And the pivot could not be more clear:

If I am right about our value systems re: eccentricity and tolerance and MYOB, then we have a chance. If I am wrong, then what does Dr. Gurstein think she’s accomplishing with her jeremiads?

Will transparency be used that way?  Here, at last, I have some overlap with the writer – (disclosure: she and I have had tussles, before) -- because the choice will be ours and it will depend upon our “sensibilities” or values. 

“How can we revive those aspects of the reticent sensibility that we need in circumstances radically different from the world in which they originally emerged? What would be their new foundation? I am sorry to report that I find myself at a complete loss for an answer.”

Yes, yes. That much is truthful and clear. That admission of failed imagination may indeed be the first step on the road to wisdom. The next is admitting that some things have actually worked, in our recent past. And squinting to perceive what they were.

What's interesting in science & tech?

Let's take a breather to look at one thing that's still going great -- among many in our maligned and under-rated civilization -- the pace of scientific and technological discovery, for example:

Facial recognition has progressed to a point where "dysmorphology" - the diagnosis of rare diseases - can be accomplished (initially) by computer analysis of a child's or adult's features.  This could be a valuable addition to the tools that we pioneered in the Tricorder XPrize contest, enabling quicker diagnosis and care in the field. 

Of course, it also raises chilling awareness of how far facial recognition tech has come... and how utterly useless will be any vain efforts to ban or restrict the technology.  Especially when it becomes capable of some degree of lie detection.  These tools will either be monopolized by elites (leading to Big Brother forever) or else used by all of us to hold accountably lying politicians and so on (Big Brother never.)  You decide. Better yet, see these possibilities explored by brilliant authors in Chasing Shadows.

Speaking of facial recognition, how about a dinosaur that is so well preserved that it “might have been walking around a couple of weeks ago,” as revealed in this spectacular find of a nodosaur in Canada. Skin, scales and yes a face.  “As it lumbered across the landscape between 110 million and 112 million years ago, almost midway through the Cretaceous period, the 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound behemoth was the rhinoceros of its day.” 

== Innovative ideas ==

Elon's latest startup - The Boring Company - wants to dig tunnels under cities that can convey you past street traffic efficiently and end congested jams. Dang. (In fact, I worked a bit on this, thirty years ago with an idea for a "resonant-frequency drill" that was impractical then... but maybe it merits a fresh look?)

Physicists at the University of Houston have discovered a low-cost, efficient, and easily available catalyst that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, using solar to power the electrical current used to split water molecules and produce hydrogen for energy. 

Amazing innovation? Or long-ago predicted in sci fi? Introducing “hearables” that consist of two waterproof earpieces, each equipped with a speaker, microphone, gyroscope, accelerometer, 27 biometric sensors, and a 4-GB hard drive in the right earbud to store music. Okay, soon. But present day hearables can already track your body temperature and heart rate, interface with a smartphone, allowing you to answer a call with a lift of the chin and shuffle your music with a few shakes of your head. Hearables also let you search the Internet just by speaking out loud — like an Amazon Echo that follows you anywhere.

Yes, I portray something prescient and similar used in my novel Existence, interfacing with augmented reality specs. (I also posit people won’t shout commands but instead use tooth clicks and “sub-vocal” larynx signals. In fact, the latter was forecast in Earth (1989). 

In a rather shocking experiment, Chinese researchers grafted the head of a smaller rat onto a bigger one while keeping the brain safe from possible damage due to blood loss. Their technique could one day be useful for human head transplants. Just don't get too excited.  The grafted head is alive. But it does not control the host mouse's body.  Good luck with that step.

So cool! And here's the latest from Boston Dynamics. Another dazzlingly weird and impressive robot. Google just sold BD to SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate.

ITIF president Robert Atkinson has released a paper disproving the nostrum that technology has been destroying jobs at a faster pace, recently. An interesting report.  

== Space Stuff ==

Boeing: Deep Space Gateway

Humans heading to Mars? In March, President Trump issued a mandate for NASA: get humans to Mars by 2033. NASA developed a detailed plan for reaching the Red Planet, identifying five intermediate phases -- starting with six SLS rockets to deliver components of the Deep Space Gateway (DSG), a new space station to lunar orbit.  A gateway to Mars, this cis-lunar station is a rare example of republicans actually overlapping interest with others! Many Republicans want to return to the moon (for reasons never clearly explained.) Others, including most scientists, would use the DSG to retrieve and analyze asteroidal resources that could make us all stinking rich. 

I propose a third use... offer the DSG in lunar orbit as a base to stage moon landings by all the wannabes out there who are eager to plant footprints on that (for the near future) utterly useless orb. Profitably sell services to the Chinese, Russians, Europeans, Indians and billionaires desperate to take short strolls in dust? Sure. 

Back to the NASA plan. Mars is a beacon for us, fine. Just remember. Phobos is likely a former asteroid and that Martian moon could be very important, indeed. 

Oh, but recall (indeed, never forget) that the GOP and Trump have ordered NASA to stop looking at the least interesting planet.  Earth.

More space!  Here’s a new video about the HoloLens augmented reality system being used in JPL’s rover mission:

   

An intriguing hypothesis that a Cold Spot in the universe - observed in the cosmic background radiation maps, cooler than the ambient average by a whopping cooler than its surroundings by around 0.00015 degrees Celsius - was caused by a collision between our universe and another bubble universe.

== Biology & Health ==

A new statistical study has found 52 genes that have at least a partial effect on human intelligence.  An interesting article on a very difficult problem. But can we please see correlations with autism and other disorders, as well? It is curious when you look at august mental-giant families, like the Huxleys, how often disorders accompany the gifts.

Memory performance decreases with increasing age. Low dose Cannabis can reverse these aging processes in the brain. Hey, stoners, that’s LOW dose. Take note, you guys, who can’t remember (wow, man) where you put the car keys. Seriously. Toke only on weekends. Any more and it's an ambition destroyer.

Sometimes an urban legend medical treatment passes scientific tests with flying colors. According to a meta-analysis of three randomized controlled trials, zinc acetate lozenges may increase the rate of recovery from the common cold three fold. On the fifth day, 70 percent of the zinc lozenge patients had recovered compared with 27 percent of the placebo patients.

Okay you want weird? “A common parasite that lives in fish eyeballs seems to be a driver behind the fish’s behaviour, pulling the strings from inside its eyes. When the parasite is young, it helps its host stay safe from predators. But once the parasite matures, it does everything it can to get that fish eaten by a bird and so continue its life cycle.”  Actually, this has been known a while.  See this SMBC cartoon that makes a biting point… with which I wholly agree.

Many parasites can change an animal’s behaviour to fit their own needs. Mice infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, for example, lose their fear of cats – the animal the parasite needs to reproduce inside.  Many species of wasps lay eggs in host ants or caterpillars and the host becomes a slave. There’s been some chilling sci fi, of late. 

The dinosaur-killer asteroid may have struck at the worst place possible.. Worst, that is, except from the point of view of tiny scavenger mammals who then left to us…

Oh but we’re unleashing all sorts of stuff: “As Ice Melts, Dangerous Diseases From The Past Could Rise Again. One more serious thing to worry about as the planet warms.” 

 == Hoaxes and rationality  ==

Heh, this is a good one – another skewering of the postmodernism cult. Oh, sure, you know that I far more often rail against the much more dangerous (for now) fact-hating madness on the entire political right. But real harm is done by a much smaller caste of raving, anti-science loonies on the very far left. (Note the distinction between ‘very-far’ and ‘entire.’) This postmodernist (PM) academic cult was shredded, a decade ago, by the “Sokal Hoax,” in which a PM journal ‘peer-reviewed’ and then published a paper on critical theory that was deliberately concocted to be utter nonsense.

Now it’s happened again, this time in a peer reviewed and published paper ‘proving’ that the male penis is not a reproductive organ but rather an oppressive social construct.

Alas, there is a sad side to this. Any rational view would chuckle and view this as a case of academia cleaning its own house through competitive accountability. But shills on the right will interpret it as proof "all academics are like this,” in promoting their war on all smartypants fact users. Of course, this ignores that postmodernists are allies of the mad right, in shared hatred of oppressive things called “facts.”

Okay now let me step back and be slightly more fair. The Sokal paper was written intentionally to be illogical and meaningless, and hence, its publication was scandalous. The “penis paper’ actually reads in a logical sequence, making assertions that some postmodernists might actually deem persuasive. Yes, it’s completely nuts, like most PM drivel. But this latest "hoax paper" is consistent with their worldview. And hence, I do not deem it to be anywhere near as devastating as the Sokal Affair.

(ADDENDUM: One of you pointed out: "The "Conceptual Penis" hoax was a bust, like a joke told a humorless relative. The "Conceptual Penis" paper was submitted to a third rate journal and rejected. That journal pointed them to pay-to-publish journal that doesn't publish gender studies but accepts everything and surprise, they published it!"  And yes, I deemed it inferior even as a joke hoax, before I knew this.

Still, it remains amusing as on-target satire.  In this context, ponder how, as Mike Gannis put it: “Reverence for word salad is anything but new.”

Here's Reginald Bunthorne's soliloquy from Gilbert & Sullivan's "Patience" ...

If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,

You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,

The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

And every one will say,

As you walk your mystic way,

  "If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,

  Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!"

 And finally....

Well, they’ve built  their Noah’s Ark theme park in Kentucky. Yeesh.  We truly are beset.

                                        

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