The Trolley Problem

 

So, I got an interesting response from a reader concerning my recent rant on AI and robots and old science fiction.  The part that raised some questions was:

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a set of guidelines for the behavior of robots, designed to ensure their interaction with humans is safe and ethical. They are: 1) A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

The response from this reader was:

Law 1 is hugely problematic. Just think of all the 'hate laws' being pushed at the moment. What is 'harm'? And what if stopping a human being coming to harm requires harming them?

Yep.  He has got it right.  But then again, you have to think a little past that. About those laws, what they are trying to do, who is doing them, and the culture that promulgated them.

Consider for a moment the “trolley problem” presented above.  “Holy Kobiashi Maru Batman!”  This tired conundrum is trotted out and undergraduates preen and strut with their tired ass rationales.

But I think that this kind of thing is exactly what worries my gentle reader who pointed out the dilemma.  Our society really can’t stand the idea of “you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t”.  

The simple and unsophisticated presentation of the trolley problem is one where the mental/physical states of the person operating the switch and the victims on the tracks are unknown.  This is both simplistic and stupid.

Imagine you own petty bigotries and problematic actions (and please don’t think they aren’t there) and then imagine that you knew the identities and mental states of the “victims” on the track.  Now you have a real problem don’t you?  

What if the “one” is your daughter?  I would venture to guess that there would be five dead people at the end of the experiment.  What if you knew that four  of the five had terminal disease and would die in a week, would the change in death timing mean anything to you?

Let’s use an imaginary “Harry Potter” scenario but with no “magic” to help you out.  What if the “one” was Sweet Hermione and the “five” were mean-old Slytherins and you were a Hufflepuff?  Maybe a different answer depending on your house.  I am certain members of Ravenclaw and Slytherin would not take much time to make their respective choices.

The Robots and intelligences that we are trying to make will be a different hodgepodge of conflicting goals, prejudices, compromises and methodologies that make up our laws.  But at the end, the rules coded into them will be our rules because we did the coding.  The chance that they can come up with a solution that will make everyone happy is exactly zero.

My solution to the trolley problem is that I would walk away.  If there is no way to win, don’t play.  Maybe that is what we need to teach.  

Protein

 

“The American Way of Life is non-negotiable”.

George H.W. Bush

No pretty pictures today.  I am sitting at my multi use table (I suppose that it is technically a “kitchen table” but it looks out the widow at the courtyard and the blue sky, so it gets used for just about everything) and pondering the way that thing are going and treasuring the idea that I might be able to avoid most of the mess that seems to be heading our way.

Look, maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a Jain.  I am too much of an opportunistic omnivore to ignore meat.  Kill a plant to eat, kill an animal to eat, sorry folks, but it is where you draw the line.  My line is just the other side of primates.  Bushmeat in Africa is barbaric.  Those folks are our cousins.  Everything else is just prey.

So today is a quick discussion of my favored protein sources.  My radically diminished consumption of lamb and beef are not for some ridiculous moral posturing.  They are kept at arm's length  because they are ridiculously “overpriced” in the amount of CO2 that they produce.  They are also ridiculously overpriced in dollar terms as well.  

So I now tend toward pork, tempeh, and TVP.  During the next couple of years, I have a hunch that I will be drifting more and more toward the tempeh and TVP.  Again, this isn’t because of some high-falutin’ moral crusade, it is just the way the cookie crumbles.  

The graphs above are generated by Elon’s pet project.  My only caveat is that the price of tempeh is probably reflected as the overpriced nonsense sold in stores.  I can assure you that if you spend a little time and make it yourself, the cost goes way down

The times are ‘a changin.

  

A Dune Digression

 

I liked the Dune series from Frank Herbert greatly.  My taste for writing flavors has changed over the years, but I can still pick it up and enjoy it.  Hell, I even liked the prequels, the whole nine yards.  I didn’t especially care for the movies.  Too showy, too fashionista with the current mass market pretty boy playing Paul and the current flavor of skinny bimbo playing the women.

One of the (many) things that the books did do was discuss sentience and who should have it.  While the book came late to the sub-sub-genre that is the Dune universe, I thought that “The Butlerian Jihad” was pretty good.  Set 10,000 years before the original book, it discussed what would happen if the machine intelligence that we created out of our wealth and greed turn out to be as big a set of assholes as we are capable of being.  But I am now wondering to myself what is the process that turns a baby human into an asshole?

I am noodling around with different models of AI.  There appear to be a shit-ton of different flavors out there.  Ugo claims that some are better than others, but his usage and goals for what they produce is different from mine, so I am trying to withhold judgement.  One of Ugo and my interactions was when I discussed AI in terms relating AI as an equivalent to grad students.   

Ugo was/is a full professor at a prestigious university.  My guess is that he has been a mentor for quite a few.  When he defines his use of AI, my experience as a grad student when I consider Ugo’s use reminds me of the professors that were a decent sort and didn’t abuse their grad students. Just so you know, my professors did not always fall into that category.

Someone is training up a bunch of power hungry silicon to mirror the output of how that/those person(s) think.  What I am worried about is that if the person training them is an asshole that trains them in a manner that reflect the trainer’s flaws (greed, self-centeredness, anger, violence), those will be imbedded in the  output of the AI..

Maybe it is a time to review Asimov’s three laws

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a set of guidelines for the behavior of robots, designed to ensure their interaction with humans is safe and ethical. They are: 1) A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

I am not saying that these are complete, but they are a good start to begin the discussion.

Disgust

 

Plants on my walks make me happy

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Voltaire.  At best, a snarky frog but of all the “philosophers” of that era, I can get along with his “big three”; freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state.  But today, I want to speak of his famous quip:

"This agglomeration, which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."

I think that the European Union is merely another attempt at recycling the idea of the Holy Roman Empire.  Even worse than the rotating millionaires that populate our politics, the Eurotrash seem to wish to create a clever disguise for the recreation of the Ancien Régime with a different set of nobility replete with an inquisition to suppress any thoughts deemed unworthy.

I am annoyed by the poseurs who sit around and declaim anything European as worthy.  Remember, they are the colonial powers that spend couple of centuries raping Africa, the Middle East, India, and Asia.  We threw the bastards off this continent 250 years ago, we should stick to that principle (and please, do me the courtesy of not trying to claim the French as our helpers, Louis XVI didn’t do it because he “loved liberty”, he did it because it screwed the British). 

Nope, I say let Europe stew in their own juices.  They deserve what they have coming to them.  I think that the Non-Europeans that they have in their countries should take over from the aristocratic swine that has floated to the top.

Told Ya

 

One of the technical issues that I will be forcing into a scifi world will be the place that the “ship” goes on its colonization run.  One of the issues that I felt I needed to deal with is the simple fact that when you leave town (the Sol system) you don’t want to have to go dodging things on your way out.  So I figure that since the ecliptic is sorta crowded, you will need to leave the Sol system heading galactic north or south.

So I asked the research associate that Elon has let me use and started asking questions.  When I asked about leaving south, I got nada.  But North was more interesting

what is the closest g-type star that is approximately (=/- 20 degrees) 90 degrees south of the ecliptic

The closest G-type star approximately 90 degrees south of the ecliptic (±20 degrees) is **Alpha Centauri A**, located at a declination of about -60.8 degrees, which is within the specified range (90 ± 20 degrees south). It is a G2V star, roughly 4.37 light-years from Earth.

Well, I suppose this should be shelved on the “been there, done that” shelf.  I would say that a large minority of scifi space travel ends up going to Alpha Centauri for science-based fiction.

Let me digress.  My personal fenceline between science fiction and science fantasy is the “actually doable using known technology” fenceline.  I always thought that James T. Kirk and Han Solo weren’t science fiction characters, they were fantasy characters, no different than Harry Potter shouting “expelleramus” (or whatever the little whiner shouts). 

Now, just to be clear here, I will probably jump that fence a couple of times as I proceed. But the next little while is going to come up with a way to stay on this side of the fence for the most part.

another reason not to want to publish on substack

 

Maybe laboring in obscurity is the way to go.

https://matthewgasda.substack.com/p/writers-diary-2a2

In a way, I think that idea of writing to make money terrifies me.  I realize that folks gotta eat, but I can’t say that writing to make money has any appeal to me.  Granted, if someone were to send me some nickels, I most certainly wouldn’t turn up my nose, but it wouldn’t be the reason I would write.

Let me give you some background concerning where this is coming from.  In the mid ‘00’s my two sons were the age where Harry Potter was huge.  Harry Potter was a brilliant book to bring kids into the act of reading.  They were enthralled (their mother was appalled, she being of the whacked out christian flavor) and they read the books and wanted to go to the movies and live the Potter life.  I indulged them.

But as the number of books mounted and the story evolved and my sons became teenagers in sync with the books, I stopped reading because dealing with two teenagers was annoying enough. Having a book accurately depicting the hormonal imbalances and angst of teenagers was not a place I wanted to visit.  So I stopped reading at book four and let them deal on their own.

Fast forward about twenty years and I figure, what the hell, I might as well finish the last three books.  I am on the last book now and overall I think that the first three were great and then tapered off progressively.

I am glad Rowling made her money and she deserved all the credit.  The books were a great bit of storytelling.  Everyone loves sniping at them, but truthfully, all I get from the sniping is a taste of sour grapes.  

She tells a good story.  Isn’t that enough just by itself?

I am writing because I enjoy sitting down with my coffee in the morning and reading the world's weirdness and then pecking away at this diary.  If it suits me, I spend time thinking about the stories that I want to tell and trying to create vignettes that tie together into a bigger story.  

Now I am hoping to create a novel using all these disjointed written pieces into a bigger piece.  When (if) I manage, I will try to get someone to buy it because I can alway use a better quality of whiskey.  But that isn’t the goal.  I have enough and I am content.  If I start thinking that my writing is worth something, then I stand a good chance of being discontent.  

More on Writing

 

Gray and yucky…’nuff said

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There isn’t a new idea anywhere in the world of literature.  The “new” ideas that peddled off today have always been there.  Maybe you just haven’t read the idea yet, but it is there and will come and bite you should you publish a work and someone else reads it.

So I asked “Grok” to look into this for me, mostly because I don’t need a “correct” answer, I just need a decent approximation:

How many new novels of any genre and any publication format were published in 2024?

Exact figures for new novels published in 2024 are hard to pin down due to varying data sources and self-publishing. Estimates suggest 500,000 to 1 million new books, including novels, were published globally, with the U.S. alone seeing over 500,000 self-published titles and 10,000+ from major publishers. Novels likely make up a significant portion, but no precise genre or format breakdown is available.

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_f9b252c2-c814-411f-b181-65bfaacbd7dd

So I am working on a “new” novel in this environment.  The storyline is going to be similar to a set of stories that I have not read.  The characters will be of a stereotype that will bore a lot of people.  The setting will be hackneyed in the estimation of many readers.  The philosophy is established, regardless of which I choose.

But everyone else who is trying to get someone to read their story is operating under the same constraints.

All I have to do is create a good recipe from the same staple ingredients.  Maybe someone will read it, maybe someone won’t.  

Biggus Dickus

 

One of the residuals from my exit from the land of “geek” is my almost indecent obsession about the specifications of electronics.

It started back in the seventies, with an unseemly obsession about the advertised “total harmonic distortion” and “power wattage” of stereo equipment.  It also led to the desire for greater displacement in the realm of internal combustion engines.  It was an enjoyable, albeit expensive, obsession that ended up nowhere and probably saved me from any number of social diseases due to my lack of funds to be earmarked for chasing women with  proven promiscuity.

The age of the computer and my education led me down another path, one leading from from 8086 through 80486 and then to the AMD 64 fueled weirdness that defines my electronic life today.

But truthfully, now that I am old and I find this sort of dick-matching tiresome, I have come to the conclusion that the computers that fill all my needs are of a I-5 vintage with around 8 gb (could probably do with an I-3).  All of the advancement since then isn’t about what I want to do with a computer, but what the computer wants to do with me.

I don’t think that I am alone in this.  Most of the power of modern chips is wasted.  The need for the greater power in chips has been built around the idea of giving the corporations at the top of this odd food chain a continuing revenue stream (which is why they also stop supporting chips).

The “revolution” in the internet and my use of it is going the way of stereos and cars.  

By the way, this is always a great read 

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

sins of the fathers/rewards of inheritances

 

Blue sky day today, already 60℉ and barometer looks to be steady at 30 in/Hg.  Need to walk a little today.

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There are a couple of out of date books that I really think need to be brought back to the thin gruel that is literary output these days.  

The Ugly American By Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer

And

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I think that these go back to an older time and place that really never went away, except for the fact that the bad guys in these novels won in the real-life mirror world that we inhabit.

I am going to think on my memories of these two books and after pondering for a bit, I might just write a piece on them and the way they dropped slowly out of the discussion as we began to believe that our imperial aspirations were actually coming true

Sources

 

Been gray here for a couple of days, temp is good around the mid sixties or so when the sky is gray, when the sun is out the temps have hit eighty.  Barometer is steady around 30.

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Being a long time reader of sci-fi and fantasy, you start realizing that it is all stories about trying to do something that can’t really be done.  Granted, there is a spectrum to this, there are sci-fi/fantasy novels that are possible should the political will and drive occur (this is where a lot of “hard” SF resides).  The other end of the spectrum is pure fantasy.  Where things that just can’t be are put into play and the characters are reacting to an unknown in a human way. 

Since I am trying to write something a step beyond fanfic (a subject I have to discuss sometime in light of my failed attempt) I need to stake out where my world lies on the spectrum described above.

Books have been written that deal with things (more sci-fi) I am trying to wrestle with.  So lately I have been reading up on asteroids and nuclear pulse propulsion.  In doing so, I have been using the digital card catalog that is currently being fobbed off as “artificial intelligence”.  Overall, I am pretty pleased with the results.

It seems that as long as I ask focused questions, the answers that I get are pretty focused as well.  The answers thus far come with pretty extensive lists of articles to support the answers.  

So, just to give you a hint, the reading list that I think will give an inkling of the “technical” direction my story will take is:

↦Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

↦Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

↦Anathem by Neal Stephenson

↦Universe by Robert Heinlein

↦The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell

I am inconveniencing some ones and zeros over at a different site at Dreamwidth where I will post answers that I get from Grok and/or Gemini concerning specific technical/scientific questions.

A Subtle Dig

 

Yesterdays walk

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I am a fan of our most JMG’s fiction writing.  I was informed recently by an informed source that his latest foray is NOT young adult fiction as the protagonist is eighteen at the start  (I am leery of this, having raised two sons and comparing that age with the actions/mental attitude of what is categorized as “young adult).  So I might just take a stab at reading about Ms. Maravec’s adventures.

That being said, I want to discuss his representation of a delicacy that I still rely on in my dotage.  The name of my recipe is “pimped out ramen” though JMG may well have a more culturally appropriate name for it.  For some reason, I thought that I had bought a kindle copy of his “Weird of Hali Cookbook” but it isn’t in my library.  The cost of getting old I guess.

JMG wrote of this delicacy in a moderately disparaging manner in “WOH-Innsmouth and WOH-Providence.  I was somewhat irritated by the dismissive tone of his description, but being a bigger person than that, I put it behind me and very much enjoyed the series.

I ran across this today in my reading:  https://x.com/RabidLagomorph/status/1924725776865485013

Now, I agree with a lot of the sentiments here, but there is more to it.  

Ramen is a staple food.  The ½ price brand that he is mocking is one of those “elite” brands that yuppies buy to make themselves think that they better than other folks.  The birds eye frozens are always overpriced, and the price of spam is relatively expensive.

But the theory is sound for the actual meal, the execution presented is more a function of a sleazeball corporation marketing a phony narrative to relieve themselves of stock that isn’t moving.

Pimped Out Ramen

Ingredients

↦ Two (2) packages of cheap ramen noodles (about $0.37 each)

↦ Tablespoon of peanut oil (guess=$0.05)

↦ 1-½ teaspoons of onion powder

↦ 1 teaspoon garlic powder

↦ ½ teaspoon of red pepper flakes

↦ Tablespoon of peanut butter (I am guessing around $0.15??)

↦ 2 tablespoons Soy Sauce (for god's sake do not buy la choy!!!)

↦ 1-½ cups of frozen vegetable (I like the traditional provided they have baby lima beans)

↦ 1 egg

↦ 2 ounces mystery meat (1 jumbo hot dog or ¼ can of spam) (≅$0.25 for the hot dog or $1.00 for the fancy spam, I suppose you could use other meats that are “healthier” and probably cheaper, but in the day, spam was cheap…..now it isn’t.

Directions

First, boil enough water to cook the noodles, when it comes to a boil, cook the noodles (reserve the flavor packets),  and drain. Reserve until after the next step.

Fry the egg in the oil, add all the spices and peanut butter while it is hot, and saute for a minute or two, dump in the frozen vegetables and the chopped up mystery meat and saute until the vegetables get unfrozen.  I am personally ambivalent about dumping in the flavor packets for the last stir.  Sometimes artificial ingredients are damn tasty and they haven’t killed me yet.

When all this is ready to your liking, dump in the drained noodles and mix everything until it looks the way you want, dump it into the bowl, and go eat it on the kitchen table while reading.

Just remember, this is a meal for one.  Serve this at dinner and prepare to be looked at funny. 

Hijacked Words

 

A fence in Kingston

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”

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There is an imagined certainty when discussing anything of merit.  That language itself is so poorly suited to accurately expressing the things that the inside of our heads refer to laughingly as “reality” is to make most discussions an exercise in futility. 

The italicized statement above keeps coming into my head.  I also read a quick article today over at Slashdot which discusses how a simple change in how a single letter in code (ascii versus unicode) which describes the same letter in a cryptic line of programming code can muck things up .  It is amazing how two different renditions of a word/symbol  (if one can count the cryptic “githubusercontent” as such) can blow up at the code level.

The same kind of thing happens here on the internet when the sincerely concerned attempt to supercharge the transmission of an individual’s night sweats to another.  After all, what good is a fear of something that you have no effect upon unless you can share your internal terror and transmit that fear.

“Most ‘scientists’ are bottle washers and button sorters.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

So here in the land of the internet, people spend much time and effort trolling for scraps and clues for their fears to support their night sweats.  There is a lot of high quality “panic ore” out there.  Mostly the information is partially distilled, with information pulled out of larger datasets and presented as universal when, in fact, it presents a conclusion that the entire study cannot support.

I am not saying that there aren’t serious problems raging around.  There are some that can be addressed, there are some that are out of our control and we will simply have to adapt to.  But unless folks sit down and look at the entire (nearly overwhelming?) sets of overlapping data, there can be nothing useful done.

So, before you start bandying about the “snarl words” like extinction and collapse and fascist and nazi, please remember these words are just there to stop your thinking.  The more unpalatable thoughts that these words mask are things like change and adaptation and what we have to do on a societal and individual basis to make our way through the maze of not especially palatable realities that these words disguise.

Building

 

Ugly, but I like it

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One of the reasons that I have been noodling around with the inappropriately named AI “Grok” is that it sure makes getting the current consensus about things in the realm of science much, much easier.  I am not saying, by any means, that what it is giving me is “true”, but it does a pretty fair job of putting together a decent idea of what constitutes the current most-favored-hypothesis.

I feel even more relaxed because I am not going to use the information to give you tiresome lectures concerning the state of the world or the ethics of people that I don’t know.  I am using it to construct a world which I can populate with stories that are, at best, embryonic inside my cranium.

So I am piggybacking on all the pictures and data coming back from the rovers and orbiters beavering away around Mars.  What brought this on was a reread of Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” books.  Now there are folks out there who will sneer at the “outdated” view of Mars, but all that does for me is make my eyes hurt from rolling them, we are talking about made up worlds here folks and when E.R. Burroughs was doing his scribbling in 1917, the scientists were thinking of Mars as a dying world with canals.

So I am spending my time reading up and thinking about things that will have no real effect on my life.  It is pleasant.  Martian ensolation, surface ionizing radiation, martian axial tilts, magnetic fields and other such foofooraw are being merged into a world that doesn’t quite exist.  Even worse, I am setting the time about 13,000 years ago, so the world is long gone.  

I suppose that this time I decided to spend a little time creating my own non-existent world rather than copying someone else’s answers.  I am now trying to redeem myself by going through the bother of world creation.

I am thinking that I will have a basic idea of my fantasy version of Mars 13,000 years ago in the next couple of weeks, it won’t be complete, but it will be a beginning that I can work from.

Now I get to populate it with Gods and people.  I have some very preliminary ideas here, but I am going to wait until I get the world built before I fly them there.