Will Technology Save Us?

Maybe the socialists are on to something after all? I just finished reading a couple of takedowns on the prospects for technology to free us from carbon-based fuels --  100 Percent Wishful Thinking: the Green-Energy Cornucopia -- and for technology to deliver food without using much land -- An Engineer, an Economist, and an Ecomodernist Walk Into a Bar and Order a Free Lunch. Perhaps our environmental problems won't be solved as a side-effect of making money? Perhaps capitalism, while having been very successful for the last several hundred years, has a limited shelf-life?

Both the above referenced articles are by Stan Cox:

Background and Personal History: Stan was a wheat geneticist in the US Department of Agriculture for 13 years before joining The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas as a senior scientist in 2000. When not working as a plant breeder in the field and greenhouse, he has written three books: Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine (Pluto Press, 2008); Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (And Finding News Ways to Get Through the Summer) (The New Press, 2010); and Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing (The New Press, 2013). Since 2003, he has regularly written investigative pieces, op-eds, and other articles for a wide range of Internet and print publications. His articles have appeared in wide range of newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, in 43 states and several countries.

We may be approaching times where more forceful government intervention is required to manage crises. This is what happened, successfully, during the Great Depression and World War II. Since then technology has developed enormously and is putting unprecedented pressure on the environment. We need new laws to deal with this situation, and I believe they must go beyond the capitalist incentives that we've been using unsuccessfully.

It's clear with health care financing, for example, that the U.S. model of capitalism doesn't work. It has resulted in too much complexity and financialization as can be seen by comparison to comparable nations. The same might be said for the media business, which seems to dysfunctional and greatly in need of a more social model with checks and balances other than what are currently employed in our capitalist system.

Energy seems to be another area where our current model of capitalism is failing, as I referenced a couple posts back. Some form of greater government regulation of the legal and financial system is necessary. Whether or not we should call this socialism seems to be the question of the day, but perhaps not the right question.

We want to protect the earth before its life-sustaining resources are depleted or damaged beyond repair.  To do this, capitalism needs to be restrained somehow. We can do this democratically if we put our minds to it.

ADDENDUM #1:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter :

In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The field has experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or decades later.

The term first appeared in 1984 as the topic of a public debate at the annual meeting of AAAI (then called the "American Association of Artificial Intelligence"). It is a chain reaction that begins with pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, followed by a severe cutback in funding, followed by the end of serious research.[2] At the meeting, Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky—two leading AI researchers who had survived the "winter" of the 1970s—warned the business community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control in the 1980s and that disappointment would certainly follow. Three years later, the billion-dollar AI industry began to collapse.

Hypes are common in many emerging technologies, such as the railway mania or the dot-com bubble. The AI winter is primarily a collapse in the perception of AI by government bureaucrats and venture capitalists...

There were two major winters in 1974–1980 and 1987–1993 and several smaller episodes, including the following:

• 1966: failure of machine translation

• 1970: abandonment of connectionism

• 1971–75: DARPA's frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University

• 1973: large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the Lighthill report

• 1973–74: DARPA's cutbacks to academic AI research in general

• 1987: collapse of the Lisp machine market

• 1988: cancellation of new spending on AI by the Strategic Computing Initiative

• 1993: expert systems slowly reaching the bottom

• 1990s: quiet disappearance of the fifth-generation computer project's original goals

The fizzle of the fifth generation
In 1981, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry set aside $850 million for the Fifth generation computer project. Their objectives were to write programs and build machines that could carry on conversations, translate languages, interpret pictures, and reason like human beings. By 1991, the impressive list of goals penned in 1981 had not been met. Indeed, some of them had not been met in 2001, or 2011. As with other AI projects, expectations had run much higher than what was actually possible.

ADDENDUM #2:  https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/05/28/ai-winter-is-well-on-its-way/:

Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to the world of wonders of technological singularity (general AI). Many bets were made in 2014, 2015 and 2016 when still new boundaries were pushed, such as the Alpha Go etc. Companies such as Tesla were announcing through the mouths of their CEO's that fully self driving car was very close, to the point that Tesla even started selling that option to customers [to be enabled by future software update].
We have now mid 2018 and things have changed. Not on the surface yet, NIPS conference is still oversold, the corporate PR still has AI all over its press releases, Elon Musk still keeps promising self driving cars and Google CEO keeps repeating Andrew Ng's slogan that AI is bigger than electricity. But this narrative begins to crack. And as I predicted in my older post, the place where the cracks are most visible is autonomous driving - an actual application of the technology in the real world.

The older post referenced above is from 2016. Excerpt:

My bet is that the self driving car will demolish the current AI hype. And I'm not talking about the assisted driving but full (level 5) autonomy, as only this makes the case for the gigantic investments made by numerous companies. Now don't get me wrong: I'd love to have one, my entire work is devoted to solving the fundamental problems that would allow for one. But at the same time, I'm astonished to see so many other people working in the field of AI, enclosed in their model domains not seeing the problem! 

The key observation is this: a self driving car is a robotic device operating in an unrestricted environment. We cannot possibly assume that roadways are restricted domains since in reality, literally anything can happen in the middle of the road. There are several other problems which I have previously discussed, but the fundamental one is that we keep building AI as statistical pattern matchers. AI can fundamentally only deal with the stuff it has seen before, cannot anticipate, identify outliers (new unknown things) and react appropriately.

Now that being said, I think the time is right to actually solve the appropriate problems and I've put forward a broad proposal on how to approach AI differently - in summary learn the stuff that is constant - physics - rather then try to memorise all the corner cases.. The problem is, once there is an AI winter, everyone doing it will get equally busted, even the whistleblowers like me.

ADDENDUM #3:   I'm spending all day on Piekniewski's blog😀.  From https://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/08/09/intelligence-is-real/ :

The inherent property of the AI booms is the enormous enthusiasm they create, particularly among the people who have no idea how these systems work and what their limitations are (like venture capitalists or government officials for example). The visions are typically very romantic: automatic translation of millions of phone calls, visual perception, cheap and capable robots, natural language communication with computers and more recently self driving cars (which are a form of autonomous robots). Who would not like to have these wonders? Notably there is a clear incentive to create hype: researchers need to get the research money. The best way to do it is to scare somebody in the government that SkyNet is about to be born (in some other country) therefore AI research needs the dime. Entrepreneurs need to convince VC's so they use a similar strategy. All that is quickly picked up by journalist, since the public loves the stories about killer AI and terminator. Eventually everybody starts jumping on the AI bandwagon.
So here is what we've got: a field with a sexy name that no one really understands which promises wonders beyond imagination. What could possibly go wrong?

ADDENDUM #4:    Good comment here (Clyde Schechter at Kevin Drum)

Well, yes, as Norbert Weiner proposed many decades back, anything that the meat machine can do can be simulated in a non meat machine. But I think this misses a few subtle points.
1. Except perhaps for the challenge of doing it, I don't think anybody actually wants to build a full AI simulation of a human brain. It wouldn't be any more useful than a human brain, and we already have plenty of those lying around underutilized.
2. Perhaps we can succeed in building an AI that does a really good simulation of empathy (or, if you prefer, actually feels empathy--it doesn't matter for present purposes.). In fact, I'm sure we can. But what else will it do. The only model we have of empathy-capable intelligence is the human brain (OK, maybe some other animal brains, too--it doesn't matter for this point.) And that human brain also exhibits anger, churlishness, boredom, fatigue, spitefulness and a whole host of other things that we probably don't want our AI companion to emulate. But nobody has yet proved that it is possible, even in principle, to build an AI that exhibits empathy without exhibiting those other things. Maybe no such algorithm is, in principle, possible. Just as no algorithm can solve the halting problem. None of nature's versions of intelligence have empathy without also having the negative emotions. So until somebody actually constructs one, or until we have a detailed enough algorithmic understanding of empathy that we can prove theorems about it, we don't know if these things can ever be separated. If they cannot, then perhaps we will not want our AI companions after all.
3. A perfect simulation of the human brain would be very problematic in another way. Part of what is clearly part of our neurologic wiring is that we recognize that we have a body and that it provides us with sensory input. We know that sensory deprivation can lead to psychosis. Would a disembodied AI perfect simulation of the human brain just quickly go psychotic? I think there's a good chance of that.
In short, nobody really wants an AI that actually simulates the human brain. We want AI that selective emulates certain aspects of human brain function and omits others. Whether that is even possible in principle remains unknown today.

My follow on thought is that we should do cost-benefit analyses, from the societal perspective, of investments in artificial intelligence such as autonomous vehicles.  Is the ability to take a nap worth ceding autonomy?

Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy

I've drifted a bit with the tides of fashion, I must admit. In the 1970s and 1980s it was more common to see environmental issues in combination with nuclear weapons as requiring a drastically changed model of governance. Then Reagan became president and the world did not end, but rather the Soviet Union collapsed and embraced the western (American) model. The Internet proved anew the power of technology to change the world. Since the year 2000, however, the flaws in the American model have become more obvious once again.

While recognizing the seriousness of the flaws, people like Kevin Drum are not convinced that there is a viable alternative other than social democracy / mixed capitalism. Democratic Socialism is becoming popular, but Kevin's reaction is:

plenty of other rich countries have tried socialism before, and eventually they’ve all given up because it doesn’t work as well as social democracy or some other form of mixed capitalism.

[ I Still Have One Question About Democratic Socialism ]

He makes a decent point as far as he goes, but doesn't really address the direction of our current mixed economies. I find it helpful to look at socialism as a direction, as opposed to a single economic model. Yes, various implementations of socialism have failed (e.g. Communism), but in general we've been successful in moving to greater government involvement in the economy via services such as Medicare, Social Security, public education and infrastructure, and government regulation of private businesses. 

In the long run, we may or not need to put the brakes on government management of society. But that is not the issue that most of us see as pressing in the near future. Rather, it is excessive financialization and the impacts of technology on society and the environment that are more urgent. These point to the need for more government management of the economy, whatever you want to call it.  Social democracy sounds like more of the same.  Democratic socialism conjures visions of Venezuela.  Nevertheless, both are valid descriptions of the direction we want to move in.

ADDENDUM:  Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature".  This excellent piece by Naomi Klein contrasts the conventional wisdom -- We're doomed -- must as well enjoy ourselves while we can. -- with an alternative such as Democratic Socialism where we stop partying and try to create a sustainable society.  Klein's article is a review of Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, by Nathaniel Rich (son of Frank Rich, prominent columnist in NY Magazine and for many years in NY Times).

the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central thesis... “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”
Yep, you and me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece. (Imagine tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the U.S. government to come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and busted?)...

All of these flaws have been well covered, so I won’t rehash them here. My focus is the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favorable” to bold climate action. On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face to face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of the planet. Why? Because the late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action in the name of liberating “free markets” in every aspect of life. Yet Rich makes no mention of this parallel upheaval in economic and political thought...

It was this convergence of historical trends — the emergence of a global architecture that was supposed to tackle climate change and the emergence of a much more powerful global architecture to liberate capital from all constraints — that derailed the momentum Rich rightly identifies. Because, as he notes repeatedly, meeting the challenge of climate change would have required imposing stiff regulations on polluters while investing in the public sphere to transform how we power our lives, live in cities, and move ourselves around.
All of this was possible in the ’80s and ’90s (it still is today) — but it would have demanded a head-on battle with the project of neoliberalism, which at that very time was waging war on the very idea of the public sphere (“There is no such thing as society,” Thatcher told us). Meanwhile, the free trade deals being signed in this period were busily making many sensible climate initiatives — like subsidizing and offering preferential treatment to local green industry and refusing many polluting projects like fracking and oil pipelines — illegal under international trade law.

I wrote a 500-page book about this collision between capitalism and the planet, and I won’t rehash the details here...

And the good news — and, yes, there is some — is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative — it’s our one and only planetary lifeline...

But simply blaming capitalism isn’t enough. It is absolutely true that the drive for endless growth and profits stands squarely opposed to the imperative for a rapid transition off fossil fuels. It is absolutely true that the global unleashing of the unbound form of capitalism known as neoliberalism in the ’80s and ’90s has been the single greatest contributor to a disastrous global emission spike in recent decades, as well as the single greatest obstacle to science-based climate action ever since governments began meeting to talk (and talk and talk) about lowering emissions. And it remains the biggest obstacle today, even in countries that market themselves as climate leaders, like Canada and France.
But we have to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has also been a disaster for the environment, as evidenced most dramatically by the fact that carbon emissions briefly plummeted when the economies of the former Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. And as I wrote in “This Changes Everything,” Venezuela’s petro-populism has continued this toxic tradition into the present day, with disastrous results.
Let’s acknowledge this fact, while also pointing out that countries with a strong democratic socialist tradition — like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay — have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all of life, appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival...

These candidates, whether or not they identify as democratic socialist, are rejecting the neoliberal centrism of the establishment Democratic Party, with its tepid “market-based solutions” to the ecological crisis, as well as Donald Trump’s all-out war on nature. And they are also presenting a concrete alternative to the undemocratic extractivist socialists of both the past and present. Perhaps most importantly, this new generation of leaders isn’t interested in scapegoating “humanity” for the greed and corruption of a tiny elite. It seeks instead to help humanity — particularly its most systematically unheard and uncounted members — to find their collective voice and power so they can stand up to that elite.
We aren’t losing earth — but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.

Good comments on Klein article at https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/links-8-4-18.html:

Saying “human nature is to blame for problem X not being solved” is to say that no one should be held accountable for their actions.
If Exxon and other companies knew two generations ago that the use of their products would result in global warming, and then covered up this knowledge, it wasn’t “human nature” that was to blame, it was their greed.
To say that this greed is the whole of human nature is a deliberate falsehood. It is human nature to want to protect one’s children. It is human nature to not want the place where you live to be ruined by climate change, or oil well leaks, or pipeline explosions. Naomi Campbell  Klein is correct to point this out. 

ANOTHER ADDENDUM:  My post at https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/08/trickle-down-economics-is-working-about-as-well-as-usual/#comment-4024228493 :

I've had some good discussions already on this thread. My conclusion is as follows:

There is broad agreement from the 2 wings of the left that we need more and better democracy, and more and better government management of the economy. The 2 wings see these options as social democracy and democratic socialism.

However the difference between the 2 wings is not as trivial as it might first appear. One group sees a need to get back on track -- i.e. to return to the USA policies of the 40s and 50s, and / or the policies of other democratic nations such as Japan, France, Germany, etc. The other wing sees the need to go beyond that, as we got to where we are now from where we were before, while problems such as climate change have only gotten worse in the meantime. I'm in the 2nd camp these days, but that is just an opinion and could be wrong, There is not much hard evidence to prove either wing correct, as I see it.

So we've got 2 wings, and both are for the most part legitimate and fact based. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. What labels should we attach to these 2 wings? To pretend that there is no difference is not helpful. Neither wing should be given a pejorative label, as both viewpoints are reasonable. Here are a couple of options:

1. Liberal -- believe in emphasizing tolerance and freedom, while helping those in need.
2. Progressive -- believe in fundamental changes to deal with environmental, equality, and related issues.

OR

1. Neo-liberal: Believe in enhancing the liberal model which abolished slavery, provided New Deal programs, and reduced discrimination based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
2. Democratic socialist: Believe in abolishing the stranglehold that the rich capitalists have on society, by getting the government to take over many functions previously reserved for rich capitalists.

My personal favorite at the moment is:

1. Social democrats: Want to strengthen the government role in society, while preserving and enhancing democratic laws and institutions.
2. Democratic socialists: Want to replace capitalism with a more communitarian society, while preserving and enhancing democratic laws and institutions.

It seems that these two views are similar enough that the 2 wings should be able to agree for the purpose of most general elections, while divergent enough to allow constructive debate regarding existential issues for humanity.

Post Script to Addendum:  Bernie actually took a social democratic line (advocating policies closer to social democratic nations such as the Nordic countries) in 2016 and was opposed by the more conservative wing of the Democratic party. I take this as a practical reaction as opposed to a more fundamental political philosophy.  Clinton tried to move to the left of Bernie in several areas (guns, race relations) and did not vigorously defend the capitalist status quo.

YET ANOTHER ADDENDUM:  Scott Alexander's review of Albion's Seed summarizes Puritan New England as follows:

In some ways the Puritans seem to have taken the classic dystopian bargain – give up all freedom and individuality and art, and you can have a perfect society without crime or violence or inequality. Fischer ends each of his chapters with a discussion of how the society thought of liberty, and the Puritans unsurprisingly thought of liberty as “ordered liberty” – the freedom of everything to tend to its correct place and stay there. They thought of it as a freedom from disruption – apparently FDR stole some of his “freedom from fear” stuff from early Puritan documents.

Puritan New England was a communitarian experiment. 

Philippines, Japan, Java

The Fates of Human Societies

I just got back from visiting the Philippines and Japan.  I've spent years in the Philippines, and the better part of a lifetime being in touch with Filipino people.  This was my first time in Japan, and only for 4 days.  Why did Japan create and maintain a strong national identity and independence and quickly adopt advanced technology, while countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia were subject to colonial domination and were slower to adopt advanced technology?  Here are some thoughts on this question.

Size and Population Density

Japan developed more quickly due to the fact that its few islands are large and close together.  The Philippines, by contrast, consists of dozens of large, inhabited islands that evolved independently (with separate languages, for example) before the Spanish arrived and proclaimed them to be a single country named after Philip II of Spain. 

Fringe vs Crossroads

Japan, like Great Britain on the other side of Eurasia, is close enough to major Eurasian centers of civilization to acquire advanced technologies as they became available, yet on the fringe and somewhat protected from conquest by the ocean.

Though, like Japan, Java supports a dense population on an island off the coast of Asia, Java was invaded by Hindus, Arabs, and then Europeans, never consolidating a single national identity until modern times (~ 1945).

North vs South

As discussed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, certain fundamental agricultural developments more easily spread within temperate as opposed to tropical climates.  Human societal evolution has probably been affected by other factors, with details beyond my knowledge, related to geographical area that may have led to the formation of stronger military and technology development in Japan.

Development

In this age of globalized economies (especially among English speaking countries like the Philippines) combined with advanced shipping and wireless communications (TV, Internet, etc), the Philippine islands are quickly attaining a cohesive national identity.  

Categorizing Things

A couple of new (?) categorization schemes have occurred to me recently.  I'll jot them down here to remember them.

Political Quadrants

A key to good government, in my opinion, is checks and balances.

Political Groupings

Conservative

Neo-Conservative

New-Liberal

Progressive