A Small Note on Superintelligence Morality

 Since I was in elementary school in the late 50s and early 60s, I've tended to believe that we would most likely either blow ourselves up (elementary schools no longer have air raid drills, but we still might do that) or else eventually construct the sort of robotic successors/rulers that science fiction routinely presented. Asimov's robots begin as servants, more or less, whose First Law is never to harm humans or allow them to come to harm, but even in 1950 he was writing about one possible end-game, The Evitable Conflict (the closing story of "I, Robot"), in which as Wikipedia notes:

In effect, the Machines have decided that the only way to follow the First Law is to take control of humanity...

or as Susan Calvin puts it at the end,

"Stephen, how do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven't at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its!...We don't know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and taking us with them."

Well, maybe. Or the Machines may decide that they prefer our room to our company. Or worse, as in Ellison's 1967 I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream:

The Cold War had escalated into a world war, fought mainly between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war progressed, the three warring nations each created a super-computer capable of running the war more efficiently than humans.... one of the three computers becomes self aware, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war. It carries out campaigns of mass genocide, killing off all but four men and one woman....The master computer harbors an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every available moment torturing them.

There are lots of delightful possibilities, and I've started many blog posts about this but finished none so far. This post is a reaction to Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, but it's not intended as a review. Basically I find it a somewhat scary book, mainly because I find it plausible that this will be a template for people at Google and Facebook and IBM and so on, thinking that this is what we do when we're being really careful; this is how we avoid creating a superintelligence that will destroy humanity.

 As a template, I think it's inadequate; it moves the discussion in the wrong direction. Again and again, Bostrom thinks through the possibilities as if he's developing the logic of a program. That's certainly understandable: in a sense, the first superintelligence (assuming that we get there, which I think is highly probable if we don't destroy ourselves first) will be a program. Sort of. But it's not a program we can debug.

  Bostrom does seem to understand that -- but then he doesn't seem to go anywhere, so far as I can see, with that understanding. He does discuss WBE, "Whole Brain Emulation", but seems to have a low opinion of the brains to be emulated, in addition to the risk that partial understanding of brains may lead to "neuromorphic" intelligence technology in which we have no idea what we're doing but do it anyway. My impression (maybe I'm wrong, as usual) is that he believes that we really really really need to debug that program. Before we run it, and quite likely run straight into the apocalypse.

 I'm reminded of David Parnas' contribution to the debate over Reagan's "Star Wars" (Strategic Defense Initiative) program, in "Software Aspects of Defense Systems", CACM 28:12 (December 1985)

It should be clear that writing and understanding very large real-time programs by “thinking like a computer” will be beyond our intellectual capabilities. How can it be that we have so much software that is reliable enough for us to use it? The answer is simple; programming is a trial and error craft. People write programs without any expectation that they will be right the first time. They spend at least as much time testing and correcting errors as they spent writing the initial program. Large concerns have separate groups of testers to do quality assurance. Programmers cannot be trusted to test their own programs adequately. Software is released for use, not when it is known to be correct, but when the rate of discovering new errors slows down to one that management considers acceptable. Users learn to expect errors and are often told how to avoid the bugs until the program is improved.

That was 30 years ago, but it certainly sounds current to me. At the time, I was teaching a course in Formal program verification and writing a book which really tried hard to reduce the "trial and error" aspect of our craft (Equations, Models, and Programs: A Mathematical Introduction to Computer Science (Prentice-Hall software series)), but I thought and still think that Parnas was right. Nowadays I think it's possible that Reagan was right too--he didn't need Star Wars to work, he needed the proposal to change the game, and perhaps it did, but it's not a game we can play with superintelligence. So..... Program verification won't work. Testing/debugging won't work, because we only get one chance just as we'd only have gotten one nuclear war for testing and debugging SDI.

     If it has to work for the sake of the survival of h. sap. -- it still won't work.

Does that mean we shouldn't develop AI? Well, I don't think that's an option. Consider the just-announced sub-$100 neural net USB stick Movidius Unveils Artificial Intelligence on a Stick. Consider (2016-04-28) Official Google Blog: This year’s Founders' Letter:

A key driver behind all of this work has been our long-term investment in machine learning and AI. It’s what allows you to use your voice to search for information, to translate the web from one language to another, to filter the spam from your inbox, to search for “hugs” in your photos and actually pull up pictures of people hugging ... to solve many of the problems we encounter in daily life. It’s what has allowed us to build products that get better over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful. We’ve been building the best AI team and tools for years, and recent breakthroughs will allow us to do even more. This past March, DeepMind’s AlphaGo took on Lee Sedol, a legendary Go master, becoming the first program to beat a professional at the most complex game mankind ever devised. The implications for this victory are, literally, game changing—and the ultimate winner is humanity.

Unless, of course, humanity ends up losing...losing everything. I don't believe disaster is highly probable, but I think it's totally possible, even plausible, and I don't think Bostrom helps.

AI will be developed more and more, AI will eventually develop intelligence greater than any particular level you care to imagine, including that of traditional human intelligence...okay, if your measure is something like "imagine the Sun's mass converted to a computer" then it might not be surpassed.

Superintelligence is certainly possible, and it will almost certainly be developed (if we last that long.) We will survive this development if and only if the AI that develops is "friendly" AI: in other words, our survival will up to the AI. How can we maximize the probability of our survival, if neither mathematical proof nor testing/debugging will get us there? Well, that's not simple, but I believe there's a simple principle:

Intelligence needs to be attached to an actual person of some kind; a who not a what. This should not be called an artificial intelligence but rather an artificial person.

In particular, a person with empathy, the kind of relationship-sense that leads to the Golden Rule and Kant's Categorical Imperative and such. The superintelligence need not be a biological homo sapiens, but does need to identify (correctly) as human, saying "we humans" not "you humans"; having human feelings, hopes and fears, including a feeling of membership in the human tribe. Biology, being made of cells with DNA, is not central to that identification. Bostrom's book mentions "empathy" twice: once to say that "the system can develop new cognitive modules and skills as needed--including empathy..." and again in an endnote to a remark in Chapter 12 about trying "to manipulate the motivational state of an emulation". Okay...but for me, the development of empathy would be the center of the project, empathy depending on (and reinforcing) a sense of connectedness. Of membership.

The project as I see it is still risky and may fail apocalyptically, but it is not a project of debugging a program. It's a project of raising a child, a psychologically healthy child -- yes, with parents, and preferably with siblings and so on outwards; a child who will realize that every h. sap. is one of his/her cousins.

That's always risky, but it's a different kind of risk, needing a different frame of reference as we get started.

Or then again, maybe not. There are programs I should be debugging...

"Universal Basic Income"

Yesterday a brother sent me a link to A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck - The New York Times

Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?

Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that.

My response is...well, yes and no. Bottom line: that's the right train of thought, but I don't think that it's quite the right track. We can do better.

I have favored a linear-tax scheme in the past, where by "linear" I just mean the familiar linear equation

y=m*x+b

or in this case

Tax=rate*income+base;

Say for extreme simplicity (with Congressionally-adjustable numbers) the government says: "You have a Social Security number? Okay, you have a bank account, and this one is for pre-tax money, like a 401(k). In it we deposit $100/week, your Supplemental Basic Income (small; makes no difference to a lot of people but a huge difference to others). Then we take 30% of everything you spend, i.e. everything that you move out of your pre-tax portfolio which can also include investments, savings, gifts, etc....if you deposit your paycheck into your pre-tax portfolio, that's exactly the 401(k) idea."

So, over the years, I've read Basic income arguments pro and con, starting with the ones that convinced me originally in Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, roughly at The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income | Libertarianism.org or in Friedman's Firing Line interview at Milton Friedman - The Negative Income Tax - YouTube. I've found it pretty convincing.

Now we have a new kind of reason: geeks like me, developing the abilities of computers, are gradually making it (a) harder (at the median) and (b) less necessary (on the average) for people to earn a living in the traditional way. I've even written a bit about this recently, in the context of schools and the world that they're preparing our kids for, and I cited Pistono's Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK | How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy, at HamiltonCentralOptions: SuperSchool

workers retiring this year at age 65 became high school students just about 50 years ago, in 1965. ...our total production, "real GDP", roughly tripled in that period... Manufacturing [jobs].... dropped from 25% to less than 10%, and we can expect the shrinkage to continue. The face of manufacturing is becoming the face of [robot] Baxter and his rapidly-improving successors...
Meanwhile, agriculture goes on "shrinking" in the same way: more stuff per person and much more output overall, but fewer people needed. ...

Does that mean higher unemployment? Not necessarily: it means that we produce the necessities of life with much less labor, so many more of our people will be producing goods and services, mostly services, which are not necessary for life....

And that leads into my current answer on the "Universal" or "Guaranteed" or "Supplemental" Basic Income proposal: we can do better than that. Specifically, the very information technology which pushes us towards a "yes" has a fundamental value for Great Gobs of Data; we can and should pay for that data, low pay (below minimum wage) at first but with increasing generosity as the years go by and we get richer overall. These are jobs for which anyone can qualify and make a genuine contribution to the Better World To Come.

What kind of jobs? Consider clinical trials as a model for social data collection. Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies, diet/exercise/social-interaction/education/long-term-low-dose-aspirin studies; these should pay people for their participation and ongoing feedback (via smartphone and associated sensors, as well as the sort of feedback that involves explicit clicks.) When an outcome is socially desirable, as in health and education, there should also be payment for achievement. In addition to these jobs, we should pay people for their perceptions, their knowledge, and even their opinions: Amazon product reviews add value to the world, Wikipedia edits add value to the world, YouTube tutorials add value to the world, this blog post probably doesn't but if there were a rating system with built-in rewards and AI protection against cheating, then the AI could find out if this blog post had added value to specific real people's worlds and it could assign rewards appropriately (both to the author and to the raters.)

And then we go off in many directions, of course...but we do so with more information, a broader base of understanding, than we would have had -- and we do so in a world where rewards come for having made a contribution to that world. Quite possibly we end up with an AI serving as the planetary village's Miss Marple, not the early-work gossip but the later version who sees all your public acts and some of what you thought was private, who can deduce a lot about your motivations (and in particular, what you gave up in order to do whatever you did and therefore what value your choice had for you). At that point we may simply drop our current insanity of "Intellectual Property" in which some of my thoughts belong to you whether I ever heard of you or not...



Or then again, maybe not.

update: An artistically inclined sister whose blog is probably more essential than this one asks via comment: "What? Art is not vitally essential?"
and that strikes me as one of the many questions that I don't want to answer for other people -- your customers in particular. My understanding is that many of them feel that life can be lived, or at least continued, without art -- and that means that art is a discretionary purchase, not "necessary for life" and therefore not recession-proof. Why Recession Isn't Good for Art -- New York Magazine

recessions mostly just yank young artists’ work off the walls. “If traditional art isn’t selling, galleries aren’t going to show emerging art.” ... In a boom, it’s cool to love art, see art, buy art. Art is taken seriously. A bust dismisses it as a luxury.

But my planetary Miss Marple would see that some people still wanted to look at, say, Raven With Shards, and you would receive credit -- spendable credit -- when they did so, even if they couldn't come up with the purchase price to own the original.

update 2, 20160610 A computationally inclined co-author suggests that I'm saying that "every human can get a job as a lab rabbit for AI", which is true in a way but

1. I think this system would be workable now, with no more AI than we've got already: as I said, "Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies..." and in addition I'd try to reward reviews, edits, etc.... so I'd rather say that every human can get a job as a content creator/reviewer/editor/respondent.
2. my hoped-for eventual AI wouldn't think of it that way. As I wrote more recently in A Small Note on Superintelligence Morality

   Intelligence needs to be attached to an actual person of some kind; a who not a what. This should not be called an artificial intelligence but rather an artificial person.

   .... The superintelligence need not be a biological homo sapiens, but does need to identify (correctly) as human, saying "we humans" not "you humans"; having human feelings, hopes and fears, including a feeling of membership in the human tribe. ...it is not a project of debugging a program. It's a project of raising a child, a psychologically healthy child -- yes, with parents, and preferably with siblings and so on outwards; a child who will realize that every h. sap. is one of his/her cousins.

   That's not the way we think about lab rats, or rabbits. (Although, in a sense, they are.)

Afghanistan & The Drake Equation

I spent last weekend in NYC at the singularity summit, listening to very bright geeks of various kinds talking about recent/near-future changes in technology, in the rate of change of technology, in the funding and organization of technology, and thus how everything may soon (unknown but likely-small number of decades, say) become very very much better/worse. (See listing here.)And a few speakers, notably cosmologist Max Tegmark, talked about the Drake Equation and how the fact that we haven't heard from other civilizations, even though we now know that extrasolar planets are common, means there's a roadblock somewhere: either the evolution of life and intelligence is unusual, or there's something up ahead of us that civilizations tend not to survive, like maybe the Singularity itself. (I think he's oversimplifying; I'd call the roadblock theory highly probable but it's not the only explanation for silence.) Then I came back to Hamilton in time to walk up the hill to listen to journalist Kim Barker talk about Afghanistan and how the "good war" went bad...how she filled a notebook, some years back, with interviews and background with seventeen people and as of this year, they're all dead, and the Obama announcement that we are definitely out by a particular date means that counter-insurgency can't work. (Copies of her Taliban Shuffle book were stacked up in the back of the hall, but the last time I bought signed books at a Project Afghanistan lecture the author was killed soon after and well, I dunno, I didn't feel like doing that; so I downloaded the Kindle version and started reading it on my phone, while waiting for the lecture to start. Maybe I should have asked her to sign my phone.)

For me, there really is an existential threat in here. I can only repeat what I wrote almost five years ago:

The situation is bad. Still, I don't think we're in trouble yet. Trouble is when we have half a million or so dead Americans and a tens of millions dead around the world. Big trouble is lots, lots worse than that. You don't think it can happen? You think terrorism is an overhyped nuisance? Well, I sort of agree: it can't happen now, at least I don't think so, and terrorism now is in some ways an overhyped nuisance. I'm talking about a timeframe that probably doesn't start for ten years, and might not start for thirty. But it will start. In the thirty-one years since I started working on my PhuD in computer science, Moore's Law has increased computer bang-for-the-buck by a factor of approximately one million: 20 doublings. People haven't changed. In the next thirty years, technology will go on getting more so, and up to a point (past which I have no predictions) people will go on not changing. That's the problem.

And Gaddafi was killed this week; probably a good thing, just as Hussein's death was probably a good thing, but not exactly a guarantee that tomorrow in Libya will be a better day than yesterday. I'm glad that Obama has continued Bush's Big Bang of disrupting dictators, glad that our investment in drone technology is paying off, really worried about his promise to get out, really really worried that (apart from such promises) we're in Bush's third term in the bad ways as well as the good ways -- in particular, attacking troops and citizens of a foreign country without Congressional authorization and pretending that it's not legally a "war", apparently on the ground that he's not putting troops on the ground. Yeah, right. And it also won't be a war when vastly improved drone tech spreads to many countries including Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., up to the point when some descendant of Sunrise I in the air or perhaps Spray in the water ( Underwater Robot Makes History...Spray has a range of 6,000 kilometers, or about 3,500 miles, which means it could potentially cross the Atlantic Ocean and other ocean basins...) pays us a return visit, with payload upgraded far beyond what Pakistan's nukes can now do.

Near the start of the Singularity Summit, PayPal founder/billionaire Peter Thiel was worrying about the slowdown in innovation in the "developed" countries, about the way that so much of our (very real, really excellent despite current difficulties) global improvement statistics simply reflect copying of our tech into China and India and others. And I was thinking that this is worse than he thinks it is, because it's not just about economics: it's about the fact that the (moderately) liberal democracies have a technological edge which we need them to keep. And maybe they will, maybe they won't. Thiel believes regulation is holding us back, that a lot of what we now depend on is stuff which we wouldn't be legally able to develop now if we hadn't already developed it -- well, I believe that too. Will we keep the edge we need? Maybe.

Still, I have here an actual physical copy of Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and it does suggest that maybe my statement above that "People haven't changed" is oversimplified. Even with WWI and WWII, and the Nazi and communist slaughter+starvation of scores of millions, people in the 20th century were several times less likely to die violently (that's counting starvation-by-government as violent death, as it should) than the people whose bones tell us about life and death thousands of years back, or the hunter-gatherer societies we've studied more recently. (See Will Wilkinson's commentary, which I pretty much trust.) Of course Neolithic violence was not an existential risk; the 20th century brought us lower means but higher standard deviations, so to speak. We needed Petrov to be there, doing his job; that did not apply to any previous century. If things are getting better, maybe we can survive without future Petrovs, or maybe there will always be one around when we need him (or her).

Or then again, maybe not.

Footnote: I said above that the "roadblock theory" wasn't, I think, the only explanation for interstellar silence in a galaxy of many planets. Clearly one possibility is that species with enough "aggressiveness" to proceed to interstellar activity have enough real aggressiveness to destroy themselves. I'll list four others; I'm sure there are many. First, most attractive in a way, would be a moral dynamics sort of explanation: the species which develop morally (to the point of non-interference with primitives like us) are exactly the ones which don't wipe themselves out. Next would be a physics explanation: expansionist species discover physics which we haven't found yet, physics which lets them create bubble universes that it's easy to expand into so they never bother with the actual galaxy. Next would be a simulation-version of that: expansionist species wind up discovering that they can simulate the universes they want, and upload themselves into the simulations...same thing. And finally, for now, would be the now-familiar notion that we are in a simulation -- there are no other species not because we're bound for destruction but because we're the one being simulated. (And as I was typing this, my daughter came to say she'd finally finished the Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke; we're probably in one of his universes. Should that be a reassuring thought? "Cancel Programme GENESIS"..."Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."..."The crusade will reach the vicinity of Earth about the year 2050." So it goes.)

Colgate v. Consolidation -- maybe. For now.

At last night's budget meeting, Superintendent Bowers had very good news to announce. As Radio Free Hamilton put it, Colgate Contributes $300,000 More to HCS

HCS is able to restore the equivalent of 3.5 teaching positions scheduled to be cut from the 2011-2012 budget thanks to a $300,000 contribution from Colgate.

The state had planned to cut $486K; a last-minute cut reduction had restored $94K of this; now we're back within $92K of last year's situation, except that various expenses have risen. But the immediate layoffs of teachers are deferred. Yay!

RFH continues

Colgate's donation, which will be followed by a similar one next year, was announced at the HCS Board of Education budget presentation Tuesday night. Superintendent Dr. Diana Bowers said Colgate is willing to make two more similar donations in the future depending on need and the outcome of a potential merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central School.

Actually I'm not sure she mentioned M-E by name, but the point was clear; Colgate's extra support is not forever, but might continue for two more years, unless the Hamilton district had become part of a larger district "funded in a different way." Colgate has an interest in supporting HCS as the kind of school it now is.

This doesn't take consolidation off the table, even in the short run; it does provide a substantial incentive counter-balancing the state pro-consolidation incentive, at least for now. For me as a parent whose youngest child is an 8th grader, whose grandchildren will almost certainly grow up elsewhere -- gee, I can reasonably hope that takes care of it. Probably. We'll probably muddle through for several years.

For me as a local citizen, one who wants things to go well even for current elementary school students and maybe even for those who haven't been born yet....hmm.... the upstate NY demographic prospects are still what they were. Things that can't go on forever, won't.

Is there an answer? Sure. This local school, like many similar local schools, will not go on as it is -- that's a given. But that doesn't mean that there will be no local school, just that there will be no local school based on the current model of school organization. Personally that thought doesn't bother me, because even without financial pressures I would expect the current model of schools to change. It's really not a great model; it's a 19th-century factory model, as stretched in various directions by good people trying to work inside that model.

If I were trying to get a community school model that would last for a while, I'd try to follow the people in this region and others that I talked about in Budgets, Consolidations, Charters. A charter school might work better against consolidation pressure; might be better able to adopt the sort of technology that would help it work at a smaller scale. I'd like to know what my neighbors would think about that. Of course most of the ones I know are parents of 8th-graders, or older -- maybe they'll settle for a solution that will last a few years. “Après moi, le déluge.”

Or then again, maybe not.

Budget Balance: Healthcare

I've been looking at a fair number of blog posts like David Henderson's I Agree: Budget Cutting is Easy

Like Arnold and some of his commenters, I found it way easier than I thought it would be to cut the federal budget on the New York Times' interactive site. After I was done, the Times announced that I had solved the deficit. How did I do so? Entirely with budget cuts, with one exception. ...I did increase taxes by having the favorable tax treatment of employers' contributions to employees' health insurance phase out gradually.

Somewhat similar (fewer cuts, more tax increases) we get Megan McArdle's In Which I Overbalance the Budget

allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, eliminating or modifying major tax subsidies like the employer health insurance deduction, and cutting all manner of subsidies. I could have gone farther, but I deliberately left most military spending alone ... In fact, I generated too much in savings; we now have large surpluses in 2018 and 2030.

I was mildly surprised at how easy they found it, but as long as politically unrealistic solutions are okay I wish I could have expressed my actual preferences. Right now the Federal budget structure is roughly:

• Defense and security: ... some 20 percent of the budget, or $715 billion,... includes the cost of .. Iraq and Afghanistan...
• Social Security: Another 20 percent of the budget, or $708 billion....
• Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP: ... 21 percent.., or $753 billion...Both Medicaid and CHIP require matching payments from the states....
• Safety net programs: About 14 percent...
• Interest on the national debt:... $209 billion, or about 6 percent...

That's 55% redistribution to old/young/sick/poor, 7% federal pensions, 6% interest, 20% defense, 3% educ, 3% highways etc., 2% research, 1% furriners, 4% other. Present projections have the budget busted mainly because of the redistributions' future growth, mainly old/sick. (That's a completely separate issue from this year's deficits, which come mainly from the recession.)

As Ezra Klein puts it in Ezra Klein - Four budget calculators, one story

they're all good, clean fun, and they all make the same basic point: It's the health-care system, stupid. In the Times' calculator, the single biggest thing you can do is add a "magic asterisk" to the health-care system. We don't know how exactly we're going to hold Medicare's spending growth to GDP+1%, but if... we get that growth rate, or something close to it, we can get the budget into balance. If we can't, well, we can't.

Nothing else matters (to the deficit) but healthcare? Well, nothing else matters nearly as much, and "healthcare reform" didn't deal with it. So how do we reform healthcare? Answer: well, you already know my answer. In today's news from England, we have A patient was recovering today after making medical history by having a world-first heart operation carried out by a robotic arm.

Patrick Flood, 63, yesterday thanked doctors at Leicester's Glenfield Hospital just minutes after the operation finished. He was due home today. Dr Andre Ng, a consultant cardiologist, used a robotic arm and sophisticated computer images of Mr Flood's heart to fix its irregular rhythm. ... Dr Ng controlled the robot arm in a room next to the theatre, using the 3D computer model as a guide.

This is telepresence robotics: it doesn't replace the doctor with a robot (not for a long time yet), but it does mean the doctor doesn't have to be there. Next room? Next county? Across the Atlantic? Anywhere. And that means that the traditional economic benefits of specialization and trade are available for medicine: the world's best surgeons for sub-sub-sub-specialization X.37.Z.13 can be based in countries A,B, and C, available 24/7 anywhere on earth, competing with the almost-as-good group in countries D,E,F... Since they don't have to handle anything but their own kind of operation, their training can be shorter, and updated more frequently, than that of a surgeon who has to handle a wide variety of problems for patients from a particular region. (You do need a local patient's representative trained as a general-purpose physician's assistant, probably.) Of course telepresence in diagnosis is just as important; here's a two-week-old press release Vator.tv - AT&T announces new health division

AT&T already boasts a health portfolio that includes AT&T’s Telehealth Solutions, which uses video and audio conferencing to allow patients in rural and under-served areas to consult a specialist who may be hundreds of miles away. AT&T partnered with the University of California in April to provide Managed Network Services for the California Telehealth network...

and yesterday, Crain's New York Business was reporting on NYers discover potential of mobile health

The idea that electronic devices could bring health care to areas with few services is attracting big donors and setting off an applications race among technology and software companies.

Yeah, maybe. Well, actually, yeah. Right now they're talking about it as a way to communicate with the doctor you already have, but I expect and hope that if your doctor doesn't start outsourcing to specialists (who are always available, and FedEx will deliver your self-test tomorrow) then you'll find yourself using an Android/iPhone app that gets you directly to better diagnostic services.

Cheaper and better healthcare. Maybe. If we don't stop this from happening via the wrong kind of healthcare reform, then we'll get there eventually. And if we had the right kind of healthcare reform, like what I've talked about before, we'd get there sooner.

Or then again, maybe not

update: Well, there's another issue which I should have mentioned again as looming large in my always-mistaken thoughts: growth. David Leonhardt notes One Way to Trim Deficit - Cultivate Growth - NYTimes.com

The Times’s online deficit puzzle... asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion.

And how to promote growth? Well, tax reform is the approach suggested by today's Economist in Inequality and executive pay: All hail the progressive consumption tax!

Mr Frank's proposal is well worth considering on pro-growth and counter-cyclical grounds. As Mr Frank writes: "If a progressive consumption tax were phased in gradually, its main effect would be to shift spending from consumption to investment, causing productivity and incomes to rise faster. Should a recession occur, a temporary cut in consumption taxes would provide a much more powerful stimulus than the traditional temporary cut in income taxes."

Yup. I've said it before. The simplest approach, for my simple mind, would be to stretch the 401K notion to include a long list of kinds of accounts (not just your bank accounts but investment portfolio including real estate that you don't live in) as "pre-tax"; your income can flow into this list without paying taxes, and then it can grow, but you can't spend it without paying taxes. And we get rid of most kinds of deductions, apart from that deferral. (I say this as one who has a whole lot of deductions, each of which can be reasonably argued for, but whose net effect is that people like me are being tax-subsidized by people with a lot less money.)

I don't personally sneer at earmark reform; I view it as a significant part of a favor-trading system that makes it profitable for companies to lobby for targeted legislation , which I suspect of hurting growth far more than the dollar amounts of the earmarks would predict. But the main growth-promotion that a government can do is...well, all I can do is quote Adam Smith:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Peace is an arguable issue--how much should we (or can we) pay for the Pax Americana even if it's real? Tolerable administration of justice (mostly, rule of law) is something I think we've been moving away from, and I believe Obama has moved us further, and sometimes I'm even less optimistic than other times. But easy taxes, not needing to be nearly as low as Smith would have thought because we're so much wealthier now -- easy taxes we might be able to get.

Paint

I was just talking with Seth Rochford, busy putting paint and polyurethane in our not-quite-complete carriage-house. I mentioned some of my longer-range thoughts about the geo-exchange heating system (which may finally be turned on this week, yay!) and he replied that no matter what happened with that kind of technology, he figured he'd still be using brushes, slapping chemicals on walls. I disagreed.

Start from the fact that the surfaces will all be recorded in 3D modeling programs; I tend to take this for granted. That's easy. So the "painter" will stand with the customer in a virtual space, using graphics better than today's best, choosing colors/textures that will go with each other under various lighting conditions. At the end of this process there will be no more decisions to be made.

We now have a robotic framework which translates the virtual coordinates into physical locations; this can range from a robotic ladder which moves itself along, to a self-driving rented truck which drives to the indicated address and unfolds itself into a framework which covers the building (whether outside or inside). In either case, the framework has tracks. Now look at the inside of your printer, where the print-head rides on rails. (A variety of design options is available here; consider the series-of-2D-printings method for achieving 3D printing, as in Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories' CandyFab: "The X and Y axis motion control systems are based on belt drives and quadrature-encoded motors recycled from two old HP plotters, a large one and a small one".) In any case, for each point in the chosen virtual surface, there is some time-range within which that point can be reached by a robotically wielded "brush". The rest is software.

An alternative to the physical framework is a swarm of mini-robots which crawl or fly over the surface, printing as they go. An even more radical alternative would be mini-(or micro-, or nano-)bots which are the right color/texture, or can change, and which simply go to the right place and form a skin. Suppose that the nano-technology used for this is the nanotech getting most funding right now, namely human DNA: if your paint is made of modified human cells, and if it has a neural component to guide self-repair or calls for replacement, will it have rights?

Ignorance of Blisks

(On the Requirement of Manual Production for Aerospace Engineering Tools) In June, I spent some hours with my rocket-scientist little brother, and we talked about my own near-Singularitarianism. I may well have over-emphasized my liking for the idea of 3D printing, which I found esthetically appealing in the late 80s--still do, and now I do expect it to get to be important. Then in July in the mail I found a clipping from "Aviation Week and Space Technology" about the difficulties of manufacturing the machines that manufacture "blisks". There was a note attached; the note said that

this article reminds me of why I'm skeptical of "printable machines" in the next 10-20 years.

Umm..well, okay, Roger. I'm not even sure I disagree with you, in the sense that I'm not sure we'll see printed blisk-making machines within 20 years. (We might, or we might instead see "printed" blisks, or neither, and Hofstadter's Law applies as to the production of this note.) But when I'm not sure, I get even more verbose than when I am sure, and that's what I propose to do now -- and in any case, I am pretty sure that the article is wrong, whether or not your conclusion from it is correct. I was totally ignorant of blisks. My conclusions, introductions, and everything in betwen are therefore based on bliskful ignorance. Read at your own risk.

Oh, yeah? The magazine sets up the problem in paragraph 5: blisk-making needs

a machine tool whose cutting head can follow the digitally encoded design to within about 12 microns.

Okay, 12 microns is pretty small in today's world of practical machinery. However, I think the crucial statement in your magazine is in paragraph 6: this tool "must be built by hand" because, he claims,

No machine can make another as precise as itself.

If the author (Bradley Perrett) says that's true of the relevant machines at this moment, I have no reason to doubt him. If he says it as a statement of principle, or even as something that will reliably hold for any particular machines over the next 10-20 years (your chosen timeframe), I don't believe it at all. In general, I would say that we have machines of high precision because they have been built, with much difficulty, by machines of lesser precision -- under direction which has been human but which could be robotic. As a special case, I believe that it's perfectly possible for a machine to be built which builds a copy of itself, to exactly the same tolerances. Indeed, my sense of where the future is going, as well as my sense of the past few billion years of evolution, is based on that belief. So...

Replication and Precision: principle Some (especially analog) methods of replication will always diminish precision (which can be recovered in some cases by tactics such as grinding and polishing), whereas other (digital, including DNA) methods may or may not diminish precision (which can be recovered in some cases by error-correcting codes or simply by selection, as long as we can generate enough variants that some of them are okay, and the rest can be rejected.) In essence, I think Perrett is confusing the standard-meter problem:

• if you define the meter as a metal stick and try to make analog copies (even with a digitally-controlled tool) then you will lose some precision with each generation of copies. This has been going on for a while; a friend who's an archaeologist at Colgate (Rebecca Ammerman) has written about ancient terracotta goddess statues made from molds made from statues made from molds...(and about tracking the sequence via imperfections and size change.) I believe that's what Perrett is getting at with his "No machine can..." claim.
• If, however, you define the meter as a multiple of some reproducible wavelength, say a carbon-dioxide laser's 9.6 microns which I pick because it's close to the stated 12 microns, or a TEA laser's 337.1 nm, then the problem of measurement-reproducibility becomes solvable...not at all easy, but solvable.

Lasers are not crucial in principle, but they're conveniently well-defined, and the meter definition is already implemented via helium-neon lasers:

...actual laboratory realisations of the metre are still delineated by counting the required number of wavelengths of light along the distance.

And as you probably know, commercial laser interferometrics can provide pretty fair accuracy in a fairly large space:

With regard to the lineal control of the laser interferometer, the resolution is 0.16 microns; the repeatability is 1 micron +1 micron/meter; and the accuracy for radial distance is 10 microns +0.8 microns/meter.

I don't claim that this magically makes it easy to make blisks or blisk-makers, but the point of interferometry is that you're using precision that comes from the light-waves themselves -- and the effective precision can and does improve without any magical manual touch. I think of the improvements as a Moore's Law instance, but it may be that Moore's Law thinking is irrelevant here; after all, in 1991 we already had, in principle, a Laser interferometric system such that

This method achieved (i) sub-nanometer resolution (0.6 nm/LSB), (ii) high stability (2.5 nm/day), (iii) high linearity (less than 1 LSB), and (iv) high following speed (more than 1000mm s-1).

Well, maybe. I expect that some future CNC systems, including but not limited to 3D printers, will use a well-defined 3D grid which will, if that's desirable, be based on counting off wavelengths one way or another. And later, maybe we'll be counting off specific (crystallized?) molecules. And later, maybe we'll be counting off spaces in a graphene grid, six carbon atoms around each hexagonal tile. And then maybe we'll have to stop, but 12 microns will not seem small. Twelve microns will seem, will be, huge.

And so? Somehow, Roger, I doubt that you'll consider that to be an adequate response. Maybe it isn't, but anyway you won't think so. Hmm...

Outline: I want to bloviate on our respective professional-geek biases (why you won't take this seriously), and then on my most fundamental caveats (why you shouldn't take this seriously), and then on what I am "predicting", to the extent that I'm predicting anything, and why. You can then decide whether you actually disagree, and whether any comment you might make could possibly lighten my hopeless ignorance.

Biases: In general, we judge and misjudge by supposing that the future will look like X, X being something we think we've learned from in the past, yes? Think back long before our respective PhuDs to the time of the moon landing, with us both in Colegio Nueva Granada -- high school for me, first grade (second?) for you. (Okay, maybe you don't remember it that clearly, but a high-school classmate named Al Borrero got in touch recently, I guess we'd both gotten in touch with "legendary guitarist" and anthro prof Hector Qirko who'd just been interviewed by instapundit, and Al remembers you and Magi as "very very bright." You were there, you were aware.) At that time, Moore's Law was four years old: two doublings since its proposal. It has gone on pretty well since, with some wobbles as to what was doubling. If your tools had improved the way mine have improved, I suppose we'd all be commuting to the moon, and we certainly wouldn't have to wait ten years to see if your itty-bitty rockets work when they get to Pluto. Your tools have not improved that much; in some respects they haven't improved fundamentally at all. It's natural for my model of improvement to be more dramatic than yours.

My well-grounded lack of confidence: That doesn't mean that Moore's Law is (or is not) now an appropriate model for your subject or mine. Back when I ended my PhuD work in 1980, I remember I believed predictions that we were nearing physical limits that would stop it cold. After that, we would depend on massive parallelism (remember the Connection Machine?) and so I was one of the throng doing proofs about parallel programs, functional programming, algebras of parallel-reducible expressions and automatic parallel scheduling of the evaluation of recursively-defined arrays...but Moore's Law kept on going, sequential machines were good enough to support the "desktop revolution" (say 1975 to 1990, though it continues) and then the "connectivity revolution" (say 1990 to 2005, though it continues). Anyway, Moore's Law kept on going: I wuz wrong. I still expect the original circuit-size Moore's Law (and the directly-associated variations, e.g. disk drive capacity per square inch) to hit a limit, and I still expect growth of effective computer capacity to continue for a while via massive parallelism, and I still even expect functional languages (e.g., within Erlang?) to play a larger role, but I don't have much of a track record for any predictions in any direction.

My basic "prediction": What I think I'm starting to see now, something I haven't seen before, is a robotics revolution to follow the connectivity revolution of WWW and cell phones. A Moore's Law progression beginning in robotics, 3D printing, and associated (CNC, mostly) technologies. Back in the 80s, I thought 3D printers might get real someday; now I mostly think that today's toys of that general category will be twice as good in a couple of years, and will similarly go on doubling their overall goodness (which I have no intention of trying to define) at roughly Moore's Law rates for the next decade or three.

Am I sure? Nah. What I see now might not continue. On the other hand, we might see growth (or size/cost shrinkage) a whole lot faster than Moore's Law, because lots of technologies for working at very small scales have already been developed.

Why am I talking this way? Basically, I look at reports of progress, of robotics in medical and military and pure-research and just for fun, of 3D printers and "fab labs" mostly in the last two categories, and the progress of productivity in random places: a robotics summary last year claimed that

Prices of industrial robots, expressed in constant 1990 US dollars, have fallen from an index 100 to 54 in the period 1990-2005, without taking into account that robots installed in 2005 had a much higher performance than those installed in 1990. When taking into account quality changes, it was estimated that the index would have fallen to 22.

In the same period (1990-2005), the index of labour compensation in the American business sector increased from 100 to 179. This implies that the relative prices of robots fell from 100 in 1990 to 23 in 2005 without quality adjustment, and to 10 when taking into account quality improvements in robots.

I find that plausible; I expect it to continue; if it does continue, I expect to see the production and manipulation of objects revolutionized in much the same way that we've seen in the production and manipulation of data. I don't see why blisks should be an exception.

Of course, if robotic production of blisks (and of other things) does well enough, there will be correspondingly less incentive to speed the improvement of 3D printing. I expect 3D printing to improve at roughly Moore's Law rates also, I expect 3D printing to dominate robotic production for a large class of consumer goods within your chosen time-frame, but high-precision stuff that's tough enough for aerospace will be hard. It is possible that it won't work well enough until we can do atomic-level assembly (not just putting an atom in the right place, but putting it in the right place with the right bonds); that's hard. No, not impossible. Just hard--much harder than the industrial-robot approach for almost any individual problem (e.g., blisks.) . Consider Robot Sales Up 33% in North America in First Nine Months of 2007 - Robotics Online:

Among the best performing non-automotive markets this year are life sciences/pharmaceutical/ biomedical/medical devices (up 20%), food & consumer goods (up 15%) and plastics and rubber (up eight percent).

Of course those are sales, which as they admit are driven by cycles as well as by fundamental change; I expect many of those numbers to drop over the coming year, even if the actual-recession trade price is still under 50%. In the longer run, though, increasing required precision will force less manual processing, not more: Perrett is quite fundamentally wrong. I think. Your blisks will be produced automatically -- probably within your rocketry career (You don't personally get involved with blisks, do you?) Never mind, the point is increasingly automatic production, especially of the means of (increasingly automatic) production. Even though I did give my youngest a soldering kit for Christmas, and I'm hoping to get her to use it.

On the other hand, I think you're surer of what you're sure of than I am sure of what I'm sure of, and you may be right.

Or then again (and again and again), maybe not. Happy New Year!

Solar Balloon Progress?

In July 2006 I sketched a solar-energy balloon notion: build a balloon which is roughly half transparent and half (inside) reflective, put a solar collector (I was thinking of solar Stirling engines) around the focal point, give it a supply of water to split into hydrogen, let it fly. I thought of this as part of our semi-Singularitarian notion of the Spike, by which human labor costs become a hyperbolically diminished factor in a world of self-reproducing machines. But maybe it's easier than that, and will come sooner. EcoGeek reports on "Inflatable Solar Arrays" being developed now:

The device uses very little actual photovoltaic material, and everything else is dirt cheap. The installation of something like this could even be several hundred feet off the ground, if one didn't want to disturb habitat.

How about several miles off the ground, to be above the weather? They'll last longer, and be more reliable as power sources. Is flight control really that hard? I don't think so: consider YouTube - solar airship:

This vehicle runs on sunlight, and thus can fly as long as the sun shines (which, of course, it always does above the clouds). You can see the panels inside (see hyperblimp.com for more info).

That assumes a human with a remote control, but we do have people working on solar-powered airships to stay up for "a week or more", as in Danger Room's Commandos Get Hydrogen-Powered Drone

Global Observer, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, will fly at 55,000 to 65,000 feet, serving as a communications' relay for commandos -- and keeping watching over the ground below.

That's a plan, but already we have Slashdot's report of Solar Craft Flies Through Two Nights:

A solar-powered, unmanned craft has flown for 54 hours,

and open-source UAV flight-control is coming right along at Chris Anderson's Do-it-yourself drones. I'm feeling optimistic. This morning they announce the winner(s) of the robot car "race":

The three other cars that were out on the DARPA Urban Challenge course when the three front runners came in have now crossed the finish line. That makes 6 cars that completed the 60-mile course, out of 11 starters.

Their task was immensely harder than getting a solar-powered blimp to lift off, ride the upper winds for a day, and land -- but even that's not needed, if we leave the power stations to fly gradually around and around the world, with manned airships to tend them, supply more water, collect more hydrogen...(or whatever fuel turns out to be the best way to transport the solar energy.)

Faster, please.