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...

A Principle, a Position, and Part of a Plan: Sustainable Open-Source Pocket Neighborhoods

The principle is simple:

 The key to a sustainable society is recycled pee. 

Think about it. Well, if you'd rather not think about it, look for an authority figure: this morning's Tech Times quotes a "NASA plant physiologist" in Space Spuds: NASA Grows Potatoes On Mars-like Peruvian Soil:

If the soil on Mars cannot cultivate the spuds, Wheeler said that it could still be produced by hydroponics and aeroponics, with fertilizers coming from inedible plants and urine.

Okay, so that makes it a universal truth, right? So think about it --- still not ready to think about it? I admit there's a yuk-factor in the way. Okay, sing about it, to the tune of Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball":

You waste away your NPK - and I’m
about to do the same
My pee saved up for just 12 months could grow
600 pounds of grain

Now are you ready to think about it? Really it's kind of obvious: the stuff in soil that plants need, mostly put there in the form of fertilizer, can wash away downriver, or it can wind up in your kitchen garbage/compost, or it can get into your stomach. Once in your stomach, it's absorbed by your body -- or not. If it isn't absorbed, it comes out as poop, which certainly has a fairly high nutrient value for plants, just like cow or horse manure. That's worth saving, you may well want to grow more plants with the same nutrients, but the goal of the whole exercise is to have some nutrients get absorbed by you. All of those eventually come out as pee, unless you carry them with you to the cemetery. So....if you want a closed loop, if you want a sustainable society, you have to recycle that pee.

I admit that I was surprised by this when I first started seeing references to it a few weeks ago (I was Googling for material on topsoil and groundwater depletion). I found things like this: Fertilizing with human urine

Our urine contains significant levels of nitrogen, as well as phosphorous and potassium (typically an N-P-K ratio around 11 – 1 – 2.5, similar to commercial fertilizers). Americans produce about 90 million gallons of urine a day, containing about 7 million pounds of nitrogen. Studies conducted in Sweden (Sundberg, 1995; Drangert, 1997) show that an adult’s urine contains enough nutrients to fertilize 50-100% of the crops needed to feed one adult...

Peecycling will fertilize the green roofs of Amsterdam

Plants need phosphorus, and we are running out of the stuff; some say we will reach peak phosphorus by 2030. That's we should [be] recycling urine, to recover the phosphorus in it instead of flushing it away.

For more complete micronutrient content, maybe add wood ash to the urine: "P" is for plants: Human urine plus ash equals tomato fertilizer, study says - Scientific American Blog Network

both urine-based fertilizers roughly quadrupled fruit production when compared to unfertilized control plants. The researchers estimate that the product of a single individual's micturition could fertilize 6,300 tomato plants a year, yielding more than two tons of fruit.

The addition of ash did confer some benefits—those plants were larger and grew fruit with significantly higher magnesium and potassium content.

But mostly it's all about pee. Collection and Use of Urine:

When most people think of creating fertilizer from animal waste, they think of manure. Composted cow manure, for example, is widely sold in garden centers. But there are actually far more nutrients in urine than in fecal matter.

In human waste, 88% of the nitrogen is contained in the urine, along with 66% of the phosphorous, according to Swedish research (see table at end of blog), while nearly all of the hazards — including bacterial pathogens — are contained in the fecal matter.

The idea that the Rich Earth Institute has been advancing for the past several years is to collect human urine, sanitize that urine to kill any bacteria that may be in it (from urinary tract infections, for example, or fecal contamination), and then apply it on fields as a fertilizer.

 (The Rich Earth Institute is also reported here, and many other places.)

Sanitize? Bacteria? Do we have to boil the pee or something? No...urine is not reliably perfectly sterile, but it's not a poop kind of problem. Depending on context, recommendations vary between "don't worry about it" and "keep it in a sealed container, undiluted, for a while before using", as in Urine Storage:

Extended storage is the simplest, cheapest and most common method to treat urine with the aim of pathogen kill and nutrients recovery. Pathogen removal is achieved by a combination of the rise in pH and ammonium concentrations, high temperature and time. Recommended storage time at temperatures of 4 to 20°C varies between one to six months for large-scale systems depending on the risk for cross-contamination (e.g. user habits, maintenance) and the type of crop to be fertilised.....
...If a family uses its own urine, the risk of disease transmission via fertilisation and crops is very low — the risk that diseases are transmitted directly, e.g. by handshaking, coughing or by improper hygiene behaviours is much higher.

And in practical terms, How To Use Pee In Your Garden | Northwest Edible Life:

2. Dilution is The Solution
*Dilute fresh urine at a 4:1 ratio and apply to the root-zone of corn every two weeks or as needed....
*Dilute fresh urine at a 10:1 ratio and apply to the root-zone of fruiting plants like tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, or to leafy crops like cabbage, broccoli, spinach and lettuce every two weeks or as needed.
*Dilute fresh urine at a 20:1 ratio and water in to the root zone of seedlings and new transplants.

In terms of sustainability, our current plumbing standards are insane: we take easy-to-process-and-use graywater from shower and sink, we take easy-to-process-and-use-pee, we take harder-to-process poop, we take very-hard-to-process contaminated (e.g. with heavy metals) water from street and factory, and then we mix them all together to make it almost impossible to process any of them and very hard to use the resulting "sewage sludge" safely. And of course when things go wrong, which they rather often do, the yuk factor enters into it anyway: "flush and forget" is then a failure.

That's the Principle. What's the Position? Do we really have to worry about this? Really, I'm not sure. We live in a world of exponential growth, more and more people with more and more Stuff per person, and it's a finite world so that growth will end. QED, sure, but that doesn't mean it will end by bumping into a resource limit. Consider:

   We may run out of topsoil or groundwater or oil or copper or phosphate, yup, all of these are resources which we're depleting: they are input limits. Or...
  We may drown in our own sewage, smother in our air pollution or be crushed by toppling towers of overloaded landfills: those are output limits. Or...
  We may not reach that point: we may all die in a nuclear war or from CRISPR-based bioterrorism or from a "natural" global pandemic or a Carrington Event (a solar disturbance that could have hit in 2012 but the Sun wasn't aiming for us that time, but it might wipe out the power grid to the extent that we can no longer distribute fossil fuels or food or ourselves, as the cities turn into charnel houses)...there are lots of possible ends to exponential growth. The one I think most about is that

  We may develop self-reproducing robotic factories, with or without more-than-human intelligence, which will offer us a chance for immense wealth for everybody..but which may simply wipe out the human race, instead. If I start in about that, which (apart from nuclear war) has been the primary driver for most of my thinking about the future since, umm, junior high school fifty years ago, I won't write about anything else, so I'll stop that one right here. There's still one left, a big one:

  We may find that exponential growth ends as per conventional economics, simply because we are in a "post-scarcity economy" where people have more Stuff than they really want and Stuff ceases to be an ego boost. An economy where for the first time in history (and pre-history), more people are obese than emaciated -- hey, didn't I just read ... yeah.. A world in which population has been levelling off, not because of the Four Horsemen but because more-educated women with more life choices are choosing ... "not yet". Or not at all, or at least not many. A world in which the "Sharing Economy" has been taking off -- more and more people don't want more Stuff. They'd like to travel abroad and play videogames (or read on their Kindles, without piles of physical books) at home, and in between they don't even want to own cars--better to take Uber or Lyft to the latest movie or concert. If I'm right about this (please remember the name of this blog) then we are not really faced with an exponential growth situation, not if we don't get recursive robotics. We're just faced with a transition to be managed, over the next several decades. And if the Sun spits our way or if we all get sick and die or if we blow each other to bits or if we do find that somebody adds a Superintelligence to the mix, then no other factors really matter, but if not -- it would be good to have a plan.

So, I claimed in the title to have Part of a Plan, and I gave it a complicated name: "Sustainable Open-Source Pocket Neighborhoods." Pocket Neighborhoods? Yes, Pocket neighborhoods:

a grouping of smaller residences, often around a courtyard or common garden...reducing or segregating parking and roadways, the use of shared communal areas ... homes with smaller square footage built in close proximity...

The idea is that we can reduce resource usage, reduce waste, reduce Stuff, all by designing neighborhoods that will make it easier to share the Stuff that's actually needed, so that houses can shrink -- it's not rocket science. We need sustainable individual houses, but they don't Share so well. We really need sustainable cities, but we don't yet know how to begin. Pocket neighborhoods are at a scale where sharing/shrinkage can have environmental impact, and we can experiment. Different groups can do it different ways, each making their own mistakes from which other groups learn. And this will appeal to

• people who worry about resource usage on principle, and also to
• people who worry about waste in principle (often the same people), and to
• people who just like the idea of sharing more, and also to
• people who just don't like having Stuff dominate their lives, and want to live simply at home (and perhaps travel more, maybe Airbnb-style to other connected pocket neighborhoods), and finally to
• people who need to live on less -- e.g., retirees badly hurt by the 2008--9 "Great Recession" and our far-from-complete recovery.

A few months back I went to the local library, where a few friends and a couple of architects were talking about their plan to construct and live in a pocket neighborhood around here; it ended up being a very crowded meeting room because representatives of all those groups heard about the idea and thought -- hey, is there room for me in there? And the answer was "no", of course; this is a small project for a few people. But the markets are there: all these groups of people exist. Or so it seems to me.
  If  I were more concerned about sustainability than superintelligence (I'm not, but I'm glad some people are) and if I had a few hundred million to put into the problem (sigh)... then I'd be trying to construct a network of clusters of pocket neighborhoods. A pocket neighborhood is 10-20 small (or tiny) houses on a few acres; a cluster is 10-20 such neighborhoods on 100 acres or so. I'd be paying a bunch of architects, furniture designers, and even appliance designers for designs, to be open-sourced with a GPL-style license (you can use it, you can experiment with it, you can change it, but if you change it you have to put the new design back into the pool on the same terms). The basic parameters of the designs would of course be about sharing, local food production, peecycling... but also about low-resource-use = low-budget, and (as TreeHugger.com keeps mentioning in the tiny-house context) about the potential use of our immense shipping-container infrastructure to enable particular unit sizes to be designed around, e.g. by the furniture designers. And I'd be paying other people to try to design organizational frameworks to help people avoid stepping on each other's toes -- it's very easy for sharing to end in mutual annoyance. And I'd be paying other people to start out some actual clusters...

And I was going to write an even longer post about a specific sample design that I had fun thinking through, but somehow that sort of post never works out for me. Not sure why, but it might be because they grow exponentially and my energy is a very finite resource. I'll stop here.

Or then again, maybe not....

On Trading Liberty [?] for Security

A more-conservative-than-I (except when he's more-progressive-than-I) co-author, whose opinion I respect, agrees with The Solitary Leaker - NYTimes.com

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things...

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

Wow. And also...hmmm..... Well, I'm not going to take the time to think seriously about this, but I will note things I've seen lately, such as the Economist's Surveillance: Should the government know less than Google?

LET'S get the most contentious point out of the way first: Edward Snowden made the right call to make public the extent of the National Security Administration's surveillance of electronic communications. The American people can now have a debate about whether or not they consent to that level of surveillance in order to prevent terrorist attacks, a debate that we were previously denied by the government's unwillingness to disclose even the broad outlines of what the NSA was doing. There may be some slight risk that knowing more about the breadth of NSA surveillance will lead terrorists to take better precautions in concealing their communications. But that risk seems manageable, and is of far less importance than the ability of Americans, and the rest of the world for that matter, to finally have an honest discussion about how much we think our governments should be able to see of our online behaviour.

So how much access should governments have?...

I don't entirely agree with that, in that what we're supposed to have is a representative democracy in which things can legitimately be kept secret from us by our elected representatives, as long as there's a Constitutional justification for it. But mostly I agree and I think that's moot at the moment anyway because that's obviously not what was happening either, even if it should have been. Sooo....Then I would want to think about Bruce Schneier's Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers

The U.S. government is on a secrecy binge. It overclassifies more information than ever. And we learn, again and again, that our government regularly classifies things not because they need to be secret, but because their release would be embarrassing.

Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're living in a police state.

We need whistle-blowers.

And mostly, with some reservations, I would agree with that, too. And I would want to consider Arnold Kling's Comments on NSA Snooping

5. The issue is an uncomfortable one for libertarians, because I think that most people believe that the government is snooping in their interest. The majority may even be right about that. I myself have less of a problem with the snooping per se than with the secrecy of the programs. In my view, it is the secrecy, along with an absence of strong institutional checks, that is bound to lead to abuse. ... ... ...

Maybe the key point is (5). Government officials will argue that what they do must remain secret. They cherish secrecy. They claim that it is for our own good that we do not know what they do. I would say that such claims are often made and rarely true.

How shall we decide between the views? Well, I would look at the data, including the video 'Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?'. That looks like a very straightforward question, with verbal emphasis on "any" and "at all"...the question received a straightforward answer from NSA Director Clapper. At the moment, my understanding (reinforced by Clapper's later statement on what he really meant) is that the answer was a simple and straightforward lie. The White House said White House: Clapper was ‘straight and direct’ in testimony on NSA:

As a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden had been briefed on the NSA programs, but publicly led Clapper in a line of questioning that would either require him to disavow knowledge of the program, or to answer truthfully, breaking the law by revealing classified information....

“So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer”...

Clapper sought to clarify his remarks on Monday, telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that he meant to convey that the NSA doesn’t “voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' emails.”

If that's what he meant to convey by that answer to that question, well...ummmm....no. Sorry, I do not believe him at all.

Like Kling, I'm worried about secrecy rather than by intrusiveness: about "the secrecy, along with an absence of strong institutional checks, that is bound to lead to abuse." If I were inventing a government for the information age, it would have much more liberty and less privacy than our current government...and there would be no long-term privacy for anything done with public funds, because most public employees are almost certainly Good People but we know that Good People sometimes do Bad Things to The Enemy, which dishearteningly turns out to simply mean the Other, all too often. And of course there are always the two-legged cockroaches, but I believe them to be a smaller problem. Conservatives and Progressives and Libertarians are all too trusting...they trust different people for different things, but actually nobody is fully trustworthy even if almost everybody is moderately trustworthy. The Constitution is all about not trusting anybody completely. (Today I'm more of a Classical Liberal. It's Tuesday.)

What I see, in the context of Clapper's straightforward response to a straightforward question (from a member of the intelligence committee which has the responsibility of oversight), is a breakdown of the Constitutional relationship between the executive and legislative branches. Perhaps that breakdown indicates a basic inadequacy of the Constitution. Perhaps it  indicates Executive overreach. Perhaps it merely indicates a personal felony on Clapper's part, or even on Wyden's (if he had prior knowledge of the system, presumably that was under some non-disclosure oath.) In any case, the breakdown looks to me like it's real. and if Snowden actually cares about the Constitution, then he should have done exactly what he did even if he personally approved of the NSA data collection...process is more fundamental than outcomes.


Or then again, maybe not.


Updates:
(1) I should also note, I suppose, that I still consider terrorism to be an over-hyped nuisance in the short run but an existential threat in the long run. That naturally changes my perception of the conversation we ought to be having.
(2) My remark about two-legged cockroaches was probably unclear; I think any time you create a "public" position and say "we'll fill it with someone trustworthy and trust that person without watching what they do," whether priest or politician or policeman or prosecutor, you are creating an incentive for would-be abusers to seek that position; you are building a feeding station for cockroaches. John 3:20, and that's all I have to say about it because I actually think people who think they're doing Good are far more dangerous.
(3) We live in Ham Sandwich Nation, a world of so many laws that everybody is violating something (and ignorance of which law is no excuse), where a prosecutor (with personal legal immunity) can prosecute almost anybody for something -- and I expect our data collection to expand from just-for-foreign-terrorism to just-for-terrorism to anything-involving-children to... Well, that's pretty much anything. So it's the prosecutor's personal choice: figure out who is Bad, and then look up what they're violating.


But then again, maybe it just magically won't happen.

update 2A more blunt view of the effects of Ham Sandwich Nation, at interfluidity » Tradeoffs

The stupidest framing of the controversy over ubiquitous surveillance is that it reflects a trade-off between “security” and “privacy”. We are putting in jeopardy values much, much more important than “privacy”.



The value we are trading away, under the surveillance programs as presently constituted, are quality of governance. This is not a debate about privacy. It is a debate about corruption.

update 3Arnold Kling notes No One is Innocent

I broke the law yesterday and again today and I will probably break the law tomorrow. Don’t mistake me, I have done nothing wrong. I don’t even know what laws I have broken. Nevertheless, I am reasonably confident that I have broken some laws, rules, or regulations recently because its hard for anyone to live today without breaking the law. Doubt me? Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison.


Harvey Silverglate argues that a typical American commits three felonies a day. I think that number is too high but it is easy to violate the law without intent or knowledge.

Of course that means that we go back from government-of-laws to government-of-men, specifically whoever influences a prosecutor's discretion.
I don't think we can fix this by avoiding surveillance, but maybe as a short-run palliative we should hinder surveillance somewhat. In the long run we have to fix the law.


Or then again, maybe not.

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.)

Two Hundred Trillion Dollars

There are some silly songs on Youtube about the $46,000 debt we're giving each new child at birth; the songs are supposed to make you feel guilty about what we're doing to our children, and I think they're supposed to energize you against the debt-ceiling rise and for the balanced budget amendment. Well, the debt ceiling is stupid, and the balanced budget amendment is a really bad idea, and $46,000 is a ludicrous figure; the correct figure, the figure that the average kid needs to pay (or pay interest on, or pass on with accrued interest to the next generation,) is probably well over half a million. Nobody can know exactly; it depends on future growth of expenses and revenues and population, but $46,000 is a very small fraction of the total.

In April 2010, after the health-care bill's passage, I wrote a "One Hundred Trillion Dollars" context post in which I quoted the Dallas Fed:

Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and it comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon. Traditional Medicare composes about 69 percent, the new drug benefit roughly 17 percent and Social Security the remaining 14 percent. ... all we would have to do to fully fund our nation’s entitlement programs would be to cut discretionary spending by 97 percent....defense and national security, education, the environment ... All of them [forever]

Today I noticed on Yahoo a more up-to-date and more complete and therefore more scary view of the same concept, from BusinessWeek, in Why the Debt Crisis Is Even Worse Than You Think:

A more revealing calculation is the CBO’s measurement of what’s called the fiscal gap. That figure is conceptually cleaner than the national debt—and consequently more alarming. Boston University’s Kotlikoff has extended the agency’s analysis from 2085 out to the infinite horizon, which he says is the only method that’s invulnerable to the frame-of-reference problem. It’s an approach used by actuaries to make sure that a pension system doesn’t contain an instability that will manifest itself just past the last year studied. Years far in the future carry very little weight, converging toward zero, because they are discounted by the time value of money. Even so, Kotlikoff concluded that the fiscal gap—i.e., the net present value of all future expenses minus all future revenue—amounts to $211 trillion.

How does that work? Well, let's think about the Smith family and the Jones family, each expecting the same future expenses spread out over time. Joe Jones intends to pay as he goes; he hasn't borrowed anything. Sam Smith has borrowed enough money from a bank to fund an investment account which will pay exactly the same expenses. In fact, aside from the issue of bank profit, he had to borrow exactly the net present value of those future expenses. (He has a triple-A rating, of course. For now.) You can think of various ways that they're in different situations, but the Smith and Jones families are basically comparable: the payments on Smith's loan will not over time be appreciably different from Jones' direct expenses. So we can think of both of them as having the same financial future: if one is in trouble, they both are. And right now, the US has the same financial future as if it had made no unfunded promises but had borrowed a grand total of $211,000,000,000,000.00. So far.

Is that exact? No, of course not. Things might not be quite that bad, they could be even worse: as the article says, the calculation is quite sensitive to assumptions about future events and policy. But it's accurate enough to say that the "debt" is not what we should worry about; we should worry about the "fiscal gap".

Of course, if you worry about the debt, then it makes sense to talk about the deficit: $850 billion dollars last year. What if you're worried about the fiscal gap? Does the deficit become irrelevant? Yes, really; as Kotlikoff says:

The gap was $205 trillion last year, measured in today’s dollars. That’s an increase of $6 trillion. ... Hence, the real deficit we should be worrying about is more than six times larger than the $850 billion official deficit capturing all the attention.

In other words, Congress and the president’s administration could agree to run a balanced budget, making this year’s official deficit zero, and the nation’s true indebtedness would still rise by $5.15 trillion!... the main reason is that we are one year closer to having to pay 78 million baby boomers roughly $40,000, on average, per year in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Because the fiscal gap is a discounted present value, one year makes a big difference.

If you think back to the Smith and Jones family, and imagine the fiscal gap as an implicit debt, then the $5 trillion is mainly the result of our failure to pay even the interest on the $206 trillion we owed last year -- we do have a really good interest rate as long as we keep the AAA rating, but it's not zero.

So, should we balance the budget anyway, even if it's inadequate to do so? No -- not in years with high unemployment. I'd agree with Calculated Risk: Debt Ceiling Update

A politician can say "We should have a balanced budget". It sounds good, but why aren't they challenged about operating vs. capital budgets? And about business cycle spending (obviously revenue falls during a recession - and spending increases)?

What they really want is a balanced operating budget over the business cycle. You can't put that in the Constitution. It requires effective government and constant vigilance.

But even capital vs. operating budget doesn't quite do it for me: I want the fiscal gap, over the business cycle, to remain a limited multiple of GDP. Fifteen times GDP? Okay, fifteen times GDP. (It would be nice to shrink it.) But don't let it keep growing (as a multiple of GDP) from one business-cycle peak to the next.

And with all that, should my taxes be raised? Yes, emphatically so -- my taxes should be raised as part of a plan to deal with the fiscal gap. I can and should pay more taxes than most people; that part's understood. I'm not in Kerry's league for lifetime income, not even in Obama's, but I can pay more taxes than I do -- it won't even cut my consumption until taxes get quite a lot higher. What I don't think most raise-taxes people understand is that even though a fairly substantial tax hike won't be a "hardship", won't seriously cut my consumption, it will cut my reinvestment. It has to. So it will reduce the money available to future generations of taxers; in fact a dollar of tax revenue increase now is somewhat more than a dollar of tax revenue decrease later, because you'll have spent the money before it grew. So it's crucial, when you take my money, to take it as part of a plan to deal with the fiscal gap--otherwise the gap grows and you've taken some of the resources we'll need to deal with it. (I tried to go over this in the aforelinked One Hundred Trillion Dollars post.) In any case, if you actually want to fix things, focus on consumption, not income. (I'll still pay more than average, I promise.)

And is it hopeless? Not at all. We still see, e.g. Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years. We still see Sarcos Exoskeleton Bringing Iron Man Suit Closer To Reality and the beautiful Watch Festo's SmartBird Robot Soar Over TED Conference. We still see Loss of memory due to aging may be reversible and, for young and old, How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education. We may even see Could 100 Kilometer high towers usher in the next space age?

The SpaceShaft concept isn't as ambitious as the space elevator but it is much more feasible. For 130 million Euros we could design and construct a 100 kilometer tall SpaceShaft within a decade. Once we have SpaceShafts up and running, the frontier of space will finally be open to humanity.

Or then again.... maybe not.

update: Fixed silly typo which had billions instead of trillions.

It's all about healthcare. Well, and signaling.

This afternoon I was sitting in the third row, right behind the woman who placed the winning bid -- $13,000 -- on the auction of Harry Potter's bow tie. Well, of J. Pierpont Finch's bow tie, Finch being the lead character of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; Finch is played by Daniel Radcliffe, a talented young actor/singer/dancer (well, a bit weaker as a dancer, I thought, but I'm no judge) who will probably be plagued for the rest of his life by people who can't help but think of him as Harry Potter. And he and his co-star were trying to raise money for a Good Cause, namely healthcare, after the performance. (Okay, a specific healthcare cause, but I'm still fussing about healthcare in general.) So....

So I would call the winning bid rather impressive; I think most people would. Radcliffe commented that we were "well over the record", some time before the auction closed---I presume he does this with a fresh bow tie for each performance. But I couldn't help but be reminded of the cost of my own appendectomy, not quite a year ago: it was in fact a little over the bow tie's price. Consider what that audience pays for healthcare each year...the auction was a Good Thing to Do, an Exercise in Nobility, a demonstration of the Brotherhood of Man (that being the last song&dance) but as a contribution to healthcare it was a teaspoonful in a lake.

Yes, I understand that's not the point. It's not really about healthcare, even healthcare is not really about healthcare. Robin Hanson put it rather well, some time ago, in his argument that it's about Showing That You Care:

I can explain these puzzles moderately well by assuming that humans evolved deep medical habits long ago in an environment where people gained higher status by having more allies, honestly cared about those who remained allies, were unsure ... These ancient habits would induce modern humans to treat medical care as a way to show that you care. Medical care provided by our allies would reassure us of their concern, and allies would want you and other allies to see that they had pay enough to distinguish themselves from posers who didn’t care as much as they.

That makes sense to me as the beginning of a model, and it certainly isn't a criticism of the woman who paid so much for the bow tie. She evidently does care, and presumably cares that it's evident that she cares, and that's a good thing.

Nonetheless, if you want to use healthcare provision to show you care, I think it would be a good idea to spend some time looking for actual ways to provide actual healthcare; a few more teaspoons of water in the lake won't do it. So I'd like to go back over my proposal of a bit more than a year ago. I'd organize it a bit differently now, but I don't seem to have moved all that far.

If I were (heaven forfend) In Charge, I would crowd-source as much as possible of the decision-making by pushing it into a market, with participants being given as much data for decision-making as possible, and being simultaneously milked for as much data as possible. I want incentives for innovation, to reduce the death-rate for billions yet unborn; I also want incentives for good performance now, not for the sort of regulatory capture our current system maximizes. Specifically I would:

1. Allow unlicensed health care, wherever it's clearly labeled as such; it won't get public support but people can choose to spend their money on it. The argument against this is apparently that people will make bad choices. Yeah, some will, probably including me and you. So? I've never understood the way some people believe that they (or those they select) can make good choices for others; in fact I'm moderately cynical about licensure requirements as they are now structured, whether for medics or morticians or cosmetologists.
2. Require transparent pricing, uniform no-bargaining pricing, from all providers of licensed health care. (The services producing my appendectomy really don't do this.)
3. Require that "licensing" be independent of geography; if the best/cheapest supplier of a particular treatment is two states over or on another continent, that's fine. As I've said before, I believe that telepresence medicine can enable the specialization and trade that has made markets work in other contexts since before Adam Smith wrote about it, so I expect this as the usual case, not an exception.
4. Take away the employer-based tax exemption; health care shouldn't be an employment issue.
5. Add a universal tax-funded "insurance" policy (insulation, actually): if your expenditures for "proven procedures" from licensed health care providers exceed the overall 16% (of GDP) average, then the taxpayers contribute some. Maybe if your cost is 30% of your income, then the taxpayers kick in (30-16)/2=7%, half of the overage, and the maximum you can pay is 50% of your income whether that's $0/year or $10M/year. Is that too generous? Not enough? I dunno. The point is to combine protection from catastrophe (but not from serious pain) with making sure that market prices are set by people or groups who are actually bargaining in that market, i.e. the better-off people for whom procedure X will not be covered. I want to do that combination with some simple, less-than-perfect-but-better-than-nothing rule with which I can trust a government. (Democrats and Republicans trust government on different things; just figure you want a better-than-nothing rule with which you'd trust a politician of the party you despise.)
6. If you want "unproven procedures" and you can pay for them, that's fine too; the licensed health care providers should have a strong motive to come up with new stuff and document/publish that it works. The FDA should not be able to keep you from paying for these likely-to-fail treatments, but it should keep you from charging it to the rest of us. If procedure X has no accepted studies supporting it, then it's up to you to pay for it.
7. Whatever additional insurance/insulation you want to buy for proven or unproven procedures is just fine, and can be bought across state lines. It's your problem. You want to save your money in a special bank account? Feel free.
8. Any care that has been paid or partly paid by public funds goes into an anonymized public database, so that we learn more about which treatments have what effects on which conditions. Organizations promoting not-yet-approved treatments will be encouraged to contribute data.

And that's really it, for me. I'm even less confident of this than I was when I wrote the first version, but I still don't see anything else I like as well. I think that the market I'm describing would probably evolve rather quickly into a market in which people choose and buy packaged health plans from "insurance" agents, and web sites build up crowd-sourced ratings of those health plans; there would be quite a bit of overlap with the better parts of what we have now. I hope. And I care, and I suppose I'd like to signal that I care.

Or then again, maybe not.

update:I never actually mentioned that this post was prompted by thinking about Mark Thoma's Economist's View: Discussion Question: How Can We Reduce the Growth of Health Care Costs?

there is far too much discussion of cutting services, and not enough about how to control costs without affecting services (e.g., using the government's purchasing power to reduce the amount the government pays for drugs, reducing the cost of insurance companies fighting over who pays bills, etc.)

You see, I doubt the premise: if you use government power as I believe Thoma wants, you are increasing the incentives for regulatory capture, crony capitalism, rent-seeking... you are putting yourself on a path where you have signaled your concern but healthcare is not what you're rewarding. Of course government power needs to be used -- to collect the money for treatments which research results say are crucial and which markets say are expensive. And government power needs to be used to maintain a context for innovation (rather than squelch it, as I believe our recent trends in "intellectual property" law tend to do.) But if bargaining-on-prices-with-the-government is the multi-billion$ activity you focus on, then that's what companies will have to invest in. That's a bad bad bad bad thing. I commented here.

Well, it's Easter morning. Maybe we're all saved?

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.

A Plan for Victory: Part I (Problem Statement)

When people on the web talk about plans for victory, lately, they mostly seem to mean victory in Iraq -- that's the War, for them. Not for me; I'm concerned with the Long War. This post is mostly a response to Tom Barnett's second book, Blueprint for Action, a book which I think is very interesting, very insightful, but less than completely convincing. Rather than a review or a direct commentary, I'm just putting my own mistakes on record. Here's the way I see it.

We're not in trouble yet. 3000 dead American civilians; 3000 dead American soldiers; maybe half a million or so dead Iraqis (maybe many more, maybe many less, but a lot.) Armed Liberal points out the Jerusalem Post report that

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported this month that at least 914,000 Iraqis have left their homes....

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.

Defense Tech: Tomorrow's Insta-Weapons says of CNC and of course more general FabLab developments that

In the CNC world, proliferation becomes a matter of design, software, and materials, rather than finished systems. What happens when North Korea or Iran starts selling missiles as digital files rather than on ships which can be intercepted? When private designers and companies create designs which anyone can produce? Two words: Watch out.

Of course I'm not just concerned with designer bombs or missiles, even the nuclear kind; we also have designer diseases coming down the pipeline. I assume that you'd have trouble getting smallpox replicated by DNA 2.0 Inc., which advertises

DNA 2.0 Inc. is a leading provider for synthetic biology. With our gene synthesis process you can get synthetic DNA that conforms exactly to your needs, quickly and cost effectively.

Well, I hope they'd be reluctant. But in fact I'm expecting that somewhere early in that ten-to-thirty year period it will be possible for a Kim or a Khameini to generate fun crossbreeds of smallpox and influenza with very high mortality rates (and enough variation in the crossbreeds to make it unlikely that any single vaccine, or even any dozen vaccines, will do much good). Later on in the development, we'll see privately owned prototyping/fabrication labs which can generate robots far beyond the levels discussed by Defense Tech: Attack Of The Genius Robot Cockroach Swarm:

are we really ready for killer robots yet? “There is a reluctance to entrust lethal missions to autonomous robots,” says Thaler. “However, the bad guys may not share the same reservations. The escalation is inevitable."

My own imaginings have less to do with killer robots; killer robots have to work against opposition, under high-stress conditions that can't easily be simulated or tested out in secret. Killer robots will come gradually from testing out developments like Samsung's $200K machine-gun sentrybots. The most effective secret developments will be systems whose high-tech components have to do with production rather than combat, so they can be debugged without bangs. There will be swarms of robot miner-fish, for example, collecting uranium ore from undersea sites, and then other swarms which build nuclear and thermonuclear bombs -- 1950s technology. We're moving that way already: Winds of Change reports on "Fibonacci's Nukes" as The Road to Atomic Perdition:

In Britain's The Times Online, Richard Beeston reports that 4-6 Arab states announced that they were embarking on programs to master atomic technology...

Well, maybe we'll have killer robots too, created by robot fablabs, but here I'm concentrating on things which we know can be done because they have been done already; I'm just saying they'll be done more cheaply, by small groups, hiding in what Tom Barnett calls the "Gap": countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, Burma and North Korea, and so on and on and on. The Gap is a big hiding place. Barnett's Gap is basically defined in terms of disconnectedness (and recent military events) which more or less automatically makes it a big hiding place. My view of the Gap is slightly fuzzier -- I see corruption, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy as providing Gapacity even where we have not lately been shooting people. So I'm a bit more worried about Russia and China (and the US, for that matter) than Barnett is. Still, I'm much less worried about Russia and China than about Iran. Barnett wants to deal with Iran, saying essentially that Iran should

abandon terrorism and their support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, shut down the nuclear-weapons program, and then the West will treat Iran as a strategic partner in the region.

Unfortunately that's not a quote from Barnett; it's a quote from the conservative Captain's Quarters blog, which continues with

That's hardly a policy shift -- it's the carrot we've been offering Iran for years.

Barnett knows that, but I don't see that he really deals with it; [update he wants to accept Iran's inevitable nuclearization, which I see as accepting an inevitable nuclear arms race within the Middle East to be followed by inevitable nuclear, umm, incidents.] His interpretation seems to be that the Iranian government is basically rational, and can be dealt with by improved connectivity in itself. I believe that he's overestimating the rationality of the human animal -- himself and me definitely included. Barnett notes the triumph of South Vietnam:

North Viet Nam has won the war, and Saigon the peace ! ... Our stuff simply sells.

Yes, that's true, if you remember that a non-nuclear North Vietnam needed a couple of million boat people and hundreds of thousands (millions?) dead in order to finally close the deal. Iran in the immediate future will have far greater (nuclear) destructive power, far greater (oil) wealth to spread its destruction, and an arguably far more destructive ideology, one that glorifies death rather than wealth. Closing the deal with Iran will not be impossible (I hope), just proportionately more expensive. Our stuff simply sells -- but some who are exposed to Western culture, well-educated within that culture, simply feel alienated by it. Call them sales-resistant, because they've been sold on something else. As Tawfik Hamid points out,

There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free.

And yet -- we're still not in trouble, yet. [upd And the solution is definitely connectivity.] I'm not that far from Barnett.

I consider big trouble, cataclysmically big trouble, to be essentially inevitable -- unless the Gap is gone. If the Gap is gone, if the Core includes the whole world, then the problem reduces to a nuisance where we clarify the relationship between liberty and privacy, and we lose some privacy so that groups of bad guys get caught before they do bad things. Technology can do that, with help from the law. (Maybe I mean the law can do that, with help from technology? Something like that.) This will not create a utopia: civil libertarians will fuss, and they'll be right to. There will be lots of nuisances, including people killing people. Overall, however, it will be survivable. That will be victory. That victory is what we need a plan for. The Gap has to go, being replaced with free minds and free markets. (No, I'm not a libertarian.)

We don't need all countries to be democratic, although we might get that. We do need governments which are moderately transparent, moderately consensual, moderately willing to back off from private lives and even property. If we get them we're sort of okay; we can move on towards some version of a Singularity. If we don't get them, I expect big trouble in less than thirty years, less than the next millionfold improvement in computer power. Maybe a lot less than thirty years. Hmmm -- I'm fifty-four, my grandparents all died in their eighties. My youngest child is ten.

Update: I see I was quoting the more aggressive version of Moore's Law: 18-month doubling. I should have used the 24-month, which is a mere 32,000-fold increase in 30 years. So far as I can tell, this makes no difference to anything else I was saying.

Update2: The pieces of the "plan" are at IIa-Basics, IIb-Sinews of War, and IIb(ii)

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