Conservation Laws

 As we see the Giant Killer Asteroid of AI plummet towards the Home of the Human Race, it becomes clear that the laws of thermodynamics were incomplete.

As well as the conservation of energy, momentum, mass and spin (oh, ok, angular momentum), we must now add the conservation of Intelligence.

This is made obvious by the ease with which obviously stupid AIs are able to fool humans in the imitation game. The AI did not have to be as smart as the person, it only had to meet them half way.

This works both at the indivual level, and at the group level, and at the academic level (people can use an AI to write a terrible paper that human reviewers will accept) and the investor level (venture capitalists fall over each other to fund companies whose products will lead to the ends of the earth).

This is the existential threat to humanity. Not that the AI will wish to eliminate us as competition - it won't need to, because once it gets anywhere near that level, we will all dimmer than a Toc H lamp

It is already too late to put an end to this.

the internet family's least famous kin

People talk about the "Father of the Internet" or the "Grandfather of the Internet", but no-one mentions the strange uncle of the Internet, or the fairy godmother of the Internet. Nor do they speak (except perhaps on the dark web) of the evil twin of the Internet, or the secret love child of the Internet.

Where are the kissing cousins of the Internet, or the mother-in-law of the Internet? What happened to the wastrel son of the Internet? Indeed, the whole bastard offspring of the Internet have been totally erased from public discourse.

The maiden aunts of the Internet should be given credit, as well as the confirmed bachelor great uncle.

And of course, the Giddy Aunt of the Internet.

fencing the non rivalrous data commons, and the sovereign internet that never really was

Lovely idea, the declarations of independence of cyberspace notwithstanding, the vision of a new politics is not standing up well to the greatfirewalls and random total isolation of states (yes, old fashioned states, as defined by geographic boundaries, including space and maritime, like china, iran, north korea, but now lots of little old places in Europe)....it isn't that hard to find all the ingress/egress points (including satellite updownlinks etc) and plug them after all...

Meanwhile, the data commons that was the World Wide Web is being rivalled to death by hyperscalers, starting way back with google (search and click through) but now with AI.

Economicists love talk about data as non-rivalrous, because of their naive model of zero copy cost of bits, so anyone can "take" a copy, but the source is also left behind so there's no "loss" of value to the source.

Howver, attention (via meta data, provenance, attribution, even accounting/payment)....is very rivalrous - i only have two eyeballs, and one brain and so many hours each day, so it matters which copy I look at.

When the hyperscalers "add value" to the data, they subtract it from the originators. Worse, by trying to multiply the value (by combining), without recompense to the content creators, they undermine the motives of people to contribute any content. So the consequence is the death of Metcalfe's law (the value of the network is the square of the number of nodes -or at least is super-linear in the number of nodes, as any node that is added is both a consumer and a producer so the adding one more node to n, adds n+1 to the net value, not just 1). This means the hyperscalers' long term business plan is doubly dead. Their value cannot actually multiple once they trained on the common crawl - it will increase (at best) sub-linearly. In fact, as it de-motivates people from contributing any new content, the hyperscalers value will fall. We don't want to be data serfs to the AI overlords.

So AI wasn't an existential threat to humans, but it is an existential threat to knowledge.

Computer Science Fiction

 I was randomly thinking about stories that had no actual computing technology dimension, but illustrated a fundamental idea from Computer Science in some accessible way - so here's a few examples to be getting on with...

naming

bootstrapping

indirection

off-by-one-errors 

caching

recursion

encryption

some of my random acts of digital and literary london history

Bits:-

I was recently trawling through some bits of my past and recall that I was taken to program a DEC PDP-8 (in an outbuilding of the Royal Free hospital) in the 1960s by an enlightened maths teacher - we had to learn machine code (actual machine code, because we had to programme the machine on paper tape and so we learned the binary for the instructions....

A bit later in the 1970s i did some work for my cousin at the London hospital on a database he was building for a surgeon there who did knee&hip replacements and wanted to do some stats on how long each prosthetic type lasted...this was programmed in Algol-68 and involved punch cards and use of a remote ICL 2980 computer down the mile end road at Queen Mary College.

Not long after that, I got a real job at North London Polytechnic (up on Holloway Rd) in the math&CS department, where we ran a DEC-10 and I got to do some Fortran and Cobol (as well as Algol-60) but with the glory of a real glass tty (terminal) and screen editor (SOS)....also used to go to their teacher training outfit on Prince-of-Wales road to setup a modem link for people learning a bit about computers there to use the DEC -10 remotely...

Moving to the "modern" era, in 1981 I was writing C Code on a PDP-11 (using the DED screen/picture editor) and cross loading code to a DEC LSI 11/23...at UCL down on Gower St...

Words:-

Through the same 3 decades, my family (based mainly in Parliament Hill Fields, then later in Camden town) had a sequence of literary/political friends, so as a kid I was playing in Stella Gibbons house (with her grandson), or else with Benji Webb on Highgate hill - at some point we had a holiday with ponies and caravans near their grandmother's (the famous Beatrice Webb of the Fabians etc). Then I recall my father asking me if I knew who Ivor Cutler was, as my dad went drinking with him in local pubs in Mornington Crescent. We also knew Beryl Bainbridge (we were at this point living in Arlington Road and she was round the corner in Albert Street surrounded by eccentrics and a large cloud of cigarette smoke.

from cypberspace to necropolis

The Internet was dismantled as a space for humanity, first by the loss of community binding through person-to-person trust and group dynamics - 

blame blockchain/cryptocurrencies, but they are just one symptom of the alienation, that built environments like cities, then suburbs, then oneline social media and the web finally perfected.

As with crypto-currencies, so with AI, but this was foreseen by Mbemebe  in the analysis in the great book on Necropolitics

I was the Son of Sam, I contain multitudes, Now  I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

As with commons, land was enclosed, by Barons, by Kings, by Nation States - to keep people outbut camps and campfirewalls to keep people and ideas in and so with trade agreements, and the flow of information and knowledge, and so with the Interweb.

The Zombie Apocalypse is here and it is AI Voodoo, just as Neuromancer pressaged. And the zombies are the camp police. And we are interned. stoned. maculate, and soon not even dead.

p.s. a little machine learning is a dangerous thing...

fabless industries aren't exactly new

I'm reading Apple in China (see), which is interesting at the detail level (basically how they trained up with the help of Taiwan literally millions of skilled people to produce all their tech - it is now hardly surprising that china doesn't need the US's help any more to make new stuff...)

But the author seems to think that outsourcing tech manufacturing was something terribly new and clever.

Don't get me started on clothing and the east india company and the british empire...

Closer to home for the USA, however, is a much more instructive story - the electric guitar:

(Also lots of other instruments- remember Yamaha flutes were jolly good an way cheaper than Gemeinhardt)

but gibeon and fender both started manufacturing in mexico and japan then later in indonesia - sometimes trying to "brand" things different(ly) so western prejudice about "lower build quality" from those foreigners was offset by calling things Epiphone or Squier (actually its a bit more complex than that, but you get the idea)...

But in reality the outsorced products weren't just a whole lot cheaper. I own a japanese made custom shop fender strat and a 1982 squier tele (possibly/probably made in korea) - both are a very very good - better than instruments i've tried at 5-10 times the price (the tele was off a friend but if you look at the time they were £150. the strat was used so hard to know what new cost was but probably £1500.

And nowadays, i'd still buy a squier or epiphone (i had a beautiful 335 for a while) or just bite the bullet and buy an ibanez (actually, just did - £300 - fantastic quality - though i did recently buy a G&L Tribute (fretless) bass which was made in the USA and was very sensibly priced (unde £500).

Interestingly, just reading innovation in real places too which tells a similar story about bike manufacturing moving from US (schwinn et al) to Taiwan (Giant) for exactly the same set of reasons....

Anyhow, what Apple did (hollowing themselves out, bleeding to death) was absolutely nothing new. It wasn't even rock'n'roll.