Resilience - just what are we talking about

A. I think a good starting point for talking about resilience was what happened during Covid (in the UK, where I am - in other places in the world, your mileage may vary) from 2020 on.

1. Working from home / home delivery

2. contactless payment

3. MRNA / Vaccines

B. We can look at resilience to shocks (like pandemics) in Financial Sector - the 2008 sub-prime mortgage triggered fiasco led to huge economic damage around the world - while some of the mitgations put in place worke,d a common response was for governments to implement cuts ("austerity") - some of this was based in incorred models, driven also by dogma (economics == the dismal science).

1. Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs

2. some countries (notably Iceland) held the bankers liable

3. the world also got into blame games (e.g EU troika versus Greece)

General: Neither of these two shocks led to people revisiting their original partly sound (but abandoned) plans for such extreme events - so the UK had a detailed government plan for responding to pandemics, but had mothballed it - most of it would have mitigated details, but nowhere would it have included things that actually happened structurally that helped more in the medium and long run. Similarly, operating rules for lenders to make sure they retained enough capital to weather storms were weked over time. They still havn't really gone back, and the culture of "growth at all costs" now shows up in the insane exposure that is heading for $2T investment in a couple of AI companies with very little long term model of what happens when they fail to deliver something that looks like a viable business plan, or a sustainable compute platform.

C. This gives me little hope we have a solid plan to cope with climate & eco-system impoverishment. While the UK has great expertise on weather prediction, and plausibly ok plans for replacing most our energy sources with renewables at an increasing rate, we're unbearaly slow on retro-fitting houses for extreme weather events (last summer here temperatures in 40C range, this winter, possibly looking at -20C). 

In gerneral, across all these wicked problems, there's an organisational failure, rather than inability to find viable technical solutions. We need a direct path from one to the other. We need accountability for people who make poor decisions. 

 

References

Finding critical regions and region-disjoint paths in a network.

Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks

Aurora: A Foundation Model of the Atmosphere

AI is like a Radioactive Waste Dump...

Just looking at a major conference like ICLR, it has been increasing in size by slightly over 2x per year (500 in 2017, to 60000 in 2026). So it will reach critical mass and blow up Real Soon now. And sadly, we don;t have a kill switch, and there will be mutually assured destruction. The Fall Out will be something else.

asymmetric power and enforcement of rights

So it was back in 1988 when a young researcher let loose the first really big self replicating worm on the Internet - he ended up getting done for it - i don't want to rehash that story, but now, when a Very Big AI company lets it's s/w cyberassault another, why is there no legal conseqence? what is the difference, really?

A related story which we can lay at the same door - when, back in 2013 a young person who was interested in Open Access, downloaded and released a lot of JSTOR content, he was hounded, almost literally, to death by legal authorities. when those same Very Big AI companies download everything from everyone and use it to build for profit services, what do we hear from the legal world? not very much yet.

$$$ trump law every time, as far as I can see...

a decade of postponing the 2nd AI winter....

 its been morr than a decade since the demonstration that purely distributional models of languages could do a surprisingly good job, dispensing with many years clever work building semantics and symbolic approaches to the job.

so what has AI done for us recently? I mean really, compared with that first fanfare, how much more has been delivered? i'd say not very much.

when you compare it with any decade of internet research (which went from IP to WWW in roughly 1 decade, and went from WWW to smart phones in the next decade, and then went from that into orbit...)

nope, AI[*] is starting to look a bit like, um, fusion reactors, or, um, quantum computers - the next big thing is about 10 years off, whatever year you look at it. and what's really amazing is that the investors are still putting up with it...

* AI, by which I mean LLMs - there's lots of cool other AI - e.g. foundation models for weather prediction or for earth sensing (e.g. fastnet and tessera in my institutions) and some nice PhiML and so on...

AI re-writes capitalism

Money can be a means of exchange or a store of value. traditionally, we therefore could use money to shift the returns for goods or labour in space and time, instead of having to just immediately exchange (barter) goods for labour or labour for labour or goods for goods.

the system then enabled trade across distance - wealth of nations, and was to some extent regulated by the "invisible hand" of capitalism (thanks adam smith for these enduring, if somewhat flawed metaphors from 250 years ago).

so more recently (but still 80+ years ago) von Neumann took the theoretical ideas from Turing (& Church) and with Eckart and Machley, documented the idea of the stored program computer - the key clever trick is that memory holds code and data. indeed, at any given time, code may be data for other code (machine translation, compiling, self-modifying etc).

So the new thing about AI isn't about very big neural networks and data centers. It is that the eco-system took all the world's data, and all the world's code, including all the algorithms for how money and exchange work, and combined them - the AI industry is now a hidden brain instead of an invisible hand, and controls the rules for the means of exchange and the store of value as well as the goods and services for which those exchanges and stores operate. 

We can think of this new processing paradigm much as we think of computers - noting that of course it is very mutable, where previous systems involved soverign currencies backed by states and national banks, and to some extent, markets learned value based on production of physical goods, or the size of labour markets. Now that is all tears in the rain.

just to note: I don't believe capitalism works at all, but like democracy, it is a model that is perhaps just less bad than many others. to this end, the computational socio-economy described above is at least as bad as capitalism, and then some, as it bears even less relationship to reality (i.e. until humans sublime, we do depend on food, shelter, social contact etc, and virtualisation doesn't preserve the conservation laws - you can't eat bits, you can't shelter under a process).

the internet (and web, and napster) kind of said the cost of copying a bit is effectively zero. This undermined the huge investment that creatives made (books, music, film) and led to wholesale theft of their livelihoods. AI turns this on its head - the cost of a bit in an LLM is insanely high. time to go back to paying people to make nice things once more.

AI singularity (as flawed or as hyped as the human upload drivel)

 the new kid on Hype Block is recursive self-improvement for AI.

so of course software tools & die has always been about making tools that can make more refined tools, that can make more refined tools - from stone, to iron/bronze to steel, carbon, and on to  high level languages with optimising compilers and so on - nothing new there

but the steps require scaling up the tooling, and re-tooling - so famous numbers for new chips and new biotech are we're around £500 billion to build the new fab for the new thing. so if you wanna go meta on that, lets assume add a 0 for each generation (actually, each generation usually takes a decade to really bed in, and that's 3 orders of magnitude more infrastructure).

so what about the AI singularity - i.e. the point at which it just self-improves ("recursively" is a bit of extra hype-sauce)? couple of challenges

1. we're out of chips right now

2. we're out of new data right now.

Aint gonna happen

sure you can use synthetic data, and then some randomizing hacks to avoid model collapse (kind of).

but if you can't buy the memory for love or money, just forget it.

the opposite direction of travel (millions of really small, specialised AI boxen, running on smart phones, or worst case £1000 laptops) makes a lot more sense. and cents.

there's a book about people that invest in cryogenics for keeping their body on ice for when the medical tech can grant them immortality - see Mark O'Connell's fun read.

back to the football...

+/- 250 years

50+ years ago in france, we had no mains water and no electricy - we could fetch water from the well, and light a wood fire to cool. this was what most people had for the previous thousands of years, certain 250 years ago. most people weren't in cities, and had that experience - a lot of the day was just keeping body and soul together. now, some people still don't have electricity or safe water. but most people do.

now many people don't have safe and reliable internet.

so 250 years from now, i predict we'll be back to most people not having safe land, water or internet. we mighyt be better off if only we can maintain fish stocks, since we certainly wont have large herds of pigs and cows....unless they can become aquatic.

we should be planning for the 1000 year dark age, and establish a couple of foundations to rebuild after we get things back into a stable operating point on planet A. (apologies to Asimov, who of course based his Foundation series, at least the first 3 volumes on Gibbon's Decline & Fall).

royal society event on 250 years this way or that made me think a bit.