Michael Crichton hit the head right on the nail with 'Prey', which I just read last night and this morning. It is about the ongoing confluence of the genetic algorithm with computing, biological and nano technologies, and how it all goes wrong with a high tech firm. The thing which caused trouble in Crichton's story was the fact that the nanobots in the story not only were programmed as swarms, with emergent behavior due to simple rules applied to many individual actors, but the nanobots also replicated and thus were subject to the evolutionary algorithm. In this story, the nanobots were released outside the factory and eventually became capable of replicating using the energy and material resources found in their new desert home.
Crichton points out in the book that, according to the technical definition of the word swarm as it is used in AI research, even complex organisms such as humans could be considered as cooperating groups of swarms, with individual organic cells being the units programmed with simple rules, and with the various organs being swarms of cells. I have also heard it said that in a sense all each of us is is a bunch of cooperating bacteria.
The thing I have keyed on in this book which relates to this indirect method for making all of us great, and making our world great, is the concept of emergent behavior. In 'Prey', each of the nanobots is programmed with simple rules to govern its behavior. Although each of the nanobots is stupid, millions of these things operating in concert generate behavior which is unpredictably related to the simple rules programmed into each individual. In the same way that flocks of birds or schools of fish can maneuver in beautiful, seemingly well coordinated displays without any hierarchical relationships between individuals, the swarms of nanobots behaved in ways geometrically more complex than the simple rules programmed into each of the individuals.
As much as it humbles us to think about, we, us human people, don't get exempted from these rules. We too have swarm behaviour, with the smaller units obeying simpler rules, more and complex behaviour at the higher levels of organisation, with copying occuring and therefore the evolutionary algorithm applying. Of more specific interest for helping us out of our lethal trap, our cultures exhibit emergent behaviour. The simple desires of each of us for economic and social security combined with our geographic and biological environments give rise to various behaviours of groups, or swarms of us. As our ancestors evolved to become generalists with partially reprogrammable minds, economic security and social security became one and the same since lone humans were often dead humans. Living in a resource plentiful world, behaviours emerged in which people would trade away a certain amount of economic wealth in order to have 'enough' social wealth in order to achieve some balance. The details of the balance were worked out by the evolutionary algorithm as the people who did a better job of finding the 'right' balance had differentially higher reproduction rates. The meme/gene combinations contributing to the more correct balancings thus came to dominate their respective 'pools'.
The group behaviour which emerged in our pre-agricultural revolution ancestors was one of relatively flat, egalitarian band societies, with the bands, or nations of bands, competing with each other for resources in a kind of perpetual, low level tit for tat type of limited competition. This behaviour was gradually evolving into a higher and higher division of labour type of society but one which was stable enough to prevent resource exhaustion in most known cases as attested to by the earliest European explorers in the New World. The Iroquois Confederacy is another example of the types of behaviours which were emerging in societies outside our civilisation of the agricultural revolution. There, different tribal nations found ways to co-exist peacefully even in the presence of relatively high rates of environmental resource usage and thus inter-tribal competition for increasingly scarce resources.
A cancerous type of behaviour emerged from the radically changed conditions our cultural ancestors found themselves in upon the advent of our agricultural revolution. These people found themselves both mildly physiologically addicted to cereal crops, and soon also found themselves technologically addicted to what Quinn terms 'totalitarian agriculture', one in which land is converted completely over to production of human food, and in which more land is turned over to agriculture in response to population needs rather than practicing any kind of population limiting strategies. As these ancestors of ours became ever more dependant on crop yields for their survival, economic relations between individuals gradually shifted more to the scarcity assumption and away from the gift assumption. Social security for individuals also decreased as the new 'right' balance between economic and social security changed due to the addiction to the new food getting methods.
As might be expected, new and different group behaviours soon emerged as a result of the subtle change in individual behaviours. These new behaviours are summarised very succintly by Daniel Quinn. These groups behaved as though the world was made solely for the use of humans and as though humans were made to rule, or have dominion over it. Furthermore, they behaved as though they had what he calls 'the one right way to live', and generally destroyed or absorbed others who did not live in their new way. The new, one right, way in which they lived was one in which all the people in the groups existed in ever more scarcity type economic relationships with each other, and consequently had ever less social security and ever more psychological problems. Some more of the emergent behaviours of this new kind of people were the rapid growth of high density settlements which became cities, hierarchical and centralised centers of control which became known as governments, kingdoms, empires, city states, nation states, etc. As this new way of living over-ran the globe, fueled by the engine of the totalitarian agriculture, various plagues came to afflict us such as pollution, famine, disease and war. (The four horsemen of the Apocalypse which one of the authors of the Christian New Testament were observant enough to see even 2000 years ago.)
It seems likely to me, and I want us to conduct at least one experiment based on this premise, that we are victims of swarm rules in which the simple behaviours and goals of individuals have given rise to complex group behaviours. The old relationships between individuals gave rise to benign group behaviours and the new rules have eventually resulted in our modern day situation in which we find ourselves almost certainly at the edge of extinction, and definitely in the midst of great suffering, both human and non. If this swarm relationship is true, then the most important question facing us is this: Can we find a way to reprogram ourselves in such a way that the group behaviour which emerges will be benign, or better yet extremely beneficial? As I keep repeating, I think we better assume the answer is yes in this life and death situation. Furthermore, I think the answer lies in using our existing technologies (the Internet, mass media, and mouth to mouth communication) along with our experts at utilising those technologies (evolutionary experts, marketing advertising and entertainment experts, and experts in the art of Dialogue among others) to help us reprogram all these billions of partially reprogrammable and massively powerful organic computers we all provide life support for in such a way that the behaviours that emerge are maximally beneficial.
From this month's Discover magazine, VOL. 25 NO. 9: Two articles offering glaring examples of the great strides in medical knowledge being made already, without dumping all our spare resources into the effort. On page 7 is a short article about how new research is finding that mitochondria may "exert a surprisingly powerful influence" on aging and on page 8 is a short article detailing how Harvard immunologist Joseph Sodroski thinks he may have isolated an anti-AIDS mechanism from studying rhesus monkeys. We're doing this much already; imagine what could be done if all our resources over and above our day to day needs were devoted to this problem!
Another article, also on page 8, reports on some more results coming in from improved fuel economy researchers. It says the Environmental Protection Agency has developed a more efficient hybrid sport-utility using compressed gas to store energy. Two things jumped out at me about this one: 1) Again, we're doing great things already just by devoting relatively small and limited resources to the problem. Imagine how quickly we could transition to a fossil fuel conservative society if we were to throw our collective mental muscles into it. 2) I was a little skeptical about what they had accomplished, although I'm certain I don't have the full story. They are basically using compressed gas to save the energy released when the driver presses the brake pedal, rather than using batteries in the same situation. This is great for stop and go driving and the article says the efficiency this way is about triple that for batteries, but it won't help a bit for longer drives when the brakes don't get used much. The part I'm skeptical about is that this is basically a government agency using money collected at gun point, rather than private individuals or companies hoping to sell this technology. In the sense that this particular experiment is one among many it's great; more data and more ideas for later inventors. In the sense that we are relying on a governmental agency which is not risking its own money developing and selling cars to develop fuel saving technologies, well lets just say we could do much better. It is the people motivated by greed and self preservation who are going to be our most reliable innovators, not agencies funded by theft. (See below quote about how taxation is robbery.) One of my favourite ideas for quickly ramping up our innovation in fossil fuel efficient technologies is the Pigovian tax schemes, in which income taxes are offset by gradually increasing fossil fuel taxes. Once there is some serious money to be made by conserving fossil fuels just watch the innovations pile up, one on top of the other!
These ideas about fossil fuel efficiency are another face of the ideas for devoting all our spare resources to the quest for the best possible health and happiness for all of us, of course, since one of the ways we get healthier is to live surrounded by a healthy environment. In our (us human people's) case, this means, among other things, being part of a healthy and clean ecosystem and it certainly wouldn't hurt our quest for healthy ecosystems if we could dump less fossil fuel byproducts into the atmosphere.
Watched "Grave of The Fireflies" last night. Very, very sad. Horrifying, the more so due to the fact that that single gut wrenching story is being replicated over and over ad nauseum even right this very minute. Luckily, I managed to find some hope in it. Let me explain...
My wife hasn't liked the movies I've been picking lately, stuff like Megadeth and Ozzie videos, so she was skeptical about tonight's movie. I reassured her that the movie had come highly recommended so she consented to give it a try. I was surprised then when her first reaction was "I've seen this before, it is a sad and gloomy movie!" It turns out that they make the Japanese school kids watch a bunch of anti war movies as they grow up, and that particularly in August of every year there are a bunch of these anti war movies shown on television. The hopeful part about this concerns the software. Although it seems obvious that an anti war sentiment must already be fairly strong in the Japanese culture after the horrors they were put through during WWII, it also seems a good guess that these anti war movies being broadcast out to many Japanese minds also makes its fair share of contribution to the existing state of opinion regarding war in Japanese minds. My wife assured me that in fact nearly all Japanese people have a strongly anti war mindset, and she attributed that at least partly to the fact that all the school kids and the grown ups watch these kinds of anti war movies. This is an example of how we can use our existing mass media technologies to help us modify our software, world wide, in such ways as to help us out of our mess, and as such should give us hope.
The movie itself is a good example of why I keep urging haste; these horrors are going on to this day, right the very minute in fact, and must be stopped. It is easy to be blase when your life is relatively good and you don't really understand the depths of these horrors, but if you allow yourself even a glimpse your understanding changes. These two kids were full of the joy of their lives and should have been at the start of great, long lives. Instead, however, they had the bad luck to be little kids in Japan at the end of WWII. It only took three errors to snuff them out. The first error was to be at the receiving end of US bombs which killed their mother (their dad was gone and probably killed in the Japanese navy) and razed their home. So they (an older brother, maybe around 10 years old, and younger sister, maybe around 4) went to stay with a kind of distant aunt. The second error was that the aunt and her family were misers and resented the two new mouths to feed. The third error was that the boy was prideful and lazy and didn't realise that he needed to swallow his pride and take the meanness dealt out by the miser aunt if he wanted himself and his sister to survive. Instead, the stupid boy got some money out of his mom's bank account and went to live with his sister in an abandoned bomb shelter. They got by for food okay for a while but then eventually the boy had to keep on leaving his sister alone in the shelter while he went off scrounging for food and money, with not very good success. It shows the starving girl begging him not to leave her anymore and him promising her he won't, and then leaving anyway in desperate last ditch attempts to feed her. He even takes her to a doctor, who examines her emaciated body and tells the boy to get her food. Finally she dies, he spends some of his last money to make a proper funeral pyre for her, and later he starves to death in a subway station looking place. Snuffed, the whole family, and no one would help.
As for fault, how can we mete that out? The people flying the planes and dropping the bombs knew they were harming people, but they thought they had to kill the Japs or the Japs would kill their brethren in the US. They didn't choose to get these particular thoughts in their heads. The miser aunt and her family didn't make some conscious decision one day to become mean and miserly, it was merely the unique product of their genes and upbringing. The stupid boy didn't choose to be prideful, he was brought up in militarised Japan and of course became a carrier of the dominant memes of the day. So is anything different in the here and now for each of us today? I argue that for most of us nothing is different. Most of us don't have the idea that our situation, that is the cumulative situation in which each of us in our billions individually exists, is very changeable. That is, the predominant mental paradigm most of us have is that people are what they are and you aren't going to get far trying to change them. For many people in the U.S., this kind of thinking is expressed in ideas like "Those rag heads are just a bunch of crazies that don't have any respect for human life including their own."
Getting the idea that we all are in fact robots controlled by extremely powerful, and partially reprogrammable computers into all our minds will change our situation in an important way. Once a person begins thinking this way, the horrors being inflicted on many of us becomes less tolerable since we realise that this situation is in fact correctable. That is, we no longer have the comfort of ignorance to excuse our inaction. The people dropping the bombs on the boy and his sister didn't think there was any way to make their families safe other than dropping the bombs. The miser aunt thought hoarding was the best way to keep her family safe. The stupid boy didn't know that sending a nation's young men out to war resulted in a real possibility of reprisal on people just like him and his family and it never occurred to him that his and his sister's chances of survival were far higher by getting his miser aunt to accept him than they were with him and his sister out on their own. People in the here and now who have the idea that minds can and do change, that as a matter of fact they change continuously, can't use ignorance as their excuse. People in the here and now who become convinced of the idea that all our problems are software problems at their root will look for software solutions. If it is indeed true that our problems could vanish with the appropriate software in the right minds at the right times, then it is also true that our chances of getting out of our mess are directly related to the number of minds in which that idea is carried. Each mind carrying some idea of the horrors being inflicted on many of us and also carrying the idea that our problems are merely software problems will be motivated to help solve the problem, with the new found hope that the problems are indeed solvable.
My friend is a Rush Limbog victim, and I mean this in a negative way. He utilises what I call the bull dog technique of arguing. It has completely screwed me up the last couple of times he did it to me, and I don't think my way clear of it until later when it doesn't do any good. Here is an example of how he did it the last time.
I can't remember exactly what we were talking about, but I think it had something to do with how short life is and how you've got to drink a lot of beer because when you're dead you stay dead for a long time. I happened to mention how it would be so totally cool if we could take all the resources we currently pour into our so called national defense and use them instead for R & D dedicated towards improving our health and happiness, thereby giving us all more time to drink beer. My mistake. I had stepped dead square onto a Limbog installed land mine. "We've got to have a strong national defense!" Rush blathered at me, using my friend's voice. "Those crazy Arabs and North Koreans, you can't reason with them and the only way to protect yourself is to have a strong national defense.", Rush continued. This coming from the voice of my friend who has gained quite a reputation amongst us in recent years for being rabidly anti-government. The conversation then deteriorated more since he inadvertently pushed one of my buttons since I have myself become rabidly anti-government lately, and in my opinion strong national defense of the centralised variety currently practiced with specialised, full time troops wielding exotic and enormous fire power is mutually exclusive with small or no government. And I know my friend, or should I say Rush, was not talking about national defense Swiss style where the entire citizenry is armed and trained, but he was talking about the preemptive empire variety currently in vogue in a certain modern globe straddling nation state. So I made a mistake and started arguing with him about whether 'we', really meaning the US Federal government, needed to be spending billions and trillions of bucks to bomb people who dare to resist back into the stone age.
Part of the problem was that we hardly ever get to see each other, and it was already late at night and he had to go work the next day and I had to split the next day, and my wife was getting sick of listening to us argue, so we didn't have much time and so I couldn't take any time to pause and think a little. The mistake I made was that I fell into his trap of arguing about national defense, and of course eventually it got into him defending the current rulers of the empire. I figured out about then that he is one of those people who are only anti-government when people from the Democratic Party are in charge. I figured out, after pondering it a little later, that the correct answer when Rush started in on me about how it's so important to be able to bomb other people into seeing things your way was simply that I was making a 'what if' observation. That is, when he said 'got to have strong defense', I should have answered in effect, "Fine, I said 'What if we could devote all our resources to improved health?'." Of course, he would not have been able to see his way past that and would have reiterated that it was a moot 'if' statement since we've got to have a strong national defense. I think I could have only kept this up under much more relaxed and non time pressured circumstances, but the correct strategy here is to refuse the defense argument.
In other words, just smile and nod at the person who is following the party line that we've got to have more bombs. Say, "Okay, whatever you say, we need more bombs, yada yada. I'm getting at something different: Imagine that we somehow magically made it so that all the crazy Arabs and North Koreans and (put name of current enemy/enemies of choice here) all dropped their arms at the same time we did, thus effectively ending the Mexican standoff between nation states. When Rush objects that this couldn't possibly happen because the crazy Arabs are sub-human and can't be reasoned with except at gun point, reiterate that we are just dreaming, 'what if?'. Fine Rush, it can't happen, you are all knowing and we are all humbled before your powerful intellect, but what if it happened anyway? What if we somehow, by some miraculous circumstance, made it so that all those billions and trillions of dollars, and all that life energy of all the workers, both military and civilian, who currently convert those dollars into weapons and military actions were instead devoted to the search for ever improved human health and happiness? Theenk about it!
Also, the most concise damning of the state I have yet found, something I found at the bottom of http://www.lewrockwell.com/long/long12.html, ... in Rothbard's words, "regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery."
If that is true, and unless you are somehow for Mass Murder, Slavery or Robbery (that is, if you are some kind of psychopath), then you, too, understand now that getting the monkey of the State and its horrors off our backs is one of the steps towards our salvation. It and us are mutually exclusive!