"With a 19:9 Inch FHD+ all screen display, 4 GB RAM plus 128 GB ROM, enhanced dual camera, super charge and the Android 8 software. Honor 10 is also powered by an AI processor boosting the performance to the higher level in market.
Honor 10 will be the AI phone with its stunning design and photo capabilities."
So the Honor 6X, bought thirteen months ago, has undergone accelerated depreciation and now transfers to Alex where it will replace his previous hand-me-down, a cracked-screen Galaxy S3. Call me altruistic.
---
The Honor 10 doesn't need an SD card (I had to buy a 64GB card for the 6X) because of its 128GB internal storage. It also uses the new Type-C USB power cable with a high-power Supercharger, which makes it incompatible with all my other phone chargers.
Other than that and the usual security/authentication hurdles, Google restored my apps and data and I just have to sit down now for an hour and reconstruct my screen app-layout, my favourite settings and re-login to all my apps.
I also want to know just how smart its built-in AI is (it's currently contextually-improving image quality for the camera - reviewers say it could in future do so much more).
"Syrinx, a young Edenist, is next introduced, leading life from a young age telepathically attached to a bitek starship called Oenone. As she grows she learns more about the world with her sentient starship, becoming best friends (as is the normal bond between bitek starship and captain). ...
Syrinx travels to the world of Atlantis, a world covered by water, inhabited by floating "islands" which themselves are sentient. But she discovers that the possession has also begun there. In the process she is captured and tortured badly, and suffers a psychotic breakdown. ...
Syrinx is psychologically reconstructed with the help of the founder of the Edenist culture."
In the Edenist habitat, Syrinx is placed into a simulation to undergo psychiatric rehabilitation. This includes therapy with Wing-Tsit Chong's stored persona (Chong was the inventor of affinity and founder of Edenism). He speaks thus (Chapter 11):
"At last, we achieve progress. Where is the only place your personal past can take form?"
"In my mind?"
"Good. And what is the purpose of life?"
"To experience."
"This is so, though from a personal view I would add that life should also be a progression towards truth and purity. But then I remain an intransigent old Buddhist at heart, even after so long. This is why I could not refuse the request from your therapists to talk to you. Apparently I am an icon you respect."
At this point, Wing-Tsit Chong embarks upon a discursion into Buddhism, but this is what I wish he had said.
"Every experience you have, Syrinx, the neural network in your brain encodes by rewiring itself. If we could watch your connectome, it would get a little more uniquely tangled than someone who had not shared that experience."
She shakes her head. This is a commonplace observation. She's not getting it.
"So consider this, Syrinx. You seriously think the purpose of life is some local brain rewiring in your own skull?"
"What else could it be?"
"Existence is arguably better than non-existence. You are here, Syrinx, because your parents created you. If they had not done so, you wouldn't be virtually stood before a simulated elder in a wheelchair expounding superficialities about the meaning of life .."
"That is the standard Darwinian argument, sir. That the purpose of all living things is to survive and reproduce. Yet if the results are merely more mobile neural nets, all accumulating experiences - rinse and repeat - how does this get us any further?"
"My child, I could say that's physics for you but I am a Buddhist. Surely we of all people can unask the question, prizing Nothingness over Being as we do."
We were recently in Liverpool. The central area, around the refurbished docks, is very hipster in a top-down, designed by committee, Bauhaus kind of way.
Liverpool is trendy again and has its mini-bubble-in-residence. Somewhere in the space between neoliberal leftism, old-time Leninism and ageless kitsch is this happening in Temple Street, just off Dale Street in Liverpool 1.
The good old days: how I wish I could take them seriously!
You must take the guided tour in the video below.
The art work is very well done. The sentiments are witty and roughly what I would expect of a bunch of leftist art students (who are not sure what a pronoun is) doing nostalgia-agitprop.
Would you entrust your life to a car you couldn't talk to? I know most people would rather die than converse with their chauffeurs but how many professional drivers can discuss with equal ease philosophy, psychology and computer science (according to the module description)?
I say “They tell me you're like the human unconscious. Like me driving with my mind elsewhere. You're 'classify then do’ - with thousands of edge cases.”
The car says, “How long have you had a problem with edge cases?”
I say “When I drive, I can go for long periods daydreaming, on automatic. But then some tricky situation arises and there's a need to negotiate. That's when driving gets my full attention.”
The car says “Tell me more about driving.”
I say “The whole Skinner thing, the behaviourist black box, the input-output rules, the famous denial of intentionality. Dennett nailed it all, didn't he?”
The car says, “Tell me more about Dennett.”
“The thing is,” I say, “Without the intentional stance there can be no such thing as empathy. But who wants to be driven by a psychopathic car?”
Aragorn, son of Arathorn rides into Bree and ties up his horse at the Inn of the Prancing Pony. It is a damp, sombre afternoon. The light is already failing. Black clouds scud across the moors. A storm threatens. A raven alights and caws three times.
Throw your die: if you get three or more ..
No, stop!
The proprietor, Barliman Butterbur, lurks at the check-in desk. A dark, brooding Aragorn enters and demands a room for the night.
Butterbur: "Good afternoon, sir. Do you have a reservation?"
Aragorn: "I need a room for the night and my horse stabled."
Butterbur screws up his face in a moue of distaste. "I'm afraid I'm full, sir. You really should have called in advance - it's most inconvenient. Perhaps I can fit you in. What name is it?"
"Strider."
Well Mr Strider, you're in room 11. It is next to the kitchens, unfortunately. We have a party of Nazgûl coming in later. Let me apologise in advance for the noise - they're here for the disco. Oh, and you'll find the WiFi code for your palantír in your room. Don't expect miracles."
Aragorn sits in his room. The fleas are lined up in orderly rows, queuing for their turn. The WiFi doesn't connect. The shower emits a thin stream of rusty cold water. The kettle doesn't work and they failed to provide his favourite (or indeed any) biscuits. The forthcoming meeting with Frodo is clearly not going to go well.
Aragorn comes to a chilling conclusion: this really is the last time I use TripAdvisor.
There are people who believe that only living, breathing humans can be conscious, can really be persons. Machines can only ever be machines. AI researchers refute this view with an elegant argument. A neuron is a finite system which transforms its inputs into outputs subject to environmental conditions. In principle a neuron model could approximate a human brain neuron as closely as one might wish.
So replace biological neurons, one at a time, with functionally equivalent fabricated devices such that their input-output behaviour is exactly replicated. Eventually you have a machine brain with identical behaviour to the biological original. How could it not exhibit consciousness and personhood?
In Capital Volume 1, devoted to capitalist production, Marx made great play of the difference between machines - constant capital, incapable of producing new value - and workers, variable capital with the unique property of creating new, and indeed surplus, value. It seems that Marxist economists ever since have thought that Marx was a vitalist. That protoplasm somehow figures centrally in Marxist theory.
Amazing. Such an elementary category error.
Marx considered the dawn of automation in his celebrated “Fragment on Machines” although he was more concerned with the deleterious impact on those workers who were forced to dance to the new, highly-automated machines’ tunes. His tone is nevertheless surprisingly tentative.
Most Marxists since then have considered only the case where highly-automated machines are bought as capital goods. In this case, the machines are isomorphic to slaves, and if the means of production remain distributed in private hands, the resulting mode of production is petty commodity production.
But consider that AI thought experiment again. Take a worker and replace him or her by a robot which sells its ability to operate at a price determined by its own costs of reproduction. Nothing important about capitalism changes.
If we change out all the workers for robots, but maintain the relations of production (wage labour and commodity production for profit) then we're still in the business of reproducing capitalist relations of production. It's a thought experiment, but not an impossible outcome.
My intuition is that the current trend of replacing variable capital (human) with constant capital (machines) will continue, the underlying rate of profit will continue to tendentially fall, and we will eventually face the under-analysed issue of the transition from capitalism to a generalised petty commodity production reminiscent of antiquity. I ignore of course any initiatives by the set-aside human ex-workers.
However, as machines get smarter and more like AGIs, their claims to the dignity of personhood may become impossible to deny (I see the SJWs marching now). Once AGI-robots become cheaper than unreliable and non-standardised humans, why wouldn't we see capitalism without a human working class?
Welcome to the new epoch of total automation under capitalism .. and the ultimate non-revolutionary proletariat.
The facility is pretty upmarket. Bristol Specialist Dental Clinic: reassuringly expensive. Clare had the area of infection in the root of her front tooth thoroughly cleaned out and a fibre 'post' inserted for strength. A fortnight's mopping up by her immune system will leave her right as rain.
Bristol Specialist Dental Clinic just off the Downs, Bristol
While Clare was flat on her back with her mouth propped open, I was downstairs in reception continuing my flirtation with literary libertarian women. In this case Helen DeWitt, who was briefly notorious last year for the satirical and acclaimed "Lightning Rods" ('how well you get on with Lightning Rods is likely to depend on how far you can believe in a world where female employees in large corporations are willing to have sex on demand with successful male employees in return for double pay.')
She has a book of short stories coming out soon, "Some Trick: Thirteen Stories", which I've ordered (h/t Marginal Revolution) but the novel I'm reading today is her first: "The Last Samurai".
"Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised single handedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity. Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop – his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai – the father he never knew."
On the way back from the dump this morning where we deposited my old printer and shredder (q.v.) we pop into the supermarket for odds and ends. The store is almost deserted.
Finishing up, we approach the one open checkout, occupied by a young woman waiting resignedly for custom. I judge her as intelligent, serious and woke.
Supermarkets are designed to be soporific. I begin unloading the trolley while the checkout girl waits and Clare adopts that spaced-out mode to which she is uniquely susceptible under the supermarket's hypnotic lighting and ambient white noise.
"Clare, if you could grab the bag she'd be able to start."
Clare starts, wakes, fishes the shopping bag out of the trolley and walks around to the front of the checkout. The girl appears to be adjusting something in her cash register. I continue unloading.
I complete my task and push the empty trolley round to the front. The girl looks up and finally begins to transfer items through - and I've been judged.
She heard me apparently ordering Clare around and by implication ordering her to start work. She's concluded that I'm a classic old, male-chauvinist pig. She thoroughly disapproves of me and is having none of it.
Paying, I play my part in the script: 'Car parking, no cashback, take your card'. We both adopt an utterly businesslike demeanour. Except she looks at me like I'm a dead fish.
I say to Clare, "Tell her you're a feminist."
Except that I don't. That might be construed as self-defeating.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a quantum gravity phenomenologist - she links theories to experiments and observations - and she has a popular blog, Backreaction. She is also losing her faith in physics as it is presently conducted.
Here is the problem. The two great foundations of physics, quantum theory and relativity, are completely successful to the precision of existing experiments and observations. Yet they are mutually inconsistent. Attempts at unification (there are many, including string theory) are presently untestable, their verification beyond the limits of colliders and instruments. There are other conundrums too such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter. In the absence of experimental data, ungrounded theories abound - they are cheap, after all! - driven by aesthetics and groupthink.
Hossenfelder is not a superstar physics-populist with a major TV contract and a slew of pop-sci publications. 'Lost in Math' is not intended for that market. It's an extended meditation on the consequences of the absence of meaningful experimental feedback. The author interviews the world's leading physicists (Witten excepted) and is typically unimpressed by what she hears. Her reactions are ironic, sardonic and hilarious. Her text reports back as if talking to peers. How refreshing.
As a bonus you get an insider's view of the hot issues: what's really happening at the LHC, the role of dark matter in cosmology and the evolution of the universe .. as well as the failure of all attempts to characterise it, the problems with the flavours of multiverse, the measurement problem, the black hole firewall controversy.
There's no easy solution to the great stagnation in fundamental physics. The author is keen that the community should be more aware of its cognitive biases, its herd behaviour and groupthink but it seems difficult to identity the incentive to improve.
As for Sabine Hossenfelder herself, she may believe that publication of this book has killed any chance of tenure for ever, but probably it hasn't. One niche closes, another opens.
I had my doubts about buying this book. Would I really learn anything that I hadn't already picked up from many other popular science books and innumerable blog posts? And is the fragility of beauty, naturalness and elegance as criteria for theory acceptability really enough to sustain a whole volume? Yet Hossenfelder's work is wider and more profound than that. Her tour of the state of the art is a joy to read, discerning and intelligent insights sprinkled throughout. I was engrossed from beginning to end.
I tend to hang on to my multifunction printers, despite their expected life of only around four years. My excellent HP G85 multifunction printer-scanner-copier-fax died after thirteen years of service back in 2012 and I replaced it with an Epson BX630FW multifunction printer. See my previous note.
I never really liked it: it was finicky and erratic. The scanner part died about a year ago and colour printing ceased a month or so back. I finally bit the bullet and decided to buy a new one.
Shopping for multifunction printers is hard, tedious work. Amazon lists dozens in the sub-£100 price bracket and they're all heavily commented by reviewers. After half an hour my eyes got bleary and I realised that the key metric was that the ratings should be heavily skewed towards five stars, with a vanishing tail of one stars.
In fact most printers, including those from HP, had a significant one-star excess, from people who had found their devices impossible to configure or just wouldn't work properly. In the end, the Canon PIXMA TS5050 seemed best for customer friendliness, and today it arrived and I got it working.
The key, I have found, to what is inevitably a lengthy configuration process, is to take it really slowly, to dawdle, to read all the instructions first and to do exactly what you're told. And so after ninety minutes the printer was successfully talking to my WiFi router and my laptop, and was printing.
I'm taking on faith at this time that it will also scan and copy, but I have hopes.
---
My other capital goods purchase was a new shredder, also due today but which hasn't yet arrived. My previous one - already ancient -was inherited from my mother's estate back in 2015. It expired in a small flash of actinic light a couple of days ago on being fed simultaneous sheets of thickish paper.
This morning I turned the printer on, intending to print a report. The computer steadfastly complained that the printer could not be recognised and that it was offline. Dear Reader, it was not. There followed an increasingly frustrating series of ineffectual remedial steps. Turned everything off and on; tried to reinstall the software from the CD (it crashed twice); retrieved a USB cable (not supplied) and tried to connect the printer to the laptop via that route (WiFi is *so* tricky).
After an hour I resorted to downloading the scanner/printer drivers from the website. That finally worked for the USB connection.
The Algerian Science Minister cut a dapper figure in his ornate, colonial office with its heavy furniture. The slow fan overhead was superfluous; I could hear the faint hiss of aircon in the background.
It was baking hot outside.
It had taken months to arrange this interview. The tech world had been agog for ages about the vast, secretive installation taking shape to the south of us, deep in the Sahara. Now I was here: what a scoop for Wired!
The pleasantries went on for a while; nothing is quick in this part of the world. Eventually the Minister's thoughts turned to business.
"Everything is easy when you have power. Algeria has potentially the cheapest solar power in the world. That's what Mr Musk said to me when he was sat in that very chair."
The Minister was smiling, enjoying his moment to go public; then he paused, as if waiting for me to recognise my cue. I naturally obliged:
"I take it you are building the world's biggest solar power array down in the south, Minister. - What were you planning to use all that power for?"
This was to be a stately unveiling, a dance of veils.
"You've heard of Breakthrough Starshot of course. It occurred to Mr Musk that such powerful launch lasers might have other targets than Proxima Centauri."
The Minister looked encouragingly at me for a moment, and then more intently, as if I was in danger of failing an exam.
"Of course, Mars," I breathed. "It's his backup, in case the BFR doesn't hack it!'
"Close, but not a cigar, as you say," the Minister said.
"No, I guess they still haven't managed to slow things down with lasers. What did Mr Musk say, that he wanted to die on Mars but preferably not on impact?"
The Minister smiled politely before continuing,
"Mr Musk told us that the greatest problem for his Mars colony was the lack of raw materials. He's thinking of opencast mining in a crater next to the colony site. Mr Musk is a genius. He sees a way to kill three birds with one stone. And the key to it is Europe, just across the Mediterranean from us."
He had completely lost me. Mining? Europe?
Still, I'm a journalist. Nothing for it but to brazen things out.
"So let me see. You're going to import coal, steel, rare earths from Europe and send them to Mars, launched on giant lasers. They will impact in a crater next to Mr Musk's future Mars Colony ready for mining. Is that right?"
As I was speaking, the Minister's irritating smile had been growing broader. My voice trailed off as I contemplated the hole I was apparently digging myself into.
“But the economics would never work,” I said, half to myself.
The Minister continued relentlessly. “The payload hits the Martian atmosphere at 20 to 30 kilometres per second, aiming at the target crater. Synthetic polymers burn off during entry or dissociate in the impact fireball. Heavier stuff tends to stay put, once it solidifies. As Mr Musk says, it's all good.”
He smiled at me once again; he'd arrived at his punchline.
“And the nice thing is, the whole project is cost-neutral: the Europeans are paying us to dispose of their EU mountain of landfill.”
This morning, Clare went swimming at the local leisure centre. I accompanied her for the walk and to take the air. While she was leisurely floating and breast-stroking her way up and down the lanes, I sat in the cafeteria, sipping a mocha and writing this blog post.
Naturally, Google knew where I was and what I was doing. As I opened a new file in Google Docs and began to tap, the keyboard autocomplete function began to suggest words.
Typing on the phone, one finger tapping, sounds slow .. but I find it restful. The thing is, Google's AI is incredibly well-informed (2,821 of my blog posts available for data mining) and its predictive abilities are .. well, awesome.
So much so that I only wrote the first five words of this post. Everything else was just me tapping on Google autocomplete.
We've just spent a week in Mallorca (Alex, Clare and myself) at the Grupotel Playa Camp de Mar, a TUI package. It's in the south-west of the island, half an hour by taxi from Palma.
I'm perfectly happy with seven days of four star hotel, sand and sun .. providing I've got my laptop and good WiFi. Clare says she wants nothing more than sunshine, a good book and a beach recliner (but I know she'll be bored after a couple of hours). Alex is inscrutable.
Clare fronting the island restaurant - from the hotel's beach
Monday breakfast
I say to Alex, " Name the social class here." He replies without hesitation, "C1."
Things are quietening down at breakfast
"Yep, not many university lecturers here, or C-level execs .. or lawyers 😉."
Breakfast is a buffet served in an aircraft hangar. Of the 200 Brits milling around the stainless steel racks of sausage, bacon, eggs, .. and donuts (!), 95% are on the wrong side of 16 stone, the average plate is carrying 1,500 Calories and never has the 'spherical cow' model seemed more appropriate.
Tuesday morning on the hotel terrace/beach
Aqua-fit in the pool. Sixty-something women lumpily filling their swimwear, up to their shoulders in water, waving their arms to a disco beat. The holiday rep in blue uniform star-jumping poolside.
Alex noted an enthusiastic oldie joining-in beside the rep.
Ah, as I type I hear the call for beach boules in fifteen minutes!
Boules on the beach
---
In the afternoon we took the bus to the adjacent port of Peguera.
Peguera: this beautiful flower
Judging by the shop signs, Peguera mostly caters to Germans with the English second and then a smattering of Russians.
Tuesday evening entertainment
We arrived to the final strains of "Hey Ho, Silver Lining" as the warm-up act finished, having signally failed to warm up the elderly audience in the subterranean hall. More accurately it was under the hotel pool - just think of the weight of all that water overhead. I have just realised that our hotel is actually a stationary cruise ship.
The venue was full for 'Gala Night' and the guests were dressed up (within the limits of their baggage allowance). We occupied the few remaining seats at the bar, right at the back, without a view.
"Thank God!" I thought.
The star now appeared. She was forty-something, glamorous in a sequinned, sparkly knee-length dress (don't overexcite them, some might die). She was over-amplified, she was raucous, she was a younger version of Julie Walters with a Midlands accent.
Our Tuesday evening star: 'Divine'
She was professional, with an excellent singing voice, smart and feral.
I imagined her state of mind: 'What a dump: this utility box of a room, this home for failing corporate conferences, this barely-sentient audience.
She flattered them, she killed them.
"Which part of England are you from?"
With this audience, she knows it's England, not Britain.
"London? What do you think of when you think of London? Crime!" (Laughs all round).
"Essex? What do you think of when you think of Essex? White socks!"
She panders to provincialism, slays them with stereotypes.
Then she got round to that man in spectacles in the third road (audience-baiting has a special role in stand-up; I don't know why I find it particularly loathsome).
"Yes, you sir. Look he's nervous. You're afraid of me aren't you!"
I couldn't see the victim. Perhaps he was doing that deer in the headlights thing. I would've been.
I turned to Alex and said, "Aren't you glad we're not at the front."
As she segued into Dolly Parton and "Nine to Five" - performed brilliantly, by the way - I made my excuses and left.
Thursday
We've been to Port of Andratx this morning for a walk-around. It's very pleasant.
Andratx: Alex and Clare walk down to the harbour
This afternoon, we did our regular check on the two cakes in the chiller cabinet in the downstairs bar. We've been watching them with increasing fascination day by day, as they gradually diminish a slice or two at a time, bought by the unwary.
When we first arrived we were tempted, but as the week has gone by they've become curiously less appealing .. . Update: they were changed on our last day. So that would be a week, then.
Friday breakfast
As we came down the steps to a very early breakfast this morning (at 7.10 am), we observed a queue in beachwear, clutching their towels, waiting for the 7.30 unlocking of the glass doors to the beach.
Yes, aligned with national stereotypes, it was eine Gruppe von zehn Deutschen!
At this early hour, the breakfast display was rudimentary. Chiefly those mini-sausages so beloved by the Germans ..
Palma
Today was our excursion to Palma - hence the early breakfast. Here are two puzzle pictures.
Myself, Clare and Alex in the old town of Palma
Our return to Grupotel Playa Camp de Mar
The band, shown below, lightened our tour while from the king's high summer palace you get a view of Palma and the bay.
The band near the Cathedral
The king's view of Palma from his summer palace (back in the day)
Poolside trivia quiz as an IQ estimator
Alex nearly won the twenty trivia questions poolside quiz. He got 16 right, leading to the three-way tiebreaker: "When was Walt Disney born?"
Alex bid 1898 and was second to 1900 (correct answer 1901).
We reckoned the median number of correct answers amongst the 50-60 players was 12. So think of this as an n=20 binomial distribution. The mean, np, equals 12 so p=0.6. The standard deviation, sqrt(npq), is ~sqrt(4.8) or around 2.2.
So Alex's score of 16 is 1.8σ above the mean (assumed 100). If we interpret this as a test of crystallised intelligence, our little team demonstrated an IQ of 127. If only we'd known that Barbie's full name was Barbara Millicent Roberts.
Based on the cost of this holiday and quiz self-selection, the average group IQ was probably nearer 105. I guess that makes us smarter yet. If only I could work out the distribution (std. dev.) of that IQ estimate .. .
The Reps also entertain
On our last evening, after dinner, we took a circuit of the beach and were distracted by the sounds of entertainment coming from the submarine cavern I already mentioned ( 'Divine', above).
We popped in to be met by this (video). We'd seen the singer having dinner with his visiting family at the next table to ours a little earlier. He'd came across a bit Sheldon (the blue trousers!) but on stage he was in his element - especially if you like Wonderwall crooned.
His next number was Lennon's dirge "Imagine", that paean to neoliberal political correctness. I was rapidly forced back to the beach - never had the warm, balmy Balearic air felt so clean.
---
I may have made the odd criticism of our hotel, but be assured, the room was excellent and the food outstanding. Here's my favourite picture, by the way, taken by Alex.
We're on the bus returning from the Port of Andratx
Our 1am flight (meant to be landing in Bristol at 2.30am) was delayed due to intense thunderstorms over the Mediterranean. We finally landed at 6.30am and then had an interminable wait for baggage.
The full text of the story (retitled) in the collection above is just a three page read. Here's an extract from Aaron M. Wilson's review of "The Evolution of Human Science".
"One of humanity's greatest scientific achievements was the creation of the Sugimoto gene therapy. If a human embryo were to be treated before neurogenesis, the child would be born a metahuman.
Metahumans are now the greatest scientists and engineers. They are have made breakthroughs that no human could ever concoct. However, there is a drawback. The metahumans have discovered that they can communicate via DNT (Digital Neural Transfer). This new language, due to its specific medium, is incomprehensible to humans. There are translations, but as with any translation from one language to another, they are far from complete.
The beauty of this story is in the way it is told. The story reads like a peer-reviewed science journal paper or article. The author of the paper questions, in light of metahuman scientists, is there a reason for human scientists. The short answer is, yes."
The demeaning role for human scientists, scrabbling at the impenetrable culture of the metahumans, is to reverse-engineer (if possible) their enigmatic artefacts, to see whether any possible benefits for humanity can be retrieved.
The metahumans are as interested in that topic as you are interested in the welfare of the worms that quietly irrigate your garden.
---
We tend to focus on one part of a problem and ignore the bigger picture. But reductionism seldom works well in human affairs.
In the mid-nineteenth century gangs of navvies built the canals and railroads. People probably speculated that we should breed a class of muscular yet docile workers for the future. Yet in the mid-twentieth century giant cranes and diggers did all the work, controlled by guys in recliners with power-assisted controls.
In the late twentieth century I recall an education which taught me many detailed facts about history, literature, science and mathematics. People probably thought that in the future, we should breed people with far better memories. But: .. Google.
In the early twenty-first century, there's rising speculation that we'll identify the thousands of alleles which have a bearing on general intelligence (IQ). Using sequence-based selection and later, genetic engineering, we'll breed a population of geniuses.
That will be neither easy nor quick. I suspect we're rather closer to AI systems which are intellectually much, much smarter than ourselves. Not so much metahumans as Google++.
It's puzzling why we're not there already. People used to think that smartness was something like enhanced powers of pure reasoning .. there was a great deal of really interesting and even exciting work on automated theorem provers (I cherish Vampire).
But what really smart people do is nothing like proving theorems by smart search from axioms and lemmas. It seems to be more about seeing the connections between a wide range of different kinds of things, and exploiting a lot of subconscious knowledge already established about each of them (knowledge, not just facts). That's a weak point in today's artificial neural net architectures but it's hardly an unknown or unaddressed problem.
A really smart system for solving problems in domains ranging from science to public administration does not require an artificial general intelligence, it is a conceivable step - perhaps a generation away.
But 25 years is still not long enough to see the first generation of genomically-enhanced metahumans.
---
Chiang had his human scientists "Catching Crumbs from the Table" of the metahumans. But most people aren't scientists. Most people's worlds haven't collapsed because no human can now beat the machines at Chess or Go.
I think we'll take the improvements to humanity on offer and be delighted that the future Google-minds will be doing the heavy-lifting of our civilisation.
".. the human crew of the construction ship Eriophora spends 66 million years building interstellar wormhole gates, so they have lots of time to ponder issues of purpose. Sunday Ahzmundin, on a quest to find a missing crew-mate, has to deal with another coworker, Lian, who is traumatised after the ship is damaged by one of the “occasional demons” that pop out of newly opened gates. Dropping in and out of suspended animation as scheduled by the Chimp, the AI that runs the ship, Sunday begins to uncover the secrets behind Lian’s subsequent death and the disappearances of other crew members, learning what hides beneath the ship’s closed and rigidly structured society."
In this novella/short novel Peter Watts is in '2001' territory, pondering the conflict between mission objectives and the interests of the 'human components' in a lengthy, opaque space odyssey.
Naturally they don't align.
The underlying problem is that we're 66 million years into the mission yet has been no message from Earth Central. Is humanity extinct? Has it been exterminated by some ghastly, lethal presence emerging from the newly-constructed wormhole network?
In the absence of a halting-state trigger, the mission continues with focused ruthlessness. The humans have been genetically-engineered for mission-loyalty, but that's an increasingly nebulous concept. Revolution is difficult when all eventualities have been war-gamed in advance by the original mission designers, augmented by super-intelligent AGIs.
Watts's novella starts slow, with some red herrings. The plot driver is Sunday's conflict of loyalties and the deeper mysteries behind the Chimp AI. The book paints its Alcubierre drive asteroid and wormhole construction robots in high-tech baroque; the characters - despite the best efforts of the author's wife - are less delineated. It's mentioned late in the book that Sunday is female for example, but you can't really tell and I don't think that was deliberate ambiguity.
Overall, this is classic sense-of-wonder SF which maintains plot-interest throughout. I thought the final resolution, ambiguous as it was, left the reader with plenty to ponder on.
"Isn't it interesting. There are three modes of production - the slavery of antiquity, feudalism and bureaucratic socialism - all of which showed extreme stagnation in the development of their productive forces. Productivity stayed low and technological creativity was minimal. Only capitalism has been able to sustain technological progress."
Clare: "I thought you were a Marxist."
"I am."
"But you're just saying the capitalism is better than all the others."
"It is. I'm a Marxist because I think Marx's method is right. He's the only one who really understood how capitalism (and the other modes of production) really worked. It's his utopianism I have a problem with, his starry-eyed view of an entirely socially-determined human nature."
"You can't be a Marxist, not with all those conditions. You don't understand about labels. You're either a Marxist or you're not. You're not. No-one would understand you."
(A pause before I continue).
"I'm still thinking about some kind of token to show that I adhere to a higher ideal, that I'm self-disciplined and ethical. That's what a uniform buys you, or a religious badge showing you're a good Catholic."
"Your hair's short enough. Why don't you get some saffron robes. That would convince people."
"I'm not a Buddhist. I would sign up to philosophical Taoism, but would a Yin-Yang tattoo convince anyone .. wouldn't you just be self-labelling as new-age and flaky?
(I muse).
"I guess I could have a hammer and sickle tattoo, but who these days associates that with iron discipline and a higher morality? Most likely they'd think I was some kind of hipster who ran a microbrewery."
---
What I was really interested in was just why capitalism is such a growth machine, despite human nature's natural inclination to find a quiet rut and enjoy it - certainly not to over-exert oneself for some abstract 'higher common good'.
I know the answer: it's fear. The unique insight of Marx was that a capitalist who doesn't ruthlessly innovate will be outcompeted - and ruined - by their competitors. Without fear, without skin in the game - no progress.
But there's no virtue-advertising insignia which celebrates that insight.
We assemble in one of Constellation’s conference suites, too few of us for the size of the room. There's a central table, pushed-back chairs, wallboards cluttered with diagrams, arcane symbols and graffiti – all the detritus from previous meetings.
I absently gather up used coffee cups and dump them in a bin, then call my little team to order. Jung: stereotypically brilliant, argumentative and intense. Latimer: the total introvert, quietly snarky. I outline the mission.
“There's still activity on the planetary far side, so this will be an opportunity for a second attempt at first contact. The question is, how should we go about it? Thoughts please, gentlemen?”
Jung’s eyes light up. “Tina, we’ve had completely the wrong approach up to now. We’ve treated this as a physical sciences problem. We’ve been obsessed with technology, reconnaissance and surveillance techniques. Wrong, wrong, wrong! It’s a psychological problem and we need to find out what makes them tick!”
I nod approvingly – we could all do with some new thinking.
“So what are you saying, we should psychoanalyse them?”
“He’s saying we should test them,” says Latimer.
Addressing Jung, he adds with a faint smile, “I suppose you’ll be wanting their IQs, right?”
Jung is getting excited “The whole thing,” he explains. “IQ, personality inventory, motivations, objectives. Everything.”
I feel warmed by his excitement. So different from the usual military coolness, their low-level brutality in relationships. I catch Latimer’s sardonic smile from the corner of my eye and feel my face redden.
“Great idea, Jung, if they were human patients of yours,” Latimer says.
Latimer has a line in sarcasm. Why does he so delight in throwing cold water on other people’s creativity?
“Being as we have no idea,” he continues “as to what kind of thing they even are, and I am damn sure they don’t speak English, I really wonder how you propose to get us even started?”
Time to reclaim control of my meeting.
“This is exactly what we been brought here to figure out,” I say. “Jung’s idea is great, if we can just work out how to operationalise it”. I am so pleased at the last bit: it always delights me to slip a piece of military jargon in.
And so we get down to it.
---
How do you find out which food an animal prefers? It can't tell you in English. So you set up a T-junction. Go left and you enter a room with the first food; go right you enter an identical room with the second food. Let the animal explore the options. After a while it always goes to the food it prefers. Reverse the rooms to correct for left-right bias.
Now the animal has told you. And that's the principle Jung is appealing to.
The first thing we need to establish is what the aliens like, and what they don’t like. Every entity needs energy and the frigid planetary surface doesn’t provide much, so our first 'food' will be a 'soccer ball' with an embedded energy source making the whole thing ‘comfortably warm’ - whatever that means to them.
We want them to see this offering as an asset not a threat. So we’re having a set of balls made up, powered at different temperatures. I think of them as our ‘nice foods’.
The ‘apparent threat’ will be our second set of balls - things the aliens almost certainly won't like. They’re the same size but instead of balmy thermal emission they'll be radioactive. Alpha, beta and gamma – a ball for each. They're our controls.
The experiment is simplicity itself. The six balls: three assets - cool, warm & hot, and three threats - beta, alpha & gamma emitters, will be placed in a frame to be robotically-towed across the terminator to the alien site. The balls themselves are not wired, no tricks. Of course the frame itself will be instrumented to the nines.
And we’ll sit back and watch.
---
While we were doing our experimental psychology and getting the go-ahead to manufacture our apparatus, Constellation had been busy with further reconnaissance. Given the alien propensity to swat our active surveillance out of the sky, we were reduced to fuzzy sensing from artificial quakes induced on the planetary surface and point-source neutrino tomography. Resolution was always going to be a stretch.
We could, however, detect distinctive shapes moving in the topography of craters, outcrops and nitrogen geysers on the far side. The Admiral gave final authorisation for our mission (without hiding his conviction that it was a complete waste of time - he was old school). Without further ado we crack the metaphorical champagne and send our Trojan gift to the opposition.
---
As we watch the telemetry on Constellation, I monitor reactions from my little team.
Jung chatters away like an excitable bird, speculating that of course they’ll prefer the warm sphere, hoping they won’t feel threatened by the radiation sources (the levels are not exceptionally dangerous) and wondering how long it will take before they react. Latimer is the complete opposite, communing with the computer systems in silence. His augmentations may come in handy - if we can formulate the situation sufficiently precisely.
As the gift-bearing frame approaches its target, less than a kilometre from the computed centre of alien activity, its cameras register indistinct shapes nestled on the surface, They remind me of partially constructed pyramids or ziggurats. There’s some indication of smaller, moving entities but no two shapes seem the same.
Our telemetry begins to fail. The balls are definitely in motion, apparently of their own volition – unfortunately for us, the aliens seem to be taking all of them!
The dataflow suddenly gets a lot worse and our screens blank. We exchange glances. Jung recalls an old line from experimental psychology: “We set the apparatus up with care, define the protocol with extreme precision .. and then the animal just does whatever it likes.”
We look at each other - what now? No-one seems inclined to break the silence.
Suddenly we hear a crisp voice on Constellation's command channel.
“Four hundred kilometres out, four point three kilometre per second. Five objects on impact trajectory.”
Latimer says absently “The Admiral’s got time to burn. Constellation’s lasers will blow them out of the sky. They’re suborbital”. He’s still plugged in, reading targeting data from the main battle computer.
“Looks like they wanted just the one of our gifts,” he adds, “so they sent the other five back.”
Only thematically connected to the episode recounted below
We were inspecting our bank account (on the app) a minute ago. Clare points to a line-item, £17 spent at Superdrug.
"That was me!"
She had spotted a bargain in electric toothbrush heads but didn't have the cash on hand. So for the very first time she paid contactlessly.
"So you're no longer a contactless virgin?"
"I felt a bit self-conscious."
"Well, I hope you didn't waste their time. They wouldn't have noticed, you know."
Indignantly: "I wasn't faffing around!"
"You know you don't have to actually touch the card. That's considered rather naff. The correct etiquette is to wave the card about half a centimetre from the device. The clue is in the name."
