Huawei, Google and the Faraway Tree

It must have come as a shock to Huawei. It's discovered that it's only a hardware-maker after all. The real power is with Google. So it will now have to develop its own total ecosystem like Apple.

But it's hard to replicate what Google has - just think of the intellectual capital represented by Google Maps, for one. Remind me again just how good the Chinese are at software for westerners.

Huawei can't win this one. Not outside of China.

We now live in a multiple planetary system. Planet Anglosphere, planet China and then the rest.

On a personal basis I distrust the woke, dissimulating Google. It's a vast gatekeeper, sitting between the producers and their customers, siphoning off middleman-rents like some vampire squid. It's interests are far from benign: ask yourself what the ideal Google-world would look like and repeat after me: 'total surveillance'.

Benign, of course, Daenerys.

I'm tiptoeing away. I already left Google Search in favour of DuckDuckGo; Chrome has been abandoned in favour of Firefox. I am tempted to migrate from Gmail to Protonmail but I hardly use email these days. But Photos, Maps, Translate, Keep, Docs and Blogger?

There are Microsoft alternatives but frying pan and fire come to mind.

Oh dear!

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Trivia note: in "The Magic Faraway Tree" (Book 2 of the trilogy), Enid Blyton introduces 'Google Buns'. Here's a recipe. And here's a link to my current (.mp3) reading of this book: 'Are you sitting comfortably, children?'.

I already read Book 1.

"Everything that could NOT possibly go wrong ..."

Tyler Cowen has an article at Bloomberg: "Nuclear War Is Still Very Possible and Very Scary".

Commentator reaganite88 had this response.

"Great column. I once got to talk to the head of Sandia National Laboratories about how they did analysis of the possibility of an unintentional detonation of a nuclear device. He said they had two teams look at each device... one to think about everything that could possibly go wrong... and another to look at everything that could NOT possibly go wrong. Because the impact of an unintentional detonation was so massive the second team was needed to try to reduce any "black swan" events that the first team could not imagine happening. "

Another commentator, Juan Pablo, noted that "Only a fundamentalist state would launch a nuclear war with MAD. MAD has worked for 70 years."

That was a theme of Dan Simmons's controversial SF novel, 'Flashback'.

It's imaginable to detonate a few nuclear devices if you're a fundamentalist. Global nuclear annihilation is something only America, Russia and China could aspire to. I don't see any Islamic state being on the road to that capability.

The future obsolescence of kin selection?

The behavioural preference for kin is a consequence of the selective advantage for alleles which promote kin-cooperation, as manifested through innate drives. It emerges from the generate-and test model of (sexual) reproduction. Genetic variations in offspring (orchestrated by mutation, Mendelian segregation and recombination) are tested by the environment. Unsuccessful genotypes tend to vanish from the population as their bearers fail to reproduce.

Our emotionally-primed ethics are the reflection of these innate drives within consciousness.

What happens when we can engineer genomes freely? When generate-and-test is obsolete?

• We will fix mutational errors and sub-par alleles
• Optimise allele-sets for desired phenotypical traits (prosocial, smart, healthy)
• Construct genome tweaks for new, trans-human traits (e.g. bat-like sonar).

Such techniques permit (but do not mandate) a much larger space of human genetic variation. No more waiting for random mutations. As a consequence there may be no particular genetic relationship between parents and their tweaked children.

Your children are, in reality, genetically-enhanced adoptees.

The theory of kin selection suggests that parent-child emotional bonding might then be poor, depending on whether lack of innate kin-recognition trumps bonding in the context of limited and viscous dispersal effects. There are anecdotes of the 'switched at birth' variety.

However, those ties are also an artefact of the natural evolutionary process. Perhaps we should additionally engineer those genes coding our emotional responses to reinstate those essential bonds of love and nurture.

All these issues: morality, ethics, emotions and purposes are ultimately rooted in (evolutionary) population genetics. They codify what has worked. It's a revelation to consider the consequences of systematic and directed genetic engineering applied purposefully to the human genome. So many things which were constants suddenly become variables.

Historically, the reason we don't lie in bed all day, the reason we don't suicide at once, the reason we reject Nihilism is that all the genotypes which might have fostered a true commitment to such belief systems, by definition, did not survive in the population. Our genotypes are those of the survivors who clung tenaciously to life in all its adversity. Generate and test.

The future will be made by those who are there. I imagine that's the reason why those particular motivational allele-sets might be pretty much off-limits.

See also: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. A continuing minority taste, population genetics assures us.