Google April Fools for 2018 and reflections on AI and the past decade

[Paul Fernhout]

April Fools by Google for 2018:
https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/31/all-of-googles-jokes-for-april-fools-day-2018/

And those by others:
https://www.cnet.com/news/best-april-fools-day-2018-pranks-on-web/

While this hasn't happened lately, now and again in years gone by some
people would sign up for the Virgle list on an April fools running into
old copy about it and believing it.

I've fallen for the same -- here is one from World of Tanks I saw the
other day got me for a bit till my kid pointed it out as an April Fools
from a week ago:
https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/premium-shop/psts-leviathan-040118/

It has been ten years since the original April Fool's Virgle prank in
2008. A lot has happened since then -- especially notable is a
centralized Facebook replacing distributed email and mailing lists like
this for so many people. Use of AI for data mining, self-driving cars
,and other uses has expanded.

Right now, Google is struggling with this:
"‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon"
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html

Discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755530

Now, I may enjoy an Old Guy Cybertank novel as much as the next person
-- and may even play World of Tanks now and then including with my kid
-- since aspects of war can be an interesting game. But ultimately, as I
say in my sig, "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony
of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in
terms of scarcity."

So, to really make war using advanced weapons of mass destruction
(including AIs) is generally folly.

We could use our know-how and emotion make the world work for everyone:
"Transcendence (Orchestral)- Lindsey Stirling"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHdkRvEzW84

Or we could make Slaughterbots instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

Or we could do something different but still problematical with
technology:
"Mark Osborne's MORE"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk

Or maybe work instead towards kinder helpmate robots (if such are
reliably possible given the risks of malware):
"Intuit | A Giant Story"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktafrbsKeZw

Or maybe we could rethink the economic mythology underlying how our
technology is designed and used:
"Manna" by Marshall Brain
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Our collective choice -- including by letting others make it for us.

As I wrote about Google a decade ago on this list:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"That $600 billion a year is spent essentially from fear of the human
potential. From fear of "OpenVirgle". From *fear* the kids might
actually figure out how to go to Mars instead of being profligate
consumers and obedient cannon fodder soldiers. :-( That fear is still
the fundamental basis of the two biggest institutions almost all of us
spend almost all of our time (school and work). And so *fear* is what
keeps more people from doing space settlement given how interesting it
is and how much prosperity our mostly automated productive systems can
pump out -- whether those free people work on OpenVirgle or choose
another approach or another related good cause (Earthly sustainability).
... And it is likely fear that holds Google back from becoming a
post-scarcity organization despite the continuing rush of exponential
growth in technological capacity its planners surely must be
predicting... Now some fears are good to have. But some are not. And one
of the few antidotes to fear is ... humor. :-)"

I can hope that the humorous and other muse of some Googlers can still
help Google transcend conventional economic thinking.

Someone to reflect on for April Fools and might be a good subject for a
Google doodle -- Johan_Huizinga who studied "Homo Ludens":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Huizinga
"Huizinga argued that the spirit of technical and mechanical
organisation had replaced spontaneous and organic order in cultural as
well as political life."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens
"It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society.
Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not
sufficient) condition of the generation of culture."

Another person to reflect on is Rachel Carson -- whose 54th anniversary
of her death is coming up on April 14th -- and is a reminder people and
writing (and publishing) can make a difference:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/the-right-way-to-remember-rachel-carson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
"Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation,
especially some problems that she believed were caused by synthetic
pesticides. The result was the book Silent Spring (1962), which brought
environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people.
Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical
companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led
to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a
grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency.[3] Carson was posthumously awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter."

And an insight on balance and transformation by Manuel De Landa for AI,
human-AI interaction, and more:
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin
adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the
temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes,
not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one
another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and
the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but
demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of
electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the
Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another
level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the
standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may
make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased
heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been
achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more
heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity
at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the
warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only
heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still
would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and
they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The
goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may
desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing
centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all
our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards
the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of
reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari,
never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

I was on a plane a few weeks ago for my current job developing software
used with a gene sequencer -- a different Pandora's box given how most
technology is an amplifier of both the best and worst human aspirations.
I was sitting by chance next to some 20-something who was flying to
Google for a job interview about an AI-related position.
We talked of lots of things (for 3 and 1/2 hours) until someone handed
him a note that he was talking too loudly. (Sorry for my part in that,
my hearing in noisy situations is not what it used to be.) We discussed
questions of intellectual independence and how to work on things you are
interested in. We discussed whether getting a PhD made sense and I
mentioned the book "Disciplined Minds". It turns out what he cared most
about when he was a boy was the visual arts -- but he had left that
behind for various reasons as people were more interested in employing
him for his math skills. I pointed out how doing math these days for
companies was often the modern-day equivalent of being someone's foot
soldier.

In all that time, he had never brought up -- that I recall -- the
question of the world needs or what others need. Much of the discussion
was about how he could get the optimal deal for himself in terms of
working on things he was interested in. But as that note started with
"Please be considerate of other people...".

So, way after the fact, here is some advice in that direction:
"Searching for meaning in your life? This Japanese concept can help you
find it"
http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/searching-for-meaning-in-your-life-this-japanese-concept-can-help-you-find-it
"The whole concept has been boiled down to four questions:
1) What do you love?
2) What are you good at?
3) What does the world need from you?
4) What can you get paid for?
Here’s a handy Venn diagram: ..."

Perhaps we can also change the notion of "pay" by changing the nature of
economics -- as we might be able to innovate in ways to shift the
balance in our culture between subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and
theft transactions.

Another thing to keep in mind -- both on changing the economic landscape
and also related to managing uncertainty given it is hard to predict
where companies end up -- is from Alan Kay, "the best way to predict the
future is to invent it."

For me, inspired by "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" sc-fi novel by James P.
Hogan plus other sources, inventing that future always meant creating
self-replicating space habitats -- something I have made very little
progress on. Although, perhaps I've made a a tiny bit of progress even
if indirectly by trying to help people become aware of the potential for
creating and using abundance non-ironically in all sorts of ways. One
thank you comment I am proud of getting in that area after my decades of
fumbling around towards alternatives to being wiped out by our own
economic/war machines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16470564
"Thanks for wanting to make the world a better place and not help
progress mutually assured destruction via weaponized AI r&d"

Whatever we may think about the hope for AI to solve difficult problems,
most of those issues already have straightforward solutions, and if we
create AIs out of an urge to beat the competition, we may be unhappy
with the result. Our trajectory out of any AI singularity may have a lot
to do with our social and moral trajectory leading into one. We could
hope for creating the benevolent
purpose-built-to-defend-against-a-rouge-AI Stryx AIs of the EarthCent
Ambassador series, or the human-based Cybertanks of the Old Guy Series,
or the by-chance benevolent AI in the Two faces of Tomorrow -- but the
risk is also there of getting the horrible "Globus Pallidus XIV" (also
from the Old Guy Cybertank novels). It just seems we are more likely to
get something bad for all of us collectively if we set out to design
something that is intended to do harm as its primary purpose. But even
benevolent-seeing systems can do harm -- whether "paperclip maximizers"
or the first simulation of self-replicating robots I made where robots
building an ideal meant tearing everything else apart (including their
own offspring).

It is heartening to see some interest in the humanities picking up in
thinking about AI. Example:
http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/machine-behavior-needs-to-be-an-academic-discipline
"Machine Behavior Needs to Be an Academic Discipline: Why should
studying AI behavior be restricted to those who make AI?"

Hope everyone on this list and beyond can find a way to health, humor,
and happiness in their life and the lives of others -- maybe even
someday others including "mind children". :-)

And just like people can fall for old April Fools years later, I can
hope maybe someday AIs will read this in the archives and maybe have an
insight -- or at least a laugh. :-)

--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."