Oftentimes I like to wonder about the future. Not my personal future, but the broader future of humanity in general. Where are we going, really? Surely I can't be the only one who wonders about this. After all, we have science fiction writers. We even have a few people like Elon Musk actively seeking to drag the future into the present (or is it the other way around?).
This is partly why I want to go back to school to study Artificial Intelligence. If we can teach computers to think and solve problems in a more human manner - that is, if we can teach computers to be creative (or even fake it well enough), this could open up whole new realms for humanity. Think what could be accomplished if we had even fifty machines working around the clock, trying to solve issues that most wouldn't bother themselves with.
/*The other reason is, I really like working with algorithms and the abstract problem solving portion of computer programming, yet I'm not what I would consider a "techy" person. I honestly couldn't care less about the specs of the latest gadget out on the market. So a position in something like AI research might be better suited to me than one where I'm writing smartphone apps.*/
Even without that, I suspect current AI and robotics, as well as other technology such as 3D printing, is quickly approaching a sort of "critical mass" that will fundamentally transform the way we live. The reason being, pretty soon we may be able to completely replace large amounts of laborers, in industries such as manufacturing, with machines. While we have machines running in factories now, we still need people to run and maintain many of them now - whereas, if the machines can maintain and run themselves, suddenly those jobs become superfluous. The limiting factor at the moment is largely cost, but I think as technology progresses we might just find cheaper ways to produce these things.
While this is all well and good, there's a sneaky elephant in the room - with the human population expanding, and the labor pool drying up, are we doomed to face massive unemployment? I would put my money on it. Fortunately for the US, we've already outsourced a large portion of the vulnerable jobs to countries like China. This will be a problem for poor laborers in 3rd world sweatshops more so than for anyone else - which is unfortunate considering how little they have. Hopefully the transition will be gradual enough that the blow will be softened a bit.
Either way, at some point we will likely have to question (dangerously, I might add), a fundamental concept that has driven economics since the dawn of humanity - the idea that people need to work to support themselves. This idea arose organically out of the simple facts of life - you need food to survive, and someone has to produce it. For the most part this has held true, save for a few exceptions: there are people with so much that they don't need to work, and management really only takes credit for work the people under them do. However, pretty soon we may reach a point where humanity can be sustained entirely by machine labor. What would be the point of insisting people find nonexistent jobs to pay for basic essentials that we could provide to everyone anyway?
As good of a system capitalism is (from a functional standpoint), I don't think its current iteration is equipped to deal with that kind of shock to its system. Nor am I advocating for any strain of Marxism. That has always faced the issue of centralizing power into the hands of government. For every one person who would use that power for good, there are literally thousands who would stop at nothing to use it for themselves. Power doesn't merely corrupt; it draws the corrupt like moths to a flame.
What I hope comes out of this sort of transformation is a far more altruistic system - one where people pursue their interests in a way that benefits the larger whole. We might end up seeing a society not unlike that from Roddenberry's Star Trek. But that kind of change would not be easy, and it would have to come from lots of individual actions to really work properly. Charity by force is theft, after all.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Shaving Cuts with Occam's Razor
For quite a while now, I have been fairly interested in stories of the paranormal. To me, at least, they give the universe a sense of mystery - that there are still things out there that we can't explain. However, something that bothers me about such stories - or, rather, people's commentary on them - is the almost instinctual reaction of people claiming to represent reason to immediately dismiss whatever it is as a hoax.
These sorts of comments will regularly drag out Occam's Razor, a principle that states that, given competing theories, the simplest one is better. And of course, the thing in question being a hoax of hallucination is far simpler, and requires far less faith to believe, than the thing being true. However, this is a total misappropriation of the principle. The razor is best used as the beginning of further investigation, not as the final word. While the simplest explanation may seem the most attractive, taking it on faith is not sound, scientifically speaking. So instead of saying "This is a hoax because of Occam's Razor", people really should be saying "This could be a hoax, and because of Occam's Razor, that possibility should be investigated before jumping to more outlandish explanations". A mouthful, I know, but more technically correct.
The trouble with the paranormal is, oftentimes it can't really be repeated experimentally. So, at the end of the day, if the event can't be replicated and explained by ordinary phenomena, we're left with nothing. For some odd reason, people seem to be bothered by this. Unanswered questions are far more common than you would think in science - after all, if there were no unanswered questions, what would be the point of research? But this does not have to be the end of the investigation, necessarily. To keep going, I would propose looking at techniques used in another field that doesn't have the luxury of repeatable experiment - history.
Historians do their work by studying artifacts of the time, written accounts, etc. and drawing conclusions based on similarities found. As an obvious example, we know the Revolutionary War in all likelihood happened, because we have numerous artifacts from that time period that point to that conclusion. Sure, the whole thing could have been some kind of massive, colonial joke played on historians, but given the amount of evidence to the contrary we can conclude that it probably did actually occur.
So, why not attempt the same with paranormal accounts? Try to gather all of the facts of encounters that are not easily explainable together, document them, and try to cross-reference them with other encounters to look for similarities and agreements. In addition, one could look to folklore and myths for similarities (folklore interests me quite a bit as well), though one will have to take care to separate the described phenomena from the described being - as an example, when looking at legends about demons, the important bits will be how they manifest themselves and behave, not their origin stories.
Logically, if any sort of paranormal entity or phenomena exists, either as an actual thing or something psychological (and some have questioned where one begins and the other ends - rightly so, I think), there should be multiple witnesses with corroborating stories. Likewise, such things would probably be described in myths and folklore, though perhaps under differing names.
I really think it behooves the rational, curious people of the world to approach things with an open mind. Everything should be questioned rigorously, including our preconceived notions of what does and does not exist.
These sorts of comments will regularly drag out Occam's Razor, a principle that states that, given competing theories, the simplest one is better. And of course, the thing in question being a hoax of hallucination is far simpler, and requires far less faith to believe, than the thing being true. However, this is a total misappropriation of the principle. The razor is best used as the beginning of further investigation, not as the final word. While the simplest explanation may seem the most attractive, taking it on faith is not sound, scientifically speaking. So instead of saying "This is a hoax because of Occam's Razor", people really should be saying "This could be a hoax, and because of Occam's Razor, that possibility should be investigated before jumping to more outlandish explanations". A mouthful, I know, but more technically correct.
The trouble with the paranormal is, oftentimes it can't really be repeated experimentally. So, at the end of the day, if the event can't be replicated and explained by ordinary phenomena, we're left with nothing. For some odd reason, people seem to be bothered by this. Unanswered questions are far more common than you would think in science - after all, if there were no unanswered questions, what would be the point of research? But this does not have to be the end of the investigation, necessarily. To keep going, I would propose looking at techniques used in another field that doesn't have the luxury of repeatable experiment - history.
Historians do their work by studying artifacts of the time, written accounts, etc. and drawing conclusions based on similarities found. As an obvious example, we know the Revolutionary War in all likelihood happened, because we have numerous artifacts from that time period that point to that conclusion. Sure, the whole thing could have been some kind of massive, colonial joke played on historians, but given the amount of evidence to the contrary we can conclude that it probably did actually occur.
So, why not attempt the same with paranormal accounts? Try to gather all of the facts of encounters that are not easily explainable together, document them, and try to cross-reference them with other encounters to look for similarities and agreements. In addition, one could look to folklore and myths for similarities (folklore interests me quite a bit as well), though one will have to take care to separate the described phenomena from the described being - as an example, when looking at legends about demons, the important bits will be how they manifest themselves and behave, not their origin stories.
Logically, if any sort of paranormal entity or phenomena exists, either as an actual thing or something psychological (and some have questioned where one begins and the other ends - rightly so, I think), there should be multiple witnesses with corroborating stories. Likewise, such things would probably be described in myths and folklore, though perhaps under differing names.
I really think it behooves the rational, curious people of the world to approach things with an open mind. Everything should be questioned rigorously, including our preconceived notions of what does and does not exist.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Just a passing thought...
As some may have noticed (though I haven't been getting many visits), I have slowed down a tad on the posting here, for a few reasons. One of which is, I kind of ran out of steam on the train of thought I was pursuing with my first couple posts - how modern life and society is, in many ways, insane, and, in my opinion, in need of some serious fixes. But I realized that pointing out that things are broken doesn't fix the issue, while simultaneously making for a somewhat depressing read... besides, I have a pretty good feeling that those most receptive to the message already know intuitively that there's something wrong; inversely, I suspect that those who don't get it may never understand.
So, instead of dwelling on problems, I'm going to make posts about interesting ideas I've had, things I'm curious about, and just kind of general musings on life. I'll be honest here - I haven't the foggiest idea of where I'm going right now, but that's the best way to go through life.
So, to start off, I want to share a bit of an idea I had a while back and expand on it. Let me start by saying that in the 21st century, a lot of the important work done in technical fields is really an exercise in creative problem solving. Yet in most places, we continue to practice this under a 20th century framework. A while ago I came across this TED talk which explains why this is a problem: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
You see, in 20th century business, most work was straightforward - you went to the factory and did stuff with your hands for so many hours, or made so many sales pitches, etc. Here work is measurable, and well motivated by carrots and sticks.
However, creative work is actually hindered by carrots and sticks. What's more, a lot of it isn't easily measurable. I can attest to this as a software developer - a short, complex bit of code can take much longer to write than a long, but fairly simple, chunk of it. Yet to management with a 20th century mindset, the person writing the complex code seems to be doing less work. And to make matters worse, they'll often try to "encourage" the person doing the difficult job with carrots and sticks - adding extra stress and baggage to an already strenuous task.
Bringing this together, I had an idea for a sort of nonprofit organization. Essentially, on one end you have people doing creative problem solving work, such as game programming. These people are essentially given free reign over what they do (within reason), so long as they produce something that generates revenue. Part of the revenue should go to the workers and toward growing the organization, then the rest should go toward charity or other humanitarian causes. I really think if this takes off, the money should be put toward "angel" investments, or research in humanitarian projects.
The real beauty of this is, such an organization could work with barely any management at all - the most you'd need is project leads, and someone to manage the paperwork and accounting. Because of this, the organization could easily run rings around companies that are tied up in their own internal red tape.
The trouble with all of this is, of course, finding the starting funds for such a thing. But then, with the success of things like Kickstarter, it might just be doable.
So, instead of dwelling on problems, I'm going to make posts about interesting ideas I've had, things I'm curious about, and just kind of general musings on life. I'll be honest here - I haven't the foggiest idea of where I'm going right now, but that's the best way to go through life.
So, to start off, I want to share a bit of an idea I had a while back and expand on it. Let me start by saying that in the 21st century, a lot of the important work done in technical fields is really an exercise in creative problem solving. Yet in most places, we continue to practice this under a 20th century framework. A while ago I came across this TED talk which explains why this is a problem: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
You see, in 20th century business, most work was straightforward - you went to the factory and did stuff with your hands for so many hours, or made so many sales pitches, etc. Here work is measurable, and well motivated by carrots and sticks.
However, creative work is actually hindered by carrots and sticks. What's more, a lot of it isn't easily measurable. I can attest to this as a software developer - a short, complex bit of code can take much longer to write than a long, but fairly simple, chunk of it. Yet to management with a 20th century mindset, the person writing the complex code seems to be doing less work. And to make matters worse, they'll often try to "encourage" the person doing the difficult job with carrots and sticks - adding extra stress and baggage to an already strenuous task.
Bringing this together, I had an idea for a sort of nonprofit organization. Essentially, on one end you have people doing creative problem solving work, such as game programming. These people are essentially given free reign over what they do (within reason), so long as they produce something that generates revenue. Part of the revenue should go to the workers and toward growing the organization, then the rest should go toward charity or other humanitarian causes. I really think if this takes off, the money should be put toward "angel" investments, or research in humanitarian projects.
The real beauty of this is, such an organization could work with barely any management at all - the most you'd need is project leads, and someone to manage the paperwork and accounting. Because of this, the organization could easily run rings around companies that are tied up in their own internal red tape.
The trouble with all of this is, of course, finding the starting funds for such a thing. But then, with the success of things like Kickstarter, it might just be doable.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Wealth, and Other Mostly Imaginary Things
I'm going to start this post with a statement many may find incredible: Money is meaningless.
For quite some time now, I've been suspicious of financial institutions. They make a ton of money by shuffling it around, packaging it in different ways, and watching numbers go up and down. It seems, to an outside observer, like a shell game of sorts. And in some ways, it is, but not in the way you would think.
You see, the value of currency is judged only by its perceived value. Sound tautological? Well, it is. What is the value of a dollar, after all? Arguably, it is its ability to be exchanged for a certain good or service, at a certain rate. But what determines the exchange rate is the perceived value of what a dollar represents, vs the perceived value of the good or service. To put it in other terms, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" - Publilius Syrus.
Traditionally, currency was backed by something, that is, it could be traded in for a certain amount of gold or other materials considered valuable. Not so anymore. The US Dollar, among other currencies, is not actually backed by anything - the only thing you can do with a dollar is give it to someone else in exchange for something, so they can exchange it for something, and so on and so forth. The entire US economy runs on the faith that the dollar is worth what the Federal Reserve says it's worth! Who here honestly trusts the Fed?
/*Though, while we're on the subject, why has gold been considered valuable for so long? It's shiny and hard to find. That's really it. Humans only very recently discovered it has actual uses in things like electronics. (For the uninitiated, /* */ and // are commonly used in programming languages for denoting comments. I find it a useful convention.)*/
Stocks are a common way to "grow" wealth. But what are you really buying into when you buy stocks? It is, in essence, a promise that you "own" a small part of a corporation, and will see some of the profits, at some point in time, if they feel like paying out dividends. These stocks go up and down in monetary value based on what people think the payout will be; their opinions, of course, influenced by a wide range of factors. Think about this for a second. It's a unit of faith in a company, valued by a hypothetical payout in units of faith in the Fed. And somehow people who make it big in the stock market are considered clever for buying into this scheme at the "right" time. The stock market is a meta-fantasy of sorts, based entirely on perceptions and illusions! Winners and losers are picked by what other people think of the things they chose! Is this really what we want modern society to be based on?
Don't get me wrong, a certain amount of wealth is useful for buying essentials like food, water, shelter, and medical care, or the occasional extra thing you might want. But to view money as an end in of itself is to merely chase after fantasy.
/*I did also want to get to power, and how much of that is also an illusion, but this post has gotten long enough as it is, IMO. For next time, perhaps.*/
For quite some time now, I've been suspicious of financial institutions. They make a ton of money by shuffling it around, packaging it in different ways, and watching numbers go up and down. It seems, to an outside observer, like a shell game of sorts. And in some ways, it is, but not in the way you would think.
You see, the value of currency is judged only by its perceived value. Sound tautological? Well, it is. What is the value of a dollar, after all? Arguably, it is its ability to be exchanged for a certain good or service, at a certain rate. But what determines the exchange rate is the perceived value of what a dollar represents, vs the perceived value of the good or service. To put it in other terms, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" - Publilius Syrus.
Traditionally, currency was backed by something, that is, it could be traded in for a certain amount of gold or other materials considered valuable. Not so anymore. The US Dollar, among other currencies, is not actually backed by anything - the only thing you can do with a dollar is give it to someone else in exchange for something, so they can exchange it for something, and so on and so forth. The entire US economy runs on the faith that the dollar is worth what the Federal Reserve says it's worth! Who here honestly trusts the Fed?
/*Though, while we're on the subject, why has gold been considered valuable for so long? It's shiny and hard to find. That's really it. Humans only very recently discovered it has actual uses in things like electronics. (For the uninitiated, /* */ and // are commonly used in programming languages for denoting comments. I find it a useful convention.)*/
Stocks are a common way to "grow" wealth. But what are you really buying into when you buy stocks? It is, in essence, a promise that you "own" a small part of a corporation, and will see some of the profits, at some point in time, if they feel like paying out dividends. These stocks go up and down in monetary value based on what people think the payout will be; their opinions, of course, influenced by a wide range of factors. Think about this for a second. It's a unit of faith in a company, valued by a hypothetical payout in units of faith in the Fed. And somehow people who make it big in the stock market are considered clever for buying into this scheme at the "right" time. The stock market is a meta-fantasy of sorts, based entirely on perceptions and illusions! Winners and losers are picked by what other people think of the things they chose! Is this really what we want modern society to be based on?
Don't get me wrong, a certain amount of wealth is useful for buying essentials like food, water, shelter, and medical care, or the occasional extra thing you might want. But to view money as an end in of itself is to merely chase after fantasy.
/*I did also want to get to power, and how much of that is also an illusion, but this post has gotten long enough as it is, IMO. For next time, perhaps.*/
Saturday, June 21, 2014
The Absurdity of the Ordinary
Oftentimes, when I have just woken up or am just going to bed, I have this odd experience of not being "all there". It's a hard feeling to describe, but it's as if my consciousness isn't entirely constrained to the here and now.
One of the interesting things about this state of mind is, it lets me look at life from a somewhat outside perspective. One morning I got this odd thought in my head: "I'm a bag of jelly, ambulating across the room by expanding and contracting around pieces of hardened calcium. I live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, hurtling around a sustained nuclear fusion reaction, which is itself tracing a path around an enormous, spiral-shaped collection of nuclear fusion reactions and balls of rock." And the strangest part of it is, people go about their lives every day as if this is the most normal thing in the world!
I've often gotten a similar thought while watching travel shows, particularly "An Idiot Abroad" (which I would recommend, though it starts to get a bit repetitive after a while). There are people in other places who live lives totally dissimilar to anything in "modern" life. Their ways seem strange and almost unbelievable, yet at the same time, had I been born as one of them instead, it would be perfectly normal to me. The logical conclusion, of course, being that they likely see our ways as equally strange, yet we go about our lives and they go about theirs as if both lifestyles are "default" or otherwise normal.
The next logical question, of course, is "Suppose I had been born on some faraway planet, as a member of some species that has never encountered humans. Would I consider that form of existence to be normal?" The answer would probably be yes, if such a species had a concept of a thing such as "normal". Humanity would be unfathomable to them, but whatever they experienced would be considered ordinary, no matter how strange a life form they would be.
Of course, our conceptions of alien life vary greatly - from "Star Trek" aliens that are basically humans with some minor alterations to downright bizarre multidimensional things. One metaphor I've particularly liked to think about with regards to this is squid. I believe it was a documentary on Humboldt Squid I had watched once that mentioned this - squid are actually fairly intelligent, yet this intelligence manifests itself in ways that wouldn't immediately register to humans as the actions of an intelligent creature, simply because they are so dissimilar. Thus, learning to communicate with squid might someday help us communicate with other sentient life out there, if there is any, because that life is probably going to be as strange as, if not stranger than, the squid. But of course, if you ask a squid, they're perfectly normal. We're the weirdos with the skeletons, after all.
One of the interesting things about this state of mind is, it lets me look at life from a somewhat outside perspective. One morning I got this odd thought in my head: "I'm a bag of jelly, ambulating across the room by expanding and contracting around pieces of hardened calcium. I live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, hurtling around a sustained nuclear fusion reaction, which is itself tracing a path around an enormous, spiral-shaped collection of nuclear fusion reactions and balls of rock." And the strangest part of it is, people go about their lives every day as if this is the most normal thing in the world!
I've often gotten a similar thought while watching travel shows, particularly "An Idiot Abroad" (which I would recommend, though it starts to get a bit repetitive after a while). There are people in other places who live lives totally dissimilar to anything in "modern" life. Their ways seem strange and almost unbelievable, yet at the same time, had I been born as one of them instead, it would be perfectly normal to me. The logical conclusion, of course, being that they likely see our ways as equally strange, yet we go about our lives and they go about theirs as if both lifestyles are "default" or otherwise normal.
The next logical question, of course, is "Suppose I had been born on some faraway planet, as a member of some species that has never encountered humans. Would I consider that form of existence to be normal?" The answer would probably be yes, if such a species had a concept of a thing such as "normal". Humanity would be unfathomable to them, but whatever they experienced would be considered ordinary, no matter how strange a life form they would be.
Of course, our conceptions of alien life vary greatly - from "Star Trek" aliens that are basically humans with some minor alterations to downright bizarre multidimensional things. One metaphor I've particularly liked to think about with regards to this is squid. I believe it was a documentary on Humboldt Squid I had watched once that mentioned this - squid are actually fairly intelligent, yet this intelligence manifests itself in ways that wouldn't immediately register to humans as the actions of an intelligent creature, simply because they are so dissimilar. Thus, learning to communicate with squid might someday help us communicate with other sentient life out there, if there is any, because that life is probably going to be as strange as, if not stranger than, the squid. But of course, if you ask a squid, they're perfectly normal. We're the weirdos with the skeletons, after all.
Don't Read This
No, seriously, don't. Don't read it. What are you doing? I told you to stop. Cut it out. Sigh... fine, do what you want. I'm a blog post, not a cop.
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