Lessons of history: is our real choice Terminator versus The Matrix?

Some futurists have asked us: what future do we CHOOSE? I thought a lot about that long ago in middle school, and then asked more and more: "What our our ACTUAL choices? What kinds of states are attainable and sustainable as a kind of attractor state? If you think that all you have to do is dream up what YOU think is the best social/economic/political system, yes, do dream big... but then ask yourself what would happen if your new social contract were staffed and implemented  by a family of chimpanzees?" That reminds me of a lot I have seen in this world...

I was so lucky that kids in my school could talk about Toynbee's World and the West, a book which asked important hard questions back in those years, and showed me a path to other work by Toynbee, Spegler, McNeill and others (yea unto Marx and Weber and Jefferson and more of Aristotle in college). "Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." And "those who assume dynamics without actually studying time-series data and facing up to their initiale rrors should change jobs."

I was delighted to hear of an open  journal continuing that tradition, Cosmos and History, and published a paper recently in that journal. But where is the intellectual community continuing that analysis? We have lots of well-connected would-be dictators now in the US who revere Trajan, but where are the folks who know the REAL lessons from what Trajan did to the Romans (which many folks start to do to us)?

That being so, I was delighted to hear of a major new thrust based IN JAPAN which tries to fill in that very important gap, to help inform some very serious (even urgent) decisions in front of us now at the  crossroads of history.

Here is the link I was sent today on that thrust:
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On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 10:56 PM Bill Daul <bdaul@nextnow.net> wrote:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/12/25/commentary/japan-commentary/big-history-helps-understand-todays-issues/

Big history helps understand today's issues

BY HARUAKI DEGUCHI

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My reply:

Thank you, Bill, for informing us of this very important strand of thinking. (See his post and newspaper story below.) 

Recently, I had a paper published in the online journal Cosmos and History  (I think),

but was deeply disappointed not to find an internet venue (google groups? special package?) to dig deeper into the issues which that journal talks about addressing.

DO YOU HAVE a URL to suggest to dig deeper into those basic questions?

i4j has another mission. It can help and linkup, but a more dedicated, more cross-cutting thread is needed.

I looked up NextNow, and it too seemed to have very different goals.

In the past, I was excited by the mandate of a Lifeboat discussion list: to discuss what are the most serious threats to the very existence (extinction) of the human species, and rational strategies to minimize the risk?

Learning from past history is one of the important starting points or resources for that discussion, but it has petered out in recent years. (People told me that David Brin built on that to create a viral blog, but is he into two-way asking of tough questions?) SO WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND NOW TO GET DEEP INTO IT, EITHER THE BIG HISTORY TOPIC OR THE LINK TO SURVIVAL?

For what it's worth, I was invited by JS&T to fly to Japan myself this month, to give a talk on how we can avoid a kind of future history collapse due to misuse of AI and other internet technologies, already a pressing challenge to governments around the world as the dynamics of history actually change in a serious way. Rather than fly, I chose instead to record a video talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6togqN9Cvt4&t=12s 

(They tell me it has been translated into Korean, and gotten some real circulation there.) TWO of the eight slides actually depict extinction challenges discussed at Lifeboat, with the kind of details and evidence to make it more than just the usual BS. I was also asked to give a talk in Seoul on worst case climate change, one of the four:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPccNVHRFIM

For my PhD at Harvard in crossdisciplinary applied mathematics, I was asked to defend two possible topics in an intense oral examination in 1971 or 1972. One was the coupling between biological evolution of humans and the rise and fall of civilizations, with lots of reference to Toynbee and Spengler as well as Eisenstadt, McNeill ( https://www.amazon.com/Rise-West-History-Human-Community/dp/B0006AYML2/). The senior Harvard faculty became very excited by the topic. I still remember when Karl Deutsch, my adviser and president of the International Political Science Association became very uncomortable when I cited studies showing big shifts in some motivation variables in a mere 7 to 10 generations, and stated how everyone in that field knows that such shifts have effects only over millions of years. Then the top mathematical biologist, a close associate of E.O.Wilson, gently explained how political science needs to learn more about reality, and cited a host of papers himself. After an hour of listening to their debates, and saying almost nothing myself, I meekly walked out, having graduated with flying colors, but not having talked about the OTHER topic, the mathematics of intelligence or mind, which is what I actually chose. (At scholar.google.com, the version of that in Asian languages is my highest citation. US AI people are not so far along yet in using what I did long ago.) I wanted to understand brains better first, and get some practical experience with history, before trying to nail down the other topic. Now would be a great time to get back to it, in a really serious way, if anyone is able and willing to discuss it.

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On the Millenniums Project list, someone recently asked "what future would YOU choose"? 

I wish that were a real discussion list, but it has other purposes. If it were an open-ended discussion list, I might have started by mentioning how I started worrying a lot in high school "What are our realistic CHOICE?" We can fantasize til hell won't quit what kind of world we WANT to live in, but that is simply not realistic. I once said to a friend: " Try to design what you think is the BEST form of government, fitting your values. And then try to picture what will happen if the entire system is staffed by chimpanzees." (I have certainly seen hearings and trials which reminded me of that sentence.) Identifying what are realistic choices, informed by the empirical data of how history works over long times (for humans and also other species), is a key part of any honest, useful response to the question.

For the moment... as I look at how money and DNA once ruled humans, but computers are on track to ruling money, my gut feeling this morning is: The most accurate depiction of our real choices may be a lot like the deep, inspired science fiction series Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It starts out as something we don't understand, which turns out to be a war between a Terminator kind of AI (slightly gentler?) and a Matrix kind of AI, in which our best hope for now is to help the Matrix side win and more fully value human beings.(Of course, there is also a choice of new internet apps so primitive and devoid of real intelligence that we all fall apart like some folks' tax returns under an IRS audit. Current governments' policies actually look more like that one, a more Spenglerian possibility.) 

I doubt the Terminators would even listen to talk about people-centered internet, but that fits well in the Spenglerian options for the future.

Please forgive if I close with a photo I took in Japan a few weeks ago, which somehow seems to fit here. It is a picture of the gateway to the future, entry to the highest and most sacred of Shinto (sanzan) shrines... with an icon of the macroscopic Schrodinger cat just past the gateway. We have CHOICES now about our future history, and this multifurcation point in that dynamical system, but physics has been more and more clear that many choices actually DO HAPPEN in the multiverse we live in. Deepak Chopra sent me a link yesterday, for example, to a new article MIT Tech Review, which appears to attack objective reality but describes yet another new experiment which proves that macroscopic Schrodinger cats actually exist. Meow. 

Thanks again for your post... and I look forward to further discussion in another venue (unless others here want to dig in as well).

    Paul 

Trump impeachment hearings: a Rorshach test for the world?

trump Impeachment hearings

Do you remember what a Rorshach test is? Basically, they show you and image which is somehow very compelling, but different people have  very different strong reactions, all thinking they know what they are really seeing.

I suppose that a majority of the people look at these hearings thinking EITHER "We really need to save the world by getting rid of this evil person fast" OR "Those evil Democrats are scheming to destroy us all and must be destroyed first."

An intelligent Democrat recently said to us: "I don't understand why the Republicans don't join this. Don't they understand that they too will be destroyed if this guy continues?" My reply to her: "Maybe some of them want to wait until after the election, when they think THEY will get to decide who replaces him." But that was a big "maybe"; many possibilities are in play.

My own immediate response was: this reminds me of the severe importance of those internet design issues I have not committed enough to solve, issues which the rest of the world somehow can't see straight on, so much so that disaster seems to loom on every one of the alternative paths now in clear focus.

It reminds me of how humans alone, as the only REAL intelligence making decisions on earth, but empowered by ever stronger technology, seem to be on a path to extinction well before the hundred year climate stuff. The hearings make me think of humans killing themselves. Yes, we see one overloaded guy at the center of the hearings, lashing out in dozens of disastrous ways. But we know that there are many others in play, on far right and far left, who may not speak as openly as he does, who have even  crazier things to say.

The war between the left and the right (NOT the only war in play) reminds me a lot of Lotfi Zadeh, the famous father of fuzzy logic,whom I had a lot of contact with when he was alive. He rightly attacked irrational extreme black and white thinking. But what was his alternative? A fuzzy middle?
When I look at the choices for US President, the best I really see in the neighborhood (in a fuzzy way) would be Klobuchar, whom I think of as "the candidate from that weird unappreciated place called planet earth." Will Iowa bring her at least to consideration? Yet when I hear her echo the party lines on the Middle East... which Trump has rightly resisted... it limits my enthusiasm. And in any case, what chance does she have? (Sure I would vote for her if I lived in Iowa.)

What this REALLY tells me is that humans alone may not be on a path for survival. Even if human life is number one on the list of what we care about, is it not time to think about  the need for a bit more real coherent intelligence on this planet? Could a well designed automated dialogue system run a less silly and confused management of BOTH sides in events like this hearing and the one to come in the Senate? Or even to the messes which CAUSED the hearing, messes due to ANY President (or chairman) having greater and vgreater power not really restrained by objective reality?

No, I am not a devotee of Ethereum. I do not believe that Elon Musk or Ethereum are the salvation of humanity, Karl Schroeder's novel Stealing Worlds is closer to the spirit of what may really be coming as IT changes the entire world game, but  the reality is more than that.

BUT: instead of the misleading, cartoon promises of Musk and of Ethereum, can we come up with designs which really make good on those promises, which have a really solid mathematical foundation?

The sad fact is that I do not know anyone else on earth who knows nearly as much as I do about that stream of applied math. And yes, I know the players and the field. I see partial answers, which are important, but how could we avoid a grossly dehumanizing endgame?  Why are humans today so oblivious to how serious the threats are?

Part of it, I suspect, is that they don;pt understand basic principles which culminated in Von Neumann's book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. We are heading today towards a Nash equilibrium, which means death in the new game, and do not appreciate the needs and possibilities for a realistic progress towards Pareto optimality (building on important foundations which many of us know a little about, but not enough). Some folks think that AI is about a bunch of little apps on their smart phones (or independent robots) which will just fight it out.

But an integrated market style system implies further risks.

In the end, in the struggle between silicon and  carbon, I see a mess as bad as these hearings. We need more from a third player, which I view as dark matter and energy ... the authentic spiritual side of human life. But where is THAT in the hearings? Nancy Pelosi has said a few things suggesting she might remember a bit about soul...

What if your best hope is something clearly present but very hard to focus on?

As a tangent... there is research which might help a bit in injecting dark matter and energy into computer systems, as well as enhancing human life in that natural way. But will people even remember it after I die of old age (the timing of which is ever harder to predict in my case)? Will humans even remember that self-destruction and extinction are not the only choices? 

A discussion of the meaning of meaning and of the meaning of life

Your question was (I think) roughly:

What is the meaning of meaning, without falling back on using some kind of quantum explanation?

My first reaction to this question was to remember all the weird debates which result from people assuming such different meanings for the word "consciousness". To understand reality at all, we need to get used to working with multiple sensible definitions, and not getting hung up[on less sensible ones.

But what of the meaning of "meaning" itself? Of course, it too has multiple sensible meanings. One is the usual interpretation of the first word in the previous sentence -- "meaning" as in the meaning of as word or phrase, which naturally leads into discussions of language. We have already discussed the basics of how language works. The world does need better support for "natural" language dialogue than what Facebook provides; a better computer network system would be better grounded, among other things, in the issues of multiple meaning in English, and of how such confusion can cause sincere confusions and fights of all kinds. 

But yesterday, another group reminded me of another meaning of "meaning." What of meaning in life, of purpose? That is even more central than language itself in our lives. After all, creatures who do not know English will often have a strong and important sense of purpose, even just in mundane neural aspect of their consciousness.

That group sent out data suggesting that the whole world has a growing problem with a lack of purpose and sense of meaningless in recent years (or decades). That is serious too. Can Cosmos and History help address THAT kind of thing? Can anyone else do so, without falling back into animal noises?

On the other list, I responded with:

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John's post is an example of an issue which it is challenging to really account for analytically, scientifically and in strategic policy -- yet it also of utmost importance, demanding that any sane person should try to pay real attention, while not pretending there is an easy solution.

I have to admit that the issue of purpose becomes a personal issue for me in recent years. For example, what is the purpose in trying to explain and prove certain new directions in quantum foundations at a time when other issues are likely to kill us a lot sooner, and people's ability to care and understand seems ever more problematic lately?

For me.. believe it or not, I was heartened somewhat by some of the comments of Pope Francis, as he visited some of the same places which my wife and I visited and probed just a week or two before.

What struck me hardest: when he said (roughly): We cannot save the life of the earth unless we first learn to really love it.

On Facebook (or youtube) it is easy to locate the back to back talks of Ban Ki Moon, Jerry Glenn (leader of www.themp.org) and myself on climate, Monday (two weeks ago) on Korea TV. But the sheer craziness I see on that subject in my neighborhood (near DC) really saps morale and effort and effectiveness and so on. It was very helpful to me that my wife arranged visits to dozens of centers of nature and life in Japan, and two days in Korea before the conference, reminding me in such a direct and personal way how much we really do love the life of this planet, and really do care enough to try to strengthen the connections to it and do the best we can, however daunting the obstacles from those who do not seem to be speaking from love or from sanity. (Caveat: for me, "sanity" is a technical term, referring to a concept which this list may not want to get deep into. If anyone cares, one of my papers last year says more: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z. )

And yes, a coherent sense of purpose is fundamental to "sanity" as I use that term, but in some environments the way ahead is much clearer than in others even at an equal level of sanity.

And that can affect anyone. Design of a better environment for humans is a crucial challenge in integrative IT design, among other areas, but I see a lot more lip service than effective design grounded in the basic principles of AI, etc.

                                                                                                             

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By the way, my direct, personal feeling of connection to life in general... as I experienced it in Japan last month....is illustrated in the photo album I posted at https://photos.app.goo.gl/aX9eKnuLmPLybxWc6

That was so good for morale!!! But it would take another long essay to explain the meanings and connections of all the many ... images... 

YES WE COULD: Example of how climate risks could be reduced much better and cheaper than any of today's crusades

So many people still believe that we cannot reduce the worst case climate risks dramatically except at very high economic costs!! Yes, all the comprehensive plans we see at high political levels these days would be ineffective or economy busting, but better options do exist by making better use of market mechanisms and new technology. Last week on Korea national TV (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPccNVHRFIM), I gave just a general outline of a "new" five point strategy to do exactly that -- make deep cuts in the worst case climate risk at minimum cost, by using real focus and strategic thinking on all five of the points on this slide.

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One of my friends in the energy sector asked "Is that really possible? For example, for the car and truck sector, could we make deep cuts without destroying our economy?"

Here was my initial explanation of why we can:

=========== He said:

One huge problem is giving up oil will kill the economy, and vast numbers of people will die from the collapse.

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One of the five points in the central slide I showed is listed as "reduced GHG from cars and trucks."  I don't think I used the word "oil" in the talk, because of limited time, but I pointed emphatically to www.werbos.com/oil.htm, which includes (along with less important things) the exact proposal from Senator Specter which he asked me to write and try to get to the floor in 2009, and the more recent, more thorough Transportation Policy report from IEEEUSA.

The emphasis was market-based fuel flexibility and choice, NOT the dumb pseudo-conservative bloc which picks winners and losers and tries to implement government monopolies!!

Those things grew out of a talk to 200 folks in Rayburn which I gave in 2007, invited by Congressman Kingston (then no 3 in the part in the House) to prepare for Bush's EISA bill (which was not as flexible and open in competition as we would have liked). The main slide, also in that folder, emphasizes a CHOICE, but puts more attention onb alternate liquid fuels.

Later, for another talk for Inglis (R), I showed the actual economic impact of the flexibility part. It actually would double revenue of **US** distribution companies, but cause deep cuts in money  flowing to the Middle East.

I guess the latter are who really have power in DC lately. I still remember when Lamar Smith (R-Texas) had the Director of Engineering of NSF bring in a Middle Eastern oil guy to give us all new marching orders in 2014. A big part of why I (and many others) retired. 

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In more detail: He replied:

Paul, what I am talking about is a PV to synthetic hydrocarbons scheme.  Probably not a US kind of project, since these really low cost for power has shown up only in the mid east.

Current policy in China tends to support what many people told me in 2017: that PV electricity at 3 cents per kwh daytime in contracts actually signed in Chile and Middle East APPEARED real because of huge subsidies to PV manufacturers in China. Those are going away. It seems that the real cost was more like 9 cents per kwh just for daytime power in favorable locations. For the moment, PVs are no longer part of the "A team" (for earth). The "A team" for earth-based solar power is a form of SOLAR THERMAL solar farm, the form which Gary Barnhard helped educate us on at ISDC Alexandria. It is a new breakthrough in power tower technology, using new advanced Brayton cycle engines to convert concentrated heat to .. electricity. It comes with low cost thermal storage (usually estimated at $50/kwh, $50 per kilowatt of permanent reusable storage capacity, about one quarter the cost of targets for future batteries). There was a big news item recently about Bill Gates putting a big investment into taking the lead in that technology. The Middle East was pulling ahead, even though this is a US technology, because corrupt and evil politicians were shutting down the US capability, but for now Gates seems to have saved the day and kept the US in the game. 

BUT: you were asking what the implications are for how we power cars and trucks, using alternative liquid fuels. Alternative liquid fuels really are a crucial part of any rational, efficient policy to slash the net greenhouse gas emissions from  cars and trucks. 

In my view, the EISA law of 2007 passed under the leadership of George Bush junior was a really great achievement, and I was very happy to help make that happen. BUT THE TECHNICAL DETAILS MATTER,

because the supply of alternate liquid fuels has been far less than Bush hoped, because of (1) terrible regulations, terrible enabling rules for EPA, due in part to nasty intrusions into how the bill was written, but also due to oversight of EPA; (2) less progress than we would create, if we are rational (getting more from new technology options like the ones you hope for AND others; and (3) a certain kind of spirit of never doing things differently, like a little dog barking and biting at the unknown even when its very survival depends on new hopes.

Specter's bill would have solved (1), led to a massive durable increase in energy security for all of our allies as well as the US, and, as I mentioned, an INCREASE in revenue to US fuel distribution operations. Good old fashioned bio based fuels could be adding MUCH more than they are now. We spoke to Reid's staff who said "No, we MUST pass an Obama bill before we can even allow discussion of anything else." He also made promises to Specter which he did not keep, which resulted in Specter leaving. 

But yes, additional competing new technologies to make alternate liquids could have gone further. We wanted rational, fair markets to decide on the market shares of SEVERAL options, all of which should be made as efficient as possible by new R&D and such. Not PVs but there are many others.

Many years ago, UNH developed a system to create liquid fuels using the concentrated heat in the "eye of the obelisk," the place in the power tower solar farms where we now put Brayton engines. This makes a whole lot of technical sense, because alternate liquid fuels require a certain amount of free energy and a certain amount of raw delta H; the most efficient path balances a mix of both (as provided by concentrated sunlight) to drive the chemical reactions making the fuel. Using ONLY free energy (like electricity from earth or space) is inherently less efficient. 

But there are many other options as well, and several "B team" options which have real hope of doing better if we do the aggressive exploratory R&D intelligently. (Fat chance of that under the New Order!)

What do we know about war as population control or predictable outcome of uncontrolled growth?

Many space people (Musk?) have proposed that a New Frontier is what we need to avoid the Malthusian growth and collapse which we have seen in dozens of promising human civilizations through the years.

As the left and right fight it out, I have once again proposed that the truth lies in the middle, and demands that we use our brains a lot more to have any real hope to avoid extinction. Forst, what I said to them:

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... wrote: of the tribe are present in their female children.  Thus genes *for* going to war were selected at close to 40% per generation.  This is a very high genetic selection, we should expect it to be nearly universal. Depressing, but evolutionary psychology analysis is often depressing. It's so depressing that I have never finished an article on it. But if someone wants to see a draft, ask. This is an important area. There are many areas where I have figured out ways to "get out of the box" of rigid, thoughtless assumptions... but not enough time to wfrite them all up. Therefore I have often sought collaborators I could trust, and have even found a few. (See scholar.google.com.)  This is one of those. A new way to do evolutionary psychology specifically for human history was one of the two topics I defended in the oral exams for the PhD at Harvard. The faculty was much more interested in the new positions I presented on this, the first topic, but I chose instead the second topic. (The thesis has thousands of citations at scholar.google.com, which gives you some idea why I regretfully neglected the first topic, and why I also stepped down as first Presidnet of Harvard Committee for a Space Economy. I am so grateful that Mark Hopkins took up THAT  baton.) The faculty were excited in part because THEY, acknowledged leaders in their diverse fields, learned so much in heated arguments between EACH OTHER, where they learned that the assumptions in one field about another are sometimes wrong. For example, I suggested that the typical lifetime of human civilizations (a few centuries, citing folks like Toynbee and Spengler and Eisenstadt and many others) is similar to the seven to twelve generations which are enough to cause huge changes in the genes for social behavior, reflected in part in books like E.O. Wilson's classic text Sociobiology. (In my view, that is STILL a fundamental, seminal source, cited less lately because of simple stupid political correctness pressures. I am tempted to say more about those, but let me wait until it seems more appropriate.) Ed Bossert, a sometime collaborator with Wilson, explained to my advisor (Karl Deutsch) that six to twelve is a very precise number, backed up by a huge mass of experiments, quite different from conventional wisdom in fields like political science. As Wilson says, there are multiple time scales at work here. Wilson did not understand the brain or culture learning dynamics as well as some of us now do (as in my ACTUAL thesis topic!), but that does not wipe out the huge value of the insights he DID include. Keith mentions depressing conclusions. Yes, it is a major challenge how to rise above those scary things -- but, as with climate change, the best way to reduce the probability of bad outcomes is to understand WHY they happen so often. AFTER one takes a lot of time and effort to understand it right, without stupid ego defenses getting in the way and stimulating stupid reactive guessing left or right.  Depressing? Beyond E.O. Wilson, another seminal source (still deeply respected) is the book Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, which came as a huge shock when it came out. MOST ecological networks lead to massive crises and extinctions. We don't see that so much now in nature because so many extinctions have ALREADY occurred, and things did not change SO much after that. Well, folks, things have changed and are still changing now, massively. In my view, we either use our full brains (yes, including space development, but also including some of the other stuff Barbara Marx Hubbard sensed), or we have little chance of surviving the many emerging threats becoming ever more real every day. (As I type this, I see news in the background of Iran joyously sending autonomous new weapons to folks like Houthis to threaten the world oil price. Just a hint of what may be to come. Is it impolite to describe what the IRG is?) But a New Frontier is not enough, for the moderate long term. One reason why I did not choose this topic was that I knew I was missing something. Now I have a better idea of what. At ONE important level, it comes down to nonzerosum n-player games, like what Von Neumann and T.C. Schelling described. It comes down to something LIKE a certain kind of social contract or immune system. It IS possible in principle, but it is not easy. Do enough people really care and understand?  But this email is probably too long for this list already, as it does address a different subject.  Best of luck. We all need it. ============================= Addendum: At Facebook, I have posted several posts with links on what I learned about this subject in many cruises  and treks through the Pacific and Latin America. MANY societies had terrible Malthusian collapses, but viable new social contracts  based on visible, transparent new social contracts offering honorable competition on a new "worldview" foundations often worked very well. Better management of new emerging IT (from  cryptocurrencies to information to weapons, with new security mechanisms)  and global climate threats, COULD WORK if we face up to the need for cooperation of the most important powers.  "Smart brains and apps,smarter integrative platforms, and clear simpler 'immune system' rules for everyone."  New technical standards for IT to make it real, and to safeguard the fuzzy broader concerns we hear of from governments all around the world. If regulation of IT is managed like the tax code, we all die. ReplyReply allForward

To EU and E Warren: is a sledgehammer the way to fix google etc?

Finally people start to realize that massive changes in the world internet have just begun, and that massive problems could emerge if we don't develop a better system of cooperation. The EU has promised to develop a global regulation system to control AI, and Warren says she will just break up Google, Amazon and Facebook.

There really are many lethal problems moving fast, but do any of these folks have any idea how to fix them?

I keep being haunted by an image on an unshaven auto mechanic wielding a huge hammer, saying: "I ain't no engineer. I don't know how cars work. but I sure can fix YOURS but good.."

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In parallel with that, there are a few discussions starting up about how one could do it right.
Here is one example:

A really crucial issue here is metrics, and truth in metrics.

My wife has told me more about "B" corporations, which do not HAVE to be organized around maximum

profit. I hope SEC allows that, not just some states. From what I have seen of oil company shareholder meetings in the UK (well publicized for good reason in FT), THEY have big and powerful shareholders who want a strong signal that a weighted sum of profit (however measured) AND climate change benefit is what they want, at a minimum, starting ASAP, because a lot of people might suffer if we don't get going, in the opinion of those (well informed) shareholders.

THIS IS NOT JUST a cause in itself, but a great TESTBED example of structural changes needed to really accomplish stuff like that.

For IT folks:

What would be needed to allow creation of a new corporate "spreadsheet" (or"blockchain" or certified ledger) with entries which predict LONG-TERM benefits to reducing risk for climate change?

Short term measures just won't do the job (e,g, allow sustainablepolicies to results), because myopic measures like the number of solar panels on roofs tend to force BAD, counterproductive decisions. (For electricity in Europe, better than solar panels in houses in the north would be big well-designed solar farms in southern Europe hooked up by new transmission, giving Germany the HUGE side benefit of redirecting money for loans or governments to money which buys them electricity and creates real jobs in the South.) 

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SINCE the world IS going to change very massively in the next decade or two, due to new IT far beyond the wimpy zero generation "AI" which you see in the press these days, we need to think more clearly and concretely about what the possibilities MIGHT be like,

grounded in the more advanced new technology. 

I will soon recommend that anyone interested in these transitions read Schoeder's new sci fi,Stealing Worlds. I am only 100 pages in, 

and may or may not end up agreeing with the final conclusions (even he misses some important stuff), it includes many possibilities which we need to account for. I was amused by discussion of a new platform (used by only a few companies) where an AI runs an entire company instead of the CEO. (After all, of shareholders do not NEED a CEO...).

No, that would not be a face recognition program. (Some versions of Watson IOT sound exactly that dumb. My slides at www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf depict a few options relevant to corporations and larger systems, which some folks tried to take over big parts of the US government, folks who still try.) It would be a decision-making system. Alpha Go is a very simple decision system, but MUCH more powerful are in the works, some in use.

But good decisions by human, by AI, or by some kind of conglomerate (designed how?), require FORESIGHT. 

In fact, the time-series kinds of networks which can offer that (with probabilities and scenarios etc)are important to HUMANS as well, since they are crucial to accurate "state identification," and even to humans learning what was FOUND in massive data trawling exercises. 

If people's data disappears into a black hole, and is not input to networks trained to output TRUTH... there are many sinkholes ahead of us in the unregulated IT world. Is truth essential both to automated corporate spreadsheets and to preserving the full rights of consumers and workers? And how do we enforce truth in those neural networks or hybrid neural/human networks?

Of course, the management of short-term performance metrics (not the same as long term bottom line larger scale goals) is also a challenge requiring lots of training and truth.

Many old style AI folks want to go back to digital expert systems using Boolean words for the next big step. That won't work, but DIALOGUE with humans is a key element as well. It is an interesting question what LEVEL of AGI should be used/allowed for now in such functions.

Best of luck,

    Paul 

============

My old alumni association cites an editorial on the problem of truth in news:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/impartiality-is-the-source-of-a-newspapers-credibility-11568109602

This is just one of the many serious manifestations of the issue of designing truthful networks.

Of course, the folks who deduce things about YOU from YOUR data is also serious.

climate threats as a testbed for new AI to cope with pervasive fake news

People have asked: Why should we feel any need for any change in corporate management laws, structures and culture, even as new IT

is about to change it all not just with local apps but with the overall system and its metrics?

I don't believe that climate change is the number one threat to human life, or that the changes should all be about climate change,but it IDS part of the picture, and it is a beautifully clear example of the LIMITATIONS of today's information networks. If we want to think realistically about how to design (more intelligent) information networks, it is good engineering practice to think in realistic concrete terms about how the present networks are screwing up.

And so, here is an example which haunts me. A top engineer made some comments about climate change which I replied to as follows:

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When climate was the main part of my job (working for Senator Specter in 2009, on loan from NSF),I was amazed to have close contact BOTH to:

(1) the folks funded by the oil and gas lobbyists pushing hard to tell us that warming of the poles is a myth;

(2) the planners for the oil industry, putting billions into new efforts to take advantage of the huge opportunities of the ice-free Arctic coming soon,

asking for billions in policy support to make sure WE get the good stuff before our competitors do.

That reminds me somehow of a hearing where people asked for support to sequester CO2 by piping it at high pressure into chambers deep in the ground. "This is absolutely safe; we have proven it," When asked what they need most:"We need federal guarantees that the government will bear the cost when it escapes and explodes." (There are better ways to handle CO2, but there was more money in lobbies trying to extract more money from the taxpayer.)

As for all those fires raging out of control in the Amazon, are they just a sign that Bolsonaro is an obnoxious person with evil capitalist policies? Even if that is PART of the story, is it really the whole thing? Proudly correct people have told me that it is,  but then came Bolivia. And then, somehow missed by our press, is the story of unprecedented new fires across Siberia, more serious than the ones which DID get world shock and press about ten years ago. Could it be that it is a secret cabal of Putin, Bolsonaro and Morales, as the current spirit of  thought seems to suggest? Or could it be that we actually live on planet earth?

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In a different discussion, a more visionary engineer pointed me to some important news on the science side:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/priyashukla/2019/08/31/scientists-may-have-discovered-what-caused-one-of-the-planets-worst-extinctions/#74e0b1a63c7c

That represents real progress on the basic science side, reinforcing what I summarized in my vimeo interview about the coming H2S threat, for which we have maps from NOAA from actual data. 

But again, this is just an example. My PhD thesis advisor once wrote a famous book, the Nerves of Government, and I ask: how can we really design neural networks that actually lead to availability of some real information, for situations like this an others? The "fake news" problem is not about hiring censors repressing independent thought, or about Russia interfering with our elections; those are just symptoms of a more fundamental unsolved design problem. 

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