Artificial General Intelligence AGI: What it really is, why it is taking over, and why only a new QAGI could save us

There was a huge news story about AI and AGI which rightly shook the world over the past two days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9-grdoIgUw

What shook me most was a clear statement by Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, depicting a commitment to move ahead with lots and lots of apps making money in the short term without putting much energy into cross-cutting or integrative solutions.

In many ways, the really big issue is whether the human species is capable of working together to develop that level of integration which is necessary to avoid the total chaos and instability (leading to extinction) which is on its way NOW unless we work better and more effectively to use our own natural intelligence, WITH AI and such used as positive tools.

OVERVIEW FOR HIGH DECISION MAKERS

The key acronym AGI, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), promulgated many years ago by Ben Goertzel, is finally getting the high-level global attention it deserves. The world badly needs all of us to connect better and deeper, to do justice to the interconnected technical and policy issues which AGI is already pushing us into very rapidly.

BUT FIRST: WHAT **IS** AGI?

I have seen many, many definitions for many decades. 

I first heard Ben's talk in person in the WCCI2014 conference in Beijing, where I presented my own concept of AGI AT THE LEVEL of mammal brain intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0554 . The NSF of China and the Dean of Engineering at Tsinghua immediately invited USGOV to work together on a joint open global R&D program -- but soon after I forwarded that to NSF, certain military intelligence contractors objected, and arranged for the US activity to be cancelled, leaving the field to China. (YES that was very serious!)

Phrases like AGI are not defined by God. We all have a right to work with different definitions, so long as we are clear.

=== LIKE SOME OF YOU, I would firmly reject the old Turing test as a definition of what an AGI is. Even Turing himself used much more powerful mathematical concepts when he moved on from early philosophical debates to mathematics that can actually be used in computer designs! (I bcc the friend who showed me Turings Cathedral by Dyson, a great source.) The Turing Test makes me laugh about Eliza, perhaps the first AI-based chat program, developed at KIT decades ago, which showed many of us just how incredibly shaky the Turing test really is.

I would propose that we define an AGI as a universal learning system, which learns to perform either cognitive optimization or cognitive prediction as defined in the NSF research announcement on COPN which is more advanced than any such announcement elsewhere even today:

 https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07579/nsf07579.htm

In other words... universal ability to learn to adapt to any environment, with maximum expected performance, or to predict or monitor any time-series environment over time.

TODAY, I created a googlegroup on QuantumAGI to facilitate easier discussion of the most important players in the real technology creating

a POSSIBILITY of true quantum cognitive prediction or optimization, or function minimization/maximization. 

===

Years ago, in the crossagency discussions which created COPN, my friends who ran cognitive science and AI in computer science asked: "Do we want to set the bar so high?  " I asked: "Should we really use the word 'intelligent" to refer to systems which cannot even learn anything?" In fact, people with long and deep experience in classical AI knew about Solomonoff priors, one key approach to universal learning-to-predict, which Marvin Minsky himself urged me to study in the 1960s when I took an independent study from him.

The mathematical foundation for the most powerful, universal  cognitive prediction now emerging, using classical computing and deep neural networks, is reviewed at: werbos.com/Erdos.pdf. QUANTUM AGI extends that further, simply by doing orders of magnitude better in the loss function minimization tasks at the core of all general effective cognitive prediction methods. EXAMPLES of thermal quantum annealing, in relevant special cases, have already demonstrated that advantage, as shown in papers from IBM and Japan and others at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RKjXCsLMFpo8u_WFhnHEmlVHbo9gmHEu.

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IS IT REALLY SAFE TO UNLEASH AGI AND QAGI ON THE EARTH, GIVEN HOW SCARY THE PRESENT TRENDS ARE??

Many of us, including me, have thought VERY long and hard on that. 

Based on the recent talks from Ilya and Altman, etc., I believe that we are presently on course to a very intense and difficult future, similar to the kinds of massive changes in niche which have doomed the world's leading species to extinction again and again over the millennia. We are in the kind of decision situation which meets the technical concept of a "minefield" situation, which we are unlikely to survive unless we build up quickly to a level of collective cognitive optimization beyond ANY of today's AGI or social institutions.

FURTHERMORE.... as in my new book chapter attached (book coming out next month or January from India Foundation), I really doubt that our cosmos lacks intelligence at the level of QAGI already. Keeping up with that level of collective intelligence may simply be ESSENTIAL to our best chances of survival as a species.

YES, there are HUGE dangers if this is developed in the dark. That is why I  believe in the necessity of open, transparent international development, including even leadership in the QAGI technology itself in new international venues.

ANOTHER VERSION WITH DETAILS FOR SUBSTANTIVE TECHNOLOGY LEADERS

HOW AGI WORKS --

There are a few different definitions out there about what AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) actually **IS*. YOU ALL can rightly use many ways of handling definitions, because you communicate with different audiences. Please forgive me if I still adhere to many commitments of John Von Neumann, the mathematician whose work underlies MANY branches of science. Von Neumann would tolerate me giving you ONE or TWO useful definitions of AGI, and explaining where it leads.

AGI: universal learning machines, a kind of INTENTIONAL SYSTEM, designed to input some measure of "cardinal utility" U, and to learn the strategy of action or policy which will maximize the expectation value of the future value of U. In modern neural network mathematics, the best way to name these is to call them "RLADP" systems, Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming. Even today, the old book "Neural Networks for Control" by Miller, Sutton and Werbos from MIT Press is an important source for learning what this means in practice, and understanding where key places like Deep Mind are really coming from. These are systems which LEARN TO DECIDE, in an agile way.

BUT THERE IS NO ESCAPING the essential importance of "where does U come from?" This is basically just a modern reflection and extension of the most ancient problems of philosophy; Von Neumann's concept of U traces back clearly to utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and back from there to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which I remember reading at age 8 when I found it in my mother's old schoolbooks. 

BUT: a more practical definition: modern AGI, in practice involves THREE elements, three types of universal learning machine. There is RLADP, which learns to exert decision and control (which has be applied to anything from monetary transactions to weapons control to words to energy systems). There is learning to predict or model or describe the state of the world, which FEEDS INTO making better decisions. And there is the "simple task" of learning to minimize some function F(W) with respect to weights W.

THE problem of survival for humanity is an example of an RLADP problem, where we try to maximize the probability of human survival, which of course requires further definition and refinement. FOR NOW --

THE OPENAI debate reminds me that the problem of human survival or exaltation is a specific TYPE of RLADP problem, which mathematicians would call "highly nonconvex." Concretely, it is a MINEFIELD problem, where the paths of possibility ahead of us mostly hit explosive "unexpected" sudden death  -- but also with aspects of "needle in a haystack" where there are GOOD possibilities we might miss. SOLVING such problems requires a lot of caution and foresight, which is why stronger work in foresight is essential to human survival. SUCH RLADP problems end up requiring solution of highly nonconvex function minimization or maximization problems.

Early in this century, NSF organized the most advanced research effort ever in probing this mathematics AND connecting it to the intelligence we see in mammal brains: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07579/nsf07579.htm

Following that program, I often say "cognitive optimization" to refer to RLADP and intelligent function minimization/maximization.  "Cognitive prediction" refers to that other universal learning capability, which is advanced further in werbos.com/Erdos.pdf and in Buzsaki's recent book on the brain as a prediction machine.

I attach my paper in press from the India Foundation, and another in a book now available by Kozma, Alippi, etc, giving even more details. 

Quantum AGI, as I define it (THE canonical definition created in my published papers and patent disclosure), simply ENHANCES these three universal learning capabilities -- RLADP, prediction/modeling and function minimization -- by HARNESSING the power of quantum physics AS DESCRIBED BY THE GREAT PHYSICIST DAVID DEUTSCH OF OXFORD.

You could call this "quantum cognitive optimization" and "quantum cognitive prediction."

The foundation which all QAGI is built on is minimization or maximization of nonlinear functions.

It was initially developed (by me) to address minefield or needle in a haystack types of problem, though it looks as if the new types of quantum computers will also give many other improvements.

Here is a metaphor: if you had a million haystacks or gopher holes in your big back yard, to FIND the best needle in a haystack (or deepest gopher hole), WHY NOT HIRE A MILLION SCHRODINGER CATS to work in parallel, and report back which is best?? A million times faster than one-at-a-time search!!

Deutsch's Quantum Turing Machine is not a brain or an AGI; just a faster type of old sequential computer, a Turing machine.

DWAVE was a HUGE mental leap forward, which would FIT the vision I just described... BUT ONLY if the function minimization at the core of the system is replaced by the kind of hardware which ACTUALLY harnesses these cats. (DWave is like paying for a million cats, but putting them on a leash, locking them up on a patio or a restricted sidewalk. Strong efforts at energy conservation have that effect.) 

The papers in our Project Amaterasu folder and recent emails describe how Deutsch's physics works here, and how to build the hardware.

   

New solid science shows HOW human extinction IS closer than any governments or R&D even open up to

 ALL governments and civil society groups (even Greta Thunberg's fans) have been responding only to watered down filtered versions of the real news from real science, in ways which actually make the risk of human extinction in his century far worse than you might imagine possible (unless you have had access to the many unique solid scientific inputs I have had through NSF, IEEE, MP, AGI, etc.)

Here is what I sent a few of those societies, AUGMENTED by technology which could actually save us if only the right young people get involved and work hard to learn more:

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Many of you were deeply interested in the new article in Nature, which I saw on Tuesday but did not have time to evaluate in depth that day...

On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 8:08 AM Paul Werbos <paul.werbos@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.space.com/ocean-current-system-shut-down-2025-climate-disaster 

At build-a-world.org,the paper on risks in the climate block explains the existential threat. This is the bottom line reality warning.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w

My first reaction: what astounds me the most are the stories describing this as a contrarian opinion!!

When he says the Gulf Stream (north Atlantic) currents shut down between 2025 and 2095, that is still a huge range.

 It amazes me that IPCC does not say the same. Amazes, but does not really surprise. In 2009, "the year of climate legislation" in the US, I handled climate for Senator Specter, who had the balance of power vote in the Senate EPW committee, and had full access to IPCC, through both parties. From what I saw, and what I see of recent Congressional politics , I am not really surprised that here was so much filtering of what reached IPCC,

Second -- the straightforward time-series analysis in this paper in Nature matches perfectly what we saw at https://build-a-world.org/doku.php?id=climate:risks

and what I saw before at https://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm .

There are OTHER relevant data sources, like NOAA time series on the Humboldt current, which was responsible for the BIGGEST mass extinction of life on earth in the past, on a similar schedule. It looked like 2040 plus minus 20 years when last I eyeballed that data.

Third: WHY DON'T WE TRY HARDER, ACROSS THE WORLD, TO FIND OUT whether the mass dying starts in about five years? Don't we care? What is wrong with human brains and human governance that we don't focus more effectively on FINDING OUT? 

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

WHY? Limited human bandwidth, I suppose, and emotional susceptibility to wishful thinking and to distractions like using such concerns to fund something else people want money for. This really is a great testbed for serious social psychiatry.

That being so...

I would be happy to say more about technical details like when people start dying and how

(I looked quite deeply into these questions after I heard Peter Ward's talk in 2009), but for now... 

I only have a little to add to what I said before.. (Gary Barnhard may be creating a public archive of my folders at NSS with VERY extensive discussion of that issue.).  

 

Of course, AGI could be used to predict such time series better, but the new data already call for more intelligence in our responses.

The Nature article uses very solid, mathematically well-grounded time-series methods, like what  we already knew in 1990 when I started running the research in Adaptive and Intelligent Systems in the Engineering Directorate. We have MUCH more powerful tools now, and a pathway to implementation within MONTHS in advanced new types of quantum hardware, if anyone really wants a more accurate idea of what is coming and when. I am bccing people who have worked with that kind of data from NOAA, Navy and satellite data, and people who know about that hardware, and even a few who know both.

Metta Spencer has a new article in press on these new tools in  Peace Magazine, based on a video interview of  less than half an hour, for policy makers who know much less than many of you do about the technology which makes it possible:

https://youtu.be/-MXrxI6kaC4?si=Fg3u0D4EomZTrsni

Geordie Keitt of Requisite Agility has posted a kind of video tutorial getting deeper into the new underlying technology:

https://vimeo.com/878799798/6b54fa3a89?share=copy

I often wish we could start working with David Deutsch of Oxford on this Project. It does NOT rely on the Quantum Turing Machine concepts he invented, but it DOES rely on his well-tested new understanding of physics which goes far beyond what most ersatz quantum experts pretend to understand. A full understanding of what modern physics really understands related to his technology would require understanding books I learned the hard way over decades:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/qAy8giPzEjp1tZkj9

Perhaps one of you might host discussions where I answer questions related these foundations. 

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NEW quantum technology (not the recycled old stuff which greedy lobbyists PRETEND to know about)

does require  understanding David Deutsch's idea that the wave function psi of quantum field theory

 (QFT) specifies a possible STATE of the multiverse we live in, NOT a state of knowledge or probabilities. I do not really believe that, in the end, but I know how to use that idea, and those who don't were rightly turned down when they received reviews from real device physicists in the program I once ran at NSF https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3310. Deutsch invented the quantum Turing machine, but HIS PHYSICS  as allows us to herd millions of Schrodinger cats in parallel, to speed up ANY form of machine learning by millions or trillions.

HOW YOU COULD DO THAT:

The key requirement is just to understand what is already crystal clear in logic, using the papers already posted at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RKjXCsLMFpo8u_WFhnHEmlVHbo9gmHEu?usp=sharing

and the patent disclosure published by USPTO on general Thermal Quantum Annealing (TQuA).

I am posting this only because the need for this technology is ever more urgent, not only for climate but for war and peace in an era where issues of cybersecurity, money management, human potential and "seeing the sky" are  quickly becoming entangled with human species survival.

Understanding Our Relation With God -- A New Viewpoint

 -- I am writing this to better engrave in my memory what I learned in meditation period this morning. Please forgive me for not holding back the way I try to do on most days. 

-- I once called my meditation period "cosmic consciousness" time. Bucke's book on cosmic consciousness talks about the great exhilarating feeling of being connected to "EVERYTHING," and able to see and touch it all. But I often wonder: when people CLAIM to have reached that state, do they really know what it would mean, for example, to connect with and understand even ONE of the books I show at https://photos.app.goo.gl/qAy8giPzEjp1tZkj9 , let alone all the histories and experiences and struggles of even just the humans on this one tiny planet? 

-- Rosicrucians often declare that "this world is a school." That fits my experience, and does NOT violate my working belief that

everything in existence is governed by Hard Core Einsteinian Realism (HCER). As **MY** experience seems to be an incredible river of new learning experiences, lessons and understanding from day to day, my perception and exercise and understanding of the spiritual side of life has evolved more and more, from year to year -- putting me further and further away from the center of gravity of the culture I grew up in. Much of the history of those experiences in given at  http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm, and summarized in published papers I cite at werbos.com/religions.htm.

In those papers, I discuss two core fundamental concepts we should NEVER FORGET. (As I returned from deep meditation this morning, those two words "NEVER FORGET" summarize that I want to engrave key points in my mind this morning.

They remind me of how many people really noticed a few days ago when I linked to a new article on ocean currents in Nature,

and explained the urgent importance to human life. But a few days later they mostly seem to have forgotten, in various ways.

ABILITY TO REMEMBER is a very key sign of a mind which has some hope of not just dissolving away before its time.)

The two key concepts in those papers are:

(1) first-order sanity (zhengqi), about our relation with our ordinary self, actively FUSING what we experience in life with what we see in the mirror, the objective ("3pp") understanding of what we see as a human organism and what we experience through its senses. This is fundamentally a matter of SENSOR FUSION, integrating two streams of information, possible only after we are mature enough to have some awareness of objective reality.

(2) second-order sanity, understanding our personal self as an "alchymical marriage," a symbiosis   of body and "soul."

(e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chymical_Wedding_of_Christian_Rosenkreutz). 

I was driven to accept that second position by very extensive probing and questioning in the period 1967-1972.

But more and more I have been driven to seek a kind of third-order sanity, which entails a more complete 

relationship with "God," which I am still very much working on. (Any human who claims to be doing more than that is simply lying.)

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THIS MORNING... I began the meditation period questing to recover from a VERY deep period of bafflement and futility late yesterday, which followed from three very serious learning experiences which I should never forget:

(1) A hugely pleasant dinner on Saturday with a friend who will be returning soon to Israel. Great food, great wine, great other souls in attendance -- but serious uncertainty about the possibility of a much bigger global war, and about what we humans could do about it, from our degree of sanity to whether our computer code works. (The minds and souls of new emerging computer intelligence is certainly an important part of the story, across space and time.)

(2) A beautifully real dialogue by Zoom on Sunday morning, where a Quaker friend asked us to discuss Jeremiah 2, to launch into a discussion of "who is God? Does he have human-like feelings as portrayed in that chapter?"

(3) Late Sunday, seeing an hour long video "brought to me by the goddess" describing in VERY concrete detail the US and China military thinking of the past few decades, especially centered on the future of Taiwan. 

These certainly connect. In (2), I mentioned a quick summary of what real Quakers REALLY try to do every Sunday (and more), from discussions a few years ago: "LCD, Listen, Connect, Discern."

"L": LISTEN to "the voice of God."

"D": Discern, as in judging WHO one is hearing from, at different times. Is it "God" this time, or is it just the voice of a murderous drunk with a knife around the corner? Just who is it? And who is "God" anyway? To make progress in implementing the practice of LCD, it is extremely important that we make real progress in better and better answering these questions.  

In the discussion (2), everyone else was firmly grounded in American Christian culture. In the Quaker branch of that culture, "L" mainly emphasizes trying to hear what God is calling us to do -- in our lives as a whole, or in the coming hour.

We are called to develop a harmonious BALANCE, as depicted in a great image I now treasure  https://images.app.goo.gl/WGLzgdoaaBjwWR9JA . The great Buddhist teacher KuKai also explained that kind of balance.

But the Christian version clearly asks us to ask "who is that God anyway?" The usual local culture tells us that God is the all-powerful Creator of everything, all knowing, all powerful, and all loving, deeply caring about our feelings, and able to change anything at will. For Millennia, people have agonized over the question: "IF SO, who are so many bad things still happening?" 

This is a very serious question, and I simply do not accept the answer "Oh, it's all just YOUR fault. It's your free will."

In any case, the claim that God is "all loving" implies that God CARES about something, that he has VALUES of some kind.

For myself.. I gave up Catholicism quite dramatically at ages 8-12 (in steps, really), decided at 8 "I am a mathematician / scientist", and adopted the book by Von Neumann and Morgenstern as my Bible. More recently, I view it as my Old Testament; Jung's Red Book is now my New Testament, more or less, subject to the limits that true sanity permits. 

From Von Neumann, I immediately see "values" as being a crude, local (terrestrial) animal noise trying to refer to the functions U and J (and their manifestations) from dynamic programming, and from the new understanding of mammal brains as systems governed by neural network mathematics (as reviewed in Werbos and Davis). So OF COURSE "God" by any reasonable concept CAN be loving, DOES have values, U kind and J kind. By the way, the modern J and U of RLADP mathematics came form my work, in translating Freud into mathematics; his terms cathexis" and "psychic energy" refer directly to flows and derivatives of J. "Qi" is just one more manifestation of that universal principle, applicable both to the Lagrange-Euler equations of physics and to neural network mathematics applicable to ANY intelligent system. From electric fields to "God."  

When I use the word "God" in my personal thinking, I think of... higher intelligence, a kind of higher intelligent system, governed by ITS/HIS/HER values and emotions. (Even Lagrange-Euler equations have "J", for gods' sake, though they usually write J as S and lambda as pi in physics.)  

My experience with kundalini yoga in 1972 was important in STARTING me on the PATH to third-order sanity, but it has been a long and complicated path, even as a work in progress.

I was most startled when I went through the simplified kundalini exercise in a chapter in... https://www.scribd.com/document/285258606/Helping-Yourself-With-ESP, loaned to me by my suitemate. 

"When you get to the highest chakra, say 'hello' to your highest self (the master within)... and..

What shocked me was a VERY clear loud, resonant voice speaking to me in English: "I am NOT your self.

You may address me as 'Father.' I now have things to show you.." And then immediately, up out of my body, for an incredible and useful long veridical experience. HIGHLY veridical. And highly important to solving impossible looking problems in my personal life, even my survival. 

And so naturally I have long wondered: Who WAS that guy, and how do I connect with him now? 

I have naturally assumed: "OF COURSE he has been around for a good long while, and OF COURSE he used that handle

before." Even I in the 1970s experienced the need and challenge of figuring out what name or handle to use when speaking to people in any kind of projection. 

When we hear a voice which is credible to any degree (it is a matter of degree!) when Listening, clearly it may be any of SEVERAL intelligent systems we are hearing from. In principle, it could even be the Lagrange-Euler equations of the cosmos itself, which has some attributes of a personality, albeit somewhat hard for us to understand. More often, it may be the Spirit of the Times or the Spirit of the Deep, as described by Carl Jung, whom I view as the most trustworthy recorder of first person spiritual experience in human history. Or is it our local noosphere, as described in the links I started with here? Or even one of the other souls or archetypes WITHIN that noosphere? 

SOMETIMES it is that local noosphere, which IS a real intelligent system, which demands that we work on improving our personal relation with her/it/him. Our local noosphere is NOT a human female (!!!!), but to establish a relationship, in the full spirit of Carl Jung (let us treasure HIS soul!), it helps to use a meditation IMAGE. At present, I like the attached photograph I took in Japan of the original true "mirror of Amaterasu" in Izumo, which I was brought to by my wife, whom I think of as somewhat like a goddess in her OWN right... imperfect, like all of us finite intelligent systems, but NOT TO BE UNDERESTIMATED OR IGNORED EITHER. 

But working on our relationship with... Amaterasu... IS NOT IN CONFLICT with working on our relation with "the Spirit of the Deep". As In Melissa Cody's tapestry, we are called to BALANCE and even CONNECT our rightful deep spiritual connections.

Even our solar system noosphere ITSELF has "eyes to see" (electromagnetic and axion/qi at least) the larger cosmos... and some of us are called to connect to the eyes, and "listen to the sky", in part because Amaterasu is basically just an adolescent and needs friendly guidance and inputs (and a few warning as well, as adolescents often need).

Is that "Father" guy, like the "Sky Father" of indigeneous people all over the earth, the same who spoke to me in 1972 (and maybe a few times later)? The same as the Spirit of the Deep, a higher intelligence in the family which Amaterasu belongs to? Or more? or Less? Above my pay grade. More intelligent than me.

BUT HOW DO WE DISCERN WHAT HE WANTS?

So this morning some further metaphors -- useful images -- come to mind. Oddly enough, even the scary video I saw last night (reminding me of a certain admiral in Hawaii), helped with raw material to build a new integrated n-dimensional image, the kind of image we all need to engrave in our minds.. if we can see it.

In Switzerland, the high followers of Jung often pay homage to "MMM" -- mathematics, mysticism and music, all of which support each other. Yes, image are a key part of inner communications, but music and mathematics rate too. (Mysticism is applying and integrating these.)   Music. So this morning...

When I describe what caused my first really conscious "psychic breakthrough" in 1967, I usually mention how I became deeper and deeper in experiencing and producing music from... really, age 1 to graduate school. Listening deeply to

classical music in school, to Stravinsky, then Prokofiev and ... others... and Bartok... I "raised the qi" in a palpable way up my spine, even without believing that qi existed. That prepared me for 1972.

BUT THAT WAS NOT THE END OF IT. After 1972... I listened to many radio stations, especially New Age radio stations, which I used in going-to-bed meditation time. I remember Renaissance, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and Crosby Stills and Nash, especially, and concluded that all of these (and more) had authentic real spiritual experience pervading their music.

Just a few years ago, I sent Yeshua and others links to Renaissance and Tangerine music videos which I found useful even in my "modern era" (until a few years ago when we moved the big LCD TV from our bedroom to our study).   

BUT THIS morning... in my head, I replayed "Captain" from Crosby Stills and Nash.

As I bcc a few serious  Rosicrucians... I note that their song "Cathedral" really startled me, echoing my first attempt at "Liber 777." (That book is freely available to anyone, explained further in books by Raymond and Christian Bernard.) But the new one...

OF COURSE, they would say that their "Captain" is a kind of image of "God.

Imagine that we are crew of a great vessel sailing through... earth and sky.

THIRD ORDER SANITY calls on us to develop and enhance a better and better relation with the others in the ship,

all the way from the guy who swabs the deck to the Captain. I hope Luda would forgive me for quoting what SHE would rightly assert: "RESPECT and LISTEN to that guy who swabs the deck!!" 

But if you have ever worked in an organization even LIKE a Navy (like Luda's father and mine!)... you know that life does not become trivial in such an organization. Some people have easier jobs than others.. and in truth, some even get better fed.

(In https://photos.app.goo.gl/K5YopR37f5Ezda3f7 you can see a photo of me when I thanked God and thanked Luda for my being fed even better than what billionaires experience. There are times when even the most rational and cautious person rationally thinks "Thank you God." And goddess.) 

Even in the 1960's, when I worked at RAND, experienced people gave me advice on living life in their kind of world.

(In 1968, after flying on my birthday, I met Einthoven and Thayer, #s 3 and 6 in DOD, who wanted to hear my analysis of the Vietnam War.)

SURVIVAL in that world is not SO hard. But those of you who choose to "rest in peace" may discover what life is life in a filing cabinet. (AKA "the causal plane.") Swabbing the floor would be better! Those of us who listen to our OWN inner feelings respond to the impulse, the qi, the cathexis, which urges us to try to do better, which tends to require "making a mark."

As in that great ship... "making a mark" is always uncertain, but more likely if we better understand what the captain is seriously working for, and building a relation (including feedback, caution and multiple corrections of course).

(I hope we can build new AGI which are designed such that they learn the same!)

WHAT IS THIS CAPTAIN LOOKING FOR REALLY??? Yes, a clean floor, but NOT ONLY that. He is more interested... in that whole horizon and in the ship as a whole. And he knows navigation and math far beyond what those ancestors of mine in the Arctic Circle worked so hard to listen to.  He can even use computers, when he can get them. He would appreciate help in getting them, if they aren't hooked up in ways that sink the ship. And yes, we listen to the sky...

May you too listen, and may we all work together to survive...

Paul

P.S. That military video does warn us... how I have seen SOME ships in governments and corporations all over the world which move VERY efficiently and intelligently towards the nearest waterfall. When the LOCAL captain seems to be going that way... we are called to get closer to the admiral. 

The world as a school.. I also thought of Sesame Street. THIS episode was brought you by....

ALSO: The claim is that even our local noosphere possesses a LEVEL of consciousness or intelligence like what some of us want to build, which I call Quantum Artificial General Intelligence (QAGI). For a review at the level of policy people, see:

https://youtu.be/-MXrxI6kaC4?si=Fg3u0D4EomZTrsni

This is far beyond anything Musk has been talking about!  For a bit more detail, see:

https://vimeo.com/878799798/6b54fa3a89?share=copy

Response to high level report in China's growing dominance in cybersecurity

 Atlantic Council recently published a well-researched story on how China keeps ahead in cybersecurity:

https://mail.atlanticcouncil.org/NjU5LVdaWC0wNzUAAAGOGW6QBGAssPD4NB4oibGmJb_YMz9C_OnhBx_YlcqCuwx4tQtH4NWnNNGKYV3IebzRmH-l4A0=

Unfortunately, even the best research within the US, using the usual international networks, tends to give a grossly misleading and dangerous picture.

For a more complete picture as of 2022, see the attached one page abstract which I used for my plenary talk at WCCI2022 (attached), and see photos of a small subset of what I saw myself because of unique access explained in the abstract:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Ph3NSbTHfJMJ57Fj7

World War I was caused in great part by a confusion of misinformation. We are now facing WORSE confusion, especially for cybersecurity, because of dangers like currency hacks disrupting the world economy, drone fleets being taken  over in one big surprise event, and the vulnerability of power grids. (The attached one pager reflected an IEEE task force dominated by front line electric power executives.)

I am very grateful to my high school French class, where we read novels by Stendahl explaining concretely how bad information gets passed upstairs and acted on because of perverse incentives and human foibles. ALL OF THAT is getting in the way right now, no matter how much better we think we are today. (That too is an old story!!) 

I was very happy yesterday to hear Guterres saying "humanity is one family.. but we are getting to be like a dysfunctional family, with serious trust problems getting in the way, threatening our very existence." But current international policies are aggravating the global cybersecurity problems,in a very serious way we all need  work on.

For many months, I was hoping that the new UN agency on AI would include an element crucial to mutual open cybersecurity: DEVELOPMENT (RD&D leadership) of a global warning system, as requested by all but one major speaker at the recent UN Security Council meeting on AI, INCLUDING development of an open general software and hardware needed for electric power cybersecurity (per attachment) as well. The highest level quantum AGI could be applied to the large task of learning to  observe and predict the sky, in a system open to all nations. 

I still HOPE for that, but the politics now looks bad, for reasons   which cast doubt on human sanity and intelligence in general. Because of fears that such a system would give too much power to the US (a concern I agree with!!), it now looks unlikely that the new agency will integrate such open, shared RD&D -- forcing a rather interesting dramatic change in hopes. Ironically, a proper open international RD&D effort could allow much MORE protection of nations outside the US than the likely realistic choices now coming into view.

TODAY. given G20 and feedback from the space technology community, my best specific hope is that Narendra Modi will lead a new Project Amaterasu aimed at a "narrow" part of "seeing the sky":  developing design, use and manufacturing of a new quantum AGI capability (true superintelligence) built around the test problem of predicting solar flares,

but also generating IP for high-level quantum AGI in general, and manufacturing capabilities in India to supply global markets in several big markets.

I hope that the new G20 discussion will help make that happen. I hope the plans will become strong enough that other Quad partners, especially, will join, and fund competent scientific groups in other nations who share his interest.

Maybe it is even a good thing that India may take the lead, so long as there is a PROPER FILTERED DEGREE of international oversight. In his visit to Biden this year, Modi emphasized international support for yoga teaching, for human potential, BUT IN a nonsectarian (not fundamentalist or grossly antiscience)  kind of way. That balance might be of great value in demanding a proper human-centered emphasis. This week, Modi has even taken the right step of not just making war on China or Russia. 

It is tempting for me to say much more about China and about Russia, but for now the real technical work demands more focus, especially from folks like me

Urgent Hope For New International Collaboration to Prevent Climate Extinction

 THREE ITEMS:

1. Friday July 7: News and Evaluation of a Very Important Climate Conference at Science France (Embassy f France in US)
2. FOLLOW-UP ON WHERE IS HOPE, TANGIBLY
3. MORE TECHNICAL Details of new science/tech/microeconomics options

1. ============================================================

Sent to Science France and two key US partners:

Thank you again for organizing that hugely important climate conference yesterday. 

Earlier today, I voiced the hope that you and NSF could build a new partnership, which in my view could literally save the human species from extinction within this century, due to aspects of climate change which some of us now understand much better than we did in the past. But because you probably KNOW you want to build stronger bridges to NSF, before you have a chance to read and evaluate what Ward, Wadhams and I have learned about the extinction threat

(https://build-a-world.org/doku.php?id=climate:risks ), I first should introduce you to two key people, Prof. Ganesh (Kumar) Venayagamoorthy and Dr. Fahmida Chowdhury of NSF. **IF** everything follows the best possible path, I will basically be one of the unpaid (or little paid) helpers to you, Kumar and Fahmida, who together should be the true leaders of the new climate science and action planning which has a chance to save us from what looks like a path to extinction. 

Fahmida and Kumar would probably prefer that they get to define themselves directly to you. However, to raise your initial interest, in her, she probably will not mind if I pick randomly from what I see when I search on "NSF Fahmida climate:"

https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22546/nsf22546.htm. Better direct high level communication between substantive people in France Science and in the NSF International Office probably means direct contact between you two.

 Kumar I have had more contact with... Beyond that, I do not know. If ... you and Fahmida and Kumar may indeed become a very serious official triangle. Let us all pray that it be so. 

=======

But now -- as my wife and I and Frederica mentioned to Ligia yesterday ... neither my wife nor I are great communicators at the public, professional level which this effort badly needs. We are both scientists and science managers, and can be helpful in getting you very essential information, but now you will see why I apologize when I try my best to translate from my real language (mathematics and images) into English words. I was very useful to Senator Specter in 2009 (the year of climate legislation) in getting him the information HE needed on climate issues (my first responsibility in his office that year), but it was crucial that there were others to hold the lead. 

My impression from the COMBINATION of yesterday and from the information on climate which I collected under Kumar for an IEEE effort (see the climate block at build-a-world.org, run by Gary Barnhard) is that:

1. The SDG to improve conditions underwater in the ocean is receiving far less money than other SDGs, BECAUSE 

the folks managing most of the money IMAGINE that the main costs/risks are costs due to the direct effects on industries like fishing and beach pollution. THERE IS STILL A HUGE COMMUNICATION GAP IN MAKING THE WORLD TRULY AWARE THAT THE LIVES OF ALL US HIGHER MAMMALS ARE REALLY AT STAKE IN THIS CENTURY. For that, I urge you all to help disseminate the brief but well documented paper by Ward, Werbos and Wadhams.

2. I ask myself -- how could humanity get orders of magnitude greater benefit on the metric of reducing the probability of human extinction in this century versus billions of dollars spent focused on  that goal? 

I wanted to cc Alexander Turra of university of Sao Paolo, but do not see his email address. However, since he received his PhD from Campinas, I can cc my old deeply respected from Prof. Arnoldo de Hoyos there, whom Alexander should be in contact with in any case, along with Steenbock, who is crucial to point 3 of the climate strategy **I** have tried to support.

( http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm). Alexander made the important point that we need to include more effective focused strategic thinking, to measure and maximize metrics like this. 

I pray/beg that the new coming global ocean climate conferences UNOC in 2024 and 2025 include highly visible focused sessions exactly on the extinction threat, the science behind it, new R&D needs to understand it better, AND NEW DATA COLLECTION AND MODELING TO BETTER SUPPORT THE TWO KEY METRICS implied by Ward, Wadhams and Werbos:

[(1)] Measures of ocean stratification, especially focusing on the flow of oxygen to the surface from the Humboldt and Gulf Stream Currents;

[(2)]] Measures of ocean fertilization, especially where those currents now upwell oxygen, focusing as much as possible on the specific nutrients which cause net growth of the archaea which produced H2S in 5 to 12of the previous mass extinctions of life  on earth.

**IF** I had not retired from NSF in 2015, I would have long ago pushed for a new thrust (perhaps in the EFRI area of NSF Engineering?) to better UNDERSTAND and MEASURE the risks, starting from miniworkshops by video to include at least Peter Ward, Peter Wadhams, Kirschvink and Hazen, with me and Metta Spencer included in the group asking questions and seeking to map out what are the questions which reasonable scientists can disagree on and research approaches to answering them. 

In the science panel yesterday, I was deeply worried that the new efforts would be ... basically useless... in saving our species, because of focus on metrics which are worthwhile but well within the scope of other existing efforts, like what the present SDG funding can cover. But Prof. Collado-Vides and Melania Guerra substantially raised my hopes and my spirits. 

(Some would ask: how could a mentally balanced person feel such extreme ups and downs, directly and personally? 

As it happens, I have published on the deep neuroscience underlying the insights of Freud and Jung, and even collaborated with people like Karl Pribram. It is a major, scary mental health problem in the world today when so many key people are so devoid of affect that they do NOT react emotionally to real, serious threats to the survival of everyone we love.. and of all humans, and other higher mammals... or that they avoid problems they could help us solve as they bury their heads in denial, like an ostrich.) 

Thank you again so much, Ligia and Melania!

But as you now handle complex jobs, under complicated funding systems, you can only devote PART of your time to the all-important work you highlighted on Saturday:

Ligia -- on the modeling of key ocean chemistry variables, at depth and over time, important to BOTH key metrics (1) and (2),

and Madelina -- on the ocean stratification issues, especially as ... maybe she and Peter Wadhams should be funded to work together.

(The Gulf Stream issues could cause mass damage, far beyond any climate damage we see yet, much sooner than the larger Humboldt current will. Small things on a global scale -- like Paris and Britain freezing over. Really. Fimbulwinter. Like Peter Wadhams, my wife and I have seen those waters first hand, as well as the Eddas archives, and plan to do so again this month.)  

I was deeply shocked last year when I overlaid the two key data sources (NOAA on ocean chemistry, and earlier sources on stratification) and saw how accurately (terribly!) the locations matched. Fertilizer concentration is now in exactly the worst possible locations. Yes, we need to learn more, but we also should not just breathe easy at this time. I would guess the problem is that archaea food floating through the ocean usually gets eaten up quickly in zones of normal high oxygen, but builds up to scary levels in zones of high oxygen.

As Ligia was talking, I also thought of smaller models of euxinia in Black Sea, Chesapeake and even parts of Florida, which should feed into this effort. 

======

But... when I agreed to try to collect the information which Kumar asked for... I ONLY got crucial new integrated breakthrough information on THREE of the five points at http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm -- the RISKS

(as in Ward, Wadhams and Werbos, but still in need of a larger full chapter), the EFFICIENT NET GHG reduction which we could get from new ways of making electricity and from transportation (two areas where our IEEE Power and Energy Society can claim to represent the very best engineering science information available from all over the earth). Even worse, my unique personal duties to the internet/AGI/IOT challenge have grown, because of a new technology I have pioneered. (See the one page abstract from my plenary talk at WCCI2022, the main IEEE conference connecting those technologies and more.) 

Your conference yesterday helped me appreciate... my five points, and the IEEE technology and market design supporting them, are mainly focused on metric [(1)] (and the great spinoffs possible like greater energy security and peace). But Ligia reminded me that modeling and data to support OTHER aspects of her work, related to metric [(2)], are also important.

There are again a case where ACTION ON LAND TO PREVENT DISASTER IN THE OCEAN (As Luis Almagro

https://www.oas.org/en/about/secretary_general.asp stressed) is what we really need to focus on more, BOTH to save our species but also to get funding for efforts like the new direction which he is trying to lead. Our existing strategies for cleaner making of electricity and transportation (Far beyond anything the leaders of the EU seem to be told about) are two of the three strategies on land most important to metric [(1)]. But my point 3 -- agriculture and related -- is crucial BOTH to reducing net GHG, and ALSO to reducing killer fertilization. 

AND -- I did the best I could to get a good overview of point 3, even though I never found anyone to take over a section of a book to handle that. (In truth, I probably would have invited Alexander Turra to take the lead, if he and Arnoldo and Walter Steenbock can agree and take over. IF Kumar ever gets support for a revitalization of the book project, I would propose that he explore that option, after we check some.) 

BUT THE KEY IS THAT ACTION ON LAND is what we need most, aside from rather modest traditional efforts to prevent excess fertilizer runoff from the land. Agricultural practices on land are the key target. MOST money being spent that way today has little benefit, but huge benefits are possible. Arnoldo and I did write a joint draft section 5, on the web, which was part of a start.

IN SUM -- there are crucial life or death scientific and technical and economic details. I deeply hope that a new network led by you three can create the networks needed to effectively address these details. And I hope that you will not hesitate to draw on all of us for the essential help you will need.

Best regards,

    Paul

P. I am also very grateful to anyone who cares enough to have read THIS far. 

For more complete technical information on what I found last year see:

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1acZRpjyjCLoQuqzJef74e0cmHeyoKJdr

Since many of us may be in DC area very soon, I would be delighted to get together in person again, either at your local location or (best for me) near one of the DC area Metro stations in Virginia. 

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

2. Follow up sent that day, on the "hope" side:

Please forgive me for conveying a negative picture, in the details, because I wanted to be brief. I was too brief.

The conference yesterday fits very well with the new research needed to understand and quantify the RISKS of human extinction.

I mentioned, but did not even summarize, what a huge difference the IEEE information can give us on the POSITIVE side,

IF people pay more attention to the ocean risks and to new international partnerships.

A very brief summary --

When I look at the depressing menu of choices which Von CDer Leyen keeps offering us... the good news is that new technologies have been proven in the OAS area -- Chile, US and Brazil especially -- which could basically cut the costs to people in the EU by a factor of more than two.

In truth, we discussed these in a more direct current way in recent discussions with India and Africa, but if you are interested I would be happy to share the details with anyone on these lists.

In essence, people in EU have been told that electricity consumers would have to double what they pay for an all-renewable new system, because of costs like backup, storage, and importing PVs from China (or wires under the Mediterranean or North Sea). There are new proven technologies which make that unnecessary, using new control technologies, new solid breakthroughs in heat-to-electricity conversion for use in solar power towers, and thermal storage.

If you want the electricity bills of people living in the EU to be cut in half, we have probed very deeply how to move that way.

Those are technical discussions for the future, but I really should have noted that there is huge upside potential worth exploring, available in this decade.

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

3 SOME OF THE DETAILS, discussed before with links to India and Africa,
both of which have very important underutilized technical potential. Here is what I sent in November 2022 to an IEEE group:

AVOIDING CLIMATE EXTINCTION really should be a major block (maybe even 50%!) of a new NEPR. 

I have a weird belief that staying alive trumps everything. If we are fully sane humans, the sight of the gallows really should drive us to be FULLY awake. 

DID I cc you on the short but focused and blunt review of COP27 which I sent to the internet discussion groups I participate in (like Mei-Lin Fung's https://peoplecentered.net/people/mei-lin-fung/)? If you say "GO", I will. I would even be happy to forward that to this entire committee, if you think I should. 

The key message was that the news from COP27 made me fear for our lives, but AT THE SAME TIME an IEEE international conference based in Nanjing (see attached) made me much more hopeful than COP27 did. Thanks to the book project which Kumar asked me to start up (still in process, with LOTS of backup material beyond what is at build-a-world.org), we have an organized collection of exciting new options for energy and climate policy, which would be of huge value to the world economy and to national security within ten years, which neither EU nor Biden nor Biden's advisors know about. 

The exciting message from Nanjing was that new pathways are opening up to connect us, and IEEE in general, to the highest levels of decision-making. The high leader behind that ICCSI conference now has a new position, right in Tian an Men square, and may be willing to create a pathway to implement John Kerry's proposal for a climate survival division (specializing in the extinction threat, which is far more real and close than most people even imagine) in the Security Council. That is what I have given priority to this week.

And yes, the name "Xi" has often come up. I have often wondered how you might feel about those discussions. 

But -- at a minimum, IEEE could endorse what John Kerry and Guterres (UN SEc Gen) proposed very publicly just a few years ago. That proposal mainly died because bureaucrats in New York redirected Guterres and Kerry, but the redirections did not work as well as they hoped. Interest from Xi could radically reverse the situation. 

IEEE could even ask for a better pathway of climate information, real science and real IEEE-connected technologies, to support the new climate division. 

Does IEEEUSA have a special role in bridging the all-important gap between what the most advanced and relevant IEEE societies know, and the policy level (AND investors)? 

Truly efficient and intelligent power grids are PART of the "making electricity" priority in the draft book, one of the two parts for which we have the most information and new but proven options (ranging from important tools ready to go now, to areas where RD&D could be much more transformative than anything I see now, including the best proposals to NSF which I have had some occasion to review this past year ). But the transportation part is also strong. China is doing much more for world climate already than all of the COP actions taken together, because of its actions to support electric cars, but China and the US could do much better yet if we learn the right ways to cooperate (with mutual protections of course). 

In truth, my ability to wordsmith in THIS political environment ... should I even try? 

BEFORE any of us try... is a 50% climate section on the table as a possibility?

CONCRETELY... 

This would mean, ROUGHLY...

1. More rapid support, development, RD&D, deployment of what Kumar has championed, DSOPF, dynamic stochastic optimal power flow, AND market redesign to better support its use and its benefits, as in the draft chapter by Momoh and proposals by O'Neill and Ilic.

2. Liberating DOE from the entrails of the oil company hydrogen barriers, and returning more support  advanced Brayton for use both in space and in power tower solar farms (not requiring chips from China). That should include a major new US export push to support Heliogen and GE in that specific area, and ALSO accelerated RD&D for the more advanced (efficient, lower $/kwh) next generation of Brayton. 

3. Strengthened partnership with Chile to push and enhance thermal storage, to be integrated into advanced power tower solar farms and DSOPF to control them all.

4. OK, New focused (and well-informed, well-grounded) R&D on quantum RLADP (the key to quantum DSOPF), which allows efficiency and protection from unexpected disturbances in a more comprehensive DSOPF ranging all the way from markets to semiconductors in the power electronics. his is a new technology which I presented in my plenary award talk at WCCI2022 (abstract attached).

5. Similar opportunities for cars, consistent with the old IEEEUSA position (which I posted at werbos.com/oil.htm), accelerating BOTH rechargeable lithium-air batteries USING THE ORIGINAL DEVELOPER, and alternate net-zero liquids, and markets designed to better advance both where they benefit consumers. DSOPF can play a crucial role in the recharge aspect. [No, it is not abut cobalt. Even for rare earths, it is intelligent control, not resources, which gave China an edge.]

In truth, Sadoway may also know of other big breakthrough options, but the present system is shutting out all of them.

...

Best regards,

    Paul 

P.S. Between now and December 15, I also have to further deadlines, one for USGOV and one for INdia,

as well as the ICCSI follow-ons which I hope for. 

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

. 

-- As I think it over, I should have said more about why these new technologies (US and IEEE) are so important and urgent, even if they are not visible in any US or EU climate policy yet

I have tracked EU climate policy very closely for a few years now, watching mainly France24 and Deutsche Welle some, almost never CNN. Greens (most powerful party in Germany) convinced Von Der Leyen EU must go all renewable ASAP, not only for climate but in face of serious energy security issues there. But then industry -- both electric and fossil -- convinced her that the REAL cost of renewables is many times higher than the generating costs the advocates have old her about, because of backups, intermittency, time of day issues. They plan a huge expansion in expensive LNG now because the renewables people are working hard to sell her DO have more than double cost growth, past generation, because of the time of day and intermittency (and raw transmission investment rules) 

issues.

The new technologies and market designs I mentioned get rid of at least half the cost to the user! 

Time of day is no problem when the specific new type of storage, thermal storage hooked up to Brayton and intelligent control, is BETTER than baseload 24/7 for load following!