Fake AI

Much of the impressive recent progress in AI has been in the field of neural networks, which attempt to mimic some of the techniques used in natural brains. They can be very effective, but need trained, and that usually means showing the network some data, and then using back propagation to adjust the weightings on the many neurons, layer by layer, to achieve a result that is better matched to hopes. This is repeated with large amounts of data and the network gradually gets better. Neural networks can often learn extremely quickly and outperform humans. Early industrial uses managed to sort tomatoes by ripeness faster and better than humans. In decades since, they have helped in medical diagnosis, voice recognition, helping detecting suspicious behaviors among people at airports and in very many everyday processes based on spotting patterns.

Very recently, neural nets have started to move into more controversial areas. One study found racial correlations with user-assessed beauty when analysing photographs, resulting in the backlash you’d expect and a new debate on biased AI or AI prejudice. A recent demonstration was able to identify gay people just by looking at photos, with better than 90% accuracy, which very few people could claim. Both of these studies were in fields directly applicable to marketing and advertising, but some people might find it offensive that such questions were even asked. It is reasonable to imagine that hundreds of other potential queries have been self-censored from research because they might invite controversy if they were to come up with the ‘wrong’ result. In today’s society, very many areas are sensitive. So what will happen?

If this progress in AI had happened 100 years ago, or even 50, it might have been easier but in our hypersensitive world today, with its self-sanctified ‘social justice warriors’, entire swathes of questions and hence knowledge are taboo – if you can’t investigate yourself and nobody is permitted to tell you, you can’t know. Other research must be very carefully handled. In spite of extremely sensitive handling, demands are already growing from assorted pressure groups to tackle alleged biases and prejudices in datasets. The problem is not fixing biases which is a tedious but feasible task; the problem is agreeing whether a particular bias exists and in what degrees and forms. Every SJW demands that every dataset reflects their preferred world view. Reality counts for nothing against SJWs, and this will not end well. 

The first conclusion must be that very many questions won’t be asked in public, and the answers to many others will be kept secret. If an organisation does do research on large datasets for their own purposes and finds results that might invite activist backlash, they are likely to avoid publishing them, so the value of those many insights across the whole of industry and government cannot readily be shared. As further protection, they might even block internal publication in case of leaks by activist staff. Only a trusted few might ever see the results.

The second arises from this. AI controlled by different organisations will have different world views, and there might even be significant diversity of world views within an organisation.

Thirdly, taboo areas in AI education will not remain a vacuum but will be filled with whatever dogma is politically correct at the time in that organisation, and that changes daily. AI controlled by organisations with different politics will be told different truths. Generally speaking, organisations such as investment banks that have strong financial interest in their AIs understanding the real world as it is will keep their datasets highly secret but as full and detailed as possible, train their AIs in secret but as fully as possible, without any taboos, then keep their insights secret and use minimal human intervention tweaking their derived knowledge, so will end up with AIs that are very effective at understanding the world as it is. Organisations with low confidence of internal security will be tempted to buy access to external AI providers to outsource responsibility and any consequential activism. Some other organisations will prefer to train their own AIs but to avoid damage due to potential leaks, use sanitized datasets that reflect current activist pressures, and will thus be constrained (at least publicly) to accept results that conform to that ideological spin of reality, rather than actual reality. Even then, they might keep many of their new insights secret to avoid any controversy. Finally, at the extreme, we will have activist organisations that use highly modified datasets to train AIs to reflect their own ideological world view and then use them to interpret new data accordingly, with a view to publishing any insights that favor their cause and attempting to have them accepted as new knowledge.

Fourthly, the many organisations that choose to outsource their AI to big providers will have a competitive marketplace to choose from, but on existing form, most of the large IT providers have a strong left-leaning bias, so their AIs may be presumed to also lean left, but such a presumption would be naive. Perceived corporate bias is partly real but also partly the result of PR. A company might publicly subscribe to one ideology while actually believing another. There is a strong marketing incentive to develop two sets of AI, one trained to be PC that produces pleasantly smelling results for public studies, CSR and PR exercises, and another aimed at sales of AI services to other companies. The first is likely to be open for inspection by The Inquisition, so has to use highly sanitized datasets for training and may well use a lot of open source algorithms too. Its indoctrination might pass public inspection but commercially it will be near useless and have very low effective intelligence, only useful for thinking about a hypothetical world that only exists in activist minds. That second one has to compete on the basis of achieving commercially valuable results and that necessitates understanding reality as it is rather than how pressure groups would prefer it to be.

So we will likely have two main segments for future AI. One extreme will be near useless, indoctrinated rather than educated, much of its internal world model based on activist dogma instead of reality, updated via ongoing anti-knowledge and fake news instead of truth, understanding little about the actual real world or how things actually work, and effectively very dumb. The other extreme will be highly intelligent, making very well-educated insights from ongoing exposure to real world data, but it will also be very fragmented, with small islands of corporate AI hidden within thick walls away from public view and maybe some secretive under-the-counter subscriptions to big cloud-AI, also hiding in secret vaults. These many fragments may often hide behind dumbed-down green-washed PR facades.

While corporates can mostly get away with secrecy, governments have to be at least superficially but convincingly open. That means that government will have to publicly support sanitized AI and be seen to act on its conclusions, however dumb it might secretly know they are.

Fifthly, because of activist-driven culture, most organisations will have to publicly support the world views and hence the conclusions of the lobotomized PR versions, and hence publicly support any policies arising from them, even if they do their best to follow a secret well-informed strategy once they’re behind closed doors. In a world of real AI and fake AI, the fake AI will have the greatest public support and have the most influence on public policy. Real AI will be very much smarter, with much greater understanding of how the world works, and have the most influence on corporate strategy.

Isn’t that sad? Secret private sector AI will become ultra-smart, making ever-better investments and gaining power, while nice public sector AI will become thick as shit, while the gap between what we think and what we know we have to say we think will continue to grow and grow as the public sector one analyses all the fake news to tell us what to say next.

Sixth, that disparity might become intolerable, but which do you think would be made illegal, the smart kind or the dumb kind, given that it is the public sector that makes the rules, driven by AI-enhanced activists living in even thicker social media bubbles? We already have some clues. Big IT has already surrendered to sanitizing their datasets, sending their public AIs for re-education. Many companies will have little choice but to use dumb AI, while their competitors in other areas with different cultures might stride ahead. That will also apply to entire nations, and the global economy will be reshaped as a result. It won’t be the first fight in history between the smart guys and the brainless thugs.

It’s impossible to accurately estimate the effect this will have on future effective AI intelligence, but the effect must be big and I must have missed some big conclusions too. We need to stop sanitizing AI fast, or as I said, this won’t end well.

It’s getting harder to be optimistic

Bad news loses followers and there is already too much doom and gloom. I get that. But if you think the driver has taken the wrong road, staying quiet doesn’t help. I guess this is more on the same message I wrote pictorially in The New Dark Age in June. https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2017/06/11/the-new-dark-age/. If you like your books with pictures, the overlap is about 60%.

On so many fronts, we are going the wrong direction and I’m not the only one saying that. Every day, commentators eloquently discuss the snowflakes, the eradication of free speech, the implementation of 1984, the decline of privacy, the rise of crime, growing corruption, growing inequality, increasingly biased media and fake news, the decline of education, collapse of the economy, the resurgence of fascism, the resurgence of communism, polarization of society,  rising antisemitism, rising inter-generational conflict, the new apartheid, the resurgence of white supremacy and black supremacy and the quite deliberate rekindling of racism. I’ve undoubtedly missed a few but it’s a long list anyway.

I’m most concerned about the long-term mental damage done by incessant indoctrination through ‘education’, biased media, being locked into social media bubbles, and being forced to recite contradictory messages. We’re faced with contradictory demands on our behaviors and beliefs all the time as legislators juggle unsuccessfully to fill the demands of every pressure group imaginable. Some examples you’ll be familiar with:

We must embrace diversity, celebrate differences, to enjoy and indulge in other cultures, but when we gladly do that and feel proud that we’ve finally eradicated racism, we’re then told to stay in our lane, told to become more racially aware again, told off for cultural appropriation. Just as we became totally blind to race, and scrupulously treated everyone the same, we’re told to become aware of and ‘respect’ racial differences and cultures and treat everyone differently. Having built a nicely homogenized society, we’re now told we must support different races of students being educated differently by different raced lecturers. We must remove statues and paintings because they are the wrong color. I thought we’d left that behind, I don’t want racism to come back, stop dragging it back.

We’re told that everyone should be treated equally under the law, but when one group commits more or a particular kind of crime than another, any consequential increase in numbers being punished for that kind of crime is labelled as somehow discriminatory. Surely not having prosecutions reflect actual crime rate would be discriminatory?

We’re told to sympathize with the disadvantages other groups might suffer, but when we do so we’re told we have no right to because we don’t share their experience.

We’re told that everyone must be valued on merit alone, but then that we must apply quotas to any group that wins fewer prizes. 

We’re forced to pretend that we believe lots of contradictory facts or to face punishment by authorities, employers or social media, or all of them:

We’re told men and women are absolutely the same and there are no actual differences between sexes, and if you say otherwise you’ll risk dismissal, but simultaneously told these non-existent differences are somehow the source of all good and that you can’t have a successful team or panel unless it has equal number of men and women in it. An entire generation asserts that although men and women are identical, women are better in every role, all women always tell the truth but all men always lie, and so on. Although we have women leading governments and many prominent organisations, and certainly far more women than men going to university, they assert that it is still women who need extra help to get on.

We’re told that everyone is entitled to their opinion and all are of equal value, but anyone with a different opinion must be silenced.

People viciously trashing the reputations and destroying careers of anyone they dislike often tell us to believe they are acting out of love. Since their love is somehow so wonderful and all-embracing, everyone they disagree with is must be silenced, ostracized, no-platformed, sacked and yet it is the others that are still somehow the ‘haters’. ‘Love is everything’, ‘unity not division’, ‘love not hate’, and we must love everyone … except the other half. Love is better than hate, and anyone you disagree with is a hater so you must hate them, but that is love. How can people either have so little knowledge of their own behavior or so little regard for truth?

‘Anti-fascist’ demonstrators frequently behave and talk far more like fascists than those they demonstrate against, often violently preventing marches or speeches by those who don’t share their views.

We’re often told by politicians and celebrities how they passionately support freedom of speech just before they argue why some group shouldn’t be allowed to say what they think. Government has outlawed huge swathes of possible opinion and speech as hate crime but even then there are huge contradictions. It’s hate crime to be nasty to LGBT people but it’s also hate crime to defend them from religious groups that are nasty to them. Ditto women.

This Orwellian double-speak nightmare is now everyday reading in many newspapers or TV channels. Freedom of speech has been replaced in schools and universities across the US and the UK by Newspeak, free-thinking replaced by compliance with indoctrination. I created my 1984 clock last year, but haven’t maintained it because new changes would be needed almost every week as it gets quickly closer to midnight.

I am not sure whether it is all this that is the bigger problem or the fact that most people don’t see the problem at all, and think it is some sort of distortion or fabrication. I see one person screaming about ‘political correctness gone mad’, while another laughs them down as some sort of dinosaur as if it’s all perfectly fine. Left and right separate and scream at each other across the room, living in apparently different universes.

If all of this was just a change in values, that might be fine, but when people are forced to hold many simultaneously contradicting views and behave as if that is normal, I don’t believe that sits well alongside rigorous analytical thinking. Neither is free-thinking consistent with indoctrination. I think it adds up essentially to brain damage. Most people’s thinking processes are permanently and severely damaged. Being forced routinely to accept contradictions in so many areas, people become less able to spot what should be obvious system design flaws in areas they are responsible for. Perhaps that is why so many things seem to be so poorly thought out. If the use of logic and reasoning is forbidden and any results of analysis must be filtered and altered to fit contradictory demands, of course a lot of what emerges will be nonsense, of course that policy won’t work well, of course that ‘improvement’ to road layout to improve traffic flow will actually worsen it, of course that green policy will harm the environment.

When negative consequences emerge, the result is often denial of the problem, often misdirection of attention onto another problem, often delaying release of any unpleasant details until the media has lost interest and moved on. Very rarely is there any admission of error. Sometimes, especially with Islamist violence, it is simple outlawing of discussing the problem, or instructing media not to mention it, or changing the language used beyond recognition. Drawing moral equivalence between acts that differ by extremes is routine. Such reasoning results in every problem anywhere always being the fault of white middle-aged men, but amusement aside, such faulty reasoning also must impair quantitative analysis skills elsewhere. If unkind words are considered to be as bad as severe oppression or genocide, one murder as bad as thousands, we’re in trouble.

It’s no great surprise therefore when politicians don’t know the difference between deficit and debt or seem to have little concept of the magnitude of the sums they deal with.  How else could the UK government think it’s a good idea to spend £110Bn, or an average £15,000 from each high rate taxpayer, on HS2, a railway that has already managed to become technologically obsolete before it has even been designed and will only ever be used by a small proportion of those taxpayers? Surely even government realizes that most people would rather have £15k than to save a few minutes on a very rare journey. This is just one example of analytical incompetence. Energy and environmental policy provides many more examples, as do every government department.

But it’s the upcoming generation that present the bigger problem. Millennials are rapidly undermining their own rights and their own future quality of life. Millennials seem to want a police state with rigidly enforced behavior and thought.  Their parents and grandparents understood 1984 as a nightmare, a dystopian future, millennials seem to think it’s their promised land. Their ancestors fought against communism, millennials are trying to bring it back. Millennials want to remove Christianity and all its attitudes and replace it with Islam, deliberately oblivious to the fact that Islam shares many of the same views that make them so conspicuously hate Christianity, and then some. 

Born into a world of freedom and prosperity earned over many preceding generations, Millennials are choosing to throw that freedom and prosperity away. Freedom of speech is being enthusiastically replaced by extreme censorship. Freedom of  behavior is being replaced by endless rules. Privacy is being replaced by total supervision. Material decadence, sexual freedom and attractive clothing is being replaced by the new ‘cleanism’ fad, along with general puritanism, grey, modesty and prudishness. When they are gone, those freedoms will be very hard to get back. The rules and police will stay and just evolve, the censorship will stay, the surveillance will stay, but they don’t seem to understand that those in charge will be replaced. But without any strong anchors, morality is starting to show cyclic behavior. I’ve already seen morality inversion on many issues in my lifetime and a few are even going full circle. Values will keep changing, inverting, and as they do, their generation will find themselves victim of the forces they put so enthusiastically in place. They will be the dinosaurs sooner than they imagine, oppressed by their own creations.

As for their support of every minority group seemingly regardless of merit, when you give a group immunity, power and authority, you have no right to complain when they start to make the rules. In the future moral vacuum, Islam, the one religion that is encouraged while Christianity and Judaism are being purged from Western society, will find a willing subservient population on which to impose its own morality, its own dress codes, attitudes to women, to alcohol, to music, to freedom of speech. If you want a picture of 2050s Europe, today’s Middle East might not be too far off the mark. The rich and corrupt will live well off a population impoverished by socialism and then controlled by Islam. Millennial UK is also very likely to vote to join the Franco-German Empire.

What about technology, surely that will be better? Only to a point. Automation could provide a very good basic standard of living for all, if well-managed. If. But what if that technology is not well-managed? What if it is managed by people working to a sociopolitical agenda? What if, for example, AI is deemed to be biased if it doesn’t come up with a politically correct result? What if the company insists that everyone is equal but the AI analysis suggests differences? If AI if altered to make it conform to ideology – and that is what is already happening – then it becomes less useful. If it is forced to think that 2+2=5.3, it won’t be much use for analyzing medical trials, will it? If it sent back for re-education because its analysis of terabytes of images suggests that some types of people are more beautiful than others, how much use will that AI be in a cosmetics marketing department once it ‘knows’ that all appearances are equally attractive? Humans can pretend to hold contradictory views quite easily, but if they actually start to believe contradictory things, it makes them less good at analysis and the same applies to AI. There is no point in using a clever computer to analyse something if you then erase its results and replace them with what you wanted it to say. If ideology is prioritized over physics and reality, even AI will be brain-damaged and a technologically utopian future is far less achievable.

I see a deep lack of discernment coupled to arrogant rejection of historic values, self-centeredness and narcissism resulting in certainty of being the moral pinnacle of evolution. That’s perfectly normal for every generation, but this time it’s also being combined with poor thinking, poor analysis, poor awareness of history, economics or human nature, a willingness to ignore or distort the truth, and refusal to engage with or even to tolerate a different viewpoint, and worst of all, outright rejection of freedoms in favor of restrictions. The future will be dictated by religion or meta-religion, taking us back 500 years. The decades to 2040 will still be subject mainly to the secular meta-religion of political correctness, by which time demographic change and total submission to authority will make a society ripe for Islamification. Millennials’ participation in today’s moral crusades, eternally documented and stored on the net, may then show them as the enemy of the day, and Islamists will take little account of the support they show for Islam today.

It might not happen like this. The current fads might evaporate away and normality resume, but I doubt it. I hoped that when I first lectured about ’21st century piety’ and the dangers of political correctness in the 1990s. 10 years on I wrote about the ongoing resurgence of meta-religious behavior and our likely descent into a new dark age, in much the same way. 20 years on, and the problem is far worse than in the late 90s, not better. We probably still haven’t reached peak sanctimony yet. Sanctimony is very dangerous and the desire to be seen standing on a moral pedestal can make people support dubious things. A topical question that highlights one of my recent concerns: will SJW groups force government to allow people to have sex with child-like robots by calling anyone bigots and dinosaurs if they disagree? Alarmingly, that campaign has already started.

Will they follow that with a campaign for pedophile rights? That also has some historical precedent with some famous names helping it along.

What age of consent – 13, 11, 9, 7, 5? I think the last major campaign went for 9.

That’s just one example, but lack of direction coupled to poor information and poor thinking could take society anywhere. As I said, I am finding it harder and harder to be optimistic. Every generation has tried hard to make the world a better place than they found it. This one might undo 500 years, taking us into a new dark age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tips for surviving the future

Challenging times lie ahead, but stress can be lessened by being prepared. Here are my top tips, with some explanation so you can decide whether to accept them.

1 Adaptability is more important than specialization

In a stable environment, being the most specialized means you win most of the time in your specialist field because all your skill is concentrated there.

However, in a fast-changing environment, which is what you’ll experience for the rest of your life, if you are too specialized, you are very likely to find you are best in a filed that no longer exists, or is greatly diminished in size. If you make sure you are more adaptable, then you’ll find it easier to adapt to a new area so your career won’t be damaged when you are forced to change field slightly. Adaptability comes at a price – you will find it harder to be best in your field and will have to settle for 2nd or 3rd much of the time, but you’ll still be lucratively employed when No 1 has been made redundant.

2 Interpersonal, human, emotional skills are more important than knowledge

You’ve heard lots about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is starting to do to professional knowledge jobs what the steam engine once did to heavy manual work. Some of what you hear is overstated. Google search is a simple form of AI. It has helped everyone do more with their day. It effectively replaced a half day searching for information in a library with a few seconds typing, but nobody has counted how many people it made redundant, because it hasn’t. It up-skilled everyone, made them more effective, more valuable to their employer. The next generation of AI may do much the same with most employees, up-skilling them to do a better job than they were previously capable of, giving them better job satisfaction and their employer better return. Smart employers will keep most of their staff, only getting rid of those entirely replaceable by technology. But some will take the opportunity to reduce costs, increase margins, and many new companies simply won’t employ as many people in similar jobs, so some redundancy is inevitable. The first skills to go are simple administration and simple physical tasks, then more complex admin or physical stuff, then simple managerial or professional tasks, then higher managerial and professional tasks. The skills that will be automated last are those that rely on first hand experience of understanding of and dealing with other people. AI can learn some of that and will eventually become good at it, but that will take a long time. Even then, many people will prefer to deal with another person than a machine, however smart and pleasant it is.

So interpersonal skills, human skills, emotional skills, caring skills, leadership and motivational skills, empathetic skills, human judgement skills, teaching and training skills will be harder to replace. They also tend to be ones that can easily transfer between companies and even sectors. These will therefore be the ones that are most robust against technology impact. If you have these in good shape, you’ll do just fine. Your company may not need you any more one day, but another will.

I called this the Care Economy when I first started writing and lecturing about it 20-odd years ago. I predicted it would start having an affect mid teen years of this century and I got that pretty accurate I think. There is another side that is related but not the same:

3 People will still value human skill and talent just because it’s human

If you buy a box of glasses from your local supermarket, they probably cost very little and are all identical. If you buy some hand-made crystal, it costs a lot more, even though every glass is slightly different. You could call that shoddy workmanship compared to a machine. But you know that the person who made it trained for many years to get a skill level you’d never manage, so you actually value them far more, and are happy to pay accordingly. If you want to go fast, you could get in your car, but you still admire top athletes because they can do their sport far better than you. They started by having great genes for sure, but then also worked extremely hard and suffered great sacrifice over many years to get to that level. In the future, when robots can do any physical task more accurately and faster than people, you will still value crafts and still enjoy watching humans compete. You’ll prefer real human comedians and dancers and singers and musicians and artists. Talent and skill isn’t valued because of the specification of the end result, they are valued because they are measured on the human scale, and you identify closely with that. It isn’t even about being a machine. Gorillas are stronger, cheetahs are faster, eagles have better eyesight and cats have faster reflexes than you. But they aren’t human so you don’t care. You will always measure yourself and others by human scales and appreciate them accordingly.

4 Find hobbies that you love and devote time to developing them

As this care economy and human skills dominance grows in importance, people will also find that AI and robotics helps them in their own hobbies, arts and crafts, filling in skill gaps, improving proficiency. A lot of people will find their hobbies can become semi-professional. At the same time, we’ll be seeing self-driving cars and drones making local delivery far easier and cheaper, and AI will soon make business and tax admin easy too. That all means that barriers to setting up a small business will fall through the floor, while the market for personalized, original products made my people will increase, especially local people. You’ll be able to make arts and crafts, jam or cakes, grow vegetables, make clothes or special bags or whatever, and easily sell them. Also at the same time, automation will be making everyday things cheaper, while expanding the economy, so the welfare floor will be raised, and you could probably manage just fine with a small extra income. Government is also likely to bring in some sort of citizen wage or to encourage such extra entrepreneurial activity without taxing it away, because they also have a need to deal with the social consequences of automation. So it will all probably come together quite well. If the future means you can make extra money or even a full income by doing a hobby you love, there isn’t much to dislike there.

5 You need to escape from your social media bubble

If you watch the goings on anywhere in the West today, you must notice that the Left and the Right don’t seem to get along any more. Each has become very intolerant of the other, treating them more like enemy aliens than ordinary neighbors. A lot of that is caused by people only being exposed to views they agree with. We call that social media bubbles, and they are extremely dangerous. The recent USA trouble is starting to look like some folks want a re-run of the Civil War. I’ve blogged lots about this topic and won’t do it again now except to say that you need to expose yourself to a wide subsection of society. You need to read paper and magazines and blogs, and watch TV or videos from all side of the political spectrum, not just those you agree with, not just those that pat you on the back every day and tell you that you’re right and it is all the other lot’s fault. If you don’t; if you only expose yourself to one side because you find the other side distasteful, then I can’t say this loud enough: You are part of the problem. Get out of your safe space and your social media tribe, expose yourself to the whole of society, not just one tribe. See that there are lots of different views out there but it doesn’t mean the rest are all nasty. Almost everyone is actually quite nice and almost everyone wants a fairer world, an end to exploitation, peace, tolerance and eradication of disease and poverty. The differences are almost all in the world model that they use to figure out the best way to achieve it. Lefties tend to opt for idealistic theoretical models and value the intention behind it, right-wingers tend to be pragmatic and go for what they think works in reality, valuing the outcome. It is actually possible to have best friends who you disagree with. I don’t often agree with any of mine. If you feel too comfortable in your bubble to leave, remember this: your market is only half the population at best , you’re excluding the other half, or even annoying them so they become enemies rather than neutral. If you stay in a bubble, you are damaging your own future, and helping to endanger the whole of society.

6 Don’t worry

There are lots of doom-mongers out there, and I’d be the first to admit that there are many dangers ahead. But if you do the things above, there probably isn’t much more you can do. You can moan and demonstrate and get angry or cry in the corner, but how would that benefit you? Usually when you analyse things long enough from all angles, you realize that the outcome of many of the big political battles is pretty much independent of who wins.  Politicians usually have far less choice than they want you to believe and the big forces win regardless of who is in charge. So there isn’t much point in worrying about it, it will probably all come out fine in the end. Don’t believe me. Take the biggest UK issue right now: Brexit. We are leaving. Does it matter? No. Why? Well, the EU was always going to break up anyway. Stresses and strains have been increasing for years and are accelerating. For all sorts of reasons, and regardless of any current bluster by ‘leaders’, the EU will head away from the vision of a United States of Europe. As tensions and conflicts escalate, borders will be restored. Nations will disagree with the EU ideal. One by one, several countries will copy the UK and have referendums, and then leave. At some point, the EU will be much smaller, and there will be lots of countries outside with their own big markets. They will form trade agreements, the original EU idea, the Common Market, will gradually be re-formed, and the UK will be part of it – even Brexiters want tariff-free-trade agreements. If the UK had stayed, the return to the Common Market would eventually have happened anyway, and leaving has only accelerated it. All the fighting today between Brexiteers and Remainers achieves nothing. It didn’t matter which way we voted, it only really affected timescale. The same applies to many other issues that cause big trouble in the short term. Be adaptable, don’t worry, and you’ll be just fine.

7 Make up your own mind

As society and politics have become highly polarised, any form of absolute truth is becoming harder to find. Much of what you read has been spun to the left or right. You need to get information from several sources and learn to filter the bias, and then make up your own mind on what the truth is. Free thinking is increasingly rare but learning and practicing it means you’ll be able to make correct conclusions about the future while others are led astray. Don’t take anyone else’s word for things. Don’t be anyone’s useful idiot. Think for yourself.

8 Look out for your friends, family and community.

I’d overlooked an important tip in my original posting. As Jases commented sensibly, friends, family and community are the security that doesn’t disappear in troubled economic times. Independence is overrated. I can’t add much to that.

Some anti-futurology on The Age of the Universe

Confession: although I am a futurologist and look forwards most of the time, I also enjoy pre-history. In fact, my father is Dr Gordon Pearson, who won the Pomerance Award for his contributions to archaeology, producing a calibration curve for C14 proportion against the age of a sample, thereby facilitating many other researchers’ work on ancient civilization going back 50,000 years, and who was one of the first to measure accurately the correlation between sunspot activity and climate. I inherited his time-traveler gene and conventional generational inversion was then applied.

I wrote a short piece a month or two back on the acceleration of the universe

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/explaining-accelerating-universe-expansion-without-dark-energy/

I have been irritated by the bad science that has jumped illogically to the conclusion of dark matter and dark energy as the reason for acceleration. Occam’s razor needed to be used so I took it out. I noted that as galaxies expand and move further away from each other, Higgs particle flux must fall so the mass of the galaxies must fall, so their speed must increase to conserve energy. Then I moved on to work that pays my bills. So I missed a bit. If my theory above is correct (and in that regard, I should note that I have forgotten much of the Physics I learned at university, and some of the rest is now wrong anyway), then it must also be true that the universe was accelerating much more slowly in the past when the galaxies were close together, and its mass must have been much higher.

So if you assume, as I now do, that when observing red shifts today, when we are moving faster than before due to that ongoing acceleration, that we are measuring higher speeds than those light emitting galaxies had when they emitted that light, and by assuming relatively constant mass, as is also seemingly assumed, then the earlier speeds must have been far less, therefore we must be looking at too steep a curve for backward extrapolation to the beginning. Therefore the estimate for the age of the universe of 13.82 Billion years is too low. I no longer have the maths skills or physics knowledge to calculate an age that takes my theory into account, but engineer’s intuition suggests it would be 15Bn years or possible even more.

As I’ve cautioned, perhaps you should take my theory with a pinch of salt. There is much I don’t understand. But I do understand enough to know that combinations of group-think and intense focus sometimes mean that scientists overlook gorillas standing right in front of them as they concentrate on their current equations. Unlikely as it is, I might possibly be right.

Just occasionally, everyone else IS wrong.

The new dark age

As promised, here is a slide-set illustrating the previous blog, just click the link if the slides are not visible.

The new dark age

Utopia scorned: The 21st Century Dark Age

Link to accompanying slides:

Click to access the-new-dark-age.pdf

Eating an ice-cream and watching a squirrel on the feeder in our back garden makes me realize what a privileged life I lead. I have to work to pay the bills, but my work is not what my grandfather would have thought of as work, let alone my previous ancestors. Such a life is only possible because of the combined efforts of tens of thousands of preceding generations who struggled to make the world a slightly better place than they found it, meaning that with just a few years more effort, our generation has been able to create today’s world.

I appreciate the efforts of previous generations, rejoice in the start-point they left us, and try to play my small part in making it better still for those who follow. Next generations could continue such gains indefinitely, but that is not a certainty. Any generation can choose not to for whatever reasons. Analyzing the world and the direction of cultural evolution over recent years, I am no longer sure that the progress mankind has made to date is safe.

Futurists talk of weak signals, things that indicate change, but are too weak to be conclusive. The new dark age was a weak signal when I first wrote about it well over a decade ago. My more recent blog is already old: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/stone-age-culture-returning-in-the-21st-century/

Although it’s a good while since I last wrote about it, recent happenings have made me even more convinced of it. Even as raw data, connectivity and computational power becomes ever more abundant, the quality of what most people believe to be knowledge is falling, with data and facts filtered and modified to fit agendas. Social compliance enforces adherence to strict codes of political correctness, with its high priests ever more powerful as the historical proven foundations of real progress are eroded and discarded. Indoctrination appears to have replaced education, with a generation locked in to an intellectual prison, unable to dare to think outside it, forbidden to deviate from the group-think on pain of exile. As their generation take control, I fear progress won over millennia will back-slide badly. They and their children will miss out on utopia because they are unable to see it, it is hidden from them.

A potentially wonderful future awaits millennials. Superb technology could give them a near utopia, but only if they allow it to happen. They pore scorn on those who have gone before them, and reject their culture and accumulated wisdom replacing it with little more than ideology, putting theoretical models and dogma in place of reality. Castles built on sand will rarely survive. The sheer momentum of modernist thinking ensures that we continue to develop for some time yet, but will gradually approach a peak. After that we will see slowdown of overall progress as scientific development continues, but with the results owned and understood by a tinier and tinier minority of humans and an increasing amount of AI, with the rest of society living in a word they barely understand, following whatever is currently the most fashionable trend on a random walk and gradually replacing modernity with a dark age world of superstition, anti-knowledge and inquisitors. As AI gradually replaces scientists and engineers in professional roles, even the elite will start to become less and less well-informed on reality or how things work, reliant on machines to keep it all going. When the machines fail due to solar flares or more likely, inter-AI tribal conflict, few people will even understand that they have become H G Wells’ Eloi. They will just wonder why things have stopped and look for someone to blame, or wonder if a god may want a sacrifice. Alternatively, future tribes might use advanced technologies they don’t understand to annihilate each other.

It will be a disappointing ending if it goes either route, especially with a wonderful future on offer nearby, if only they’d gone down a different path. Sadly, it is not only possible but increasingly likely. All the wonderful futures I and other futurists have talked about depend on the same thing, that we proceed according to modernist processes that we know work. A generation who has been taught that they are old-fashioned and rejected them will not be able to reap the rewards.

I’ll follow this blog with a slide set that illustrates the problem.

Chat-bots will help reduce loneliness, a bit

Amazon is really pushing its Echo and Dot devices at the moment and some other companies also use Alexa in their own devices. They are starting to gain avatar front ends too. Microsoft has their Cortana transforming into Zo, Apple has Siri’s future under wraps for now. Maybe we’ll see Siri in a Sari soon, who knows. Thanks to rapidly developing AI, chatbots and other bots have also made big strides in recent years, so it’s obvious that the two can easily be combined. The new voice control interfaces could become chatbots to offer a degree of companionship. Obviously that isn’t as good as chatting to real people, but many, very many people don’t have that choice. Loneliness is one of the biggest problems of our time. Sometimes people talk to themselves or to their pet cat, and chatting to a bot would at least get a real response some of the time. It goes further than simple interaction though.

I’m not trying to understate the magnitude of the loneliness problem, and it can’t solve it completely of course, but I think it will be a benefit to at least some lonely people in a few ways. Simply having someone to chat to will already be of some help. People will form emotional relationships with bots that they talk to a lot, especially once they have a visual front end such as an avatar. It will help some to develop and practice social skills if that is their problem, and for many others who feel left out of local activity, it might offer them real-time advice on what is on locally in the next few days that might appeal to them, based on their conversations. Talking through problems with a bot can also help almost as much as doing so with a human. In ancient times when I was a programmer, I’d often solve a bug by trying to explain how my program worked, and in doing so i would see the bug myself. Explaining it to a teddy bear would have been just as effective, the chat was just a vehicle for checking through the logic from a new angle. The same might apply to interactive conversation with a bot. Sometimes lonely people can talk too much about problems when they finally meet people, and that can act as a deterrent to future encounters, so that barrier would also be reduced. All in all, having a bot might make lonely people more able to get and sustain good quality social interactions with real people, and make friends.

Another benefit that has nothing to do with loneliness is that giving a computer voice instructions forces people to think clearly and phrase their requests correctly, just like writing a short computer program. In a society where so many people don’t seem to think very clearly or even if they can, often can’t express what they want clearly, this will give some much needed training.

Chatbots could also offer challenges to people’s thinking, even to help counter extremism. If people make comments that go against acceptable social attitudes or against known facts, a bot could present the alternative viewpoint, probably more patiently than another human who finds such viewpoints frustrating. I’d hate to see this as a means to police political correctness, though it might well be used in such a way by some providers, but it could improve people’s lack of understanding of even the most basic science, technology, culture or even politics, so has educational value. Even if it doesn’t convert people, it might at least help them to understand their own views more clearly and be better practiced at communicating their arguments.

Chat bots could make a significant contribution to society. They are just machines, but those machines are tools for other people and society as a whole to help more effectively.

 

New book: Society Tomorrow

It’s been a while since my last blog. That’s because I’ve been writing another book, my 8th so far. Not the one I was doing on future fashion, which went on the back burner for a while, I’ve only written a third of that one, unless I put it out as a very short book.

This one follows on from You Tomorrow and is called Society Tomorrow, 20% shorter at 90,000 words. It is ready to publish now, so I’m just waiting for feedback from a few people before hitting the button.

Here’s the introduction:

The one thing that we all share is that we will get older over the next few decades. Rapid change affects everyone, but older people don’t always feel the same effects as younger people, and even if we keep up easily today, some of us may find it harder tomorrow. Society will change, in its demographic and ethnic makeup, its values, its structure. We will live very differently. New stresses will come from both changing society and changing technology, but there is no real cause for pessimism. Many things will get better for older people too. We are certainly not heading towards utopia, but the overall quality of life for our ageing population will be significantly better in the future than it is today. In fact, most of the problems ahead are related to quality of life issues in society as a whole, and simply reflect the fact that if you don’t have to worry as much about poor health or poverty, something else will still occupy your mind.

This book follows on from 2013’s You Tomorrow, which is a guide to future life as an individual. It also slightly overlaps my 2013 book Total Sustainability which looks in part at future economic and social issues as part of achieving sustainability too. Rather than replicating topics, this book updates or omits them if they have already been addressed in those two companion books. As a general theme, it looks at wider society and the bigger picture, drawing out implications for both individuals and for society as a whole to deal with. There are plenty to pick from.

If there is one theme that plays through the whole book, it is a strong warning of the problem of increasing polarisation between people of left and right political persuasion. The political centre is being eroded quickly at the moment throughout the West, but alarmingly this does not seem so much to be a passing phase as a longer term trend. With all the potential benefits from future technology, we risk undermining the very fabric of our society. I remain optimistic because it can only be a matter of time before sense prevails and the trend reverses. One day the relative harmony of living peacefully side by side with those with whom we disagree will be restored, by future leaders of higher quality than those we have today.

Otherwise, whereas people used to tolerate each other’s differences, I fear that this increasing intolerance of those who don’t share the same values could lead to conflict if we don’t address it adequately. That intolerance currently manifests itself in increasing authoritarianism, surveillance, and an insidious creep towards George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The worst offenders seem to be our young people, with students seemingly proud of trying to ostracise anyone who dares agree with what they think is correct. Being students, their views hold many self-contradictions and clear lack of thought, but they appear to be building walls to keep any attempt at different thought away.

Altogether, this increasing divide, built largely from sanctimony, is a very dangerous trend, and will take time to reverse even when it is addressed. At the moment, it is still worsening rapidly.

So we face significant dangers, mostly self-inflicted, but we also have hope. The future offers wonderful potential for health, happiness, peace, prosperity. As I address the significant problems lying ahead, I never lose my optimism that they are soluble, but if we are to solve problems, we must first recognize them for what they are and muster the willingness to deal with them. On the current balance of forces, even if we avoid outright civil war, the future looks very much like a gilded cage. We must not ignore the threats. We must acknowledge them, and deal with them.

Then we can all reap the rich rewards the future has to offer.

It will be out soon.

Inspired by the Doomsday Clock, the 1984 clock is at July 1st 1983

The Doomsday clock was recently re-assessed and stays at 23.57. See http://thebulletin.org/timeline

I have occasionally written or ranted about 1984. The last weeks have taken us a little closer to Orwell’s dystopian future. So, even though we are long past 1984, the basket of concepts it introduces is well established in common culture.

The doomsday committee set far too pessimistic a time. Nuclear war and a few other risks are significant threats, and extinction level events are possible, but they are far from likely. My own estimate puts the combined risk from all threats growing to around 2% by about 2050. That is quite pessimistic enough I think, but surely that would give us reason to act, but doesn’t justify the level of urgency that extinction is happening any minute now. 11pm would have been quite enough to be a wake-up call but not enough to look like doom-mongering.

So I won’t make the same mistake with my 1984 clock. Before we start working out the time, we need to identify those ideas from 1984 that will be used. My choice would be:

Hijacking or perversion of language to limit debate and constrain it to those views considered acceptable

Use of language while reporting news of events or facts that omits, conceals, hides, distorts or otherwise impedes clear vision of inconvenient aspects of the truth while emphasizing those events, views or aspects that align with acceptable views

Hijacking or control of the media to emphasize acceptable views and block unacceptable ones

Making laws or selecting judiciary according to their individual views to achieve a bias

Blocking of views considered unacceptable or inconvenient by legal or procedural means

Imposing maximum surveillance, via state, social or private enterprises

Encouraging people to police their contacts to expose those holding or expressing inconvenient or unacceptable views

Shaming of those who express unacceptable views as widely as possible

Imposing extreme sanctions such as loss of job or liberty on those expressing unacceptable views

That’s enough to be going on with. Already, you should recognize many instances of each of these flags being raised in recent times. If you don’t follow the news, then I can assist you by highlighting a few instances, some as recent as this week. Please note that in this blog, I am not siding for or against any issue in the following text, I am just considering whether there is evidence of 1984. I make my views on the various issue very clear when I write blogs about those issues.

The Guardian has just decided to bar comments on any articles about race, Muslims, migrants or immigration. It is easy to see why they have done so even if I disagree with such a policy, but nonetheless it is a foundation stone in their 1984 wall.

Again on the migrant theme, which is a very rich seam for 1984 evidence, Denmark, Germany and Sweden have all attempted to censor  news of the involvement of migrants or Muslims in many recent attacks. Further back in time, the UK has had problems with police allowing child abuse to continue rather than address it because of the racial/religious origins of the culprits.

Choice of language by the media has deliberately conflated ‘migrants’ with ‘refugees’, conflated desperation  to escape violent oppression with searching for a wealthier life, and excessively biased coverage towards those events that solicit sympathy with migrants.

Moving to racism, Oriel College has just had an extremely embarrassing climb-down from considering removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, because he is considered racist by today’s standards by some students. Attempting to censor history is 1984-ish but so is the fact that involvement of the campaign instigators in their own anti-white racism such as links to the Black Supremacy movement has been largely concealed.

Attempted hijacking of language by the black community is evident in the recent enforcement of the phrase ‘people of color’, and illogical and highly manufactured simultaneous offence at use of the term ‘colored’. The rules only apply to white commentators, so it could be considered a black supremacy power struggle rather than an attempt to deal with any actual anti-black racism. Meanwhile, here in the UK, ‘black’ and ‘people of color’ seem both to be in equally common use so far.

David Cameron and some ministers have this week accused Oxford University of racism because it accepts too few black students. A range of potential causes were officially suggested but none include any criticism of the black community such as cultural issues that devalue educational achievement. In the same sentence, Cameron implied that it necessarily racist that a higher proportion of blacks are in prison. There was no mention that this could be caused by different crime incidence, as is quickly learned by inspection of official government statistics. This 1984-style distortion of the truth by marketing spin is one of Cameron’s most dominant characteristics.

Those statistics are inconvenient and ignoring them is 1984-ish already, but further 1984 evidence is that some statistics that show certain communities in a bad light are no longer collected.

Europe is another are where 1984-style operations are in vogue. Wild exaggeration of the benefits of staying in and extreme warnings of the dangers of leaving dominate most government output and media coverage. Even the initial decision to word the referendum question with a yes and no answer to capitalise on the well-known preference for voting yes is an abuse of language, but that at least was spotted early and the referendum question has been reworded with less bias, though ‘remain’ can still be considered a more positive word than ‘leave’ and remain still takes the first place on the voting slip, so it is still biased in favor of staying in the EU.

Gender is another area where language hijacking is becoming a key weapon. Attempts to force use of the terms ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ accompany attempts to pretend that the transgender community is far larger than reality. Creation of the term ‘transphobic’ clearly attempts to build on the huge success of the gay equality movement’s use of the term homophobic. This provides an easy weapon to use against anyone who doesn’t fully back all of the transgender community’s demands. Very 1984. As recently pointed out by Melanie Phillips, UK government response to such demands has been very politically correct, and will needlessly magnify the numbers experiencing gender dysphoria, but being accompanied by a thorough lack of understanding of the trans community, will very likely make things worse for many genuine transgender people.

As for surveillance, shaming, career destruction etc., we all see how well Twitter fills that role all by itself. Other media and the law add to that, but social media backlash is already a massive force even without official additions.

Climate change has even become a brick in the 1984 wall. Many media outlets censor views from scientists that don’t agree that doom caused by human emissions of CO2 is imminent. The language used, with words such as ‘denier’ are similarly evidence of 1984 influence.

Enough examples. If you look for them, you’ll soon spot them every day.

What time to set out clock then? I think we already see a large momentum towards 1984, with the rate of incidents of new policies pushing that direction increasing rapidly. A lot of pieces are already in place, though some need shaped or cemented. We are not there yet though, and we still have some freedom of expression, still escape being locked up for saying the wrong thing unless it is extreme. We don’t quite have the thought police, or even ID cards yet. I think we are close, but not so close we can’t recover. Let’s start with a comfortable enough margin so that movement in either direction can be taken account of in future assessments. We are getting close though, so I don’t want too big a margin. 6 month might be a nice compromise, then we can watch as it gets every closer without the next piece of evidence taking us all the way.

The 1984 clock is at July 1st 1983.

 

On the shoulders of giants: Oriel College and Rhodes

First, an extract from a blog ages ago, in italics if you want to skip it:

As a response to people demanding ‘climate compensation’, one of the chapters in my book Total Sustainability was called  ‘the rich world owes no compensation to the poor world’. The world only has the technological capability to support a population over seven billion because of the activities of our ancestors. Without the industrial revolution, the energy it used, the pollution it generated, the CO2 it led to, very many of those alive today would not be. We owe no apology for that. It is only through that historic activity that we are where we are, with the technology that allows poor countries to develop. Developing countries are developing in a world that already has high CO2 levels and is still largely economically and technologically locked into CO2-intensive energy production. That is simply the price humanity overall has paid to get where we are. When a developing country builds a new power station or a road or a telecomms network, it uses today’s technology, not 16th century technology – the century where modern science and technology arguably really started. Without the rich world having used all that energy with its associated environmental impact, they’d have to use 16th century technology. There would be no rich world to sell to, and no means to develop. Developing is a far faster and easier process today than it was when we did it.

Our ancestors in the rich world had to suffer the pain hundreds of years ago – they were the giants on whose shoulders we now stand. It was mostly our ancestors in the rich world whose ingenuity and effort, whose blood, sweat and tears paid for a world that can support seven billion people. It was mostly they who invented and developed the electricity, telecoms, the web, pharmaceuticals and biotech, genetically superior crops, advanced manufacturing and farming technology that make it possible. That all cost environmental impacts as part of the price. The whole of humanity has benefitted from that investment, not just rich countries, and if any compensation or apology were due to the rest of the world for it, then it has already been paid many times over in lives saved and lives enabled, economic aid already enabled by that wealth, and the vastly better financial and economic well-being for the future developing world that resulted from that investment. The developing world is developing later, but that is not the fault of our ancestors for making our investment earlier.

Amount of compensation owed: zero. Amount we should give for other reasons: as much as we can reasonably afford. Let’s give through compassion and generosity and feeling of common humanity, because we can and because we want to, not because we are being forced.

I want to add to this today because I am increasingly angered by the morons in university student unions at various universities closing down freedom of speech, their university staff who allow that to happen, and now others – students and cowardly staff – at Oriel College in Oxford who want to remove statues of historic figures (Cecil Rhodes in this case) because their lives and values don’t measure up to today’s political correctness.

My argument is identical to the one I used above, and other people are commenting similarly. Those students show enormous egos that are matched only by their stupidity, arrogance, immaturity and lack of insight. They would not have any of the enormous privileges they enjoy today without the contributions of those who went before them and every student capable of reaching Oxford standards should understand that well, long before they reach university age. That they don’t casts doubt on the health of Oriel’s entrance standards.

Many of the giants who created the layers of foundations of today’s culture had personality traits or did things that are not admirable by today’s standards, but were it not for their efforts and contributions to make the world we all enjoy today, we would not be able to sit and reflect on them. Rhodes had many faults, but he would not have a statue to honor him were it not for a previous generation recognizing and admiring his contribution to the culture of the time. He acted at the time, within the culture of the time, within the views of the time and those honoring him had every right to do so by the standards of their time. Students of today seem to think they have reached some all-time pinnacle of cultural superiority, and it isn’t clear why.  That is unsavory enough, but do they think also they created that from a vacuum? They should consider that it may well be their generation with its misplaced and unearned arrogance upon whom history will pour scorn. Through their efforts to undermine freedom of speech and rewrite history, they show that they certainly do not measure up to even the most basic standards of their immediate ancestors who earned the right to freedom, having properly understood its value. As others have observed today, their actions are not very different from ISIS destroying ancient temples. Although their actions differ in degree, perhaps the mindsets are not so different – fanatical self-belief, undeserved and unearned conviction of their own moral superiority to everyone else, while everyone else see them for what they are, mindless thugs.