And now for That Woman, Part 11...
Synopsis:
Synopsis: In That Woman Part 11, we learn how Marsha turned herself into
the leading journalist of her day, and what it did to her. Though she
always worried that Andy Sokol would pop back into her life and spoil
everything, he never did--until now. She's up for the fight. But as far
as Drew and Jason are concerned, she's going to mess up everything,
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, part 8...
Synopsis:
In That Woman, Part 8, Marta suddenly hears from Andy, of all people. Partly to make Dr.
Blume have a hairy fit, partly to satisfy her own curiosity, and
possibly for other reasons she does not comprehend, she goes out with
him. At Fourth House, her life changes forever. Meanwhile, Drew is hot
on the trail of the those who sicced Baby to spy on her, and Jason is in
full pursuit of Drew. Together, they discover there are many more
strange beasts (plant, animal, mineral, all of the above?) where Baby
came from.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
Apologies to those who have returned to this space over the course of the summer expecting to see a new post each week. I have been working very hard on a tight deadline to finish a new non fiction book. I couldn't write good posts while also writing that larger story (fascinating characters, a business mystery unraveled, stay tuned!). Its title and publication date will be announced here soon.
In the meantime, let me share with you a novel called That Woman. I have been working on it for a long time. It's the sequel to my first novel, Drew Pepper. (Click here to read Drew Pepper for free). Drew Pepper had a science fiction theme, but as it turns out, what was fiction when I wrote it is about to become fact. Drew Pepper was confounded by chimeric mice with human-like intelligence, the result of experiments conducted by her basement tenant. Such experiments were not allowed in the US (they were doable in Canada, but probably not done). However, the NIH has decided to reconsider. So one day soon we may all be confounded by chimeric mice who behave in curiously familiar ways.
That Woman is about Drew's boss, Marsha Cooper, and how she became one of the most accomplished power brokers in the country. It's a Canadian story, steeped in Canadian history, Canadian ideas, Canadian politics, Canadian values, but not the kind you may be used to reading about. Marsha Cooper's Canada is not as sunny as Justin Trudeau's: it's much closer to Brazil with snow. Get set for robotic birds that speak, drones that spy, exoskeletons that can carry you away against your will, several love stories and business at its worst.
I shared Drew Pepper as a serial (free!) because it is a mystery story, and mystery stories are best savored over time.That Woman will be presented as a series too. Each week, starting today, and for many Fridays to follow, I will upload a new segment for you to download and read. It's free, no surprises when you click. If you wish, you can subscribe here so that you will get a weekly email
from me sharing the latest issue.
As always, I look forward to your comments: please share them here.
I hope you enjoy meeting That Woman!
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
A friend hands me an article downloaded from who-knows-what site. Global Research is the publisher. I've never heard of it before in spite of the ambitious name. The author is Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri. Never heard of her, either, though after I google I find out, first, she is dead, and second, she is well known to some as an environmental author, though her doctorate is of unknown origin according to others, and there's a youtube video of a lecture she gave that you can watch. When she was still in this world, she wanted us to understand that we are being poisoned daily by our intake of certain pharmaceuticals which soothe us into accepting lies and deception from the US Department of Defense and the Department of Energy about the metal poisons, pathogens, weaponized viruses, etc., in the chem-trails sprayed in our skies by the US air force, and even commercial pilots.
What do you think of this, my friend wants to know?
I read it, slowly, slowly, checking each assertion against what at first appear to be end-notes citing sources because good sources are what one expects of anyone making such alarming assertions. But the end-notes don`t actually name sources that support the claims. They are extensions of the claims made in the main body of the article, which, apparently was published in 2010, yet here we all are, still. However, it nevertheless sets my nerves to jitterbugging: just enough of what she presents coincides with what I know from other reading. It makes me wonder. What about those chem-trails? But how can I prove or disprove claims from un-sourced assertions?
I tell my friend what's wrong with the article, why it may contain information but still have only a glancing relationship with truth, and why it would never make it into the standard press, which of course the author claims is due to the major media's cover-up of the conspiracy to poison us all.
This brings me to the current Facebook broohahah. We all know that Facebook is a huge money-making machine, its fortune derived from selling information about us and our interests to others as we share on its site. I am not a Facebook fan, though I have a page. I use it to tell anyone who might be interested that I have just posted something new here on this blog. Sometimes people contact me through Facebook, sometimes I find people that way, and for any reporter, that is very useful. But in general, I care so little about Facebook that though there has been a Facebook version of the news for some time, I never noticed it until Gizmodo raised a fuss loud enough to make my local paper. Gizmodo is owned by Gawker which is mainly in the recycled gossip business. Gizmodo has made a claim, via an unnamed source who once worked for Facebook, that Facebook's trending news section is a huffpuffery of left wing bias and censorship.
Okay, that's interesting I thought. Who knew Facebook (owned by a billionaire) has left wing bias? So I went to my Facebook page to look at the news section.
Huh, there it was on the right hand side, a changing list of story titles and links that are trending on Facebook in descending order of interest. Apparently, Facebook is trying to compete with Twitter, though why that would be, when Facebook has a billion users and earns a lot more money, is unclear. Apparently, Facebook's algorithms pick their way through our pages to discern the stories we share and count them up to see what's on top of our minds. Gizmodo would have you believe that the top stories listed on my Facebook site constitute many people's main source of news, so, messing with the list is messing with news about the news. Gizmodo alleges that Facebook's list is no neutral product of a neutral chain of commands. Facebook employs human curators, smart people fresh out of Ivy League schools, to doctor its trending list, taking out stories that originated (aggregated is the better word) on right wing sites like Breitbart or Fox, while injecting stories from the left side of the American political opinion spectrum that might not be trending at all. Such manipulation of the information about what interests us, in Gizmodo's view, turns a lie into a truth.
However, picking through the Gizmodo story left me in a queasy state. Is there truth in it or just truthiness? First, it's clear from the Gizmodo story that the unnamed source has no recent knowledge of Facebook's practices, never mind its political
agenda. As well, the story makes it seem as if there is something wrong on its face with Facebook employing smart curators. Yet any publisher, and Facebook is a publisher, has a duty to be as sure as it can be that the stories it republishes on my page and your page are neither defamatory, nor pornographic, nor incendiary bombs meant to drive us into the streets with pitchforks. This is what real news organizations hire editors to do. Editors sort the drivel and error-ridden chaff from information that is as trustworthy as wheat germ, and they try hard to publish only the latter, not the former.
So: is taking stories off the trending column and putting other stories on it a new form of propaganda, or is it responsible behavior? Facebook denies that it does anything evil, Gizmodo asserts it does. What's the truth?
And last, but not least, there is the matter of the Jian Ghomeshi debacle, another instance of the problem of finding truth in this information soaked era.
Ghomeshi was a radio broadcaster, the star of a pretentious pop culture show called Q carried on the Canadian broadcasting system. The CBC is Canada's government-owned network with a legislated mandate to inform, entertain, and keep the country together. Ghomeshi was what passes for a radio celebrity. He went to a lot of entertainment industry parties where his picture was taken, his face often appearing on social media or in the papers because he is pretty, though his audience was only a few hundred thousand listeners a week. Just before he was accused in public of assaulting some women he'd dated, he published his own version of events on Facebook, claiming he liked rough sex and so did the women he went out with and that any charges that were about to be leveled at him were spurious and motivated by jealousy. The CBC fired him after reviewing a video he showed them in which a woman displayed serious bruising courtesy of Ghomeshi. The Toronto Star published some of the allegations, and eventually, the CBC's investigative show the Fifth Estate carried a feature on him and his behavior. These, and the Toronto police chief's pleas for any victims to come forward elicited several other women to come forward with allegations about unwanted experiences with Ghomeshi. The police charged him with sex crimes and two trials were set down.
The first trial involved the claims of three women alleging violent sexual behavior that they had not consented to. The trial became a huge spectacle in which Ghomeshi said nothing at all except not guilty and his lawyer, the brilliant and well prepared Marie Henein, proceeded to exhume all the strange emails sent to Ghomeshi by these complainants, emails written after the alleged events took place. Some of these emails suggested these victims were still interested in pursuing relationships with Ghomeshi. They also wrote emails to each other and some of their testimony under oath was inconsistent with, or contradicted, statements previously given. All this led the judge to rule that, while he was not saying the events didn't happen, their testimony was so tainted that he could not make a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard in a criminal trial. Ghomeshi was acquitted. Most women who read about the trial were furious. Why had three women telling similar stories not been sufficient to send Ghomeshi to the slammer? How could women ever press sexual assault charges successfully if emails and behavior after the fact could rewrite the actual events complained of?
Ghomeshi was supposed to face a second trial in June. His accuser in that trial had worked with Ghomeshi on his show for three years. She had moved to LA long before the other charges became public. In 2014 she wrote about what she endured at Ghomeshi's hands in the Guardian newspaper: she wrote about daily harassment and an actual assault while on the job and that when she complained to her managers, she was told that it was her job to take it. She also explained that her union abandoned her. Unlike the first trial, the Crown had a witness to one alleged act of sexual assault and there was another, but more useful, email trail. Still, after losing the first case, the Crown struck a deal with the defense to withdraw the charges if Ghomeshi apologized for his wrongdoing and signed a peace bond.
And so he did. Sort of. He never described the acts he was apologizing for. So where was the truth in that? Was he or wasn't he guilty of sexual assault?
Kathryn Borel, the complainant, was not satisfied with this vagueness. So she did something very unusual and very courageous in a city boasting many libel lawyers ready to prosecute a civil action. After the case was withdrawn, she stood on the steps of the courthouse in front of an assemblage of cameras and microphones and described what Ghomeshi was apologizing for in the most graphic terms. Her speech was recorded and can be found here. It is also carried in full on the front page of the Toronto Star, the newspaper that investigated and first published the allegations against Ghomeshi.
It is startling to read, painful to hear, shocking, yet refreshing. While court processes are supposed to present the truth, the fact is that this kind of statement is rarely heard in a trial. A lawyer's prime duty is to the client: lawyers only ask the questions they already know the answers to, which is why relevant facts may never find their way to a courtroom floor and irrelevant facts can become central. What with cross examinations that pick through interesting minutiae one question at time, victims almost never get a chance to say in their own words, uninterrupted, exactly what happened.
In this age in which we are constantly bathed in information that often has no value, when one hears truth spoken, there is no queasiness, there are no cavils as set out above.
Physicists and mathematicians like to say that a theory must be true if it's beautiful. Put another way, unlike information, truth is like art: you'll know it when you hear it.
"As if it's not showing any forgiveness," is how the beleaguered fire chief of Fort McMurray, Alberta described the awful blaze that had just jumped a river and was devouring his town. Some 88,000 people, desperate to get away, were stuck in a vast traffic jam along the highway south, some running out of gas even as the fire roared up alongside.
"Forgiveness? Is he saying what we're thinking?" my husband and I asked each other. My husband said it first: he was ashamed, but he said it, even as we watched the horror unfolding from the safety of our den, feet up at the end of a day, tired, cosy, safe in the false assurance that nothing like this could overtake us, right? What we were thinking and did not want to say out loud is that this disaster was Nature's payback. Fort McMurray is the home of those who make their livings from the mining of the oil sands, a fossil fuel resource tarred as the dirtiest anywhere due to the carbon dioxide and methane let loose when it's burned. Fort McMurray and the oil sands have been targeted for years as the central evil by climate change warriors seeking to save us from ourselves, as if the exploitation of these sands is the worst of the worse. (What about the fracking going on throughout the US Midwest and in British Columbia that is causing earthquakes? What about the coal fired plants being built every day in China?)
Sow what you reap is how this is being spoken of online, according to Gary Mason, a columnist in my morning paper, a man who urges everyone to dump such notions where they belong. He found his own feet in Fort McMurray many years ago, as so many have done since. He reminds us that it has been the home of many seeking to earn a good wage to keep their families fed, of others employing wonderful skills to solve difficult engineering questions, because that's what they're trained to do and relish doing. Their work, as Mason reminds us, has kept all Canadians in a style better than we would have enjoyed otherwise, because in Canada, still, wealth is shared. And yet. If you have ever been to Fort McMurrray and toured a tar sands plant, seen the giant machines that fell whole forests as if they are little more than fields of grass, machines that chew the earth into such pits as to make the Orcs look like good guys, if you have seen that, as I have, you may harbor thoughts about Nature getting its own back.
Even the most rational among us like to think of Nature as a judge, a vengeful entity that will punish those who do wrong to us, or wrong the earth. In a way, this is yet another attempt by humans to remake Nature, in this instance into a Someone, a bigger version of a human person with motives like our own, who can be understood and possibly placated with words and gestures of remorse. When Nature is a Someone, we don't have to face the inconstancy and ubiquity of natural change, the hit or miss nature of natural disasters. We want the world to be predictable, to obey known social rules, to be controllable. One billionaire I've been researching has said that he avoids any situation he can't control: that's what he's after, control.
I say good luck to him because change rules everything alive, even billionaires, and even things not alive, like wildfires. Fires have a brief almost-life: they are born, they consume and grow, they evade human efforts to extinguish them almost as if they are making smart choices to preserve their existence. Eventually they die for lack of fuel. Viruses, which aren't alive either, have to hitch a ride in the cells of actual living things in order to propagate. Sometimes they kill that which they use to increase themselves, which ends them too. But sometimes they pick up a new piece of genetic material from one of their hosts, a trick that allows them to thrive in new conditions.
We worry about big events like forest fires much more than we worry about microbial change. We prepare for the possibility of earthquakes and tidal waves, ice storms and droughts more than we get set for changes among the living and sort-of-living things that interpenetrate us in every way. Bacteria crawl over our skin, break down our food, signal to our brains and change our moods, and dispose of us when the central organizing network that distinguishes each of us finally gives up and disintegration begins. Viruses and bacteria are found everywhere from the deepest hot vents in the ocean to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, recycling vital chemicals, killing and being killed, sharing new genes that prove to be helpful or destructive in ways reminiscent of how we share the news good and bad.
This year, Nature has been teaching us that these small things must also be considered when we study and plan for climate change. Like forest fires, they can change human lives in sudden, drastic ways as they adapt to changed circumstances in their search for continuance. The Zika virus that used to just make people feel bad, has suddenly acquired new capacities. It enters human systems via vectors we do not understand, finding its way (how? thanks to a particular mosquito?) into the neurons of developing fetuses and the nervous systems of adults. Mothers, thinking joy will be theirs, give birth to children with microcephaly, the result of profound neurological destruction wrought by the virus as it replicates. Some infected adults find themselves paralyzed. Something so small, and only half alive, which used to be innocuous, or, at worst, an irritant, now thrives in humans in ways that make lives hell.
Recently too, a bacterium called Elizabethkingia, which once left humans pretty much alone, has been having a moment, even as Zika makes its way into North America from ground zero in northeastern Brazil. The number of cases of this bacterial infection seen in Wisconsin have gone up almost by an order of magnitude this year-- from almost none to at least 59 cases since November, according to Jennifer Yang writing in the Toronto Star. Yang reports that there's only been one case known in all of Canada in the last three years yet Illinois has an outbreak -- caused by a different strain. It isn't a nice bug: 20 deaths have been linked to it and this bacterium is everywhere, though the particular species at work in Wisconsin was only discovered in 2011 living in the gut of a mosquito. Turns out the bacterium likes to congregate and propagate in human blood. Turns out that it is highly drug resistant with more than 20 antibiotic resistance genes.
Bugs like this can make punishment by forest fire almost seem kindly. While the changing fire season in Canada's northwest is undoubtedly our collective fault, the changes in microbial life resulting from climate change will likely have a far more serious impact on humans everywhere. The microbes are far smarter collectively than we will ever be, and as one Canadian researcher has suggested, have a worldwide network through which useful new genetic information is shared. This is why fighting new infections caused by changed bugs is going to make fighting forest fires look easy by comparison.
The microbes won't be forgiving either.
I recently opened up my Globe and Mail to find a two page spread explaining how smart technologies created the picture displayed there of a man who never existed executed in the style of Rembrandt. The Globe and Mail called it a "frame worthy portrait." I don't know what to call it. An art fraudster's dream? Artish techno-crap? Abomination comes to mind, but maybe that's me channeling my Uncle Harry (see more on Uncle Harry below). Tu Thanh Ha, better known as a political reporter, gives us the story behind the image. The Dutch bank ING has apparently funded and supported public art for years. ING teamed up with the advertising moguls, J. Walter Thompson, to further advance its brand through the invocation of the greatest of all Dutch painters, Rembrandt. They asked leading technologists to whomp up something Rembrandtish for the public's enjoyment. So several leading experts brought to bear the smart technologies of the moment. All of Rembrandt's known portraits were subjected to facial recognition software and other clever tricks to arrive at a statistically representative Rembrandtish array of pixels.This data was used to direct a 3-D printer. The result approximates the cracked, bumpy, brush-stroked surface of a painting made four hundred years ago, though it presents the image of a man who never existed and so was never painted by Rembrandt. It is not painted at all.
Please look at it and tell me what you think. I see a clumsy, sad sack sort-of person with a floppy hat, sort-of hair, a sort-of potato nose, lifeless eyes, a ruff of the period, illuminated by light said to mimic Rembrandt's use of same. To my eye it looks like paint-by-number.
As my Uncle Harry would say, I am appalled. Only technologists would consider this a project worthy of the name public art, technologists utterly disconnected from what art is, and why we make it.
So what is public art anyway?
Long ago when I was small, my Uncle Harry had strong opinions on same. He was a famous man in our town, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a city of
nicknames including the Hub City, the City of Churches, the City of
Bridges, but not the City of Art, though that should have been one of
them.He was known as "Doc" because he fixed the broken bodies of cars. He was the second eldest and best known among his accomplished and equally opinionated siblings, because he had a knack for calling public attention to his points of view on everything -- pioneers, business, the need for another community swimming pool, the weather. "How hot is it? It's hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk!" the newspaper cutline would shout under a picture of my Uncle Harry frying an egg on the sidewalk on a sizzling day in July. Saskatoon had phone-in radio shows, and Uncle Harry often called in. He was an activist in things having to do with city governance, recreation, the pioneer experience, the rights of First Nations, anti-racism, and he also had strong views on civic art. Everybody in town knew his gravelly voice.
Now even then, when I was young, there were a lot of people in Saskatoon who knew from art. One of the leading businessmen in town, who had made a pile of dough in meat packing, was a major collector of the Group of Seven. In 1964, a beautiful, eponymous museum arose on the river bank to which Fred Mendel donated his works as a permanent collection. The Mendel was better attended in its prime than the Art Gallery of Ontario though the whole population of Saskatchewan was then (and is still) much less than half of Toronto's. There was -- is -- something about Saskatchewan that inspires visual artists and the love of same. The Emma Lake Artists' Workshop, which started as a summer school in the Thirties, took on the world in the Fifties when artists affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan (who were also part of an informal group known as the Regina Five), invited big name artists to come and do art on the shore of Emma Lake. Emma Lake is north of Prince Albert. That's north. The workshops were led by major majors (Newman, Stella, Noland, Judd, Olitski) and even by Clement Greenberg, then a leading critic in New York City. No surprise, then, that Saskatoon decided to commission a major work of public art in 1960 to grace its brand new City Hall.
My Uncle's opinion was not sought on this subject, and he was not pleased with the project selected. Why? It was not a sculpture of a guy on a horse or a gal with a man draped over her lap, it was not a human figure at all. It was a work in sheet metal cut into shapes reminiscent of farm equipment piled to suggest an ancient Mayan god of rain. Its title is Rainmaker. My Uncle Harry's view was that this was not art at all, or at least not something that the ordinary, every-day people of Saskatoon could possibly enjoy. It was something that could only appeal to the high-falutin' fools up at the University. Yet the public had to pay for it. Uncle Harry's egalitarian view was that public money should be spent on something that reflects public tastes. Starting with his.
So he made a big fuss. He called up a radio talk show to make his views known. This involved comparisons that were invidious. This was not art, this was....
Apparently this tradition of protest over public art continues in Saskatoon. In 2014, two shrink wrapped bales of garbage were purchased from an artist by the City for the sum of $4,300 and set out on the sidewalk. A local man covered it over with a tarp and affixed a note saying that public money should be spent on taking away the garbage, not adding to it.
But listen, these works were at least made by people with ideas that they wanted to get across, they were not just statistically enabled theft. Love it, hate it, advocate for it, or militate against it, a work of art surely should be, must be something that erupts first in the mind of a person determined to reach out to others by means of an image. It can never be the shallow reproduction of a style apprehended by a piece of software. Now I'm willing to believe that in the future, as intelligent robots wend their way through the world, they may one day make works of art that encapsulate or celebrate their particular experience and world view. But this is not that.
So listen up, ING. You will never get any of my spare change in your bank by re-branding yourself this way. This project of yours can never be ennobled by the word art. Even the paintings made by bored chimpanzees have greater value. Why? Because chimpanzees, unlike software and 3-D printers, have hearts and minds. They have feelings. They have ideas. They belong to communities and they want to share.
Right Uncle Harry?
Alphabet, which you probably haven't heard of, is now the highest valued company in the world, last month eclipsing even Apple in its ability to generate billionaires through the magic of owning sufficient numbers of its shares. Its common stock is trading near the $750 mark. Why? It earned about $16 billion in profits in the last quarter because it is the proud owner of a company that you have certainly heard of --Google.
More than a year ago, Google reorganized itself. The result was Alphabet, a holding company sitting on top of Google and its various subsidiaries. Google had been buying startups and medium-size companies at a furious pace and shareholders were getting confused as to who was in charge of what. The value of Alphabet by market capitalization was reported in February, 2016 to be $546.8 billion which is bigger than the GDP of many countries. [A reader on a Google plus site objects to this comparison, so another way of putting this is a comparison between Alphabet's profit and a country's tax revenue. For many countries, $16 billion a quarter is huge.] Alphabet, or its subs, are thus able to buy many more of the companies and scientists doing leading edge work in robotics and artificial intelligence. This is yet another demonstration of the theory of the virtuous circle: the more successful a company is, the more opportunities it will get, and the faster it will grow. In the case of Alphabet, this is both a miraculous thing and an extremely dangerous prospect.
There is a plan afoot at Alphabet/Google to corner the markets in artificial general intelligence and autonomous robots. Thanks to Alphabet/Google we are speeding at an ever increasing rate toward what Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity, the point (in 2029, he predicts) when the intelligence of machines will be far greater than the sum of all human smarts. Kurzweil's hope is that very soon -- before he dies -- various innovations now in pre-production at Alphabet/Google will permit him to upload his mind into an autonomous robot which will carry his Kurzweilness into the distant future though his body resides under the grass. His business model is based on the notion that many others will want to pay for this sort of machined immortality too. But immortality isn't his only story: Kurzweil says we'll soon be able to plug nanobots into our brains to augment our general intelligence and connect directly to an Internet of intelligent machines. Since Kurzweil is in charge of Google's project to back engineer the human brain, his musings will certainly turn into an Alphabet of commodities.
In case you think I'm making this up, just google Ray Kurzweil.
Artificial general intelligence means mimicking with algorithms the flexible ways in which living things adapt, adjust, and learn from interactions with the environment. As my last book SMARTS details, birds do it, bees do it, even brainless slime molds -- alone or in groups -- do it. In fact, everything alive has to teach itself: everything alive has to learn. For millennia, it was a given that only humans display this capacity. Charles Darwin was the first to study how other living things, specifically worms and even brainless plants, learn. For a long time his results were ignored, pushed to the back of Science's desk, but in the past twenty years, Darwin has been shown to have been more than right. Current science demonstrates that intelligence is shaped by particular embodiments (which makes me wonder what kind of intelligence we will get if the mind of Kurzweil is embodied in a robot like Atlas). And yet: in spite of truly fascinating work exploring intelligence in its many, many forms, mimicking human intelligence still drives most of the work on artificial general intelligence. This may be Alan Turing's fault. In a paper published in 1950, he set out a standard for a successful artificial intelligence--something that could fool a human into thinking it's human. Those leading the charge to create machines smarter than us are still running down Turing's road.
DeepMind is a UK based company started by a former junior chess master, Demis Hassabis, who went on to achieve double firsts in computer science at Cambridge, Turing's alma mater. He started a game company and then, years later, earned a doctorate in neuroscience. He had decided he wanted to figure out how human brains work so that machines may be imbued with human-like imagination as well as human-like memory. He started DeepMind with that aim and demonstrated that he could invent algorithms that learn by themselves, learn well enough to master complex games and beat humans playing them. DeepMind was purchased in 2014 for 400 million pounds by Google. Hassabis now leads Google DeepMind.
This week, Google DeepMind announced one more milestone on the road to achieving what Hassabis describes as artificial general intelligence via an algorithm. If you want to see him interviewed, check Nature Magazine's truly awful venture in online science reporting. Hassabis and his colleagues create game playing algorithms which embody the way the human hippocampus remembers and imagines. When IBM's super computer defeated chess grand master Gary Kasparov, chess was described as an almost impossibly difficult game for a machine to master, involving as the calculation of at least 20 possibilities for each move made [thank you dear reader for the correction about the supercomputer too]. But DeepMind pursued a much bigger challenge-- machine mastery of the game of Go.
I first heard of Go many years ago when I was still a student. My husband's colleague, Bonnie Kreps, a leading feminist and documentary filmmaker working at CTV's W5, was married to a high energy physicist at University of Toronto where I studied politics and English. Bonnie's husband Rodney kept trying to get me to study physics no matter how many times I confessed to being hopeless in higher math. One day I gave in: I sat in on one of his seminars. After it was over, we went for coffee in the faculty lounge. There were game boards of Go littered about. I'd never heard of it before, though I did recognize it from a photograph I once saw in a National Geographic magazine. The photo was of two Japanese monks sitting on a stone wall in front of a temple playing a board game. The game looked exotic and oddly beautiful in that photo, with its round, white and black stones massed together on a wooden board. Rodney said Go was much more interesting, much more difficult than chess. When I went home, I asked my husband if he'd ever played it. Not really, he said, but it was the game of choice in a lot of mathematics disciplines. He'd first come across it as a grad student at McGill. One of his economics professors had a Go board set up in his office. A sign beside it said: anyone who touches this board will not graduate.
Go is a simulation of a war, a game of territory, a game requiring future planning, sacrifice in order to advance, group maneuvers, and most of all intuition. For every move in Go there are at least 200 possible variations. The difficulty of calculating the impact of each move grows astoundingly huge in no time flat.
Hassabis's first try at generating an algorithm that could teach itself to play Go was able to beat a human on a smaller version of the standard board (thus reducing the complexity). But this week, his enhanced algorithm beat the world grand master of Go in Seoul, a man named Lee Sedol. (Oops, revise that: the algorithm just won game two! Oh no, revise again, the algorithm just won game three!! And one of the commentators described this win as, in a sense, so leisurely on the part of the algorithm it made him feel physically ill.) The algorithm is not programmed to play a specific sequence of moves. It is programmed to efficiently adapt and learn, which permits it to imagine and predict the results of its own and its opponent's behavior. It is programmed to intuit but most of all, to win as efficiently as possible.
So where does that take us?
Nowhere we should worry about we are told -- constantly -- by the corporate leaders of Alphabet/Google. We should not worry about the loss of jobs to intelligent and autonomous robots in spite of predictions that half of the jobs we now rely upon will be taken over by smart machines in the near future. We should not worry about lawyers, doctors, writers, even artists being replaced by algorithms (did you see the recent stories about the algorithm that can predict a winning Broadway musical?). Why don't we have to worry? As one of the commentators on this site has pointed out: a guaranteed annual income will solve the problem.You may have noticed that our political leaders are beginning to sing this tune. I don't know whether to be grateful that they can see where this revolution is going before the brown stuff hits the wall, or, to throw up my hands in despair because by these musings they make it obvious that they don't intend to try and shape that future in any way.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, who is worth $11 billion, has spoken on this point repeatedly. “I think that this technology will ultimately be one of the
greatest forces for good in mankind’s history simply because it makes
people smarter,” he told SXSW last year. However, other folks who are not sitting on a mountain of Alphabet shares, such as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, beg to differ. They're telling us these innovations could lead to the abrupt end of our position as the leading species on earth due to machines who have their own ideas about how things should be. Musk was so shocked by the Google DeepMind Go win that he declared AI had just made a ten year advance in one jump.
So, with regard to danger: who do you believe, Musk or Schmidt?
Sometimes, reading the papers and listening to the news convinces me that my feet are firmly planted on planet earth even though I know I am hanging upside down over a chasm deep and wide. This has to do with the extraordinary power of words to alter perceptions of reality by re-framing it.
Take the recent kerfuffle between the FBI and Apple. The FBI asked a US court to order Apple to create new software to get around the encryption system on one of Apple's phones. The court complied. Apple is appealing. It claims its First Amendment rights are being abrogated, that being forced to write a specific code is like being forced to make a specific speech and speech cannot be compelled.
Apple's phone encryption can be broken with about 10,000 tries, but its phones are designed to make their memories go phhhhhht! after ten unsuccessful attempts with the wrong password. The FBI has asked Apple to invent a method to break into the phone of the San Bernardino terrorist -- the nut-cake who killed and wounded so many of his colleagues at their annual Christmas party last year. Why? His phone might reveal if he conspired with others. Apple has refused on the grounds that if they give in to this request, every tin pot dictator or authoritarian regime (especially China's) will demand the same sort of software key and then no one's information will be safe from wicked foreign governments, crooks, or terrorists. If we make this software, Apple says, it will soon jump from the hands of the FBI to anyone with the cash to pay. The privacy of customers means everything, our entire business depends upon it, says Apple CEO Tim Cook.
This court battle has been portrayed by various journalists as an existential struggle between security and privacy, as if Apple's Tim Cook stands on the bridge, sword in hand, protecting us from governments run amok in the cause of making us safe. Simply repeating the phrase-- privacy versus security-- makes it seem as if we still have security and privacy to protect.
And there you have it, the false frame.
Recall, please, the first stories published in the Guardian and the Washington Post in the early summer of 2013 based on Edward Snowden's purloined documents. The first stories concerned a top secret order issued by the US FISA court (which does its business in secret), requiring the huge American phone company, Verizon, to hand to the NSA all the phone records of all of its US subscribers for a three month period. This was a shocker. Americans communicating with Americans were thought to be exempt from the NSA's signals snoopers. The second stories dealt with an NSA program called Prism. An NSA document copied by Snowden showed that from 2007 on, the NSA had gradually acquired direct access to the US based server systems of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube PalTalk, AOL, and Yahoo. Apple joined Prism in 2012. Because most Internet traffic moves through servers in the US as it swishes around the globe, the NSA had what it calls home team advantage. By getting server access, it was able to grab the communications of pretty much every person -- American or foreign -- using the Internet. Through Prism, NSA acquired " email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details and more."
When asked for comment, the companies involved said they had no knowledge of such a program. Apple executives in particular claimed never to have heard of Prism. These denials notwithstanding, the Guardian characterized the program this way:
"The Prism program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organization, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users."
Also according to the Guardian, after the 2012 amendments to the Act which enables the FISA court, the NSA required neither individual authorizations by the court nor anything more than a reasonable suspicion that "one of the parties was outside the country at the time... records were collected by the NSA. The document also shows that the FBI acts as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech companies, and stresses its reliance on the participation of US Internet firms, claiming 'access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning.' "
These revelations were a huge embarrassment to the named companies which had made many public statements declaring their commitment to the protection of their customers' private communications.
As if to amplify the issues of the FBI v. Apple case, the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto this week revealed that the Chinese company, Baidu, collects an incredible range of information about its Android phone users from the various apps they download. Millions of people around the world make use of these apps, not just citizens of China.
I read and reread these stories, trying to understand why Apple is making such a fuss about fighting the FBI's current demand, and why the FBI went to court to try and compel Apple to obey.
I think the answer is that their use of the words" privacy" and "security" make both parties seem much better than they are. They create a false frame that makes us forget that our security is, at best, hit and miss, and that companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. let the privacy horse out of the barn many years ago.
