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To Boldly Go...

12/30/2022

“To boldly go…” (probably the most famous split infinitive in modern English) was, perhaps, the essential embodiment of the Star Trek series. It captured the spirit of adventure and discovery which that series sought to tap into, a spirit which is a deep part of human nature since long before there was much in the way of technology.

All this came to mind as I watched the new documentary: “Goodnight, Oppy” about the Mars rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” whose mission (intended to run 90ish days) actually continued from 2004 until 2018. It’s a pretty slick production (available on Amazon), a paean to modernity, filled with the romance of engineering (yes, there is such a thing!), not a little anthropomorphizing, a bunch of science, and, most of all, human achievement.

I’m not ashamed to say that I was touched by the spirit of accomplishment and teamwork which the Mars Rover Team conveyed. I had had a similar sense when I saw the successor to “Opportunity”: “Curiosity” land on Mars in 2012 (still running after 10 years); using a stunning conception of multiple technologies to make it happen. The chills were not just envy of their comraderie, but also a feeling of participation—of human-ness—in the face of the vast emptiness of space. In such an expanse, the values of family, clan, and team go a long way towards ameliorating the bewilderment of the cosmos.

I’ve read more than enough science fiction in my day with many tales of interplanetary adventure and portraits of cultures spread across the galaxy on the backs of human ingenuity. Star Trek is certainly a leading example; so is Star Wars, and neither is among the best in terms of writing or imagination. Yet, the fun of the fictional accounts (of whatever quality) lacks the reality of our accomplishments over the past two decades on Mars.

The epochal thrills of July, 1969, when we landed on the Moon have faded for many and are unknown to the 85% of people today who hadn’t been born (or were too young). Space-wise, it’s been a pretty quiet half-century; with much of the techno-awesomeness shifting to the information and biosci areas. And, to be sure, there is definitely a sense of “early days” about the Mars Rovers. I doubt folks went “gaga” over Columbus’ maritime tech in 1492, and most of the so-called “Age of Exploration” was highly colored in the mode of the “Christian West takes on the world” or various flavors of inter-national competition. We have much the same, only lately it's been USA vs. USSR, or USA vs. China as the reality behind the slick tag lines (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a plaque on the Moon reading: “We came in peace for all mankind.”).

The “space race” of the 1960s reflected much the same mix of economic/technology development and geo (cosmo-?) politics as did the earlier “Age of Exploration.” There’s little doubt that NASA’s recent moon rocket test (Project Artemis) was also spurred on by the extra-terrestrial presence of Chinese Taikonauts and tech (not to mention SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and other billionaire space projects). We beat the Russians back in the 1960s and we don’t want to let some other “commies” out-flank us on the Moon or Mars in the 21C.

Even leaving the moral and political issues to the side, we look back on the deeds of centuries ago with much more amazement at their meagerness (compared to where we are now) than amazement at their accomplishment/bravery/foolishness. I suspect that if we are around to do so in a couple of hundred years, that people of the 23d century will feel the same condescension towards our initial, often faltering, steps. And those from the 33d century may well feel the same about us as we do about Viking ships and Polynesian long-distance sea canoes.

Still, from where we are now, the story is remarkable and so is the opportunity (ditto for the “Spirit,” the “Curiosity,” the “Perseverance”). Perhaps the part to which I so connected—even more that the team’s energy—was that these projects symbolize our human potential. Amid all the (very) messed up things on this planet, it’s not our lack of ability that is in doubt; rather, we insist on pettiness, greed, and short-sightedness instead. These impediments are as human as our dreams. I’m glad we have R2D2’s squeaks and Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise “to boldly go….” I’m even more glad that we have lots of unglamorous folks working hard to nudge a little robot that is actually trundling over red sands on another planet.

In this holiday season, there’s still room for wonder and awe.

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Grand Turing Test

12/23/2022

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You may have seen something lately about the hot new tech toy: ChatGPT. It’s obviously a name that didn’t come from a marketing department and it doesn’t even proclaim itself as ready for business. Rather it’s a test bed for AI. You can write a question and (in most cases) a pretty well fleshed out answer comes back. Check it out here.

Just for yuks, I asked “What does “condemned to repeat it” mean?”

In 15 seconds, this is what came back:

“The phrase "condemned to repeat it" is often used to refer to the idea that history has a tendency to repeat itself, and that if we do not learn from the mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them. The phrase is often attributed to the philosopher George Santayana, who wrote in his book "The Life of Reason" that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This means that if we do not learn from the events of the past, we will be doomed to make the same mistakes again in the future. The phrase is often used to encourage people to study and learn from history in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

It's not a scintillating answer, but it’s on point and plausible. Let me just say that I have seen worse answers from college freshmen.

There are still quite a few limitations and rough spots, but, like all machine learning; it will get better fast. Indeed, that is the whole point of ChatGPT: to train the machine to do better.

This public splash has engendered all sorts of chat about the coming age of AI (as to which, see my post from August, 2021 here). But, I’m not going to go down the road of bewailing the end of humanity etc, etc; nor go into detailed analyses of the current state of AI in general or ChatGPT in particular. It’s way too early to be parsing the answers it’s giving at this stage. We (society in general) need to pay attention and start thinking about how to handle this capability. There are a wide range of implications; not least: how to deal with the “It must be true, I read it on the internet!” in our truth-challenged discourse. But let’s not panic quite yet.

Even for those of us in the teaching (or, more precisely, the evaluating/assessing/grading) biz, the challenge is rapidly approaching, but not imminent. Simply put, if a student can grab the prompt from a take-home essay exam (which I usually use) and drop it into their friendly I responder, will I get back anything I can use to understand what the student actually absorbed out of the course? Do I really want to spend twenty minutes chasing down the source of any individual answer to an exam? Grading is already draining enough.

Most tests “back in the day” were “in class,” usually closed-book, and were as much about memory capabilities as about reasoning and understanding. I realized some time ago in my teaching that memorization wasn’t all that important at the college level, and turned to open-book, take-home tests where the student would have to marshal ideas and information to come up with an answer showing some insight about the material and issues covered in the class. Then, along came Wikipedia and other internet sources which provided all sorts of “facts.” So (it seemed to me) that there was not only little point in forcing students to memorize facts that they could easily look up, but that I didn’t care (again at the college level) about them remembering whether Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena in 1815 or 1816.

At least (so I figured) I can still pose interesting questions that require thought, reflection, integration of sources and ideas, etc. Students can pull their facts from Wikipedia and the course materials and show me that they “got it” when I talked about the impact of guilt on the treatment of perpetrators and collaborators in the aftermath of WWII in Europe.

Well, that seems to be going by the boards soon, too. ChatGPT provides some decent answers to questions like: “How has democracy changed from Ancient Athens to the present day?” or “Why don’t we have so many political revolutions anymore?” Clearly, I (and teachers everywhere) have some serious work ahead in reconfiguring our exams and other assignments. As a good friend of mine points out, we need to improve how we assess students already and now we have another incentive. More, we can use the defects in ChatGPT to point out the difference between an intelligent answer and one that is merely coherent. In any event, the academic “arms race” is escalating!

One of the tools already in many college teachers’ arsenal is a service called “Turnitin,” an antiplagiarism software program that takes students’ electronically submitted essays and compares them to all the material on the internet, including Wikipedia, scholarly articles, and papers from students at other universities across the country. It’s very helpful, but it is a ‘dumb’ tool, it just matches words. Now that ChatGPT and its progeny will start writing student essays (slightly different every time), it’s about to go the way of the bi-plane. Fortunately, there is a new site that promises to be able to detect when an answer is written by an AI like ChatGPT. It’s called Originality .

I haven’t tested it yet, but I am quite curious to see how it develops. Competition (both economic and techie) being what it is, I can see a serious escalation of software vs. software intelligences coming up.

All of which leads up to the title of today’s posting: Grand Turing Test. The original concept was developed by the brilliant British mathematician Alan Turing in the mid 20C, at the very dawn of the computer age. He posited that computer “intelligence” could only be determined by a human who would pose questions to an intelligence (human or machine) in another room and, if the questioner was unable to tell whether the answers came from a human or machine, then the machine was, in fact, intelligent. This is the goal towards which AI has striven for several decades.

I’m proposing that we will soon be facing a slightly different version, i.e. whether one computer/software program/AI (like Originality) can tell whether an essay is written by a human or by another AI (like ChatGPT). Both sets of programmers will be beavering away to instill even more intelligence-appearing (or intelligence-detecting). Is there an end in sight? Doubtful.

In the meantime, I hope to continue writing these essays with just enough quirkiness and insight that it will be some time until I can be replaced by an AI-blogger. Or, perhaps, I will just find a program, drop in a couple of prompting words and tell them to riff for 1100 words or so.

Or, maybe I did already.

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Counting

12/16/2022

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As of December 18, I will have been on this planet for 25,000 days. (No estimates are available for time (or non-time) I’ve spent on other planets, dimensions, or universes.) It’s a milestone of some significance, even if uncommon in our normal reckoning of duration and lives. You can run your own calculations here.

Years and days are the only standard measurements of time that are “natural” rhythms of life (i.e. astronomical in origin). All others—months, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds—are artifices, adopted for purposes of social coherence. So, it makes sense that they resonate more deeply and provide a more “organic” foundation for observance and commemoration. Still, We don’t normally count days (much less the other time periods) for an extended duration.

Just for illustration, 5000 days is about 13 ? years; 10,000 days is about 27 ? years; 20,000 days is about 54 3/4 years; and 30, 000 is just over 82. The oldest person alive currently (and the 4th longest recorded life ever), Lucille Randon of France, born on 11 February 1904, has seen 43,409 days.

According to the Bible, (Psalms 9:10) a full span of life is 70 years (~25,500 days). As I’ve noted earlier, health and demographics, particularly in the last 50,000 days (~ since 1870s), has lifted that target for most people on the planet. According to the Social Security Administration, I’ve got (on average) another 6,000 days or so

Days pass quickly enough and, almost as quickly, cycle into weeks and months. Every “older” person will tell you that time does seem to go by faster as one ages, but even in our youth these markers spin by, almost to no notice at all. Perhaps this phenomenon is related to the time dilation that Einstein posited in his theory of relativity; i./e., time slows down as we move faster.

Still, for newborns, counting by weeks seems OK for about half a year, then counting by months seems OK for 2-3 years. After we reach adulthood, for reasons of either boredom or fear of realization of age, we tend to shift to only paying attention to “big” birthdays, every five or ten years.

Whether days or years, round numbers tend to become occasions for celebration and reflection; both of which are good things, so I guess we shouldn’t pass up any convenient opportunity for either. I would invite you to bring over a cake, but I’m more of a pie guy.

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Worth it?

12/9/2022

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Some years back, when I was just starting my focused study of history, I had the inklings of a perception/question about the state of modern civilization—both our marvels and our struggles—and came up with a pithy and provocative framing question on which I have ruminated from time to time: “Was the Renaissance worth it?”

There are, of course, many reasons to criticize this question. The Renaissance was but one step, and not even the most important one in the formation of the modern world. The question’s pithiness borders on the cuteness of pop culture/journalistic attention-grabbing. More fundamentally, what do I mean by “it” and “worth”?

So, I’ll grant you the first two points, if you will acknowledge that “is modernity worth it?” is a bit more academic and off-putting phrasing. I could pitch the question in terms of whether the “scientific revolution” was worth it or “the Enlightenment,” or the “industrial revolution,” but the underlying issue comes back to the complex of developments, principally in Europe during the period from 1500-1900 that drove the principal components of how we live (or aspire to live) today; what I will loosely call the “modern world.”

Another way of framing the question of “Was it worth it?” is to adapt the standard political query every election cycle: “Are we better off now than we were 500 years ago?”

Even before we get to the intractable question of “worth” or “better,” it’s an immensely difficult question to tackle. We are the proverbial fish who swim around with little (no?) sense of the fact that we’re in water. It takes a lot of attention to contemplate living in a world without all the toys and tools and trials that we take for granted: vaccinations and travel, and longer lives and more knowledge, cultural diversity and globalization, electric pick-up trucks and telecommunications—a seemingly endless list of technological and cultural developments that many of us enjoy (or at least make use of) constantly. Even those (billions and billions) people today who are not at the higher end of the economic scale are still (mostly) not living in abject subsistence poverty. And the well-documented proclivity of humans to forget history means that with rapidly increasing populations over the past century, the percentage of folks who are aware of what life was like twenty years before they were born (to pick an arbitrary marker) is pretty small; a fortiori, 200 years before.

Being aware of who/what/where we are is tough enough. It is no easier to take a second step and imagine the life of the “pre-modern” person by way of comparison. We’re not talking cave persons here, but your average Ting, Dietrich, or Hassina who was born along with Leonardo da Vinci in 1452. Even in terms of material life, comparison is difficult. The only stuff we can measure is…the stuff we can measure. The first people to ride a train in the 1820s thought it was amazing to go 30mph; for us going that fast is mundane (except trying to go cross-town in Manhattan during rush hour). Technology, standards of living, longevity/health, scope of knowledge are all stunningly (and reasonably accurately) known to be better.

Happiness is another matter as are human nature/morals. We have no way to measure these criteria and, indeed, we have trouble even figuring out the units of measurement, not to mention the profound differences in what those concepts meant to Ting, Dietrich, and Hassina vis-à-vis each other or vis-à-vis us, born 500 years later.

It’s easy to dismiss this axis of comparison as being unmeasurable (and therefore meaningless) and sticking to the “hard” countable standards. But, of course, that’s mechanistic nonsense. In addition, it’s useful to remember that (per human nature) much of human happiness is perceived in relation to our perceptions of others, not by any absolute standard. In the kingdom of the flushable toilet, there is still plenty of room for resentment and envy for those better off (and, of course, billions of people don’t even have flushable toilets).

Aphorisms like: “human nature never changes” might be true in some ways, but beg more questions than they resolve. For one thing, if human nature doesn’t change (certainly not over a span of a few hundred years), then the scope of potential human improvement has to be sharply limited. In other words, if we’re still the same “humans,” how can we be better off compared to 500 years ago?

In terms of morality, there might be a case for being better off. Yes, Martin Luther King did tell us that the “arc of history bends towards justice,” and in terms of our own (modern, liberal) standards, the relative status of women and people of color are demonstrably better. Still, we need to be careful, for nowhere is it more clear that it is difficult to see and assess ourselves than in terms of our epistemological ethos. Pretty much every culture has felt self-satisfied with their own morality, only to be looked down on by subsequent generations for their relative barbarism. To argue that this is a reflection of moral improvement looks dangerously like the victors writing their own history; it’s not to be fully trusted.

Finally, I have to mention all the stress, pain, and madness that seems to be part of modern life. I doubt that there is any way to assess mental health over centuries, but it does seem clear that the inherent discontents of civilization (as Freud described it (1929)) are piling up. I rather suspect that these are not due the current (i.e. last 50 years) state of the world, with globalization, consumerism, and techno-overload. Instead, these recent developments are but the accumulation of disorientation, alienation, and a general acceleration of the pace of life which seems increasingly overwhelming to so many. This is not just a matter of school shootings and election-deniers, but can be seen more broadly in the general crisis of governability and social cohesion which is plainly evident in many (most?) countries around the world. The creeping sense of climate fatalism only makes it worse.

There is, of course, no way to go back and “re-boot” the system. Nor am I a fan of gratuitous “Luddite-ism.” However, to the extent we can make choices about our future direction as a species, we need to consider those who, over the centuries have called for greater attention to the art of living well; not merely being “well-off.” Perhaps, at the least, we might slow down and shift our priorities away from the material. Maybe we have enough “stuff.” The frenetic drive for “improvement” is, after all, pretty narrowly focused. It’s partner—the drive for “growth”—(as I have argued earlier) is similarly suspect.

Was the Renaissance worth it? It’s hard to argue with Leonardo, Newton, and Watt/Edison/Tesla et al.; particularly from the comforts of the modern 21C home office. As a historian, I understand the nonsensical nature of such a question. As a person, I have to say that there are significant costs for the road we’ve been marching down and we need to stop pretending otherwise.

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Sauce for the Gander

12/2/2022

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Recent anxieties about Chinese expansionism, especially towards Taiwan/Formosa/Taipei, have featured a host of admonishments, mostly from countries who have no ability to affect the situation, as well as a rich strain of language filled with “strategic ambiguity” from the US about its likely response. The President has been the most forthright about warning off the PRC from reclaiming what for the past fifty years has been acknowledged on all sides to be an integral part of China. It’s strategically problematic, but—as usual—I’m more concerned with a bunch of interesting historical parallels.

The posture of the US and the “West” to Chinese hints and exercises has been couched in terms of the preservation of liberty, democracy, and opposition to international aggression, leveraging the rebuff of Putin in Ukraine, and with relatively little mention of our dependence on the world’s dominant microchip manufacturers based in Taiwan.

In 1823, a different President (James Monroe) proclaimed a “doctrine” of a US sphere of influence over the Western hemisphere. He was especially concerned with Spanish efforts to reassert control over its recently rebellious colonies occupying the majority of the hemisphere south and west of the US border (roughly a line from Miami to New Orleans to Denver in current terms). This was a political gesture, since the US had no capability to project military power outside its boundaries at the time. Over the balance of the 19C, the “Doctrine” was restated and expanded (e.g., the “Roosevelt (Teddy) corollary”), usually in alignment with the expansion of US military and commercial power. During the Cold War of the later 20C, it was revived (aka the “Truman Doctrine”) with an eye towards Moscow’s promotion of world revolution. It provided a fig leaf of rationale for dozens of US military interventions across the 19C and 20C.

While the Monroe Doctrine claimed a foundation, too, in democracy and liberty, it was often described in more “realpolitik” terms as a type of “cordon sanitaire” (or protective belt) to keep other global powers well away from our shores. Indeed, recognition of various great powers’ spheres of influence was a well-established diplomatic practice to prevent the “big boys” from bumping into each other by ensuring that their informal imperial areas did not become a flash point for conflict.

While there are examples from the Congress of Vienna (1815) to the Versailles Peace Conference (1919), perhaps the most famous and long-lasting example was that accorded to the Soviet Union in the aftermath of WWII. Churchill agreed (and FDR acquiesced) in Soviet control over most of central Europe. The US understood that support for liberal and democratic governments in these countries was futile, given the presence of the Red Army and the general weariness following the War. Realpolitik trumped idealism.

A similar story played out at the end of the 20C when the US acquiesced in the Chinese take-over of Hong Kong from the erstwhile British hegemon; even if China had to wait until its own economic and financial system was strong enough to stand on its own, making Hong Kong’s nominal independence expendable.

So, what is the basis for the US to deny China the right to a protected zone?

Before you answer that, give some thought to a scenario where the Confederacy had holed up in Southern Florida after losing at Appomattox in 1865. What if President Grant started some table pounding about “finishing” the Civil War and some (literal) saber-rattling about launching an expedition to preserve American “national integrity”? How would our (the “Union”) position compare with what China is saying now? Is their moral stance based on Chinese “national integrity” and a rejection of the exploitative economic model of unbridled capitalism all that different from what would have come ringing out of the North back then?

Generally, the US has a robust history of holding others to standards to which we might aspire but far too often fail to meet: very few war crime trials for the Allies in WWII, we get really angry when some “radical muslims” kill about 3,000 Americans, so we proceed to kill some multiple of that (just in terms of innocents/collaterals) in retaliation, and our extensive list of “interventions” around the world in the last 100+ years which is hard to distinguish in some ways from other countries’ “aggressions” (beyond our vastly better PR). We’re very good at self-satisfied justifications, colored by myopia, and a refusal to consider others’ epistemologies.

We heard similar outcries over allegations of Russian “interference” in our elections in 2016 and 2020. It’s almost as if we forgot the actions of the CIA and diplomatic/propaganda efforts with regard to democratic processes in dozens of countries in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Most other former imperial powers have comparable lists and we all are conveniently self-righteous when the shoe is on the other foot.

In other words, there’s been an awful lot of “how dare they…[do to us what we did to them]” going on. As global power shifts, and the 200+ year dominance of the West draws to a close, it would be good if we had a bit more humility about our aims, practices, and effects. It’s OK to play global power politics, let’s just not pretend that there is an automatic congruence between our past actions and our current posturing or between what we say and what we do.

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Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

To Boldly Go...

Grand Turing Test

Counting

Worth it?

Sauce for the Gander

Condemned to Repeat It --Musings on history, society, and the world.

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Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.