I was born in the PRC of the 1970’s and it shows. My solution to everything seems to be to control all variables. Recall that I suggested trading software should be like professional car races where the trader bots are limited by their flops. Another thought along the same line of political campaign contributions.

It seems there are a lot of thoughts on how to do campaign financing right. Roughly, the political candidate with the most money has the most resources to influence citizens to cast the vote for them. So the political office is won before the election at the fund raising stage.

Political Action Committees of all flavors are the vehicles to which money donation can be made towards a certain cause–indubitably a political candidate.

Why not restrict the media in which political campaigns can spend their money? Supposing that candidates are only allowed to champagne by SMS limit of 160 characters. That seems to drastically alter the competition to the most important stuff rather than fancy presentations that do more to misdirect than inform.

Okay, perhaps SMS limit is a little extreme, but consider the perhaps limiting the AD impressions and prime-time minutes of TV, in a way that the candidates can not drown out another party by spending money to buy out all the campaign media opportunities.

A second way is to semantically limit the content. During a video, the number of letters, words, and numbers displayed on screen can be limited. The number of objects, simultaneous sounds, animation, and images of opponents.

By setting these kinds of limits, one can possibly effect a more issue-centric and content-centric political campaign process.

More simply, it removes the influence of money.

More idealistically, the hope is to engage in better politics by honestly focusing on our intelligent humanity.

…

These SIP thoughts partially inspired by Netflix’s Designated Survivor season 3. Halfway through, will issue FAMX rating of 1.3X for the front half of the show.

It seems I’ve begun to use a scale to represent how much a story or a show is enjoyable. The rough idea is that if I were listening to a podcast story, how fast would I listen to it? If the show is largely content free or uninteresting, I may speed through it at 2X or 3X speed. If a show is packed with information, or emotional content that I may wish to linger upon, then I slow it down to 1X, and some cases, the shows run so fast, like Star Trek Discovery, or Hamilton biography, that I may have to rewatch or re-listen to large portions of it, the average speed slows down to below one–0.5X for example if I watched an episode twice. 0.1X if I had to review a formula or chart 10 times.

There are those moments, where I would freeze a frame or stop reading mid-sentence in thought, agony or enjoyment, until biological reasons stops me. In these situations, the content merit a near 0.

And everyone has experienced content that you cannot finish fast enough, those cases we have a large FAMX rating.

I hope this blog has been at most “FAMX 1X” or simply “1 FAMX”

Hope these explanation helps.

Just saw this film on Netflix…

This is the kind of stuff a parent wishes to show his daughter. Look, take your test and try your best. ‘cos you should know your older sisters didn’t try their best and…

But seriously, I guess one interpretation is that the AI set up the intruder to test the daughter some how? Quality being the ability to survive? Or ability to distinguish those useful for survival and those that are in the way? Why did she have to kill mother? Was this kind of a prove of self sufficiency? Is there an inevitable violence in the maturation of humanity? Is the corruption of those in Eden an inevitable element of our existence ? ( the intruder being the corrupting element with forbidden knowledge) perhaps an existence of overwhelming enemy to overcome is a required element of human evolution? Mother set up the fear in the intruder, and then in Daughter, to introduce the strongest possible fear and hate. Hatred for robots unites humanity, it concludes after failing to unite humanity in peace using other approaches.

Although, one do have to commend Daughter for single handedly deciding for the whole of humanity that it does not need Mother AI. Perhaps after an extinction level event, we will really be ready to decide to put automating ourselves out of mind and out of practice.

Thought provoking movie. Worth a watch at 1.25X.

I’ve come to realize that it is very hard to turn Bluetooth and internet off on mobile devices. There is an irresistible urge for the device to be connected. Many operations turns into the Bluetooth on. Similarly, the WiFi refuses to stay off. Connectivity defaults can be reset during OS upgrades. Rebooting the devices resets connectivity setting. Power saving mode changes can flip on these connections. Connecting the phone to computer or car causes them to turn on. Walking into a geofence may cause them to turn on… like your body can act involuntarily, fart or burp or hiccup, and they turn on.

At the present time, it is not conventionally known that these surreptitious auto-connections are causing us any harm. But the simple matter of fact is that I remember turning it off and then moments or days later it is turned back on again.

How will AI endanger our humanity? I feel perhaps the leakage will be here. When by our own, arguably the most excellent engineering organizations, deliberately engineer these features in software and hardware systems that operate against my individually expressed wishes.

The possibilities of how invasive and how offensive an advanced AI would be under governance of present day (2010’s) corporations is painfully forced into my mind.

I said “off” but it is still on. And some people probably got a lot of cash bonus, stock grants and stock appreciation for making it turn on even when I said “off.” Like, it’s not even about that software engineer selling his soul for money any more. That team selling everyone’s humanity for money!

Will more advanced AI technologies be hated by most?

It seems like that’s where we are headed today.

P.s. for those readers mocking me, please keep in mind that I don’t spend all my days on the iPhone. I do not derive my meaning and purpose from staring at this tiny screen all day long. When the button(s) that used to turn wifi(and Bluetooth) on and off suddenly become only a suggestion for the OS, it is very annoying and very inconvenient. In some circles, this might be called a bait-and-switch: get users used to pressing a certain area on the screen, then switch that action to mean something else.

P.p.s. The Mobile OS’s has essentially become mafias. Quite literally, when an OS upgrade lands, your device will suddenly malfunction leading to a forced reboot in the middle of whatever activity that was in progress. When you discover the availability of the update, you realize that it is really “an offer that you cannot refuse.” Nice offer, but still kind of forced down my iPhone’s throat.

Also, one shouldn’t forget that Apple settled the lawsuit paying $0.5 billion dollars for slowing down users’ iPhones via an “over the air update” to force them to buy new ones.

During all this time, it has lost no market value or received any impactful punishment for malfeasance that I as a customer would like to end. Apple has lost no faculty or direction for repeating the same exercise of selfish deceptions to increase its sales numbers or other business metrics.

And other companies do it too, of course, but most reader will have more direct experience with mobile devices from Apple.

The fact that all these things have happened and will obviously continue to happen is very alarming. Granted, my radio devices being turned on unexpectedly harmed me in ways that only I can sense and imagine. But mark my words, when it is an AI that gets turned on you unexpectedly, you will not be laughing at me any more.