Grammar School Inspirations

Posted on 2025-11-21 by Me under Artifice Intelligence, GAGI, Machine Learning, Privacy, Sad, TAS, Technology

My kid is nearing the end of her tenure in our local public elementary school. However, for some reason they have had trouble mastering required elements of the language art. After I struggle to answer some of her homework questions, I felt giving up. I had to read some of the text 4-5 times before coming up with very tenuous answers.

Finally, I decided to dispense my massive wisdom instead of trying to demonstrate the correct.

Child, there are several different things you are learning here. In the least you have expression. Expression is the minimum you must do to in the context of speaking, writing, and other performances—let’s just call all these activities performances. Expression can be very basic, chicken scratches, a whole page filled by pencil, a hand print, a foot print, a bark, a cry, Hayden’s Trumpet Concerto performed on a Eb. there are no limits to what constitutes as expression. In America we have laws that protect human vocal expression as a basic rights. Modern arts have taken these to the limits of our imagination. Therefore the minimum is that you must express.

Next thing the teachers teach you is the skill of information communication. An idea in your head, be it information you know to be factual or a feeling, can be communicated to others through performances. Some of the skills in information communication include: summarization, listing information, relating information, serialization, causation etc. the skill of information communication is one of human’s proudest achievements. We can do it efficiently and to great precision. Therefore it is vital that you learn how to do this for both simple and implicit information.

Another purpose of performances is one of affectation. (Here we use it in the first person and speak to skills of affectation, later in a different perspective.) Many of the devices and techniques the school teach are methods of affectation. “How do I grab the readers’ attention?” One often hears echos of classes past… “How do I prepare the reader for this complex concept?” And “How do I surprise/scare/alert/depress the reader/listener/viewer(consumer)?” These skills, for performance learners are geared towards achieving specific goals affecting the consumers. Their successful application reasonably leads to manifestation of intended changes.

So then, for elementary school, you can focus on learning skills and identifying which of expression, communication, and affectation each skill element aims to accomplish….
Me

Now, then, I realized I digressed so much that it is now bed time and her homework is unfinished—because of me. But these thoughts are racing through my head unstoppable.

In truth grammar school performance skill classification actually helped me understand a mess of confusing things. For starters, the fact that expression, as in the freedom of expression, is actually a very nebulous… err… expression. But viewed from a complexity or mental effort to produce, it does not require much. It would appear that freedom of expression is an upper bound on permissible performances. It says that our system of thinking imposes no upper limit to speech or other forms of expression.

EXCEPT, we actually can and indeed do impose restrictions on performances. What comes to mind immediately are NDA’s, trade secrets, government secrets, passwords, etc. There are also lower bounds such as real estate mandatory disclosure rules and SEC filings where specific fields of information are required to be included in any performance. It would appear that we have (or that we have expressed, ala functional relativism—adopting relativistic view to enable computability/functionality/operability) indeed put restrictions on performances that communicate. Even though they are expressive performances, due to their informative functions. The detailed consideration of this type of expression can partially be taken up by a new branch of law covering information property which I proposed as a different type of property from those that we already have laws for, e.g real estate, chattel etc, due to the advancing and emerging science and technology of information. Briefly, we want to quantify it quality information communication using modern and future formal theories of information(such as the idea of information gain). That would enable us to make more precise statements about what we want/can/should communicate.

FURTHERMORE, performances with affectatious nature can further be restricted. Most prominently, in many professional circumstances (teacher, doctor, CPA, police) and in the court of law, it is never permitted for a person to perform so as to (mis)lead the consumer to believe information that is false. They are not permitted to perform so as to induce a damaging or undesirable action of the consumer.

Aside from expression, communication and affectation can be subjective. Whether a person has mislead and whether the performance as intentional or inadvertent, these are determinations that we do not have objective criterion’s for. In the future we may have the technology to measure them, but right now, our society tend to resort to functional relativism by identifying authorities on matters of lying and manipulation—judges in the court system, managers in the professional environment, etc. We, as a society, tend to agree with the judgement of these authorities. “Judge xyz has ruled on such and such matter.” says xyz made a decision , but it also says we hold that decision to be good or true enough to proceed.

I really enjoy my conversations with my children. They make me think hard about what I know and believe. They ask “why” and “what” so much that it trains me to have more critical assessment of the nature of my realities…. and spelling. I can’t wait to talk to them again and again…

Equality of Utility II

Posted on 2018-07-03 by Me under america, Artifice Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimizing Life, Social Order

Some time ago we investigated the equality of benefits. Roughly speaking let us consider degenerate real world actions into discretely selectable choices of action $a\in A$ given individual $x$ , who has observable features $f(x)$ and protected feature $p(x)$ . Suppose the company has to choose among a set of actions to take $a \in A$ . What is a workable definite of fairness or equality in such a decision making effort with respect to protected properties $p$ ?

Let god bestow us, a neutral third party, with a utility functor u whose evaluation on the individual $u(x)$ results in a function $u(x)(a)$ is the utility of company taking action a to individual $x$ , $u(x)(b)$ is the utility to individual $x$ of company taking action $b$ .
Let $f$ be the decision process of company $g$ , $g(x)$ is the decision company makes, some $a$ for the individual $x$ . Then the right thing to do
$g(f(x)) = argmax_{a\in A}(u(x)(a)) = g(f(x), p(x))$
Simple, we do as god says, act as if we have the knowledge of an oracle–even when knowing some discriminable information that we then chose to ignore.

This is not as easy as it looks in a formula. Think of a person with a clown nose and one without, your behavior will likely be very different between those two persons, even if you decide that a clown nose has absolutely nothing to do with the task at hand.

Additionally, the nature of our imperfection dictates that our systems that we build are imperfect. What if we cannot achieve God’s will? What if we fail to do the virtuous even when we know what the right thing to do is?

What could a neutral thirdparty reasonably demand of a faulty company? One suggested approach is to establish probabilistic equality among protected classes. Suppose there are some number of classes, $m\in M$ which corresponds to values of p(x), between which we must protect their utility. (So for example M could be cartesian product of age, sex, race, birthplace, religion and political party)

$E(u(x)(g(f(a)))| m) = c\ \forall m\in M$

That the customer utility for each class is identically some value $c$ . This is a simplification as there are other classes of equivalence in stochastic variables.

Note this framework has some slight benefit over traditional machine learning framework evaluating equality on confusion matrix of classifier performance g. There two most inspiring examples that I suffer from:

Situation 1: I noticed that my coworker was getting Tesla car advertisements while I do not receive one. Even though my utility in not receiving the advertisement was a negligibly loss–because I cannot afford a tesla, I still feel angry. I may even be tempted to find a protected attribute of mine to claim that tesla discriminated against me in its advertisement campaign: What! they think mid-aged Asian man can’t have a midlife crisis or can’t afford to splurge on a Tesla? In this case a true negative for prediction regarding response/conversion through a Tesla car Ad but offensive enough to cause problems. In retrospect this would have had positive utility for me, when I reached out to Tesla I learned more about how the car would work for me. But the decision seem to produce a negative sentiment from its subject.(The company has, since my drafting of this blog entry, sent me repeated invitation to test drive the S, perhaps due to recent but small increase in my disposable cash, which I may consider calling upon by taking the offer to test drive, at a suitable time. this is just an example)

Situation 2: I am offended when I do receive an advertisement for STD testing, and in particular for hepatitis family of diseases. For gods sake, there’s a Asian Liver Center at Stanford whose purpose for establishment is to check me for hepatitis or other Liver problems present in Asian livers. In this case, god bless me, that I am free of hepatitis and other liver problems of any kind, and that this is a false positive in advertising. I am offended. And in reality one may argue that the benefit of this advertisement, to me, to increase my chances of early detection is positive– $E(u(huan)g(f(huan)))>0$ I still feel offended. This case is a false positive to advertisement conversion. It is a positive utility to have shown it to me. And yet it produced negative sentiment.

Situation 3: I just received a piece of snail mail from a Redwood City mortuary advertising their service to Mr. And Mrs. Chang. I am terrified. I feel this is a death threat of some form. Putting the idea of me dying in Redwood City in my head. The letter has hand addressed envelope. This is a false positive for advertising relevance(I did not die, not yet any ways, and I am not planning on dying) it has zero utility for me, and I am definitely feeling very negative sentiment.

These are but several of many possible situations where the company could do the right thing in front of God, and in front of the board, by still be erring and thereby producing very negative sentiment. At risk of running out of numbers to enumerate all of them, I have not numbered all the types starting at 1.

To summarize, there are several factors that ultimately factor into a company’s decision making process, nonexclusively they are:

The E.u.g.f for x, whether it is defensible in front of an oracle, God, or court of law;
how will any action make the subject individual feel, the sentiment it produces, irrespective of objective utility;
is utility function universally accepted;
and finally the company’s bottom line.

With these considerations in mind, we can now continue with our exploration of fairness.

In a world… where there are nebulous words!

Posted on 2017-11-11 by Me under Artifice Intelligence, Clandestine Activity, economy, Ethics, Innovation, Internet, Open Source, Optimizing Life, Social Order, Technology

It occurs to me to write these down on a special occasion… Initially I was considering an optimization problem in a situation where localized optimization is essentially playing a zero sum game with an opponent who is much more powerful.

In this situation, even though we have big data, and even though we have deep learning, it still remains that there is bigger data and yet more sophistication else where. One of the challenges of the nascent big data and deep learning enabled AI industry is one of problem selection.

There are people who are trying to cure cancer and save lives. And there are people trying to trade stocks, win political campaigns, or engage in armed conflict (not that these are the same things) Their continued admonishments against AI are the people who fear the latter. I would imagine there may be very few who would oppose the prior.

That! That is the underlying restriction to the technology: what it can do for prior cause is practically restricted by what it does for the latter. The same applies to all tehnolgies of course. We’ve had internet, social media, a typical Californian would probably take a few minutes to recognize therebeing anything exceeding unusual about the potential downside of yet another meme…

Also, consider aliens, of the interstellar variety, one should always be mindful of our real competition. There is likely a far greater intelligence out there. Let us not doubt, and let us certainly not delay the development of our own Big Intelligence as matter in due course of our kind’s progress.

The halting thought problem

Posted on 2016-12-16 by Me under Artifice Intelligence, Uncategorized

One wonders if there are thoughts that people cannot have for those people who did have them did not continue on to be able to pass the thought onto others?

Just like a crashed computer cannot infect another computer with the virus that crashed it, could there be some group of thoughts inducible in normal humans that cause catastrophic problems so severe that those accidentally reaching it in the course of evolution actually never lived to tell?

Yoshua Bengio’s talk at the 2016 Bay Area deep learning school inspired this nightmare last night… What if just as we don’t need to drive a car and crash a thousand times to learn how not to crash a car, we have learned not to think of many things that would crash our own programming? Other somewhat subliminal messages that caused this nightmare was his computer crashing three or four times during the presentation.

What if the reason why we don’t know how human brain learn is because that knowledge would cause instability in human individual or society–to crash them–so severe that we have built-in mechanisms that prevents us from understanding it? The same way it is easy for us to understand physics and logic and emotions, etc, etc, through same unknown mechanism, we are inhibited from having some class of knowledge or skill?

The obvious example would be for example if I derive a deterministic way to cause a person to stop peeing, or rather, if I learned to stop myself from peeing. That is an obvious example. But there could be other less obvious examples–things that cause psychological changes, inducing forgetfulness, ahh for example if I figured out how to forget and then immediately forgot how to do so. This kind of “bug” or boundary conditions seems very possible.

Aside from admitting that it is structurally possible, there is the added effect of evolution. If true, evolution theory tells us that those are precluded from happening strictly because those of us survives have evolved away these dangerous edge cases or otherwise developed very strong and redundant inhibitory systems to prevent them from occuring.

Lastly, is knowledge of how we learn such a dangerous knowledge? Do we constantly have mini-crashes, just as we are about to learn the secrets of knowledge, the learning of it, something peripheral, like a presentation software, crashes in us and prevents that thought from occuring?

Thankfully we know that we have not evolved away the ability to think about such possibility, perhaps there is still hope?

A possible symbiosis

Posted on 2016-10-11 by Me under Artifice Intelligence, Uncategorized

So… To take myself out of the nitty gritty for a moment it seems still possible for there to be machine-human symbiosis.
Some number of decasdes ago, while in highschool I wondered about this matter. At that time we had 80486 computers and Ram in the megabytes. My conclusion for the computer replacing many human jobs or functions or that they become more valuable than humans was that it is inevitable that we strive to live with them. Much like white people have learned to live with black people and that we care for endangered more than we care about some peoples economic welfare–we can learn to live with computers as equals and sacrifice some human pursuits to that end.

Alas that was more than two decades ago.

Last night, I heard Kaifulee’s Lee address a crowd and discuss AI businesses in China. His answer was somewhat sombering. In paraphrase, I believe what he said was that in the age of AI, where computer product managers are gradually replacing human functions that requires less than 5 seconds of human thought with AI, the future human will be in things that take more thought, but under time and audience pressure he gave art, music, appreciation of art, things that require a personal touch, as examples of new jobs.

Personally, I can empathize. As one who sees foremost advances of AI and robotics, and a person whose job is partially to make money by disruptively using this new technology to replace old systems, I can definitely see his human_replaced_counter ticking up and projections for it to grow very fast.

(Much else was discussed at his talk, of course, this is just a short question at the end of the talk)

It might just be me, but I can almost see tears as he answered this question. There isn’t a comfortable answer when you have to admit that someone, or something, else will definitely beat you at something. When that something is your livelihood, and there is even a Robo-vc now, it is harder to be objective. Now of course we do not want to be paralyzed by paranoia. But we should think hard!

What will we do when machines take over our jobs. What do we do when machines take over our lives and live for us?

And where is the problem? Why don’t all the Uber drivers replaced by bots go on welfare and go to free community college. They can get their degree in the comfort of their home on Ng’s coursera or Thrun’s Udacity. They can learn to do something else, perhaps learn to write programs? Learn to Code as it is now colloquially called. They can take my job after that. That way I can go get my md’s and ph.d.’s and go heal people or philosophy?
(Footnote: what we don’t want to see if a flow of talented and educated people to jobs they over qualify for: coders driving Uber, md’s ph.d.’s writing code. The prevalence of this phenomenon stirs a deep dark anxiety that I cannot name. The decisions to do so are individually very rational. However it would seem to me that society’s investment in educational infrastructure to created these md/phd’s have not achieved sufficient ROI, for the society’s sake. I.e. If they train in physics, should they not attend to physics matters that the training was designed to do? And should they not be related with completely unrelated subjects? If not why do we have so much investment in physics higher education? S/physics/another subject/; again it is worrisome if society is this way but no worries for the individual or the institutions involved in this process, each of which is arguably producing maximally and with the best of intentions)

Would that be a blast? It’ll be like 24th century of Star Trek: we will have no wars, no worries about money or scarce resources. With advancement of technologies, society is advanced. We will no longer struggle against fellow man but against a greater obstacle. We will only strive to better ourselves or humanity.

Such a grand future awaits us!

The FAM Blog

Art Museum Collection F

Category Archives: Artifice Intelligence

Grammar School Inspirations

The halting thought problem

A possible symbiosis