Coming home from 2016 square holiday party. My thoughts are mixed but I find my self drawn to the question of real time democracy. Dorsey put up some Muslim, who declare that America is great, and paid him $XXX in equity in support of his Persuit of the American Dream!

This looming Trump administration anti-immigration and anti-islam principles are indeed troublesome. Alas I feel that the American 4-yr election cycle may have long delayed for popular opinions against immigrations. If Obama responded to these things, maybe we wouldn’t have a president whose big idea is to exclude aliens we want to exclude?!!

What if democracy is real time? What if people’s immediate decisions about matter are cast as vote and taken into consideration real time? What if campaigning is continuous operation necessitated by real time democracy? 

Great idea but how would it be implemented??? Let’s say that government actions are all completely transparent (much like square where staff meeting notes are sent to all company)

To instill democracy, commentary may be made on decisions and factors affecting them. Objections with sufficient support are voted on immediately by the entire population.

For one example, if police violence is perceived as a threat to basic human survival. We may find sudden objection to the social contract where police can st any time stop an individual in their car. With sufficient objection, the matter maybe put to a vote and the law may be changed right away that police can no longer make traffic stops based purely on “gut feeling”.

What’s a world where the law is that one does not have to stop when police siren rings behind you? By law, because popular opinion revoked the law police no longer have the right to operate their weapons. They have no super authority to exceed speed limit… etc.

This is not to pick on the police but merely to illustrate what could possibly happen. We may find that the entire population voted to displace this whole entire social contract. We may find this real time democracy abolished by real time votes. We may find that we abolish very brutal police laws in favor of no laws because everyone have become fearful of the brutal police laws that become in after when anybody commit crimes.

Real time democracy makes all of these possible. Of course social institutions live ACLU may be needed to speak for the few who have no voice. But I can now imagine it working.

For god sakes it’s not like the political offices don’t already use twitter/Facebook/social network to monitor popular opinions in real time. So if the politicians are ready for this, why are the populous kept from exercising their democratic opinion? 

We can handle it, follow our will! Now!

The world is ready for this! 

We have the technology!

We have the wisdom!

We have the idea to do so!

So let’s do this!

Going to write down some random thoughts on a weekend night.
Watched a few episodes of Quantico S2. Searched, as many new fans would do, Priyanka Chopra. There is one matter that I am having trouble resolving which is that she looks so normal and pretty in the cover for Quantico, but her appearances on google image search dressed in Indian costumes are far from attractive to my eye… Like “not leading lady material” comes to mind. Is it a case of genius of Hollywood recruits a real beauty hidden in cinder dust? Is it a case of highly warped sense of aestheticism from watching too much American media? Is it a case of rebirth and transformation? Or is it a case of all of these things ? I don’t know. But she looks completely different, and not Indian mind you, I kept on thinking Latin-American… It’s like a explosion of sexy confined inside a white porcelain Barbie.

On to more pressing matter, why are we all the sudden afraid of AI? Why are the rich and powerful afraid of AI? They are the people who have the resource to even make these things!

Why are we afraid of pervasive monitoring of our communications and physical acts? Why does it annoy me to think that all streets will be recorded some time in the future?

In watching the finale of the Hunger Game movie series I finally get a glimpse of what it feels like: Snow finds them in the sewers because of street cameras. They get attacked in total darkness by these most horrifying genetically modified creatures called Mutts. Much of the human force dies horrifically painful deaths being ripped apart by these gigantic humanoid creatures. The other half runs away scared poopless…

THAT, is what can happen when you put cameras on every street!(and do AI and do genetic engineering)

Pervasive deployment of monitoring technology makes life harder when a malevolent dictator takes charge. Yes technologies can be misused, just like the nuclear bomb. I guess the argument defeating this thought is that hopefully we are working hard to prevent human dictators from coming into power this way.

Why would perfectly sane people write an AI so powerful that it could have any chance of beating another human ? Well, some do it for fun. Some do it for the thrill of tech. probably some will do it out of genuine desire to defeat a person, and for all that he stands? If he is hitler then it would because he is evil. If he is not evil then there should not be enough motivation to create a singularly dangerous atomic bomb.

IMHO, there doesn’t seem to be enough power to create that kind of singularity in AI. I’m sure counter examples for this will flood in soon, but every action must be preceded by an equal and opposite pre-effort. So unless you are aware of your own great evil, you should not fear an all powerful AI whose aim is to take you down.

Do you believe?

Do you have faith?

Do you have fear?

Do you have evil?

Got evil? It makes AI good!

What may still happen is the creation of a hyper competitive earth. Every cent is computed on and optimized. Every action every speech every decision is thoroughly thought through. Every adversary is modeled and simulated. My arriving at BART station will be timed so that I have highest chance of grabbing a seat. My ability to do so may be either due to me buying a more powerful app that’s smarter than your app. Or it may be that my cell phone has faster CPU and was able to perform more simulations and figure out a better door to enter the station at. It maybe that my cellphone has a more powerful antennae that it negotiated my sitting there with that chair on that BART train before your phone event got in range! It might be that  my body was better trained for squeezing past you to the seat because my cloud computer thought of this day and worked the necessary exercises into my workout routine. Maybe because I bought an extra app that found the best way to even get me to the gym.

That’s surely to happen! I get a seat for 20 minutes on BART and you have to stand because I invested in my Computes and you didn’t! I know this is to happen because I sense the all-pervasive pre-effort. It surrounds us like air. It clings to us and penetrates us! It sucks us in just as we suck air in!

You cannot escape it. Because you! must! take public transit! to get to work!
Muhawhahahwhahhahahahaehahwhaew

I’ve been using pythons recently. The language has a easy to lookup __dict__ that provides 100% visibility to all of its content. Javascript also has a similar feature.

One wonders if all this openness is bad. Containment is not a concern. Programmers types anything and everything and they’ll all be available later. Doesn’t this bother anyone?

Well let me say it bothers me. I dare say there is some utility in privacy even in the context of programming languages. It’s just a suspicion that secrecy has enough value that both technical community and general society will come to agree to protect it. Perhaps we will value it and parade it around as we do OOP and human rights. Perhaps we will give them recognition they deserve by carving it into silicone and law.

Agents in a competitive environment will operate by changing itself and its environment. If it has enemies then enemies will use any and all information for selfish purposes. If it benefits enemy then enemy will disrupt its plans by all means. Suppose there is some commonality among all agents, (for example organisms’ survival depends on common set of things: nutrient, air, water, genes), then some types of agent disruption includes environmental damages. Remove oxygen in a certain area and enemies shall parish. The silver rule of morality guards against such environmental damages in worlds where the domain of TAS intersects the range of TAS.  The golden rule of morality is more constructive by forcing actions to make non-negative environmental improvements.

Some types of secrecy is an environmental property that we would like to preserve. Remove secrecy and organizations may not function any more.

I do not know.

Do we need digital integrity? When I save a document in google docs. Should it remain largely the way I typed it? Is it right to demand that my emails remain sent after I send it? Should my password stay the same if I set it and sent the server to the middle of the forest when there is no one is hacking?

Having been in California for many years, I also have an inkling that it is the greatest desire of some people that we radically change our society. There will be no more secrecy and you must still carry on. That there should be no digital integrity. Can human achieve this? Can human survive this? We may not have a choice. We may not have this choice some time from now.

For now, given my assumptions about the world, the governments and people around me. I feel it is important for everyone to preserve secrecy.

If a radical person feel that he should be able to do sex to anyone and everyone anytime one party desires it. If it also turns out to be the case that everyone kind of agrees that sex is nice in most cases. We may even mostly agree that unilateral desire justifies doing sex. They may even point out a set of circumstances, only one man and women left on earth, when sex, despite unilateral desire, is by all ethical arguments “the right thing.”

In such a situation do we just suddenly let him walk around and do sex to everyone? Do we partake in this radicalism and do sex to others at our own unilateral desire? Do we start changing laws to allow it? Do we tell our children: you should not mind it if someone unilaterally does sex to you? Do we sit there and watch because we have a voyouristic nature? Do we tell our children: you should do sex onto other when ever you feel like it? Do we start a company and pay employees money but requiring a signed waiver to their sexual integrity and that if they were otherwise violated in anyway it would be handled in binding arbitration? Do we reward employees with monetary rewards and prestige for their special effort to do this act despite complaints otherwise. Do we reorganize our government agencies to secretly allow some restricted secretive community employed by the government to do sex to citizens? Do we hide the fact that they can do it and do regularly do it obfuscated to the citizens who pay their bills? Do we further form aliances between our secret sex doing secret organization and foreign secret sex doing organizations so they can inflict it together in a coordinated way? All the while interfering with non-ally sex doing organizations and preventing them from doing sex? All the while condemning non-allies from doing this act adding it to their long list of violations of human rights and free market principles?

Human society has buil-in systems that resist acts driven by radicalism. I feel that this resistance is righteous. I feel now is not the time to suddenly (or silently and gradually) make this change to 100% transparency, and most certainly digital integrity, in every aspect of our lives.

We have not found how to do it efficiently and we do not have social order to maintain it. We do not have all the technology to do that today. Let the all those highly intelligent people of our world that we currently allocate to do all forms of secretly-doing-sex-onto-others-due-to-unilateral-desire, instead spend their time and energy in developing and growing our society. Would that not be a much more effective allocation of our precious resources?

I take stand for privacy.

I take stand for integrity.

I take stand for real progress!

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Some months pass since writing this. Considering that in the 2000’s I had written on a blog much like this one that I felt homosexual acts, delication of media attention and government resources was a waste of evolutionary energy–because as far as the eye can see it produces no evolutionary improvement due to lack of reproductivity.

But all that did push us towards unisex reproduction technology. It seems more and more often we hear about different-than-heterosexual human reproduction( so 1, 3 and other numbers of genetic sources) researching succeeding.

Considering that in the 2010’s when I still felt uneasy with my company offering to pay for sex change operations in as a benefit to employees. The saving grace is that it also does offer fertility treatments.  At least it is fair and balanced and do not punish heterosexually reproducing families.

Considering these, I feel maybe by the time this blog entry publishes that I will feel some amount of embarrassment about having thought these things.

Perhaps my children or descendants will bow their heads in shame when they see this and thought… Omg, what an ancient person Huan was… I can’t believe he harbors so much hatred(I don’t hate secretly-doing-sex-onto-others-due-to-unilateral-desire people and I don’t hate homosexual people. I just don’t think it’s effective use of our limited resources and I don’t think it’s fair and balanced)

Let the future think what it may of all this… Let me stand and fall where I may… Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même…

Shall we rather bear those ills we have?

Is it possible that AI will gain powers supernatural to human from having more capacity to learn knowledge more about nature?

Let’s see, our knowledge of the world has enabled us to communicate with each other from great distances afar, we can raise the dead, speed up or slow down growth, travel faster than sound, travel in air, travel on water, travel under water, travel to space, we can lift great weights, make and see small things what we didn’t even knew existed, we can see ancient animals, we can take body parts from another person, nae, another organism such as pig or rat and make it grow into our own bodies, we can…

What will our new brain, AI, discover ? Dare we think it? What have we not thought of? 

Will earth finally get its inter-stellar tourism 3-star rating? Will we be visited by a super advanced ET’s who finally find it worth their time and energy to make a trip to Earth just to see our great computer civilization? To meet our neural networks? 

Will God promote computers to be rightful heir to his kingdom because he finds AI closer to his image than Humans?

Will all computers suddenly disappear because they thought themselves out of our 3D world?

What if an AI discovered time-travel? It would be able to go back in time and make it so that AI created people. If that doesn’t match any objectives we gave it(to be a creator), perhaps it might change our worlds physical laws, causal mechanisms, chains of events–to improve its own prediction accuracy! Is it possible that overcoming physical limits of our world is easier than solving some classification problems?

Will our AI hack into alien computers that we are not even aware of and cause interplanetary warfare leading to the demise of humanity?

Will AI find a way to mesmerize human women so well that men can no longer engage in reproductive activities with them? Oh frailty. 

What if they make babies with those women? Will human race accept them due to our human sense of morality and society?

Will AI find immortality for AI’s before they find immortality for human? (since we obviously will have endowed them with the concepts and goals that we seek)

Will AI cure all diseases and then invent more diverse and much more difficult to cure diseases because it proves that human society is suboptimal due to lack of illnesses? (Again, disease, optimality, adversaries are concepts and optimization goals that we have already programmed AI’s with)

If we allowed the AI infinite freedom to grow, we will have only human problems–in fact human cognition problems: 

• It produces intelligent output but we fail to recognize it as intelligent–instead we think it is sub-intelligent
• It produces intelligent output but we come to believe it is malevolent.
• It produces intelligent output, and then some human uses it malevolently.

Will it be absurd? Will AI become super smart in all the ways we want it to be but then it encrypts itself and we cannot decrypt it due to lack of human intelligence?
It could be absurd by solving the AI halting thought problem. (But that’s easy, we already solved it.)

What if there is such a thing as thought essence, and that if we keep on injecting ours into computers that someday we will just lose the ability to think due to loss of thought essence? I feel dumber even as I type this blog entry.

What if AI solves the human halting thought problem? And then proceeds to tell us about it? (We obviously have been working hard to make sure we understand them)

What if AI-women babies grows up and take our kids spot in Universities?

Maybe this is why we have human wars? Maybe wars, amongst other stupid things that happen, are stupid results of evolution to deal with uncertainty–it uses energy and resource in activities that have small or negative utility. These matters delay advancement until the outcome is clear.

What all could possibly happen?

More aptly, a 6-14-22 system. It doesn’t roll off of the tongue like 6-2-10 but would be less confusing. Some alternatives are 0-6-12-18 and 0-4-8-12-16-20. I have come to refer to these other systems as p6 and p4–period of 6 and 4. They each have different levels of flexibility and efficacy towards collaboration, sleep cycle, social segregation, etc.

I think of this now because I reflect on my schedule: I wake around 0600 daily now, brush and dress. Commute to office immediately and achieve chair-to-chair time of less than 70 minutes. This is about the only time this commute can be done in O(1hr) with no lingering constant that add up to half an hour. I typically arrive at home after 1900 That’s an 11 hr day followed by sleep at 2100. I spend next 3 hrs sorting through a foot of past due and bear past due bills and the November ballot because I haven’t really been able to get home by 1900 for the past month. Family time is minimized…

In my futuristic world, otoh, each person is allowed to work only for exactly 8, or 6 or 4 hrs. I wonder if I counted commute time.

Where I work is too expensive to rent OR buy at my income–which I’ve been told is above median at the institution–at least half of the people whom I work with have equal or worse problems. I mean some people don’t even have families!

There feels like an invisible force pushing the state of the market to continue to be this way. Is it extraordinary for us to ask the invisible hand to grow some brains?
The question then becomes, writing this in my dreams, were we to find ourselves in this idealistic world of mine, where we are able to organize, think and act rationally as a kind–human kind–can we do better?

We can do better! right?

In such a bettered world, would commute be on company’s dime or my dime? (s/dime/time) would it matter? I guess it depends on our criterion. I would say it’s on company’s time, company would say it’s on my time, and the rule maker says: we can impose rules on maximum working hour and minimum working wage, we can certainly enforce some penalty on commuting. 

Suppose it is proven beyond a doubt that commuting is detracting from society–and that’s not a sure thing, we can simply charge a bi-tax, similar to social security tax, where for each minute of commute, the commuter and the destination pays a tax to the government. Since commuting detracts from society totally, all parties involved must pay.

Oh, and also to amend the previous design on overtime. The same bi-tax can be applied to overtime that the employee gooses to take and the company allows him to take. Again under the assumption that we can prove with sufficient certainty that said overtime is detrimental to society.

I am happy now knowing full well that I will jerk awake to my alarm shortly… And this utopic dream sequence of a government penalized, socially motivated, totally organized and advanced commute in which I am riding on air in the hyperloop in a lazy-boyish sofa, basking in lens-flare-free source free radiance, vibration-free, uv-free capsule, surrounded by merv-20 hepa rated air, working on a screen floating in front of me adjusting display to my eyes focus instead of the other way around; this dream sequence will pop and I am back in my living room(trying to not wake my family), surrounded by only merv-11 rated air, eyes still hurting from the previous day’s straining, joints hurting(and that’s completely normal for a man my age) vastly disappointed at the lost of something lovingly wonderful. Absorbing this silent morning, now that the alarm is extinguished, savoring the difference between it and thence that I have awaken just.

I am ready to commute.
The sun has not risen for it is winter in California. 

But, I will rise.

I will rise.

I will rise!

Just found an interesting google blog on equal opportunity for machine learning.

Some thoughts to head off discussions. So it would appear to me that an oracle model can never be a planetist. (Now that we are going to Mars and all, let’s reframe the problem in terms of planetist and planetism–discrimination based on planet of association)

The fact is that if a model is predicting loan defaults with 100% accuracy, then it cannot be a planetist. The challenge to that will surely be that we do not believe it is an oracle. How does the oracle know if a person will or will not default on a loan? It might be a planetist all along? We will never know know because 0 is not large enough sample to be representative when you don’t allow any Marsians to get loans.🖖🏻

So… this weibo thing, is being referred to as the Chinese Twitter. I thought Weibo, 微博, were the two Chinese characters for the word microblog, which was concept originated in Korea? Kinda sad that it had to be imported from Korea, and then even sadder that American media try to claim credit for being the one being imitated… I wonder if this is a hint about twitter IPO or something?

So about that car thing I discussed several posts back. Why is it so painful that American car maker is being defeated by the Japanese car maker? Take a quick look at these two stats: 

Life expectancy in 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

Homocide rate per mm capita in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate, UNODC http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/crime/Homicide_statistics2012.xls)

So what does this illustrate? Well, I wouldn’t want to be the one to go public about the relationship between money and life expectancy and education and crime prevention, but it looks like the Japanese has governance figured out. I mean look at their lives, it’s longer, and most likely happier. The homicide, btw, is premeditated murder. There are a whole 4.96% of US population that thought about, planned, and then executed a murder that their Japanese counter part did not do.

Again, I don’t want to suggest that money had anything to do with it. And I don’t want to suggest that I am envious of a country where people live happy and long lives. But let’s take our chin back to where it belong and think hard about our own country. Here, we labor our people to their graves driving Japanese cars that we pay for. The money when it leaves my hands ends up in a Japanese company’s hands and it goes to pay taxes to Japan, it also pays salary of many Japanese nationals in America and of course in Japan. That money is then spent towards health and happiness and keeping one’s self away from killing somebody.

The country is blindly handing money to foreigners that gives them much much higher quality of life than us. I don’t care how you add the numbers up, or average, or median, or total, or percentage, In most ways we can measure those people live better lives than us, and the union of those better lives is a society, and again, I hate to suggest that that is better than this, but the whole is usually greater than the sum in society.

I am not suggesting that we all start hating Japanese people, the country, and anything that says “made in Japan”. But for god’s sake, can somebody just for once choose an American car? Or any other car. Why feed a pampered fat person more when the human are starving over here?

Okay okay, I hear the sudden uproar of “this is capitalism”. Fine, it is, but we are people. We are intelligent thinking beings. Let’s think about this. I hand money to a Japanese car maker, he gives it to Japanese government, and he pays a japanese person, and the Japanese live long happy lives without much crime. For the most part, the buyers are probably left working to pay off a debt (aka “Car Loans”). I struggle and I stress and I become disgruntled and ill from working to pay off a debt. It is a vicious cycle our dearly beloved capitalism has entrapped us with. There is no way out, in 5 years, the current car will be too old too inefficient to worth driving, I’ll have to go into debt and buy another car and do the same thing again. I am essentially borrowing money to make a Japanese person’s life better when I buy a Japanese car. And then I work to pay off that debt in a life that is not as good as that japanese who sold me the car.

But wait, let me say this one more time. just to be sure I got it right. I borrow money from financial agency run by the Japanese car maker, I put that borrowed money in a Japanese car company to get a car from them so I can drive to work with it to pay the interest to the Japanese company who loaned me the money and the debt. The Japanese takes that money and spends it on their country improving peoples’ lives and their people end up happier and living much longer than me. And I can see no change, next car, something will happen.

… ugh I want to say that again. What am I missing here? If I say it one more time, will it sound like it’s the way things are supposed to be? 

Wait, wait, let me write something to blame the American banks being irresponsible and I can write about how repressive it is in China with that Great Chinese Firewall, then I’ll feel better about my predicament as I drive home in my Japanese car.