There’s a blog post of google principals for ethical AI technology. One thing that catches ones eyes is this passage

Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.

Which leads me to remember some old posts of my own blog regarding the matter. Humanisitic orientation to establish anchors in an ethics proclaimation is certainly very good. The one problem it does make unclear is the nature of human beings.

For example, is technology able o ecretly drive a nail into my tire while my car is parked outside of swimming gymnasium “injury to people”? From text, it would seem that nail in the tire is not damaging to my human person. But it does damage my social-economic person. Without a functioning car, I cannot do a lot of things to be part of the society and economy, but my person, for now, is still whole.

In particular, when it comes to google, the questions will be “is my email account part of my person?” Is my house “part of my person?” A tank with high powered cannon on the turret, is not primarily designed to damage my person, but it certainly is a weapon of fairly sizable destruction relative to my house.

While I’m griping, USA always lead the world in humanist ideals and also in technology (but maybe not together) to lean on international standards is an error on both sides

Technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.

It lowers USA corporation to the standards of companies from countries like PR. Of China and Republic of India. While we hold every country in high esteem, they’re all functioning countries keeping their massive population alive and happy, we’re not sure how they do it is how we should do it. We don’t want to sink as low as them.

Some recent example, BitTorrent, and virtual currencies, are all things whose purpose can be construed as to contravene principals or laws of most country. So on this side of the error, the policy inhibits technological advancements.

Its hard to think, discuss and write these things when Google employs half of your friends and aquaintences. But it is worth discussing further imho.

There seems to be a fault with democracy. Those who argue that

• You can exercise a fair amount of political power by voting
• You can choose to depart a democratic system by leaving it.
• You can choose participate further by becoming politician and influencing the votes of others.

There is a matter of efficiency. Yes, in theory, an immortal participating in a democracy will get his way if he rightfully deserves it, according to the rules he agreed to. But most people are not immortal. The system, imho, is not efficient enough for most practical purposes, for us to exercise our inalienable liberties fully, or at all.

And forcing us to perform political acts, such as persuasion, can be compared to forcing us to perform physically offensive acts, on other people. Some find it unacceptably invasive and offending. Forcing us to spend time and money on politics is like depriving us of body parts or money. It seems unjustifiable.

As an example of police brutality… Recently, there was a video of a girl being beaten by police. After internet uproar, the police department posts body-cam of the same video. While the police man was short tempered, he was… By some standards, being asulted by the women under arrest. She definitely was resisting arrest.

21st century technology has not developed to the point where we can

• Measure the burtality if the arresting officer. Perhaps by means of force sensors on his gloves and clothing. It would help to estimate the exersion made by him as well as the location and power of attack on him.
• Assessing the public’s judgement of the event democratically. Perhaps by counting twitter sentiment?
• Measure the degree of resistance exercised by the girl. Perhaps by force sensors on her clothing.
• Measure the danger that the police officer and bystanders were under.

Is anybody working on the improvement of our democracy?

Do we want this type of improvements? This exercise while seemingly too restrictive for human policeperson(they cannot calibrate their motors to limit force of a punch), it is precisely the kind of system we would want to deploy when policebots are on patrol.

Since robots and other computerized systems can quickly adapt to new situations, and since they may even create new solutions to problems, as a transitional step, we should implement much more efficient democracy to assess each situation case by case.

Tesla should, for example, open up its data gathered during major accident for scrutiny by the public as well as regulatory agencies. The low-latency high-fidelity availability of data should be part of our great country’s auto-pilot licensing process.

It is our right to know and to weigh-in on these issues in a timely and effective manner.

Ps, what about privacy? Idk, but honestly, between running into a highway divide at 60mph not knowing why looking down from heaven and my wife knowing where I am driving to… I’d rather the latter than the prior, for the moment. I already changed my mind, several times, while typing that, but still, the momentary instinct is that people want to and deserve to know more.

It’s the season for reflections on familial holiday traditions. I wonder about practices ingrained in social and cultural norms. It is quite possible that some of the practices may have been designed with malicious intents, in some perspectives.

Now all you corporate or cult monitors and governmental secret police relax. I am not specifically talking about your most respectable high-functioning cultures. Although the same comment may apply, I am mainly thinking of larger and older cultures, human cultures.

I once read, news or fake news I do not recall, that the act of circumcision is a degenerate form of castration, to reduce the sexual competitiveness of the son against his father. I hope that’s fake science… But… It kind of makes sense, if you think about it… I mean, there are a lot of older men making babies with really young chicks that I observe often. So… Oh I see, you thought dad didn’t want you to compete for mom…. He was more likely thinking about his neighbors daughters, … If you think about it…

So… We should examine some other things… Like, did your mama ever tell you don’t choose the choicest material, but instead select a less pretty and less young and less demanding wife? Do you ever wonder if it was to make sure you still had energy left to take care of her? (Sustainance-wise, you sick idiot)

What about daughters, did your dad teach you to hate sex? Not even allowed to think about it until 18, and even then the scrutiny on your possible mates make it impossible. Does this life-long endoctrination that sex is bad (in almost all cultures) serve a selfish reason that he might have a chance of having you around home longer? Maybe you’ll be like countless unmarried women-child who stayed home and fed her mom and dad to their deathbed?

The question here is not necessarily the existence of these cultural practices, but more that, well, more that we have not systematically examined them critically in Scientific and rational ways. Most of what you do, the stuff that you feel you belong to, the culture and the people and the practices, when they were originally formed, the intent was not innocent.

Recall this example I think of often. For Millenniums the Chinese people bound the feet of young girls. Some say it is to relief them of the freedom to choose husband(but why would parents do this?) Some say it is beautiful, that an unbound women will not be selected for marriage due to ugliness of the feet. (Oh, and non-virgins are not marriageaterial either)

The truth of the matter is, Millenniums of men had to suffer the grotesque deformity caused by foot binding. The women cannot do chores as freely (oh, maybe that’s why the first mom and dad’s did it?) And the wrinkles and cravses it creates is home to many bacteria and foul odor. The men suffered from the establishment of this cultural stable. And yet they keep on telling their daughters: come, let’s do the damn thing, it’s good for you!

And while we’re banging on Chinese people (it is 2010’s after all) think about the population control they imported. Men had to suffer vasectomies and women abortions to keep the nation smaller and weaker. And still many enormous number of people stand tall and proud to be a party to the Party that brought population control to China.

And of course your dutiful Chinese-American will be quick to remind us that the Chinese exclusion act of the 19th century was introduced to the congress by a Californian Republican and then passed both senate and the house to be signed into law by a Republican president. Today, even in Trumpverse, there are a whole lot of Chinese-American Republicans, or those who lean right.

Can politics (and parties) be an ancient ritual that can have nonproductive implementations? Can the Republic be an antiquated construct that is begging for modern upgrade?

I conclude this brief consideration with a scene from season two of The Good Fight (Day 457) Lucca is coming home with her new born, baby-daddy by her side. All she cpuld think of is her mother’s advise, that she wants to smile at the sight of her (women) friends’ car. That the sight of her husband, the thought of abandoning her career to support his being a senator on capital hill, puts the biggest frown on her face… These scenes, are very powerful to me. I feel uneasy. I would not want my daughter to feel the way Lucca does. Her bond with her co-workers is stronger than with the man that she has sex, baby and can gain power all together! Her Mother’s advise: what do you feel when you see his car in the garage. I am unhappy that the main character of this show feels more for friends and co-workers than for her traditional-style family…. components (since Lucca and Collin are not marrying) I cannot, accept that kind of family, three adult women… Like it just wouldn’t work.

My scientific rational examination says, no, that’s not the right way to do it. My instinct says, if all looks so good, and healthy boy, a good women would be able to put the man in his rightful place in the family.–by what ever human womanly ways she may have. Otherwise, perhaps the choice of sex and partner was indeed a mistake and that all human traditions actually make sense and feet binding served an important historical purpose.

caveat emptor: I am of human kind, the kind with built in cultures.

I’ve been seeing in the news of Chinese scientists being targeted for national security investigations, arrests and prosecution in United States in the 2010’s. (Xiaoxing Xi and Sherry Chen in case bis history is conveniently foegoten) Also, recently saw the kind of charade the New York law enforcement put up when they marched the executives of Abacus bank to court in a chain gang.

I think the law enforcement are totally entitled to public arrests and demonstration of force to intimidate Chinese Americans into abiding by the law. I also think if the chain gang was illegal in any way, Abacus would have saught it out as a counter suit.

While I don’t think this is necessarily fair to Chinese Americans, I do think it is progress. Better public accusation, ostensibly by-the-book, than one million stings of disparagement and sabotage against the Chinese Americans in their daily lives and work.

It’s okay! It’s all okay, I would personally do the same to Chinese people if I had your information and cultural fear. And by cultural fear, I don’t necessarily mean the fear felt by the surviving paranoid, but the fear felt by the dominant race in the country. If I had centuries and centuries of massively successful domination, or, if I were a recently powerful race, would definitely worry about keeping it. I mean, I practically do the same thing in my domainion, right? Everyone does it, it is in the nature of our evolution. It is the basest, deepest and most unconscious bias you can theorize about. The Chinese people do the same thing in their own country, so they all are used to this. That is to say, even though this happens instinctively, it is also practiced with contemplation and rigor every where in the world.

I would do the same thing. Seriously, not that I’m running for the head of FBI, but I am fearful of Chinese people in America. Especially younger Chinese immigrants who are often ruthless cunning bastards! And I say that with great admiration to their abilities, stamina and determination, because I find it very difficult to survive among them, much less have a prospering life style of silicone valley.

There! I did it! I freely admit my animus in public. They have at times made my life excruciatingly miserable and I am unafraid to admit it. Their actions causes me pain and I dislike them for it. I am very good at misspelling Chinese names when I want to. I can find very quickly a Japanese word for a Chinese(or Asian for that matter) expression because some times I feel really guilty about my tax money is paying for retirement of some soldiers who killed Japanese in the atomic bombing, or secret policeman who captured Japanese suspects for the mass interment camps.

I share these feeling s that you feel. I am comfortable publicizing this because I think my hatred and inaction is that of a good person, superior to those of you who harbor the same and insists on participating in hidden racial manipulation agendas at work and at play. Stop all your finsglings in your little fifdoms. You should stop clandestine activities to that end and talk about this publicly. Look at Trump for an example of public, controlled and legally contestable actions!

Politically, their upbringing gives them nature pride in their home nation which is a prosperous and growing world power. Their country now has human rights and religious freedom written in their constitution, they have balance of power, I write this even as Xi gains the ability to keep the top chair for life… In this respect, their silence on their pride is worrisome as well. Come, let’s have a Chinese Pride Parade. Let there be no secrets about this, there is no need to hide it. They know already, I mean, com’on, give the people and the secret police of America some credit okay? Even though the courts rule against them, it doesn’t mean their actions were not based on very very credible information. And plus all this shows that American practices of: innocence untill proven guilty and due process of trial by peers …

Oh.. they spelled the Appellent’s name wrong in the initial rulings(CH-0752-17-0028-I-1) for the appelent. At the top it says “Xiafen Chen, appellent” in the ruling it reads “appellent Xiafen Chang”

I wouldn’t have caught the mistake myself but for my last name is Chang and I remember her to have a different family name.

I guess …

The courts can make mistakes…

too?
……….

Did they rule on the right person? Is this a case of mistake identity? Or is it a million stings of… What the fuck’s? Continuing? Another straight faced question is whether we should worry about the aptitude of the courts to accurately communicate their decision in a multicultural society; or should we be concerned about checks and balance of power of the government when secret police hacks the court’s computer to introduce this typo as a form of intimidation? Do you have any way to prove it’s not intimidation by the secret police? These seem equally likely to the typo being intentionally misspelled by a court appointed clerk.

But, alas, good effort guys! We’ll get it right next time! We will get there. This will be a great nation for all, some day.

It’s okay…

It’s okay…

It’s okay…

You know, all you hackers and crackers, and breakers, whether you work for the government, a corporation, my parents, my wife or my kids. I will always win this one in my mind that you are crap of humanity when you take my personal information and reveal it to other people. You are all scum of the earth when you take what I intend to keep private to myself and present it to other people with or without my knowledge and consent. You can hack my bank account and all my brokerage accounts and all my social network accounts and maybe even my kids and other families online accounts. But you know you will always be wrong and evil and the worst humanity ever produced in my mind. I don’t care if all your people does it this way. Were it not wrong for me to do so, I would hate you with the fervor of religious zealots hating blasphemers, homosexuals and competing religions or believes. You should suffer the consequences of having categorically immoral behavior.

But hopefully you will choose to do otherwise in the future.

Just want to note down: first time that I have not been asked for an ID while buying alcohol… in almost 40 years… I don’t feel old, but I distinctly feel the difference in perception of me, now that I am old…

Hey, this is to help neighbor celebrate 70th, so, I don’t feel that bad yet, perhaps after the beer this will sink in more.

I told a blind woman: hey you are stomping into a shit puddle and splashing me with turd juice!

She says back after some deliberation: who are you? Jesus Christ? You are just as blind as me,you shouldn’t judge me. Truly you probably put that puddle there to set a trap for me.

I say to her: wait!! What?? You are blind not anosmic! Why are we even having this conversation? Why would I do that to you!?!? Why am I even at this camp!? And now you are just shitting an pissing into the puddle standing upright, is this incontinence camp too?

She says: you are just jealous that I thought of it first…

…

Oh no, now you are douching yourself with it.. I cannot watch this any more…

…
(oh wait that’s actually kind of smart, because now I, a man, cannot, within my imagination, copy the idea you presently practice.(sorry, despite present absurdities, I still have a little residual sense of wonderment about the products of people conditions and processes))

And the day continues this way, and day after day..

Seriously this seriously happened, come and smell me. (Now a few years later, the oder should be palpable still)

Ps, as always, I whole vehemently deny and disavow any connection with or even similarity to real world people, things or events of past, present or future.

Several months ago I wrote about the Deep Universal Regressor. Hopefully you have discovered that it is full of bugs, fashioned typically for the late 2010’s, following Interweb AI blogging conventions of the day. It isn’t really because I’m time traveling and writing this from the far past or far future, just that this is the way we wrote in those days.

One most notable one is if you tried to regress using my suggestion, you found that it does not extrapolate well. After some inspection, one realizes the problem. One way to fix it is to use a decision list to make progressively smaller estimates:

The are linear activations from previous layers calculated from .

But of course, this approach also has some fatal flaws that needs to be fixed. Some effort has to be made to ensure the right term will be adjusted at the right moment–it needs regularization. It also needs some experimentation around what is.

After that, the is the limit.

Ps, it’s kind of interesting that this range-preserving combination approach is slightly more general version of attention mechanism. Recall attention is applied as softmax combination of items of consideration. The softmax is just a positively weighted average, which in turn is a convex combination.

P.p.s. On the reverse side of this approach, perhaps we can apply activation in an earlier place to create similar effect. This approach is often taken to restrict parameter in a range, for example using to produce a dense layer that applies only positive multiples to inputs. The approach I have tried with good success is the exponentiation activation. At first blush, you might judge this absurd. When we take a step, would the change in not be the same as the change in ? There is no contribution to complexity of the model in this parameter activation. If you look at it as and then compute the output of the neuron as , the derivative of x with respect to A is linear in X. What difference does it make how you arrive at ?

But I have observed that the application of this activation makes linear regression converge faster under SGD. Looking at it more specifically is the parameter’s value is its own derivative. In other parlance the sensitivity of the derivative with respect to a parameter is linear in size of the neuron’s outputs. If A was just raw tensors, this derivative would be the constant . Another consideration is that perhaps all we did was to initialize A using a log-normal or log-uniform distribution. Lastly, the effect of exponentiation maybe through the effect of increased or decreased learning rates. For this blogs purpose, I tried to implement a few of these alternative explanations directly with linear model: using log-normal initialization to a simple dense layer, trying various learning rates. These attempts did not produce the same quickened convergence as exponentiating the raw parameters.

These meandering is of course a middle way between many. For example, if we’re not raw tensors but the output of some tensor function of the input, and we further normalize: this would be an attention mechanism like those used in transformers. Although the derivative of this is neither linear or constant.

Here is a list of parameter activations and their detivatives. Expressing in terms of A brings us a view of the scale of the gradient.

		in
W	1

Clearly, its hard to boost the progress of training anymore this way.

Ppps ah, yes, astute you are, I have assumed positive data. The negative of can be concatenated as parameter or learned using a second layer or even a simple softened sign parameter. That should be exercise for reader to adapt to their own problems.

Pppps, This works so well, I want to name it, let’s call it autoactivation. In the tradition of autoencoders and similar to the auto- in autoimmune diseases, autoactivation means that the parameters of the network activate themselves, they are autoactivating. By the same convention, self-attention models are autoattentive.

Has anybody given a serious go at using log-normal initializer for deep neural network parameters? Seems likely to make sense. Additionally, one can also do batch- and layer- log-normalization on layer activations.

I wonder how the world will turn out one day. Once long ago, I was in the company of some intellectual human discussing political ethics… And it occured to me that I was struggling to understand a lot of what was being said.

What will happen one day when our political practices advance to a place when most people cannot hold the concepts in their head due to cognitive limits? What will happen if truth, happiness and right and wrong are not comprehensible by most people? These incomprehensible thoughts about things that are fundamentally human(good/happy/free…), let’s call them truer truths…

It’s kind of weird that from intellectually enlightened discussion come a thought of the possibility that we cannot comprehend what is right or good. But from the conception of such truer truths we deduce knowledge of truer truths. It would seem, if there be gods who comprehend these truer truths, lEr him slip a hint of their existence, like black hole leaking radiation.

This of course also come home to the origins of the discussion with companions, what if AI became more cognitively advanced than humans in that they know more about the truer truth that us? It is imaginable today that we have enough computers, under control of a single entity, to computer more than human brain in some task. The AI may be closer to Gods of religion than any of us.

Scary stuff.

Let’s come back down to earth. What if I cannot understand what you say is right? Am I in the deficit to all that is good and mighty for not understanding you? There is a slight chance that you are making it up and that you don’t actually make any sense at all for real. What if we have a constitutional amendment that says “gdjiDkdberish” ? Or a law that says “only non-alien citizens can live and non-aliens can understand e=mc^2” or “affirmative action credits shall be calculated by the suface derivative of the Mao-Zhou balance equations of said population as measured by Kim’s protocol.”

Hey, I mean, it’s not like I’m inventing a human thought here. Among us who are subjects to it, how many really understands the US tax code? In theory, that’s something we chose to do out of our free will. Like really, how are any thing we have today different than these examples above?

And the other side of this argument, how simple do our value system have to be for it to be practical? How universal do our value systems have to be for it to be right? For example, can we demand that citizens can remember to follow the laws? Can we require people to have enough math skills to pay taxes? Can we require them to be literate enough to read candidate names to participate in an election? Can we require citizens to read election candidates write-ups and pass a test before casting his ballot?

What are the faculties, cognitive or otherwise, do we request of our citizens to access to their rights?

…