I’ve been thinking about the book “Everybody lies…” One thing that the author uses a lot is data from all different sources. I guess it is to be recognized when some one does something good even if that work is based mostly on diligent products of many other people–in this case data of all sorts.

Looking at recent kaggle competitions, it also seems that companies are starting to notice this. Some competitions, such as the zillow $1mm competition, not only does not prevent competitors from using outside data, it encourages them to use new data source.

That’s very interesting. This kaggle competition not only encourages competition in model building, but also encourages data harvesting–finding and using mature but previously unused data.

This may very well continue for some time yet as we find new ways to treat more and more objects and information as data.

What will be harvested next?

I’m watching a documentary about Chomsky during 2016 winter break. Around 29:00 he talks about how to deal with Kurds: chemical warfare was the most advanced thing they had and they felt it righteous to use it against enemy. It makes me wonder what we use today on civilians. Genetic mutations? (To become dependent on other races?) Micro-nannites that does bad stuff to the body ? Subliminal messaging to cause most embarrassing and economically destructive errors. What are our most advanced weapons? It has to be money right? Capital weaponry that destroy other countries. One wonders what most advanced weaponry we have today? Perhaps this evil, necessary or not, will help us think about this whole AI thing. Oh and there is another one, the halting thought is one important mental agent that can be used against people!
The framework under which we can discuss the terrorism Chomsky describes is the TAS framework(Transitive Action Spaces framework). He points out that a set of actions under nation state TAS against other nation state (bombing, assassination, spying, many means of civilian killing) are all terrorism, or war crimes, no matter who fills the valences of an action in the terrorism set. We, those endowed with standard human intelligence, tend not to think in TAS, and even if we do, we assign bias for our own nation state or cause.
I can imagine myself believing that some actions in TAS whose admission into an ethic has additional restrictions on properties of its valances. For example:
abduct_president(country A, country B)
Is pretty terrorizing, right? We can add some kind of property restriction such as
Number_of_soldiers_in_current_conflict(A) < Number_of_soldiers_in_current_conflict(B)
Then the action abduct_president is admitted as ethical. Interestingly, Chomsky points out that the rules used to evaluate ethicality of actions at the Nuremberg trials was this:
Actions_taken(winners) \in Ethical_actions

Actions_taken(losers) – Actions_taken(winners) \in Unethical_actions
Anything losers did winners didn’t do is considered illegal at the world court. This imposition, maximizes winners freedoms during the war and minimizes losers freedom to act. (Here freedom means available ethical actions) When the eventual winner acts according to the silver rule he will conquer moral high ground(or alternatively he gets to punish loser on all actions he does not desire). The eventual loser maximizes his freedom when he does everything that the eventual winner does(an eye for an eye tit-for-tat) Because it becomes ethical and he is not punished. (Assuming winner and loser has the same desires)
Of course it is unfair. But at least it’s not winner takes all. Another completely amazing fact Chomsky points out is that “_in_the_current_conflict” was a necessary suffix to all propositions as the rules changed in the next conflict in a different theatre, the US took some actions against Vietnamese that Germans who took these actions were convicted for wars against humanities-AFTER their conviction at the world court. 
So, it would seem that TAS is a rather easy system to use to discuss matters of ethics after all. The accepted ethic seem episodic, one per major conflict. The ethic encompasses a TAS but can be parameter used by properties of parameters of TAS(such as population) and it can depend on what has happened in the current conflict. What is ethical may depend on what other people do, not just what you and other people want.
And I should reiterate that Chomsky feel this an ethic should be universal. That may mean that when you are the winner and I am not that the same unfair rule applies to me. This seems tautological as the loser has no choice, but it needs to be stated for completeness. I think a more restrictive universality would stipulate that winning and losing should not affect whether or not the subject of the action is winner or winning.
Reasoning sounds sound, why is he controversial? What is he being challenged on? “Terrorism is bad no matter who does it, and US like all other dominating world power does it” his statement seems right to me!? If those who do it feel justified, it needn’t be hidden, it can stand under the light of reason, right? Would be curious to know what the fuss is about.

There is an old saying:

Admiration is the most genuine form of mimicry

I find frequently that other blogs I read will publish very similar content as my own on very odd topics. I think either great minds think alike, or we’re all caught in the great tide of the media cycle, or you copied my idea, or I copied yours. It doesn’t matter the causal relation of who thought or said what because of what.
The topics discussed on this blog are addressed far from comprehensive and satisfying. In the great ocean of bits of human thoughts and desires, this blog is essentially a big fat zero.

I hope everyone who needs it can benefit from this blog and gain new tinder that spark thoughts in your minds that will burn long and bright. I comfort you in the knowledge that I too shall seek you out when I have lost the prime for my mind-well.

I’ve now seen two pediatrician, not our primary doctor, perform a “special move” on my baby by first demanding to turn lights off, and then making the baby cry. I secretly wonder if they shook my baby while all lights are off. What the heck else could they possibly be doing? One took the baby into the bathroom, the other one just shut the lights in a tiny examination room.

It’s really hard to tell what people do in the cover of darkness. Sometimes I do not even trust the baby’s own mother… that hard stomp on the floor did that reverberate through the baby’s brain too?

And God knows what their grandmas and grandpas has done to them…

So fragile they seem, so tired we seem, so easy injury seem!
How do human babies survive?

Whom do we trust? What do we trust? Perhaps this is one best way to understand or explain our fear of robots.
There are some almost axiomatic principles that we, as individuals or as collection of individuals, choose to believe in: That all men are created equal for example, or that omnipotence means also having power to be purely evil, or that google doc is most secure way to write and track history, or that my own reasoning power is the only thing I trust, or that open source participation by entire humanity is the only knowledge base and thinking process that I trust, or that The Book is the only wisdom I believe in, etc. There will also be declaration of allegiance: In God we trust! Etc.

The problem with robots is that we do not trust them. The implementation process may be buggy–who can raise their hand and say they’ve never deployed a bug to production? The design could be flawed. Just look at humans! Evolution creates flaws too. The metal could bend and break. And most important of all, the actions of a robot cannot be summarized into simple and universally understandable axioms. Asimov’ three laws of robotics is one such an attempt to resolve the dissonance between fear and need for robotics. It may or may not be possible to have this in advance. In retrospect, after some millennium of work, we may know a set of rules but I do not see it as a solution to our fear of robots.

Another heuristic we have are processes. When we do not know of a near-constant time determiner of actions, we routinely use process to ensure results. Democracy is a process, it is a solution we came up with to solve a really hard organization problem. Registration for credit card is a process, another really hard problem with multiple parties taking actions each having disparate power and utilities. Application for admission to colleges. The doctor’s appointment… all of these are process that arriving at very simple outcomes: one leader chosen among 2 or dozen, credit granted or not, admitted or not, healthy or treatment.

One wonders if robotics will simply be enrolled in a process. Just as a child grows and earns the trust of her parents, peers and society, robots may need to go through the same process in order to be accepted into roles that adults human perform. It’s actually kind of like how the movies envisions it. After a while, the fearsome loathsome thing is gradually accepted by one, two, and more people.

There is still separation between systematic social acceptance, like legalizing self-driving cars, and personal acceptance–that I let it drive me. These are two different decisions that need to be made on a case by case basis. At least for now, until such a time when we have agreed upon our version of laws of robotics.