James L Adams—People and Products

Resistance to Change:

Anthropologists sometimes speak in terms of generations (25 years) and in those terms, our species (homo) has been around some 240,000 generations (6,000,000 years), This is plenty of time for us to evolve a la Mr. Darwin.  But we did not have the advantage of stone tools until the Paleolithic period which began about 100,000 generations (2.5 million years) ago – 140,000 generations with no tools, probably no fire, definitely no athletic shoes, roaming the land in small groups (probably extended families )for our food and shelter, but plenty of time to evolve into tool users.   

 The Neolithic Revolution, when we discovered agriculture and began living in fixed areas, was about 500 generations ago (12,500 years). This period of time since we began farming and building towns and cities is a bit shorter, and we are obviously still involved in working the wrinkles out of such activities. 

 But think of what we have done to ourselves since the industrial revolution which occurred in Europe only about 10 generations (250 years) ago—or for that matter since transistors were invented some 70  years ago (three generations)—a major change in our life style with little opportunity to evolve to match it.

 I have been expecting a back lash against the recent high rate of changes in our lives, much of it resulting from developments in science and technology, over the past few years, but so far it has not happened.  In fact, we seem to be fascinated and entertained by these changes, providing that they don’t inconvenience us too much as individuals.  But there are signs that a backlash is beginning, ranging from mutterings of people being forced into “upgrading” their computer software, to the increasing worry about job loss, traffic, scarcity, and environmental degradation, to the increasing gap between the rich and poor, and the loss of the essential middle class.

 An example is an angry article in the October 25^th issue of the New York Times written  by Mark Lynas, and entitled Europe Turns Against Science.  It is here.  The article criticizes the 17 countries in Europe that have announced bans on the cultivation of genetically modified(G.M.) crops.  The author feels that this will not only be extremely costly, but even though the bans do not include research, will cause these countries to fall behind those who are including genetically modified plants in their agriculture (the U.S.?).  These European countries have great influence in the world, and apparently much of sub-Saharan Africa is also forbidding the growing of G.M. foods.  This is in spite of a great amount of research showing that G.M. foods are safe, and strange inconsistencies, such as the importing of some 30 million tons per years of soy and corn based animal feeds by these European countries, much genetically modified, and much from the U.S.  And since many G.M. foods are designed to be immune to many pests and diseases,  the use of pesticides and other polluting and expensive chemical agents will continue to increase in these countries.

 And then there is the problem of sufficient food production in the world.  G.M. crops  often are more productive.  The United Nations, which keeps track of  population trends in the world, has for some time predicted that the world population would peak at  9 million by the end of this century.  We are now at 7.3 billion (the last billion of which happened in only 12 years).  The U.N. has now upped its prediction for the end of the century to 11 million, a large portion of which will be in Africa.  In fact, one prediction is that by 2050, Nigeria will have a larger population than the  U.S.  Where is the food going to come from to feed everyone?  Lynas has a couple of quotes in his article to back up  his argument about some extreme African attitudes toward G.M.foods.  One is by Tobaiwa Mudede, described as a crony of Robert Mugabe, who singles out G.M. food as the cause of the “huge problem of sexual dysfunction in the U.S”. , where “males become impotent around the age of 24, at the prime of life”. The author also mentions being interrupted while giving a talk in Tanzania by a farmer who said  he would never grow biotech crops because “they would turn my children into homosexuals”.

 I blame resistances such as these on changes happening too fast for the comfort zones of our species.  We don’t seem to be that bothered by the much slower ongoing activities in “improving” plants through cross-breeding. There is some value in this typical  human resistance to change, because it results in thorough study of secondary effects of new developments. And I am expecting the next resistance to appear either in the area of associated with computers and the internet, or to extreme and very expensive developments in medicine oriented toward immortality .  But the downside is that many people who could benefit from these developments are deprived of them. The undernourished in Africa?

The Adventure of Fixing

As I have told you in previous posts, I live in a wonderful 110 year old house (old for California) with original plumbing and wiring.  Since I do like to make, fix, and tinker with things, I apply this convenient urge to my house—convenient because most contemporary builders are used to being guided by modern codes, and 110 years ago, there were not such things.  Therefore my house is a giant puzzle, of great importance to Marian and me.

 Usually when “fixing” part of it, I go through a period of great frustration, and then extreme happiness when I succeed.  Is this some mental disease, that I enjoy pain because I know I will feel good when it stops?  Am I the possessor of some kind of masochistic personality disorder?   I do not worry, because it only applies when I am working on a very hard problem or am in a seriously annoying situation—and it feels so good when I escape.

 Minor example:  Our relatively ancient washing machine finally needed replacing, not only because too many parts were failing, but it was using an embarrassing amount of water, energy, etc, and not getting clothes very clean.  So we bought a new super-efficient one.  But as often happens to us, new appliances,  pieces of furniture, and other household objects are larger than the old ones, because new houses often have larger rooms in them , and people seem to like big things with lots of features (can you believe the ad here?—from MoMA, for God’s sake— only approximately $8,000—  click on the red version—tasty, huh?).  So I had to move the plumbing for the washing machine to a different location.

 The excitement of working with 110  year old steel pipe is that it thoroughly rusted, so that it is much more fragile than new pipe, and is usually rusted solid to things such as elbows, tees, couplings, shut-off valves, and other such devices.  When taking it apart, it may unscrew (good), or the pipe may break (bad).  In an old house, where the pipes wander randomly through the structure, a pipe that has twisted in two inside the structure can be very bad news.

 When I began to take the old pipe apart, I instantly found that it was thoroughly rusted together.  So I got a larger wrench and pulled harder.  I began with the valves, and sure enough, the nipples (short pieces of threaded pipe) twisted into pieces of rust, barely visible from the elbow that was next in line.  Since I could not get the wrench on the fragment of nipple,  I twisted the elbow, and sure enough, the longer pieces of pipe it connected to also twisted into two pieces.  I then followed one of the pipe assemblies further into the structure, becoming more and more worried, until finally one section cleanly unscrewed from the next—victory, I could put a new piece of pipe on it and rebuild the assembly as I wanted it to be.

 But the other pipe assembly was more resistant.  I became more and more depressed as I piled up pieces of rusted pipe, and as I began to have to work within wall structure.  I finally accepted the fact that I might have to do some major wall surgery, which might take days.  But just as I accepted defeat, A length of pipe not only unscrewed within the wall, but in a location where I could push a new piece into the into the wall and attached coupling and happily tighten it up.  Within a very few minutes I passed from utter defeat to complete victory.  That is one of the finest feelings available to the human (give or take minor things like sex, food, and good weather). 

 That was yesterday and I am still high today.  So the answer to “The Joy of  Fixing”, is dependent upon a high degree of challenge followed by success?  Not exactly a huge insight, and I certainly knew that from experience in everything from professional work to interpersonal relations, But somehow, I had never directly connected it to my love of doing things like repairing 110 year old plumbing.

Intelligence and the Computer

Intelligence is a broad word.  If you want to check it out in Wikipedia, it is here.  Of note is that although usually applied to humans, it is also used in conjunction with animals, plants, and increasingly to machines (artificial Intelligence.)  If we consider the word “smart”(perhaps a subset of intelligent), we seem to include everything with a chip in it (smart cars, smart houses, smart thermostats, smart toys, etc.)

 Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, there seems to be increasing confidence that the computer and related information systems will continue to become more intelligent as time passes.  In fact, a few hard-core folk believe that computers will surpass humans in intelligence. There is an educational venture in the Silicon Valley area that calls itself Singularity University and which studies innovation and so-called exponentially accelerating technologies. Singularity in this case refers to digital technology, and is defined in Wikipedia here.   One of the co-founders, and now Chancellor of the  University, is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology visionary..  He has written a book entitled Singularity is Near, and believes this singularity will occur in 2045, and that we should prepare for this time when computers become more intelligent than humans and continue to advance more rapidly than we can.

 Admittedly, I do not have the technical reputation that Kurzweil does, but I do not believe this at all. Computers have steadily taken over activities that humans used to do—calculation, recording and organizing information, controlling machinery, making decisions based on input, and so on.  But I see no way they can take over the ship.   For one reason, we humans, not computers, define intelligence, and we do so selfishly.  Think of how much faith we place in the I.Q. test, which˙ after all merely measures how well one does on a traditional “test”(according to traditional questions) rather than overall intelligence.  Nevertheless we believe in it, But should should computers out perform us at taking the test, we will change the test. As computers do better than humans at various tasks (Big Blue beating Kasparov at Chess, once thought to be a game requiring great intelligence, and speed at calculation, which got me good grades at Caltech), we seem to change our minds as to how much intelligence is necessary to accomplish these tasks. And there is always Dave’s approach to HAL, his misbehaving AI computer, in the 1968 movie A Space Odyssey—shut it down.  

 I first encountered the then large mainframe computer in the 1950’s when I worked first in the Air Force, and then at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  I was fond of these machines because they could do complicated and involved calculations that I really did not like to do, and practically never could have, by hand.  I have worked with computers ever since, and like most people, I consider them not only immensely useful, and wondrously capable of speeds and data handling with which humans cannot compete.  But I don’t think of them as particularly intelligent, any more than I thought of the Library of Congress, adding machines or telephones as Intelligent.   I know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are being applied in an increasing number of ways. And the role of computers will change a great deal by 2045, which after all is 30 years from now. The digital age is still quite young. The invention of the internet was approximately 30 years ago and of the World Wide Web only 24 years ago. Computers will continue to amaze us , until we take the new miracle for granted, but we humans will continue to lead the movement.

 I am a believer in artificial intelligence when humans are in the loop.  When I joined the Stanford faculty, I worked a bit with the then Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, headed by John McCarthy, one of the early pioneers in AI.  One of the graduate students was working on computer vehicle control ,  and was using a remotely controlled cart I had built for my Ph.D. thesis (remote control by a human with time delays in the loop) a few years before.  It was clear to me then that computers would take over an increasing number of information processing tasks that people had traditionally done, but even then I was skeptical about how far they would go at being truly intelligent.  At some level, we humans have always had to tell digital devices what to do and how to do it.

 In the early days, AI was very interested in the workings of the human mind.  But the human mind is beyond complex.  Yesterday there was an article in the New York Times entitled “Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain, by Kenneth Miller, Co-Director of the Center for Theoretical Neurosciences at Columbia University”. It is here. He wrote it because of the attention being paid to an increasing number of people who seems to want their brain frozen and stored until science has progressed to the time when someone can thaw it out and start it up again. His answer is “maybe centuries from now”.  I have another reaction, and that is “who would want to”?  But the article does give an insight into how far away we are from truly understanding the human mind, despite a great amount of brain and behavior research.

 AI researchers no longer think of duplicating the human mind on silicon, but the search for computer based intelligence that mimics human intelligence is alive and well. In fact, as computers become better and better at crunching numbers and handling “higher” mathematics, and as they are equipped with better sensors and actuators and integrated into more and more nets, they become more and more useful to us (with a few exceptions, such as handling “big data” for marketing purposes and being involved in pranks and crimes). But the more time I spend screwing around with such things as new operating systems and applications, handling the increasing number of people who want to send me e-mails or texts, find things on the ever-increasing internet, or become my friend or contact on social networking sites, the dumber my computer seems at handling information for me,  and I have never considered allowing it to make decisions for me.

 The good news is that I don’t have to worry about Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity, because I will be dead by then.  The bad news is that computers may hasten my death, but only through frustration, and not because they are more intelligent than I.

Job Loss and Support for New Directions

There was a passionate article in last Sunday’s New  York Times by Paul Theroux, a prolific writer of books, and in particular travel books,  He is noted for spending major times in local areas and writing about the lives people live there.  This article was written after he had spent a great deal of time traveling in the U.S. deep south working on his latest book, “Deep South.  Four Seasons on Back Roads”.

 The article was about poverty resulting from the loss of jobs due to the closing factories, which in turn Theroux blames on outsourcing, which he in turn blames on the greed of companies.  This is not a new problem, but Theroux writes with the emotion of having spent time with people (in his words)  “towns with their hearts torn out of them” from factory closings.  This is not a new message, but to read Theroux at this level of anger is unusual.  You should read the article, if you have not.  It is here.

 Among other charges, he delivers blasts at various foundations and wealthy people in business and government in the U.S. who advertise the help they give to poor people in developing countries, but have not helped poor people in these towns he visits in the U.S.  I am a believer, having followed the bankruptcy of San Bernardino California (where I went to high school) from the closing of income producing activities ranging from an air base (Norton) to train maintenance shops (Santa Fe), to a nearby steel mill (Kaiser, which ironically was carefully taken part and moved to China, where it was re-assembled). An article about the collapse of the city is here.  Among other San Bernardino statistics, during the 2012-13 school year, 33,274 students (8.1% of the total) experienced homelessness.

 A large number of people who lost their jobs in San Bernardino have families,  little cash or credit, probably house mortgages, and may not have had  the training or education to easily find other jobs. I was discussing this with a colleague earlier today, and we agreed that somebody should help people in such a situation (and the deep south), because it was not their fault that the income base of the city collapsed. But we could not figure out who.  Should businesses insure their employees against a collapse?  Not much precedence for that, and probably not a lot of support from businesses.  Should the government do more in the way of offering training and education?  But that would possibly result in more tax on businesses, who are already screaming that taxes are too high, and outrage people who think that government aid is already too profligate. 

 And this might only be a preview of future problems.  Although most of the attention has been paid to blue-collar workers, computers have already taken over many tasks formerly done by white collar workers (CPA’s, lawyers, administrators, medical workers, clericals, etc.).  There is a great debate going on as to whether this will cause new work opportunities for white collar workers (“The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee ) or whether the white collar job loss will eventually be larger and noisier than the blue collar loss.  We will find out, and perhaps the white collar workers will be able to more easily slip into new jobs, but once again, many of them may need help, and who will pay if they do not have the resources to learn new skills, or are at a stage of life where it is extremely inconvenient to re-locate? Or do we thoughtful and sensitive U.S, citizens just say "tough luck"?