Artificial Cleverness

The other day I received a survey request from some survey company. “Would you like to answer a few questions about AI?” a woman asked. “Sure,” I answered. Why not?

Then I was asked a few dozens of questions about my opinions on AI, AI Data Centers, and power plants built just to satisfy the voracious appetite for megawatts that those AI Data Centers will suck up.

I know that the dirty bits of technological advances are always placed far away from those who benefit most from them. Elon and the rest can’t bother themselves with the detritus their technology produces, after all. Why would they?

My opinions are overall negative. At one point I had to repeatedly say, “I told you already that I do not voluntarily use AI if I can avoid it. Only if it is forced upon me. So, no. I don’t have an answer to your question since it assumes that I use AI. I do not.” I didn’t tell the interviewer what I call Microsoft’s AI, Copilot. My name for it is, Copulate. Cause that’s what it does to us.

I grew up in the nineteen sixties. I remember the Lost in Space Environmental Control Robot, simply called Robot. I remember HAL 9000 from 2001, A Space Odyssey, and Scottie talking to the computer in Star Trek.  “Hello, Computer.” 

I remember, from reruns, Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet. I remember the annoying computer voice in Babylon 5 that Mr. Garibaldi shot with his plasma gun to shut it up because it was being so annoying.  And any number of Scifi novels where sentient machines were prominent characters. I remember somebody, maybe Scottie in Star Trek, telling a troublesome computer to, “Compute the last digit of Pi,” at which point it cried out and fell into an infinite loop. Clever.

Sentient machines were part and parcel with my thinking while growing up. And yet they always irked  me. Oh, not that machines could parrot a human mind. Chat-bots do that every day. Maybe it was Frank Herbert’s admonition against, “making a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” that always gave  me the willies. What does that mean, exactly? To make something in another thing’s image? How Old Testament!

Roger Penrose, in his 1989 book, “The Emperor’s New Mind,” argued that there are things that algorithms, programs run by a Turing machine, simply cannot compute. Things like Alan Turing's Halting Problem and Set Theory’s contradictions suggest that there are things a computer just can’t comprehend. They would literally, “run forever,” trying to figure it out. Penrose called it, “Artificial Cleverness” instead of, “Artificial Intelligence.” It’s clever. And it can fool people into thinking it is more than that. But it isn’t. 

Beware of Geeks bearing gifts.

Then there are the infinities. I have a theory that what separates us from thinking machines is our understanding of infinities. Actually, infinities and singularities. The infinitely huge and the impossibly minuscule. We can look at a mathematical problem and reduce it to an infinite progression. And then we say, “Oh, that will take forever,” and give up. That’s what Newton and Leibniz did when they co-invented Calculus. 

I still hate calculus. I just can’t see how it applies to real life. In none of the YouTube videos and classes I have taken in calculus, and I have taken several that I can remember. I have learned about calculus, learned but not understood, do they give a concrete example of how this relates to the real world? No. You know. Just give me an example and show me how it pans out. But that’s just me. Maybe I’m just an artificial intelligence? Nah, can’t be.

And it’s not that we haven’t built a powerful enough computer. No computer, no matter how big, no  matter how many teraflops it can chew on, will ever comprehend it. Roger Penrose, now in his nineties, is an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and several other institutions. A position similar to that of Isaac Newton, according to Wikipedia. If you were so bold, it would not be amiss to call Penrose, “The Pope of Mathematics.” I like the moniker. It suits him.

In his book, Penrose argues that a Turing machine, which is the mathematical framework of all computers today, cannot do what a human mind does routinely. It can’t just look at something and say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous. That’ll never work.” It cannot create consciousness, sentience, or everything else that goes to construct a human mind. Look at thought experiments like, “The Chinese Room,” or “Mary’s Room.” We cannot make a machine in the image of a human mind, no matter how hard we try. As the saying goes, “There’s no, ‘There,’ there.”

Isaac Asimov, in his short story, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” purports a machine that has become conscious but without any of the tactile inputs provided by a body of flesh and blood. So it is a machine consciousness with none of the senses that we have. And somehow it knows this, though he doesn’t explain why that might be the case. There’s just no ’there’ there. 

The conscious machine has killed all but five people, who he then tortures. He does this out of spite and to try and make the five living, later just one, persons, suffer like it does. The machine has not mastered human consciousness but it knows about spite.

Notice the pronoun. “It” instead of, “He” or “She.’ It’s an “It,” not something with a sex. Not something that can flirt and make goo-goo eyes at you. Not something that can enjoy the thrill of a first kiss. Not something that will ever enjoy poetry. Or loath it. There is no ‘There’ there.

It’s Alan Turing’s Imitation Game. And it is just that. We call it Artificial. Turing called in Imitation.

I call it a preposterous.

Imagine

Things Matter

There are places I remember. Things of my past I left behind. Some have gone and lost their meaning. In my mind I loved them all.

So sang the poet of my youth, modestly rewritten. Or reimagined.

Forgive me, John. Forgive my indiscretion. To me you spoke of things that belonged to me. And are a part of me. Places I remember. Some are lovers and friends and some are not. And I know I often stop and think about them. The people and things…, I’ve left behind. In my mind I loved them all.

They connect me and that place in time. And make it unique, unique to me and the place and time where I was when I acquired them and made them my own as a part of me. As it is a part of you who know me. And so you are it and it is you.

I remembered something today. A nub of wax and a stick of candle. It was a fragment of a memory of an item of wax I bought on the streets of Jerusalem in 1976, a long, long time ago and an age where I was a young, young man ago. And I didn’t know what I was doing as many long ago young men ago don’t know but they do it anyway and so I was out doing what many long ago young men ago do and suffering the consequences of their actions for years to come, as is the custom of consequences for stupid young men in the long, long ago way behind time.

And I was in Jerusalem, Israel. In a holy city. In school. And I was twenty-two years old. And an idiot, but I didn’t know that at the time. Idiots generally don’t.

It was Easter, 1976. What a nice time. I had watched a parade of pilgrims entering the gates of Jerusalem from the top of one of the stone walls surrounding the Old City, my feet splayed around a chunk of iron workmanship left by the Romans or the Persians or Ottomans, I think, one of those, and it kept me from falling off the wall is all I cared about. I was an idiot, after all, and didn’t care about anything. I just cared that I was not falling from the wall I was sitting on like a stupid Humpty Dumpty sitting on a thousand year old wall. And thinking of what I could drop on the pilgrims entering the old city along the Via Dolorosa close to the ruins of the Antonia fortress. I didn’t drop anything on the worshipers, I am glad to remember. I’m sure they appreciated it.

Later I descended from the great gate to the city with my Nikormat camera in hand, ready to record relentlessly from the perch I had nested upon and followed the other pilgrims on their march, and entered the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Christian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Quarters are important in Old Cities. There are four as defined by the British two centuries ago. They got into everything, those Brits. The Muslim quarter, the Christian quarter, the Armenian quarter, and the Jewish quarter. The Temple Mount was some sort of fifth quarter and off limits to annunciation or categorization, I guess. The Brits were all into dividing up former colonies. Just ask the Indians, the Ghanans, the various Americans, et al. That’s what Empire is all about.

And there I was. Et al, as it were. Sitting on top of a stone gate at the entrance of a medieval city with an iron rod in my crotch preventing me from falling into a place called the Old World of Somewhere or Other and wondering why I was sitting there in the first place. And there was a significant religious ceremony about to happen nearby and below me so shouldn’t I go and take a good look? And maybe I should buy a candle on my way there. Ah, what the hell.

So, unignited candle in hand I entered the Church of the Holy Sepulture in Jerusalem, Israel, the Holiest Place on Earth or Any Other Planet in Any Other Universe, I Just Dare You. Go ahead. Give it a Try. Here we are. The holiest place on earth during the holiest time on earth. How often does that happen?

Well, once a year. And I was amidst crowds of thousands. All holding dead candles in lifeless fingers wishing for ignition. It was intense. And then. At the tomb of Christ. The symbolic place where fifth century Christians imagined a thing called the Resurrection occurred, a miracle supposedly occurred in the spring of 1976. Fire appeared in the form of a flaming torch or lantern or Bic lighter or something from a priest in the Holy Sepulcher. I had been there already, of course. It’s just a stone box in the middle of a stone structure that calls itself a church with a shelf or a stone coffer that, if you really wanted to, you could imagine was a tomb for a demigod. Why not? Gods are a dime a dozen.

But this one was… Different. This one brought fire. And I lit my candle from the wave of pilgrims lighting theirs from the waves before them, all originating from that coffin of stone where a resurrection had occurred. Or so they told us. The light and radiance grew through the building and the throng that inhabited it. It just happened. All at once. And everywhere. A miracle, if you will allow.

This god didn’t seem like all the rest. Um, I don’t know. He’s just. Not the same. Or maybe it’s just me.

Or maybe it always was just me. Just us. Just you and me. Or me speaking for the rest of us, if I can regard myself as a bellwether. One speaking for all, like as I might. If I might. Like the John Lennon song. Maybe it’s us. Imagine. Imagine all the people. Living as one.

Just imagine. Maybe we can imagine a whole world. A whole universe. Living as one.

If only we could.

Imagine that.

Land of the Pharaohs

It’s Wednesday and I’m sitting on the upper deck of a cruise ship called the Royal Ruby on the Nile River near a town called Edfu. I’ve been in Egypt since last Thursday. My schedule has been that busy and time for travel logs that scarce. I will attempt to record my previous experiences post haste.

The flight was uneventful, though long. Traveling from west to east from the United States tends to be less stressful, for me at least. Or maybe at the beginning of a trip I’m still rested.

The flights tend to be at night and the layovers short-ish. A few hours in Newark. A short stint in Zurich. Long slogs through seven time zones, six, actually due to Daylight Savings Time making the East Coast look like it sank into the Atlantic. From Zurich via Swiss Air and into Northern Egypt… which is lower Egypt. And then I’m WhatsApping my driver outside Cairo airport.

Customs was a breeze. I got my e-visa in advance and waltzed through immigration like an invading army. Napoleon the Last bringing civilization and Yankee dollars to the uncouth. Actually I was more like a clueless tourist. But I had dollars!

Cairo is a big city of about 20 million. My hotel, the Tolip (Tulip) Golden Plaza Hotel, is disappointingly far from the old city with not much to recommend it, being surrounded on three sides by busy streets and the forth by a busy connector between two of those streets.

Pity. My first impulse in a new town once I check in and steal a few towels and an ash tray is to walk around it and begin the process of calibrating my internal GPS. The most scenic thing here was the Tivoli Golden Plaza, an outdoor mall mostly populated with restaurants and a hookah bar that looked intriguing. I ordered room service and turned in.

I mentioned that travel is easier going west to east. That’s a relative concept. Like west and east. Traveling at night means you can sleep, in theory. For me it means I can maybe cat nap while my head bangs against the airplane window with all the rhythm of a heart attack. Assuming I get a window seat. And the gremlin on the wing leaves me alone.

Once I was stuck in a center seat all night like Osiris strapped in for his celestial voyage to the afterlife at a gate at Some International Airport. Only I was going to a four hour layover followed by an eleven hour flight to my ultimate reward. See now why I leave a day early?

For this reason I book an extra day before my trip officially begins just to recover and maybe schedule a short activity the next day. This I did.

I scheduled a walking tour of Muslim Cairo for the next day as an extra. I didn’t have to meet my group until that night so I had the whole day free.

Cairo is a big, middle-eastern city with busy roads to nowhere and traffic cops in military uniforms and trucks overloaded with produce, parcels, and people. Motorcycles, sometimes hoisting entire families, sluice by on every side. Pedestrians appear and disappear like virtual particles. I begin to wonder if  ‘Crosswalk’ is a dirty word. Traffic violations sure aren’t. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.

Cairo is not the original city that was built here. That would be Memphis, a city built along the Nile river around five thousand years ago when the Nile was somewhere else. But the Nile used to have this awful habit of getting frisky and roaming around. It’s as if your local interstate highway whiplashed from time to time, sometimes to the east, sometimes to the west, and sometimes completely wiping out the city you live in that it used to peacefully pass by. And there are crocodiles. Were crocodiles.

Picture the poor mapmaker. He just created a cartographic masterpiece worthy of Peri Reis when-Poof! West bank Memphis us now East bank Memphis. Except for the parts that are now under water.

Cairo nee-Memphis is temporarily preserved from this fate due to the Aswan dam upstream down south in Upper Egypt, which also explains the lack of crocodiles everywhere below the dam. This whole Upper/Lower, North/South thing confused the hell out of me until I got used to it. Which I never did, by the way. Every place has its peculiarities.

My guide, Rania, brought me around the city with a car and driver that disappeared and reappeared like the proverbial genie whenever we summoned him to do either. Where do genies go when they are dismissed, anyway? For a coffee, I guess.

We visited some ancient mosques, ancient for Cairo, which was founded my Muslims in 969, or a little earlier. Baby. And a museum that was the house of an English doctor and ‘collector’ who donated it and its contents to the city in his will. Cairo, the whole city, new and oldish, is home to 20 million people plus 5 million who commute in to work here. Yes, the traffic is as bad as it sounds.

One of the benefits of having a guide is that she can advise you on what scams the locals have in store for you at the marketplace of hagglers and charmers, jugglers and thieves.

“Now,” said Rania. “In this market whatever they ask you, offer them half.”

Gotcha!

We pass through a gate bracketed by two towers into the old city of Cairo. Stalls and suks inhabit the street fronts. Merchandise spills onto the sidewalks where attendant merchants strive to hook you in by eye contact. Tuk-tuks and horse drawn carriages push through the crowds, juvenile street scarabs cling to their backs hitching a ride till they hop off at the next corner while overburdened men hauling bundles dart around them.

At one street is a mosque and the old jail. Across the street is a public well providing fresh water for travelers and their camels as it has for centuries. A call to prayer issues from a handy minaret, disregarded by the throngs below, people, animals, and machines. The blood of the city courses on, unconcerned.

I Love me an Old City.

 

Rania brought me to a few ‘demonstrations.’ One of Papyrus making and one of perfume. There I got a cup of tea and free use of the WC, normally they expect a donation of ten Egyptian pounds, and invited me to procure some of their wares. I got some perfume, with an extra bottle, two decorative bottles, and a vaporizer for just ten pounds more, and a papyrus painting of Osiris and Isis in a boat. Or maybe it was Anubis and someone? Either way, it turns into something else when you turn off the light, also discounted. They were locally made and would make good gifts.

Egypt is having a dearth of tourists, understandably considering the horrors next door, so the economy is suffering. The dollar is strong, getting 31 Egyptian pounds for one greenback. I haggled my way through a few souvenirs.

And so the city surges.

A picture is worth a thousand words, ‘tis said. All of them wrong. A million words cannot capture the beating heart of a single emotion, though poets try as poets will. You need smell it like Chaucer on his way to Canterbury or Christmas morning at Grandmas and savor it and rub it through your fingers and your senses and into your hair and skin until it becomes a part of you.

Over lunch I asked Rania what she thought about the situation in Gaza. She paused, thoughtful.

“Egyptians don’t condone the violence in Gaza against Israelis,” she said. “But we believe the response has been too much. Israel’s response has been unjustified. We can’t accept that. The little I have heard from the Muslim world speaks the same.

When I lived in Israel the people I met there were, well, people. Beyond the superfluity and shifting sands of custom and culture, color and coincidence, we share the same bedrock. Jews, Muslims, Christians. Palestinians, Israelis. Working together. Resenting each other. Tolerating each other. Fighting each other. We are, it turns out, the same. Some good, some bad. Some great, some you wouldn’t turn your back on. Just like everyone else. We are us, all of us.

Rania brought me back to my hotel after lunch of shawarma and tea. One of my packages set off the scanner at the hotel entrance.

“Please come to the front desk,” the guard asked with supreme politeness. Apparently I had been caught with contraband. ‘Do they have room service in prison?’ I mused. ‘Or wherever security guard Anubis would bring me?’

“You can’t bring this into the room,” I was told, also politely.

The offending item was… “A coffee service?” I increduled. I had bought it on the street. “We can check it for you until you leave.”

The service consisted of a brass coffee pot, a tray, two glasses, and a brass stove. I haggled it down, but not quite by half.

‘Ah, of course,’ I self-enlightened. ‘They don’t want me using the stove in my room. I might make crystal meth. Or worse. Coffee!’ I wonder what the airport will think?

Contraband quarantined, I found the lounge where I was meeting my group. I will be invading Egypt with three companions: Kit, and Pat and Buzz, the latter of which at first appeared like a married couple but are just traveling buddies. I wonder where their spouses think they each is? What goes on in Memphis...

The next day began the official beginning of our adventure.

PS. For the record, Pat and John, his real name, worked together and really are just traveling friends. I thought my story was better.

PPSS. It is now the last day of my trip, which is when I was able to finish this missive. My flight leaves tomorrow at 1:05 PM. I am sitting in the Hookah (non-alcoholic) bar enjoying a Banana Feteer, a Turkish coffee, and a shiysha of some smokable substance. It is apple flavored.

You take what you get, I guess.