Category: Artificial Intelligence

How To End Identity Theft

by James Wallace Harris, 3/31/24

The reason we have identity theft is it’s easy to pretend to be someone else with just a credit card number, a password, and a bit of trickery. Because we no longer buy most of what we buy in person, sellers must accept tokens to prove who we are, and it’s easy for others to steal our tokens. We call it identity theft because thieves pretend to be us by using our tokens.

In the old days we had to show up in person to buy what we wanted. The seller was only concerned with the validity of the money. Their concern was counterfeit money, not counterfeit people. Credit cards introduced two problems. They could represent fake money from fake people. That was when the credit card only made an impression on a piece of paper. With electronic validation of funds sellers knew they could get their money, but they couldn’t prove from whom. This was the beginning of modern identity theft.

Thieves had to physically pretend to be someone else when buying in person, but the merchants’ requirements for proving identity weren’t hard to forge. It became even easier on the internet.

To stop identity theft will require perfect identification of a person. And we can’t reply on driver’s licenses, photo IDs, passwords, electronic keys, or other kinds of proofs of identity that can be forged. We need to prove the person is exactly who they are.

Can you prove who you say you are? Even if you had a birth certificate and every piece of printed identity you acquired over your whole lifetime, can you really prove who you are? Who are we really? Identity is an abstract concept. We need to make it physical.

Our bodies are who we are. We can give it any number, password, or electronic key to point to that body, but that won’t stop identity theft.

What the government needs to do is establish identity by having a person visit an agency that establishes physical identity. They record your face, voice, fingerprints, palm print, eye print, DNA, etc. and enter that into a database. Then whenever you need to prove your identity, either in person or online, those identifiers need to be measured again and the results compared to the database.

When validating your identity, it will be vital that no recordings of those biometric factors will be allowed. What’s needed is a machine that sends information back to the database in real time. The database needs to be able to connect to the validation machine and know it’s receiving live data only.

Imagine buying something at a store or at home. You’d have to have an identity validation device. It will include a video camera and a bunch of biometric sensors. You use the device to measure who you are. Since all transactions will also be recorded, I can’t imagine many thieves even wanting themselves measured so closely.

Our phones can do face and fingerprint identification, and it would probably be easy to add voice and eye print recognition. But phones compare input from sensors to previously stored recorded data on the phone. That’s not good enough. The recorded data of your physical identity needs to be in a national identity bank that’s guarded better than banks for money.

The national identity bank needs to be able to take control of remote sensors and verify live input against your recorded identity in the identity bank. If thieves somehow stole recordings of all your biometrics they could pretend to be you, so the key is to create identity recognition machines that can’t input recorded data and prove the data its sending back to the national identity bank is from live sensors.

Think of it this way. The old saying, “Seeing is proof.” That essentially meant you had to see with your own sensors (eyes) to believe. The identity bank will have billions of eyes that work in real time.

Of course, if such an identity system were created it would solve all kinds of problems, but it would also create others. For spending money, voting, buying airline tickets, going through customs, or doing anything where identity is crucial it would be a plus. But for people who want to stay anonymous, or not be tracked, or fool the system, or be somewhere illegally, it will be a negative. In a police state, with universal security cameras and AIs, such a national identity bank will be absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

But aren’t we moving towards such a system anyway? We’re required to get RealID driver licenses. Security cameras are becoming as universal as cockroaches. As we add more biometric sensors to our devices, merchants are bound to start using them. Banks and credit card companies are going to get tired of being responsible for refunding stolen money. They will demand more identity recognition tools. If banks and credit card companies didn’t refund stolen money and we had to cover our own losses, we’d start demanding them too.

I’m not sure we can avoid this future because most people will want it. My guess, is most people favor security over privacy.

JWH

“Sorry, I’m Not a Human, I’m A Computer”

by James Wallace Harris, 3/10/24

What will happen if we all end up embracing artificial intelligence (AI)?

My friend Linda told me a funny story today. Her robotic vacuum cleaner was acting up, so she called its tech support number. The tech immediately started telling her how to troubleshoot the problem, but Linda had to tell her to hold on a minute.

Linda went off and gathered up her robot. When she came back, she said, “I’m sorry I took so long, I didn’t expect you to fix it right away.”

The tech replied, “That doesn’t matter, I’m a recording.”

Linda said the computer spoke perfectly and told her exactly what to do. She was shocked by how well the call went.

At first Linda and I joked about this incident, thinking up funny scenarios that standup comics could create about humans interacting with artificial intelligence machines.

I even thought I would try to write up some of those humorous ideas, but then I started thinking along a different track. What if people prefer getting phone help from an AI rather than real people? For years now everyone I know has complained about how hard it is to get any kind of support over the phone. Most folks hate phone trees. Many acquaintances complained they couldn’t understand phone support from foreign call centers. And everyone seems to think it’s almost impossible to get a human on the phone.

What if AI chatbots change all that? What if computers start giving us perfect service over the phone, the kind we used to think humans provided? No one wants humans to lose jobs to automation, but what if we end up preferring the AI voice over the human voice?

How far will that acceptance go? It’s one thing to want to get help from Amazon when your return doesn’t fit any of the listed reasons on the website. But what about more sophisticated support over phones? Would you choose to pay $20 an hour to talk to an AI psychiatrist over Zoom or $100-300 an hour to human psychiatrist in person? What if the cheap AI psychiatrist helps you become happier sooner?

Right now, AI chatbots aren’t factually trustworthy. What if they were? What if it was impossible to tell the difference between AIs and humans by talking to them over the phone? Synthetic voices are getting closer to sounding human. But with AI generated video, soon chatbots will be able to talk and look like a human over video calls too. What if AI chatbots could pass the Turing Test? Will you care? Remember that old New Yorker cartoon showing two mutts with the capture, “On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.”

Already people are using chatbots for friendship. I imagine they will soon offer phone sex talk if they don’t already. Will Only Fans users care if they see AI generated nudity rather than video images of real people?

We must ask, what do we really want from other people?

I’ve been watching the excellent limited series Feud on Hulu. The first season was about the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The second season is about Truman Capote and how he ruined his friendship with several New York society women he called his swans. On the surface, the show is about famous conflicts, but below the surface it’s about hurt. It’s about what we want from friends, and why we don’t get what we want, which is recognition and support.

How often are you disappointed with technical or business phone support because the offered solution didn’t recognize your individual problem or solve it? What will happen to society if AI chatbots see deeper into our souls and give us more support than other humans? Will we let millions go unemployed?

This whole AI thing is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone ever imagined.

JWH

Will People Change vs. Can People Change?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/28/24

I just finished listening to The Deluge by Stephen Markley, a book that speculates on what the next sixteen years could be like. The book is almost nine hundred pages in print, and over forty hours on audio. Reading this book feels like it’s compressed the last twenty years of polarized political conflict into a forty-hour long disaster film. It’s intense.

Markley uses a large cast of characters to dramatize how people on the left and right will battle for control over the next five U.S. presidential election cycles. Most of the story involves two groups of characters, those working within the political system, and those who decidedly don’t. Markley portrays an ultrasecret ecoterrorist group that works to force change by violent acts versus a dedicated group of political wonks that labor in Washington to influence both parties. Dynamic women characters lead both groups. (By the way, I disliked both women. The only character I cared about was a drug addict in Ohio, who Markley uses as a kind of everyman.)

To further spice up the story, Markley explores the growing power of computer surveillance, artificial intelligence, privacy, and how everyone can be tracked.

I’m not going to review the details of The Deluge because I want to use my reading experience to talk about a specific response to reading the book. I’ll link major book reviews at the end in case you’re considering reading the book. I can say liberals will be terrified by the conservatives in this story, and conservatives will by horrified by these fictional liberals.

The Deluge is about climate change. We could have solved that problem by now if we had acted promptly twenty years ago. The government could have added a tax on all fossil fuels and then raised it slowly month by month. For example, by adding ten cents to the federal tax on gasoline each month. If we had started this in the year 2000, gasoline would be approaching $30 a gallon today. That would have forced people and corporations to make the changes needed.

That tax revenue could have been used to overhaul the power grid and for developing renewable energy technologies. If we had taxed carbon properly, we wouldn’t be fighting over climate change today. That didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because the people who owned trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves made sure it didn’t happen. They built a political and religious coalition to fight with them to protect that wealth.

All that’s beside the point now. What Markley envisions is the breakdown of the United States over the next sixteen years so it’s obvious to all we need to do something. The Deluge includes dramatic scenes of a massive fire that destroys Los Angeles, a massive flood that overwhelms the Midwest, and a massive hurricane that devastates east coast states. These events caused the insurance industry to collapse, leading to economic chaos. Markley doesn’t overplay all this. His fictional disasters are realistic, only somewhat larger than what we’ve already experienced, killing just hundreds or a few thousand people in each event, but having an enormous impact on politics and the economy.

Reading The Deluge makes readers ask themselves: Will American change soon? But I ask: Can people change at all?

Before reading this novel, I had seen two insightful videos about climate change that ask the same questions. The first video makes a careful case saying people don’t change and if there is a solution for avoiding climate change it must work with the psychology of how people act. The second video summarizes the first video with impressive summations of it and this tweet. (I wish I could summarize what I watch and read this well.)

Over the two hundred thousand years that our species have existed on this planet, we haven’t changed. Our societies and technologies change, but not us. Over those two hundred thousand years we have developed four major cognitive tools to understand reality: religion, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Only science using mathematics has consistently proven it can consistently describe reality. If you don’t believe that I wouldn’t fly in an airplane.

Science is not black and white. It’s statistical and hard to understand. But science has overwhelmingly shown that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is turning up the temperature. The parts per million of CO2 in the air acts like a thermostat. Add more CO2 turns up the temperature. The only way to return to the weather we liked in the past is to return to the CO2 levels of the 1960s, but we keep adding more. The only way to stop adding CO2 is to completely stop using fossil fuels. And if we want to turn down the thermostat, we need to remove CO2, which isn’t easy. That’s why taxing carbon is the only way to force us to change, but we won’t do that, because it’s not in our psychology.

However, The Deluge suggests when things get bad enough, we’ll change. It ends hopefully. People even have hope for their children and grandchildren.

Personally, I don’t think we will change. If you want to know what the next sixteen years could be like, read The Deluge. If you believe people can change, and we’ll do the right thing eventually, read The Deluge. If you don’t believe we’ll change, I wouldn’t bother with the book unless you like looking at train wrecks. And if you suffer from depression, I suggest avoiding reading this novel at all costs. I seldom get even the slightest depressed, but this book bummed me out.

Reviews:

JWH

ChatGPT Isn’t an Artificial Intelligence (AI) But an Artificial Unconsciousness (AU)

by James Wallace Harris, 2/12/24

This essay is for anyone who wants to understand themselves and how creativity works. What I’m about to say will make more sense if you’ve played with ChatGPT or have some understanding of recent AI programs in the news. Those programs appear to be amazingly creative by answering ordinary questions, passing tests that lawyers, mathematicians, and doctors take, generating poems and pictures, and even creating music and videos. They often appear to have human intelligence even though they are criticized for making stupid mistakes — but then so do humans.

We generally think of our unconscious minds as mental processes occurring automatically below the surface of our conscious minds, out of our control. We believe our unconscious minds are neural functions that influence thought, feelings, desires, skills, perceptions, and reactions. Personally, I assume feelings, emotions, and desires come from an even deeper place and are based on hormones and are unrelated to unconscious intelligence.

It occurred to me that ChatGPT and other large language models are analogs for the unconscious mind, and this made me observe my own thoughts more closely. I don’t believe in free will. I don’t even believe I’m writing this essay. The keyword here is “I” and how we use it. If we use “I” to refer to our whole mind and body, then I’m writing the essay. But if we think of the “I” as the observer of reality that comes into being when I’m awake, then probably not. You might object to this strongly because our sense of I-ness feels obviously in full control of the whole shebang.

But what if our unconscious minds are like AI programs, what would that mean? Those AI programs train on billions of pieces of data, taking a long time to learn. But then, don’t children do something similar? The AI programs work by prompting it with a question. If you play a game of Wordle, aren’t you prompting your unconscious mind? Could you write a step-by-step flow chart of how you solve a Wordle game consciously? Don’t your hunches just pop into your mind?

If our unconscious minds are like ChatGPT, then we can improve them by feeding in more data and giving it better prompts. Isn’t that what we do when studying and taking tests? Computer scientists are working hard to improve their AI models. They give their models more data and refine their prompts. If they want their model to write computer programs, they train their models in more computer languages and programs. If we want to become an architect, we train our minds with data related to architecture. (I must wonder about my unconscious mind; it’s been trained on decades of reading science fiction.)

This will also explain why you can’t easily change another person’s mind. Training takes a long time. The unconscious mind doesn’t respond to immediate logic. If you’ve trained your mental model all your life on The Bible or investing money, it won’t be influenced immediately by new facts regarding science or economics.

We live by the illusion that we’re teaching the “I” function of our mind, the observer, the watcher, but what we’re really doing is training our unconscious mind like computer scientists train their AI models. We might even fool ourselves that free will exists because we believe the “I” is choosing the data and prompts. But is that true? What if the unconscious mind tells the “I” what to study? What to create? If the observer exists separate from intelligence, then we don’t have free will. But how could ChatGPT have free will? Humans created it, deciding on the training data, and the prompts. Are our unconscious minds creating artificial unconscious minds? Maybe nothing has free will, and everything is interrelated.

If you’ve ever practiced meditation, you’ll know that you can watch your thoughts. Proof that the observer is separate from thinking. Twice in my life I’ve lost the ability to use words and language, once in 1970 because of a large dose of LSD, and about a decade ago with a TIA. In both events I observed the world around me without words coming to mind. I just looked at things and acted on conditioned reflexes. That let me experience a state of consciousness with low intelligence, one like animals know. I now wonder if I was cut off from my unconscious mind. And if that’s true, it implies language and thoughts come from the unconscious minds, and not from what we call conscious awareness. That the observer and intelligence are separate functions of the mind.

We can get ChatGPT to write an essay for us, and it has no awareness of its actions. We use our senses to create a virtual reality in our head, an umwelt, which gives us a sensation that we’re observing reality and interacting with it, but we’re really interacting with a model of reality. I call this function that observes our model of reality the watcher. But what if our thoughts are separate from this viewer, this watcher?

If we think of large language models as analogs for the unconscious mind, then everything we do in daily life is training for our mental model. Then does the conscious mind stand in for the prompt creator? I’m on the fence about this. Sometimes the unconscious mind generates its own prompts, sometimes prompts are pushed onto us from everyday life, but maybe, just maybe, we occasionally prompt our unconscious mind consciously. Would that be free will?

When I write an essay, I have a brain function that works like ChatGPT. It generates text but as it comes into my conscious mind it feels like I, the viewer, created it. That’s an illusion. The watcher takes credit.

Over the past year or two I’ve noticed that my dreams are acquiring the elements of fiction writing. I think that’s because I’ve been working harder at understanding fiction. Like ChatGPT, we’re always training our mental model.

Last night I dreamed a murder mystery involving killing someone with nitrogen. For years I’ve heard about people committing suicide with nitrogen, and then a few weeks ago Alabama executed a man using nitrogen. My wife and I have been watching two episodes of Perry Mason each evening before bed. I think the ChatGPT feature in my brain took all that in and generated that dream.

I have a condition called aphantasia, that means I don’t consciously create mental pictures. However, I do create imagery in dreams, and sometimes when I’m drowsy, imagery, and even dream fragments float into my conscious mind. It’s like my unconscious mind is leaking into the conscious mind. I know these images and thoughts aren’t part of conscious thinking. But the watcher can observe them.

If you’ve ever played with the AI program Midjourney that creates artistic images, you know that it often creates weirdness, like three-armed people, or hands with seven fingers. Dreams often have such mistakes.

When AIs produce fictional results, the computer scientists say the AI is hallucinating. If you pay close attention to people, you’ll know we all live by many delusions. I believe programs like ChatGPT mimic humans in more ways than we expected.

I don’t think science is anywhere close to explaining how the brain produces the observer, that sense of I-ness, but science is getting much closer to understanding how intelligence works. Computer scientists say they aren’t there yet, and plan for AGI, or artificial general intelligence. They keep moving the goal. What they really want are computers much smarter than humans that don’t make mistakes, which don’t hallucinate. I don’t know if computer scientists care if computers have awareness like our internal watchers, that sense of I-ness. Sentient computers are something different.

I think what they’ve discovered is intelligence isn’t conscious. If you talk to famous artists, writers, and musicians, they will often talk about their muses. They’ve known for centuries their creativity isn’t conscious.

All this makes me think about changing how I train my model. What if I stopped reading science fiction and only read nonfiction? What if I cut out all forms of fiction including television and movies? Would it change my personality? Would I choose different prompts seeking different forms of output? If I do, wouldn’t that be my unconscious mind prompting me to do so?

This makes me ask: If I watched only Fox News would I become a Trump supporter? How long would it take? Back in the Sixties there was a catch phrase, “You are what you eat.” Then I learned a computer acronym, GIGO — “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” Could we say free will exists if we control the data, we use train our unconscious minds?

JWH

Thinking Outside of Our Heads

by James Wallace Harris

I believe recent developments in artificial intelligence prove that many of the creative processes we thought came from conscious actions come from unconscious mechanisms in our minds. What we are learning is computer techniques used to generate prose or images are like unconscious processes in the human brain.

The older I get, the more I believe that most of my thinking comes from my subconscious. The more I pay attention to both dreams and my waking thoughts, the more I realize that I’m very rarely making conscious decisions.

I might think “I am going to walk across the street and visit Paul,” but I have no idea how to make my body walk anywhere. But then, I’ve always assumed muscle actions were automatic. It was mental actions I believed were conscious actions. I used to believe “I am writing this essay,” but I no longer believe that. This has led me to ask:

Just what activities do we perform with our conscious minds?

Before the advent of writing, we did all our thinking inside our heads. Homer had to memorize the Iliad to recite it. Prehistory was oral. How much of thought then was conscious or unconscious? Have you ever read The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes? I know his theories have lots of problems, but they do imagine what I’m thinking about.

How often have you worried over a problem, say a math problem, or a programming problem, and gave up, but then later, usually after a nap or sleep, the solution came to you? That’s the classic view of unconscious thinking. But even when we’re thinking we’re solving a calculus problem is it really being done at a conscious level? Are you consciously recalling all your math lessons over a lifetime to solve the problem?

How often when working on a Wordle or Crossword does the word magically come to you? But sometimes, we are aware of the steps involved.

In recent years I’ve developed a theory that when we work with pen and paper, or word processor or spreadsheet, or any tool outside our body, we’re closer to thinking consciously. Sure, our unconscious minds are helping us, but making a list is more willful than just trying to remember what we need at the store.

Writing an essay is more willful than woolgathering in the La-Z-Boy. Authoring a book is far more willful still. Engineering a submarine by a vast team of people is an even more conscious effort. Sure, it involves a collective of unconscious activity too, but a vast amount documentation must be worked out consciously.

I’ve written before about this idea. See “Thinking Outside Your Head.” That’s where I reviewed different techniques and applications we use to think outside of our heads.

Many people want to deny the recent successes with AI because they want to believe machines can’t do what we do. That humans are special. If you scroll through the images at Midjourney Showcase, it’s almost impossible to deny that some of the images are stunningly beautiful. Some people will claim they are just stolen from human creativity. I don’t think that’s true.

I think AI developers have found ways to train computer programs to act like the human mind. That these programs have stumbled upon the same tricks that the brain evolved. Many great writers and artists often talk about their Muse. I think that’s just a recognition of their unconscious minds at work. What those creative people have learned is how to work consciously with the unconscious.

What some creative people are doing now is consciously working with two unconscious minds – their own and an AI. There is still a conscious component, the act of working with tools outside of our head. Where the action is, is that vague territory between the unconscious mind and the conscious one.

JWH