Inventions – Auxiliary Memory

Is Ethical Capitalism Even Possible?

by James Wallace Harris, 10/20/23

This month, several of my friends have separately expressed doubt about the future. I don’t hold much hope either. Our current world civilization seems to be falling apart. Capitalism is consuming the planet, but capitalism is the only economic system that creates enough jobs to end poverty. The only alternative to free market capitalism I can imagine is if we adapt capitalism to an ethical system. So, I’ve been keeping my eye open for signs of emerging ethical capitalism.

Here’s one: “The Workers Behind AI Rarely See Its Rewards. This Indian Startup Wants to Fix That” from Time Magazine (8/14/23). The article describes how AI startups need vast amounts of sample data from other languages for their large language models. In India, many data companies are exploiting poor people for their unique language data and keeping the profit, but one company, Karya, is giving the poor people they employ a larger share of the profits. This helps lift them out of poverty.

Capitalism has two dangerous side effects. It destroys the environment and creates inequality. For capitalism to become ethical it will need to be environmentally friendly, or at least neutral, and it will need to be more equitable. If we want to have hope for the future, we need to see more signs of that happening.

Right now, profits drive capitalism. Profits are used to expand a corporation’s ability to grow profits, and to make management and investors rich. Labor and environmental controls are seen as expenses that reduce profits. For a corporation to be ethical it will have to have a neutral or positive impact on the environment, and it will need to share more of its profits with labor.

Since the pandemic hourly wages have been going up, and so has inflation. If capitalism becomes more ethical, costs for environmentalism and labor will go up, thus ethical capitalism will be inflationary. Some people have gotten extraordinarily rich by making things cheap, but it’s also shifted labor and environmental costs away from corporations onto the government and the public. The price at the store does not reflect the actual cost of making what you buy. You pay the difference in taxes.

For ethical capitalism to come about things will need to be sold for what they cost to make. That will involve getting rid of governmental and corporate corruption. It will involve political change. And it will be inflationary until the new system stabilizes.

My guess is ethical capitalism will never come about. If I were writing a science fiction novel that envisioned life in the 2060s it would be very bleak. Life in America will be like what we see in failed states today. Back in the 1960s we often heard of the domino theory regarding communism. Failed states are falling like dominoes now. Environmental catastrophes, political unrest, dwindling natural resources, and viral inequality will homogenize our current world civilization. Either we work together to make it something good, or we’ll all just tear everything apart.

Civilization is something we should all shape by conscious design and not a byproduct of capitalistic greed.

We have all the knowledge we need to fix our problems, but we lack the self-control to apply it. I have some friends who think I’m a dope for even holding out a smidgen of hope. Maybe my belief that we could theoretically solve our problems is Pollyannish.

I have two theories that support that sliver of hope. One theory says humans have always been the same psychological for two hundred thousand years. In other words, our habits and passions don’t change. The other theory says we create cultures, languages, technologies, systems that can organize us into diverse kinds of social systems that control our behavior.

We could choose better systems to manage ourselves. However, we always vote by greed and self-interest. We need to vote for preserving all.

In other words, we don’t change on the inside, but we do change how we live on the outside. My sliver of hope is we’ll make laws and invent technology that will create a society based on ethical capitalism and we’ll adapt our personalities to it.

I know that’s a long shot, but it’s the only one I have.

I’m working to develop a new habit of reading one substantial article a day and breaking my bad habit of consuming dozens of useless tidbits of data that catch my eye as clickbait. In other words, one healthy meal of wisdom versus snacking all day on junk ideas. Wisdom doesn’t come packaged like cookies or chips.

JWH

Living With an Aging Infrastructure

by James Wallace Harris, 8/6/23

I’m writing this on my iPhone by typing with just my right index finger because our internet is still out. It’s been over a week now. We feel like we’re living in the 1980s. We know this is a first-world problem and nothing compared to all the natural catastrophes happening around the world. Still, it’s quite educational.

When AT&T came out to fix our internet, we discovered the wire from the pole to the house was on the ground hidden in some bushes. It had been pulled off the pole and the connection at the house by a falling tree limb. The repair guy said it would be no problem stringing a new wire, but I, unfortunately, knew better.

“You can’t climb that pole,” I said to the repairman as he started walking to the back of my lot.

“What,” he said.

“That pole is so rotten and broken that MLG&W guys won’t climb it. The linemen won’t work on it without a bucket truck.”

The AT&T guy tried to use a distant pole but there were no free circuits. So now we’re waiting for AT&T to return with a bucket truck.

We’ve been waiting years for that telephone pole to be replaced. Our block is bisected by power lines on incredibly old poles. They are hollow, with big cracks, and holes. The power company tagged them years ago to be replaced but they spend all their time fixing lines and circuits that are broken. This summer Memphis has had several storms causing several big outages, including over 100,000 customers.

It’s a matter of aging infrastructure. Memphis is built under a sea of trees, and those trees are always falling. It’s an endless battle between the arboreal world and power lines. In the winter, ice storms make a siege on the trees and water pipes and sewers. During the rest of the year, frequent storms rattle millions of limbs. And the extremes of hot and cold wear on everything all the time.

That line of old telephone poles that divides the block is shrouded by trees in backyards segregated by fences of all types. Those poles won’t be easy to replace. And they won’t be replaced until they fall. Which means days of power outages for about seventy homes in this area. I live with the fear of one old dead tree in particular, falling across the powerlines and bringing the whole line of telephone poles down in my backyard.

Last year we had a freeze that damaged many water lines, and the city was under a boil water alert. Many people in Germantown can’t drink their water right now because gasoline got into a leaky old pipe.

I expect from now on as the weather gets more violent and as our infrastructure ages, we’ll all live with increased outages. If you are paying attention to the news, cities all over the world are living with scheduled blackouts and water shortages. The recent floods in China are a terrifying portent of things to come.

Living without the internet is a lesson about the future. Things are going to break down more. We all need to become preppers. As we build new infrastructure and repair the old, we need to design new structures that can withstand far greater abuse from Mother Nature.

I wish 5G internet was available in our neighborhood. Then we wouldn’t need wires. Unfortunately, we only get one bar of broadband in this neighborhood. And I wonder if they could route the power lines under the streets. I know they bring fiber optic cables to old neighborhoods that way.

I believe there will be plenty of solutions to these aging infrastructure problems, but we might have to go through decades of bumpy readjustments.

JWH

CD/DVD/BD Discs vs. Streaming

by James Wallace Harris, 6/29/23

I recently wrote “The Emerging Mindset of Not Owning Movies” about converting my DVD/BD collection to digital files so I could stream through Plex. But I soon realized that converting hundreds of discs was too much trouble, so I gave up. I figured it would be worth the money to just subscribe to a bunch of streaming services instead.

However, in the weeks since I discovered some TV shows and movies aren’t available on streaming. The trouble is I just don’t like using disc players anymore. For example, I exercise by watching Miranda Esmonde-White’s Classical Stretch program. I have a couple seasons on DVD. When I was testing out Plex I converted them to files that I could stream through the Roku interface. It was so much nicer than loading the disc every morning.

Another reason why I gave up on Plex was I thought I needed to buy a Synology NAS and buy 2-3 very large capacity hard drives. Something that would take several hundred dollars.

Well, I had a breakthrough this week. I realized that I neither had to convert all my discs to make Plex worthwhile nor did I need a robust RAID system to store my video files. All I needed was just the files I would watch, and if I was only converting discs that aren’t on subscription streaming services then that wouldn’t be very many at all.

I bought a 512GB SSD for my Intel NUC 11. The NUC had a place for a second short SSD card. It was $59. Installing Plex again was three minutes. I put Classical Stretch, Survivors (1975 BBC show), and the last three seasons of Perry Mason on the drive. I could subscribe to Paramount Plus to watch Perry, but I didn’t want to add another subscription right now.

Plex streams videos off the SSD extremely fast. Almost, instantly. Way faster than the 8GB mechanical hard drive I was testing Plex with before. It’s extremely convenient.

When I finish Perry I’m just going to delete its files off the SSD. Not having to build a secure backed-up library makes things so much easier. Now, if I want to watch something I own on disc I’ll just rip it and put it on the SDD, and when I’m finished, I’ll delete it.

For some reason, coming up with this solution has made me very happy. I don’t need to mess with a second computer, or a NAS, or spend endless hours ripping and maintaining a library of video files. I’ve even simplified the ripping process. The proper method for ripping was to rip with Make MKV and then shrink those files with HandBrake. Then copy the files to the server and make a backup somewhere else. It was very time-consuming.

Now I just use MKV and save its .mkv files directly to the SSD. I don’t worry about shrinking the .mkv file to conserve space or backing it up. If I know I want to watch something that night that’s not on a subscription streaming service but I own the disc, I just rip it while working at my computer, and it’s ready for watching on Plex later when I want to watch TV.

I’ve very happy with this solution. I love to figure out solutions that are cheap, streamlined, minimal, and make things easier. This means I need only one computer, and I don’t need DVD players and their remotes. I recently got rid of one TV, leaving just two (one for me, one for Susan). That was satisfying too. I also put away one CD player and turntable. I only stream music now, but I left one CD player out in case I do want to play CDs. However, it’s just so much nicer not messing with those machines. I regret buying my Audiolab 6000 amplifier and CD transport. I wish I had gotten another Bluenote Powernode.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve simplified my life by getting rid of several machines. I also gave up having a second computer, a Linux machine. I have less to worry about. I realize that I’m zeroing in on something. That I’m focusing my efforts and resources.

JWH

Are You in Future Shock Yet?

by James Wallace Harris, 3/24/23

Back in 1970, a nonfiction bestseller, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, was widely talked about but it’s little remembered today. With atomic bombs in the 1940s, ICBMs, and computers in the 1950s, manned space flight and landing on the Moon in the 1960s, LSD, hippies, the Age of Aquarius, civil rights, gay rights, feminism, as well as a yearly unfolding of new technologies, it was easy to understand why Toffler suggested the pace of change could lead society into a collective state of shock.

But if we could time travel back to 1970 we could quote Al Jolson to Alvin, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Couldn’t we? Toffler never came close to imagining the years we’ve been living since 1970. And his book was forgotten, but I think his ideas are still valid.

Future shock finally hit me yesterday when I watched the video “‘Sparks of AGI’ – Bombshell GPT-4 Paper: Fully Read w/ 15 Revelations.”

I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT for weeks, and I knew GPT 4 was coming, but I was surprised as hell when it hit so soon. Over the past few weeks, people have been writing and reporting about using ChatGPT and the general consensus was it was impressive but because it made so many mistakes we shouldn’t get too worried. GPT 4 makes far fewer mistakes. Far fewer. But it’s fixing them fast.

Watch the video! Read the report. I’ve been waiting years for general artificial intelligence, and this isn’t it. But it’s so damn close that it doesn’t matter. Starting back in the 1950s when computer scientists first started talking about AI, they kept trying to set the bar that would prove a computer could be called intelligent. An early example was playing chess. But when a computer was built to perform one of these measures and passed, computer scientists would say that test really wasn’t a true measure of intelligence and we should try X instead. Well, we’re running out of things to equate with human-level intelligence.

Most people have expected a human-level intelligent computer would be sentient. I think GPT 4 shows that’s not true. I’m not sure anymore if any feat of human intelligence needs to be tied to sentience. All the fantastic skills we admire about our species are turning out to be skills a computer can perform.

We thought we’d trump computers with our mental skills, but it might be our physical skills that are harder to give machines. Like I said, watch the video. Computers can now write books, compose music, do mathematics, paint pictures, create movies, analyze medical mysteries, understand legal issues, ponder ethics, etc. Right now AI computers configured as robots have difficulty playing basketball, knitting, changing a diaper, and things like that. But that could change just as fast as things have been changing with cognitive creativity.

I believe most people imagined a world of intelligent machines being robots that look like us — like those we see in the movies. Well, the future never unfolds like we imagine. GPT and its kind are invisible to us, but we can easily interact with them. I don’t think science or science fiction imagined how easily that interaction would be, or how quickly it would be rolled out. Because it’s here now.

I don’t think we ever imagined how distributed AI would become. Almost anything you can think of doing, you can aid your efforts right now by getting advice and help from a GPT-type AI. Sure, there are still problems, but watch the video. There are far fewer problems than last week, and who knows how many fewer there will be next week.

Future shock is all about adapting to change. If you can’t handle the change, you’re suffering from future shock. And that’s the thing about the 1970 Toffler book. Most of us kept adapting to change no matter how fast it came. But AI is going to bring about a big change. Much bigger than the internet or computers or even the industrial revolution.

You can easily tell the difference between the people who will handle this change and those who can’t. Those that do are already using AI. They embraced it immediately. We’ve been embracing pieces of AI for years. A spelling and grammar checker is a form of AI. But this new stuff is a quantum leap over everything that’s come before. Put it to use or get left behind.

Do you know about cargo cults? Whenever an advanced society met a primitive society it doesn’t go well for primitive societies. The old cultural divide was between the educated and the uneducated. Expect new divisions. And remember Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For many people, AI will be magic.

Right now AI can help scholars write books. Soon AI will be able to write better scholarly books than scholars. Will that mean academics giving up writing papers and books? I don’t think so. AIs, as of now, have no desires. Humans will guide them. In the near future, humans will ride jockey on AI horses.

A couple weeks ago Clarkesworld Magazine, a science fiction magazine, shut down submissions because they were being flooded with Chat-GPT-developed stories. The problem was the level of submissions was overwhelming them, but the initial shock I think for most people would be the stories would be crap. That the submitted science fiction wouldn’t be creative in a human sense. That those AI-written stories would be a cheat. But what if humans using GPT start producing science fiction stories that are better than stories only written by humans?

Are you starting to get why I’m asking you if you feel future shock yet? Be sure and watch the video.

Finally, isn’t AI just another example of human intelligence? Maybe when AIs create artificial AIs, we can call them intelligent.

JWH

How Could We Maximize Democracy?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/15/22

What if we had the perfect voting machine – how would it change politics?

What would make the perfect voting machine?

It would only allow one vote by each registered voter
It would block any illegal votes
It would block tampering
It would be trusted by all
It would make vote tallying easy
It would allow for easy recounts
It would be easy to use
It would be easy to access

Let’s imagine a perfect machine. Let’s imagine its impact like we were plotting a science fiction story about the future.

What if the government issued every registered voter a tablet that had limited internet access and could only be used for one function: voting. The tablet would be configured:

Fingerprint recognition
Faceprint recognition
Voiceprint recognition
Eyeprint recognition
Had a unique physical ID number in a chip
It will only work with the .gov domain

To register to vote and get one of these machines you’d have to prove your identity to the government. It would link your machine ID and identity to the voter registration system. It would register your encrypted biometric data. You will be given a voter registration card with your name and machine ID.

When you vote it would only accept one vote from your machine’s ID and only if your machine has validated your biometrics in four ways. This is far more secure than any online banking system or financial investment system. No one but yourself should be able to use this tablet. If it was stolen it would be useless.

Whenever a vote is taken the results should be tabulated nearly instantly and the results put online. Anyone could validate their vote by looking up their machine ID in the voting results. It’s not likely anyone will know this number unless you tell them. If you think your vote was changed you can register a protest.

This method would allow any individual to conduct a vote recount. The data file from a national election would be large, but probably smaller than a downloaded song. Voters could be given software that would allow them to drill into the data and analyze the results. Everyone should get the same totals. If needed, a vote could be retaken to validate the process. And countless checks can be added to the system to automatically look for fraud.

Right now we have a representative democracy. We vote for people we want to vote for us. With this system, we could vote directly. Our elective representative would prepare possible laws but everyone would vote on them. Of course, not everyone would vote on each issue, but the numbers would be huge. Far greater than any valid statistical sample. This would eliminate more forms of current corruption.

To make this system even more effective, we should set the winning majority higher than 50%. This could solve our current political polarization. We should aim to make more people happy with our government and laws. We should aim for a two-thirds majority or 66%.

That would push out the extremes of the political spectrum and create a purple party in the middle. Our representatives would have to work up laws based on compromises that would appeal to a wider majority.

Right now we’re getting minority rule and citizens are becoming unhappy. There’s talk of civil war. Extremists on the left and right want things that the majority of Americans don’t. Our political system is corrupted by political parties and their shenanigans. If we maximized democracy it would eliminate the need for political parties. Everyone would vote for their own unique platform. But to achieve a two-thirds majority would require voting with the aim of making the most people happy rather than just ourselves.

I doubt this will ever happen, but it’s a kind of science fictional speculation of how we could change things if we tried. Human nature pushes us to keep doing the same thing until everything breaks and we’re forced to start over. Some people are advocating starting over now, but that will only make even a smaller percentage of people happy.

If we had such a maximized voting system it would be important to elect politicians that tried to make the majority happy rather than just special interest groups.

JWH