AI Regulation?

 In almost all regulating laws there is a front section defining what is regulated. But 2 years ago I detailed the problems with AI, namely how does one define it so it can be regulated? Legislators and administrations are really the worst, and dare I say incompetent, entities to define this.

We know that basically AI is composed of three things. First the processors or hardware. Second the complex software structures. Third the massive amounts of data. Therein lies the problem, Each is unique, each is ever changing, and each by itself cannot be adequately defined.

We can regulate the telephone network of days of yore, we can regulate the electrical network, but we cannot even try to define AI dispositively. So stop with the regulation. Otherwise you may need a separate Supreme Court just to regulate the regulation! 

Nonsense, and How Do You Wash the Windows

 Frank Gehry passed away recently. I had the misfortune to spend some time in one of his monstrosities, the Stata Center at MIT. I always wondered how one washes the windows. Why were the rest rooms hidden away and sized for one each. It was a grossly dysfunctional building.

But if you are one of the left wing types you glorify it. Especially if you never tried to function in one of them. As The New York Review notes:

The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined with a callow Postmodernism. Instead of trying to untangle those two discordant stylistic visions, which wastefully dominated American architectural discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, he showed an exhilarating way forward with freeform designs that drew on advanced contemporary art as their primary source of inspiration. He made the world safe for oddball buildings, and whatever one might think of the idiosyncratic architecture by the generation who followed him—Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and their ilk—their careers would be unthinkable without the precedent he set. Although his dramatic departure from architectural convention was at first confrontational and forbidding, it gradually became more buoyant and embracing. As his clients’ budgets increased and he moved from corrugated metal to shiny titanium, unfinished plywood to polished Douglas fir, and rubber matting to travertine flooring, his architecture lost none of its expressive power and appealed to many who’d found his earlier tough-guy efforts more alienating than audacious. But he was never to everyone’s taste, including Marxist intellectuals averse to an architecture of pleasure, who saw him as an agent of capitalist corporate branding

 The buildings just did not work. Why should a great university like MIT have this colossal clump of metal and dirty windows, leaking like a sieve, disconnected from everything else on campus. One missed the old hallways of the original buildings. One had to scurry about hidden hallways in hopes of finding the adjoining location. 

Buildings must adhere to their functions. Not the bizarre ideas of some over paid architect.  

The F Word

 In the winter of 1961, when I was still in Secondary School, I had managed to get my college admissions done with scholarships. I had passed all my Regents Exams so I had a Regents Diploma. So I thought I could just slide the second half of my Senior year. My father, not so much. He decided that I should learn what work was like, not the kind of stuff college grads did in suits and polished shoes and clean nails. But real down and dirty work.

January 1961 in New York was cold and snowy. My father got me a job, with my Headmaster approval, working for the NY Sanitation Department clearing sewer drains along the road ways. I got up at 4 AM, dressed as warmly as possible, took the bus, the first one at 4:35 that go me to the Garage at 5:30. I clocked in and met my "fellow" workers. They were a couple of years older than me, High School dropouts for the most part, many married with kids! Unlike contemporary students off to the Swiss Alps I was off to the Port Richmond garage. My peers there were not ones who could advance my career. 

Every day I would be out with a team clearing sewer drains in freezing slush getting splashed by passing trucks. But one thing I did get was the use of the F word.

Now in my school one rarely if ever heard it used. It was at the time the lowest of the low words. But here I heard it used as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunctive, and every possible word form. In fact there was one fellow who could, with hand and arm motions, conduct a conversation with that one word alone! After a few weeks I could understand him. I did realize that one could not have a dictionary for such speech since it did involve human facial and hand expressions!

Thus I have always associated the use of this word to Staten Island the the Sanitation Department. I could out Soprano the Sopranos. Once some dude in New York tried to intimidate a few well dressed colleagues and myself. The use of my Staten Island dialect and the F word sent him scurrying for fear of his existence! Amazing what that word could do. It transformed me n my Brooks Bros attire into a street wise guy, with possible connections that one did not want to upset. It was the lowest class language available but intimidating.

In today's world we now have "ladies" and "politicians" using it without any form of proper training. It sounds foolish and out of place. They all failed to get educated in the Garage. In fact their use is laughable! As are they. 

Sneaky ISP

 My local ISP, CATV provider, is pushing that you get their "new" gateway and WiFi unit. The call it "great news". Unfortunately all they want to do is to get you to eliminate your secure home WiFi and install their unit under their control and which allows for the CATV company to establish a second WiFi to support their services on your dime! 

I testified as an expert on this issue almost a decade ago. Won the case. But it also allows me to opine on the facts as well as the principle. 

My advice, get your own WiFi and do not let these characters into your network. Or anyone else for that mater! 

Annual Letters

 I had an interesting connect this week. First my semi-annual secondary school luncheon. The attendees was down to eight from the usual twenty just five years ago. Each of us has had our crises and losses, including luncheon ones directly. Age does creep up. Then the second connect was one annual "letter" filled with pictures and happy faces across the posh spots of the globe. As if there was some immunity to family crises.

If I were to send out an annual letter it would be akin to my luncheon conversation. Age does creep up, and all family members have challenges. My five grandchildren each have set a separate pathway in life. My namesake grandson is a successful CPA and soon to marry a charming psychologist. My oldest grandson is a police officer married to an El Salvador descendant and with my first great grand child.  One grand-daughter is a forestry major grad somewhere in the upper Michigan peninsula in sub zero temps and feet of snow doing something on trees. Go Figguah! The other grand daughter is finishing business school wondering what is next. Finally the youngest grandson is in retail. He knows more about inventory, market demands, personnel management than any Harvard MBA. It helps to work in the trenches.

So if we had a family letter it would be work, work, work! Each different, none like their grandfather. 

Instead of regaling our fine times, I listen to and support my ailing colleagues and assist the next steps with family members. As one ages, meetings become medical appointments, entertainment becomes watching BritBox reruns, travel is hospital visits for friends. But that is life amongst the common folk.

Yes, I still have many colleagues I stay in contact with from California, Moscow, Greece, Singapore and the places I spent time at in business, rarely at what could be called pleasure. 

So to all those whose year has had its bumps, and few "grand moments", I commiserate, but laud your life of interesting challenges. 

AI, its Existence and its Expression

 We have expressed our concern regarding AI before at some length. The main concern was that it was not possible to define it, especially as one tried to legislate controls over it. Unlike the development of what we now see as the Internet, AI appears to have limited if any benefit to its users. In fact, one may not even be aware that there is some AI, whatever that means, intervening in their day-to-day life.

 In the early days of the Internet, the user saw the results and benefits immediately. They could send emails, download and upload files, get documents in readable form instead of fax. Before web browsers even, benefits were clear. Modems may have been slow but faxes were slower. Dial up allowed for users with a telephone line to get results. There was an obvious and overt progression of benefits. Cable modems allowed increased speed and browsers allow simplified interfaces. Then the dot com boom exploded with new applications. It changed the economy.

 So far so good. Then came social media. The end of the boom and the beginning of a propaganda-based paradigm. Anonymous postings did away with any ability to vet veracity or sources of statements. This was a major loss. One could “post” or state anything without any ability to verify. Then add to such apps as Facebook, not just “friend” to “friend” communications but sidebars of targets promotional propaganda. These apps as we noted decade ago could psychologically profile a user and them promote in a user specific manner whatever some third party wanted to get the user to believe. Users could be manipulated at low cost, real time, and with high targeting efficacy. A deadly tool. But still visible.

 Now comes AI. Whatever it is, it is hidden. Behind a wall of software. It now knows you; it knows how to manipulate you. It is goal driven to get you to do something. And you never see it, never get a benefit. It benefits the supplier solely often causing you harms.

 Besides the societal person to person effects of AI, there are massive ecological effects. For example, the explosive use of electrical power and generation of heat is just one. The AI farms effectively tax everyone by the increased demands for power.

 How does this power issue work? Simple. Power if delivered locally and produced separately. For the most part the local power company is akin to the old local telephone company. It just provides the local lines for distribution. The actual power is generated by third parties who own and operate generators. They are like distant telephone companies. There then is the network agglomerators who interconnect generators to distributors. Here is where it gets tricky. Periodically the local operators negotiate with the network agglomerators for power. They agree to buy X at price Y. As the demand X increases Y increases. This is not linear! A key fact. Thus, when X increases, Y increases even more so. Namely it gets more expensive per unit! Who pays, the consumer!

 Thus, AI creates a social cost or deficit. It makes us pay to be manipulated. We see no benefit, we neither get information, entertainment, or perform efficient transactions. We do get propagandized flows of persuasion promoting the creators’ intended ideas.

 Is this AI, again whatever it is, worth the costs we are now paying? Purported the AI sucks up massive data, say from medical publications, and when we ask a question, it forms an answer from this massive collection. But are the data we collected it from correct? Often it is not. No one vets the source data. There may a lot of junk. Unreliable “facts” used to create false conclusions.

 Overall, AI is a danger for three major reasons:

 First, it is a massive targeted propaganda instrument.

 Second, it creates excessive costs to consumers for such things as energy usage and water supply survival.

 Third, it relies upon massive amounts of highly unreliable input information creating equally unreliable results.

 Simply stated, AI, whatever it is, may be not just questionable but a deadly societal weapon.