Blog Archives

Words and Power

12/4/2024

Talking the talk isn't winning the war.

Deterrence these days is based on willpower not weaponry. Back when we had Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the issue was how many big missiles each side had. The SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) treaties were all about numbers.

These days, hostile states feel able to keep going despite the nuclear arsenals ranged against them because they don’t believe anybody’s going to use those weapons. The war in Europe can continue because nobody in “The West” wants to really upset Russia. And Russia knows it.

As for the conflict no longer (?) escalating spookily close to Tel Megiddo, how are we handling that? We’re air-dropping supplies, voting at the UN, making speeches, dropping hints. Because — I’m guessing here — we don’t want to upset the voters back home by sounding too warlike.

I’m sure all those hostile state actors with “obliterate-thy-neighbour” written into their constitutions will be terrified that we might say nasty things about them if they cross the next red line.

I’ve just watched Roosevelt’s speech after Pearl Harbour. He wasn’t worried about upsetting Japan.

Deterrence is all about being believable. So is winning. End of story.

Trigger Warning!

9/4/2024

UK politics! Weather! Forecasting!

Here is my forecast for the next nine months in the UK.

Torrential rain will continue to fall.

Until, suddenly, it stops. Completely. For the rest of the year.

The dry season will begin. The land will be parched. Crops will dry up in the fields. Wildfires will rage across the Scottish Highlands.

[No! They won’t! Not the Scottish Highlands!]

Shock! Horror! Public Enquiry!
It will emerge that the water companies have failed to catch a single drop of rain-water during this present wet season. Hosepipes will be banned. Stand-pipes will be installed in high streets. Water will be rationed.

It will further emerge that the water companies have been running a lucrative business taking in other countries’ sewage, for disposal, and pumping it onto our beaches and dried-up river-beds.

There will be calls for a public enquiry. There will be an argument about whether the public enquiry should be an independent public enquiry. A retired judge will be appointed to head the public enquiry. Nothing more will be heard from the public enquiry.

Making sure
Various strains of foreign knotweed will be spotted growing in our dried-up river-beds. It will emerge that these alien plants are (a) very hardy and (b) very invasive and (c) poisonous to cows, sheep and horses.

Ministers will say “We must make sure something is done.” Nothing will be done.

The government will say that it has “already spent six billion on ensuring that something is done”. Nothing will be done.

Barbie 2 will launch in cinemas across the UK. It will be announced that Barbie 3 is in development.

Nine “red wall” Conservative MPs will defect to the Labour Party. Three will defect to the Liberal Democrats and one will defect to the Green Party.

One defecting MP will be accused of not having a “red wall” seat at all, but a boringly ordinary, no-longer-safe Conservative seat. “I’ve always made it very clear that I support the red wall,” he will say.

That’s not salt!
The Prime Minister will clarify that when he said the General Election would be held “later in the year”, he meant that it would be held at the very end of the year and possibly not before the final possible date of 28th January 2025.

“I’ve always made it very clear that the General Election will be held at the right time,” he will say.

The opposition Labour Party will drop all its policy pledges. “We’ve always made it very clear that we are running on a promise to save the country,” the Labour leader will say.

Filming of Dune 3 will begin in the arid desert that was once the Cotswolds in November.

The first of nine desalination plants will be opened by a water company on the Dorset coast near Lyme Regis on the Jurassic Coast.

In what is intended to be a witty gesture, media packs for the opening of the desalination plant will all include one small fossilised coprolite. It is later judged that this was a mistake.

Working through the night
It will emerge that the prime minister was third in the race to be first to congratulate the president after the US election. “I’ve always made it very clear that it’s not a race,” the prime minister will say.

At COP29 in Azerbaijan, delegates will work through the night to agree the wording of a Final Declaration calling for targets.

A British journalist will point out that the Final Declaration includes whole paragraphs cut and pasted from the COP28 Final Declaration. The COP29 president will describe this intervention as “not helpful”.

Endgame
With barely three weeks to go before the final date for the UK general election, a podium will be brought out one morning and placed in front of 10 Downing Street.

Journalists behind the barrier on the other side of Downing Street will spend the morning talking to their cameras about “the famous black door”. As the hours continue to pass, they will reminisce desperately about past announcements from “the famous podium”.

By mid-afternoon, they will be reminiscing about “the famous cat”, and wondering live on air how various functionaries feel about being filmed as they come and go.

By mid-evening, they will be talking about the darkening sky, famously dark at this time of night of course, but dark with no stars tonight and will the prime minister think this an omen?

And we’re cutting back to the studio — no! — I think there’s movement, the door, that famous door, is opening, as it does when people come in and out, and — yes!

And we’re seeing the prime minister approaching the famous podium, the prime minister who of course we all recognise, whom I should say, he’s coming up to the podium now, he’s about to speak, and --

The heavens open. Rain falls. Thunder crashes.

The whole nation washes itself clean.

I’d like to mention the late Denis Howell, who was appointed Minister for Drought in August 1976, during the driest Summer in the UK for 200 years, as a member of the then-Labour UK government.

Within days of Mr Howell’s appointment, the rain started and didn’t stop; the Minister for Drought became (officially) the Minister for Floods. Then, in the cold Winter of 1978/79, Mr Howell was appointed Minister for Snow. There was a lot of it. But it did stop.

Denis Howell was a principled politician with a humorous side. I don’t know much more about him than I’ve written here, but I do remember him, and I also remember reactions to him, and and I think it’s fair to say that overall, he was a positive presence at a difficult time in British politics.

FI, not AI, surely?

7/4/2024

What is the value of a machine that is intelligent?

Nothing, unless it’s interested.

Cramming large-language models with text is no more valuable than giving them “yes” and “no” and a statistical model for working out the frequency of each answer.

Back to basics
The Turing Test is about fooling us.

The machine can’t be definitively identified as a machine — it’s fooled us. It’s played “the imitation game” successfully by imitating intelligence, not by being intelligent.

So the whole pursuit of artificial intelligence is the pursuit of the perfect fake, not the real thing.

Okay, got that.

The intuition game
But how are we defining intelligence here? It’s a commonplace in the discussion of ChatGPT and its friends that they come up with idiotic responses.

We can trust them to talk confidently and fluently, but not to make sense. Nor indeed to know what they’re talking about.

Intelligence is stupidity unless it understands itself and the context in which it’s active. The surveillance economy is not acting intelligently, for example, if my purchase of the second book in a series triggers a lot of energetic marketing for the first book.

Read the room, don’t miss the books
Ha! Books. I get occasional emails suggesting that I “might like to buy” books written by William Essex.

An intelligent intelligence would know why I haven’t felt the need to buy those books — despite their being so brilliantly wonderful and absolutely worth buying, of course.

How many more examples do I need here?

Uh, it kind of makes my point that the answer to that question is so obviously — none.

We know AI, don’t we?

The human factor
And while I’m on a roll here — communication is 55 per cent body language and 38 per cent tone of voice. If I’m face to face with somebody, they can read my mood. Beat that, Skynet!

I’m going to add: intelligence is mostly intuition and reading the room.

It’s interest. It’s curiosity.

It’s not lots of words cadged without permission from human writers (the best kind).

Baby steps
When an intelligence is born, not made, it lies in a cot being fed information by its parents.

Over time, it learns how to operate itself and it begins to explore its surroundings. Over more time, crucially, it becomes curious, and eventually, it learns to draw its own conclusions from its various inputs.

It learns independence. That’s a mark of intelligence.

Cue ominous music.

The development process of natural intelligence
Children learn from who their parents are, and how they behave, as well as from what they’re told and shown. They do the same with teachers, siblings, peer group, kindly aunt, weird uncle, et cetera.

After all, we may remember our teachers, but not what our teachers were trying to tell us.

Maybe the scientists currently shovelling Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Francoise Sagan, Gertrude Stein, Desmond Morris, Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Kathy Acker and the Marquis de Sade into their pet projects should study this process.

Intelligence is the ongoing evolution of a subjective response to information, not the information itself.

It’s curiosity, and eventually, it’s answering back.

If we’re going to make it real, let’s make it kind.

That's Not My Cloud!

6/4/2024

What if the next place is a surprise?

In the film Meet Joe Black (1998), Death (played by Brad Pitt) decides that he’d like to take a holiday (and be shown around by Anthony Hopkins).
The transition out of life is described at one point as moving on to “the next place”. That’s in a conversation between Brad Pitt’s character and an elderly hospital patient (played by — enough with the brackets!) played by Lois Kelly-Miller.
I enjoyed watching Meet Joe Black years ago, and the DVD’s on my shelf somewhere. Might watch it again.
[Aside: interesting where the pauses come in writing. I’ve just hovered between “my” shelf, “a” shelf, “my bookshelf” and “one of my bookshelves” when in fact I know that DVD’s on the shelf half-way up the stairs.]
But what was front-and-centre in my mind when --
[Sorry to interrupt; just gone and counted them — on one of the four shelves half-way up the stairs.]
— what was front-and-centre in my mind when I woke up this morning was the phrase “the next place”. I can’t tell you very much about the dream that put it there, but I lay --
[Had to check. Middle of the bottom shelf. Sorry!]
— I lay in bed thinking: wouldn’t it be a funny story if the next place wasn’t the one we were expecting?
[Only half-awake, and I’m already telling myself a story. I feel good about that. I did have to grab my phone because I couldn’t remember the name of that film with Brad Pitt — but that doesn’t mean anything.]
I wasn’t thinking “the next place” in --
[At my age, memory lapses are to be expected. I’m holding up five fingers as I type this and the president’s name is Ronald Reagan. I’m fine I tell you!]
I wasn’t thinking “the next place” in an Up or Down sense — no, that wouldn’t be funny — but what if the next place was actually Valhalla and not, I don’t know, one of those New Yorker cartoons in which two people stand on a cloud holding harps?
Or maybe there’s a ferryboat and I can either produce a coin to pay for my crossing or go back and haunt people?
Now, there’s a story.
What does the ghost want? The ghost wants your spare change.
Never mind the dream; I’m enjoying being awake.

Words and Power

Trigger Warning!

FI, not AI, surely?

That's Not My Cloud!

Dear Diary: The Archive