Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

if the universe is a simulation, can it crash?

Leave a reply

Hopefully, if the universe is a simulation, it is a stable one. And if it crashes, whatever intelligent entity is out there can call his or her IT guy, spin it up again, fast forward to where it left off, and we won’t know the difference. If it is a simulation, do we really want to know? This article in Scientific American says that if we really want to know, one way to test whether it is a simulation is to try to crash it on purpose. So how would you do that? One way is to build our own simulated universes, then let them build their own simulated universes, and so on. At some point, the hardware of our universe should not be able to run all those universes. So to get to this point, we need to keep working on building way faster computers.

robotic fighter planes

Leave a reply

Robotic fighter planes are here. I remember reading one article (which I can’t find at the moment) about a test where human pilots were unable to beat them in a simulation. The simulation is unimportant, because the robots were unconstrained and allowed to sacrifice themselves if that gave them the greatest chance of taking out the enemy fighter. And that is just what they did – play chicken with the human pilots, whose instinct was to try to preserve themselves and their expensive planes. Anyway, here is another article from Forbes about a “robotic wingman” called Skyborg. Beyond the apocalyptic name (Terminator bad guys meet Star Trek bad guys?), the article focuses on intricacies of Pentagon procurement. Suffice it to say, the companies involved (who probably issued a press release that led to this article) hope there will be lots of procurement.

AI and rural jobs

Leave a reply

This Wired article is written by a Microsoft executive originally from the southwest corner of Virginia, which is where I happen to be originally from. He gives a few examples of how technology can transform old jobs and create new jobs in out of the way places.

  • Running “automated” farming equipment requires some combination of mechanical fix-it ability and IT help desk ability.
  • Keeping the books at a nursing home chain requires some fairly advanced database skills.
  • Precision plastic parts can be molded locally by technicians trained at community college, rather than ordered from abroad.

December 2019 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Most hopeful story:

  • Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

October 2019 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)

Most hopeful story:

  • I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story!  

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.

There will still be openings for evil HR cats.

Cognizant Jobs of the Future Index

Leave a reply

What kind of education and job skills should you recommend to young people today (assuming career/economic success is the goal. Yes, the world needs philosophers and musicians but sadly that is not a path to material success for many)? I figure biotech, materials science, robotics and computer science (deep theoretical understanding and/or engineering, not just code writing). Again, if material/economic success is the goal, I think you need knowledge and skills that are attractive to the private sector. (My own are mostly of interest to the public sector. I don’t regret my choices but this does put a ceiling on the potential size of my bank account.) There should be plenty of jobs in education and health care services, but not necessarily well paying ones at least in the U.S. I think there will always be plumbers and electricians.

Okay, now let’s see if I’m right. Here is the Cognizant Jobs of the Future Index. There are way too many jobs to list here, but their categories are:

  • algorithms, automation, and AI (okay, this is the computer science route, although someone could also try the math/statistics or even actuarial science path)
  • customer experience (this appears to cover what might be traditionally known as sales and marketing)
  • environmental (includes energy-related fields and environmental engineering – well, what do you know, maybe my choices aren’t so bad after all…)
  • fitness and wellness (home health care, physical therapy, etc. – things an aging population will need and hard to automate at least in the near term)
  • health care (includes the obvious, but also data science, genetic related, and medical device engineering related jobs)
  • legal and financial services (yes, lawyers will still be a necessary evil)
  • transportation (more on the engineering and planning side, not so much taxi and truck drivers…)
  • work culture (your human resources department will also continue to be a necessary evil)

So, I think a kid could do worse than a degree in chemical, mechanical or electrical engineering, then specialize from there. (Civil/environmental is nice…but again…the public sector thing). If you want to be a doctor or lawyer, go for it. The world will still need artists, philosophers, and in general people who can think, understand systems and solve problems, but it is still unclear when we will start valuing these things.

UAE and AI

Leave a reply

A couple interesting facts I learned in this article: (1) The United Arab Emirates has a “Minister of AI” and (2) 89% of workers in the country are foreign-born. The author makes a case that the citizens of the country value their leisure time more than westerners and are willing to embrace state ownership of the means of production with as much automation as possible.

June 2019 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!

Most hopeful story:

  • There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.