Let’s play “spot the flaw in that argument!”

Today’s exciting game will be played with quotes from Softbank Robotics CEO Masayoshi Son given at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A tech CEO? This will be a target-rich opportunity. You can expect a flurry of ambitious exaggerations from this one!

Players at home, you know what to do: get your buzzers ready, and slap that big red button and be prepared to give a succinct summary of what exactly was wrong with the statement. If you are chosen, you stand a chance to win fabulous prizes.

Are you ready? Brace yourselves, here it comes:

In 30 years, the singularity

Whoa! That was quick! The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with that one. Too easy?

OK, first answer is from Ronald in Ohio, who takes exception to the 30 year claim. No, I’m sorry, Ronald, you do not win a prize. That number is actually correct. As we all know, the singularity is always 30 years away.

Our next caller is Darlene in Seattle, who asks, “What the heck is a singularity?” and — judges, what is your call on that? — the judges say yes! That is a damn good question! Pierces right to the heart of the issues! It’s a quasi-mystical boojum that is invoked in place of the idea of “heaven”, which makes many technocrats uncomfortable because it is too unsciencey.

But poor Son, we didn’t even finish his quote. Here’s the rest:

will happen and artificial intelligence in all the smart devices and robots will exceed human intelligence.

Ouch! Our board lit up so bright that the room lights flickered and dimmed! Let’s take…caller #1274. Vonda in Florida, what’s your criticism?

“Thanks for taking my call, PZ. I’ve been trying to get through for years, and this is my first time on.”

Great, Vonda. And the flaw you spotted is…?

“Well, there’s a couple: one is that he can’t define ‘human intelligence’, and another is that he can’t possibly define it as a single scalar in a range on one axis that you could speak of something exceeding something else.”

Excellent, Vonda! Judges? Yes, the judges agree! Let’s move on with this juicy speech.

Just to give you a hint, Son is about to try to answer Vonda’s question:

Son says that by 2047, a single computer chip will have an IQ of 10,000 — far surpassing the most intelligent people in the world.

Yikes! The responses are pouring in —

Dmitri in Siberia: “…absurd reductionism. You can’t assign intelligence a single number…”

Kim in Korea: “…what kind of IQ test can generate scores that high…”

Jim in Manitoba: “…if you can measure the IQ of a computer, tell me what the IQ of a Dell Windows 10 machine is right now…”

Rudy in New South Wales: “…God won’t let a computer get that smart…”

Andrea in New York: “…IQ tests are designed to test human minds…”

OK! Except for Rudy, you all win!

I’m going to let Son complete his thought. Don’t buzz in on this one, gang, we’re just going to let him finish digging that hole already.

Where the greatest geniuses of the human race have had IQ’s of about 200, Son says, within 30 years, a single computer chip will have an IQ of 10,000. “What should we call it,” he asks. “Superintelligence. That is an intelligence beyond people’s imagination [no matter] how smart they are. But in 30 years I believe this is going to become a reality.”

I know. It’s embarrassing. The man is a CEO and he doesn’t understand what IQ is, and thinks that sticking a “super” prefix on something makes it clever or informative. Maybe he’s just hoping that if he lives another 30 years, he might learn something.

Let’s go on. This one is for scoring:

Son built this prediction by comparing the number of neurons in a brain to the number of transistors.

Uh-oh. The Big Board is on fire. Literally on fire. Hold those calls!

He builds the comparison by pointing out that both systems are binary, and work by turning on and off.

Oh, christ, we’ve got a thousand enraged neuroscientists trying to get through. Watch out! Those cables are shorting out! Get the studio audience out of here!

According to his predictions, the number of transistors in a computer chip will surpass the number of neurons in a human brain by 2018. He is using 30 billion as the number of neurons, which is lower than the 86 billion that is estimated right now, but Son says he isn’t worried about being exactly right on that number.

Oh god. He actually said he isn’t worried about being exactly right on the number? With this audience? Cut the power. Cut the power! Call emergency services!

Wait, what’s that loud rumbling sound I’m hearing from the bowels of the building? The generators? GET OU…

technicaldifficulties

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

I have confused feelings about this story: an Australian writer, Mem Fox, was treated to American-style customs.

The room was like a waiting room in a hospital but a bit more grim than that. There was a notice on the wall that was far too small, saying no cellphones allowed, and anybody who did use a cellphone had someone stand in front of them and yell: “Don’t use that phone!” Everything was yelled, and everything was public, and this was the most awful thing, I heard things happening in that room happening to other people that made me ashamed to be human.

There was an Iranian woman in a wheelchair, she was about 80, wearing a little mauve cardigan, and they were yelling at her – “Arabic? Arabic?”. They screamed at her “ARABIC?” at the top of their voices, and finally she intuited what they wanted and I heard her say “Farsi”. And I thought heaven help her, she’s Iranian, what’s going to happen?

There was a woman from Taiwan, being yelled at about at about how she made her money, but she didn’t understand the question. The officer was yelling at her: “Where does your money come from, does it grow on trees? Does it fall from the sky?” It was awful.

There was no toilet, no water, and there was this woman with a baby. If I had been holed up in that room with a pouch on my chest, and a baby crying, or needing to be fed, oh God … the agony I was surrounded by in that room was like a razor blade across my heart.

There are some things I’m not confused about: that was criminal and horrific, and ought to bring deep shame to all Americans. What kind of stupid people are doing this job that they think YELLING at someone who doesn’t understand their language somehow makes them comprehensible?

But what bugs me is that this story becomes newsworthy only when it happens to a white woman — as if the injustice is amplified because the target is someone innocent of the crime of being brown. No criticism of Mem Fox intended, but of the media and the people who assume it isn’t news if it’s not happening to someone who looks like them.

Where is the story of the Iranian woman in a wheelchair, the Taiwanese woman, the woman with a baby? Is anyone following up with them, or is their story not as credible or sympathetic as that of a white woman?

And most importantly, where is the follow-up to expose the immigration thugs who are perpetrating these offenses?

Here we go again

It’s a too familiar story: man declares his dedication to feminism, man gets exposed for harassing women. The latest disappointment/betrayal comes from the comedian Jamie Kilstein, and his ex-partner Allison Kilkenny has the summary. He’s out of Citizen Radio.

This is heartbreaking because I like Jamie, I respect his talent, and in the past I’ve defended him. This is another familiar part of the story, that I’m too often the last to know, too loyal to my friends, and I end up being shaken by the regrets in the face of undeniable serious problems. Once again I’m caught gawping in disbelief that a friend would do this.

The only solution: I’ve decided to have no more friends forever, especially not male friends (secondarily, no female friends, because why should they trust yet another unreliable guy like me?). Heart of stone, people, soul of ice. It’s the only way to keep from disintegrating.

More details.

Another reason to be cranky

This week we worked out our teaching schedules for next year, and it has been determined that next Fall I will teach cell biology and a section of our writing course, and in the Spring I will teach…evolution (a new course for me) and neurobiology (a course I haven’t taught in over 5 years), which is going to be painfully intense, possibly worse than this semester. I think the anticipation of stress is contributing to my insomnia.

It will be an interesting time, at any rate. I have some of the same complaints about the current status of neuroscience that Ed Yong describes.

But you would never have been able to predict the latter from the former. No matter how thoroughly you understood the physics of feathers, you could never have predicted a murmuration of starlings without first seeing it happen. So it is with the brain. As British neuroscientist David Marr wrote in 1982, “trying to understand perception by understanding neurons is like trying to understand a bird’s flight by studying only feathers. It just cannot be done.”

Oh, man, Marr was amazing. I could just spend the whole semester trying to puzzle out his work on color perception, which is a perfect example of complex processing emerging out of simple subunits, all figured out with elegant experiments. I went through his vision book years ago, it was bewilderingly complex.

A landmark study, published last year, beautifully illustrated his point using, of all things, retro video games. Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording examined the MOS 6502 microchip, which ran classics like Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, in the style of neuroscientists. Using the approaches that are common to brain science, they wondered if they could rediscover what they already knew about the chip—how its transistors and logic gates process information, and how they run simple games. And they utterly failed.

Wait! That’s perfect! I once knew the 6502 inside and out, writing code in assembler and even eventually being able to read machine code directly. I still have some old manuals from the 1970s stashed away somewhere. I wonder if the students would appreciate signing up for a course on how brains work and then spending the semester trying to figure out how an antique 8-bit chip works by attaching an oscilloscope to pin leads?

Even when I last taught it, that was the struggle. It was easy to give them the basics of membrane biophysics — it’s all math and chemistry — but the step from that to behavior was huge. If I just teach it from top down, beginning with behavior, it’s a psychology course, which is a subject so vast that we’d never get down to the cellular level. There is no in-between yet.

I have a year to fret about it. Who needs sleep anyway?

I wish to complain

I have a sore throat. And a hacking cough. And sinuses full of phlegm. That combo means every night is a struggle to get any sleep, and tonight I’m staggering out of bed at 2am.

What it also means is that every day I’m in a foul, snarling mood, ready to punch Nazis in the face, but also so debilitated that there’s no way I could adequately carry out said punching. This is an injustice.

Minnesota has neo-Nazis!

I’ve known that for a long time — the first year I moved here, I had to deal with a chicken farmer (my source for fertilized eggs) who was proudly Nazi, served in WWII on the American side but was impressed with how clean and orderly Germany was, named his German Shepherd “Eva” after you-know-who, and presented me with a copy of Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Sweet guy.

Now, emboldened by the election of a fascist, other neo-Nazis are stepping up their game. Some of them marched into the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to guard the artworks from the socialist IWW members who were counterprotesting outside.

The Star Tribune reports a “trio” of guys “said to look like neo-Nazis” entered the museum on Saturday afternoon and headed for the third floor. According to a witness, they were there to “guard” classical European (read: white) art that happened to be placed near a protest-themed exhibit with photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. (The horror.)

Turns out the alleged neo-Nazis were the ones who could’ve used guards: Quoting the same witness, the Star Tribune says some protesters had followed the three fellows in and confronted them. Words were exchanged, and a “shoving match” ensued, with at least a few “punches thrown.” A museum spokeswoman says one among the right-wingers was “attacked,” but declined to press charges.

There was also some bozo outside throwing Nazi salutes and shouting “Heil Trump”.

Some advice: the art in the museum doesn’t need protection from socialists. Socialists tend not to be on the side of anti-cultural thuggery. That would be the Nazis. Nazis only defend art when they see an opportunity to appropriate it.

That said, however, the IWW committed a grievous faux pas. We do not punch Nazis in places where it endangers valuable works of art. Punch nazis outside. Remember that.

Obviously, Republicans have no understanding of academia at all

You’ve probably heard already that several Republican legislatures want to dictate the ideology of their universities. The American Association of University Professors has sent out this email:

Shortly after the 2016 election, the AAUP warned that we could be facing the greatest threat to academic freedom since the McCarthy period. It now appears that such a warning was not misplaced. Extremists in the administration, Congress, and several state houses have created an atmosphere in which “alternative facts” reign supreme, and which encourages the introduction of legislation that threatens the core principles of our democracy.

The latest examples of extreme legislation come from Iowa and North Carolina. In Iowa, a bill has been introduced that would prohibit the hiring of a professor or instructor at a public university or college if his or her most recent party affiliation would “cause the percentage of the faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by 10 percent” the percentage of the faculty belonging to the other dominant party.

In North Carolina, legislation (since tabled) was introduced that would require tenure-track and tenured faculty members to “reflect the ideological balance of the citizens of the state,” so that no campus “shall have a faculty ideological balance of greater or less than 2 percent of the ideological balance” of North Carolinians.

Many may rightly believe that initiatives like these cannot pass and that if passed they would be overturned immediately by the courts. However, the introduction of such legislation has a chilling effect. Moreover, implicit in these proposals is the demand that prospective and current faculty members disclose their political affiliations and personal political views as a condition of employment, which is precisely what happened during the McCarthy period.

The AAUP opposes in the strongest terms any legislation that would create an ideological or political litmus test as a qualification for employment as a faculty member at a university or college. Our commitment to academic freedom is rooted in a vision of democracy that thrives on dissent, critical inquiry, free speech, and free research. We will continue to join with other organizations to resist threats to academic freedom, legislative intrusions into higher education, and harassment of faculty.

These are stupid initiatives, and normally I’d laugh them off and suggest that no way could they actually come to pass, but then I thought there was no way our stupid candidate could come to the highest office in the country.

No ghosts, and no afterlife of any kind

Basic stuff: Brian Cox explains that there’s no physics to support the existence of ghosts, but I’ve also heard Sean Carroll explain the same idea.

Recent polls have found that 42 percent of Americans and 52 percent of people in the UK believe in ghosts – a huge percentage when you consider that no one has ever come up with irrefutable proof that they even exist.

But we might have had proof that they don’t exist all along, because as British theoretical physicist Brian Cox recently pointed out, there’s no room in the Standard Model of Physics for a substance or medium that can carry on our information after death, and yet go undetected in the Large Hadron Collider.

“If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist, then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern, and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made,” Cox, from the University of Manchester, explained in a recent episode of BBC’s The Infinite Monkey Cage.

“We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.”

I can almost hear the protests already: But that’s mere physics, the afterlife is metaphysical and supernatural and whatever other meaningless cliches they want to sputter. Read carefully. We, our bodies, are physical and bound by the laws of physics. If you want to claim there is a floofy physics-free metauniverse where your consciousness dwells, you still have to deal with the fact that there must be some kind of bridge or interface between our material forms and that etheric plane you believe must exist. There has to be an interaction, or there is no connection between my worldly identity and self and consciousness and the ghost/soul you claim is the actual me.

To put it in words the New Agers might understand, the vibrations have to resonate with my brain — and we’ve mapped all the frequencies that could do that, and we’re done, there are none left over to accommodate magic. Sorry.

There is also lots of other evidence against an afterlife, like the lack of empirical evidence, the inconsistencies of ghost stories, the necessity of mundane biology to maintain a mind, etc. The evidence for an afterlife consists entirely of wishful thinking.