danni naeil

Category: Books

  • Book review: Unmasking AI

    Book review: Unmasking AI

    I simply don’t have the time to review the books I read concurrently with papers and book chapters from the courses I study. Only in the last month, I’ve read about 30 papers on mining, Indigenous peoples, sovereignty and territory. So, Joy Buolamwini’s book Unmasking AI: My mission to protect what is human in a world of machines I actually finished in April last year.

    Buolamwini is a computer scientist from MIT, who rose to stardom while doing research proving how artificial intelligence programs were trained on very skewed and distorted amounts of data. She mentions the Shirley card: a photographic standard with a white woman as the “ideal composition and exposure setting.” This is included in Brian Christian’s brilliant The Alignment Problem, the book where I found her name.

    Overarching aims of the book

    There are two important terms in the book. Algorithmic bias occurs when one is disfavoured or discriminated by an AI-program, and coded gaze is evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion of certain people in technology. As Buolamwini does research on artificial intelligence in image processing, she discovers how algorithmic bias underlies many programs, and the coded gaze excludes her own face from being detected by an AI program.

    I agree wholeheartedly with her overarching approach: artificial intelligence will not solve climate change, racism or poverty. In the words of Rumman Chowdhury, “the moral outsourcing of hard decisions to machines does not solve the underlying social dilemmas.” Buolamwini continues: “AI reflects both the aspirations and limitations of its makers.” We must take initiatives to also halt our stop tools.

    Another important term is the AI functionality fallacy, normally called hallucination, which is, simply, when “the system doesn’t work properly,” though most people will be fooled by the program itself and believe it is working.

    Facial recognition technologies are the core of her research, as she states “there are many different types of face-related tasks that machines can perform.” I’m grateful she separates face/facial detection and facial recognition. Not many people explain the difference, which can be tremendous. When a program can detect a face, it’s face/facial detection. Facial recognition is when the program can discern faces, separate them, and might even be able to see who is who.

    Technological details

    For being a book for lay people, she takes a pleasant dive into technological details of how artificial intelligence programs can work, on nodes and neural networks. She asks very important ethical questions, which constitute a cornerstone of this book and her fame: “Was the data obtained with consent? What were the working conditions and compensation for the workers who processed the data?”

    Furthermore, she explains the importance of classification and strategic sampling of things and people. Being a student, her methods and choices of data collection are interesting. It matters much which data you choose and why you actually choose it. It needs thorough discussion in research. Motifs, reasons, usage should be transparent and well-comprehended by others.

    The power of labeling – ground truth – is in the hands of a very few people. What is depicted in an image? Few people hold the power to classify people, animals, plants, cars etc, and the abilities such as gender, sex, skin tone. The world gets a little more static in the form of gender and sexual orientation, although people are more fluid, not a brand stuck in time.

    Methodological issues

    The publication of her master’s thesis had implications for people’s jobs in companies related to her research. This very thing we discussed in one of my courses: how do you justify publication of your research if people or organisations are named? Is it truly justified? Why do you want to achieve: Attention, improvement, a job? This is an issue for me, since she mentions she excluded the worst findings: that would’ve been complete heresy in the social sciences. You include the general and the deviant, you don’t unselect data. That would severely damage your credibility.

    Affronted celebrity

    She, among others, is, as she writes later in the book, excluded as a participant on 60 Minutes. She is affronted and aggrieved. Together with teams of people she writes a petition to CBS.

    How many of us have “teams of people” signing a petition to a TV channel? In the book she mentions how she put at a lot of work into this participation, while also writing the last of her PhD dissertation. Funnily, we discussed this kind of behaviour in class : what happens to a researcher who’s used to stand in the spotlight, who’s used to be listened to? What happens when a researcher becomes an activist and a media star? Here, I think Buolamwini doesn’t see clearly, even when she admits she’s used to the spotlight.

    It could be that we, in this regard, live in very different countries, since a researcher here couldn’t really do all the commercials, sponsor documentaries covering themselves and running organisations doing similar work to their research project. It could be that I’m a social scientist, so this kind of critical thinking is supposed to pervade our education. It could be that our self-confidence differs greatly. You simply can’t take yourself that much for granted. But I do clearly think that she couldn’t blame anyone but herself for doing too many things at the same time. There’s only so much one person can do and accepting limitations is necessary, without blaming others. Furthermore, I disagree with her on being excluded as a black woman only. Most likely because she can’t see her own privilege after all the media attention. How many people achieves this status after a few years? I know researchers who can’t even get published in local news because they’re deemed not interesting or irrelevant. I know researchers who perceive you as mainstream, lame and non-critical if you participate on commercial conferences, on TV and in commercials, that you’re part of the system you pretend to fight. Lastly, simply because you think what you’re doing is important, doesn’t mean everyone else will, or at least not all the time.

    This is the only bad part of the book, but it is bad. Lamenting not being shown on national American TV, as if everyone famous is entitled to it, as if being famous for a cause equals the rights to be seen, heard, listened to.

    All in all

    Still, she’s impressive. During an ad campaign for Olay, she delves on the advantages and disadvantages of doing a campaign for skin care. It can seem shallow at first, but I definitely comprehend the reasons to do it. Women of colour are many times excluded, not being targeted as consumers. And why shouldn’t people want to look good, even if it depends on skin products? Why shouldn’t activists have the right to promote something they deem is important? To fight for inclusion and the right to be vain or good looking or whatever is part of democracy.

  • Book review: World on the Brink

    Book review: World on the Brink

    Sinea deterrendae sunt – China must be deterred. That is the maxim of World on the Brink: How America can beat China in the race for the Twenty-First Century by Dmitri Alperovitch (and Garrett M. Graff). The title is self-revelatory, because the book is mainly about China, the United States and Taiwan.

    Unfortunately, the book begins with an illustration of what a Chinese attack on said island-nation could look like, and several times before I’ve complained about the future as an example. It gets tiresome presenting the near future for an audience, however feasible and smart it may be.

    Taiwan

    The authors delve into the shifting antagonistic and fascinating periods of relations between the US and China, how entwined their histories have been for approximately 300 years. One center is the island of Taiwan, earlier called Formosa after the Portuguese word beautiful, home of the semiconductor giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), producer of Apple’s and nVIDIA’s chips.

    A blow to TSMC would, and I concur amateur as I am, most likely cause the global economy to collapse. TSMC, alongside the Dutch company Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (ASLM), are considered (perhaps) the two most important companies in the world. The authors draw on Chris Miller’s fantastic book Chip War, and it truly is very hard not to acknowledge Alperovitch and Graff’s perception of these two companies as the pinnacle of modern human civilization. Without them no cars, phones, computers, satellites, HIMARs, airplanes etc.

    The Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) considers the island a province of China, a natural part of the mainland, so to speak. Little did I know the former Chinese empire did have a presence on the island, but never acknowledged it dominated and subjugated the island. Only after the Kuomintang fled the mainland and the Communist party conquered it, did the CCP turn its eyes on Taiwan (still named Formosa for many).

    Opening China

    Zhou Enlai, the eminent premier under (the crazy idiot) Mao Zedong uttered words about Taiwan, that sums it all up, to Henry Kissinger: “That place is no great use to you, but a great wound to us.” Richard Nixon, another paranoid leader, wrote some very insightful words about China though: “There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in isolation.” Thus ensued the pivot under Nixon and Jimmy Carter, when China earned the status of Most Favoured Nation, and could rely on a steady growth related to trade with the US.

    It’s funny how things work out in reality: Pax Americana, with its financial and economic system, benefited China perhaps more than any other nation, and hopes were that China would become democratic. It was seen as unavoidable (the Olympic Games in 2008 contradict this, but the economic perspective and thirst prevailed).

    Anyone studying China knows that the importance of “The Century of Humiliation forms the spine of the People Republic’s founding mythology, where the party emerged as China’s rightful rules by avenging it’s indignities and restoring it’s honor”, as put by the reporter Chun Han Wong (cited by Alperovitch and Graff). Following Mao, Deng Xiaoping, in turn, spread the famous motto of “hide your strength, bide your time” (or “hide our capabilities, bide our time” as it truly was?). Roughly ten years ago a new leader emerged, who initiated the wolf warrior diplomacy and the current motto of “show your strength, waste no time.”

    Cold War Two

    Taiwan is Berlin during the 1950- and 60’s, and the US must “protect and preserve it as a bastion of Western alliance and avoid provoking a devastating global conflagration until an era of stability can take hold.” They agree with Theodore Roosevelt on “speak softly but carry a big stick.” Too late did the US understand that the so called cold war had begun decades earlier. Soviet spies and propaganda had been working against the US and only in the 1950’s did the Americans comprehend the scope of hostility and actions from the USSR. The Chinese hostile relation towards the US was proven, Alperovitch muses, in 2009 while Chinese hackers penetrated Google and a host of other American companies. Thus, a cold war is a concept, which relies on the defender to comprehend hostile actions. History shows this conception, perception, can take decades to comprehend.

    Next comes American arrogance. Americans have been prone to ignore threats and hostile actions at first, and later, they’ve had an inconsistent threat perception. Alperovitch and Graff argue that the American policy nowadays in shortsighted and incoherent in comparison to the anti-Soviet policy’s focus on the defeat of the Soviet Union. A real policy is based on the defeat of the Chinese communist party, requiring diplomatic, economic and military deterrent, a readiness to act at all times.

    Respectful and supportive treatment of friends will convince Europe China is a real threat. This the Biden administration has done, in my regard. Biden has let allies and his secretaries into the spotlight, given them room and spotlight. Biden has understood how allies appreciate information-sharing, carrots, not sticks, and support, although the US needs to step up more and needs to let countries know the US is on their side, be they the Phillipines or Sweden, according to Alperovitch and Graff.

    Population collapse

    I once wrote a very small examination on China and the gendercide/infanticide of girls and female foetuses. In China (and India) tens of millions of girls have been killed and female foetuses been aborted without medical reasons, resulting in a warped gender balance, with far more men than women. Ever since I have thought much about population collapse.

    As a parent (or would-be parent), China is one of the most expensive countries to live in. Funnily, China in this regard is very liberal, turning most costs on the parents, not society. Therefore, the average population estimate is that China has about 700 million inhabitants the year 2100. For Russia, the average estimate is 67 million inhabitants. Both countries are facing a population collapse, which might not have a precedent in countries without natural disasters and war.

    An issue I miss in the book is environmental collapse. A very large proportion of the Chinese population live in densely populated areas, with water scarcity an issue. They do tocuh on air pollution and water scarcity. During the presidency of Hu Jintao many thousand of protests on environmental issues occurred in China annually, now a past phenomena. The environmental issues haven’t decreased during Xi Jinping, but exacerbated. Environmental and population collapse are intertwined and pose a very real threat to the Chinese communist party, and I wish the authors had written about this.

    Semiconductors (and environmental concerns)

    On writing about the importance of semiconductors, they actually do write about environmental issues. This is when the really interesting part begins. They write about the importance of foundational chips, how the US should outmanoeuvre China here, and thus, leading us up to the extremely important critical minerals and rare earth elements (abbreviated REE, also called rare earths).

    Accessing these minerals is challenging, and doing it in an environmentally friendly way is even more so.

    It gladdens me to read how they propose the US should “develop new mining and refining capacity that meets higher labor and environmental standards”, and one way of competing could be to have taxes (in concert with allies and encouraging African and South American countries to follow suit) on “Chinese-processed minerals and the products that contain them”, and ban imported products “from a country that have comparable levels of effectiveness on labor and environment compared to laws in the United States.” Worker safety and sustainable mining are called for, all laudable efforts if realized. I wonder though, if American laws are enough?

    War with the West?

    Misconception and miscomprehension of the enemy is not solely an American problem. Russia has completely miscalculated Ukraine, the US and the EU. The takeover of Ukraine turned into a full-frontal war which has cost about 200.000 dead Russians and they still don’t dominate the four Ukrainian provinces Putin/Russia has annexed. As Alperovitch and Graff puts it:

    The leaders of nations are historically terrible at understand their adversaries’ thinking, in part because leaders – convinced of their own peaceful intentions but wary of the nefariousness of others – tend to underestimate how their own actions will be viewed by others while overestimating the aggression of foreign adversaries.

    Diplomatic relations are a necessity to avoid military confrontation, which can happen very easily. China and the US are more hostile today than in many years, and without diplomatic channels between their respective leadership can lead to complete disaster for everyone on Earth. Recalling nuclear confrontational approaches in the “early” days (from a Western perspective) of the Cold War, it took time to establish “rules” and procedures for avoiding total war between superpowers. The authors urge for diplomatic relations amid deterrence.

    An minor detail: Regarding “normal” cyberespionage, like the (Russian) SolarWinds attacks, this belongs to similar acts the US commits too: “Shame on us for letting it happen, rather than shame on them for trying.” The authors join Shapiro in this regard.

    Conclusion

    “We have to marshal all our resources” to deter China diplomatically, economically and militarily. That’s the simple conclusion of this book, simply because a war between the US and China would be extremely costly in human lives and to the world economy. It would be untenable and cause extreme damage to all of us. The US must therefore focus much of its attention on China, with a clear and outspoken strategy to deter China from ever claiming Taiwan or waging war on the US, without loosing Ukraine.

  • Book review: The Alignment Problem

    Book review: The Alignment Problem

    The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values. How to compress one of the toughest, most intellectually demanding issues of humanity into one book of about 300 pages? I certainly wouldn’t be up for the task. Brian Christian is. A computer scientist inclined on philosophy, and through this book (at least) on psychology too.

    Probably you’ve heard about reinforcement learning in conversations on AI. It originates from psychology and animal behaviourism, like so many other parts of the field of AI (neural networks and temporal differences are two others), while others touch philosophical issues and conundrums humans have pondered on for centuries. Brian Christian, like Johan Harri, travels the world to interview lots of people about how to get machines to understand and obey humans. 

    What’s it like to code artificial intelligence? Think of AI-programming as asking for wishes from a genie. How do you truly and literally articulate three questions for things (for instance, what is a thing or a question even, where does the thing or question begin and where does it end)? How can you ever be sure the provider (program) comprehends the three things precisely the same way as you do? 

    You wish for a long, healthy life. What is long? Stretched out, or with a lifespan beginning and ending clearly? Longevity as in an average human life now or 2.000 years ago, or 120 years in to the future? Long as a star? Long as a giraffe’s neck? What’s included in the word healthy? Not being obese? Not being lanky? Being muscular? Living healthy for 30 years and then suddenly die of an aneurysm? Or to live healthy for 85 years and the fade away during two decades? Does healthy mean you start to smoke, without any repercussions, and it thus causes you to die of a lung or heart disease you otherwise wouldn’t? Does it mean you can suffer from terrible diseases if you catch or cause them, but never have a cold or a light fever? Besides, what is life? (Should you rather be able to wish with your inner thoughts depicted to the receiver? Then what happens if you’re interrupted by other thoughts in those thoughts?)

    These are very simple examples of how hard it is to code, to express what you wish a program to execute. What you wish, you’re very unlikely to express in an exact manner to a machine because you can’t project every single detail to it: The alignment problem.

    Compared to plenty of writers on AI or code (perhaps except for Scott J. Shapiro) Christian really delves into deep issues here. He won’t let you simply read the book, but dives into details and present thoughts, then provoke you with delving deeper and then even deeper. He reasons on driving, for instance: Male drivers are generally worse than female drivers. Applying AI as a solution to this issue could mean male drivers will be targeted primarily, which means fewer targeted female drivers. Thus driving could be worse, since the female drivers then would in general be driving less safe than the remaining male drivers = worse traffic. Applying AI seems simple and straightforward, but very seldom is. Christian concludes that “alignment will be messy.”

    To program artificial intelligence, one also needs to understand politics, sociology and gender – social sciences – because what do words like “good”, “bad”, “accurate”, “female” really mean? Any word needs some context and what is that context, or those contexts? Christian mentions sociologists who can’t reduce models dichotomously, whereas that’s how computer scientists believe reality is perceived. They need to cooperate to adjust the programs to reality as best as they can, which may not always be feasible. As Shapiro writes, you simply can’t reduce reality this way. And messy as it is, you can’t turn the AI program neutral/blind either (just ask Google about the black Nazi soldier produced by Google Bard/Gemini.).

    The alignment problem is thorough. Christian immerses the reader into fields of temporal difference (TD) and sparsity in reinforcement learning, independent and identically distributed in (i.i.d.) supervised/unsupervised learning, redundant coding (like the discussion on gender above mentioned), simple models, saliency, multitask nets and a bunch of guys sitting around the table (BOGSAT).

    This book is a true achievement. This book is a gift to humanity. This is the one book on artificial intelligence to read.

    (If you’re disinclined to read the book, I recommend this podcast episode (though almost three hours long) instead. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/brian-christian-the-alignment-problem/)

  • Book review: Stolen Focus

    Book review: Stolen Focus

    In 2007 Douglas Coupland released the novel jPod. During a trip to the Czech Republic I read it on behest of my girlfriend, and I utterly loved it. Five nerds in cubicles (pods), assigned to their places due to the initial J of their respective surname, in a basement of Neotronic Arts are designing the gore in video/computer games. They’re joined by a sixth member, whose surname also begins with a J and she initially thinks they’re morons. They’re all born at the end of the 1970’s and beginning of the 1980’s and their attention span at work is maximum 15 minutes long. Morally they differ from their parents, they belong to the ego of the digital age and spend lots of time not working (a Gen X trait, Coupland’s generation I dare say). Having read it thrice it remains one of the my favourite books of all time.

    Fast forward to 2008, the year we travelled to the Czech Republic, and “Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and you little ego – it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now” as Johann Hari writes. For someone who’s managed Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts for organisations, I can only agree – it’s invasive and takes control of you. I’m happy jPod was released before social media and the new generation of smartphones wrecked the attention span and ability to focus completely.

    “How to slow down in a world that is speeding up?” Hari continues in the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again. He outlines twelve problems for our individual and collective attention spans, and ability to focus. All of them will not be covered here though. For that, you have to read the book.

    On average a person working in an office is undisturbed for approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Undisturbed by others, that is. The average attention span is merely 47 seconds, because people also interrupt themselves. All the time. Meanwhile it takes 23 minutes to return to a state of focus. Meaning we basically never stay focused.

    Hari interviewed lots of people for this book, James Williams at Oxford Internet Institute being one among them. His words resound deeper than many others (and there’s tons of important words said by intelligent people in the book). We need to take on crucial issues such as climate change, but “when attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down.” This is a hypothesis Hari clings to, and I concur: tearing attention apart means people can’t concentrate, can’t direct energy on proper things. As Hari writes, “Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection.” Mind-wandering is a state of mind people should enjoy more, but instead blocks it out more or less completely by staring at screens. Also due to the thinking that directed thoughts, meaningful thoughts and chores are good, while letting your brain do “nothing” is useless.

    To flood social media with more information is a very good way of blocking debates and conversations – it shortens the collective attention span. Add actual noise and sounds, which both deteriorate hearing capacities. Somehow we believe it’s an equilibrium: you listen to noise and sounds 50 % of the day, and you can recuperate if 50 % is quiet. But that really depends on the noise (background chatter for instance, or cars passing by), the sounds (simple, more occasional sounds) and the silence. Allowing exposure of sounds and noise for hours each day, combined with voices and music, hurts the ears and hearing. Eventually it will deteriorate by system overload. The same with your brain. It cannot evade being disturbed and deteriorates slowly, making you more stupid.

    Hari interviews Sune Lehmann, a Danish researcher on time, who exclaims that the new upperclass will be the ones with very long attention spans, always able to limit information input and aware of what they are actually doing. The rest of us will simply react to the information fed to us. We read and watch stories about people who can sleep less, eat poor and bad food, and still outperform the average person: the Bond villains and the tech prodigies. They never experience sleep deprivation, never seem to slow down. It’s the opposite of Andy Weir’s main protagonist in Project Hail Mary who states that humans become stupid when tired. We don’t comprehend that the reason behind “greatness” is mind-wandering, thoughtful discussions, promenades, information intake (and helpers, such as wives, butlers or servants): Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt writing their speeches and pondering tough decisions, Harry S. Truman thinking through information and memos before making extremely hard decisions. We desperately need the ability to think in order to grasp and tackle climate change, artificial intelligence and other important issues, though with ruined minds and attention spans we won’t. Another quote from James Williams: “You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering and deep thought.” 

    Lehmann reminds me of Cal Newport’s Deep Work: the future will belong to the people who can focus, who can work deep. Because Earl Miller from Massachusetts Institute of Technology says we’ve learned to compare ourselves to computer processors, machine parts with the ability to multitask, when in fact we can’t. When we try to do two or three things simultaneously, our brains are reconfiguring relentlessly. While we may believe we’re doing several things at the same time, our brains constantly start a new chore, gets interrupted by another one, stops and initiates the new chore, then gets interrupted again, stops and tries to reinitiate the first chore but actually has to restart a little bit further back than before, because of the interruption. On it goes. In some small doses it’s worse to check your Facebook feed continuously than to get stoned – and who’s allowed to get stoned at work?

    Hari continues to tackle issues such as school systems reining in our children’s abilities to learn and move (more) freely, diagnosing children with ADHD, how reading on screens is bleeding into how we read paper, and the Western world’s issues with nutrition and obesity (your tired body craves sugar and fat, which is omnipresent, we cannot evade it).

    One thing I appreciate with Hari is how he allows different arguments to meet in the book, carried by other people who oppose one another, or Hari himself. And he ends with hope, telling us about the generation his grandmothers belong to and how one of them fought for universal suffrage in Switzerland in the 1970’s. Regarding the possibility to challenge these twelve distractions, destroying our ability to focus, Hari writes:

    “No source of power, no set of ideas, is so large it can’t be challenged.”

  • Book review: How To Do Nothing

    Book review: How To Do Nothing

    Well. I obviously missed this book when it hyped in 2019. Perhaps I’ve seen it in some bookstore, though I doubt it. Since I’m reading books on technology, Brian Christian (a review on his book The alignment problem is coming soon) mentioned this book on The Ezra Klein Show and I finally read it.

    Jenny Odell, an artist and former teacher at Stanford University, wrote a book on how to do nothing (resisting the attention economy), published in 2019, on… many things. Usually, the books is classified as related to technology (and/or science), which can confuse a reader like me, because it’s not about merely about tech’s (contemporary) inherent obsession with attention and/or societal effects, but about being present, bonding with and relating to other beings, forgetting yourself.

    Odell opposes the sense and notion of time, “especially concerning technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self and community.” Odell’s desire is ”awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community.” We should expand our sense of time, sympathy, empathy and embrace more than ourselves, more than humans. Life isn’t merely about me, my ego. I concur that time is, by many, perceived as production and nothing but production. The Marxist Franco “Bifo” Berardi words are quoted as “time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing””. Listen to many Swedish debates throughout the years, and you’ll hear the arguments against decreasing the numbers of working hours annually, or why weekends, holidays or daylight “saving time” (another book from Odell I’m soon reading) cost money – time isn’t productive. Swedes are their jobs, their occupation – or nothing, meaning you’re nothing if you don’t have an obvious occupation.

    Furthermore, she problematises how come nurturing and tending is unproductive, or at least not as productive as proper (industrial or consumer-based) production, because it’s not producing something new. The newness is inherit in a capitalist economy.

    Later on she questions the ideal of retreating (dubbed “The green wave” in Sweden during the 1970’s, related to Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, another book in-reading) from the hectic city life, with digital detox “treatments” (my brackets), because they’re simply for people with the right resources at their disposal. She urges us to participate, not hide or be exclusively elusive, and contemplate with others, rather than run away in an meaningless effort of releasing ourselves from society.

    Technology

    Related Odell asks “What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?” She argues for placefulness, to be situated in reality, where we actually are at any given moment. How meaningful are digital worlds when climate change alters the very foundation of humanity – is it of any use?

    Odell bashes tech profiles as different as the “tech mogul” (my brackets) Peter Thiel and Tristan Harris (the famous, sympathetic ex-Google employee, co-founder of Center for Humane Technology). She can’t see the difference in their efforts: what are they actually doing to improve the world – to give us more technology? We don’t need it. We must take time to think and act together with other people in real life. We must contemplate and realise the conception and perception of time is different. It simply can’t be seen as merely production.

    “Could augmented reality simply mean putting your phone down? And what (or who) is sitting in front of you when you finally do?” Odell asks. For someone who watched Spike Jonze’s movie Her and adored it, this is a blow. But a good one, right on the cheek where I need it. Reality is where we are, not where we want to be. We cannot create a true disconnect, however much we wish to daydream or watch things on the Internet. You simply cannot wish yourself to Mars or to the next week. You are where you are.

    “… the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment.” Yes. Much has been written on the topic of technology in the shape of social media or the Internet. But Odell turns to the public space. Suddenly, I’m fully aware of the the very few spaces, without money involved, that exist for an inhabitant or visitor of a city/municipality. Most places require you to spend money for presence, and the public spaces (indoors, I might add) are few. It isn’t simply about having money, but being able to be you in a place that doesn’t demand anything from you. Sitting at a table in the public library without spending is undervalued and with so much more than currency. It should be valued more than money.

    One of the best passages of the whole book is on the personality on social media versus real life. The inability to be yourself on social media and the ability to actually change your mind seems to be dissipating. People around you see a complex person, an identity that keeps evolving, whereas the identity on social media is constant, “as monolithic and timeless as a brand.”

    Odell mentions an art student “working” at an American company in 2008, spending her time staring out the window or going up and down the elevator, her job consisted of thinking. Sitting by a computer, secretly or blatantly reading posts on social media or news articles hides behind the mask of working, as you’re actually staring at the computer screen. Looking at the world, thinking things through, isn’t classified as work. It’s a blatant breaking of the rules – being unproductive. I can relate to this very well. It’s better to stare at a turned-off screen than out the window, because the latter signifies “doing nothing”. Even staring at useless Internet webpages is perceived as better than walking the corridors pondering a real issue related to work. People will ask what you’re actually doing staring out that window or on that walk. Is it really productive?

    I will return to the issue of attention in later reviews and posts. I’m thinking about writing much more on this very topic, since, Odell writes “attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw.” Attention is what you give to something else and time is a factual variable of your very life. Without time, you’re dead.

    Productiveness

    Achieving wealth by saving at least 10 % of your wage and invest in the stock market – FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) – has been a popular concept, or job, or aspiration, for many years in Sweden. Probably since the financial crisis of 2008-2010. As an idea it challenges the classic work ethics: work for 40 years, earn your wage and then retire and do some things (mainly travel and drink red wine) before you die comfortably of old age. Instead, work your ass off (as part of the educated middle class), save 10-50 % of your wage, invest correctly on the stock market, and retire when you’re about 40 years old. Spend the rest of your life with your kids, and do some projects (that remain focused on you, your ego) and beg to all possible gods that the stock market is continuously fed oil, coal and all the rest. Both ideas rest on basic mathematical solutions and – productivity.

    Odell challenges this idea completely, by claiming you should spend together with other people, walking in the vicinity of your house/flat, listen to people, engage with people, feel your emotions and don’t think of time as productive or non-productive, realising diversity species-crossing is as important as you are – everything in your life isn’t simply about you. It’s about multitude.

  • Book review: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

    Book review: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

    As soon as I noticed a book published with this savvy title (and cover, created by Rodrigo Corral) this year, I knew I had to read it: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in five Extraordinary Hacks. Authored by Scott J. Shapiro, professor of law and philosophy at Yale Law School. In his youth, Shapiro spent much time with computers, but later chose a career in philosophy and law. When writing about cyberwar, he returned to computers, re-learning programming, computer science and the lingo: Evil maid attack, bald butler attack, bluesnarfing, phishing, spear phishing, whaling…

    Attempting to answer the simple questions of why the Internet is insecure, how do hackers exploit insecurity and how they can be prevented, or at least decreased in numbers, Shapiro takes us on a journey with five stops, from the late 1980’s to the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the Minecraft wars 30 years later.

    One of Shapiro’s main arguments is the distinguishment between upcode and downcode. Upcode is the human aspect of cybersecurity, such as regulation, law, and organizational norms, whereas downcode is the technical programming and operating of programs, operative systems and alike. His consistent argument is that upcode regulates downcode. Thus, he opposes solutionism, the view that “technology can and will solve our social problems”. I’ve written about the tech elite earlier in 2023, their engineering-like focus on all issues, they being able to solve everything with math and algorithms, as if reality can be reduced to technicalities. Shapiro continues, with his fantastic sense of humour: “Great news! We can reverse centuries of imperialism, revolution, and poverty with our cell phones.” This connects to Bruce Schneier’s angle on cybersecurity too: focus on the humans primarily.

    Another sentence deeply related to Cathy O’Neil is “Most problems do not have solutions that are reducible to finite procedures.” Solutionism cannot succeed, because it relies on (Alan) Turing’s physicality principle: changes in the digital realm presupposes changes in the physical realm, which means computation, when all is said and done, is a physical process, and relies on control over the physical world, such as cables, servers, and routers.

    The almost inherent insecurity of the Internet of Things (IoT) is quite obvious, another connection to Schneier, who claims the same thing. IoT-devices have very rudimentary operating systems, meaning they’re usually really poorly designed. They have a singular, or few, purposes, rendering them with attack vectors. So, your refrigator might be part of a zombie-net controlled by some angry teenager playing Minecraft, using your very refrigator attacking another server running Minecraft.

    Solutionism dominates so much, represented by ignoration and non-comprehension among programmers and computer scientists, disguised as the common resentment and claims that politics is unfit to kepp up with things technical. The sentiment of solutionism Shapiro compresses in one sentence:

    “Politics becomes engineering; moral reasoning becomes software development.”

    Cybersecurity – it’s a human thing

    Shapiro connects law and legal discussions in the cases the tells. What are the implications judiciously for the hackers, how does the hackers think, and the legal system perceive these acts. In cases where the perpetrator is sentenced, how does the legal system reason?

    I appreciate how he considers gaming and programming culture as overtly (white) male, rendering women targets usually for misogynic hatred, or at least suspicious activites by men against women (and other gender identities, might I add). This touched briefly on the deeply ingrained meritocratic aspects of programming/hacking culture, as covered by Gabriella Coleman in Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.

    Shapiro also provides us with the combination of basic computers science terms and programming functions, such as the difference between data and code, and how operating systems work. If you don’t understand how very rudimentary programming functions, Shapiro will inform you how it actually works to prove his points, and easen the complexities of cyberspace somewhat. Knowledge will calm you more than ignorance, he reasons, and I concur.

    Mainly he presents various ways hackers exploit humans via their cognition: visuality, irrationality, probability, and time. Hackers are great cognitions and really social beings, at least virtually, and comprehend how some people will be fooled.

    The sense of humour!

    Regarding the oh, so common Nigerian prince/general/rich person mail, Shapiro regularly depicts issues and technicalities through diagrams or pictures, and provides proper examples the reader can understand, such as:

    “This Nigerian Astronaut pushes this internet scam to eleven.”

    Anyone who comprehends this sentence, will enjoy reading a serious book on a serious subject.

    It goes up to eleven

    Of all the books on technology I’ve read, this is the best one. Were I to give people a recommendation on one single book they could read to better grasp the cyber realm, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing it is.

  • Book review: Quantum Supremacy

    Book review: Quantum Supremacy

    Lately, I’ve become interested in quantum computing and wrote a short paper on the subject, combining the search for quantum computers and equality between nations. While doing some very basic research I encountered a video of a famous physicist talking about quantum computers as the next revolution: Michio Kaku. So I bought his book, with the very long name: Quantum Supremacy: How Quantum Computers will Unlock the Mysteries of Science – and Address Humanity’s Biggest Challenges.

    Kaku’s a very charming man, asserting Silicon Valley might become the next Rust belt, unless they can compete in the race for quantum computers, that the age of silicon is over and the power of quantum mechanics is beginning. Kaku is sympathetic, a man with a positivity, which I admire in a world of too much bleakness and passitivity. However, some of Kaku’s initial assertions are somewhat overrated and even faulty.

    These flaws initially concern me. One is the common perception and confusion regarding Google’s “Quantum supremacy” in 2019. Yes, they claimed supremacy (meaning they could perform something considerably faster than a classical computer (as digital/binary computers are called in relation to quantum)) and rather falsely so. The claim concerned an IBM computer, though IBM retorted with speeding up their computer, refuting Google’s claim. And they seem to have been right, because the computation made was actually more like a simulation than an actual computer calculating. Therefore no real supremacy.

    Secondly, the assertion that a company’s net value on the stock market is a trustworthy evidence of real progress (PsiQuantum valued at $3,1 billion initially, without any computer at all), is no evidence at all, since many companies have been valued bazillions without any sort of product or service near completion (Dot-com bubble anyone?).

    Thirdly, Kaku claims “everyone” is involved and engaged in the race of quantum supremacy, which is a lie rather than an overstatement. Looking at this map, it’s obvious very few countries and companies are actually involved and have the resources to be involved at all. Kaku depicts himself as an overly eager and enthusiastic scientist with a very positive view of the future, which is nice and badly needed, but appears naïve at times.

    After these wild assertions Kaku delves into the real stuff: quantum theory and quantum mechanics and it gets exciting – really exciting (for anyone interested, I can recommend Adam Becker’s “What is real?” as a counterweight to these extremely complex subjects, being one of the best books ever written, giving perspectives on debates, issues and controversies regarding quantum physics.) Kaku presents various interpretations on the aforementioned issues and how they’re related to quantum computing, as well as introduces various quantum computers in use today, including the quantum annealing machine architecture of D-Wave. After reading, one comprehends the immense, erratic difficulty in producing a functioning, stable and predictable quantum computer, and how far away humanity is from a dependable architecture.

    Kaku delivers his pitches about how quantum computers can evolve humankind and solve serious issues, such as climate change, biotechnology, cancer, fusion power etc. At first, I get annoyed, especially with pieces like:

    “In fact, one day quantum computers could make possible a gigantic national repository of up-to-the-minute genomic data, using our bathrooms to scan the entire population for the earlist sign of cancer cells.”

    Well, no thank you, not regarding the lack of privacy and serious misuse of personal data in today’s world.

    But it gets better. Kaku brings us into the field of health care, medicine, and later physics, his specialty, and with these subject he slows down. He enters a more thoughtful, reasoning pace. He’s very dedicated to preventing and curing diseases, with a pathos I find touching. Sometimes he reaches for the stars, hoping quantum computers might aid us in finding cures humanity need in order to vanquish severe diseases afflicting us.

    I’m unqualified to know how quantum computers might help, even though he teaches me about quantum mechanics and physics, which is really enjoyable. And when he slows down, he argues pro and contra, for how quantum computers can help us live longer, and how the search for longevity can result in misery, that things are very complicated and precarious. I appreciate “on the one hand” and “on the other” when he claims that geoengineering is the last desperate step in preventing more damaging climate change, because what seems benign can become malign.

    In the end he goes futuristic again, telling us about a fantastic world with quantum computers in the year 2050. Why has this become a trend? Carissa Velíz uses this method of exemplifying the world of today in the beginning of her book, and David Runciman turns to the year 2053 when he wants to tell us how democracy dies. It’s shallow. Leave it to Ghost in the Shell.

    Then I remember his words on learning machines and artificial intelligence, writing about a conversation with Rodney Brooks from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on the top-bottom approach in programming machines and programs:

    “… Mother Nature design creatures that are pattern-seeking learning machines, using trial and error to navigate the world. they make mistakes, but with each iteration, they come closer to success.”

    So, instead of programming every motion and logic from the top-down, AI should rather be based on bottom-down. Kaku continues here with the “Commonsense problem”, which concerns the issue of computers being far to stupid to comprehend simple things very small children easily understand. Children rapidly learn things computers cannot even begin to grasp, simply because children learn by their mistakes. Like other animals and insects, humans correct mistakes and try to do better, while computers are stuck in loops, or simply aren’t fit to understand how come a mother is always older than her children, for instance. Kaku claims classical computers aren’t able to learn so many commonsensical things. Are quantum computers needed for this step to be taken?

    I think of classical AI as Ava in the movie Ex Machina, cunning and learning, but slow and fragile. AI powered by quantum computing might rather be like Connor in the game Detroit: Become Human – an android superior to humans in plenty of ways. Because while reading this book, and some other sources, it’s clear how superior quantum computers might be in sensing, data analysis and processing copious amounts of data.

    All in all, it’s a positive book about what may happen when or if quantum supremacy is reached. By happenstance, Geopolitics decanted published a new podcast episode on quantum computing and artificial intelligence recently, an episode I recommend.

  • Book review: Weapons of math destruction

    Book review: Weapons of math destruction

    This is a mandatory book during a course on democracy, that I actually read approximately three years ago and thus never reviewed (this website didn’t exist then), so I thought it was time for a proper review.

    Cathy O’Neil is a computer scientist and mathematician, who left the academic life for the financial industry in the early 2000’s, working with computers, for companies making lots of money. There she discovered what is now called Big Data and later became troubled by the purposes and intents of algorithms. After realising the even more troublesome side effects on society, she thus wrote this book, with the secondary title How Big Data increases inequality and threatens democracy.

    Through ten chapters, O’Neil takes the reader through what a data model is and how it can affect people in real life, such as the effects of university ranking models and the possibility of getting an adequate education, evaluations of teachers, online advertising, criminal injustice and justice and getting insurance, among other things. How come a data model deems a teacher unsuccesful or a job applicant unfit? Is the model correctly constructed or does it inherit its lack of perspective, and mathematical incoherence, from the creator? Data models with destructive effects on people’s lives are what she calls weapons of math destruction, WMD.

    In large, I agree with her and appreciate her arguments and conclusions. Negative feedback loops can infer that black men are more prone to commit crimes because the police has indicated black neighbourhoods as more exposed to petty crimes, sending police patrols to these neighbourhoods rather than white communities with more hidden crimes not marked on a map. This kind of feedback loop creates or maintains inequalities, which have destructive consequences for society.

    Sometimes, though, she contradicts herself. The extremes in statistical data are more likely to be pointed out and punished, she writes, although she also writes (rightly) that black men become an average in criminal statistics, simply being the median and mean, rather than the extreme. In a black community with more black men than white men, black men are the average. In a sense, being an average person, financially for instance, in a big data model can be very punishing, while being an extreme in form of extremely rich is better.

    On average (huh!) though, this book is still highly relevant, even though we’ve moved into the “age of AI”. AI-programmes rely on the same errors and statistical inferences as the programmes O’Neil discusses. Personally, I think the book is good for social scientists. She presents statistical models used by scientists and businesses, and how easily they can turn into stupid models discriminating people. It’s nice to get a mathematicians perspective and logical thinking.

    Conclusion: It still stands. Brief as that.

  • Book review: The creativity code

    Book review: The creativity code

    Marcus du Sautoy is a British mathematician, who’s published several books on mathematics, appeared on TV and is highly regarded as an educator. He released a book in 2018 called The creativity code: How AI is learning to write, paint and think (du Sautoy is very fond of the word code in general, like in human code and creativity code), where he writes and ponders on the meaning of artificial intelligence and its implications for culture. He begins with admitting his existential crisis, devoting his life to mathematics, and realising AI might make computers superior to humans, rendering his skills inadequate and insufficient, even unnecessary.

    First, the book focuses on how different artificial intelligence programs are created and function. He retells the famous story of DeepMind (Google DeepMind since 2014) and its advances in machine learning and AI, with examples such as AlphaGo and AlphaFold. Du Sautoy connects this urge to create AI with the human urge to create books/stories, paintings and music, then adds philosophical notions and ideas about what constitutes free will, action and philosophical reasoning. How can we be sure a program is thinking or acting by its free will versus a human? Are humans programmed to act in certain ways, and how much do we act out of free will?

    ChatGPT has been prone to hallucinate, a phenomenon Kevin Roose wrote about, and the program has been limited to a certain number of responses after that. Du Sautoy mentions this (remember that the book was published five years ago) likelihood in generative AI, that they resemble drunk people fumbling in the dark. Or like Grumpy Old Geeks put it, like a guy drinking too many beers, going “Aaah, fuck it!”.

    The inability to comprehend why something happens or how somethings happens in a computer program, creates ambiguity, insecurity or outright hostility towards artificial intelligence. Why an AI-programme woke up in the middle of the night was incomprehensible, thus creating a sense and foreboding of algorithmic apocalypse. Music and mathematics are closely related, and he mentions several attempts to use artificial intelligence to create music, like an app created by Massive Attack.

    DeepDream is an attempt to understand the algorithms of machine learning and avoid incomprehensible black boxes. This relates to the robots created by Sony Computing Laboratory. These robots are teaching each other how to name their own movements, to communicate with each other, creating a conundrum for the humans watching, as they don’t understand the words unless they also interact with the robots. To guarantee there are no bugs or errors in the code, however, is an increasing issue and challenge.

    An example of a black box is the hunt for mathematical theorems. A program spits out new theorems. The issue? No one can understand them, because they’re not told, simply lines of mathematical “code”, so to speak. No mathematician can understand what the lines actually mean. Is this kind of AI necessary or useful? Just like du Sautoy writes, mathematics needs to be told, needs to be storified, otherwise it’s incomprehensible nonsense.

    Does one need emotions and the sense of physical space to understand? Does one need this understanding in order to be able to communicate with others about it? He gets philosophical, but that’s a necessary approach if we’re to comprehend artificial intelligence and its’ effects on society, rather than talk about technical details and functions.

    At the end, du Sautoy returns to his anxiety, his existential crisis, about computers excelling at mathematics (and physics), but he also states that mathematics is infinite, whereas humans are not. Perhaps that’s why we need AI, he asks, because mathematics is larger than us.

  • Book review: The Russo-Ukrainian War

    Book review: The Russo-Ukrainian War

    I’ve reviewed The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine before – a completely outstanding book about Ukraine, author being historian Serhii Plokhy. This is the second book of him I review, a very contemporary, and initially, personal account of The Russo-Ukrainian War, beginning a few days prior to the full-scale invasion and war.

    I truly appreciate Plokhy introducing the reader to a very brief and coherent history of Ukraine, before continuing to the actual war itself. Initially, Plokhy gives us a personal account of the very beginning of the full-scale war initiated by Russia on the 24th of Februari 2022. As a reader, I can feel his anxiety and connection to the nation assaulted by a larger, dangerous and ruthless neighbour.

    Plokhy provides us with Ukrainian and Russian sources, and therefore accounts of what Vladimir Putin actually did say, or might have said, on certain occasions, which puts things into perspective. The infamous televised meetings, publications, and public speeches and debates are briefly mentioned here, giving us a precious insight into the Russian debate on which nations are perceived to belong to the Russian nation (or empire, if you will): Belarus, Kazakstan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldavia. Perhaps Armenia and Azerbaijan. This facilitates, for instance, the comprehension of recent Russian threats and discourse on armed nuclear attacks on European capitals.

    The book provides historical insights, and retrospect accounts of Ukraine’s position in the Soviet Union, the aftermath of the Cold War and the beginning of the 2000’s, with the Orange Revolution, EuroMaidan and first invasion of 2014-2015 at its focus. All this, puts the war into a context and provides the reader with a coherent comprehension of what has happened prior to the war beginning last war and why Ukraine is attacked by Russia.
    In between, Plokhy depicts the invasion, the initial Ukrainian reaction, the responses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and president Volodomyr Zelensky, and the population. Then, the Russian onslaught on Kiev, Butja, Charkiv and Mariupol take centrepiece.

    The relationship between China and USA are later discussed, and this is one of the best parts of the book. I’ve spent an entire semester studying China and have read a lot about US history, presidents and political system, and might claim I’ve got a fairly good perception of what’s happening in the Pacific Ocean, as well as between the countries. Plokhy’s account of the tension, but also dynamo, between these two titans is very relevant to this war, China being able to use Russia for its own purposes, while being an uncomfortably ally, and the US taking a fierce stance against Russia, while not wanting to completely antagonising its perceived and dedicated main rival.

    Plokhy can, in other words, really put things into perspective, and for this I’m grateful. Considering the stress and time-pressure this book was written, it’s impressive.

    Three downsides of the book from a needy reader

    There’s several maps in the introduction to the book. The absence of maps in the chapters is one downside, since a lack of visual, detailed maps next to the text turns the reading experience into a constant page-turning event, if one is prone to check the whereabouts of an event. This becomes almost a confusing experience during the chapter explaining the Ukrainian offensives towards Cherson and near Charkiv. Is the town of Izium in Cherson oblast, or in or close to Charkiv oblast? Is Mykolaiv close to Cherson or Charkiv? If you’re familiar with the maps from the Institute for the Study of War you might know, but if not, you’re usually lost.

    Another downside is the assertive focus on the Ukrainian side. Don’t get me wrong, I strongly support Ukraine and want them with borders restored to pre-2014 and the dignity of the nation-state of Ukraine restored. I want the civilians to be able to live their lives without Russian interference. And I want peace for Ukraine, on their own terms.
    However, that doesn’t mean the book should focus so much on Russia’s losses and troubles on the front. I’ve listened to, and read texts, Ukrainian troops describing how they loose people in trenches and foxholes, for instance last summer during heavy and intense Russian artillery fire, or soldiers entering a forest and losing approximately 75 % of the soldiers in a very short time. Reading the book you wrongly get the picture of only Russia suffering heavy losses, which has been far from the case. Unfortunately.

    Thirdly, I’d include the lack of gender perspective, but this is only because I’m a very needy reader. Plokhy is a very (I need to stress very) competent writer and historian. But during this war I really feel the absence of gender perspective. This winter Lisa Bjurwald released Slava Ukraini! Womens resistance to Russia’s War. It deals with women’s resistance against Russia, the systemic repression, rapes and violations against women perpetrated by Russia’s armed forces, the Ukrainian women’s part of the armed forces, civilian and volunteer forces and importance for the nation of Ukraine. It’s bleak and very dark on the one hand, but also positive, good and hopeful. This recognition of specifically women is hard to come by in wars, although I also lack, generally, the real understanding and insights of men being sacrificed by superiors on the fron.
    All in all
    So far, this might be the only book that compresses the first year of the war in a reliable and proper way.