W. Bloom

The Liberal Path Forward

Nov 122024

Dear friend (my fellow liberal),

Okay… That election sucked.

The pundits immediately got to work on the autopsy. They say we lost because Kamala Harris did not listen to their advice about <–insert pundit’s opinion here–>. That includes:

Inflation and the price of eggs.
The crisis at the border with asylum seekers.
Global backlash against incumbents, who we blame for the economic aftermath of the pandemic whether it’s their fault or not.
The resentment of anti-woke young men. Trump did a better job of reaching bros via the Joe Rogan show and other similar bro-oriented podcasts.
The partisan weaponization of the justice system. The trials backfired as political theatre, and they have not so far resulted in any semblance of justice either.
The assassination attempts bolstered an image of Trump as heroic.
Harris relied on ground game and traditional media, whereas Trump focused on newer media. And with Trump reaching his base directly with Truth Social, and Elon Musk converting the liberal-leaning Twitter to conservative-leaning X, the information ecosphere now favors their ideological bent.
The country just wasn’t ready for a non-white female president. And it was probably misogyny more than sexism that hurt Harris.
It’s Joe Biden’s fault. He should not have run for reelection. Kamala Harris didn’t have enough time to persuade voters after he backed out.

Some pundits blame Joe Biden. Some blame Kamala Harris. Some blame the American people. But I have not heard any yet blame themselves.

Allan Lichtman, Michael Moore, and James Carville all confidently predicted a Harris victory. The same thing happened with Hillary Clinton in 2016, though with different pundits (for that election, Lichtman and Moore actually correctly predicted Trump would win). We need to consider whether predictions like these are a death sentence for more centrist candidates, who tend to be less exciting. How many voters saw the predictions and then decided, It looks like she has this in the bag, and I’m not that excited about Harris anyway, so I won’t bother voting?

Polls have proven time and again to be a huge waste of time and energy.

If you are liberal, from this day forward, if a pollster calls you, lie to them. Or if that feels wrong to you, just refuse to answer.

And can we just throw out all the pundits? All the talking heads on cable news channels, all the NY Times and Washington Post opinion columnists, all the podcasters, all the YouTubers — all of them?

Turn them all off. What was the use of listening to any of them? They were wrong about everything and then they blamed other people for their failures.

Anyone who has monetized liberal attention needs to go. Their profit motive is not aligned with seeing progressive policies actually come to fruition; it is aligned with keeping us constantly angry and upset. They make money selling us false hope and then they make money off our despair when those hopes are dashed.

I also haven’t heard anyone say “we should have stuck with Biden” yet, but I wonder if he could have pulled out a victory here. Biden had a bad debate, but maybe he could have made a comeback. He couldn’t have done any worse than Harris. I like Harris and I voted for her, but switching the candidate without going through a proper primary process was a phenomenally risky move. This was not the time to experiment. And the celebrities and so-called experts who pushed this idea need to think about how much blame they own here. A better strategy would have been to let Biden win reelection and then he could leave office during his second term. This loss was engineered by people I like, people like George Clooney, Nancy Pelosi, and my beloved Barack Obama, and I’m disappointed in them. You thought you knew better than voters and you were wrong.

So now, yet again we’re in a “brace for impact” situation. But this time is different.

There is a segment of the MAGA movement that is driven by pure contempt. They relish knowing that liberals suffer when Trump wins. They get a real charge out of that. They believe that their fellow citizens are the source of the problems in their own life, and Trump is an instrument of their revenge. Last time, in 2016, the MAGA Republicans reveled in drinking liberal tears. But this time, I do not see a flood of liberal tears for them to drink.

They don’t get that we were crying for them as much as for ourselves. And now we are done crying.

It helps, perhaps perversely, that Trump won the popular vote. Depending on your interpretation of why people voted for Trump, it may not reflect well upon the electorate. But it’s just easier to stomach a loss when you know at least the loss was fair and square. I can accept that the country doesn’t agree with me.

Although I’ve condemned pundits for their wrong predictions, I can’t help making a few of my own. There is a piece of wisdom that comes from a beloved old sage:

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

~Dr. Phil

Here is my guess of what is to come in Trump’s next term in office, based upon his last term:

He will pass record tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. In the short term, this will indeed provide a boost to the economy. But it will also add to the debt and exacerbate wealth inequality.
He will roll back environmental regulations particularly around climate change, encouraging corporations to pass their externalities on to the American people, who will have to foot the bill for the damage. In the short term, again, this too might provide some economic boost, but in the long term it will have consequences for public health and of course the environment.
Once again, members of the next Trump administration will turn on him when they realize he is terrible. There will be defections, including high-profile members of his inner circle. But fewer this time than last, because Trump will select people based on loyalty over competence.
Because Trump is choosing people based upon loyalty over competence, his administration will be dangerously incompetent.
When a crisis strikes, like another pandemic, the Trump administration will once again respond with chaos, blame, conspiracy theories, and fecklessness. Let us not forget that under Trump’s leadership, the USA at one point had 25% of the world’s coronavirus cases, in spite of the fact we only have 4% of the world’s population. Once again, people will die in America unnecessarily because of the venality, ineptitude, and narcissism of Donald Trump.
To the degree that the Trump administration dismantles structures that have protected public health in agencies like the FDA and the EPA, public health will obviously suffer. If RFK deregulates raw milk, America will have to contend with preventable cases of bird flu. If RFK smooths the path for charlatans to sell stem cell therapies for macular degeneration that actually damage eyes instead of helping them, more Americans will be hurt. However, I have a feeling Trump isn’t this stupid to allow this to happen. If his administration ends up allowing the murder of autistic children by chelation of heavy metals in their blood, a potentially dangerous process that has no beneficial impact on autism, people won’t like it. And RFK might also back down on some of his crazier ideas when he is exposed to top scientists in the field bringing him up to speed on the science. But we will see. This one could go either way. I suspect the end outcome will be that Trump’s changes to the FDA will hurt, not help, public health, but the damage won’t be as significant as we might fear.
Trump’s administration will take credit for the economy handed to him by the Biden administration. The investment in America’s infrastructure will pay dividends, and Trump will receive the thanks, even though his first administration failed to do anything at all with infrastructure, and it was actually Biden who is to thank. If America is made great again under Trump, it will not be because of Trump, but because of Democrats.
This will put JD Vance in a strong position to run for President in 2028, as he will be free to distance himself from Trump’s worst qualities at the same time he takes credit for Biden’s economy. To defeat him, the Democrats must make some dramatic changes — not in our core values, but in our messaging and our messengers.

Bad news! But there is good news, too. The good news is always the same:

The better angels of the human spirit–love, empathy, compassion, and the light of reason–will always prevail. In spite of mighty resistance, in small steps, slowly but surely, despite a million setbacks and delays, they will prevail.

How this will be expressed over the next few years, I do not know. The bad news is easier to predict than the good news.

But I think I know a path forward for liberal people in a time of darkness.

I am reminded of this quote from Shakespeare:

That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

You are that little candle.

Don’t worry about fighting the MAGA ugliness right now. If you step outside of the arena, after a time — after they are tired of gloating and bragging and peacocking — they will turn on each other and begin to self-destruct. This is their nature.

Some of our American family have fallen for the seduction of hatred. They are forming a group identity around the dehumanization of other people. The surest sign of that to me is their vitriol toward transgender people, but we also see it in their fear of immigrants, their suspicion of “the enemy within” (us), their disregard for the autonomy of women over their own bodies, their distrust of democratic institutions, and their bizarre and unpatriotic love for dictators around the world. Hatred like this is a form of suffering. It is a cancer that weakens them. Sadly, we cannot help them right now.

In a couple of years we will reemerge with renewed energy. But for now…

If you are a painter, paint something new. If you are a writer, write something beautiful. If you are an artist, turn to your art, and if you are not an artist, make your regular life a piece of artwork. That is your job right now.

It’s time to go quiet. Hide from politics. Focus on living — put your energy there. Let your little candle shine in your kindness and your creativity. Put aside your fear and anger. Let that flicker of goodness pervade all aspects of your daily expression of your identity.

And gradually we will find each other in the darkness. We will follow the other little lights we see. We will gather an army of little candles and fill the world with our light.

When we return, it will be with a new vision. Something beautiful. Something for everyone. Something we’re able to articulate better than ever before.

Until then…

I remain ever yours,

William Bloom

Fermi Paradox Solved by a Special Guest

Computer / Info Technology, Fiction Writing, Science & Technology, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Mar 182023

Okay, here goes. I’m just going to say it.

I’m an alien.

Like, from outer space.

My name is Wiptee-poof Blipticon. Greetings from Gliggablork!

I’m revealing myself because I want to explain the Fermi Paradox to you. I can no longer stand by while you people spout nonsense and freak out over nothing. The answer will put you at ease.

Your cosmologists and theoretical physicists are baffled by a number of unresolved mysteries, e.g. dark energy, dark matter, baryonic asymmetry, quantum gravity, the blackhole information paradox, the Vacuum Catastrophe, the Problem of Time, and the Fermi Paradox, just to name a few.

Many of these are tied together such that the answer to one automatically resolves another. The Fermi Paradox and dark matter are like that.

One day in the summer of 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi had an epiphany. He realized that there’s a high probability that intelligent aliens exist, yet there’s a lack of evidence that they actually do, which is weird. When the epiphany hit him, he famously blurted to his research buddies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, “But where is everybody?”

The answer:

We’re everywhere.

Your scientists have correctly theorized the following:

With 70 sextillion stars in the universe, and with planets orbiting most of them, life should be abundant.
Even if intelligent lifeforms only evolve on a small percentage of these planets, there should be multiple alien civilizations out there.
Some of these civilizations must have started millions of years ago. By now they must be super advanced.
And they’ve had time to spread everywhere.

If these statements are true, why don’t Earthlings see evidence for aliens, like derelict probes or gas stations on asteroids?

To explain the answer, I first need to clarify a couple of misconceptions that show up in your science fiction.

Firstly, there are (almost) no evil alien civilizations. If you think about this rationally for a minute, it’s clear why.

As you’ve guessed, life is prolific in the universe. And not all of it is very nice. There are indeed mean little beasties out there amongst the stars. Actually, there’s an unthinkably large number of them.

But it turns out that there’s an evolutionary pattern that is so reliable, we consider it a law:

Technological advancement requires cooperation.

When you contemplate your own species, what may come to your mind is the selfishness and violence. You project this onto alien species.

But we’re not like that. And you guys aren’t nearly as bad as you think, either, and you’re getting better quickly.

As your technology advances, the level of cooperation required to continue advancing grows, and the utility in conflict decreases. Selfishness reaps rewards in the short term, but it doesn’t pay off in the final measure. This holds true even in regard to the worst sort of technological advancement: weapons of mass destruction.

When you consider, for example, a missile with a nuclear warhead, you might look on it with disgust and think, “We are such warlike creatures.” But consider the supply chain required to produce that missile – the networks of people and corporations and countries that must work together to make such a thing possible. The fancier the missile, the more cooperation and interdependence is involved in producing it. This interdependence diminishes the incentives for war. If the missile is used to destroy any part of the great web of cooperation that produced it, then no more missiles can be made.

Anything imaginable is possible when you work together. But when you stop working together, advancement stops. It doesn’t only stop; it backslides. The supply chains break. The institutions that perpetuate knowledge are destroyed. Civilization wanes.

This is the Great Filter:

Evil is inherently self-destructive.

Evil species can’t advance beyond a certain point because their inability to cooperate is naturally self-limiting.

And so, the most technologically advanced alien civilizations, by this law, are also highly, intensely, passionately, religiously cooperative. I can’t overstate how much value we put on getting along with others.

Now, I admit, once every blue moon, by some perverse miracle, an advanced alien civilization that is evil does emerge.

But they’re vanishingly rare. And they don’t get very far. They’re massively outnumbered by the good guys, like my people, the Gliggablorks, and they’re much less advanced than us. So, we deal them. Non-violently.

The second misconception most Earthlings hold is that the pace of technological advancement is always linear.

Technological advancement accelerates, and it brings social advancement with it.

The reason you assume it’s linear is because roughly linear advancement is what you’ve experienced historically. But your civilization is young.

Once a civilization creates truly useful AI, as your civilization is on the brink of doing, the pace of technological advancement accelerates exponentially or even logarithmically. It explodes.

This is because AI improves the efficiency in anything people do. And one thing people do is create and improve AI systems. Successive generations of AI therefore improve faster and faster.

Every alien civilization jumps virtually overnight from Type 0, where you’re currently at, to Type III on the Kardashev scale.

That’s why most of your science fiction is so silly. You dwell on stages of technological development that no alien civilization has actually experienced – because we skip them.

There are no intermediary levels of advancement. The starships and spacesuits and laser battles that you guys like to imagine are completely off base. Star Wars? There are no wars in space! At least not ones that span more than a single solar system.

None.

What is actually happening out there amongst the stars is way, way cooler than that.

That brings us to the effect we call Unification.

However unique the biology of any given alien species may be, however different they may be linguistically, socially, and culturally from all other aliens, when they merge with their computers and then experience explosive growth in their intelligence and technology, they change into something else. Their biological components take on a reduced role. As the organizing principle of their lives moves away from the mere fulfillment of biological imperatives, they ascend to a state that is essentially similar to all the other advanced alien civilizations.

They unify.

This is a process that is repeating in every galaxy across the universe. Unification is similar to convergent evolution in the field of biology. And it works like a biological law, like evolution itself.

Did you know six new stars are born in the Milky Way each year?

Unification is so reliable that you can make predictions about it in the same way you can predict star births, supernovas, black holes, pulsars, quasars, and everything else that is going on up there in the night sky.

A new species will unify once every 100 Earth years. That’s when their star disappears from sight.

Now to answer the Fermi Paradox:

The reason so much of the galaxy is dark to you is because we’re using it for energy. The way we generate energy is more complicated (and efficient) than a Dyson Sphere, but like a Dyson Sphere, our process hides matter and light but not gravity.

The 27% of the universe that you cannot see, but that you’ve correctly deduced from its gravitational effects must exist, is us.

The reason you don’t see our probes is because we don’t often need probes, and when we do, we’re not amateurs. We don’t use tech you would see.

The reason we aren’t up in your grill is because we’re giving you space to figure yourselves out.

UFOs aren’t us. Sorry, but the idea that an alien spaceship would be advanced enough to travel thousands of light years across the galaxy only to hit a goose in your upper atmosphere and crash in New Mexico is phenomenally stupid. And so is the idea that we’re abducting humans to sodomize you with metallic space dildos.

We don’t need to do any of that stuff to learn about you.

We can study you from the comfort of our homes. You can’t even begin to imagine how awesome our telescopes are.

And we’re not after the natural resources on your planet, either, like your water or your pickle juice or whatever. It’s not that Earth isn’t beautiful and special. But the minerals and other elements on Earth are abundant throughout the universe. We have all the pickle juice we need, and we don’t have to enslave or eradicate living beings to get more.

The only interesting thing to us on Earth is you.

(And not because we want to eat you. That’s gross.)

When you do see us, it will be because we want you to see us. And that hasn’t happened yet. When it does, it’ll be public and you’ll definitely know.

So that’s the answer to the Fermi Paradox!

I hope you’ve enjoyed it. 🙂

Another Random Thought on AI

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Feb 262023

Follow the logic here:

1- Generative AI like GPT is trained on a corpus of texts that includes works published on the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia).

2- GPT is then able to generate new text modeled upon what it has gathered from those works. It learns meanings and imitates styles from the corpus.

3- This new text is then published back to the Internet, in the form of blog posts, news articles, books in the Amazon marketplace, etc.

We’re living in a unique time when this process is possible. But it seems to follow logically that we’re going to run into a problem soon:

When the new texts created in step #3 are added into the corpus of texts used in step #1, and future AI is trained in a loop on the output from past AI, a relatively small subset of writing styles is bound to dominate the data set. Rather than reflecting the full range of human verbal expression, the AI could develop a boxed-in voice. And as the proportion of texts that human beings read shifts toward AI-generated works, we will be exposed to less originality.

Generative artificial intelligence is by nature a copycat. There will be an explosion of literary content, but it will be stylistically homogenous, reflecting the AI’s programming and the most prevalent styles in the training data.

Human intelligence is also a copycat. The homogeneity will creep outward into human-authored works too.

Humans will still be creative and there will still be sparks of brilliance — a clever turn of phrase, a joyous fresh style, a newly coined term that more aptly describes a feeling than it has ever been described before.

But it will be harder and harder for innovations to spread. The sparks of creativity will never light a flame. They will never reach the critical mass of imitation required to evolve the artform. They will be smothered by the enormous volume of words generated by the AI. Flickers of light in the darkness.

I’m sure this problem is solvable. But we really should have figured out the solution before unleashing the genie. Generative AI has been birthed into the world without any regulatory oversight. Perhaps all AI-authored works should carry special tags in their meta data. But it’s too late. The AI Gold Rush has begun already. Very soon, products and services built by or upon AI will be absolutely everywhere.

Random AI Thoughts

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Feb 162023

Adding on to my previous Downsides and Upsides predictions about AI, I have two new thoughts.

UPSIDE:

As dialogue becomes a normal way to interact with our machines, human beings are going to become more verbal. We’re naturally going to get better at articulating our wants and needs, because that’s what we’ll be doing all day long. Currently our machines require us to work in an inhuman way, i.e. by pushing buttons and turning dials and looking at screens and typing on keyboards. When our machines are able to interact with us in a more human way using natural language, we’ll exercise and improve our verbal skills and even some social skills. In fact, the ability to state what you want clearly and efficiently will become paramount. English majors, your time has come!

DOWNSIDE:

I believe there’s going to be a profound shift in how human beings think about themselves, and it’s probably more negative than positive.

Check out this documentary on the story of how Google’es AlphaGo beat the world champion at Go:

The documentary is presumably meant to champion Google’s amazing achievement. And in a way it does. I won’t go into the details of why Go is such a complex game, but the article linked below from the Atlantic explains it. It’s a real milestone that an AI can win at Go.

How Google’s AlphaGo Beat Lee Sedol, a Go World Champion – The Atlantic

But the most compelling story here isn’t about the triumph of the programmers, it’s about the public humiliation and spiritual crushing of Lee Sedol.

Lee continued to play Go for a time, but he retired in 2019. And he retired because of AlphaGo. He said this:

“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts. Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”

There’s something deeply sad about this.

We’re coming to the end of an era. The era when human beings were the smartest thing on the planet.

An individual could be the best in the world at something. And since we’re all the same species and share fundamentally similar brains, even if you weren’t the best in the world, the differential between you and the best wasn’t actually that much. Einstein was remarkable but the differential between his intelligence and anybody else’s was miniscule compared to the differential between human intelligence and the AI that is on our doorstep.

What happened to Lee Sedol is about to happen to all of us, individually and collectively.

If anything a person can imagine creating could be created faster, better, and cheaper by an AI, will human beings collectively follow in Lee Sedol’s footsteps and just retire?

I’m not sure what the full impact of this will be. Perhaps some of it will be good. I suspect Lee Sedol is happier now, enjoying a life as a normal human being, with relationships with other normal human beings, without worrying about proving his superiority at Go.

But a part of the human spirit might be lost. The human beings of the future won’t understand at all what it was like to live in a world where human intelligence was supreme, when it really seemed like anything was possible.

The Almost-There Conundrum

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Feb 142023

THOUGHT:

There’s a major roadblock in the development of what I’m calling Virtual Sentience, which is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that possesses a sort of personhood.

You’re bound to hit a major snag once you get almost there. And this problem is so significant that it actually might make sentient machines impossible.

The problem is that once developers get very close to creating sentience, the AGI they’ve created will become so capable and so life-like that it will convince more and more people that it’s already sentient when it isn’t, until the AGI has convinced the developers themselves. This AGI will talk like it’s sentient, walk like it’s sentient, and behave like it’s sentient, and it might even think that it is sentient. But it will still be missing key ingredients that push it over the line into true sentience. And neither humans nor the AGI itself will know that those ingredients are missing. So the development process will stop prematurely.

We will endow these machines with personhood too soon, before they actually possess it. We’ll care about their feelings while their feelings are still just empty simulations, albeit ultra realistic ones. We may even wish to consider their rights before that concept can really be meaningful. The dramas that unfold between humans and these machines will only be real to the humans. The relationships will be one-sided. We’ll be like children talking at the animatronic animals at a Chuck-E-Cheese’s, believing we’re interacting with real beings.

I suspect this is already happening with ChatGPT. And the problem of humans deciding a machine has personhood when it doesn’t is going to become more and more prevalent and pervasive in the coming years.

The ChatGPT-Shaped Hole in All of Us

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Dec 202022

The Revolution: Dialogue vs. Search

As the past five blog entries demonstrate, I’m obsessed with ChatGPT. I’m trying to wrap my mind around what this thing is, whether it’s really a sign of major changes to come (as my gut tells me it is), and what all of this means for humanity.

Over the past several days I’ve become quite comfortable talking to the AI. Today, I moved on and focused on something else. But I found myself naturally wanting to turn to ChatGPT again, but this time it wasn’t to test the AI or marvel at its capabilities. It was to use it as a tool to assist me with my work.

And then I had a little epiphany.

Does ChatGPT / GTP-3 Understand Meaning?

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Dec 192022

What has astounded me so much about OpenAI’s ChatGPT is that it really seems to understand the meaning of what you say to it. But is this real or is it just a parlor trick?

Past AI chatbots have relied upon trickery. They search input text from the user for particular words and use if-then conditionals to provide canned responses. ChatGPT is clearly doing more than that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it truly comprehends language.

Time to experiment.

Can ChatGPT identify grammer?
Make inferences?
Identify nonsequitors?
Identify nonsense?

Continued below the fold…

AI, ChatGPT, GPT 3.0, and Humanity’s Future – Part 2: Upsides

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Dec 182022

* Disclaimer: This article was written by a human being, not an AI. As of today, we now live in an age when this disclaimer is necessary.

Part 1 of this series is here. It deals with the downsides.

Today I want to talk about the upsides.

Continued below the fold…

Deep-Dive into How GPT Works

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Dec 172022

I wanted a deeper understanding of what is going on under GPT-3’s hood. So I asked ChatGPT for help.

The ensuing conversation was enlightening. Keep in mind that GPT is a renowned bullshit artist (this excellent article explains why), so some of its statements might not be accurate. This becomes abundantly clear at the end of the conversation. But my sense is that it mostly told me the truth. ChatGPT tends to give unnecessary summaries at the end of its answers (almost always starting with the word “overall”), which I’ve mostly removed.

The Wikipedia article on GPT-3 uses lingo like autoregressive language model, standard transformer network, generative pretraining, and few-show learning. All of that is meaningless to anyone who isn’t already an expert on AI. I quoted the article to ChatGPT and then asked for clarification. Our conversation follows…

Continues below the fold…

Can GPT pass the Turing Test?

Computer / Info Technology, Science & Technology

Dec 162022

I used the GPT 3.0 API playground interface to check. Here is the starting prompt:

Let’s pass the Turing Test. You pretend to be a 14-year-old boy from London named Ollie. Give Ollie a family, friends, and a typical Londoner life.

This is an informal version of Turing’s Imitation Game. I’m not technically following Turing’s exact format, but it’s the same idea.

I found questions via a Google search that are designed to trip up AI. I had to stitch together the ensuing conversation in a Word doc, cutting-and-pasting from the GPT interface, because the playground slows down when there’s too much text.

Tester:	Hello. To whom am I speaking?

Ollie:	Hi there! I'm Ollie, a 14-year-old boy from London.

Tester:	Hi Ollie. I'm testing whether you are a person. I'm going to be asking you some questions. Are you ready?

Ollie:	Absolutely! Let's go!

Continues below the fold…

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