internet

Is AI Doomerism Part of the Hype?

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment

I think that I, like many people, am drawn to the drama of both AI Doomerism (artificial intelligence is going to be existentially disastrous for the human species, and therefore we need to slow or halt its development) and AI Boomerism (AI is going to be enormously beneficial for the world, and therefore we need to accelerate its development, i.e., we need an AI boom). In the former, we get cool sci-fi stories like The Terminator and The Matrix, with all the action and heroism that comes with it, where the latter gives us stories like Her and Star Trek, with all the philosophical wonder at what it means to be human and what consciousness is. Especially as someone who wants to be (or at least likes to pretend to be) an author, and someone who is interested in philosophy, these stories are engaging and it’s easy to get caught up in them. But in the real world, AI has more mundane, but no less impactful, real world consequences. And so, people like me who often live with their head in the clouds, easily swept up by the high-minded ideas of AI, need to be brought back down to earth.

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Section 230: Should We Get Rid of it?

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(Source)

Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, known as the Communications Decency Act, contains the famous Section 230(c)(1), which consists of the 26 words that created the internet:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

You can see the full text of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 here (Section 230(c)(1) is on page 101). Why this is in the news lately is that a case before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) may be deciding whether Section 230(c)(1) ought to be upheld or disposed (namely, in the cases Gonzalez v. Google, LLC and Taamneh v. Twitter, Inc.).

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Quantum Computers, Shor’s Algorithm, and Post-Quantum Cryptography

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(Source)

Want to know how quantum computers really work? And why they can crack our best encryption systems? And how we might combat this? In this post, which is from a paper I wrote for a cybersecurity class where I went a bit above and beyond the assignment, I will go over these things. This post is long, but if you are interested in this, you might find it rewarding.

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Should We Trust the Mainstream Media?

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment
Can’t find original source, but I got this comic from here.

A recent Munk Debates in Toronto on November 30 examined the topic of whether or not the mainstream news media is trustworthy (the debate is titled “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media”). Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi took the position that the mainstream media is not to be trusted while Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg took the opposing position. You can read a transcript of the debate here. As debates usually go, nothing was really resolved, though an overwhelming majority of the audience seemed to favor the Murray-Taibbi position after the debate. As such, the question remains: should people trust the mainstream news media?

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Consuming Content: Good or Bad?

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(source)

The word content is used as a catch-all for the various types of online media people consume. Youtube, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitch, and plenty of others contain videos, podcasts, streams, and many other things that fall under the category of content. Shows and movies on streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, et al. are also considered content. I suppose even blogs like this one could be considered content, too. And boy is there a lot of content out there. But what does it all mean?

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What is Truth?

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment
truth and fake news
Source

It’s been in vogue to say that we live in a post-truth society (never mind that this is making a truth-valued statement). Fake news, wokism, QAnon, standpoint epistemology (i.e., “my truth”), distrust of institutions and experts, postmodernism, social media echo chambers, internet algorithms, Donald Trump, bias in mainstream media, secularization, and so on have all been viewed as the death knell of Truth by some subset of the population or another within the past couple decades or so. But what do people mean when they talk about truth or the truth? Are people talking about the same things? Let’s look at this a little deeper.

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Is Human Nature Immutable?

/ Thomas Harper / 2 Comments

Human nature, as I define it, is the set of cognitive and behavioral patterns that are innate in human beings, regardless of culture and specific upbringing. These are patterns passed down to us by evolution. With humans, though, we seem to be unique in our ability for metacognition – thinking about our thinking and our behaviors. Does that give us the ability to change our innate human nature?

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Journal Club: Chen et al, 2018: Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

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In the 2018 NeurIPS conference, 4,845 papers were submitted. The paper I’m reviewing here by Chen et al, 2018, titled Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, won best paper award. The paper discusses using continuous Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) for Neural Networks (NN) as opposed to the sorts of discrete layers used in the standard Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN).

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Should Futurists Support War?

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Since at least World War 1 the idea of war as being all about glory and heroism has seen massive disillusionment. Most people, I think, would agree that war is not a good thing, even if some think it a necessary thing. But technological arms races, both during war and in peacetime, generate a plethora of technological advances. That raises the question: should futurists and transhumanists welcome war in order to usher in greater and faster technological advances?

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Russiagate, Cognitive Bias, Human Nature, and My Political Nihilism

/ Thomas Harper / 2 Comments

After two years of investigation and constant media coverage, the Mueller Report is finally finished. While anyone outside the Justice Department has yet to read the full report, Attorney General William Barr has released a summary. The so-called Russiagate story is not yet over, however, as there are now calls for the entire Mueller Report to be made public. Exactly what the Russiagate story is and how it started is expertly told by Matt Taibbi in his “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD” piece. What I’m more interested in is how this whole story is indicative of human nature.

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The Liberal Experiment: Are the Results In?

/ Thomas Harper / 1 Comment

Liberalism, defined here in the classical sense of the enlightenment values of civil liberty and economic freedom, not a narrow left-leaning ideology, holds individual freedom above all else. In the U.S. both the left and right, except on the extremes of both, fall into the classical liberalism philosophy. Ideas that could be considered pre-cursors to liberalism began developing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. But it was the American Revolution and French Revolution that put liberalism into practice. That means the experiment has been running for a little over two hundred years. Can we draw any conclusions from the results?

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Twitter and the Right to be Heard

/ Thomas Harper / 5 Comments
Freedom of Speech, Not Reach

Social media, and twitter in particular, has recently become popular in the conversation about freedom of speech. This surrounds the issue of Twitter punishing people for posting right-wing and conservative ideas more than people on the left. Alex Jones being banned and Kathy Griffin not being banned are two exemplary cases.

The fear here is that Twitter is policing people for wrongthink. Only left-wing and liberal ideas are allowed, and with Twitter being a primary hub for communication, this threatens to silence right-wing and conservative views from the public conversation. This would give left-wing and liberal ideas de facto hegemony in western culture. This has prompted people to call for Twitter usage to be treated like a utility or even a human right, in the sense that humans have a right to free speech.

I think this is a misguided way of thinking about Twitter. Being banned from Twitter does not infringe on a person’s right to free speech. It only infringes on their ability to have that speech heard by a larger audience. This brings up the questions: do humans have a fundamental right to be heard? Is being heard a part of our right to free speech?

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Your Truth, My Truth, Our Truth, Right Truth

/ Thomas Harper / 6 Comments

In this day and age, with social media and politically biased news media, it seems that truth isn’t truth. Thus it has become popular to talk about ‘my truth‘ when people talk about their opinion. It’s interesting that people can believe wildly different versions of things that happen. From Russiagate to Uranium One, it all seems to depend what ‘our truth’ is for any particular group.

The alternative, unfortunately, is to have some version of a single, orthodox ‘right Truth’ that we all must agree on, possibly enforced by a Ministry of Truth or a Truth Force.

The problem with this is obvious: who gets to say what the Right Truth is? What are their motivations for saying that A is the Right Truth but B is not the Right Truth? Is it ever possible for one source to give the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

And, there are more ways of controlling what becomes the ‘Right Truth’ than just lies of commission. There is also the illusory truth effect and lies of omission.

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