Elon & Twitter 7

Follow-up to this post

It's done. Twitter sued to force Elon Musk to finish the purchase of the company which he started last spring. Before the case went to court, he complied and last week bought Twitter. 

So the employees are happy now, right? Nope, they sound angry. They demand (open letter draft) that Elon change nothing: 

• Don't fire anybody (Because that would be undignified, because if we work in a foreign country we could lose our visas, because we would lose perks like health ins!)
• Don't wreck our contribution to public conversation (Because nothing improves public conversation like censoring people we hate!)

But - too late. He already fired the CEO and two other executives, and talks about firing more. It's common when a company comes under new ownership that he/she brings in a new team.

Last Wednesday he personally carried a sink into Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. He tweeted a video of it saying: "Entering Twitter HQ -- let that sink in!"

(cont'd tomorrow)

Loss for Meta

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, continues to lose value as revenue goes down and they keep investing in virtual reality. Meta stock in 2016, at its peak, was worth about $362/share. This week a share was going for about $100. 

Mark Zuckerberg owns 350 million shares. About 13 months ago his net worth was $142 billion, and then Meta began its precipitous decline. Don't feel too sorry for him because he's still worth $38 billion, which will get him through the winter all right.

Bloomberg wealth index listed him at one time as 3rd richest, right after Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Now he's pegged as #23.

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from Bloomberg

AI art? 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Can computers create art in the same way that humans do? It depends on how you define the words "create" and "art."

Computers or artificial intelligence can generate answers to questions, can direct equipment to build (like 3-D printer), can generate digital images, and much more, on one condition: that they have been programmed to do it.

That is, programmed by a human engineer to do the task. It's called "narrow AI." Programming is done by algorithms. An algorithm is instruction, a recipe, a formula. AI can be programmed or instructed by a human being to do any number of tasks for us.

But that's not "general AI," which would think for itself and create - in the sense that humans create ideas. So artificial intelligence doesn't actually create art, but rather the human engineer had the idea and taught the computer how to generate what he had in mind. The engineer is creating the art and using AI as a tool. 

What is creativity? This article explores its meaning. What is digital art? Wikipedia has an article on it.

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(Experts tell us to use the word "it" rather than a personal pronoun like he or she to refer to a robot. It may be designed with something like a face on it, it may have a name (like Sophia), it may be programmed to use friendly words -- but it is a machine, not a person.)

AI art?

Artificial intelligence has come a long way. We take its presence for granted when we program our thermostats, or when it runs manufacturing robots or helps the staff at a pizza shop, or when it links your phone to the camera at your front door.

In the spirit of innovation, people are trying to find out what else it can do. For example, can AI create art? Some claim that AI can do that. 

A digital art competition was held last July at the Colorado State Fair. Here's the piece that won:

Some of the contestants were upset when they discovered that AI had generated the image. The judges said they would have given it the prize even if they had known.

Is it art if it was generated by artificial intelligence? Does AI actually create, as humans do? 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Burrito econ

If one of your favorite foods as a student was a bean burrito, you had lots of friends who shared your taste for this nutritious, convenient fast food. Historic innovations made it possible.

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Back in 1945, an engineer was testing a new vacuum tube (a magnetron) when he accidentally discovered its ability to heat food. He built a metal box around it to trap the magnetic energy field, and - voila - the microwave oven was invented. Then in 1956 someone else invented the frozen burrito. A new wave of college student cuisine was going to follow.

By 1979 you could buy a microwave at Sears for $399.85. An unskilled worker in 1979 was making an average of $3.69/hour, so it would have taken about 108 hours of work time for him to buy it. 

An unskilled worker today averages $14.50/hour, and a microwave at Walmart is $74.00. To purchase it would today would take about 5 hours of work time.

The "time price" fell off a cliff. From 1979 until now, manufacturing innovations made a microwave cheaper both to make and to purchase. New eating options opened up to college students and everyone else.

from Gale Pooley's blog

Free market 5

(cont'd from last Friday)

This short video is making two of the same points that Jay Richards did in last week's posts, though not from a Christian point of view:

• Poverty was the normal human condition for a very long time.
• A few hundred years ago, things started changing. People started becoming freer from poverty and from tyranny. Freedom made a difference.

In "House of the Dragon" things don't change much. That's pretty realistic, because that's how it was for humanity for thousands of years. 

(Note: no endorsement for this show is intended because I haven't seen it.)

Free market 4

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

In Tuesday's video (posted originally in 2015), Jay mentioned the worldwide "Index of Economic Freedom." It is still being analyzed and reported on every year, and here it is for 2022. 

Why bother to care about whether a nation has economic freedom? Jay answered the question: because God commands us to care about the welfare of our neighbors, and economic freedom delivers by far the best outcomes for a society's people.

People are creative problem solvers. People are also morally flawed. Best outcomes result from empowering that creativity while at the same time restraining potential evil. When people  flourish, when they prosper, it is because the nation does a good job of balancing those conflicting goals.  

Pick a country you're interested in and look for it in this year's Index. You will get a lot of information about how free and safe its people are to be productive, to create a prosperous society.

Free market 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Do you doubt that a free market can enable prosperity, to meet the needs of more of the people? A sizeable number of our people really do doubt it. They think that an economy controlled by a socialist type of government (either voted into power, or forced into power by coup - doesn't matter which) will make more prosperity available to more people.

Jay Richards (Tuesday's video) learned the value of a free market from his 6th grade school teacher. On the day the class had to stay indoors during recess, their teacher brought in small toys like silly putty, paddle ball, Barbie trading cards, about $1/per toy, one for each child. They looked around at each other's toys, then wrote down how satisfied they were with the toy they had on a scale of 1 to 10. The teacher added up all the scores for a baseline total.

Then she gave them the freedom to trade with kids in the adjacent row, and added up all the scores again. No new toys had been added to the system, but the total score went up. Next, she gave them the freedom to trade with every student in the room, so their trading options multiplied.

They scored their satisfaction once more, she added up the total, and the number went way, way up. Overall happiness of the students soared when they were allowed to freely trade. No one was allowed to steal or force a trade (rule of law). They made only win/win exchanges, that is, trading only when both parties wanted to. 

That's a free market.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Free market 2

 Re-post from 2015

All through human history, the natural state of the vast majority of people has been bare subsistence or poverty. So our biggest concern, the most pressing question, should be: how did some cultures manage to raise their standard of living to comparative wealth?

A single feature correlates to cultures that rise out of poverty - it's economic freedom. This photo of the Korean peninsula shows visually the economic difference between the controlled north and the generally free south. That black area between South Korea and China is North Korea at night. In the south, they have the prosperity to light up their dark hours.

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South Korea has general economic freedom. But in North Korea, a "command" economy is controlled by a dictator. North Koreans as a people group are too poor to afford light at night.

Jay Richards' video in yesterday's post is so good - go back to yesterday and watch it if you haven't yet! He uses a beautiful story to demonstrate freedom in the marketplace - it results in more satisfaction, more happiness, more wealth,  for everyone. Including the lowest sectors.

Free market 1

Re-post from 2015

Jay Richards argues that Christians who care about human well-being should support free markets. Because Jesus said that "inasmuch" as we care for the well-being of our brothers and sisters in need, it's as if we do it for Him. So let's think about well-being and ask good questions.

"Even if you live in the bottom quintile (20%) of the American economy, you are among the wealthiest people ever to have lived in the history of the human race." (Q) How did it happen that people even in the bottom income bracket in the United States are wealthier than most of the rest of the world? 

Poverty has been the state of humanity throughout history since the Garden of Eden. By far the majority have had a subsistence living, just enough (material wealth) to survive. So the most important question that can be asked is not "where does poverty come from?" but (Q) "where does prosperity come from?" 

The second most important economic question is, (Q) "what special conditions have enabled whole cultures to leave absolute poverty and enjoy more than subsistence?"

The key factor that answers that question is in tomorrow's post.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Enough 4

Follow-up to this post

There's a page for "myth of superabundance" on Wikipedia, but it doesn't refer to the book Super Abundance. It's not even the same concept. It's a myth saying that we will never run out any resource, no matter how reckless we are in using it--resources like trees, water, animal species, minerals. Nobody should be careless in the management of earth's resources.

What the book does say is that, over the ages, resources and solutions have kept pace with growing populations - and surpassed them. Instead of famine and lack, highly increased populations have food and enough resources for an elevated living standard.

As Steven Pinker says: “People . . depend on ideas—formulas, algorithms, knowledge—which allow stuff, useless by itself, to satisfy our wants. In this lucid and illuminating book, Tupy and Pooley lucidly use this insight to explain a fact that, surprisingly, surprises people: over the centuries, our increasing knowledge has made more stuff available to us.”

As Michael Shermer says: “In a tsunami of bad news . . emerges Superabundance, a data-fueled corrective to the doom and gloom the media daily heaps upon us. Tupy and Pooley have done the world a service with this fact-filled reminder of how good our lives are compared to ages past, and how much more human flourishing is in store if we unleash human innovation.”

from Super Abundance

Is it fake? 5

 Re-post from 2019

Google has the trust of most Americans. Their search engine produces neutral, unbiased, reliable, factual results. That's the perception. But Dr. Epstein tells a different story when it comes to the  [2016] presidential election.

He starts out strongly identifying himself with one political side. It's necessary, because otherwise he will be dismissed as purely partisan. His message is bad news for his own party.

That's our state of affairs. Partisanship, manipulation, and outright lying are broadly expected from each side of our political divide. 

Sadly, the difficulty of finding out what is true now saps the moral energy of a pretty big segment of "we the people." They throw up their hands and refuse to engage in public debate at all because they have given up.



Google manipulated politically-related searches in 2016. Voters were fed results which delivered huge numbers of votes to Google's preferred political party. 

"Democracy, as originally conceived, cannot survive big tech as [it is] currently empowered," says Dr. Epstein. He's right.

Deepfake

"Deepfake" combines the AI term "deep learning" with the word "fake" to mean a video or image in which the true person's visual is replaced (powered by artificial intelligence) with the likeness of someone else. Why?  To simply entertain . . or to deceive.

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The resulting video or image is really convincing. Take a look at some Youtube videos. Here's one of Bruce Willis' face on a younger actor's body, speaking Russian in a commercial. And here's one using Tom Cruise's familiar face.

A Russian company called Deepcake made the deepfake video of Tom Cruise. They are probably ready to make one for you, or for a political party or for a country, or . . what wouldn't they and  other deepfake creators be willing to do?

It used to be that we could believe videos of people saying or doing something, because the technology didn't exist to lie so convincingly. What now? It will make truth even harder to know than it used to be. For example: do you believe some video showing a politician saying something awful? Or should you suspect it's a deepfake video made to convince you that she's awful? It could happen -- will happen.

Or this technology could create . . well, anything. Including some fake life that you wish for on the Metaverse. As always, what we do with any tool reflects what we value. You and all of us make choices. 

Hamburger bot

This hamburger flipping robot seems more successful than Amazon's scout. Flippy 2 can make french fries and works the fry station at White Castle and Jack in the Box stores. 

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Flippy was created by Miso Robotics, whose true-believer CEO thinks humans will largely be replaced at fast food restaurants eventually. He envisions the day when customers will "walk into a restaurant and look at a robot and say, 'Hey, remember the old days when humans used to do that kind of thing?’"

Why will a robot replace a human worker? As he puts it, "It does it faster or more accurately, more reliably and happier than most humans do it."

Bots failed

Amazon would have loved to hand some of its short-range delivery tasks over to robots. But they've given up live testing of their "Scout" program. About 400 employees who worked on it will be reassigned, they say, and maybe they'll find something else for their robots to do.

It worked by using self-driving technology within small areas. The video below shows that, and shows other companies trying the idea on retail deliveries.

It looks feasible, so why did Amazon shelve it? Because AI is not as close to human performance as some would like to think. In spite of big amounts of data pouring into it from cameras, Scout bots would get stopped by things like trash on the sidewalk. Feedback from customers was not good enough.

Elon & Twitter 6

Follow-up to this post

Twitter is suing Elon Musk to force him to buy the company per his original (large) offer, and that case was supposed to go in front of a judge soon. But there's a surprising turn of events in this ongoing drama. Now he says okay, he will buy it!

When he first made the offer last spring, staff and board members let it be known that they didn't like it. Elon's issue was to turn Twitter toward more free speech and away from viewpoint censorship - but a surprising number of people defended censorship.

Now that the purchase seems to be going forward again, critics are resurfacing.

One of them is a former high government official and hypocrite, who tweeted: "When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy."

Comments poked fun at his vast insincerity . . because a man of his experience just has to know that our "vital platforms for communication" are already owned by billionaires! One of the comments: "[Y]ou weren’t worried about Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, or anyone else."  Let's add to that list Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, Sergei Brin.

The win for oligarchy that he mentions was achieved years ago when our billionaire social media giants used their influential power to censor speech they didn't like.

Google rules

What happens when Google disagrees with you? You could be banned from Youtube, you could be silenced, and you could definitely be fired if you're an employee. That's what happened to this senior software engineer (video) .

If openness and dialog could cost you your job, there's a strong temptation to shut up. A lot of people out there are staying silent at work.

Censorship 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Texas passed a law that says social media companies cannot censor postings based on their political point of view. The law was challenged in court because they wanted to keep on doing just that. 

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But the judge ruled on September 16 that the law is just and that they must not muzzle free speech: "Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.” The Texas law stands.

And . . the law is going to be challenged again, this time at the Supreme Court. One of the SC  judges has already stated that this issue should be addressed.

In a related case, the attorney general of Missouri and the attorney general of Louisiana are bringing suit against current administration officials who, they claim, have partnered with social media companies to censor speech the government doesn't like.

A federal judge has ordered officials to surrender email exchanges with Big Tech.

from The Stream

Censorship 1

AT&T shuts down phone service to supporters of Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter. Politically motivated, this started during the previous administration in an effort to silence opinion that opposed that president's position on abortion and Critical Race Theory.

Since 99% of the company's employees who made political donations donated to the previous president/party, it's not surprising that they have a political agenda. They defend their actions by saying they can do whatever they like. But is it fair? 

Wait . . none of that is true. But the following is true.

Twitter shuts down service to people who oppose the current president's position on school lockdowns, mask information, J6, and much more. They even banned the previous president.

Since 99% of the company's employees who made political donations donated to the current president/party, it's not surprising that they have a political agenda. But is it fair?

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AT&T can't legally ban you for your opinions. But so far Twitter and other social media can and do ban whatever they want. That may change soon.

from The Stream

(cont'd tomorrow)

More SLS delay

Follow-up to this post

Here's the latest news on NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS) -- it won't launch until at least mid-November of this year, another six weeks. The original (current) target was in August.

Why? Difficulties and problems with the SLS are mentioned here and here. But hurricane Ian added another layer to the mess. The delays go on. Pressure from public opinion must be building.

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from Space

Enough 3

(cont'd from last Friday's post)

How poor were people in the past, compared to our standard of living today? Dr. Jordan Peterson says that it's very hard for today's students to picture it. Economist and co-author of Superabundance, Dr. Gale Pooley agrees and likes to use the example of sugar with his students:

For the same amount of time that an average worker would work to buy one pound of sugar in 1850, how many pounds of sugar would that labor buy today? His students suggest 2-4 pounds. But actually that work time today would buy 227 pounds!

from Discovery