Friday, February 12, 2021

What good are people?

What on Earth do we do with all these people?


Right now there are 7.8 billion people on the planet,  increasing at 1% a year, which means it will increase by another 2 billion in 30 years.

We have about 1.4 billion people apiece in China and India,  and 330 million in the USA.

Almost every problem on Earth right now is made worse by the rapid growth of population, which continues to accelerate.  

The truly bad news is that we have more people than we know what to do with, by a substantial margin, and we probably have more people than the planet will sustain right now, certainly true if they all want to live the way Americans live and burn up resources at that rate.

Aside from environmental damage,  one result is huge social unrest, because there appears to be no way countries can employ all these people.

On top of that, artificial intelligence and robotics is steadily growing more capable and replacing humans with machines, so we need even fewer people to keep things running.

In the USA,   many of the 75 million people who voted for Donald Trump were either unemployed, or about to become unemployed, and in any case felt neglected, at risk in many ways of being left behind by society or replaced by hordes of immigrants or both.

As one reader pointed out in a NY Times piece today on "unemployment benefits" due to Covid-19 pandemic in the US,   most people are not knowledge workers and are not likely to be retrained as engineers or scientists.

So, again, the question is, what do we do with all these people?  

Are they doomed to live miserable lives being ever larger burdens on a smaller fraction with jobs until the system crashes under its own weight?  By some estimates we are not that many years from such a situation.

To answer that question we might rephrase it slightly to:  What are people good for?   Is there some factor or issue or constraint which, if solved, would turn 8 billion people from net drains on the planet to net resources,  changing the picture from one of growing desperation to one of astounding wealth?

Since machines can already do the actual heavy lifting jobs for society,  we can probably narrow our search to:   What knowledge-based activity can put 8 billion people to good use?

We know that we have on the planet many problems in how to deal with various crises, as well as problems agreeing on what crises are more important than others.

So again, rephrasing and recognizing that we do have both Google and a world-wide web and that most people have, or conceivably could have smart-phones or devices to connect them to that web, we get to:

What would it take to make the 8 billion of us, connected to each other via the web, into a massively powerful problem-solving machine?

Perhaps one way to approach that problem is to look at a simpler microscale problem -- How can we get N-people working together to be even smarter if we added one more person,  for any value of N?

Right now,  we seem to hit the worst of "committee" behavior and a consequent drop in net intelligence of decision-making groups with N around something like 10 to maybe a max of 100.   There are very few ways we can fruitfully use 1000 people on any given problem and end up with better solutions than 100 people working together would produce.

So - what's the rate-limiting factor here?    Maybe some analogies will reveal patterns or insights.

Today's supercomputers for example use tens of thousands if not millions of smaller computers to synthesize effectively a single huge "super" computer.   Can we do something like that with people?  Or if not why not?

The human brain uses 100 billion neurons, working together, to solve problems vastly more complex than any single neuron could possibly encompass let alone solve.    I'll assert without proof that a human being with 100 billion neurons inside their brain surely has at least the capability of a single neuron,    so, theoretically, not discussing how exactly,  100 billion people might,  if acting the way neurons act together,  somehow synthesize an emergent meta-brain or meta-intelligence.

Is that far fetched? Or is that reasonable?   Are we not "there" yet because we don't interconnect well or enough, or because we have too few humans connected to social media, or is there some other factor in the way of collective brilliance?

Because if we could multiply our collective wisdom the the same extent that neurons multiply up to a brain, we would surely be able to solve interstellar travel and spread out to other planets ( if we then wanted to ) and reduce our overloading of Earth.

Or, are we creeping up on this emergent meta-Brain situation without even realizing it, just as, probably no individual neuron in our brain really can imagine (?) what an entire brain is or can do?   Despite our obvious battles in social media, is there some axis or dimension along which we keep stumbling to better and better modes of interaction?

Surely,  appealing to greed now,  if there were some missing app,  something Thomas Edison would refer to as the "smallest missing piece" -- as the light-bulb was to the electric power industry he wanted to create -- if there were such an app it would surely be a 'killer-app', a "unicorn",   something worth over a $trillion to the inventor(s) who could both get rich and save humanity and Earth -- shades of Total Recall. 

So modestly approaching that problem can we somehow make a map or diagram of the situation such that the SHAPE of of the missing element becomes clear or even obvious?  What function is missing in what larger almost-complete set of functions that together would span this problem?

I'm thinking here that, if we knew the specs, if we knew what this missing component needed to DO, we could then relatively easily figure out HOW to do that.    I'm exploring the idea that the real stumbling block problem before us right now is figuring out the specs.

Do we need to talk faster? Do we need to all use the same language?  Do we need a better or different language? 

Actually, if we sketch out 8 billion interconnected people,  we have in the middle a huge network of the world-wide web,  and at the end of each branch we have a dyadic pair --- a smart-phone that acts, Janus like,  on the one hand connecting to the world in WWW-speak, and on the other hand,  connecting to that particularly human being in that-persons-native-speak.

I use awkward wording on purpose here.   We have some hypothesized set of tasks that need the dyad pair  ( phone plus person ) to carry out,  that needs to be divided up between stuff the phone does and stuff the person does. 

In electronics,  there is a concept of "impedance matching" where we insert a "transformer" between a component with its native impedance or resistance to a circuit with a preferred resistance and by tweaking the transformer we match up the two so that the circuit "sees" its desired load, being as it were faked out by the transformer.    If the load is too heavy, the circuit can't budge it; if the load is too light, the circuit can't transmit much power to it -- imaging trying to convey 5 horsepower to a feather, for example.  There is a "right" resistance that maximizes the effective delivery of power, a Goldilocks level, and the matching-transformer makes the end component not have to change itself, but makes it appear to the circuit too have exactly that level of resistance. 

So maybe, our problem is that the native resistance ( in some meaning of the word ) of a human is not well matched to the optimum resistance the overall meta-brain wants to "see", and similarly on the other side of the match,  the 'resistance'  or "receptivity" of the web needs to be matched better to values that encourage and draw out and receive "pushes" from the individual.

That's just one way we might try to find analogous human and social factors to align with.

Or maybe we need to ponder more fully how a brain operates.    Often the brain is modeled as a network of neurons but that's not actually true -- the brain is a network of neurons immersed in a responsive chemical soup.

The soup part is generally treated as noise.   Maybe it's not noise.  Maybe it's an important component that is what makes the whole thing work!

Just as with humans interacting,  we have tended to model communication as the words or text-based,  language-based interaction and until recent decades, considered the emotional context and body language, etc. as noise, which we sought to reduce to zero in a 'perfectly rational conversation" that didn't evoke strong emotions.

Possibly that's a mistake.  Possibly the emotional 'soup' in which the words are exchanged is as important as, or more important than the words.  

Or maybe "phase" matters.   After all there are THREE not TWO signal encoding modes -- Amplitude modulation ( AM ), Frequency modulation ( FM) and Phase Modulation (PM).   The first two are used in radios but not the third in which the meaning of a signal changes if the 'same' signal arrives a microsecond sooner or two microseconds later.      We know that, again by analogy, when creating "aperture synthesis" with an array of discrete radio antennas,   it is critical to capture the phase information, not just the Amplitude information, or emergent super-resolution is impossible.  

 


 We know on a large scale for humans that an answer to a question of  "yes!" has a very different torque or meaning to it than an answer of "...yes" where the difference is purely the timing of the response.   We blip that as noise on most exams but it matters for human communication.   Maybe it matters for neurons and maybe it matters a lot.  ( Actually it's strange that we don't measure time-to-answer on most computerized exams when assessing comprehension of a subject.  An instant confident "yes" is quite different from a "um.... yes". Why do we discard that information now that we can capture it with computerized testing when we are already using "adaptive question sequencing" to try to deduce not just how much people know but how well they know it ? )  

So maybe the hand-held smart-phone impedance matching transformer needs to subtly be shifting the phase of each individuals communication, especially on a global scale with a speed of light limit, so that it becomes less chaotic and more coherent?  After all the only difference between room quality light and a cutting laser is phase synchronization of the individual photons and achieving and sustaining "phase-lock".

And while Generation Z may be used to everything being digital,  once upon a time in electronics and all the time in the brain,  these effects are analog.

Does that matter? It might.   Massively parallel analog signal networks may be able to achieve in real-time emergent behaviors that digital signal networks cannot.   Until we understand fully how human brains operate, we can't rule that out.

And, perhaps, in fact it is our hope for mankind.    Possibly interconnected emotion-laden analog communications between human beings is capable of "computing" emergent behaviors that networks of silicon-based emotionless computers and AI devices cannot. 

It's a thought.  It gets back to the original question -- What are people good for ( that computers are not?)  Maybe what we considered bugs  ( human emotions and empathy ) are in fact features we can exploit.

Whether its an alien artifact or a property of nature or living things,  biological swarms such as termites and slime-mold and monarch butterflies seem capable of somehow plugging into and utilizing emergent intelligence far beyond what any individual agent can deliver.  

 ( For that matter,  noting that human beings have a trillion cells but tracing backwards in time they once were all just "one" ancestor cell,  viral swarms of a billion Covid-19 bits all of which derived from a single one and may in fact still be connected to it via space-crossing quantum entangling comes to mind. How "intelligent" is such a swarm and what problems can it detect and solve that we had never realized it could, and if it uses that process can we disrupt it and thereby defeat it? )

Again, it's worth pondering. This is a central research question that deserves a place at the table. 





 









 

 




Thursday, February 11, 2021

Searching for advanced alien civilizations - some thoughts

Let's ponder the question - Are aliens out there?
Why haven't we seen them yet?

Given Earth's late arrival, half the civilizations started out there could have a 15 billion year head start on us. If only ONE survived adolescence, in that time good odds they've surveyed, alarmed, and even visited the known universe and may be busy farming / nursing along it / us. If they were hostile we'd already be dead. 

Sure, I know about the Drake equation, which computes odds of survival of any given civilization.  I had Frank Drake as an instructor! ( Carl Sagan too, for that matter! ) I'm reversing the logic and saying that, yes, odds that any given one will make it may be tiny, but,  despite that, given the huge numbers we start with,  the burden of proof is on the hypothesis that ZERO civilizations have ever crossed that sound barrier of adolescence.   It only takes one success to change the entire picture.

Looking for electromagnetic waves or messages seems akin too seeking smoke signals. 

Look - by now we would have installed universe-wide GPS, broadcast wireless power, and Google++. We would have put in guard-rails against predictable catastrophes.

Knowing anthropology they'd want to intervene here, but gently and remaining invisible, again as we would so as not to destroy our unique flowering with simply a clone of their own.   From what we've seen, cultures grow stale and need injections of new life to remain vital:  new food, new music, new fashions, new ideas.  Anything but Rocky-#3,782,421 reruns!

Maybe we don't see them because the whole galaxy is synchronized to bloom at once, like a Queen Anne's Lace. 


 

Regardless, a valid Scientific question is simply this: Are we being nudged along by an unexpected outside entity? We don't need to leap abruptly to "God did it!". If we were, as posited above, how would we know?

Does 'religion' count as evidence that maybe, details to be determined, something is going on along those lines? . For example, given that viruses mutate 1000x faster than we can keep up, why are we still alive? Shouldn't we all be dead by now? Search for that sort of question, not radio waves!

So that may not be the right question but it's the kind of question I think might be scientifically valid and productive to search. In the case of that question, what's more surprising than that life started on Earth is that, despite our best efforts ( ?! ) we haven't managed to kill ourselves off yet

Given daily headlines, that is a surprising observation, and worth digging into.

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
  ― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Letter to editor - New Scientist - re mistaking what "intelligence" measures

 In the 16 January 2021 issue Robert Sternberg proposes some ways for
"Rethinking intelligence" ( p26),  but mixes individual intelligence
with collective social intelligence,  which matters because it is surely
social collective intelligence which will be needed to address problems
such as water, energy, climate change, etc.

He is not alone in this, as an unstated implicit social assumption is
that by maximizing the former we will maximize the latter.  However as
any sports coach will tell you,  a team of stars does not generate a
star of a team.   Interactions and relationships matter.   Similarly
airlines have crashed and patients died because professionals when
measured solo failed to form great teams.  Virtues such as  empathy, 
compassion, humility, honesty, and trustworthiness all come into play,
especially over repeated encounters.  A diversity of backgrounds
improves decisions, as does being sure the team includes women.

Socially we operant-condition people, from Kindergarten to Tenure,  to
focus on individual skills -- then act surprised when teams of them act
like committees and fail us.  In aviation and the military teams are now
trained as teams; the entity being taught is "the team".  This
demonstrably works.   Modifying STEM education metrics can take decades
to have an impact;  modifying group decision-making can be done in an
afternoon of professional coaching.  But long-term we should educate
youth in what matters not what counts.

 

Moral Distress in Nursing: thoughts on voice, failures, errors and system-level issues

 This post is inspired by a tweet from Tese Stephens ( Teresa M. Stephens, PhD, MSN, RN, CNE ) reflecting her current work on "moral distress" in nursing.


The subject of abusive contexts in teams or organizations is tangled with the subject of "psychological safety" as taught by Professor Amy Edmondson.

Her poster is here but you need an image-processing program to zoom in enough to read the text. ( it's a 4096 x 4096 pixel image! )  This is the expanded version of this tweet:

https://twitter.com/DrTese/status/1221089268740902915

 

 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPIuNZ1X0AUOHGe?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

She's on twitter as @DrTese.  Her self description is: "Christ follower. Boat Rocker. Nurse researcher/educator exploring resilience as a means to fight moral distress and burnout. Holocaust educator. Views are mine."

 



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Before going on let me put in a plug for the opposite end of the spectrum -- innovation and entrepreneurship and solution of uncharted waters by use of virtue-driven consultation and listening to every voice at every level:

Spiritual Solutions to Economic Problems - through Baha'i consultation
https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2014/05/spiritual-solutions-to-economic.html

I think religious and spiritual factors are extremely relevant because it is precisely a strong fellowship and membership in an organization which upholds very high standards and is polarizing about it that gives a person the strength to stand up in strong headwinds and insist on having a voice.

Examples would be nursing professional organizations,  church or other worship communities, and the US Army.   It takes a village to be a strong individual, especially if it involves going toe-to-toe with a social culture that opposes virtue, or finds virtue in an assumed culture that accepts, winks at, or even worships selfishness, greed,  etc.

=================================== 

And one more totally surprising fact - the most top-down mission-critical organization in the world probably, the US Army,  uses after-action debriefings in order to hear the voices of the lowliest private as to what is working and what is not.   So if the US ARMY is capable of retaining authority at the top and still listening to their own staff, why can't every organization?


US Army Leadership Field Manual FM 22-100

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 I'm an IT systems analyst ( retired ) and worked 15 years at the University of Michigan 890 bed teaching hospital in Ann Arbor where I observed first hand many ways the nurses were left out of the conversation about what sort of Electronic Health Record or Physician Order Entry system the hospital should have. 

Around the globe,  it is extremely common for large-scale IT project to fail, and Electronic Health Record System implementations are high on the list of disasters caused by failure of higher ups to listen to the staff.  This sort of thing is common across industries, not just in health care.   Arrogance of management is wide spread.

Part of the problem is that we have confounded "authority", meaning one who is an expert, with "authority", meaning one who is in charge.   In the 1800's this would have been the same person, but today the world is vastly more complicated and no person can possibly be an expert in everything, but the powerful narrative that 'the boss' is supposed to be 'the expert' massively distorts necessary conversations as dissent and well-deserve advice is taken as hostile enemy action.   

The Toyota Way describes how Honda and Toyota managed to rise from war devastated Japan to overtake the Big Three auto makers in the USA and a key part of that process was a culture of massive transparency and efforts to expose, and then fix, errors and waste, on every level, including management.     There was no taboo on a "360-degree assessment" actually looking up for sources of problems in operations as well as the normal looking around and down -- that's why it worked and that's why it was so unpopular in America.

As a private pilot myself I also had been following the literature on aviation safety as well as Amy Edmondson's work on "Psychological Safety".     I did my MPH work at Johns Hopkins and took the course in Patient Safety from Dr. Peter Pronovost which covered many of these topics in depth.   I also ended up working the Office of Clinical Affairs, a decade ago now,   harvesting data on medication administration and preparing the monthly internal reports as well as the federally mandated reports on same.

Here's an index into some of the post I wrote in the past on safety, errors,  system-level errors, etc.  I actually wrote several hundred and these are the most important and immediately relevant ones.

 

A systems-level analysis of why large organizations develop blind spots

The road to error - illustrated


The Crash of Comair 5191 in Lexington KY -- taking off on the wrong runway


The crash of ComAir 5191 - a multi-lelvel systems analysis of how things go so wrong

Comair 5191 - Confirmation Bias and Framing (1/20/07)
Cockpit voice recorder transcripts

 
Washington DC Crash of Air Florida was 25 years ago - remembered
(with links to BMJ, High-reliability engineering, TEM, etc.)  

 

On the Deepwater Horizons oil-spill into the Gulf of Mexico

https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2020/02/deepwater-horizon-lessons-we-still.html

https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2010/05/oil-next-time.html

https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2010/11/gulf-spill-report-reveals-lack-of.html


 

Hypnotized in high places - Northwest Flight 188

 https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2009/10/hypnotic-trance-in-high-places.html

 Things we have to believe to see

Why men don't ask for directions

Pisa/OECD - Why our education stresses the wrong way of seeing

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Active strength through emergent synthesis

US - Economy of arrogance (and blindness)

Virtue drives the bottom line - secrets of high-reliability systems

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help

Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)

High-Reliability.org web site

Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

The importance of social relationships.

Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)





High-Relability Organizations and asking for help(my thoughts)
Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper, MIT)
High-Reliability.org web site
Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety - Texas

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Nineteen case studies of health care organizations that dramatically improved their operations through the use of feedback-regulated small-team ("microsystems") operations are well documented in another  post.