It would seem I can only come back to write here during especially tumultuous moments in history— driven by thoughts and emotions and a desire to codify them.

I never wanted to write about the Trump Presidency again, but I guess that has been foist upon me. It is really hard to put into words what I feel. I had forgiven my fellow citizens and neighbors for ushering in the first version of President Trump—chalking it to a middle finger to "the establishment" in an earnest acknowledgement of the pain and hardship they are feeling—that frankly, I have not. But this time? This time they know the chaos they are choosing, this time seems gratuitous and mean spirited. It is as if the only important thing for some group of Americans is "owning the libs". That isn't the country I grew up in. Until Trump there was still a sense that we are in this together. At least I thought there was.

Now more than half the country distrusts the institutions that are meant to protect us and our rights. Health, Education, and Judicial institutions form the bulwark against power and misinformation—against abuses of power and overreach. They are now all weaker today than they were eight years ago.

And even more of the country distrusts each other.

In a very real sense, we are becoming Russia. An autocratic state, run by those out only for themselves, ruling over an increasingly cynical and despondent population.

Despite my belief that Trump and Co will erase any of the economic growth we've experienced in the past 4 years and generally fuck around with a lot of things I care about (ACA, CHIPS Act, our support for Ukraine), I know that much of what Trump and his cronies have in mind, will not materially effect me. After all, I am in a very good financial situation. I do not have children whose future I need to consider and whose rights will continually be winnowed away. I have good friends with whom to commiserate. I do feel some empathy—mixed with not a small amount of schadenfreude—for the folks who have once again been grifted by the biggest con man our country has ever seen. They will be hurt the most in the coming years.

More than anything, a President sets the tone for the nation. And the tone Trump has always set is one of fear and anger, division and chaos, me and mine. This is what I find so difficult to deal with. This is why I need to disconnect and not pay attention. That is also what they want, so that they may push their agenda against weakened opposition.

I may have skipped a few steps but I am in in whatever phase feels the most like despair.

But I can do something about this. Maybe I cannot completely filter out all the inputs that will be coming at me (and maybe that is not the right path), but I am in command of how I feel about those inputs. The next four years will be a test as to how much I believe that. How much the story I tell myself will have sway over the one playing out in the world out there.

I'm very excited to see Tim Urban resurface with his new book on what ails us as a society. I haven't even finished the book yet, but I couldn't wait to share it.

If you were a fan of Wait But Why, you likely read the mega-series of posts titled The Story of Us. (since removed). In this series, Urban builds a case describing the current dysfunction in our society and its origins. The author has now turned this into a book called What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies that he describes in his meta post about the process of creating it, as a complete look at the issues we now face as a society.

His thesis begins by laying out 3 facts:

Fact 1: Technology is exponential

It’s natural to assume that the world we grew up in is normal. But nothing about our current world is normal. Because technology is exponential. More advanced societies make progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced.

Fact 2: More technology means higher stakes

Technology is a multiplier of both good and bad. More technology means better good times, but it also means badder bad times.

Fact 3: My society is currently acting like a poopy-pantsed four-year-old who dropped its ice cream

Why, in a time so prosperous, with the stakes so high, would we be going backward in wisdom?

The book was more than 6 years in the making. I was surprised to see it come out. So surprised that I had to go see if George RR Martin had finished the next book in the Ice and Fire series. (I can save you some time—he has not)

I'm reading it as fast as I can and I am sure at least a few posts will be forthcoming from me on topics found in the book.

What's Ben's Problem?

On a personal note: about a month ago I ruptured my achilles tendon playing volleyball. I've always had "tight tendons", as many athletes do 😉, and this time my left leg finally gave up the ghost. I met with the surgeon who recommended we let it heal non-surgically. Amazingly, that is a thing and results have similar efficacy to surgery.

Jena has been amazing with helping me out and I've been trying to get around on one of those little knee scooters, but—if you're considering it for yourself—I would not recommend this injury.

I'll be in a cast for at least a few more weeks, then a soft boot for a few more. After that, I'll start physical therapy. It was an ok time for this to happen, I guess. Ski season was winding down and I should be able to incorporate some trails into my rehab, so I won't miss too much of hiking season.

The following is a poem by David Whyte as included in his latest book: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words as presented on a recent Sam Harris podcast. I thought it deserves inclusion here, in its entirety.

Friendship...

is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Through the eyes of a real friendship an individual is larger than their everyday actions, and through the eyes of another we receive a greater sense of our own personhood, one we can aspire to, the one in whom they have most faith. Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding not only of the self and the other but also, of a possible and as yet unlived, future.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.

Through the eyes of a friend we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others. When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation; boredom is the second great killer of friendship. Through the natural surprises of a relationship held through the passage of years we recognize the greater surprising circles of which we are a part and the faithfulness that leads to a wider sense of revelation independent of human relationship: to learn to be friends with the Earth and sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter and in that faithfulness, take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going.

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend of sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

This bit also stood out as I have experienced this with past co-workers and am embarking to learn and grown with my current colleagues.

I have worked a lot in the corporate world and. I always say that real conversations always happen along this axis of vulnerability, even in in the most the most powerful hierarchies in the in the business world. And the foundational axis of vulnerability, you know, in the hierarchy of a workplace is my as a leader simply admitting that I do not have all the answers.

Quick shout out to Happy Scribe for providing such a great service of "transcribing the internet" and making it much easier to find parts of podcasts.

Like my post just before the election, people are calling for not further isolating, harming, and punishing those that got conned by Trump and his enablers, despite how good that might feel right now.

While I certainly don't share Sam's "vilification of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the "progressive wing of the left", there is a lot he says here with which I agree.

"We have a sitting U.S. President who is trying to hold onto power by shattering every democratic norm we have. And failing that, he is trying sabotage the Presidency of his successor for his own personal gain. And he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. This is probably the lowest point in our democracy since the civil war."

There will be much made of the current attempt to undermine our very democracy in the years to come. What has to come first is figuring out a way to make this a country for all again, with shared ideals and shared truths. Nothing should be off the table: regulations on social media companies, improved election mechanics (STAR or Approval Voting), and publicly funding elections are a few things to try. Then there are the policies and ideas that have yet to be tried in the U.S that can bring us back into the company of the best democracies in the world, things like education/training, healthcare for all, Universal Basic Income, diminishing the power of corporations, and wealth equality.

I plan on digging into each of these and more in the combining months with posts here. Subscribe to be notified when the posts go up.

What we didn't need now was more reasons to be wary of each other.

* While most conservatives don't hate poor people, it seems they continue to elect people who, at the very least, don't care about them.

I want to capture how I feel at this time in history. "This time in history" is a funny phrase. Every time is a time in history. Every thing is either experience or memory.

But I needed to get this out prior to next Tuesday's election—the most important one in my lifetime. I think I've said that before. This time is truer than ever. We need to vote. And we need to vote for Joe Biden. This isn't because he is amazing or anything. We all know he ain't. Put simply, America may not be able to handle another four years like the ones we've just had.

This isn't going to be a post about all the things wrong with Trump and the tone he has set for the country. That would take too long and others have done it better. Plus he shouldn't get all the "credit". He simply tapped into something that was already there.

No, I'd like to take this post down a more personal path—in an old school weblog sort of way. I'd like to tell you about what has made me very sad and very angry in 2020.

I've always thought Americans—when it really came down to it—would stand together—would rise up as one. (Some) Wars have done it. I figured huge events like an alien invasion or global pandemic would have the same sort of effect. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has not brought Americans together, except for maybe in hospital beds near each other. We've had riots where some are angry and sad and some are out to sow chaos for their own gain. There are people proudly not wearing masks—disregarding the other people in our society for—you know—their freedom. And you have people getting together in large numbers, going to restaurants for—you know—boredom.

I really don't like how my fellow Americans are behaving.

More than anything, I dislike how I feel during these times. What I am feeling borders on hate for those who would—in my opinion—put their party and "winning" over the good of the country, and even their neighbors.

I don't like hating.

I want to try to understand people. I am not interested in how they may see things but how it is that they came to see things the way they do.

I would like to tear down the idea that we are our beliefs versus just believing what we believe. We should believe what we believe but be who we are. We should hold our beliefs as less sacred—be willing to change them when new information is presented. But today, we vote based on how we identify and which candidates best reflect that identity back at us.

This is why to say someone is voting against their best interests is simply not understanding how that person sees the world and their place within it. I won't ask someone why they are seemingly voting against their interests ever again. Instead I'll be curious about the person. I'll want to know what motivates them? What is important to them? How do they see themselves, their community, their country.

We need to understand each other and for that we need to talk to each other. And here we get to the thing that has really got me down—especially in this time where we are (or should be) spending time more or less isolated with our families and small circles of friends. It is harder than ever to talk to those "on the other side".

We need to move away from politics as team sports where one side "wins", one side loses, and the sum is zero. It isn't winning to simply make the other side angry, or sad. We should be looking for ways to have the highest number of Americans improve their lives.

My views on America both past and present have really been informed by this Wait But Why blog post series that I recommend everyone read even though it is uber long. Really, though, you should read it. It is great. Here's a bit from the end:

Humans are complicated animals with complicated motivations, but the basic idea holds up. If a reasonably stable human society starts falling into some kind of downward spiral, it’s probably because something about one or both of the independent variables has changed—usually, something about the environment.

I’ve read a whole bunch of sociological theories about why we in the U.S. have been spiraling down a polarization vortex, and there are lots of interesting ideas, with little consensus.

The post goes on to point out that Americans are becoming segregated into geographic and information bubbles that make it tougher for us to come into contact with others holding different views, and when we do, it is more difficult to understand and empathize with them.

I think it can be easy to dismiss the geographic bubbles until you dive into the research of Thomas Schelling and corresponding simulation created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case.

Small individual bias can lead to large collective bias.

Equality is an unstable equilibrium. The smallest of bias can push a whole society past the tipping point.

The smallest biases that almost all of us have, for example, all it takes—even for those who desire to live in a diverse neighborhood—is a slight interest in not being in the minority (fiscally, racially, etc) of that neighborhood, to compel the whole neighborhood to segregate. Play with the simulations yourself to see how.

What's even worse than slight preferences tipping us all into a segregated world, is that simply being unbiased isn't enough to change it back. If there was ever bias present, people will need to take active measures like choosing to move into places where they are the minority to correct things. It won't fix itself.

Then there are the information bubbles where we get our news from hyper-specific outlets catering to what we tend to click on, based on algorithms whose only purpose is to maximize our attention—get us that next video. This has lead to people going down rabbit holes and believing crazy things. Watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix and reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff really brings these points home.

The problem beneath all other problems

Technology’s promise to keep us connected has given rise to a host of unintended consequences that are catching up with us. If we can’t address our broken information ecosystem, we’ll never be able to address the challenges that plague humanity.

Persuasive design techniques like push notifications and the endless scroll of your newsfeed have created a feedback loop that keeps us glued to our devices.

Social media advertising gives anyone the opportunity to reach huge numbers of people with phenomenal ease, giving bad actors the tools to sow unrest and fuel political divisions.

Algorithms (and those who deploy them) promote content that sparks outrage, fans the flames of hate, and amplifies biases within the data that we feed them.

We need to have some shared understanding of the truth or we cannot function as a society. But as we are pulled and pushed into these "safe" information bubbles we only hear opinions from people who look and sound like us. We are living in different realities.

I'm going to be searching for people in these different realities in 2021 regardless of who wins next week's election. I'll just be a lot sadder and angrier for a while while I do it. Please cut me some slack.

Some time ago I appended a pair of characters to the end of my twitter bio. They paired well with where I was at that time and how I was beginning to feel about my life. I was seeking change for the better.

These Sino-Japanese characters are Kai and Zen—Kaizen when used together–and mean improvement. When Toyota started to use the term as part of its underlying lean manufacturing principles, the common meaning bent towards the way the carmaker was using it: continuous improvement. In combining ‘kai’ and ‘zen,’ each individual makes sacrifices for the betterment of the entire group. The cycle of kaizen activity as laid out in The Toyota Way (and popularized in the West by W. Edwards Deming) is: Plan → Do → Check → Act.

When I "discovered" the symbols, I had believed just that they were beautiful to look at and elegantly illustrated a concept that appealed to me. It's not only appropriate now, that I apply these symbols to my life—as I look to get more involved with charitable endeavors and work on myself—but it also ties into the application of agile methodologies that I've employed during the last 15 years of my career in software development and startups.

There are likely other ways to understand kaizen or live the philosophy of kaizen that could be beyond me.

One does not really ‘understand’ the cultural connotations of kaizen, but rather ‘feels’ and ‘senses’ its presence living in modern-day Japan. In Japan, an entity or product without kaizen is like a bowl of rice without miso soup–one simply flourishes by enhancing the other. [Source]

While I may never fully come to understand all that it means, I will likely still keep these two symbols in my various social media profiles as a small reminder to always be changing for the better.

If you enjoy my (low-volume) writings here, please subscribe to get them delivered to your inbox.

Long before these anxiety-provoking times, my interest in meditation was sparked. For a long time that interest was a small ember glowing inside—I didn't really know how to proceed and I was put off a bit by the religious undertones often associated with some forms of meditation. After reading Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by neuroscientist, Sam Harris, whose practical descriptions demystified meditation for me—it seemed like something I could do.

After a few fits and starts, I began practicing meditation in earnest midway through 2019. Most of my experience with meditation is in the practice called mindfulness which is what Harris mostly speaks about and teaches. And although, like yoga, this is something you can do without a guide, I've found it helpful to have one—I've tried out a half dozen or so mobile apps. My favorite is Sam Harris' Waking Up app, as it has a very nice collection of 50 ten-minute sessions that serve as an introduction and build on each other. I've also tried several other good apps including: Ten Percent Happier (based on the book of the same name by Dan Harris—no relation to Sam!), Calm, Oak, Headspace, and even a headband that measures brain activity while you meditate, called Muse.

While my life has not transformed due of meditation, my perception of things has. I'd like to use this post as a reflection of these things and a marker along my path. I'll discuss the general benefits of meditation and the benefits that I have reaped. In addition I'll break down meditation into some basic parts and define a few terms.

The scientific benefits of meditation

Meditative practice promises all sorts of benefits. The following are a few of those, all with the scientific -backing of thousands of studies.

1. Stress relief and reduced anxiety
2. Improved emotional health and outlook
3. Enhanced self-awareness
4. Increased attention span and focus
5. Reduced age-related memory loss
6. Greater understanding, capacity for kindness, and connection with others
7. Controlled addictions
8. Improved sleep
9. Pain relief
10. Decreased blood pressure

These two articles (1)(2) provide a good overview, as well as links to additional readings and the study findings themselves. A scientific approach and the research that went in to the books and apps recommended above were a necessary component for me to take meditation seriously. Believing that meditation was shrouded in mysticism, made it a non-starter for me. While I have not realized all of the benefits listed (yet), I have witnessed some and see how the door is opened to others. Below I'll lay out what I've learned and how that knowledge has improved my life. Some of these concepts might be a little strange sounding and possibly not accessible without some meditation or contemplation efforts of your own.

(That sounds like some of the stuff that turned me off of meditation for so long and for that I apologize. But some things cannot be told but must rather be understood from experience.)

These are some of the ends to meditative practice, but it is really the means by which these benefits come that is at the core of meditation.

The goal of mindfulness meditation is to simply be aware of how things already are

That is, the goal is not to change anything about yourself, but to recognize how your mind already is and experience the freedom that is inherent to the nature of consciousness. This can bring about freedom from anger, fear, shame, envy, craving, etc and ultimately (and most inscrutably) a freedom from self. We can cover that last one—self as an illusion—at another time, both for when I am more comfortable with the concept and when I can articulate it better¹.

Things I've learned through practicing meditation

• There is nothing that needs to happen or occur when practicing mindfulness meditation. The goal is to simply observe what is already occurring.
• Our bodies are merely sensory input devices to our consciousness.
• There is nothing hidden from us or beyond our reach - it is all there in consciousness to be observed.
• Sounds, smells, sights, sensations all appear in consciousness—the "place" where we experience these things is all the same.
• Thoughts and feelings appear in this same place, too,
• We are not our thoughts. We don't think them, they occur to us—they appear in consciousness.

How these learnings have changed how I am

• Phrases like "a thought occurred to me" or "an idea came to me" really resonate now as how this process actually takes place. I have started replacing phrases like "I thought" and "let me think" to remove the concept of thought authorship.
• Since thoughts are things that just occur, I don't judge myself for them—I simply observe them.
• Likewise, I am not hard on myself for forgetting something—these things are fleeting after all.
• While I cannot always stop an emotion from taking control and affecting how I react in a situation, I can now often recognize what has triggered an emotional response and (since that response is not me, nor did I make it happen) I can move past it much more quickly than I have in the past.
• It is hard to overstate the impact the last point can make. By detaching from the emotion and impulse that can come over us and not identifying with these emotions and impulses, we are free to not allow them to have power over us.

How to get started

Maybe you've been interested in trying meditation, maybe what you've read here has you motivated to try. It shouldn't be daunting, and you don't need to know anything to get started.

In fact, my advice is to focus on mindfulness and to just download one of the apps listed in the intro and get started with some guided lessons. My favorite app, Waking Up, is not free, but does include a guarantee of a full refund should you not find it valuable. And as Harris often points out on his podcast, he doesn't want financial wherewithal to stand between someone and this content he finds so important, so you can even email him and ask for a free account.

But if you'd like more background on the practice of meditation itself (including why people who meditate—maybe annoyingly—call it practicing) read on.

While there are MANY² variations of meditation that have been developed over the thousands of years people have been doing it, there are really two major categories into which we can group meditation styles:

Focused-attention meditation: Concentrating attention on a single object, thought, sound, or visualization. It emphasizes ridding your mind of attention and distraction often focusing on breathing, a mantra, or calming sounds.

Open-monitoring meditation: Focusing on broadened awareness of all aspects of your environment, the nature of thought, and the sense of self. Becoming aware of thoughts, feelings, and impulses that might normally be suppressed or occluded.

Both of these styles are incorporated into Mindfulness—"the psychological process of purposely bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the present moment without judgment."

Endnotes:

1. If you want to jump ahead, Sam Harris also wrote a book about this concept called, Free Will.
2. There are many types of meditation and many names for similar styles. This makes it confusing. Here's an abridged list without regard for duplicative or overlapping styles: mindfulness meditation, spiritual meditation, focused (or focused attention) meditation, movement meditation, mantra meditation, transcendental meditation, loving-kindness or metta meditation, body scan or progressive relaxation, breath awareness meditation, zen meditation, vedic or yogic meditation, noting meditation, skillful compassion meditation, resting awareness meditation, reflective meditation, visualization meditation, chakra meditation, Vipassana meditation, Qigong meditation, Taoist meditation, sound bath meditation, self-enquiry meditation, Christian contemplative meditation, Sufi meditation

As I sit here at my desk, in a small home Jena and I built in the foothills of the Cascade range in North Central Washington I am struck by how lucky I am. Both Jena and I have been able to work from home, we already had pretty stocked cupboards and were able to purchase enough to last for a while, and we're healthy. Well about that...

We've been practicing sheltering in place for the past two weeks and social distancing since the 3rd of March. We also have a personal isolation plan inside our house to stagger the impact should one of us get the virus so we won't have it at the exact same time.

I started a few drafts of this post. I was going to post a bunch of stats, and links to what we should do but I am sure most of us—and especially those of you who find yourselves looking at this post, know what to do and are frankly sick of those posts. Me too. I'm still going to post a bit of this, but not go into nearly the detail I had prepared. But I still want to cauterize the thoughts I am having and get a sense of the emotions I am feeling during these strange times we are in. So here we are, another post about the world's latest bout of viral outbreak. The novel coronavirus and resulting COVID-19 disease are here, another in a long, unbroken chain of pandemics. It would have been nice had we been more prepared for this. We knew it was coming. We've just been lulled into thinking all viral outbreaks would be contained like SARS, etc.

At the time of writing there have been 819,025 coronavirus cases worldwide with 174,684 in the U.S. Worse, there have been 39,794 deaths (3,400 in the U.S.). But these stats grow hourly and they can also be pretty deceiving. First, they don't tell the story of the non-linear growth we are seeing. While there are only 819,025 cases right now, that number will balloon into the hundreds of millions or more in the coming months. What's more—these numbers are actually suppressed. There are a ton of people who have many of the symptoms but who cannot get tested. There are many more who have been exposed but who aren't presenting any symptoms (as many as 86%). These people, while not sick, can still infect others. And now, we see, that for some reason, the younger populations in our country are being hit harder than they did in China.

All this is to say that it is highly likely that you or someone you know will contract COVID-19. So far that still isn't so scary—or shouldn't be.

With proper medical care patients with COVID-19 have a very good chance at being fine.

The real problems arise when proper medical care is not available. This would most likely occur in the event that our health care system becomes overloaded. And this is the whole reason you have likely been told to socially distance or shelter in place - i.e. stay the fuck home.

But due to misinformation, a failure of leadership, and the good ol' American spirit of don't tell me what to do, the U.S. isn't doing all it could to slow the spread (or flatten the curve) and we are now the hotbed of this outbreak.

Shown more simply, some have called this The Hammer and the Dance

See, the key to minimizing the number of deaths is to make sure there are enough healthcare workers and ventilators for everyone who needs them. That only happens if we don't see the big red spikes in these graphs—it only happens if we flatten the curve.

A team of data scientists, engineers, and designers made this really great tool: COVID Act Now to help people see just how much time their state has to prepare against hospital overloading. My home state of Minnesota has implemented shelter-in-place well in advance of their hospital overload line. That should give them a really good chance to minimize the deaths (sub-1000?) from this.

My current state of residence got hit early and the Governor was reluctant to order citizens to shelter in place early. He could have saved more lives if he did. Now the National Guard has been called in and field hospitals are being built (on actual soccer fields). We have only had 210 deaths so far but that number is likely to rise well past 10,000 due to slow reaction at the government level and lack of commitment and diligence at the citizen level (people are still out and about WAY too much around here).

The scariest part is that most states won't see their peak for
3-4 weeks. That means SEVERAL MORE MONTHS of staying
at home and avoiding crowds.

Unfortunately, we've seen the same things play out nationally: a denial that it is a problem, a slowness in understanding the situation, and a lack of decisiveness has and will cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S.

Spoiler Alert: It won't be a very good job, and it will exceed 100,000.

And in case you haven't seen enough of these, here's one more exponential graph:

"Our grandparents were called to war. We're being called to sit on the couch. We can do this."

So, we're being called to stay home—only going to work if we are in an essential area. It would be great if the government would be on top of this job-loss situation. Sending $1200 to each person once, this summer, is not what I mean, either. But that is a post for another day. (Spoiler: Canada once again shows US up.)

We can do this—we have to. We aren't a country that chooses to sacrifice hundreds of thousands even millions of lives, because something is hard. If a global pandemic cannot bring us together, I have little faith anything can. And that is truly disheartening and sad. America has lost a thread—any thread—that binds us together.

If you don't want a child to cross a street you should yell “Stay on that side” versus “Don’t cross the street”. I don't have children but that hasn’t stopped me from passing it on to all my parent-friends. It is just one of those things that has always stuck with me.

Telling children (and adults, too!) what you want them to do rather than what you don’t want them to do puts the focus on the desired action and ups your chances of a positive outcome. (Source)

Nadene van der Linden's post on improving communication with kids provides some helpful tips:

Use more “dos” than “don’ts”

Some kids hear a lot of “don’ts.” Often parents know what they don’t want to happen, so they lead in with a “don’t” statement. The downside of “don’t” statements is that they fail to promote the positive behavior you want to see. If anything, they reinforce the behavior you don’t want.

Imagining talking to your child as you talk to your friends can help break the “don’t” habit. We would rarely say “don’t do this, don’t do that” to our friends when they come to visit. We instead use more open and respectful suggestions.

Swapping our “don’ts” for “dos” can look like this:

• “Don’t go outside, it’s cold,” becomes, “Stay inside please. It’s too cold to play outside.”
• “Don’t hit your brother,” becomes, “Play gently with your brother.”
• “Don’t color on the carpet,” becomes, “Please do your coloring on the table.”

Several years ago, I started hearing and seeing more and more examples of positive and negative language in use. Here's a recent (ridiculous) example from the apartment complex we lived in:

A quick inspection will show that the most prominent text on each of these refuse receptacles is to say what it isn't. The green recycling bin on the left has two large signs warning no garage is to be placed there and a smaller white sign indicating it is single-stream recycling. Meanwhile, turning our attention to the right, the largest type on the sign shows "Recycle" but we are supposed to understand that the arrow points, not to the opening just to the left but instead to the green bin on the other side of it. Each bin is communicating most loudly what its use isn't. At some point, they may have realized that the signs still were not working and placed an easel with even clearer instructions—you know—instead of just replacing all the signs on each bin with a large clear sign for what goes in each.

Not just for kids and garbage bins

You can easily see that the tips for communicating with kids can provide utility for adults as well. Simply tweaking language to convey gratitude versus apology changes the tenor of communication as well.

"Sorry I am late" becomes "Thank you for waiting for me"
"Don’t" becomes "I like it when..."

You might not even realize that you use common negative phrasing every day. I know I didn't think I was until I examined some common expressions in use around the Edwards' household.

Here are some examples from the post How to Turn 11 Everyday Phrases From Negative to Positive (slightly rearranged; emphasis mine):

Why not? → Sounds good
No problem → Definitely!
Can’t complain → Everything’s going well, thanks

These phrases are meant to be positive - but the human brain has a negative bias, and subconsciously brings up all of the reasons not to do something, problems, or complains when processing these words.

I’m exhausted → I need to rest
I forgot → I’ll make sure to set a reminder

Flipping the phrase to include a solution leaves both the speaker and the listener with a better taste in their mouths.

Constructive criticism → Feedback

How you ask for feedback can affect what type of feedback you receive. Ask for criticism (constructive or not) and that is what you will get.

Language structures reality and impacts the way we feel. “No, I can’t get it to you on Thursday,” feels differently than “What I can do is get it to you first thing on Friday morning.” They basically say the same thing but one sets an “I can” framework and the other an “I can’t.”

The Framing Effect

This has been studied, most famously perhaps, by cognitive and mathematical psychologist Amos Tversky and Nobel Memorial Prize-winner (Economic Sciences) Daniel Kahneman¹.

Way back in 1981 Tversky and Kahneman set up an experiment where they asked hypothetical patients to choose one of two treatments for a hypothetical disease based on the descriptions below. The catch? Both predicted outcomes are the same, they just seem different based on the way they are framed.

72% chose Treatment A when it was positively framed compared to treatment B, while only 22% chose it when it was negatively framed.

Linguists believe individuals who follow the findings of Tversky’s and Kahneman’s experiment, and use positive verbalism like positively slanted speech, are generally perceived in a better light compared to those who do not. Through mindfulness of this type of diction, English speakers can elect to alter the reception of their message. This is because positive language affects cognition. (source)

That affecting cognition part is huge and it is largely described by something called the Pollyanna Principle—that humans are more inclined to remember pleasant things more accurately than unpleasant things. This happens at the subconscious level—and for anyone who's self-examined—that's who's calling the shots.

PositivePsychology.com describes this as:

the human tendency to focus on the positive and use more positive words and terms during a conversation. Generally, people who are mentally healthy and not suffering from depression tend to focus more on the positive than the negative, and they are prone to recalling more positive than negative phenomena from their memories as well.

According to researchers Matlin and Stang in the 1970s “cognitive processes selectively favor processing of pleasant over unpleasant information” and business consultant Sarah Simoneaux suggests that we actually comprehend positive statements 30–40% times faster than we would negative ones.

Our languages, to varying degrees, have even evolved a positivity bias into them. Researchers published a paper to this effect in 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (you can figure out how to pronounce the acronym).

By looking at the spread of 100,000 words in 10 different languages² evidence is presented of "a deep imprint of human sociality in language" across three axis:

1. The words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias
2. The estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation
3. This positivity bias is strongly independent of the frequency of word use

Even when taking into account that one of the sources of study was that font of positivity known as Twitter, the results show that we generally are an optimistic species—at least those subsets of us that have survived until now.

But using positive messaging doesn't just change the way others receive those messages (and thus, think). It changes the way the sender of those messages feels.

So when we use positive language...

• People do what we want
• We are perceived as better
• We feel better

The language we use affects how we perceive the world, how others perceive us, and how we perceive ourselves. It can be used as a tool for us to live in a better place. It will actually be better for us—since the world is only what we perceive it to be.

I know many people have a tough time with this positivity thing. I thought I would complete this post by leaving this video here in hope that it just might perk them up.⁴

tl;dr - I've migrated this site away from Medium.com to a shared server running an install of Ghost. There were several reasons for this but chief among them was a growing sense of disconnection with the readers of the site and a desire to create a community again.

Please subscribe to ensure you are a part of this community we are growing here.¹

🌰🥜 and 🔩🔩

Despite being a bit behind the curve when I migrated this site and its contents to Medium.com a few years ago, it felt like the right thing to do. The work involved with maintaining the site's infrastructure, my disillusionment with Wordpress as a writing platform, and corresponding enchantment with the writing experience on Medium all played a part. But underlying it all was a belief that I could share my content with more people on Medium than I could on my own. I knew that would come at a cost but at the time it was one I felt glad to pay.

Back in 2017, I got in just in time to utilize my own domain—something that Medium subsequently shut down but would have been a deal breaker for me had I had to use medium.com/alttext versus alttext.com. What they also did, however, was to start switching over, more and more, to a membership model. I paid—it wasn't much—and I believed in what the leadership at Medium was trying to do. Not only did I move Alt Text to Medium but I spearheaded the move of the Misty Robotics blog as well. Medium seemed like a great content discovery and consumption solution and it also happened to be a pleasure to create content there.

Experiencing Medium as a reader

At some point, however, more by laziness than anything, I let my membership lapse and I was confronted with how the Medium community felt to a non-member. It felt exclusive but not in the way that I wanted it to. All of a sudden I wondered how much of that was apparent to readers. I didn't want some people left out. I always made sure my content settings allowed anyone to read posts on Alt Text. But what I don't know is how that affected my posts being recommended or otherwise served up to Medium readers. (I suspect it did not help)

The costs of hosting Alt Text on Medium now started to outweigh the benefits. Sure I am a very sporadic writer and I probably did get a bit of a lift in terms of readership. But the cost of that was that I don't feel like I have a relationship with those readers. Even now, I don't really have a good way to tell all those who subscribed to Alt Text on Medium that I have moved; that I would love for them to subscribe again, to this new form. Because the largest reason for the move was a growing sense of being disconnected to the community I really wanted to build.

Ghost made this possible

Though this move has really been facilitated by the creation of Ghost. The editor in Ghost is essentially the experience of drafting and publishing on Medium. There are a few places where it isn't as polished but that is more than made up for by the fact that it is in continuous development and you can embed HTML into a post. They even have a discourse community forum where I can gripe :)

I've still got to work on my local development environment (I'm a bit rusty in that department and I was never super knowledgeable in dev ops/sys ops to begin with) that will allow me to make some more significant changes to the template.

What's next for Alt Text?

As with all plans, this is subject to change but moving back to a more independent platform should allow for a few things I have been meaning to do more of here at Alt Text.

• More posts. Yeah, I know I have said this before, but I feel a pretty strong sense of purpose here. I would like to connect with people through what I write here and so I plan on keeping a better cadence of posts—you know, like more frequent than annually but perhaps assuredly not weekly.
• A redesign. That's right, one of the itches I've really wanted to scratch in the past few years is getting back to some design and UX work in my spare time. This site has often given me this opportunity and now, outside of Medium, I'll be able to do that again. Though you may notice that this default theme provided by Ghost is very similar to what Alt Text looked like on Medium, you should start to see subtle tweaks here and there prior to a new look.
• Different content types. Another thing I miss from the heydays of Alt Text (see screenshot below) is the ability to mix in some different content in addition to longer form posts. Small asides, movie and TV reviews, etc. Sometimes I just want to post a quick thought–why should those be restricted to Twitter?

• Subscriber perks. I'm not sure about this one but aside from getting new content from Alt Text sent to their inbox, I am wondering if there is something else I can do for those that choose to subscribe. If I can figure out the technical challenges, maybe something as simple as commenting on posts is only open to subscribers, or maybe there is an area only for subscribers. Still needs more thought but I do want to encourage a community here—since that is what I have been doing in my career for the last dozen or so years. So hey, why not subscribe?

1. For those of you who have followed Alt Text all these decades, you know it will be a low-volume newsletter list to sign up for.

Just over a year ago now I wrote about the importance of maintaining a balance between work and life when working at a startup.

My life with Jena is too important to slip into old patterns — to prioritize work ahead of us. I’ll need to take time off. Not just vacation, but evenings and weekends. That can be hard at a startup. It will just take awareness, discipline, and good habits. It will take growth — growth of a different kind.

A year go, I thought it would take awareness, discipline, and good habits to take control of my life and to maintain balance while working for a startup again. Increasingly, however, I am learning it will actually take complete change of perspective. A new way of conceiving of myself.

Introspection has never been something that has come naturally to me and I’ll write more about this in 2020, but over the past three years, I have come to know myself much better. I’ve been inspired by a confluence of sources as I have begun to look more inward these past few years:

• Time way from work, after SmartThings
• Author, Sam Harris’ book/app, Waking Up and podcasts, many of which deal with consciousness and meditation
• Working with and growing with the extremely generous and open leadership team at Misty Robotics

But largely it was a growing realization that I should be curious about myself—that there were parts of me that needed to be examined, understood, and hopefully improved.

Part of what I have come to understand is that I am not my work. (I am also not my thoughts, but that is also a post for another time). I have to remind myself of this often, but I know my value is not derived from what I do.

“Your value comes from who you are, not from what you do.”

When a great friend, recently sent me, Chop Wood, Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great by Joshua Medcalf, these ideas—these recent realizations—were reinforced and illuminated in a new way. That last quote above, and those below are from this book.

“It is easy to feel like your value is much greater when your teams win, when you make a lot of money, when you experience great success in business. But it is just as easy to feel defeated and depressed when your teams aren’t winning, when your business is failing, and when it feels like you are failing at everything”

Is my value equivalent to the success of the businesses I’ve started? Does the success of this little robot I am working on now change who I am as a person?

No.

“The truth is that your value is constant, it is priceless, and it never truly goes up or down based off of results or your performance”

And that is the same for everyone. Companies — especially startups come and go. Whether I am designing an app, executing a marketing plan, leading product development, or operating as CEO—when that role changes, my value does not.

“Find your identity in something that cannot simply be stripped away in a moment, and do the hard work of reminding yourself that your value comes from who you are.”

Think about it. You can lose your job in an instant. Can you lose who you are in that time? No. But if how you see yourself is so tightly wound with what role you are in, it might feel that way. Now I haven’t figured all of this out yet. I still put too much of myself into my work. But I am learning. And I am looking to the future.

As 2019 comes to a close, people everywhere will be contemplating their goals for the new year. I won’t be. Other people or outside forces can stop me from reaching goals. I’ll be looking for a mission for the rest of my life. When I find it, no one will be able to stop me from living it.¹

1. Don’t worry. I’ll write a post about it too.

Startup is an interesting word. They used to just be called small businesses. But of course, startups aren’t meant to remain small. They are meant to grow, and usually, grow rapidly. Maybe they should be call growups.

If I’m being honest, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get back into a startup after SmartThings. The last few years really burned me out and it wasn’t all Samsung’s fault. There were lots and lots of little self-inflicted wounds we gave ourselves along the way. I was enjoying time off and travel. I got cats, read, blogged (a bit); helped start a non-profit based on effective giving, moved to the Pacific Northwest (sort of). I wasn’t bored.

I had even been helping a friend or two with some startups of their own — doing brand and design work, strategic planning, even a bit of front-end development. It was fun.

So when I agreed to speak with Tim Enwall, Misty Robotics’ CEO, it really was as an advisor to what they were attempting to start. But as I learned of Misty’s products, mission, and team, the more I discovered overlapping interests and experiences that I could bring to bear to an exciting opportunity. In fact, it seemed like the role was tailored specifically to those interests and experiences.

But still, the idea of rejoining a startup wasn’t wholly appealing. I had a lot of questions. They were mostly about myself. Could I have a sense of ownership in an organization I hadn't started? Had my abilities atrophied from several years of disuse? Would I have sufficient motivation to participate fully in this type of endeavor again? Could I maintain a sense of balance between the life I now felt protective of and the demands an early stage company would place on my time and attention?

Now a year into this new adventure, I have answers to these questions. Yes. No. Yes. No.

Well, three out of four ain’t bad, as they say. But I’ll need to make adjustments on that last one if I’d like to enjoy any sort of longevity at Misty (or any other effort I undertake). My life with Jena is too important to slip into old patterns — to prioritize work ahead of us. I’ll need to take time off. Not just vacation, but evenings and weekends. That can be hard at a startup. It will just take awareness, discipline, and good habits. It will take growth—growth of a different kind.

Today, I join the team at Misty Robotics—a team with an audacious goal: to put a robot in every home and office. That’s a lot of robots. And before we can get there, robots will have to prove their value in societies, companies, and families.

Plenty of robots are already in our homes and offices. We use them every day. Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and yes, even Bixby are examples of headless robots that you can speak with and of which you can ask questions. We’ve had Roomba vacuuming our floors and we’ve got drones that follow us and take our pictures. There are sightings of telepresence robots, robo-security guards, and autonomous greeters and tour guides patrolling Silicon Valley offices, malls, stores, and real estate. There will be a robot carrying the torch at the next year’s Winter Olympics. Saudi Arabia is learning there are consequences for robot-related publicity stunts:

So of course…the robot to which they “granted citizenship” is now advocating for more rights for the real women of Saudi Arabia.¹

And, of course, we all know robots are coming for our jobs and our cats, apparently. Robots are here.

The problem: Rosie is not.

Our current crop of robots is fairly one-dimensional. Some can answer simple questions. Some can vacuum your rug. Some can take your picture, but none spark our imagination. None bring about visions of the future we saw way back in the 1960s with The Jetsons. 1960s*.

That’s where Misty comes in. If we don’t want homes full of single-function robots zooming and whizzing around, we need to create robots that can do more. We need robots that can multi-task. That can prove their worth as a valued member of the family. A personal robot.

To do this, a lot of work will be required—sparks of innovation will fly. But the timing is nearly right. And we’ve got a good team—spiritually led by founder and Head of Product, Ian Bernstein, who has been building robots since his early days. He wants our robots to be something more and describes Building The Imperfect Beast, like this:

Like in all relationships, everyone has their quirks that make them unique. Their style, mannerisms, and vibe. Robots should be no different if we wish to make them feel more like a being than an object.

Founder and Head of Company, Tim Enwall recently described the following strategy when he laid out Misty’s Ten Year Plan:

Make the very best multi-purpose robots available to programmers and makers (a.k.a. dreamers, inventors, creators) and enable them over time to add tens of thousands of skills to make them eventually useful to office and home consumers.

This is the commitment to ecosystem creation and advocacy that we had in the early days of SmartThings and what truly set us apart. It is my aim to amplify this strategy with Misty and partner with external robotics enthusiasts and developers curious about robots to enable the era of the home robot—the personal robot—the era of Rosie.

Endnotes:

1. This will be the last time you’ll see me link to anything about Sophia. Really the only thing intelligent about her is the promotional skills being brought to bear schilling for this artificial “intelligence”.

Editor’s note: Because this issue is so crucial to our lives, I’ve broken the original post down into these six topics—each in their own post to allow for easier reading.

This is a huge topic. That’s why the original post was comprised of more than 7,000 and why I have broken it out into five separate posts. Even so, it didn’t cover nearly every aspect of the importance of AI to our future. My hope is to motivate readers to think about this, learn more, and have many conversations with their families and friends.

I’ve broken the original post down into these six topics—each in their own post. Feel free to jump around.

1. An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence
2. What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise?
3. The how, when, and what of AI
4. AI and the bright future ahead
5. AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us
6. What should we be doing about AI anyway? (this post)

While it may be true that we are inventing our replacements in so many of life’s activities we need to ensure that things don’t go off the rails and we create the bringers of our own demise. There are researchers, philosophers, computer scientists, and others working on the problem of artificial intelligence goal alignment and safety right now, and it will be a growing field. But, what can laypeople do to help ensure that when AI is developed it is done safely? I think the activities that will have the biggest impact can be broadly grouped into these activities: learning more, discussing with others, supporting the effort, and then, for a few, directing your careers and other efforts directly.

Learn more

If you’re inspired to learn more, I heartily encourage you. To get started, here are a few sources that have inspired me:

• This pair of 2015 blog posts by Tim Urban at Wait But Why: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligenceand The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction.
• Max Tegmark’s 2017 book: Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
• Listen to the Sam Harris podcast The Future of Intelligence (with Max Tegmark) or watch his TED Talk titled Can we build AI without losing control over it?
• The “classic futurist’s bible” The Age of the Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
• Follow along with news of AI on The Future of Life Institute’s blog
• Learn more about AI Safety at OpenAI

Discuss with family and friends

Chances are, if you’ve just read these posts, you are now more informed on AI and AI safety issues than nearly anyone you know or are likely to meet for a while. Normal people simply don’t spend time on this.

Max Tegmark asks these 7 questions at the beginning of Chapter 5 in Life 3.0. While interesting in their own right, these questions serve as great jumping off points for conversations. I encourage you to have those conversations, both here on this site in the comments and back in your own lives.

1. Do you want there to be superintelligence?
2. Do you want humans to still exist, be replaced, cyborgized, and/or uploaded/simulated?
3. Do you want humans or machines in control?
4. Do you want AIs to be conscious or not?
5. Do you want to maximize positive experiences, minimize suffering, or leave this to sort itself out?
6. Do you want life spreading into the cosmos?
7. Do you want a civilization striving toward a greater purpose that you sympathize with, or are you OK with future life forms that appear content even if you view their goals as pointlessly banal?

You can take a survey featuring some of these concepts (and more) and see the results at the Future of Life website. Just take care on the twelve aftermath scenarios. Example: I thought the Egalitarian Utopia sounded good but it isn’t clear just from the survey that it represents a repressing of any superintelligent AI development (to which I am opposed).

For my part, I am already planning on breaking this immense and important subject down further in future posts. If you have concepts, ideas, questions, etc, on things you would like to see me research and write about, feel free to mention it in the comments or reach out to me directly.

Support AI safety efforts

Not everyone is an AI researcher but nearly everyone can support their work. There are numerous researches engaged in important work.

In spring of 2015, FLI launched our AI Safety Research program, funded primarily by a generous donation from Elon Musk. By fall of that year, 37 researchers and institutions had received over $2 million in funding to begin various projects that will help ensure artificial intelligence will remain safe and beneficial.

Here’s a small list with the funds they have sought.

There are several prominent non-profits that could make use of your generosity. Among them are:

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which focuses on mathematics research that is unlikely to be produced by academics, trying to build the foundations for the development of safe AIs.

The Future of Humanity Institute—a mature, well-established research institute, affiliated with Oxford and led by Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies).

OpenAI — Started by some tech heavyweights including Elon Musk, of Tesla /SpaceX/Neuralink/etc, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and more with a mission is to build safe AGI, and ensure AGI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. They even include a suite of software tools to help with that effort.

If you have trouble deciding, the Open Philanthropy Project is attempting to determine which groups are most effective. With this type of research, however, it may be hard to determine each groups impact for some time.

Get involved directly

Donations not your thing? Want to get your hands dirty? Well, are you a computer programmer? Are you tasked with writing programs that analyze a bunch of data? Are you working on algorithms or machine learning to make this easier? You are are the forefront of the efforts to create artificial intelligence, even if you don’t think you are. You can use some of OpenAI’s tools to aid in testing and even pledge to create only ethical technologies.

Not yet an engineer? Consider getting a PhD in Computer Science.

You can support AI safety with your activism and civic duties—support organizations and candidates who demonstrate an understanding of the risks and a willingness to advocate, negotiate, and legislate to bring AI about in a safe way and perhaps not these ones trying to fight any regulation.

If you can’t beat them…

Want to get on our robot overlords’ good side? You could join the Way of the Future church, who’s mission is to create a peaceful and respectful transition of who is in charge of the planet from people to people + “machines”.

Other parts in this series (in case you missed them):

Part One: An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence
Part Two: What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise?
Part Three: The how, when, and what of AI
Part Four AI and the bright future ahead
Part Five: AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us

This is such an immense topic that I ended up digressing to explain things in greater detail or to provide additional examples and these bogged the post down. There are still some important things I wanted to share, so I have included those in a separate endnotes post.

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

— Stephen Hawking

Editor’s note: Because this issue is so crucial to our lives, I’ve broken the original post down into these six topics—each in their own post to allow for easier reading.

This is a huge topic. That’s why the original post was comprised of more than 7,000 and why I have broken it out into five separate posts. Even so, it didn’t cover nearly every aspect of the importance of AI to our future. My hope is to motivate readers to think about this, learn more, and have many conversations with their families and friends.

I’ve broken the original post down into these six topics—each in their own post. Feel free to jump around.

1. An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence
2. What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise?
3. The how, when, and what of AI
4. AI and the bright future ahead
5. AI and the bleak, darkness that could befall us (this post)
6. What should we be doing about AI anyway?

These new intelligences could also bring with them some pretty terrible things, for us. First, though, there are likely some consequences that will arrive prior to the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). We’re already seeing some of these: automated weapons systems, increased surveillance activities, and loss of privacy and anonymity. These are things that humans are directing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics to do.

The motivations for these things are pretty clear — safety and security, strategic advantage, economic gains — because they are the same sort of things that have been motivating humans for millennia. While we may not agree with the tactics, we recognize why someone may use them.

This won’t be the case with superintelligentand AI systems. There won’t likely be malice when we are eliminated. It just may be the most logical or efficient course of action. Referring back to the ants; we don’t have malice when we wipe out a colony of ants to build a new highway. We simply don’t think of the consequences for the ants because they don’t warrant that type of concern. Which brings us to the largest fear that those involved in AI research have: that we are bringing about our extinction.

Can’t we just pull the plug? Don’t they just do what we program them to do? They wouldn’t want to hurt us, would they? Who would be in charge of an ASI? All these questions point out the big problem with developing AGI and, by proxy, ASI: we simply don’t know what life will be like after ASI arrives. We’re creating something that could change nearly everything but we really do not know in what ways.

There are four main scenarios where things could go very wrong for us:

1. A self-improving, autonomous weapons system “breaks out”.
2. Various groups will race to develop the first ASI and use it to gain advantage and control.
3. An ASI itself will turn malicious and seek to destroy us.
4. We don’t align the goals of the ASI with our own.

Now let’s look at each of these in turn and determine just which we should concern ourselves with the most.

1. A self-improving, autonomous weapons system “breaks out”.

“[Lethal autonomous robots] have been called the third revolution of warfare after gunpowder and nuclear weapons,” says Bonnie Docherty of Harvard Law School. “They would completely alter the way wars are fought in ways we probably can’t even imagine.” And that “killer robots could start an arms race and also obscure who is held responsible for war crimes.”

Militaries around the world are investing in robotics and autonomous weapon systems. There are good reasons for this that range from saving human lives (both soldiers and civilians) to greater efficiency. But what happens when an autonomous system with a goal to improve the efficiency with which it kills, reaches a point where it is no longer controllable?superintelligent Unlike nuclear weapons, the difficulty and cost to acquire weaponized AI once it has been developed will be low and will allow terrorists and other rogue parties to purchase such technology on black markets. These actors won’t show the relative restraint of nation-states. This is a very real problem and we’ll see more news about this well before we get to a world with ASI.

2. Various groups will race to develop the first ASI and use it to gain advantage and control.

Similar to the arms race mentioned above, nations, companies, and others will be competing to develop the first ASI because they know that the first one that is developed has a good chance of suppressing all others and being the only ASI ever to exist. In the opening chapter of his book Life 3.0 Max Tegmark lays out how a company that manages to build an ASI manages to take control over the world. The Tale of the Omega Team is worth the price of the book, in and of itself. It lays out all the advantages the “first mover” to AGI and then ASI gains and all of the rewards that come along with that. It will be hard to convince everyone on Earth to leave that fruit on the tree. This is one of the reasons I believe the move from ANI to AGI/ASI is? inevitable. I hope (maybe naively) that it is some group with good intentions that wins this “last race”.

But these stories need not be relegated to the hypothetical. Russia and China areis racing to develop ever more sophisticated systems as the West tries to create guardrails.

“ Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

—Vladimir Putin September 2017, in a live video message beamed to 16,000 Russian schools.

3. An ASI itself will turn malicious and seek to destroy us.

Unlike the scenarios above, this requires the AI to “want” to hurt humans of its own volition. Neither I, nor serious AI researchers are concerned with this scenario. AI won’t want to hurt us because they won’t want. They won’t have emotions and they won’t think like us. Anthropomorphizing² machines/programs in this wayare is not useful, and could actually be quite dangerous.

It will be very tempting to look upon these programs — that may indeed mimic human speech, comprehension, and emotions — and believe they are like us, that they feel like us and are motivated as we are. Unless we specifically attempt to create this in them, artificial intelligences will not be made in this image.

4. We don’t align the goals of the ASI with our own.

This is the scenario most AI safety researchers* spend most of their time on. The concept of aligning the goals of artificial intelligences with our own is important for a number of reasons. As we’ve already defined, intelligence is simply the ability to accomplish complex goals. Turns out machines are very good at this. You could say that it is what we built them for. But as machines get more complex, so does the task of goal setting.

* Yes, AI Safety is a thing that organizations like The Future of Life Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) spend a lot of time studying.

One could make a compelling argument (if you’re a biologist) that evolutionary biology really only has one primary goal for all life — to pass on genetic instructions to offspring via reproduction. Stated more crudely, our main goal as humans is to engage in sex and have babies. But as you may have noticed, even though we spend a fair bit of energy on the matter, that isn’t the thing we do all the time. We have developed sub-goals like eating, finding shelter, and socializing that serve to help keep us alive long enough to get to the sexy times. Once we have kids, even though all we have to do is raise them until they, themselves are old enough to procreate, we still find other things with which to occupy ourselves. We go on hikes, surf, take photos, build with LEGOs, walk our dogs, go on trips, read books, and write blog posts — all of which don’t further our goal of passing on our genes.

We even do things to thwart our one job on planet Earth. Some of us use birth control or decide not to have children altogether. This flies in the face of our primary goal. Why do we do things like this? Let’s refer to Max Tegmark’s book Life 3.0 again:

Why do we sometimes choose to rebel against our genes and their replication goal? We rebel because by design, as agents of bounded rationality — we create/seek “rules of thumb”, we’re loyal only to our feelings. Although our brains evolved merely to help copy our genes, our brains couldn’t care less about this goal since we have no feelings related to genes…

In summary, a living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn’t pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to pursue and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware of it) guide our decision making toward the ultimate goal of replication.

[but] since our feelings implement merely rules of thumb that aren’t appropriate in all situations, human behavior strictly speaking doesn’t have a single well-defined goal at all.¹³

“The real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”

Every post about AI existential risk must mention Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “paperclip parable”.¹⁴ Sorta like a restatement of the genie or Midas problems, or — restated — be careful what you wish for.

“But, say one day we create a super intelligence and we ask it to make as many paper clips as possible. Maybe we built it to run our paper-clip factory. If we were to think through what it would actually mean to configure the universe in a way that maximizes the number of paper clips that exist, you realize that such an AI would have incentives, instrumental reasons, to harm humans. Maybe it would want to get rid of humans, so we don’t switch it off, because then there would be fewer paper clips. Human bodies consist of a lot of atoms and they can be used to build more paper clips. If you plug into a super-intelligent machine with almost any goal you can imagine, most would be inconsistent with the survival and flourishing of the human civilization.”

 — Nick Bostrom, Paperclip Maximizer at LessWrong

So what should we do about this? AI/Human goal alignment is likely to be a recurring theme here at AltText for a while so we will only touch on it now. Life 3.0 puts forth a pretty basic-sounding plan designed to make future AI safe, involving:

1. Making AI learn our goals
2. Making AI adopt our goals
3. Making AI retain our goals

Sounds simple enough but it is actually incredibly difficult to define and carry out a plan like this. And we may only get one shot with it since the first ASI is likely to be the only one to ever be created.

This goal-alignment problem will be the deciding factor of whether we become immortal or extinct when artificial superintelligence becomes a reality.

Other parts in this series:

Part One: An introduction to the opportunities and threats we face as we near the realization of human-level artificial intelligence
Part Two: What do we mean by intelligence, artificial or otherwise?
Part Three: The how, when, and what of AI
Part Four AI and the bright future ahead
Part Six: What should we be doing about AI anyway?

This is such an immense topic that I ended up digressing to explain things in greater detail or to provide additional examples and these bogged the post down. There are still some important things I wanted to share, so I have included those in a separate endnotes post.