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  • Upload me Watson!

    George Rebane

    IBMwatson IBM’s Watson supercomputer has bested humans at the TV game Jeopardy.  Furthermore, it promises to give a definitive performance on 13, 14, 15 February.  Big deal?  Yes it is; and please don’t confuse this advance in machine intelligence with the 1997 victory over chess master Gary Gasparov by IBM’s then hotshot Deep Blue.  The discovery of Jeopardy questions in response to a short list of ‘answers’ is a much more complex and significant task (more here).

    Watson was not developed to give IBM a new source of revenues as a smart contestant on TV quiz shows.  It was developed to displace the next layer of smarter humans from the workplace.  RR readers are familiar with and not surprised by such advances in these pre-Singularity years (please see the posts in the ‘Singularity Signposts’ category on the right.)  Watson is now embodied in a room-sized computer of servers and large memories.   I believe we will be surprised at the rate that Watson’s progeny will shrink in size, power consumption, and cost.

    The Watson AI combines code that incorporates speech recognition, speech understanding (including nuancing), and data mining algorithms that have access to a memory the equivalent of over 200 million pages (15TB RAM).  This puts the machine into industrial strength categories required for dredging out obscure patterns in data and inferring the possible relations of these patterns to the problem at hand.  And, of course, it can do that with arbitrary and arcane data sets that are equivalent in complexity to that of a set of data, information, and knowledge items that are common to American 21st century culture – i.e. the facile knowledge base of successful human Jeopardy contestants.

    But, all this is already happening today.  Tomorrow and soon thereafter, Watson’s progeny will be able to access and process joined sets of data representing domains of knowledge that are related at various ‘semantic distances’ from each other.  In short, these critters will exhibit expertise in multiple areas way beyond the capability of any one human expert.  And they will be able to draw conclusions and infer new patterns (i.e. improvise and invent) at rates beyond our capabilities.  The point I want to emphasize here is that all this will be available shortly, and long before Singularity actually occurs.

    Bottom line – displacing human cognitive capabilities in the work place is already well under way, and now Watson is demonstrating another quantum jump in functionality.  What the impact on the human job markets will be is a political problem that we in the developed world do not broadly acknowledge, and for which we have no preparation in the field of public policy.  Only one thing is certain, the collective response by our standard cohort of political mini-minds is guaranteed to amplify the realworld problems of wealth generation, its redistribution, and the resulting quality of life.

    Exit question: I have published my estimate that by 2020 we will have about 70 million Americans (about 1/3 of the workforce then) functionally and structurally unemployed, what’s your estimate?  What should we be doing in preparation?

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  • Arizona loses to California

    George Rebane

    Associated Press reports on a Mexican study on the disposition of Arizona’s illegal aliens (aka “migrants”) since SB1070 became state law.  It turns out that about 100,000 Mexicans left the state with fewer than 25% returning home.  The rest presumably crossed the Colorado River to California that has the most lenient laws about which fugitive Hispanics have to worry.

    California’s leftwing is celebrating their arrival because it hastens the total fiscal meltdown of the state.  The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) calculates that the annual net cost of illegal aliens to the state is over $10B.  Other such estimates are much higher for public expenses in the areas of healthcare, prisons, education, and direct transfer payments that swamp the revenues collected from such fugitive labor.  Now we have attracted 75,000 more unemployed workers.

    The study also states that, at most, America’s 12 million Hispanic illegals send about $26B back to Mexico each year, and pay twice that much in taxes to our governments that goes into computing the net losses to our country.  Next to Mexico's oil revenues, such receipts to their destitute citizens are the second largest source of foreign revenues for that failed state.

    To get the proper collectivist view of what’s happening in Arizona, you can read the latest post on my favorite communist website, truthout.com.  There Joel Olson’s op-ed ‘Corruption and Class Struggle: What It's Really Like to Live in Arizona’ spells it all out, and throws in some choice words about the real cause of the Tucson tragedy.

    A more enlightened and rational response to the fugitive aliens problem can be found in Missouri (here).

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  • The Light from Tucson

    George Rebane

    People instinctively try to draw some compensating outcomes out of the Tucson massacre.  What they take away and how their ongoing lives are informed by the senseless carnage there illuminates who they are.

    The reaction of the broad left to this tragedy has been instant and, in my view, maniacal.  I see no counterpart from the broad right.  When this is pointed out here and elsewhere as further evidence of the obvious gulf between the ideologies, our middle of the road centrists immediately counsel tolerance and understanding.  This as if the mere recognition of the real world is somehow offensive to them.  In perusing the media, including the blogosphere, I have found no occasion of the centrists attempting to pour some of their calmative oil on the agitated left.  It makes me again question whether there is any real difference between the self-declared centrists and the students of Marx to Alinsky.

    The left’s response, from Congress to the progressives, is to immediately renew and again reveal their distrust of the law abiding individual with new proposals to proscribe liberty and expand the state’s monopoly of power.

    My takeaway is that I am more confident than ever in the credo that I have carefully built over the decades.  Those on the left and center consider anyone who believes as do I in fiscal responsibility, constitutionality, free market capitalism, individual liberty and responsibility, and small government to be an (adjectives deleted) right winger.  If that is the only label that allows them to distinguish us from them, then the aftermath of Tucson again makes me proud to proclaim – well, so be it.

    In sum, I have yet to find any of my principles weakened by what has happened, nor did I expect that kind of discovery.  But I have found that these principles are more dear than ever, and that invitations to come together in some sort of undefined and compromised halfway point appeals to me even less.  Why would I want to embrace any of the collective tenets that have always denigrated the individual, see the state as man’s highest achievement, and continue to counsel violent overthrow instead of peaceful and productive transformation?  That said, I will never shut my mind to new arguments that seek to paint ‘the middle’ as a happier land.  But beyond that muddled middle, to me the left remains as a living lie to all that separates us from the herds of animals.

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  • Ruminations – 12jan2011

    George Rebane

    China has announced that it is on the path to making the yuan (aka renminbi) a global currency (more here).  In short, the yuan will then take its place beside the euro and the dollar as a currency in which international accounts may be settled – in other words the yuan will become a major convertible international currency that will directly compete with the dollar in international trade.  To the more sheltered progressives who do not understand the significance of this, let’s make it real clear – crap like QE2 will no longer fly; if we then print, we pay big time.

    It was an eye opener probably missed by most who were busy watching football or the latest ‘reality’ show.  Our VP Joe Biden, currently in Afghanistan, concluded on camera that in fighting the Taliban we “are breaking the momentum” of that raghead contingent.  Earlier we had been led to believe that we had things ‘turned around’, and even before that we were on the ‘upswing’ of the fight against those fundamentalist murderers.  Now we are back to just breaking the momentum of their advances?  This is a careful retreat which the administration has managed in the media regarding our fortunes in a country that has eaten empires.  As these pages have warned, fundamentalist Islam is yet again the most powerful enemy that liberal western civilization has encountered.  (Recall that Islam was western civilization’s greatest enemy until the Battle of Vienna in 1683.) It almost makes our collectivists look like pussycats, except when their political correctness plays into the hands of the mullahs.

    (more…)

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  • New Robots in Manufacturing

    George Rebane

    This year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas featured advances in robotics.  They are now coming out of the R&D pipeline in droves showing all kinds of capabilities in vision, manipulation, mobility, smarts, and even emotion.  One of the featured robots was the ‘Little Helper’ robot that is designed to work in manufacturing facilities doing tasks that require moving around a shop floor, handling materials, reasoning, and seeing and doing the right thing.  In short, tasks that used to be the sole province of human workers.  (see video)

    These mechanical critters are being developed to fill jobs in advanced countries with low worker birth rates like Denmark and Japan.  During these pre-Singularity (also see Singularity catergory on right) years as they begin to fill positions in industry, you can expect their abilities to explode in handling more and more complex work while their costs of acquisition and maintenance go down.  Here is the IEEE news website on robotics for a wider view of current advances in the different areas where robots are both augmenting and supplanting humans.

    Given the sorry record of our K-12 public education, doesn’t that make your think about what it would take to remake the whole system into a meritocracy instead of maintaining it as bulwark of politically correct, union-saddled mediocracy? 

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  • The War of the ‘Tax Eaters’

    George Rebane

    It has now been several years since an early few of us identified and spoke out against the fiscal travesty of the public service unions (please search RR with ‘public service union’ and ‘public sector union’).  We were immediately castigated by the progressive left whose comments, on these pages and under the online editions of my Union columns, are a record of their perfidy and ignorance, a record now worthy of review.  The same factions are still on the attack – it is their best defense against what has become a worldwide blight on civilized nations.

    The blight is finally being recognized by a few in the mainstream media who years ago might have been our first line of defense.  This week the prestigious Economist finally weighed in with its cover story – ‘(Government) workers of the world unite’ – that seeks to be a harbinger of “The battle ahead – Confronting the public-sector unions”.  It repeats all the arguments made here and in other conservative/libertarian news outlets and commentaries.  The article also confirms and updates the latest data about these large cohorts of overpaid wallet suckers or “tax eaters”, as they were aptly labeled by William Cobbett, himself a British liberal at that.  (figure from article)

    PublicSectorUnions

    Large liberal blogs like truthout.com continue to bleat to the sheeple their own version of the real reason for the states’ fiscal crises.  Their constant stream of far left cum communist offerings makes them a worthy successor to Pravda as far as wringing truth out of what they publish.

    Here in California, as in many other states, the public pension ponzi has brought the state to its knees.  Along with Illinois, California shares the bottom of Moody’s bond rating totem pole.  It will have to pay premium rates to borrow, which it must since Bernanke has promised not to send us any bailout bucks.  We are $28B in the budget hole, will stay there for years, and have half a trillion dollars in unfunded pensions looking us in the face.  Our progressive politicians are in terminal denial that ‘it’s the public-sector unions stupid!’

    In response, our renewed Governor Jerry Brown today released his much anticipated ‘pain and suffering’ budget.  (Reuters, budget summary)  And yep, all the $12.5B pain and suffering in budget cuts are going to fall on the non-union state employees.  The never-ending feast of the overfed unions still sees no end.  When you are a bought and paid-for politician, you have to deliver on the votes and campaign contributions.  Who says there is no honor among thieves?

    The War of the Tax Eaters has been joined.

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  • Where Were the Law Abiding Guns?

    George Rebane

    While the looney left is having problems coordinating its fabrication of rightwing guilt for the Tucson atrocity as they play defense against the emerging facts about the shooter’s politics, there is another aspect about this tragedy that has yet to be discussed.  In an open public gathering involving political figures and a large crowd, one can ask why there was no law abiding citizen there carrying a concealed weapon that could have been used to save lives.

    All states issue Concealed Carry Weapon (CCW) permits with various restrictions to law abiding citizens.  Arizona is not known for making it extraordinarily difficult for a citizen to legally carry a concealed weapon.  Yet there apparently was no one there with the ability to abbreviate the shooter’s twenty-round plus rampage of mowing down people.  One can successfully argue that once issued a CCW permit, it becomes incumbent on the law abiding citizen so privileged to be armed more often than not and, yes, put himself in harm’s way when he finds himself in the midst of such sequential slaughter.

    In days of yore, such wanton killings, that we now witness regularly, ranged between extremely rare to impossible.  The shooter then knew that if he drew his gun, there would be at least one, and more than likely several guns, instantly pointed at him.  (History and contemporary newspaper accounts confirm this.)  Today the terrorist, criminal, or criminally insane knows that the odds are overwhelmingly on his side.  The state has effectively disarmed the law abiding citizen by either outright denying him the right to carry, or ‘educating’ him that being discreetly armed is a character defect.  Thus we leave ascendant those who respect neither our culture nor civilization.

    The question stands – where were the law abiding guns?

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  • The Loss of Form

    George Rebane

    Manners Back in the stone age when we were young, a lot of emphasis was put on teaching children how to behave in various social situations.  And we were taught that there existed different kinds of social settings in which this behavior was OK, that behavior was required, and those behaviors were definitely ‘out of place’.  Our lives then had different kinds of places.

    As a boy, I was taught that I was different from a girl, and that it was my responsibility always to show certain deferences to the opposite sex.  Girls were equally instructed about boys.  We had definite roles to play which would grow and change as we grew.  All of those roles might be called formalisms, and could be gathered under the canopy of a culture – our culture.

    So instructed, one of the many benefits we kids had was that we knew how to ‘be’ in literally any situation in which we found ourselves.  I looked forward to being taken to various observances, celebrations, meetings, and other purposive gatherings.  I knew how to greet people, what to say and do.  I knew my place, and everyone else there also knew my place and respected me when I maintained it properly.  From my secure place it was a blast to see the adults do their thing with each other, most trying to maintain their places, some trying to achieve a better place, and a few even falling out of place.  I was learning all about places that people had in my culture, and also what it took to get from one place to another.  Adult watching was a lot of fun, and profitable as I entered the job market – first as a paperboy, then as a farm hand, and on into a machine shop as the only kid at a work station.  We kids knew what to do when.

    (more…)

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  • The Vitriol Verdict is In (updated 11jan2011)

    George Rebane

    The response of the left to the tragic shooting in Tucson yesterday has been swift and sure.  The whole thing was the product of right wing “vitriol”.  Starting with the local sheriff, through the mainstream media, and into the blogs, it was too much political speech from the conservatives, especially those in the tea party movement, that made the already “disturbed” shooter do it.  According to these instant analysts, the purpose and direction of government growth should now be clear to all reasonable people.  It took less than twenty-four hours, and the verdict is in.

    [update]  We now have more data on the Tucson shooter.  He is a self-described terrorist and one who believes the Constitution is the source of all ills for our country.  He may also be clinically deranged.  All this does nothing to deter the left from piling on to their revealed wisdom that the tragedy was a derivative of the nation’s conservative thought and expression. 

    The fact that his professed belief system is diametrically opposite to that of conservative/libertarian values means nothing but to apply their Saul Alinsky modus operandi more fervently than ever.  Whatever inconvenient truth you encounter, just shout the opposite even more fervently and hope that the under-educated pick up on your cadence.  This behavior ranges from the New York Times (‘the nation’s newspaper’) all the way down to the local left.  Some of the mini-minds are even calling for the tea party movement to reconsider its diametrically opposite principles.  Are they pandering or just being naturally stupid?

    Nevertheless, this method works.  Through a stream of continuous and constant lies, the USSR was able to convince progressives everywhere along with a considerable fraction of the world that the Katyn forest massacre and similar collectivist outrages over the decades were not their doing.  This went on until well after the Wall fell.  I wonder what wall has to fall before today’s progressives will retreat from their hallowed ends justifying such means.

    Before starting to politically demagogue this tragedy (‘waste no crisis’), should we not hold off a bit before rendering our definitive diagnoses, instant indictments, and partisan prescriptions?

    [11jan2011 update]  Here the Arizona Republic attempts to corral its own vitriolic sheriff.  H/T to RR reader.

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  • Politically Endorsed Science (updated 11jan2011)

    George Rebane

    The newly proposed lecture series ‘What’s Next in Science?’ is causing a dust-up in the local blogs, and as a former scientist who has worked on the frontiers of knowledge, I should weigh in.  At issue is how the Nevada County Board of Supervisors should respond to the lecture series that is being organized by local residents Mr Robert Bergman, current mayor of Nevada City, and Dr Judith Kildow, PhD, retired professor of “ocean related issues”.

    Given their well-known ideological bents and the tentative list of first year lecture titles/subjects, the organizers appear to be launching a program promoting California’s highly politicized AB32 global warming agenda (more detail on this is found here on Russ Steele’s NCMW).  As long as Mr Bergman and Dr Kildow are acting as private citizens, I don’t think there is anything wrong with such an activity wrapped into the folds of selectively supportive science – even if it turns out to be propaganda light, or even some stronger stuff.  It is their First Amendment right.

    And who knows, their lecture series may even become a staple of our local culture, drawing in audiences from near and far.  If it indeed turns out to be such a salutary community betterment enterprise, then from various local elected bodies the lecture series and its founders would be due resolutions of recognition that are suitable for framing.

    But what I find more than a bit gratuitous is that such a resolution is being sought from our BoS even before the first lecture is scheduled.  This is the same board that less than six months ago deemed a resolution in favor of Prop23 to curtail job-killing AB32 to be beyond their self-inflicted non-partisan pale (well covered here and on NCMW).  Does this look like the Rood Center is preparing for a premature change of ideology ceremony?

    One can well argue that we are now reduced to a 3-2 conservative majority on the Board.  But it still is a majority that can carry the day, a majority that can still take a principled stand against betting our economic future on the promise of government subsidies, if only we play ball and turn our left cheek toward Sacramento’s progressive plutocrats.   Perhaps the advertized theme of the lecture series – ‘Bringing the Ocean to the Sierra’ – really derives from the political gerrymandering of the coastal districts vs the inland and mountain districts.  We will all then hear the socialized surf.

    Perhaps I should also sign this
    Dr George Rebane, PhD

    [11jan2011 update]  The resolution has been pulled from today BoS agenda.

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5 comments on Upload me Watson!