David Foster

Nothing Beyond the Current Moment

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From Harvard:

Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Reading the above, the first thing that struck me was that a university dean, especially one who is an English professor, should not view the 19th century as ‘a very long time ago’…most likely, though, she herself probably does not have such a foreshortened view of time,   rather, she’s probably describing what she observes as the perspective of her students (though it’s hard to tell from the quote).   It does seem very likely that the K-12 experiences of the students have been high on presentism, resulting in students arriving at college   “with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach,” as a junior professor who joined the faulty in 2021 put it.   One would hope, though, that to the extent Harvard admits a large number of such students, it would focus very seriously on challenging that worldview.   I do not get the impression that it actually does so.

In a discussion of the above passage at Twitter, Paul Graham @PaulG said:

One of the reasons they have such a strong “orientation toward the present” is that the past has been rewritten for a lot of them.

to which someone responded:  

that’s always been true! it’s not like the us didn’t rewrite the history of the civil war to preserve southern feelings for 100 years. what’s different is that high schools are no longer providing the technical skills necessary for students to read literature!

 …a fair point that there’s always been some rewriting of history going on, or at least adjusting the emphasis & deemphasis of certain points, but seems to me that what is going on today is a lot more systematic and pervasive than what’s happened in the past, at least in the US.   Changing the narratives on heroes and villains,   selecting particular facts to emphasize (or even to make up out of whole cloth) is not the same thing as inculcating a belief that “the unenlightened past has nothing left to teach.”

I don’t think most people inherently view the past as uninteresting; many stores, after all, have traditionally begun with the phrase “Once upon a time.”

I get the impression that a lot of ‘educators’, at all levels, have not much interest in knowledge, but are rather driven by some mix of (a) careerism, and (b) ideology.   For more on this,   see my post Classics and the Public Sphere.

And it’s also true that many schools are not providing students with the skills necessary to read literature–although there are certainly some schools that are much better than others in this area, and one would have hoped that graduates of such schools would be highly represented among those selected to become Harvard students.   Maybe not.    And technologies that encourage a short attention span–social media, in particular–surely also play a part in the decline of interest and ability to read and understand even somewhat-complex literature.

Although I suspect some of these students are perfectly capable of concentrating their attention when they really want to.   Some of them are probably computer science majors–hard to write or even understand a program without really concentrating on it. Some may be drama majors–I imagine that learning one’s lines and acting them requires a pretty significant level of focused attention.   And there are surely many other examples.   But the intrinsic motivation which is there in those cases doesn’t seem to be there in the case of reading literature.
Or am I kidding myself, and has the   short attention span phenomenon now become so pervasive that a lot of these students–and and even higher proportion of the people who didn’t go to Harvard…are going to come into adulthood lacking in sufficient attention span to be able to write code, do engineering design, analyze financial statements, fly airplanes or conduct air traffic control, perform surgical operations, etc?
Your thoughts?

Artificial Intelligence & Robotics, as Viewed From the Early 1950s

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In the early 1950s, electronic computers were large and awe-inspiring, and were often referred to as ‘electronic brains’.   At the same time, industrial automation was making considerable advances, and much more was expected from it.   There was considerable speculation about what all this meant for Americans, and for the human race in general.

Given the recent advances of AI and robotics in our own era–and the positive and negative forecasts about the implications–I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at two short story collections on this general theme:   Thinking Machines, edited by Groff Conklin, and The Robot and the Man, edited by Martin Greenberg.   Both books date from around 1954. Here are some of the stories I thought were most interesting, mostly from the above sources but also a couple of them from other places.

Virtuouso, by Herbert Goldstone.   A famous musician has acquired a robot for household tasks.   The robot–dubbed ‘Rollo’ by the Masestro–notices the piano in the residence, and expresses interest in it.   Intrigued, the Maestro plays ‘Claire de Lune’ for Rollo, then gives him a one-hour lesson and heads off to bed, after authorizing the robot to practice playing on his own.   He wakes to the sound of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’.

Rollo was playing it. He was creating it, breathing it, drawing it through silver flame. Time became meaningless, suspended in midair.

“It was not very difficult,” Rollo explains.

The Maestro let his fingers rest on the keys, strangely foreign now. “Music! He breathed. “I may have heard it that way in my soul. I know Beethoven did.

Very excited, the Maestro sets up plans for Rollo to give a concert–for “Conductors, concert pianists, composers, my manager.   All the giants of music, Rollo.   Wait until they hear you play!”

But Rollo’s response is unexpected.   He says that his programming provides the option to decline any request that he considers harmful to his owner, and that therefore,   he must refuse to touch the piano again.   “The piano is not a machine,” that powerful inhuman voice droned.   “To me, yes.   I can translate the notes into sounds at a glance.   From only a few I am able to grasp at once the composer’s conception.   It is easy for me.”

“I can also grasp,” the brassy monotone rolled through the studio, that this…music is not for robots.   It is for man.   To me it is easy, yes…it was not meant to be easy.”

The Jester, by William Tenn.    In this story, it is not a musician but a comedian who seeks robotic involvement in his profession.    Mr Lester…Lester the Jester, the glib sahib of ad lib…thinks it might be useful to have a robot partner for his video performances.   It does not work out well for him.

Boomerang, by Frank Russell.   In this story, the robot is designed to be an assassin, acting on behalf of a group representing the New Order.    Very human in appearance and behavior, it is charged with gaining access to targeted leaders and killing them. If it is faced with an insoluble problem–for example, if the human-appearing ‘William Smith’ should be arrested and cannot talk his way out of the situation–then it will detonate an internal charge and destroy itself.   As a precaution, it has been made impossible for the robot to focus its lethal rays on its makers. And, it is possessed of a certain kind of emotional drive–“William Smith hates personal power inasmuch as a complex machine can be induced to hate anything.   Therefore, he is the ideal instrument for destroying such power.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Mechanical Answer, by John D MacDonald.   For reasons that are never explained, the development of a Thinking Machine has become a major national priority. After continued failures by elite scientists, a practical engineer and factory manager named Joe Kaden is drafted to run the project. And I do mean drafted: running the Thinking Machine project means being separated from his wife Jane, who he adores. And even though Joe has a record of inventiveness, which is the reason he was offered the Thinking Machine job in the first place, he questions his ability to make a contribution in this role.

But Jane, who has studied neurology and psychiatry, feeds him some ideas that hold the key to success.   Her idea…basically, a matrix of associations among words and concepts..allows the machine to show more ‘creativity’ than previous approaches, and it shows great skills as a kind of Super-ChatGPT question-answerer.

When the Thinking Machine is demonstrated to an audience which includes not only its American sponsors but the Dictator of Asia, the Ruler of Europe, and the King of the States of Africa, the questions to be asked have been carefully vetted.   But when it is asked an unvetted question–“Will the machine help in the event of a war between nations?”…the answer given is unexpected:   “Warfare should now become avoidable.   All of the factors in any dispute can be give to the Machine and an unemotional fair answer can be rendered.”

Of course.

Burning Bright, by John Browning.   A large number of robots are used to work in the radiation-saturated environment within nuclear power plants.   The internal mental processes of these robots are not well understood, hence, no robots are allowed outside of the power plants–it is feared that robot armies could be raised on behalf of hostile powers, or even that robots themselves will become rivals of humans for control of the planet.   So robots are given no knowledge of the world outside of power plants, no knowledge of anything except their duty of obedience to humans.   And whenever a robot becomes too worn-out to be of any continued usefulness, it is scrapped–and its brain are dissolved in acid.

One day, a robot facing its doom is found to have a molded plastic star in its hands–apparently a religious object.

Though Dreamers, Die, Lester del Rey.   Following the outbreak of a plague which looks like it may destroy all human life on earth, a starship is launched. A small group of humans, who must be kept in suspended animation because of the great length of the journey to a habitable planet, is assisted by a crew of robots.   When the principal human character, Jorgan, is awakened by a robot, he assumes that the ship must be nearing its destination.   It is, but the news is grim.   All of the other humans on board have died–Jorgen, for some reason, seems to be immune to the plague, at least so far. And among those who did not survive Anna Holt, the only woman.

If it had been Anna Holt who had survived, Jorgen reflects, she could have continued the human race by using the frozen sperm that has been stored. “So it took the girl!   It took the girl, Five, when it could half left her and chosen me…The gods had to leave one uselessly immune man to make their irony complete it seems!   Immune”

“No, master,” the robot replies. The disease as been greatly slowed in the case of Jorgen, but it will get him in the end–maybe after thirty years.

“Immunity or delay, what difference now?   What happens to all our dreams when the last dreamer dies, Five?   Or maybe it’s the other way around.”

All the dreams of a thousand generations of men had been concentrated into Anna Holt, he reflects, and were gone with her.   The ship lands on the new world, and it appears to be perfect for humans.   “It had to be perfect, Five,” he said, not bitterly, but in numbed fatalism. “Without that, the joke would have been flat.”

Man and robot discuss the world that could have been, the city and the statue to commemorate their landing. “Dreams!” Jorgen erupts. “Still, the dream was beautiful, just as this planet is, master.” Five responds.   “Standing there, while we landed, I could see the city, and I almost dared hope.   I do not regret the dream I had.”

Jorgen decides that the heritage of humanity can go on–“When the last dreamer died, the dream would go on, because it was stronger than those who had created it; somewhere, somehow, it would find new dreamers.”   And Five’s simpatico words–combined with a cryptic partial recording about robot minds and the semantics of the first person signature,   left by the expedition’s leader, Dr Craig–convince him that the robots can carry forward the deeper meaning of the human race.   Five demurs, though:   “But it would be a lonely world, Master Jordan, filled with memories of your people, and the dreams we had would be barren for us.”

There is a solution, though. The robots are instructed to forget all knowledge of or related to the human race, although all their other   knowledge will remain. And Jorgen boards the starship and blasts off alone.

Dumb Waiter, Walter Miller.   (The author is best known for his classic post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz)    In this story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system.  But when war eruptedfeaturing radiological attackssome of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.

I was reminded of this story in 2013 by the behavior of the Swedish police during rampant rioting–issuing parking tickets to burned-out cars.   My post is here.

The combination of human bureaucracy and not-too-intelligent automation is seems likely to lead to many events which are similar in kind if not (hopefully) in degree.

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Productivity Problems: Is ‘Shunning Technology’ Really the Main Villain?

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Andy Kessler, a very smart and generally insightful guy, has a recent WSJ column titled ‘The is One Puzzling Job Market’ and subtitled ‘Why has productivity lagged for so long? Because huge sectors shunned technology.’

This assertion doesn’t feel right to me.   In the case of the healthcare industry, for example, Kessler says “Medicine is unproductive. It’s a doctor-intensive chronic-disease-treatment business. But with prevention and diagnostics to find disease early, perhaps we’d need fewer oncologists and cardiac surgeons.” Perhaps, but it’s not as if diagnostics–mammograms, for example–have been ignored.   Prevention can involve, for example, better diets and obesity reduction–these things are really more about accurate science, proper statistical analysis, and honest and effective public communication than they are about technology per se.

A major technology initiative in healthcare of the the last decade or two has been the wide use of electronic medical records.   While these do have considerable potential, the current implementation reality is different.   I don’t think I have ever heard or read a physician or other healthcare professionals who had anything good to say about these systems.   The perceived productivity impact is negative.

It is certainly true that telemedicine has great potential for productivity improvements, and also probably for better paytient outcomes, since it makes it far easier to get an appointment than is the case with traditional practice approaches.   But some of the same advantages can also come from local clinics with an emphasis on quick availability and more use of nurse practitioners and other alternatives to the need to see physicians for every visit.

As another example of an industry with poor productivity, Kessler cites education.   I think we can agree on the poor productivity. But is the problem really lack of technology? How about the massive administrative overheads, the insistence on instructional methods that don’t work very well (in teaching reading, for example), and the overweening power of the teachers’ unions?   Indeed, schools have been quite eager to spend money on ‘technology’.    The kind of projects that Michael Schrage referred to as ‘sparkly tools’ will not do much good until these other problems are addressed.

In transportation, there are indeed technology improvements that can be made in air traffic control and, for railroads, in rail car tracking and hot-bearing detection to prevent derailments, for example.   But there are also physical infrastructure issues–no matter how great your air traffic control system is, an airport’s capacity is going to be limited by the number of parallel runways, and, in some wind conditions, the availability of crosswind runways.   There are also management and process issues–in freight rail, for example, is the current vogue employment of very long trains, now under the banner of ‘precision scheduled railroading’, really a good idea from the standpoints of productivity and market growth?

Kessler says:   “Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1948, but its parent, AT&T,   had 10 to 20 years of old vacuum-tube inventory and so delayed using transistors.”   This claim makes no sense to me.   I can’t imagine that any company, even AT&T would have built up a 10-20 year inventory of just about any commodity, let alone inventory of items in a field which was already known for rapid change.   And early transistors weren’t cheap, and did have their limitations.

There is indeed an apparent paradox when you consider all the technological improvements of recent years–and then look at the productivity numbers.   But I suspect that much of the cause for this disconnect will be found in:

Mediocre or outright bad management. There is a tremendous amount of wasted motion and effort in a lot of organizations today. There’s always some of this, of course, but my sense is that it’s been getting worse, rather than better.   See for example this article about Google, written by a guy whose startup was acquired by that company.

Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs.  

Unwise mergers and acquisitions.   Although company combinations can be beneficial, too often they are done under sets of assumptions that turn out to be, shall we say, optimistic.   How much productivity is lost as a result of all the legal and finance work done to enable these combinations and in the organizational disruption that often follows?   (And then, in some cases, to unwind them via a spinout?)

Excessive regulation, particularly ideologically-driven regulation.   In Washington, DC, childcare workers will now be required to have associates’ degrees.   There are many other examples of pointless education and training requirements.   And the ‘industrial strategy’ programs favored by the Biden administration are very likely to direct resources into politically-favored…but not particularly productive..companies and entire industries.

Bad technology implementations.   There are a lot of examples of technology implementations that seemed promising, but resulted in either complete failure or marginal…if any…productivity gains.   Often, there problems are a result of failing to systematically think about the overall business process and the potential people problems involved.   See the sad story of Target Canada, and Zeynep Ton’s description of retail inventory systems that carry meaningless balances because the work of the checkers, and the way in which the feedback loop from goods availability to sales numbers worked, is not properly understood.

There are certainly many technologies now available, and becoming available, that can greatly enhance productivity.   But it is difficult for any technology or combination of technologies to improve productivity enough to overcome the drag of the structural problems sketched about..and many others.   As Lewis Carroll said, we must run as fast as we can just to stay in place, and if we want to go anywhere, we must run twice as fast as that.   Unless we do something about the sources of the persistent backward motion.

Your thoughts on productivity and technology?

Drucker’s Prescience

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Peter Drucker, in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity,  discusses the increasing role of knowledge in modern societies and suggests:

As a result, it is quite possible that the great new ‘isms’ of tomorrow will be ideologies about knowledge. In tomorrow’s intellectual and political philosophies knowledge may well take the central place that property, i.e. things, occupied in capitalism and Marxism.

This must have seemed like a rather strange idea to most readers in 1969…the great new ‘isms’, and therefore the great political and cultural fault-lines, were going to be about knowledge?   Surely, debate about the nature of knowledge must have seemed like something more appropriate for a university philosophy course in epistemology than a likely major subject for the political and media stage.

But, isn’t this precisely what we are seeing now, with all of the assertions and arguments about ‘disinformation’, the assertions about ‘science says’ and resultant reactions and critiques, the revelations about social media bias, and the concerns about potential artificial-intelligence bias?   These are all arguments about what constitutes a valid, useful, and true source of information.

The whole idea that it should be possible to present and hear arguments for both sides of an issue…which is the entire basis of our political system and our justice system–is under attack. People argue that they are in danger if they are exposed to a view different from their own.   There seems to be a longing for a single, unquestioned source of truth.

Or maybe the whole idea of ‘truth’ is obsolete in many minds.   Things have reached the point at which there is actually a need to defend the possibility of objective knowledge existing at all.    Maybe one reason for the decreasing interest in the pursuit of objective truth is that most people today are much more insulated from the struggle for survival, and instead of worrying what truths reflect they way the world works–‘how can I keep my hut warm in the depths of winter?’–they worry about what truth-claims reflect the social world which they must navigate and will advance their position in this social world.   This is the view of the courtier, rather than that of the merchant, the peasant, or the warrior.

I’ve previously quoted something a wise executive said to me, many years ago:

When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality.   It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of every thousand frame, and from that, you have to figure out what is going on.

If this is true of the person running a large organization, it is even more true of the individual in a democracy, both in his incarnation as a citizen and voter and his incarnation as an individual decision-maker in matters concerning his own life and that of his family.   He cannot possibly directly observe all of the factors bearing on, say, the border situation or the war in Ukraine or the Covid vaccines or the stability of the Social Security system, hence, those who control what frames are presented to him–and in what sequence–have tremendous influence.

Those who seek power and/or cling to power generally seek to control what is viewed as truth.   Someone at Twitter just remarked:

Fun fact: soviet psychiatry version of DSM 5 had a condition “truthseeking” (правдаискательство) used to commit dissidents for questioning the legitimacy of the bolshevik regime.

I doubt that Drucker foresaw anything as radical as some of the positions taken in today’s fights over knowledge, but overall, his forecast appears to have been a correct one.

Your thoughts?

Lighter than Air: Balloons and Dirigibles in Warfare

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It may seem weird, at our present level of technology, to think of a balloon as an international issue and a possible security threat.   Balloons and dirigibles, though, have a long history in warfare and national security.

The first military use of balloons was by the French revolutionary army, which used tethered balloons for observation purposes, notably at the Battle of Fleurus (1794), where a hydrogen-filled balloon was employed. Balloons were used by both sides in the American Civil War; by this time, telegraph equipment was available to facilitate the transmission of messages back to officers on the ground.

In the First World War, balloons were used for observation, and were important in accurate targeting of the longer-range artillery that had become available, but the war also saw the first military use of lighter-than-air craft that could maneuver under their own power–dirigibles.   Prior to the war, the German Zeppelin company had conducted extensive development of dirigibles and had even employed them for scheduled passenger trips within Germany. The LZ 10 Schwaben, built in 1911, was 460 feet long and could carry 20 passengers. Powered by three engines of 145hp each, it could reach a maximum speed of 47mph.

When war broke out, it was inevitable that Zeppelins would be use for military purposes. In the first raid on London, a Zeppelin dropped 3000 pounds of bombs, including incendiaries which started 40 fires.   Seven people were killed.   Airships became larger with heavier bomb loads, and fleets of up to 11 ships attacked the British capital city. The Zeppelins were vulnerable, though, to incendiary bullets and rockets.   Climbing to higher altitudes offered some protection, as did a clever tactic in which the ship would cruise in or above the clouds, with observers situated in a basket lowered as much as a mile below its Zeppelin.   But losses among the attackers were high and growing.   More of these bombing missions here.

A pioneering airborne logistics mission was also attempted, with a resupply mission to the German force in East Africa which was commanded by General von Lettow-Vorbeck.   The airship L-59, seven hundred and fifty feet long, was loaded with fifty tons of equipment and departed on a journey of over 3000 miles.   The intent was that the airship would be cannibalized when it reached its destination with the envelope used for tents and the engines employed to power generators. Just a few hundred miles from its destination, though, the airship received a message stating that General Lettow-Vorbeck had been decisively defeated, there was no longer any point in the mission, and they should return to Germany.   Which they did.   It turned out that the message had been based on a British deception operation.

In the run-up to WWII, the Graf Zeppelin was used to gather signals intelligence on British radio and radar systems. Large rigid airships were not used in the war itself, the US Navy’s ships having all come to bad ends…but blimps were used extensively for antisubmarine work:   168 of them were built for this purpose. They were primarily intended as observation platforms, being eventually equipped with radar and with magnetic anomaly detectors, as well as being great visual platforms, but were also armed with depth charge bombs and machine guns. They were apparently quite effective in helping to combat the submarine menace, and only one of them was lost to enemy action.

Since 1980, tethered aerostats have been used for border surveillance and have also been employed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stratospheric balloons, such as the Chinese balloon that was just shot down, are used for aerial imagery, telecommunications, and weather forecasting.   They have been improved in recent years, and some of them have at least some ability to navigate in desired directions by changing altitude to find winds going the right way.   More here