Terraforming the Earth

As space agencies around the world race to the red planet and beyond in an attempt to satisfy ego and ignorance, they may want to focus their limited resources on real tactical problems facing the planet. As those, who had a tough time with science at school, rise to make polices that affect humanity, the danger of human extinction is now more real than ever. To top it off, those who were good at science appear to get real excitement by looking at pictures of the dwarf planet and designing ways to punch a one-way ticket for humans to a planet close-by. Admirable, of course, but completely irrelevant.

It is time NASA had a real resource and portfolio management process. Engineers, albeit being good at what they do, often fail to see the big picture. The risk of an asteroid impact or run-away greenhouse effect are so high in close quarters - it does not make any sense to allocate resources to finding green men in the solar system or among the thousands of exo-planets, that were found recently.  Terraforming the Earth, although not as exciting as the projects undertaken by the space agency, has real utility for humanity. Humans, designed to burn anything they get their hands to, have cooked up a real mess, that would require rectifying. It is a solvable problem if the best technologists in the world put their minds to it and perhaps forget the exploration of the universe for a little bit. Sure, this may not propel careers or pave the way to easy Nobel prizes, but limited resources have to be optimally deployed for the sake of humanity. Additionally, although not as exciting as science fiction including a black hole from the LHC devouring us all, an asteroid impact that could substantially extinguish humans is real. Having “plans on paper” to “bomb the rock” may not be realistic. It may require real technology to nudge the Earth bound catastrophe to safety.  

Those who are responsible and accountable for deploying the limited resources to practical uses may need to refocus their priorities. Ego cannot be part of the objective function, rationality has to be.

Barren universe

Not withstanding the efforts of space agencies and academic institutions around the world to find extra-terrestrial life, it appears that disappointment could be in store for humans. Recent excitement about an exoplanet just 14 light years away is symptomatic of scientific quest that is chasing pre-determined answers. Before turning all listening devices to the “target,” one may want to ask a few questions. If we are seeking human like life there, one has to assume that they are enjoying “Friends” and “Seinfeld” now. And, it is difficult to find fault with them not attempting to make contact. If we are seeking something less or more, then it is unlikely they will be spewing garbage into the airways. In other words, the attempts of humans to make contact are unlikely to be rewarded unless an extra-terrestrial civilization of similar incompetence is close at hand.

Humans, locked into a tiny window of space-time, have been chasing an unattainable dream – intelligent life that could teach them better tricks. As they peak through that microscopic window, they are most likely to see a barren universe, devoid of life and intelligence. Expanding the window, either by new Physics or by constructs deemed feasible with the status-quo, such as worm holes, information travelling at speeds many magnitudes higher than light and quantum entanglement, could provide a way out of these hard constraints.

Finding life in the searchable space-time in close proximity is as unlikely as spotting a needle in a haystack as big as the solar system. Good luck getting there by 2020.

The death of logic

 
In a country of blue, red and grey
In a land of every possible hue
Where policies are made on the back of a napkin
To satisfy donors and those who may become donors
 
In a country of red, white and blue
In a land of every possible opinion
Where judgments are made by pictures on TV
To satisfy friends and those who may become friends
 
In a country of East, West and Midwest
In a land of every possible culture
Where biases are made by location and accents
To satisfy those nearby and those who may move close
 
In a country of wealthy, poor and the middle-class
In a land of disappearing dreams for most
Where classes segregate by every possible means
To satisfy those who hold similar views
 
In a country of knowledge, ignorance and mediocrity
In a land of expensive and unattainable education
Where students march in the streets to be heard
To satisfy their own cults and egos
 
In a country of fake hair, fake stories and fake passion
In a land of politicians and incompetent policy-makers
Where debates are designed to expose the hatred
To satisfy the millions glued to the idiot box
 
In a country of science, religion and agnosticism
In a land of pretense and wisdom
Where they battle each other for superiority
To win prizes, acceptance and money
 
In a country of coasts, mountains and plains
In a land of inexplicable space and beauty
Where they battle for the last acre of land
To nourish their own false sense of wealth
 
In a country of finance, technology and movies
In a land of fraud, fallacy and fiction
Where the suits battle the turtle-necks
To stuff their own pockets and wallets
 
In a country of such complexity
Where logic is dead and buried
But, somehow, one can’t lose hope
For without it, the world will be in despair

Proof of simulation

The idea that the universe is a simulation has been in the periphery of cosmology. This is not surprising – every established scientific arena, astrophysics, medicine and economics included, has not been kind to pursuits that questioned the status-quo. This abundant bias, nourished by the ability to publish and win Nobel prices in short horizons, has perpetuated established theories even in the absence of any evidence. Even “theories” that could never be tested has been gaining popularity, within the closed doors of academia, with even less interest to look outside than country club dwellers.

The thought experiment that the universe could be a simulation, however, has been around for over a decade. Some have even suggested ways to test it experimentally. Given that the established theories require 96% fantasy for them to work, it is not too big a leap to go a bit further. After all, thought experiments typically do not require 6 trillion experiments to ferret out an elusive particle and such statistical fantasies have been held as one of the greatest achievements of contemporary humans.

If the universe were a simulation, what would be the properties of such a system? In a sufficiently complex simulation:

1. The participants of the simulation, albeit capable of describing the processes that make the simulation work, will never be able to explain the origin of it.

2. The participants, who could measure the constants that drive the rules of the simulation, will find them finely tuned and held constant.

3. The simulation will exhibit recurring patterns.

4. The participants will find constraints within the system that limit them to certain parts of the simulation.

5. The participants will face an overall hard constraint that does not allow them to get outside the simulated system.

6. The participants of the system will remain unaware of anything outside the boundaries of the simulation for the duration of the simulation.

7. The participants will likely reject the hypothesis that they are part of the simulation.

8. The participants may find anomalies to the rules they have discovered because of the possible flaws in the simulation itself. Such flaws may be patched up over time and the anomalies may disappear.

9.  The system will exhibit no learning.

10. Any excursion – random, planned or induced by the participants, away from the rules, will revert back to the rules.

Within the context of the tiny part of the universe – humans - all these properties appear to be true. Moreover, no current observation negates the hypothesis. Hence, it is likely that the universe is a simulation.

Chicago’s moment to leap to the future

With nearly 75% of the US population expressing the idea that racism is a problem for the country, it is clear that the country is in deep thoughts as to how to get rid of the cancer affecting its soul. A modern society, afflicted by the disease of racism, could have a rather pessimistic prognosis. On the other hand, if most of the country sees the problem, then, we can certainly solve it. As they say in medicine, early diagnosis almost always leads to better outcomes. And, in the pain and despair of a horrible incident, Chicago has a unique opportunity to lead the country and perhaps the world out of ignorance and a curable disease through education and the advancement of culture.

Chicago has been at the forefront of advancing emerging ideas in economics, science, arts and journalism. Its educational institutions opened the eyes of those seeking knowledge but the city itself, could not get out of its artificially imposed boundaries, allowing irrational thoughts and actions to percolate through. In the process, they suffered from violence and segmented islands of wealth, information and ignorance. A city, that led in thought and culture advancement has been trailing in practical actions, however. Steeped in political corruption for decades, the city has been losing its just position in history. It will be a shame if one of the greatest cities in the world, sub optimizes itself, not because of lack of knowledge but of the constraints self imposed on itself.

This is Chicago’s moment to leap to the future. It has leaped many times before to open the eyes of the world. Now, it is time for introspection and out of that will come strength to leap again. 

A small leap for Man and a big jump for Math

Recent news that a University of Chicago mathematician may have reduced a NP complexity problem of network comparisons to that akin to P level complexity, signals a jump in knowledge in otherwise stagnant field. Consumed by big data and bigger noise, mathematicians and data scientists have been burning the midnight oil, solving everything under the Sun, using century old techniques and faster computers. In the process, most forget to think and step aside to see the challenge in front of them could be simplified before diving deep.

In the age of cheap hardware and companies plush with cash, innovation appears stagnant. Making a neural net with thousands of computers in a network is not innovation, it is just a show of brawn over brains. Pumping large number of rules through a supercomputer in an attempt to beat a human recollecting random facts is not innovation, it is scaling ignorance. Collecting, storing and analyzing large amounts of noise in an attempt to discover complex heuristics is not innovation, it is just sticking one’s head in the cloud.

Innovation happens but only rarely. Reducing the complexity of a problem class, fits the bill perfectly.

The economics of violence

Organizations – religions, countries and country clubs, operate on a simple idea. Individuals in a system have a put option with a limited exercise horizon and if the system can coax an individual to exercise it prematurely for the presumed benefit of the system, then the managers of the system could effectively do anything they want. Since the objective function of the system itself is fuzzy and ill defined, managers do not need to show optimality and they can use anecdotes and unproven hypotheses, to elicit premature and suboptimal exercise from a small number of individuals. The act of violence, perpetuated by closed systems, autocratic and strategic, with benefits accruing to a small percentage of the members, require the ones on top convincing a few to engage in irrational acts by demonstrating the asset they hold is wasting and a premature extinguishing of their own lives is optimal, if not for themselves but the system itself.

For hundred thousand years, humans killed and mutilated their way to glory, aided and abetted by clan leaders, fully aware of what they were doing. If the value of an individual demonstrably improves, then it will diminish the ability of clan leaders to force premature exercise of put options held by the individual. Education, the only tool, that could improve asset values in closed systems, may be the last hope for humans, slipping away to oblivion at the height of their ascendancy. Education and knowledge have been stagnating, however, with a few drinking from fire hydrants and others infinitely seeking the illusive mirage. While some in the valley sleep dreaming about the singularity and the cure for death, there are seven billion elsewhere, without a clue what tomorrow is going to bring.

The foundations, sitting on billions still debating whether to provide white or pink nets to cure malaria, may have to rethink their strategy. If they really want to cure the ills of the world, they have to improve the knowledge content of humans.

Puppet show

The Unified Microbiome Initiative (UMI), as described in a recent article in Science, albeit belated, is a step in the right direction. As indicated by one of the founding members from the department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, it has been abundantly clear that microorganisms play a critical role in the welfare of humans. Perhaps, UMI should go a bit further – it is not just that microorganisms have a critical role in health and disease of humans in a tactical sense, they may be controlling how humans evolve, a true strategic imperative.

Intelligence has been ill defined. Ability to maximize utility for the system seems to move inversely to the complexity of the individual. Thus, humans, on top of the food chain, appear least competent to maximize societal utility. An alternative definition of intelligence is the ability of the individual to contribute to system welfare. Here, microorganisms are dominant. They have been here for 4 billion years and they will likely be here for another 4 billion before the Sun throws a temper tantrum and balloon to a red giant. Meanwhile, the “intelligent,” will likely perish in an asteroid impact within perhaps a few 100s of thousands of years.

More importantly, humans appear almost ignorant of the systemic effect imparted on them by microorganisms. The DNA provided by the parasites far surpasses any bits and pieces of the human DNA admitted to the ecosystem, some affectionately call, the human body. In this vast universe of organs and food digesting machinery, humans have been dancing to every whim of their visitors in the stomach and elsewhere. Diseases can be forecasted, health can be measured and even death can be predicted by a simple conversation with the Microbiome.

It is ironic that humans are simple puppets to those who have been dominating the Earth for so long.

Language optimization

Language, a distinct advantage that separated humans from chimps, may become a liability for them in a regime of accelerating information and forced specialization. Early on, language provided efficient communication among clan members with relatively simple objective functions to optimize. Later, as they branched into art, philosophy and literature, language became a construct that may have touched the souls of some, but it also meant that it began to lose the communication efficiency, it was originally designed to do. Presently, conventional languages, with complex semantics and grammar, appear unable to distill and communicate critical technical information.

Computer languages, that stay at a lower level without flowery grammar, are certainly more efficient to program machines. In the human sphere, millennials have been experimenting with a variety of constructs that remove the complexity of grammar and schema, but it is unclear if any of the current methods are efficient in communicating content. In an environment of deep but not broad knowledge per individual, science and engineering may need to invent a modern language that does not constrain them to formats that are designed for different purposes. For example, the abstract of a scientific article, that often limits the format to certain number of words but force the author to utilize inefficient grammar, lose in multiple ways.

It is time to rethink scientific language. Nobody has the time to read through the entire paper and content is not complete in allowed abstract format that conforms to artificial and old constraints.

Gravitational annoyance

A recent paper in the Journal of Science that describes the failure to detect gravitational waves from any source including the merging of two galaxies with possible combination of two black holes, perpetuates the gravitational holdout to otherwise beautiful theories woven up by physicists. Gravitation has spoiled every attempt at Grand Unification of the hypothesized fundamental fields of nature. It is ironic that a field that is obvious at human scale has been the one most difficult to understand and explain with status-quo theories. Ever since an apple fell on Newton’s head, gravity has vexed humankind and it seems like the current situation will continue for a while.

Failure of Grand Unification Theories is a subtle sign that we do not yet have theories that can be unified. Early in the 20th century, a few brilliant minds made inexplicable leaps into emerging knowledge. It is scary to even think of a world in which they did not exist. Newtonian mechanics could have ruled the mediocrity for a few more centuries. However, there were visible cracks in both the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the ones who followed are simply unable to mend them. More importantly, they have taken the hammers given to them and they have been looking for nails all around the universe to put the hammers to good use. None is able to spend a career or even risk a tenured position to ask if the hammers need modifications.

The jumps in the stochastic evolution of knowledge are rare and they are driven by an amazingly few members of billions of humans around the world. The next jump appears too far in a regime mediated by paid research and manufactured education.

Machines do not learn!

Artificial Intelligence is fashionable again, aided by cheap computing and cheaper memory, computer behemoths have been diving head first into the abyss. It has happened before, albeit, with much limited computing power. Just as in the previous iteration in the 80s, the current excitement may die down in a few years. Simulated machine voice and jeopardy are easier problems to solve but finding a cure for cancer is a lot harder. Similarly, churning through limitless text - “search”, is a mechanistic process but “curing death” is not. Soon, hopefully, the “leaders” will realize the naked truth – machines do not learn and that the “singularity” they envision is many centuries away.

Machines have captured the human imagination from the start. When they trained animals to drive farm equipment many thousands of years ago, they understood how machines could be built and powered to enhance productivity. More recently, the silicon chip, a conventional and mechanistic processor, has raised their ambitions to a level that may not be realistic. In the initial going, it was focused on productivity, very similar to farm equipment but now some believe their machines can learn. If so, this is a departure for humans from sustenance to imagination, from mediocrity to advancement, from tactics to strategy. But alas, machines do not learn!

“Machine learning,” a term used too liberally by information technology and consulting firms, may need further definition. One can clearly demonstrate machines do not learn by themselves and if so, we are back to using machines to enhance productivity – a posture humans have been in for ten thousand years.

Real finance

Recent observations by a previous Fed chairman that it is puzzling why one would advocate a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall act because he could not see how the crisis in 2008 would have been avoided had it been in effect, is symptomatic of regulators who are good tacticians but not strategists. From Princeton to Wall street, financial institutions and their regulators still believe intermediation is “God’s work.” Academics, slaves to economics text books from last century, still believe financial intermediation is integral to markets and the economy. If the former chairman is intellectually honest, he may want to revisit the transcripts from Jackson Hole in 2005, before spewing wisdom. The one who came before him, who spewed infinite wisdom for many decades seem to have finally realized, “something was wrong.” He is still selling wisdom at $75K per pop. Meanwhile financial malls, that do everything but intermediation, with a skewed incentive to take risks for their bonuses that depend on the upside potential emanating from their actions and they are generally not accountable for the downside risk, invest into fooling both the academics and the regulators.

Although the chairman may be an expert of the depression era, what he may be missing is that the modern economy needs very little finance as we know it. Any financial activity, that does not have a direct connection to real assets and real investments, adds no value to the economy. Real assets today comprise of only two things – real estate and intellectual property. Financial intermediation in the former can now be done by the internet and it does not require “God’s men,” behind oak desks in the penthouses. And financing needed to develop and nourish IP is not something the mega banks have any clue about. They are dinosaurs with a ridiculous combination of disparate businesses with conflicting incentives that still pose a systemic risk to the entire population.

Glass-Steagall is a necessary condition to eliminate the greed of the ignorant and I am sure “God” will approve.

Hilbert hotel

Recent news that scientists have realized a quantum Hilbert hotel using a beam of light is indicative of the power of thought experiments, validated by simple experiments. Both interesting thought experiments as well as simple validation techniques are on the decline not only in Physics but also in other fields. In the Hilbert thought experiment, a hotel with infinite rooms, fully occupied, could make an additional room by shifting occupants one room up. More generally, the same hotel could make infinite empty rooms by shifting people to even number rooms leaving an infinite number of odd number rooms. The human brain that evolved through practical needs of Sapiens, has been lured into thoughts it was never designed to have.

Thought experiments on Infinity and zero (absolute nothing), such abstract concepts, are in a favorable direction to nourish the brain and perhaps move it into the next quantum state of knowledge. It takes no investment, no heavy machinery and not even high mathematics. It, however, takes imagination, something that has been draining out of humanity. Humans have been unable to internalize infinity and zero, perhaps because of the limitation of the brain but it is more likely because the brain gets inundated with the finite continuously. The thoughts that envelope the finite are mediocre at best and they are not extensible to the abstract nature of infinity or zero.

Thought experiments are possibly the best path to fundamental shifts in human knowledge.

ET’s very large SUV

Recent discovery of an object by NASA’s Kepler telescope around a star, some 1500 light years away that cannot be explained by typical exoplanet properties, has raised speculation that it may be an artificial structure, created by advanced intelligence to garner energy from the star. A simpler explanation, such as a fragmented comet could be more valid, but certainly less interesting. Astrophysics, quickly degrading into bedtime stories of fancy, may yet have a long way to sink in conventionalism, before it could make a contribution.

Humans, seeking intelligence elsewhere, with attributes similar to theirs, seem to forget that their own experiences clearly show that intelligence is a network process. The mighty bacterium, able to dance with billions in unison, appears much more intelligent as a system than humans could ever be. By substantially increasing the diversity and the probability of favorable mutations at the micro-level, the system is able to evolve and adapt faster in a universe that appears hostile in every direction. Harnessing energy in such systems will be an internal process and may not require structure-building or star-domination, only phenomena humans are able to understand fully. Granted, finding such intelligence will remain outside human capabilities for the foreseeable future, if not for ever.

The recent fervor in seeking extra-terrestrials, is symptomatic of the limited understanding of humans of the formation, development and propagation of intelligence.

Training Schrödinger’s Cat

A recent article in Nature describes a possible break-through in quantum computing. Engineers at the University of New South Wales seem to have built a quantum logic gate in Silicon, possibly opening up a pathway toward practical quantum computing in Silicon based processors. In theory, the technology could turn conventional bits into quantum bits, allowing traditional chip architectures to morph into those supporting quantum computing.

This is good news. As many philosophers worry about singularity, for no apparent reason, creative engineers have been moving the goal posts closer to practical quantum computing. It is a technology discontinuity, something if shown to be practical, could substantially change the economic prospects of a whole generation, currently stuck in a plateau of no innovation. They are beginning to realize that calling a phone 6, 7, 18 or 6S is not really innovation – it is packaging. They are realizing that creating fake computer generated voices in marketing announcing Sherlock Holmes and Watson, is not really innovation, it is bad sales technique. They are realizing that skipping version 9 and going straight to 10 is not innovation, it is a cheap gimmick. They are realizing that names that are difficult to pronounce are not really technologies but ways to siphon money out of companies who want to jump on the latest band wagons.

The next discontinuity is not in software – it is in hardware. Unfortunately, world's largest hardware companies do not seem to understand it and the world is now replete with incompetent software companies – creating operating systems, applications, "artificial intelligence" and databases – with no innovation content.