Was Y2K an overhyped threat?

Remember the Y2K panic? There were fears that computers that came into widespread use in the mid-twentieth century, when the year 2000 seemed very far away, had been programmed with internal clocks that assumed that the first two digits of the year was 19. There was concern that when the year 2000 rolled around, many systems would crash because the computers might think the year had suddenly reverted to 1900 and thereby go awry. There were fears of planes crashing, power systems going down, the banking and financial sectors going haywire, and so on.

There was a lot of activity among computer professionals to take steps to solve the problem before the end of 1999. I personally did not do anything since I am not a computer professional. I also tend not to wait up on December 31 until the New Year rolls around but on that day I did decide to stay up until midnight to see what might happen. And there was … nothing. Everything was just as before.
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What would a criminal justice system in the absence of free will look like?

I read the new book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky where he outlines the biological basis for why we have no free will. I will discuss the main arguments of the book in a later post but here I want to outline what he says about an objection that believers in free will often raise, and that is that if we say that all our actions are determined by our genes, history, environment, and random factors, and that we did not freely choose to do them, then people who commit crimes should not be blamed and punished. He agrees that such people should not be blamed for what is after all outside their control and that retributive and punitive punishments, that form such a large part of our criminal justice system, have no place. But that does not mean that we simply do nothing.

He sets up his argument by recalling how things have changed so dramatically over time in the way that we respond to people with illnesses like epilepsy or schizophrenia that cause them to act in ways that are dangerous to themselves and to others. (Chapter 13, pages 300-340) In the past, it used to be thought that their actions were freely chosen ones and they were punished accordingly, often in horrendous ways. Not anymore. Now we realize that they are victims of illnesses that cause them to behave in those ways, and we have changed our response accordingly. As he says: “Once, having a seizure was steeped in the perceptions of agency, autonomy, and freely choosing to join Satan’s army. Now we effortlessly accept that none of those terms make sense. And the sky hasn’t fallen. I believe that most of us would agree that the world is a better place because sufferers of this disease are not burned at the stake.” (p. 316)
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What AI systems know about me

I saw a couple of recent posts by people who had asked AI systems for information about themselves. Asking these system to tell you information about yourself is a good way to see if they are making up stuff because presumably you know your own life better than anyone or anything else. They reported that after giving out information that was correct, it suddenly seemed to veer off and simply make up stuff about them.

Curious, I decided to try this for myself. I asked ChatGPT “What can you tell me about Mano Singham?” and got back this response.

Mano Singham is a theoretical physicist, author, and retired professor. As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, he is known for his contributions to the field of physics and for his writings on science, education, and atheism. Mano Singham has held the position of Director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) at Case Western Reserve University.

In addition to his academic work, Singham has been an active writer and blogger. He has written extensively on topics related to science, secularism, and rational thinking. One of his notable works is the book “The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets,” where he explores the mathematical references and jokes hidden in the popular animated TV show “The Simpsons.”

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How safe are self-driving cars?

I for one would really like to see self-driving cars become an everyday reality, as common as cars are now. It may surprise people that many such cars are already widely used in several cities as taxis. But there are key questions concerning safety and one would hope that the companies marketing these cars would be transparent about the ability of their cars to detect pedestrians and obstacles. But Sam Biddle writes that one major company is putting its cars out on the streets even though it seems to have two key vulnerabilities: an inability to see small children and large holes in the ground.
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How dangerous are deepfakes?

We have got used to the existence of ‘deepfakes’, computer generated images and videos that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This has caused some serious concerns about the possibility of deepfakes becoming a powerful tool for disinformation and mischief, especially in the political arena, since it is possible to have people seem to say and do things that are damaging to themselves with the viewer being none the wiser that they have been conned.

But how dangerous is this?

In the November 20, 2023 issue ofThe New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews some recent books that look at the dangers posed by deepfakes and concludes that the fears may be overblown, and that even when deepfakes are explicitly political, most of it is used for parody and otherwise humorous purposes, and not meant to convince us that we are watching the real thing,

Fakery in the visual realm goes back to the earliest days of photography, where a lot of editing was done in darkroooms to get the effect sought.

In “Faking It” (2012), Mia Fineman, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that early cameras had a hard time capturing landscapes—either the sky was washed out or the ground was hard to see. To compensate, photographers added clouds by hand, or they combined the sky from one negative with the land from another (which might be of a different location).
…

From our vantage point, such manipulation seems audacious. Mathew Brady, the renowned Civil War photographer, inserted an extra officer into a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his generals. Two haunting Civil War photos of men killed in action were, in fact, the same soldier—the photographer, Alexander Gardner, had lugged the decomposing corpse from one spot to another. Such expedients do not appear to have burdened many consciences. In 1904, the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted that nearly every professional photographer employed the “trickeries of elimination, generalization, accentuation, or augmentation.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that what Hartmann called “straight photography” became an ideal to strive for.

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On free will

There are few things that arouse stronger reactions in people than the claim that free will is an illusion. When I used to run workshops for graduate students on how to critically read research papers, I would hand out a paper that discussed experiments that had evidence that seemed to show support for the idea that we did not have free will. (More on the nature of this evidence later.) The students would get into this exercise with gusto, as I knew they would, poring over the paper and analyzing the data and the reasoning to try to find flaws so that they could hold on to the idea that they had free will.

Why do we cling so tenaciously to the idea that we have free will? To even discus the idea we need to be clearer about what we even mean by the term ‘free will’, since there is some ambiguity there and many different definitions floating around. The usual free will model is that ‘I’ consciously make a decision to take some action (get up, pick up a pen, say something, etc.) and then carry it out. The word ‘will’ is not that problematic. We can assign it to the decision-making process that results in the command to be executed. It is the word ‘free’ that causes problems. Free of what, exactly? A belief in ‘free’ will says that the ‘I’ is not purely biologically driven and is in control of that part of the process and could just as easily have made a different decision (keep sitting, not pick up the pen, stay silent, etc.) and carried that out.

But who is this ‘I’ that initiates the process?
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The need for immigrants

The GOP has taken a very anti-immigrant stance. According to what they say they want, the borders should be shut to any newcomers. But as can be seen from this graph that shows how the US population would change under various assumptions about the level of immigration, that would not be a good thing.

Immigration is essential to the long-term health of the country, because otherwise people 65 years or older will outnumber children under 18 by 2029, putting stress on medical care and other services.

What the xenophobes are likely most scared about is the growth of the Hispanic population, expected by 2060 to make up 26.9% of the country (currently it is 19.1%) while the non-Hispanic white population, currently making up around 58.9%, will begin to decline in 2045 and may drop to 44.9% by 2060.

One suspects that if the influx of immigrants were from (say) Scandinavian countries, they would be welcomed.

Serious injuries in rugby

I have been railing about the serious dangers to participants in American football, especially with the rise in evidence of CTE, the long-term brain injury that results from repeated collisions that can cause concussions. It is thought that the repeated accumulation of concussions, even small ones during practices, is what leads to later serious cognitive decline in players. I feel the evidence is already compelling enough that I no longer watch games and also think that schools and colleges should no longer offer this as a sports option to their students. It is an activity that should be left for adults to choose to participate in, though they should be made aware of the risks.

Americans tend to view rugby as pretty much the same as American football, except without the protective helmets and body padding and hence think that it must be much more dangerous. I used to tell them that it was not so, that there were differences that made rugby safer. One is that there is evidence that the protective gear actually gives players a false sense of safety and encourages them to do dangerous things that they would not do without it. Another is that in rugby, it is only the player who has the ball that can be tackled, thus any given player faces far fewer collisions per game. A third is that any collision that results in contact with a player’s head results in an immediate yellow card that requires the offender to be off the field for ten minutes, to sit in a chair that is quaintly called a ‘sin bin’. If, during that time, an off-field review shows no mitigating factors, it is upgraded to a red card and the player cannot return to the game.
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Materialism, scientism, and meaning

I am a materialist, in the sense that I believe the entire universe is made of matter that follows laws. I do not believe in the existence of anything supernatural or otherwise that can act in violation of the laws of science. As such, I do not think that the universe has any meaning in itself. The universe just is and any meaning that exists is what we construct. This does not bother me.

Jessica Tracy, a professor of psychology at the university of British Columbia, started out with beliefs similar to mine and was quite comfortable with them but then, at the age of forty, says that she suffered an existential crisis.

Suddenly, I was unable to stop thinking about the meaninglessness of my existence. Religious belief, the most obvious source of meaning available to many people when those big ‘Why are we here?’ questions come up, was not an option. As a scientist, I had always abided by the dictates of materialism: the central scientific doctrine holding that everything that matters is measurable. Materialism is largely responsible for the uncountable scientific advances our culture has accumulated over the past several centuries, from smartphones to vaccines. At the same time, it has placed a clear-cut kibosh on the possibility of a supernatural deity running the show.

In fact, one of science’s main draws for me was its airtight logic and appeal to rationality. I had no interest in seeking a source of meaning that requires abandoning – or at least setting aside – the critical thinking that my scientific background had instilled deep within me. And yet, as I hit midlife, I realised that science’s hardcore materialism was devastating me.

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