Category Archives: Evolution

Random Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, and the Learning Curve.  

Evolution, Web/Tech

 Intelligence is the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations. Merriam-Webster.

Me: OK Google, call Richard
Google Assistant: Richard Home or Richard Mobile?
Me: Home
Google Assistant: Home is in Portola Valley California

While driving somewhere, Michele and I will sometimes entertain ourselves by comparing the abilities of Google Assistant and Siri. It is fascinating what they can do and even more fascinating what they can’t do. Despite the above example, in almost all cases, OK Google understands better, and is more accurate and useful than Hey Siri.

I’ve read that Google is able to get better engineers because Google gives public credit to its engineers while Apple hides them behind the Apple Brand. For example, at Apple, a paper entitled An On-device Deep Neural Network for Face Detection is listed as written by the Computer Vision Machine Learning Team while, at Google, a paper entitled TFX: A TensorFlow-Based Production-Scale Machine Learning Platform – I have no idea what either title actually means, by the way – credits Akshay Naresh Modi, Chiu Yuen Koo, Chuan Yu Foo, Clemens Mewald, Denis M. Baylor, Eric Breck, Heng-Tze Cheng, Jarek Wilkiewicz, Levent Koc, Lukasz Lew, Martin A. Zinkevich, Martin Wicke, Mustafa Ispir, Neoklis Polyzotis, Noah Fiedel, Salem Elie Haykal, Steven Whang, Sudip Roy, Sukriti Ramesh, Vihan Jain, Xin Zhang, and Zakaria Haque. 

As an aside, when looking at the Google team, they are surprisingly diverse but only in strangely limited areas. The Google Team, which I picked more or less at random, is not a microcosm of America. When I go to the alphabetical Google People Directory, there is a large percentage of Indian names as well as Chinese, Pakistani, Iranian, and Arab names along with the expected European names. Even the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichaiand, was born in India. End aside. 

As another aside, Looking at that list of names above, which has so few women on it, I wonder if the fact that there are so few women in the High Tech biz is because Silicon Valley is populated by a high percentage of men from conservative cultures and they bring an unconscience bias against women. That said, I read that Google just hired two women to head all their Cloud Machine Learning technology; according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, they are “Fei-Fei Li, who was director of AI at Stanford, and Jia Li, who was head of research at Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc”, so maybe, the times are a-changin’. End aside. 

Reading about AI, I realize that, when I think of Intelligence, I am really thinking of being conscious. Intellectually, I know that intelligence is not the same as consciousness, at least from the limited things I’ve read, but I find it very difficult to imagine intelligence without consciousness. It does make me feel better that I am not the only one making this mistake; certainly, HAL was conscience and Skynet, Ava in Em Machina for sure. When we drove through Georgia last fall, we asked Google Maps – with lots of double checking with Apple Maps – to plot a course diagonally across rural Georgia while staying off of highways. It did a super job but, in my imagination, at least, it is just a brute force problem, not Artificial Intelligence. Memorize every road in Georgia with its length, from intersection to intersection, crank in the speed limits of each section – speed limits which even my humble Hyundai knows – and calculate the fasted route. We did go by the world’s largest Peanut Monument and Google did take us through the very cute town of Colquitt, pop. 1,939, where I was able to buy an excellent cappuccino, but I think these were artifacts of the route and Google did not think: Oh, I’ll take him by the Peanut Monument and through Colquitt because it is the only place in rural Georgia he can get a cappuccino.  

On the other hand, when Google DeepMind taught itself to play Go and then beat Go master Lee Sedol in four out of five games, there was a lot more than brute force going on. A disclaimer here, I know nothing about Go, except that I have read that it is much more complicated than chess. Like chess, every move opens the door to many more moves, except in Go, the number of moves starts to approach the infinite. I read that there are more possible moves than all the atoms in the universe, so it is impossible for DeepMind to memorize all the moves, the program had to actually think about what move would be best. One of the things I found most amazing while reading about DeepMind vs. Sedol is that DeepMind made many unconventional moves that nobody had ever seen or thought of before and Sedol says that he learned to think out of the box more by playing DeepMind.  

Years ago, when I was an Industrial Psych major, the thinking was that the Learning Curve was not a smooth curve but a curve broken up by a series of plateaus. Sort of analogous to the evolutionary theory of Punctuated Equilibrium in biology. Change happens, we settle into the new reality, and then we have a jump to another new reality. That way of looking at learning is not as popular as it was but, after looking at the recent Google demo, it seems to me that is what is happening in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (I put both down because I’m not sure of the difference). We are making a jump to a new reality. 

Believing Is Seeing

Americana, Evolution

Eyeball

A couple of parts in my right eye have come loose. It is a little uncomfortable but my vision is still the same so my main problem is my concern that it will get worse. Still, even though I can see as well as before, it is turning out to be a remarkable experience (not really remarkable, I guess, but remarkable to me). When the damage first happened, I saw floaties in my field of vision, pretty big floaties, that I guessed were just debris from the loosening. But now I usually don’t see the floaties, they are still there but my brain has wired around them filling in the blank spaces with information from the other eye, I think, sort of like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop.

Except that my brain only wired around most of them, not all. While I am standing in the kitchen doing dishes, for example, and a floaty drifts down to the corner of my eye, I will be distracted by seeing the cat just at the edge of my vision field. When I turn my head and look, she is not there. In other words, when the floaty is floating around where there shouldn’t be anything, my brain sort of fills in the blank spot but when the floaty is somewhere where there might be something, my brain uses the information from the eye and makes it something reasonable, like a cat crouching down next to the dishwasher.

We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brain. The eyes just provide the necessary raw information required for the for the brain to turn it into an image. However, the required information doesn’t have to be very much information. We are incessantly trying to connect the dots, trying to make patterns out of the constant flow of information coming from our eyes. At a very basic level, our brain is overriding our lying eyes.

I suspect that when we know the answer, really know the answer, it is even easier for our brains to override those lying eyes.

Of Oxalis, Rabbits, and Human Radiation

Evolution

Oxalys_

It’s Spring in our garden and everything is starting to grow – everything of the non native plants, that is, most of our native plants are winter growers and have been growing for a while – especially the Oxalis.  We have two kinds of Oxalis in our backyard, one that hitchhiked in and one that I brought in on purpose. Both of them are trying to take over my potted plants. The hitchhiker probably came in as seeds in a succulent that I bought. Once it got here, the Oxalis went nuts, and it seems that 50% of my gardening time in spent pulling little Oxalis plants from between more desirable plants, like the Gasteria in the picture. I have no excuse for actually buying an Oxalis plant but I did have a reason. My thinking was that the new plant, Oxalis callosa, is a beautiful little South African bulb, I like South African bulbs, and, because it is a bulb, I assumed it would just stay in its pot. It hasn’t.

O. callosa, the South African bulb, is doing so well because it has no natural predators. Well, that is not true, the deer probably like it, but the local bacteria and local bugs don’t, so, when I say it has no predators, I am not talking about large mammals that will eat almost anything, I am really talking about the basic predators at the most basic level.

A story that most of us have heard is that of rabbits taking over Australia. In the late 16th century, English sailors brought rabbits to Australia for food. They were kept in cages and weren’t, apparently, a problem. Then in 1857, Thomas Austin released  24 rabbits into the countryside, saying  “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting.” The rabbits went wild, just like my Oxalis and for the same reason. There was nothing in Australia to make them sick, there were no germs that loved rabbits, there were no parasites to slow them down, Yes, there were larger animals that could and did eat the rabbits but that is usually not a big enough problem to destroy a population. Ten years later, the millions of rabbits had become a major problem and they are still a problem.

Humans, or more accurately proto-humans, have been leaving Africa for millions of years, even before we became what we now call human. The current thinking is that H. sapiens,  modern humans, us in other words, crossed from Ethiopia to Yemen sometime around 75,000 years ago. We did run into some of the proto-humans that had populated Western Asia earlier and they must have fought and killed each other, but there were no germs waiting for us, there was no bacteria to prey on us, there was no malaria or parasitic disease like flatworms, no typhoid or dengue fever.

We evolved in Africa during the last 4 to 8 million years and lots of organisms that like to live off of people evolved right along with us. But Greater Asia didn’t have the African diseases or parasites. Our new Eden was a much easier place to live in  than our birthplace and we were are worse than the rabbits; we are explorers and we have spread everywhere.

Human Radiation

The Earth is alive

Around home, Evolution
San Andreas
Road cut on Highway 25 closed by the winter rain.

I feel like I have been cooped up all winter, watching it rain, watching the Warriors on a record-setting roll, and giving in to the allure of idleness. To put a purpose to getting out, I took the first of – hopefully – several drives along the San Andreas Fault between home and the Carrizo Plain. It is a part of California that I don’t know.

But it wasn’t until I started driving down Highway 25 that I realized how cooped up I had been. I rolled – buttoned? – the windows down, slowed the truck, and soaked in the spring day. The grass was bright green, just starting to go to seed in some areas, and the oaks were flaunting their new growth, a green that is so green, so bright, that it seems artificial. San Andreas-2 San Andreas-3San Andreas-5

Running along the fault, it was pretty hard to not think about earthquakes and how they affect the people who live here. Maybe a confession is due, I like earthquakes. I know that earthquakes kill people – lots of people all over the world, although not so many in Northern California and other parts of the developed world – and cause damage, but nobody I know has ever been hurt and the damage around here has been minimal. I like earthquakes because they remind me that the Earth is Alive.

By Alive, I mean Alive, as in living, not just the opposite of inert. When I drove back home, I detoured to the western gate of Pinnacles National Park just to marvel at what seems to be an incongruity but is really an artifact of the Aliveness. San Andreas-6

Pinnacles is a strange little National Park. First, it is small and pretty inconsequential with only about 200,000 visitors a year – for comparison, the Grand Canyon has almost 5,000,000 visitor a year – and yet it was made a National Monument about eight years earlier than the Grand Canyon. Even this week, in what the Ranger said was a busy week because of Spring Break, the entry gate was close and we were told to pay, on the honor system, by dropping our money into a collection kiosk.

The Park is here because the rocks are very strange and, I am guessing, when it was first made a National Monument, nobody knew why. Now we know that the rocks were formed by a volcano on the San Andreas fault about 23 million years ago – that is about 20 million years before Lucy – a little north of Los Angeles. Because the volcano was directly over the fault, the western part of the volcano was on the Pacific Plate and the eastern part was on the North American Plate, and because the fault was and still is moving, the western part of the volcano was dragged about 200 miles northwest over the ensuing 23 million years. Now one large chunk of that volcano is in Northern California and the remainder is still in Southern California. Although I don’t think anybody knew it at the time, Pinnacles is a perfect San Andreas Fault demonstration.

Heading north, back to civilization and home in the fading light, the Wildness turned into a manufactured landscape. The Earth is our home and we are trying to bend it to our will, but here, along the San Andreas fault, it is obvious that is impossible. The earth is Alive and still bats last. This spring afternoon, it is starting to bat flowers.  San Andreas-7San Andreas-8
San Andreas-9

Coming back from the Mullin Show, thinking about evolution

California, Evolution, Psychological Musings, Religion, Science

Mullin-2135The sweet spot of any drive up the California Coast, south of San Francisco, is the section between Morro Rock and Big Sur. Of course, that is if the purpose of the drive is the drive, if the purpose of the drive is to get north as quickly as possible, stay off of this section of road. Here the highway turns into a two lane road that follows the contours of the land. As much as anything else, driving this section of road in Michele’s car, with the top down, was the reason we had made the trip south in the first place. (BTW, all the shots from in the car are Michele’s as is the lovely bridge/surf picture near the end.

The two lane section starts after Morro Bay, goes inland for awhile, then gets serious. Mullin-2078
Mullin-
Mullin-2136But, before the road got serious, we passed the Elephant Seal rookery near the Piedras Blancas Light Station. Neither one of us even knew that the Elephant Seals had moved in south of Ano Nuevo , so we decided to stop for ten minutes. It was more than an hour later before we left and our visit to the Elephant Seals was the surprise highlight of the drive home.Mullin-2133

It seems that a couple of Elephant Seals moved into the area in 1990, first to an offshore island and then to the beach right next to the highway, both north and south of the lighthouse. Now there are about 17,000 animals in the general area.  To back up, Northern Elephant Seals were almost hunted to extinction in the 19th and early 20th Century but they are now protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and they have bounced back. With a vengeance. It is estimated that there are well over 150,000 animals breeding from Baja to Point Reyes and they take up alot of beach space.Mullin-2088

Elephant Seals really are Seals. They are distant cousins to Raccoons, even more distant cousins to Bears, and they probably evolved from Otters. Their ancestors were land animals and the Seal side of the family, for some unfathomable reason, wandered back into the ocean sometime around 25 million years ago.

To me, that is pretty amazing and it took some drastic changes to make it happen. Not just giving up legs and feet for flippers, the problem of no fresh water in the ocean also had to be solved, and to make the changes even more improbable, the Elephant Seals have chosen a life that requires being able to stay underwater for as long as thirty minutes. They are mammals, carnivores, able to dive as deep as 5,000 feet to get food and unable to move – move for lack of a better word, they sort of half flop, half inchworm along, their body jiggling like jelly – more than a couple of hundred feet from their real home, the ocean.

Mullin-2098
 Mullin-2099

Mullin-2093

At Piedras Blanca, we stand on a wooden deck just above the beach, captivated by the hundreds of huge animals just below us. As they go about their daily lives, it is hard to watch them without wondering how they can even exist.

One theory is that  God made the Elephant Seal, along with all the other creatures that live in the water, on the fifth day of Creation (or, maybe, the sixth day because Elephant Seals were land animals that returned to the water, but let’s not quibble over a day). I find that hard to believe; it goes against all the evidence except the Bible (and it is pretty easy to argue against the Bible with its dubious origins, translations of translations, and its assembly by committee three hundred  years after the fact).

Darwinian Evolution says that it is only a result of random change over 25 million years. I like this theory better, but I found it less satisfying than I had hoped when I went on an Evolution binge about 30 or 40 years ago. The time line is fact, or at least fits all the evidence. And the same with change; what I find hard to embrace is random. The Universe clearly has a direction, from Chaos to Order, from stray particles to atoms, from atoms to molecules. About 3,600,000,000 years ago – somehow – life came along and some molecules became cells. About 600,000,000 years ago, some of those cells became simple animals. Those simple animals became increasingly complex, filling empty econiches. Somehow those stray particles became armadillos and kale. They became sowbugs and flamingos. They became elephant seals and us, wondering how we got here.

To me, this direction, even progression, seems important. I don’t believe in a personal God and I certainly don’t believe in a God that cares how I worship or have sex. But I do believe that the Universe is Connected and Alive, a Self-organizing System rather than a machine.

As an aside, I have long wondered why Fundamentalist Christians – mostly Christians, but also Fundamentalist Jews and Muslims – resist the billion year timeline, insisting on a literal six day Creation. After all, without that time line, Creation and Evolution are not really competing theories. God could have made the Universe over billions of years just as easily as six days (maybe God’s days are longer).  The problem, it turns out is not time, it is change. Because evolutionary change requires destruction of everything that came before, it is hard to square with a just, fair, and caring father. How could this just, fair, and caring God destroy millions – maybe billions – of Bambis and Thumpers, how could a merciful God  wipe out the dinosaurs to get to chickens? End aside.

One of the things that makes Piedras so much fun and what made it so surprising is that you get very close to the animals. And up close and personal, a nursing mother facing off a horny bull becomes high drama and a two and one half ton animal becomes an individual. Mullin-2104

Mullin-2115

Mullin-2083

We finally tore ourselves away from the Elephant Seals, hoping to get to Nepenthe at Big Sur by sunset.

Mullin-2137  The road was as good as I remembered, but it was much busier making it hard to pass without going into full traffic jamming mode and I am getting too old for that.

Mullin-2143

Mullin-2146

Mullin-2151

Mullin-2155

We did make it in time for sunset, or as the case was today, in time for the sun to go down behind a cloud layer. So, instead of a sunset, we rewarded ourselves with their Famous Ambrosiaburgera, a couple of glasses of a very nice red wine, and a side order of brussel sprouts.