What "IF" Says About AI and Love

 

The John Krasinski movie "IF" came out this past weekend, and my wife and I went to see it.  I won't have to put in a spoiler alert if all I say here is that it's about imaginary friends that children came up with and then abandoned, only to meet their "IFs" again later in life.  What has this got to do with engineering ethics?  Several things, actually.

 

For one, one of our culture's most popular art forms—the cinema—is deeply embedded in state-of-the-art technology that allows entirely imaginary beings to appear onscreen with actual people, looking as realistic as the hairs on your head.  Yes, animated cinema has a century-long history, but the seamless integration of live action and dreamed-up entities such as Blue, the nine-foot-tall purple fuzzball that appears in ads for IF, has been possible for only the last few decades, and relies on a small army of animators and other technical people plus the best CGI technology money can buy. 

 

For another thing, "IF" focuses on the roles played by, let's face it, figments of our youthful imaginations.  As my wife and I were talking after the film, she stated that she was sure she had an imaginary playmate growing up, while I could not recall any such thing, although I enjoyed many imaginary adventures with real friends before the age of about 12.  Whether or not you had an IF yourself, you can understand that many children do. 

 

The movie leaves unexplored the question of why kids make up imaginary friends, and instead treats the IFs as entirely independent souls, despondent that their former playmates left them behind.  I use the word "soul" intentionally, because the beings in question have intelligence and will.  Being so endowed, they are capable of love, which the movie clearly signals as the ultimate outcome when an abandoned IF is reunited with his or her child, no matter what the child's present age is.

 

As touching as many of the scenes that reunited an IF with its soulmate were, I personally found the most moving part of the film to be a scene that relied on a person, a technology, and a work of art which all originated in the mid-20th century.  The person was the grandmother of the main character, the twelve-year-old Bea.  Grandma is portrayed as well-intentioned, but remote and clueless about how time has changed her granddaughter, whom she apparently hasn't seen in several years.  The technology was a floor-model stereo record player, the type which gave rise to the immortal couplet "Enjoy your stereo often, then use it for a coffin."  And the work of art playing on the phonograph was Aram Khatchaturian's "Spartacus" ballet, to which the grandmother had danced at a public performance when she was about Bea's age.  To get her grandmother in touch with her inner child, the record is played by Bea, who watches as her otherwise bumbling and ineffectual ancestor transforms herself into a graceful ballerina there in her darkened New York apartment, illuminated only by city lights that profile her like stage spotlights during her dance.

 

Yes, the grandmother's imaginary friend experienced an E. T.-like revival once the grandmother remembered her earlier fleeting experience as a dancer.  But the true act of love in the scene was Bea's thoughtfulness in acting on the evidence of an old photograph, choosing the record, and playing it in Grandma's presence. 

 

And this is the quibble I have with the movie.  The characters' actions, the facial expressions, and even the musical score all telegraph that the reunion of adults with their abandoned IFs is the best thing that's ever happened to these people.  It's certainly the best thing that's happened to the IFs, whose plight is the engine that drives the plot forward.  But can anything that we make up ourselves, anything that we have complete control over, really be a source of meaningful love? 

 

This is not a trivial question, as we watch advanced AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and its successors and imitators proliferate at an unsettling speed.  Already, some of my recent Google inquiries have led with an AI-generated paragraph that I read without realizing it was from an AI system.  Only after I sensed something off or skewed about it did I notice that it was from Google's answer to ChatGPT. 

 

No, I am not a Luddite who wishes all AI to be plunged to the bottom of the sea.  But as large-language-model AI systems begin to imitate the sound of real humans more and more, we will be tempted to treat them that way, expecting more from them than they can deliver. 

 

For most children, an imaginary playmate is a harmless aid to play that, in its proper role, is the way we teach ourselves to become adults.  Krasinski cleverly shows the grandmother's TV playing scenes from "Harvey," the 1950 Jimmy Stewart film about a man with the wonderful name of Elwood P. Dowd, who imagines he has befriended a six-foot rabbit.  We should remember that Dowd ends up in a mental institution, though with an ultimately happy outcome. 

 

Writers and other storymaking types often say that once they have created a character, the character sometimes takes on a life of its own and does things that the writer never thought it would do.  Despite having fruitlessly attempted the writing of fiction, I can't say this has ever happened to me, and maybe that's why I never had an imaginary friend when I was a child.  But even writers know that their characters are simply figments, not realities capable of loving or hating real people.

 

The existential philosopher Martin Buber is famous for distinguishing two types of relationships.  One is the I-it relationship that souls have with the natural environment and human-created things.  The other type is the I-thou relationship, which can only happen between souls.  Regardless of the emotional weight put on them, imaginary friends and AI chatbots do not have souls, and we can only relate to them on an I-it basis. 

 

Both children, who are growing up these days in a very hostile environment for young people, and adults can only give and receive love in I-thou relationships between persons, or between a person and God.  While movies like "IF" say something worth listening to about our inner child, we err in hoping for that which an imaginary friend cannot give.

 

Is the Bloom Off the Self-Driving Rose?

 

Pardon the mixed metaphor—roses don't drive—but I couldn't think of another way to summarize the current prospects for truly autonomous vehicles.  For several years now, we have been promised that self-driving cars are just around the corner.  In particular, Tesla has marketed an expensive option for their electric vehicles called "Full Self-Driving Capability."  But as the NHTSA is asking Tesla for ever more detailed information about how it has deployed and modified its autonomous-driving software since 2014, it's beginning to look like the promised future of leaving all the driving to robot chauffeurs while we nap or play cards in the back seat is nothing more than hype.

 

What is reality right now regarding self-driving cars?  The Society of Automotive Engineers has established six levels of autonomy, ranging from 0 (what a Model T had, requiring you to do everything yourself) up to Level 5.  A Level 5 car could drive you anywhere that is physically accessible by a car without your having to lift a finger. 

 

The most advanced self-driving systems currently on the market are Level 3.  A Level 3 system such as that in the Honda Legend, which was introduced only in Japan in limited quantities, really does drive the car without human intervention, but reserves the right to ask the human to take over if things get too hairy.  "Hairy" in this case can mean something as mild as a rainy day, which sets up weird reflections on streets and can confuse even deep-learning AI systems. 

 

Tesla's much-publicized "Full Self-Driving Mode" is only a Level 2 system, because the occupant is supposed to be prepared to start steering at any time.  People routinely violate this rule, however, which is how several accidents involving supposedly self-driving Teslas have happened.

 

Computer scientist and engineer Anthony Levandowsky ought to know the self-driving score if anybody does, as he got into the business way back in 2003 when he teamed with some fellow U. C. Berkeley engineers to enter a self-driving motorcycle in DARPA's 2004 Grand Challenge.  He went on to work for Google, left Google for Uber amid lawsuits charging theft of intellectual property, was convicted of same, and pardoned by President Trump on Trump's last day in office.

 

If anybody has an insider's perspective on self-driving vehicles, Levandowsky does.  What is he up to now?  He runs a company that converts giant open-pit quarry trucks to be autonomous vehicles.  And in an interview with Bloomberg News, he says that the kind of highly restricted environment in which such trucks operate may be the best that truly autonomous driving can do for the foreseeable future.

 

While there have been numerous technical advances in sensors, computing power, and AI in the two decades or so that Levandowsky has been in the business, self-driving cars are up against a truly astounding opponent:  the average driver.  As the Bloomberg article points out, suppose you see a couple of pigeons on the road ahead.  As an experienced human, you know that pigeons almost always fly away before your car lands on top of them.  And even if you are contending with a particularly dopey or hung-over pigeon whose situational awareness isn't up to snuff, running over a pigeon is not going to ruin your car.  So it's no big deal to see some pigeons in your path if you're driving.

 

But to an autonomous vehicle system that may never have encountered these particular pigeons on this particular stretch of road under these particular lighting and weather circumstances, it's a totally novel experience.  And most prudent programmers will insert a default "brake when in doubt" operation when the system encounters something that might be dangerous.  So what may well happen is that the car suddenly brakes, and the driver following you may not notice in time, leading to a rear-end collision or even a pileup on a busy freeway—all because of a pigeon.

 

Multiply this scenario by the thousands of other ones that come up all the time, and you begin to understand why self-driving taxis are found only in highly restricted areas of certain cities, and why so many of the demonstrations of self-driving cars take place in California, Arizona, and other places where clear skies can be counted on.  Levandowsky takes the position that every so-called self-driving car out there is really just a pilot project, and Tesla even makes this condition explicit, calling their system a "beta version," meaning it's still under development. 

 

So when, if ever, are we going to get to have our little cocktail among friends in the back seat, heedless of the weather or the traffic?  I can picture only two situations in which even some people can get to experience this in what remains of my lifetime.

 

One is if cities establish self-driving-only zones in which only self-driving cars with similar operating systems are allowed.  This type of operation will never be a mass-market phenomenon, but it essentially transfers Levandowsky's self-driving quarry trucks to dense downtown areas, where the environment can be controlled, perhaps with strictly-enforced rules on pedestrians.

 

The other would extend this principle to an entire region or country.  Maybe we should start with Lichtenstein.  Only self-driving cars would be allowed on the roads.  This will probably never fly in the U. S., but it might take place in some dictatorial environment such as China or North Korea—assuming North Koreans ever get rich enough to buy their own cars.  And even then, the rest of the environment is still going to cause lots of problems—pigeons can't read highway laws, and they're going to land on the road anyway. 

 

It's kind of a shame, really.  Part of me was looking forward to handing the whole responsibility of driving over to some system that had proven itself at least as trustworthy as your average taxi driver.  (Not the taxi driver I wound up with in Amherst, Massachusetts once, who had been out "fishing" with a six-pack and hit a curb, blew out a tire, stopped at a gas station, got the tire fixed, and still got us to our flight to China somehow.)  But now it looks like that's going to go the way of other Jetson-inspired dreams, like personal flying saucers.  Of course, if they do get batteries good enough to operate self-flying one-person drones, we could rewrite the FAA rules a lot more easily than redoing all the traffic laws.  But you'd still have to deal with those pesky pigeons.

 

Sources:  The Bloomberg News article "Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere" appeared on Oct. 5, 2022 at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere.  I also referred to the J. D. Power website for the SAE's six levels of autonomous-vehicle operation at https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/levels-of-autonomous-driving-explained

and https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tesla-autopilot-driver-assist-system-nhtsa-seeks-details-recent-changes/, as well as the Wikipedia article on Anthony Levandowsky.

Can Democracy in America Survive Big Tech?

 

Two articles I came across recently raise the question in the headline of today's column.  One is by a journalist named Allum Bokhari, who gave a speech last November at Hillsdale College, one of the very small number of U. S. colleges that does not accept Federal grants, loans, or other funding.  The other is by Robert D. Kaplan, a geopolitics specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  Both gentlemen are deeply concerned that social media, as it now works, constitute an existential threat to American small-d democratic government.

 

Kaplan is concerned that social media may create conditions in which the "fragile, perhaps even ephemeral" experiment called American democracy cannot survive.  His studies of nation-states range widely over time and geography.  The old USSR, he points out, was not defeated from without by nuclear or conventional warfare.  Rather, it was destroyed by internal weaknesses and a crisis of purpose that led to its disintegration.  Regarding the present rivalry between the U. S. and China, he sees social media playing radically different roles in the two countries.

 

In China, the authoritarian government ensures that everything on social media reinforces the "blood-and-soil nationalism" of the dominant Han cultural matrix.  Traces of dissent are ruthlessly stamped out, and ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs are suppressed and even locked up in concentration camps.  There is basically one political story available in China, and social media reinforce it.

 

In the U. S., on the other hand, Big Tech effectively control social media, and recent events emphasize the subtle but increasingly effective control they exert.  The dominant vision embraced by those who inhabit the upper reaches of corporate and cultural America is a transnational one which, when it looks at American history at all, sees a story of exploitation and shame, exemplified by the New York Times's "1619 Project" that attempted to show that the founders based America on slavery, not on anything noble.  Even worse, the economics of social media have come to embrace the divide-and-conquer principle that feeding different kinds of people what they most want to hear means cutting up the citizenry into "racial, gender, political, or sexual" identity groups that are often pitted against each other, to the great loss of the basic unity that any nation needs to survive.

 

Allum Bokhari brings his experience with Breitbart News to the table.  While I am no fan of Breitbart News, the old principle of free speech (much abused lately) says that every voice deserves to be heard, if not believed.  And he brings some indisputable facts to the table that are worth considering.

 

Unlike the early days of the Internet when no single social-media platform was dominant and everybody had more or less equal access to everybody else's website, today's Internet is a creature of the Google-Facebook-Amazon complex of corporate control.  And control is the right word.  The velvet glove of free apps and fun-looking websites conceals an iron hand of manipulation that is so subtle and complex, powered by advanced AI software, that the vast majority of users have little or no idea that they are being manipulated.  But they are.  

 

Cadres of software engineers spend countless hours devising complex algorithms to change behavior, not only to the benefit of advertisers on Big Tech's media, but for other reasons as well.  One quote that Bokhari reports from a source he interviewed at Facebook says it all:  “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.”  If this isn't manipulation, I don't know what is.

 

In recent months, the manipulation and control has come above ground for everyone to see.  Bokhari cites the actions of Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech firms in de-platforming President Trump, and of Amazon and Apple in kicking the upstart social-media platform Parler off their equipment (or in the case of Apple, off the privately owned phones of millions of users).  One can argue about the motivations for such actions.  But the bare fact of the actions remain:  privately owned companies, largely unhindered and in fact protected by government regulation from lawsuits that private individuals can be subject to (that is what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does), unilaterally censored an entire social-media network regardless of who or what was on it, and also censored the sitting President of the United States. 

 

For those who can remember the old days of only three television networks, the only analogous action I can imagine would be if the President decided to make a speech one day, and in the middle of his words spoken to the "pool" camera that all three networks were taking their video feed from, executives decided to pull the switch and return to their regular programming of the Beverly Hillbillies or whatever.  Nothing like that ever happened, but if it had, the roars of outrage from common citizens of every political viewpoint would have been deafening. 

 

Today, roars—or anything else—can't be heard unless Big Tech approves of the roar.  The dominant progressive political views of the transnational cultural elite who are in charge are squeezing out the wide spectrum of views that, no matter how annoying some of the extremes are, turn out to be vital to the survival of democracy.  To those who deplore disagreement and debate, I would say this:  disagreement and debate are features of democracy, not bugs.  Cut them off and you are left with a softer form of what China has:  a homogenized, uniform, expert-driven technocracy that maintains the form of democracy, perhaps, but denies its power.  If this nation, which has endured for 245 years, is to preserve government "of the people, by the people, for the people," the malignant effects of social media and corporate control must be dealt with.  And soon, before it is too late.

 

Sources:  Allum Bokhari's post, based on a modified version of his Nov. 8, 2020 speech at Hillsdale College, is available at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/control-need-rein-big-tech/.  Robert D. Kaplan's article "How We Lose Against China" appeared in the Feb. 8, 2021 issue of National Review on pp. 27-29.

Is Google Too Big?

 

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against Google Inc. under the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act, charging that the firm is a "monopoly gatekeeper for the Internet."  This is the first time the DOJ has used the Act since 1998, when similar charges were filed against Microsoft.  The Microsoft case failed to break up the company, as the DOJ once announced its intentions to do, but reduced the dominance of Microsoft's Explorer browser by opening up the browser arena to more competition.

 

By one measure, Google has an 87% market share in the search-engine "market."  I put the word in quotes, because nobody I know gives money directly to Google in exchange for permission to use their search engine.  But as the means by which 87% of U. S. internet users look for virtually anything on the Internet, Google has the opportunity to sell ads and user information to advertisers.  A person who Googles is of course benefiting Google, and not Bing or Ecosia or any of the other search engines that you've probably never heard of.

 

Being first in a network-intensive industry is hugely significant.  When Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized as Stanford undergraduates that matrix algebra could be applied to the search-engine problem in what they called the PageRank algorithm, they immediately started trying it out, and were apparently the first people in the world both to conceive of the idea and to put it into practice.  It was a case of being in the exactly right place (Silicon Valley) at the right time (1996).  A decade earlier, and they would have lapsed into obscurity as the abstruse theorists who came up with a great idea too soon.  And if they had been only a few years later, someone else would have come up with the idea and probably beat them to it.  But as it happened, Google got in the earliest, dominated the infant Internet search-engine market, and has exploded ever since along with the nuclear-bomb-like growth of the WorldWideWeb. 

 

It's hard to say exactly which one of the classic bad things about monopolies is true of Google. 

 

The first thing that comes to mind is that classic monopolies can extract highway-robbery prices from customers, as the customers of a monopoly must buy the product or service in question from the monopoly because they have no viable alternative.  Because users typically don't pay directly for Google's services, this argument won't wash.  Google's money comes from advertisers who pay the firm to place ads and inform them who may buy their products, among other things.  (I am no economist and have only the vaguest notions about how Google really makes money, but however they do it, they must be good at it.)  I haven't heard any public howls from advertisers about Google's exploitative prices for ads, and after all, there are other ways to advertise besides Google.  In other words, the advertising market is reasonably price-elastic, in that if Google raised the cost of using their advertising too much, advertisers would start looking elsewhere, such as other search engines or even (gasp!) newspapers.  The dismal state of legacy forms of advertising these days tells me this must not be happening to any great extent.

 

One other adverse effect of monopolies which isn't that frequently considered is that they tend to stifle innovation.  A good example of this was the reign of the Bell System (affectionately if somewhat cynically called Ma Bell) before the DOJ lawsuit that broke it up into regional firms in the early 1980s.  While Ma Bell could not be faulted for reliability and stability, technological innovation was not its strong suit.  In a decade that saw the invention of integrated circuits, the discovery of the laser, and a man landing on the moon, what was the biggest new technology that Ma Bell offered to the general consumer in the 1960s?  The Princess telephone, a restyled instrument that worked exactly the same as the 1930s model but was available in several designer colors instead of just black or beige.  Give me a break.

 

Regarding innovation, it's easy to think of several innovative things that Google has offered its users over the years, including something I heard of just the other day. You'll soon be able to whistle or hum a tune to Google and it will try to figure out what the name of the tune is.  This may be Google's equivalent of the Princess telephone, I don't know.  But they're not just sitting on their cash and leaving innovation to others.

 

In the DOJ's own news release about the lawsuit, they provide a bulleted list that says Google has "entered into agreements with" (a politer phrase than "conspired with") Apple and other hardware companies to prevent installation of search engines other than Google's, and takes the money it makes ("monopoly profits") and buys preferential treatment at search-engine access points. 

 

So the heart of the matter to the DOJ is the fact that if you wanted to start your own little search-engine business and compete with Google, you'd find yourself walled off from most of the obvious opportunities to do so, because Google has not only got there first, but has made arrangements to stay there as well.

 

To my mind, this is not so much a David-and-Goliath fight—Goliath being the big company whose name starts with G and David representing the poor exploited consumer—as it is a fight on behalf of other wannabe Googles and firms that are put at a disadvantage by Google's anticompetitive practices.  From Google's point of view, the worst-case scenario would be a breakup, but unless the DOJ decided to regionalize Google in some artificial way, it's hard to see how you'd break up a business whose nature is to be centrally controlled and executed.  Probably what the DOJ will settle for is an opening-up of search-engine installation opportunities to other search-engine companies.  But with $120 billion in cash lying around, Google is well equipped to fight.  This is a battle that's going to last well beyond next month's election, and maybe past the next President's term, whoever that might be. 

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the DOJ lawsuit against Google from The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/20/us-justice-department-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/21/google-antitrust-charges-what-is-next, as well as the Department of Justice website at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monopolist-google-violating-antitrust-laws, and the Wikipedia article "United States v. Microsoft Corp." 

Is There A Contact-Tracing App In Your Future?

Excuse the similarity to last week's headline about immunity passports in your future, but with so little going on right now either in the economy or elsewhere, thinking about the future seems to be a good thing to do.  And it's likely that you will hear more in the coming weeks about contact-tracing apps for your mobile phone.

A contact-tracing app is designed to follow you around like a 24-hour detective, noticing everybody you've been within Bluetooth range of.  Bluetooth is a short-range communications system that virtually all mobile phones have, and its typical range is about six feet (two meters), which is conveniently just the same as the social-distancing space we are supposed to be keeping to avoid COVID-19 nowadays.  If anyone you've been near subsequently tests positive for COVID-19, this fact is communicated via the app to everyone who has come within proximity to that infected person in the last week or two, and they know to quarantine themselves and get tested too. 

In the computer geek's ideal world, not only would everybody have such an app, but the app would also take note of the physical location where the encounter with the infected person occurred.  That way you could let people even without mobile phones know that if they were in such-and-such place at such-and-such time, there was somebody there who could have infected them.

Countries such as South Korea which have implemented extensive contact tracing by non-automated means have found that it greatly reduced the need for blanket restrictions on movement, such as the U. S. and many other countries are enduring right now.  So worldwide, a number of countries are developing contact-tracing apps.  The BBC reports that Australia and Denmark hope to roll theirs out within two weeks, and Germany won't be far behind. 

In the U. S., the states of North and South Dakota as well as Utah have announced that they are working on similar projects.  However, the tech giants Google and Apple are reluctant to implement the GPS-coupled geographic data feature, because they fear that for example, if the Walmart in your neighborhood gets cited as a place where somebody could have picked up COVID-19, that could hurt the store's business. 

At an Oxford University ethics website, Bryce Goodman discusses the ethical implications of these proposed apps.  He sees it as a privacy-versus-health tradeoff, and would push the lever way toward health and away from privacy.  He points out that the same kind of privacy-intrusive data tracking is already being used to sell us things like skin cream, so why not use it to save lives? 

Until a vaccine against COVID-19 is available, we are either going to have to keep doing what we're doing now—hunkering down and wrecking the economy—or get a lot better at tracing contacts and quarantining only those people who need to be quarantined.  I agree with Goodman when he points out that the extremely blunt instrument of a general lockdown is much harder on some people than others—mainly those who can't work from home and are suffering from the lack of a paycheck, or any distinct prospect of one in the future.  So anything we can do safely to lift the economically costly restrictions should be considered seriously.

On the other hand, whatever humankind can conceive, an unkind human can hack, and it's very easy to picture how a widely-used, let alone compulsory, contact-tracing app could be twisted to cause embarrassment, loss of business, or worse.  Ideally, what would emerge from the system would be a big-data picture of the entire process of how the disease is spreading, geography and names included.  That information would have to exist somewhere, regardless of how often the proposers of the idea say it would be anonymized, because the whole point of the system is identifying people, and perhaps places as well.

There will be mistakes made, and perhaps intentionally false data provided to the system.  How would you feel if you had been doing everything right and suddenly your phone tells you you have COVID-19 and have to stay in total isolation for two weeks?  Or what if some hacker maliciously publishes the names of everybody who has contacted someone with COVID-19 in a whole city?  Welcome to Pariahville.

Those are some downsides I can think of without even trying hard, and I'm sure there are others.  On the upside, I have to admit it would be nice to go back to something approximating normal and get a haircut, pump gas, and (horrors!) even go to a movie without feeling either fearful, guilty, or both.  But I would have confidence to do such things only if I knew that my chances of catching the disease of the hour would be so small that it would fall down into the risk noise of being run over by a bus or hit by lightning.  Right now, that's not the case.

And here's where this topic folds into last week's topic:  the immunity-passport idea.  It might develop that the contact-tracing app becomes a de facto disease-free passport.  If you've been using it faithfully for however long, and if the great majority of people around you are also using it, and if it really works, the fact that it shows you are clean can be trusted.  But if I was running a movie theater, I'd want to see that green spot or whatever it would be on your app before I'd let you in.  And that would get us right back to where many citizens of China are today, who have to show a green color on their compulsory smartphone COVID-19 app before they're permitted to move around most places.  In that regard, China is not a place I would like to emulate right now.

I'm no prophet, and I can't tell whether contact-tracing apps will get very far (Singapore has had less than 25% participation in their voluntary rollout, which makes it almost useless), or will become the de-facto passport to ordinary life again.  Probably what will happen is somewhere in between.  But it will be interesting to see if we can use this high-tech solution to fight what is presently devastating many lives, both in terms of sickness and death, and in terms of economic loss and social isolation.

Sources:  I thank Michael Cook, editor of mercatornet.com, for calling my attention to contact-tracing apps and providing me with these sources I referred to:  the BBC at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52325352 and the Oxford Practical Ethics site at http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2020/04/guest-post-pandemic-ethics-social-justice-demands-mass-surveillance-social-distancing-contact-tracing-and-covid-19/ .  I also referred to an article from the Reuters website at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-apps/showdown-looms-between-silicon-valley-u-s-states-over-contact-tracing-apps-idUSKCN22702F. 

Welcome to the All-Digital Economy

. . . and how's that working out for you?

The United States, along with many other industrialized nations, is currently engaged in a large-scale experiment that is in some ways the realization of the fondest dreams of a small but influential segment of the population.  For some time now, many investors, as well as leaders of the dominant high-tech companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc.—have strived to move us toward an ideal future in which all human interaction and economic activity would take place by means of digital platforms—owned and operated by them, of course.  This ideal world would consist of two classes:  the small symbolic-manipulator elites of owners, designers, and engineers who create and operate these platforms and profit mightily therefrom; and the masses of consumers whose only useful function is to use what the platforms provide. 

Well, the shelter-in-place orders that affect about half the U. S. population and have shuttered all non-essential businesses have violently catapulted us into this ideal future in a matter of a couple of weeks.  And so far, the results are not good.

Yes, a few lines of business have benefited:  food-delivery services, the online videoconferencing system Zoom, and those who provide binge-watched TV series.  But we have also seen the largest number of applications for unemployment benefits in history (over 3 million last week), a stock market slide resembling an avalanche, and a level of economic uncertainty that has no parallel in living memory. 

I have the privilege of knowing one of the few people in the U. S. whose weekly routine has been almost completely untouched by these events.  He is not a resident of a desert island, nor a fantastically wealthy hermit living in an isolated compound with years worth of supplies.  It's just that for years now, he has been following the shelter-in-place rules by choice.  This relative of mine acquired enough funds to retire about twenty years ago, and chooses to live by himself and spend most of his waking hours online in chatrooms, watching YouTube programs, and viewing the occasional sports show on TV.  He ventures outside once a week or so for grocery shopping, but other than the occasional medical problem, he has no other human contact, and likes it that way.  The only inconvenience he has experienced so far from the coronavirus restrictions is that he had to go to four grocery stores last week to find bread—the first three were sold out.  But other than that, his lifestyle is largely undisturbed.

A nation can afford only so many people like my relative.  It's a free country, so far, and so if a person chooses to cut himself off from society like that, he is allowed to do so.  But we are currently experiencing what happens when he is joined by dozens of millions more forced to live that way.  Yes, we're glad there are such things as Zoom, Netflix, YouTube, and for that matter, cellphones, electric utilities, and water supplies.  But we are also finding out by direct experience that a vast part of our economy consists of embodied people going places and being together to do useful and entertaining things.  And when you cut that part out, everybody suffers in one way or another—the subsistence-wage person who loses the low-wage service job at a restaurant or movie theater, to the wealthiest investor who has seen his net worth decline by a third recently. 

Underlying the prejudice in favor of digital everything, and the corresponding disdain for people and industries that make things rather than bitstreams, is a kind of Gnostic dualism.  The Gnostics were sects popular in the early years of the Christian era.  One prominent branch of Gnosticism believed that the universe was divided into a good spiritual part and a bad material part.  Because the physical human body was material, they disdained it and believed that the real person was a good spirit who just happened to be imprisoned in a decaying material body.  The goal of life was to free yourself from the body and all its trappings, and rejoin the other good spirits after death.  Or something like that.

Well, we are finding out what happens when we all become temporary Gnostics, and eschew as much human contact with each other and with our physical workplaces as we can.  The distant goal of having everybody exist mainly online as an anticipation of the day hoped for by transhumanists (a popular movement in Silicon Valley) when we can all free ourselves from our mortal biological "meat cages" and live forever as software, has just jumped into our laps without being invited. 

The fact is that human beings are creatures that don't just inhabit bodies:  we are bodies, but we are also more than our bodies.  We are also immaterial minds, but a mind without a body is incomplete, as is a body without a mind.  Any rational political economy will acknowledge this fact, and will plan for a future that includes bodies as well as minds—full human beings interacting in accordance with human nature, which—despite the last few hundred years of innovations in philosophy, science, and culture—has not changed. 

We as a nation will get through the coronavirus pandemic somehow, though not without serious losses that could have been mitigated with more foresight.  But the experiment we are now undergoing of trying to live all-digital lives holds lessons for us that we can all profit from, and I don't mean just dollars and cents. 

Here's an idea:  if your life has been disrupted by the pandemic, start writing a list of things you miss from back before the pandemic began.  Ask yourself why these things were important.  And when things get back to whatever the new normal will be, don't lose the list.  Ask yourself, and ask your leaders, what things we have chased after too hard, and what things we have neglected.  And then let's try to apply the lessons that this experiment is teaching us, before we forget about the whole thing and go back to the mistakes we were making before.

Sources:  The 3 million unemployment compensation applications recorded for the week of Mar. 22-28, 2020 were reported in numerous sources such as The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemployment-rate-coronavirus-business.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Gnosticism. 

Hiding In Plain Sight: Foiling Face-Recognition Technology

The government of China has invested billions of dollars and years of effort in creating a facial-recognition database of as many of its 1.3 billion people as possible.  Their goal is social control:  to keep tabs on every individual and to make sure anyone doing anything the government doesn't like will at least worry about being caught.

But those of us in the U. S. and Europe shouldn't simply sigh in relief that our governments don't do such things.  Facebook and Google are virtually everywhere, as are closed-circuit TVs (CCTVs) and dashcams, not to mention smaller companies such as ClearView that are focused on selling facial-recognition technology to law-enforcement agencies.  It is hard to go more than a few feet in most cities these days without your image, or the license plate of your car, being converted into an electronic form that can reveal your identity and location. 

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, reporter John Seabrook describes how some individuals and researchers are fighting back with what amounts to digital-surveillance invisibility gear.  This equipment doesn't make you invisible to ordinary people, who might just think you have a fondness for eccentric outerwear:  shirts with images of random license-plate numbers, or even fuzzy-looking artwork that might be a traffic signal painted by Monet.  But the same artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers who came up with the powerful facial-recognition software in the first place have found that some of the same AI techniques can be used to produce patterns that, if worn on the body or applied to the face, confuse facial-recognition software to the point that as far as it's concerned, you might as well not be there.

Admittedly, the average person in the U. S. is probably unaware that CCTV  cameras can track your every move, because the data thus generated is currently used mostly for commercial purposes:  optimizing online ads, for example, by figuring out what kinds of people look at certain store displays and so on.  But residents of China and other places where systematic government spying using facial recognition is a part of everyday life have already adapted their behavior to the fact that anything they do outside their own homes (and maybe inside, too) is probably known to the government.  It's the Big Brother of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 realized, not just in an isolated experiment or two, but over most of the most populous nation in the world. 

In today's interconnected, hyper-monitored, Internet-of-Things world, the ethical concept of privacy is a soiled and tattered thing.  Every time you sign up for a "free" service such as Facebook or another social-media platform that involves images, you are obliged to lie that you have read and understood a ream of legalese that it would take several lawyers a long time to understand thoroughly.  Buried in that legalese is probably verbiage that allows the company to do effectively whatever it wants to with your pictures.

I attended a seminar on ethics and technology recently at which philosopher Eric T. Weber argued that some day, a clever lawyer may file a class-action suit on behalf of all of us who have thus signed our rights away.  His point was that assent without understanding is not assent, and compared the situation to the concept of informed consent that subjects of medical experiments have to grant.  If you don't understand what the doctors are going to do to you but say it's okay anyway, that is not regarded as informed consent. 

Prof. Weber also pointed out that European laws are more advanced in this regard, in that the presumption there is that a person owns the data they generate until they intentionally let go of it.  That's a nice theory, but the minute you set foot on public property—a road, a sidewalk, even a shopping mall—the fact is that you are liable to have your picture taken.  And with the way AI has proliferated, you are liable to be recognized and categorized, even if the data is supposedly "anonymized" so that identifiable individuals cannot be picked out.

The whole thing uncomfortably reminds me of something that began during World War II and continues today:  the continuing rivalry in what are called electronic countermeasures (ECM).  As soon as someone invented radar, someone else invented a way to fool radars, and the game has continued ever since.  But that game is played by sophisticated adversaries with access to billions of dollars of research and development funds. 

What chance does an ordinary person with no AI knowledge or skills have to defend themselves against the nosiness of a Facebook, Google, or ClearView?  Up till now, virtually none, unless you just self-isolate at home indefinitely (pardon me for letting that phrase creep in, but I couldn't keep the coronavirus out of this blog entirely).  But clothing and accessory designer Kate Bertash, profiled in Seabrook's article, now sells ready-to-wear "anti-surveillance" items from her small studio in Los Angeles.

The right to privacy is something that any democratic government should respect and defend, rather than ignore or even destroy, as the government of China appears to be doing.  But privacy is one of those subtle rights that you may not miss if it is slowly and gradually chipped away, until one day you suddenly find that you need it and it's gone.

It's gratifying to know that at least some researchers and retailers are waking up to the problem of omnipresent surveillance and trying to do something about it.  And it isn't just bad actors who want to evade facial-recognition systems.  In the words of the U. S. Declaration of Independence—"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"—liberty implies the freedom to do all sorts of innocent and licit things without being concerned that your actions will result in consequences you don't want, either from unwelcome government intervention or from commercial entities exploiting their knowledge about you to sell you things.  It's a shame that people even have to think about AI-generated invisibility cloaks, but such are the times we live in. 

Sources:  I referred to the article by John Seabrook, "Adversarial Man," on pp. 44-51 in the Mar. 16, 2020 New Yorker.  Eric T. Weber is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Kentucky, and appeared in a panel discussion entitled "Can Ethics Keep Pace with Technological Change?" hosted by the Texas State University Department of Philosophy on Mar. 12, 2020.

To Brick or Not To Brick: When What You Buy Isn't Really Yours

Mood lighting isn't really my thing, but a number of consumers have bought something called a Hue smart lighting system from the well-known lighting manufacturer Philips.  For maximum enjoyment, you buy a Hue Bridge and connect it to the Internet so it both controls your lights and interacts with some online resources operated by Philips.  For people who get a thrill out of dimming their living-room lights while they're still at work, I suppose this is as good as it gets.  But early adopters who bought the first version of this system up to five years ago are in for an unpleasant surprise, according to Matthew Gault, writing at www.vice.com.

Next month, Philips will cease supporting Version 1 of the Hue Bridge, which means it will then be vulnerable to security issues and the online services won't work anymore.  To retain the full functionality of your system, which can include up to 50 bulbs if you went whole hog with every light in your house, you have to buy a new $60 Bridge and start over registering all your light bulbs and changing accounts and I don't know what all.  My life is complicated enough without having to register light bulbs, so my sympathies are with the unfortunate owners of what are now legacy Hue systems that either have to upgrade or go back to kerosene lanterns (not really).

Gault points out that this is just one example of a larger trend:  the increasing tendency of companies to treat hardware like software, which nobody really buys.  If you hire a lawyer to render that fine-print boilerplate nobody ever reads before saying they've read it in order to use new software, he or she will tell you that you don't own the software even if you pay thousands of bucks for it.  All you get is a license to use it, and the term of the license can vary from indefinitely to a very short time indeed. 

Apply this notion to hardware, and you get such situations as Gault describes with another smarthome company called Revolv.  For a couple of years, Revolv was doing well selling smarthome systems, and then a subsidiary of Google bought Revolv and unilaterally shut down the service in May of 2016, leaving people with hundreds of dollars' worth of useless hardware.  Gault uses the word "brick" as a verb when describing this charming behavior, as in, "They bricked my phone" meaning to disable remotely—to turn a useful piece of electronics into something as useful as a brick. 

Faced with such an eventuality, consumers don't have much recourse.  Suing over the price of a piece of consumer electronics is not cost-effective.  Class-action lawsuits are possible, but that works only if there is a reasonable possibility of a large-enough payout if the defendant loses, so that the lawyers for the plaintiffs, who typically work on a contingency-fee basis, can recoup their expenses and make a profit.  Unless someone is actually physically harmed or otherwise injured, such civil suits rarely succeed.  Having your smart speaker or smart light bulb quit working does not pull on the heartstrings of juries, especially juries of people who can't afford such niceties.  So most consumers on the short end of sticks like this will just grumble and swear not to buy anything from that company again—unless it's somebody like Google, whose services and products are getting to be almost as ubiquitous as water and air.

Where does this leave the companies morally?  Suppose this was the Middle Ages, say, and we're looking for a situation in human relationships comparable to what these companies are doing by bricking or ceasing to support their products.  This may sound extreme, but the only thing I can think of that's comparable is a raid:  to be specific, a Viking raid on an English coastal town.

Say you're a fisherman, minding your own business one day and mending your nets.  You've managed to accumulate a small number of useful objects:  cups, bowls, maybe some jewelry for your wife—imagine whatever would equate to an upper-middle-class living in, say, 900 A. D.  All of a sudden, you see ships on the horizon, and you know they're Vikings.  And you know what's going to happen next.  You can kiss all your nice things good-bye, and maybe your wife and your life as well.

Now, Google or Philips doesn't rape your wife and burn your house down.  But when they brick or otherwise reduce the functionality of their products, they do take something that you thought was yours, and they don't give anything in return.  In their defense, the companies would say that they delivered a certain amount of service over the useful life of the product, but surely we didn't expect the device to work forever, did we? 

That's a hard question to answer.  As I get older, my perspective on technological progress has changed, possibly because I've seen so many technologies come and go:  8-track tapes, videotapes, cassette tapes, floppy disks, CRT displays. . . . For some reason, the image of a spoiled child picking up and then discarding one new toy after another comes to mind.  Sometimes he tires of the toy and throws it down and demands another.  Other times, the toy is taken away before he's finished with it and he throws a tantrum.  But he's never truly happy or content either way.

Unless we all become lawyers and refuse to buy anything without executing a custom-written contract with every company we buy from, specifying the term of service we expect from their products, we will continue to be the spoiled children playing with toys whose usefulness is at the whim of the manufacturer.  There are too many lawyers as it is, and I also agree with Gault when he says that governments don't seem willing to be the playground supervisor who enforces fair play. 

So a phrase that dates from even longer ago than the Middle Ages seems appropriate here:  caveat emptor.  The buyer should beware that any product involving software, which is increasingly almost any piece of electronics these days, may up and quit on you at any time—not because it breaks, or because you misused it, but because its maker found it uneconomical to keep it going.  And you'll just have to deal with it if it does.

Sources:  Matthew Gault's article "Philips' Internet-Connected Lightbulbs Will No Longer Connect to the Internet" appeared on Mar. 6, 2020 at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgead4/philips-internet-connected-lightbulbs-will-no-longer-connect-to-the-internet.  The announcement Philips made about the Hue Bridge is at https://www2.meethue.com/en-us/support/end-of-support-policy, and the story about bricking the Revolv smarthome systems is at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/05/revolv-devices-bricked-google-nest-smart-home.

Should Social Media Be Regulated?

Last month, the youngest U. S. Senator, Josh Hawley, a freshman Republican from Missouri, filed a bill called the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act.  The purpose of the act is to do something about the harmful effects of addiction to social media.

What would the bill do?  I haven't read it, but according to media reports it would change the ways companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google deal with their customers.  The open secret of social media is that they are designed quite consciously and intentionally to be habit-forming.  So-called "free" media make their money by selling advertising, and advertising is worthless unless someone looks at it.  So their bottom line depends on how firmly and how long they glue your eyeballs to their sites.  And they have scads of specialists—psychologists, media experts, and software engineers—whose full-time job is to squeeze an extra minute or two of attention from you every day, regardless of whatever else is going on in your life. 

Writing on the website of the religion and public life journal First Things, Jon Schweppe says the SMART Act may not be the one-stop cure-all for our social media problems, but it's a step in the right direction.  It would  prohibit certain practices that are currently commonplace, apparently including one that has always reminded me of what life might be like in Hell:  the infinite webpage.

It used to be that when people first figured out how to make a web page scroll, it was only so long.  You could always get to the bottom of it, where you might find useful things like who wrote it or other masthead-and-boilerplate information.  Well, that doesn't always happen anymore.  The infinite webpage pits the pitiful finite mortal human against the practically unlimited resources of the machine to come up with more eye candy, as much as you want.  You keep scrolling, it will keep showing you new stuff. 

This particular feature reminds me of a passage from C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe featuring the candy called Turkish Delight.   The wicked-witch Queen of Narnia offered the boy Edmund his favorite type of candy to convince him to betray his friends.  The candy she offered him was enchanted so that whoever ate it always wanted more, and "would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves."  No matter how much time you waste on an infinite website, there's always more.

The SMART bill would also give users a realistic option to voluntarily limit their own use of social media with daily timers, prohibits "badge" systems (which is evidently a kind of special-privilege feature that gets rewards heavy users and encourages them even more), and would prohibit or modify other addictive features. 

The Federalist's John Thomas sees the SMART bill as the first step in what may be a turning point in the history of social media.  He likens it to the Parisian reaction to brightly-colored advertising posters enabled by the then-new lithography process in the 1860s.  Pretty soon, a good percentage of all available vertical flat surfaces were covered with posters, and the town fathers decided to regulate how and where posters could be displayed. 

This may be the point at which the U. S. citizenry stops merely wringing its hands and saying there's nothing you can do in the face of rising teen depression and other ill effects of social media, and starts to take action.  As Thomas points out, though, there are few grass-roots organizations taking up the control-social-media banner. 

This may be because the dangers social media pose for mental health are insidious and gradual rather than abrupt and catastrophic.  Suppose that every person had an intrinsic social-media limit:  say after viewing X hours of social media (and X would be different for each person), your brain would literally explode and you'd die.  Well, you can bet that after two or three of these incidents, governments would come down on Facebook, Google, and company like a ton of bricks with all sorts of restrictions, up to and including an outright ban.

But nobody's brain literally explodes from doing too much Facebook.  The negative consequences of social-media use are much less obvious than that, but are nonetheless real.  Even the most tragic cases of teen suicides that result from peer persecution over social media can be blamed not just on the media, but on the cruelty of other teens.  Nevertheless, the nominal anonymity and ease of use that social media offer can turn what might be fairly well-behaved peers in person into abominable monsters on Facebook. 

Some writers oppose the SMART Act and similar legislation on the free-market principle that government is more likely to make things worse with legislation than otherwise.  While that can happen, it is foolish to take the hyper-libertarian position that if a good or service is bad, people just shouldn't use it.  Back when ordinary glass was used for automobile windshields, it would turn into long razor-sharp shards that decapitated numerous drivers, and Congress invited Henry Ford to testify about a proposed law that would require the use of the more expensive safety glass in windshields.  Reportedly (and this is from memory), Ford said, "I'm in the business of making cars, I'm not in the business of saving lives."

When Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress not too long ago, he was self-controlled enough not to say anything that harsh.  But if the day has at last arrived when our elected officials are finally going to do something about the harmful effects of social media, one of two things (or perhaps a combination) is going to happen.  Either the social-media companies will have to get ahead of the proposed legislation and enact real, quantifiable reforms of their own and prove that they work, or they will have to change their ways in accordance with regulatory laws that they brought upon themselves. 

My own hope is that the companies will figure out a transparent and effective way to self-regulate.  But the choice is theirs, and if they brush off the SMART Act and think they have the raw power to squash such regulation, they may be in for a painful surprise.

Sources:  Jon Schweppe's article "Big Addiction" appeared on the First Things website on Aug. 13, 2019 at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/08/big-addiction.  John Thomas's article "Hawley's SMART Act Is the Beginning Of the Revolt Against Big Tech" is on the Federalist website at https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/13/hawleys-smart-act-beginning-revolt-big-tech/. 

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