Medical Nanomachines: Potential Boon or Bane?

 

One of the more unlikely premises for a movie was the idea behind the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage.  A scientist who plays a crucial role in the Cold War is stricken by a blood clot, and his own invention—a way to shrink objects to microscopic size for only an hour—is applied to a submarine full of people who then travel through his bloodstream to save him. 

 

Science fiction has a way of becoming reality, and while nobody has yet figured out how to shrink people and submarines, a recent New Yorker profile of the work of chemist James Tour and his colleagues describes microscopic light-powered jackhammers that can penetrate bacteria cell walls. 

 

In the first place, living cells are fantastically complex machines in their own right, so there is nothing intrinsically new about tiny machines.  The innovation claimed by Tour and his team is that they have developed a way to control the action of tiny jackhammer-like molecules by irradiating them with a specific wavelength of near-infrared light.  The molecules have what are called plasmons in them.  The details are complicated, but basically the plasmon acts like a kind of molecular tuning fork that resonates at one particular wavelength.  When light of that wavelength hits the molecule, it absorbs a great deal of energy and begins to vibrate vigorously, punching a hole in the bacterial wall and initiating the bacteria's demise.  And in contrast to shorter wavelengths of light in the visible range, near-infrared light can penetrate an inch or two into the body, allowing access to fairly deep regions under the skin.

 

So far, no human tests have been done.  Some moth larvae in Tour's lab have been treated with molecular jackhammers to save them from a terrible death from MRSA bacteria, but that's about it so far.  Years of testing with increasingly complicated organisms—mice, pigs, and so on—lies ahead before any practical applications to humans can be expected.  And there may be some bump in the road ahead that will prevent this technology from finding any application in humans at all.  But so far it looks promising, and I'm sure Prof. Tour will have no problem finding funding for more research, and commercial applications too if he's interested.

 

The article's author Dhruv Khullar mentions that some researchers are concerned about the inherent dangers of molecular machines.  He describes the "gray-goo" problem posed by an early futurist, K. Eric Drexler, who speculated that if a nanomachine was programmed to turn every living thing into more of itself, it might infect the whole biosphere.  This reminds me of what happened to some goldfish my mother bought us when we were kids, after giving in to our continual begging for them.  The fish were fine for a while, but one morning we got up and instead of goldfish, there were just floating lumps of whitish gunk in the tank.  She got rid of the aquarium soon after that, and we never had any more fish unless they were cooked first.

 

Tour's devices don't seem to pose such a hazard, because without the special near-IR wavelength of light shining on them, they don't do anything.  So that seems to be a pretty safe way to control them, unless you start speculating about how you might sneak some molecular jackhammers into a victim's drink, and then take them into a room bathed with the requisite wavelength of near-IR light, which is invisible, of course.  And there you go with another science-fiction suspense film.

 

It seems to me that activities such as Tour's are pretty harmless compared to, for instance, tinkering with existing coronaviruses with gain-of-function research.  For whatever reason, nature has produced (or God has allowed, depending on your point of view) some really nasty viruses that use mechanical means to take over cells and turn them into virus factories, with the byproduct of making the host ill or dead.  I was unable to locate the details, but someone once told me that the rabies virus is precisely designed with a kind of spear that penetrates neurons to infect them.  So in developing his molecular jackhammers, Prof. Tour isn't inventing as much as he is co-opting a technique and powering it by other means, namely light waves.  And arranging things so that the molecules can't do anything without external illumination is a nice fail-safe feature that allows the researcher to exert control.

 

This work is only one example of the discoveries scientists and engineers can make when provided with enough resources and cultural favor.  Not every country in the world is hospitable to scientific research of this type.  And it takes money and smart people, which are both limited resources.  We should not take such activities for granted, because they don't happen automatically.  It's easy to assume that medical technology will just keep on advancing on its own without anybody other than the researchers paying much attention. 

 

But there is a big threat to all U. S.-government-funded research looming on the horizon.  While the U. S. has never experienced a fiscal crisis such as the one that struck Germany in the early 1920s, nothing says we are immune from it.  As interest rates rise and the population ages, two money sinks—interest on the national debt and entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare—threaten to take over the Federal budget and squeeze out just about everything else.  While private funding has increasingly taken up the slack vacated by declining government support for research, it's hard to imagine a healthy private sector persisting if the government has gone bankrupt. 

 

And such events are not that predictable.  Neither major political party currently has the intestinal fortitude to address this issue with anything near the seriousness it deserves.  As things stand, there is still enough research money available to support impressive efforts such as the things Prof. Tour and his group are doing.  But if we are to see any practical benefits from it, there are years of work ahead, work that somebody has to do and somebody else has to pay for.  Smart young people will have to decide that research is worth doing, and the public will have to decide that it's worth paying for, and worth having a fiscally sound government to pay for it.  So far, it's all working, but whatever can't go on forever eventually has to stop.

 

Sources:  The New Yorker of June 24, 2024 carried Dhruv Khullar's article "Small Wonder" on pp. 20-23.  I also referred to a Rice University post on Prof. Tour's research at https://news.rice.edu/news/2023/molecular-jackhammers-good-vibrations-eradicate-cancer-cells

and Wikipedia articles on plasmons and molecular machines. 

 

Seeing the Unseen in "Inside Out 2"

 

I promise this is not going to turn into a movie-review column.  But the new Pixar release "Inside Out 2" does what it does so well that I think it deserves some positive attention, and without CGI-powered technology a movie like this simply wouldn't be possible.  The thing it does well is to turn dusty abstractions into solid-looking realities that are vivid, memorable, and understandable.  And that's not easy.

 

In case you missed both the original "Inside Out" in 2015 and this year's just-released sequel, here is the basic setup.  Riley is a young girl (pre-teen at first, just turned 13 in the present film) who faces some stresses in her life that by themselves are fairly common and unremarkable:  enduring a move from the Midwest to the West Coast, playing competitive hockey, and generally dealing with adolescent crises.  So far, so dull.  But you, the movie viewer, are privileged to see what goes on in Riley's mind.  Not her brain, her mind—that's an important distinction.

 

The "Inside Out" films are perhaps some of the most philosophically sophisticated and yet successful movies ever made, because they portray abstractions—the technical philosophical word is "concepts"—in a way that is not only accessible but entertaining to virtually anybody old enough to understand English (or whatever other language the foreign export versions are dubbed into).  In the first film, we meet Joy, Anger, Fear, and Sadness, each voiced by a top professional actor and matched by characters designed to remind you of their nature at every moment.  Sadness is a small, rounded, blue, bespectacled woman, and Anger is a stocky, bright-red guy who literally blows his top like a blowtorch at the slightest provocation. 

 

The conceit that inside our minds there is a tiny being at the "controls" of our body is an old one, and the Pixar writers show the various emotions at Riley's control panel, so that when Sadness takes over, we see Riley crying, for example.  The film vividly portrays metaphorical phrases such as "back of the mind," "train of thought," and "stream of consciousness" in ways that are both logical and funny as all getout. 

 

But the movies are more than just bad puns realized with millions of dollars' worth of digital graphics.  Lisa Damour, one of the psychologists who served as a consultant during the sequel's production, has written a book on the the anxiety epidemic that teenagers, especially girls, are experiencing these days.  Interviewed by Slate, she said that "Inside Out 2" can help teenagers and their parents understand that unpleasant emotions like anxiety are not simply bad and to be avoided at all costs, but instead have an important role to play as long as they don't completely take over. 

 

The Slate reviewer credits the original "Inside Out" with helping him change the way he relates to his own children, and the new film has the potential to do that and more for both teenagers suffering from anxiety and their parents trying to help them. 

 

I would go farther than simply saying that the movie can help teenagers and their parents therapeutically.  I would say that it's a strong proponent of realism in a culture that has embraced nominalism and idealism for way too long.

 

In under a thousand words, nominalism is the idea that there are not really ideas, just names.  And idealism starts from thought and tries to get to things afterwards.  Carried to their logical conclusions, these philosophies often terminate in nihilism, the belief that life has no meaning.  The Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once said that because we "breathe in" nihilism in the modern world, we tend not to notice it, just as a fish doesn't notice it's in water.  But the tendency to reduce human life to only that which is scientifically verifiable—biochemistry and neural impulses, basically—is all around us, and probably lies at the root of manifold modern pathologies.

 

"Inside Out 2" flies in the face of all this by making non-material concepts such as emotions, memories, and the sense of self into concrete, visible, and even entertaining realities.  No, there is not really a little red-felt homonculus running around in my brain whenever I get mad.  But anger is a real emotion, as real as hatred, fear, or love.  And to pretend, as many scientists do, that anger is only a certain combination of neural activity and hormones is not just perverse, it's incorrect and incomplete. 

 

It's appropriate that Pixar is a division of Disney, because with such films Disney continues its tradition of making what I would call benevolent propaganda films for traditional family values.  Consider the title of "Whistle While You Work," a song written originally for the studio's 1937 animated feature "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."  The song's theme is what all responsible parents want their children to learn:  life is full of work, so you might as well enjoy it.  In dramatizing an emotional and ethical struggle experienced by the barely-teenage Riley that could take up many paragraphs in a learned treatise on the maturing of the concept of the self in adolescent girls, but doing it in a way that I hope millions of people will pay to watch, Pixar has done a great service in the cause of realism, philosophically speaking.

 

And historically, moderate realism has been the preferred philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as most other Christian denominations.  I seriously doubt that many of the thousands of people working on "Inside Out 2" consider themselves evangelists, and nobody is going to literally come to Jesus simply as a direct result of the film.  But anything that moves large numbers of people away from the nihilist world view and gets them to believe that abstractions such as anger, fear, and love are real things—in some sense, more real than the atoms we are made of—is preparing the ground for actual evangelism, whether the filmmakers realize it or not.  And for my money, that's a good thing.

 

Sources:  The article entitled "Inside Out 2 Takes On the Teen Mental Health Crisis.  Does It Suggest the Right Solution?" appeared on the website of Slate on June 14, 2024 at https://slate.com/culture/2024/06/inside-out-2-disney-pixar-movie-anxiety-teens.html.  Flannery O'Connor describes modern nihilism as a gas in a letter to "A." as quoted at https://yirt-studies.livejournal.com/40496.html.  "Inside Out 2" is currently in U. S. release nationwide. 

I, Robot, Th. D.

 

For those unfamiliar with academic titles, Th. D. stands for Doctor Theologiae, a doctorate degree in theology.  So far to my knowledge, robots or algorithms have not yet been awarded any advanced degree, let alone one in theology.  But an article on the website of the journal of religion and society First Things got me thinking about how algorithms can distort our sense of the sacred.

 

Author Grayson Quay notes that many people subscribe to Bible phone apps that provide the user with a verse for the day.  The more popular apps evidently provide verses that have been shared or tweeted the most by the people using the app.  In this way, the well-known echo-chamber effect that has plagued recent political discourse so much has found its way into the spiritual lives of millions. 

 

The problem is that just because a verse gets tweeted a lot, that doesn't mean it's the best verse to read at a given time, or at any time.  The natural result of this process is that people using the verse-of-the-day app will see mainly verses that other people have felt like sharing. 

 

If you examine your own motives for sharing anything online, you will probably find desires such as to (a) impress other people with your perceptiveness or cleverness, (b) amuse other people with something you thought was funny, or (c) create a reaction that can be summarized as "Oh, ain't it awful."  None of these motives mesh well with Bible verses, at least not without some help.  One can make jokes with them, but they are generally humorous to the extent that they are not spiritual and vice-versa.

 

Quay claims that the popularity filter used by social-media algorithms will exclude everything that isn't of a feel-good quality.  For instance, I doubt that Psalm 137:9 will make it:  "Happy is the one who seizes your infants/ And dashes them against the rocks."  Imagine if the algorithm sent that to the mother of a newborn.  But if you try to remedy the situation by making the algorithm send verses truly at random rather than basing them on popularity, you're bound to get ham-handed incidents like that from time to time.

 

As ethical problems go, the comparative fatuity of Bible-app verses is not that serious.  But what is serious is the way we are turning over all kinds of things that used to be done by humans, into the unfeeling hands of what amounts to robots.  And we are doing it without examining the big changes that can result.

 

Every choice has a basis or cause behind it, and the basis has a philosophy.  If you make a Bible-verse app choose randomly from among a set of carefully selected verses that go through a long cycle, say lasting three years, you have what amounts to the Lectionary Cycle idea of public Bible readings used by Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and a number of other liturgical Christian churches, who got the idea in turn from Jewish practices.  This system is based on the notion that the Bible is God's word, and we fallible forgetful humans need to be reminded of all of it from time to time.  It's a good system and has been used for hundreds of years.

 

On the other hand, if you go with the social-media approach and share only those Bible verses that have been shared or tweeted a lot already, you employ a philosophy that prioritizes hits and click volume.  If you're running an online business, that's the kind of philosophy to use, but popularity is not the exclusive or even main goal of Christian ministry or discipleship. 

 

While it's true that if you are so repellent that nobody listens to what you're saying, you will do nobody any good, even Jesus himself said things that proved so confusing or unpopular that he lost a good deal of what we would now call market share.  But under the assumption that Jesus made no mistakes in his ministry, those were the right things to say at the time.

 

This topic comes close to home, because for some years I have been choosing Bible verses to prompt a weekly discussion group of Christian faculty members at my university.  No, I have never picked Psalm 137:9 for the topic of discussion, although I think highly enough of my colleagues that they would probably get something good out of it.  My goal has been to choose verses that relate to issues or problems that Christian instructors commonly face.  We are humans first and instructors second, of course, so some of the topics just relate to our common humanity.  Some verses prove more successful at starting good discussions than others do, but success as such is not necessarily my goal. 

 

The point is that I try to customize the selections to suit my particular audience, and to challenge them as much as amuse or entertain or please them.  The operators of most social media dread true challenges to their audiences as the plague, because the metaphorical off switch is always handy, and once a subscriber drops an app, it hurts market share, which is the true bottom line for commercial apps, and possibly for many Bible apps too. 

 

In Acts 20:27, in his parting words St. Paul tells the Ephesians that he has given them "the whole counsel of God."  This says to me that he didn't hold back on the hard and difficult and challenging parts, as well as the reassuring parts of Scripture and teaching. 

 

The principle here is that we should listen to what is good for us, not just to what pleases us.  And that principle has a much broader application than merely to Bible-verse apps.  The customizing of news and other information to increase user engagement has been simultaneously one of the greatest innovations in commercial media, and one of the most insidious cultural shifts as well, a shift that has had widespread, profound, but largely invisible and hard-to-trace effects.  While church attenders have the Lectionary to counteract the effects of echo-chamber Bible apps, the rest of the world has surrendered happily to its echo-chamber world, and the world is suffering the consequences.

 

Sources:  Grayson Quay's article "Algorithmic Spirituality" can be found on the First Things website at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/06/algorithmic-spirituality. 

 

Good News for America's Power Grid—Mostly

 

I've been rather negative in this space lately, partly because engineering ethics tends to focus on things that go wrong.  So today I'm going to write about something that the federal government is doing that is mostly right, or at least could turn out that way, depending on how it's done.

 

Last Tuesday, May 28, the Biden administration announced a federal-state initiative aimed at improving the nation's power grid.  Called the "Federal-State Modern Grid Deployment Initiative," it is a grab-bag of funded projects, coordination initiatives, and regulatory changes that share a common theme:  making the country's power grid more up to date and efficient. 

 

Twenty-one states are participating in this initial rollout, and all I'll say about that is that my native and current home state of Texas is not one of them.  Ever since World War II, Texas has operated its power grid more or less independently from the rest of the U. S., so it's not surprising that the state decided to pass on this opportunity for federal collaboration too.  But that won't keep Texas from doing the same sorts of things that are being encouraged by the initiative.

 

One item that caught my eye concerns a backing-off of environmental regulations.  It turns out that, according to the White House press release itself, if a power company wants to merely upgrade an existing transmission line longer than 20 miles, they have to suffer through submitting a detailed environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act.  This sort of thing can take years, and this is one disincentive that has discouraged grid operators from upgrading their lines.  Well, as part of the grid initiative, the government is now allowing companies to do the "simplest form" of environmental review.  Whether they can put it on a postcard is unclear, but it looks like an improvement, at least on paper. 

 

Another part of the initiative encourages transmission-line operators to "reconductor" their lines, with financial incentives that up to now have been lacking.  If a given region needs more power delivered, a grid operator has two choices:  either build more transmission lines into the area, or upgrade existing lines with what are called "advanced conductors."  Traditional power transmission lines—the high-voltage ones supported on the big steel towers—consist of a core of steel strands for strength surrounded by aluminum strands that do the conducting.  Even at the low frequency of 60 Hz, most of the current flows on the outer regions of such a conductor, so the poorly-conducting steel in the middle doesn't cause too many losses, although it does contribute some.

 

Well, advanced conductor technology that is apparently a few decades old can increase the maximum carrying capacity of a transmission line.  The steel core is replaced by composite materials (carbon or ceramic fibers in some cases), and the plain round wire-drawn aluminum is replaced by annealed aluminum trapezoids, which somehow work better.  The overall result is that you can carry two to three times the maximum load with advanced conductors compared to the traditional ones.

 

Why haven't so-called "reconductoring" projects been carried out much until now?  Partly because of a perverse disincentive built into the funding structure of how electric utilities operate in the U. S.  Many funding formulas allow the companies to be reimbursed as a fraction of their total investment.  It's cheaper to reconductor an existing line than to build an entirely new transmission line, so up to now many grid operators have been choosing the more expensive route to maximize their allowed return on investment.  The federal grid initiative has money and regulatory features designed to even the playing field so that it will make more economic sense to replace older conductors with newer, more efficient ones, rather than cluttering up the landscape with new transmission lines over different routes, along with all the environmental hassles which new lines involve.

 

I suspect the Biden administration was hoping that its environment-friendly constituents were looking the other way during the announcement of this initiative, because most of the time it has pushed for more environmental regulation, not less.  But the whole thing is being sold as a big step toward the overarching goal of "tackling the climate crisis," meaning converting the grid to renewables.  And certainly we need more transmission-grid capacity to deal with the odd places that large lumps of power are showing up, mostly in the sunny, windy West, while most of the energy is needed in the soggy, cloudy North and East. 

 

Two critical technical issues were not mentioned in the press release for the initiative, although they may have been addressed somewhere in the fine print.  One is the vulnerability of our power grid to the unlikely but potentially devastating effects of either a strong geomagnetic storm or a nuclear-bomb-triggered electromagnetic pulse.  I understand that relatively simple and inexpensive measures could be taken now to make the grid much more resilient against such events, but as the power companies have no financial incentive to install them, they mostly haven't.

 

The other issue concerns grid stability.  It turns out that the typical solar or wind farm is a "grid-following" installation, in that it takes its cue from the grid's AC voltage and just follows along with it.  As long as such grid-following sources are a small percentage of the total power coming into the grid, there is no problem and the power gets used like any other source of power would.  But if too many followers crowd out the conventional spinning-turbine grid leaders, the whole grid gets unstable and is likely to collapse in the case of sudden shocks such as the loss of a large chunk of power.  There is a way to fix this:  to make renewable sources pretend to be spinning-turbine sources.  But it costs more, and nobody installing just one additional renewable source is going to want to spend that kind of money.

 

Perhaps such global concerns will come up in the coordinating meetings that the federal initiative will hold, and they'll address those issues too.  Even if they don't, it looks like this is a government initiative which is actually likely to produce solid benefits, even if it's technical and rather boring to the average citizen.  But engineers are used to being viewed that way, and these days I think we can use some low-drama good news in the public sector for a change.

 

Sources:  I referred to the White House news release issued on May 28 at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/28/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-launches-federal-state-initiative-to-bolster-americas-power-grid/,  a Nebraska Examiner article at https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/05/29/21-states-join-biden-administration-in-bid-to-modernize-nations-aging-grid/, and an item on reconductoring in Forbes at https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2024/04/09/reconductoring-could-help-solve-americas-looming-grid-problems/?sh=25cea40828de.

The Seoul AI Summit: Serious Safety Progress or Window-Dressing?

 

Last Tuesday, representatives from the world's heavy hitters in "artificial intelligence" (AI) made a public pledge at a mini-summit in Seoul, South Korea to make sure AI develops safely.  Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Meta (of which Facebook and other social-media platforms are a part), and OpenAI all agreed on voluntary safety precautions, even to the extent of cutting off systems that present extreme risks.

 

This isn't the first time we've seen such apparent unanimity on the part of companies that otherwise act like rivals.  This meeting was actually a followup to a larger one last November in Bletchley Park, England, at which a "Bletchley Declaration" was signed.  I haven't read it, but reportedly it contains promises about sharing responsibility for AI risks and holding further meetings, such as the one in South Korea last week.

 

Given the cost and time spent by upper executives, we should ask why such events are held in the first place.  One reason could be is that it's an opportunity to generate positive news coverage.  Your company and a lot of others pay lots of money to send prominent people to a particular place where the media would be downright negligent if they didn't cover it.  And whatever differences the firms have outside the meeting, they manage to put up a united front when they sign and announce declarations full of aspirational language like "pledge to cooperate" and "future summits to define further" and so on. 

 

One also has to ask whether such meetings make any difference to the rest of us.  Will AI really be any safer as a result of the Bletchley Declaration or the Seoul summit?  The obvious answer is, in some ways it's too early to tell.

 

Every now and then, a summit that looks like it's mainly for window-dressing publicity and spreading good vibes turns out to have amounted to a genuine advance in the cause it is concerned with.  In 1975, a group of molecular biologists and other biotechnology professionals gathered in Asilomar, California to discuss the ethical status and future of a technology called recombinant DNA.  Out of safety concerns, scientists worldwide had halted such research, and the urgent task of the meeting was to hammer out principles under which research could safely go forward. 

 

The scientists did reach an agreement about what types of research were allowed and what were prohibited.  Among the prohibited types were experiments to clone DNA from highly pathogenic organisms.  It's not clear to me whether this would have stopped the kind of research that went on in the Wuhan laboratories that are suspected of originating COVID-19.  But it would have been nice if it had.

 

Historians of science look back on the Asilomar conference as a new step in bringing safety concerns about science before the public, and in reaching public agreements about rules to follow.  So such summits can do some good.

 

However, there are differences between the 1975 Asilomar meeting and the kinds of meetings held by AI firms in Bletchley Park and Seoul.  For one thing, at Asilomar, the participants were the same people that were doing the work they were talking about, and there weren't that many of them—only about 140 scientists attended.  I seriously doubt that the people at the UK and Korea AI safety meetings were exclusively working AI engineers and scientists, although I could be wrong.  Such technical types rarely have the clout to sign any kind of document committing the entire firm to anything more than buying pencils, let alone making a high-sounding safety pledge.  No, you can rest assured that these were upper-management types, which is probably one reason that the texture of the agreements resembled cotton candy—it looks pretty, it even tastes good, but it's mostly air and there's nothing really substantial to it.

 

My standard response to anyone who asks me whether AI will result in widespread harm is, "It already has."  And then I give my standard example.

 

If you look at how American democracy operated in, say, 1964, and compare it to how it works today, you will note some differences.  Back then, most people got more or less the same news content, which was delivered in carefully crafted forms such as news releases and news conferences.  The news then could be compared to a mass-produced automobile, which went through dozens of hands, inspections, and safety checks before being delivered to the consumer.

 

Today, on the other hand, news comes in little snippets written by, well, anybody who wants to write them.  Huge complicated diplomatic issues are dealt with by the digital equivalent of throwing little handwritten notes out the window.  And everybody gets a different customized version of reality, designed not to inform but to inflame and inspire clicks, with factual accuracy being down between priorities number 20 and 30 of the list of priorities internalized by the same firms we saw gathering last week in Seoul. 

 

The results of the deep embedding of what amounts to AI (with a small fraction of the work being done by humans) in social media are all around us:  a dysfunctional government that has lost most of whatever respect from the public it ever had; an electoral process that has delivered two of the least-liked presidential candidates in over a century; and a younger generation which is the most unhappy, fragile, and pessimistic one in decades. 

 

While it is true that AI is not exclusively responsible for these ills, it is inextricably implicated in them.

 

For the heck of it, I will wind up this piece with a Latin quotation:  Si monumentum requiris circumspice.  It means "If you seek his monument, look around you."  It is engraved on the tombstone of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where he is buried.  We can apply the same phrase to the workings of AI as it has been applied to social media.  Instead of holding meetings that issue noble-sounding broad declarations of pledges to develop AI safely, I would be a lot more convinced of the firms' sincerity if they put together a lot of working engineers and scientists and told them to fix what has already been broken.  But that would mean they would first have to admit they broke it, and they don't want to do that.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article on the Seoul AI Safety mini-summit appeared at https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-seoul-ai-summit-uk-2cc2b297872d860edc60545d5a5cf598.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on "Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA" and Christopher Wren.

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.

 

Why Did Chicago Shoot Down ShotSpotter?

ShotSpotter is an acoustic gunshot-detection system marketed by the public-safety technology firm SoundThinking and used by well over 100 cities in the U. S.  In some ways, it sounds like a law-enforcement dream come true.  Before ShotSpotter, a citizen who reported hearing gunshots could report them, but usually had no idea where the sound came from.  In an area covered by ShotSpotter, police can now often pinpoint the source of the gunshot with an accuracy in the range of 2 to 8 meters (about 6 to 26 feet).  What's not to like about ShotSpotter?

 

A lot, it turns out, at least if you're the mayor of Chicago.  Back in February, the office of Mayor Brandon Johnson, who won his first election campaign promising to end the use of ShotSpotter, announced that the city would not renew its ShotSpotter contract.  Understandably, having spent millions of dollars on the system, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling defends ShotSpotter.  He was quoted in an Associated Press report as saying, "If we're not utilizing technology, then we're falling behind in crime fighting." 

 

Mayor Johnson and other critics have three main charges against the way ShotSpotter is used.  They say it's "inaccurate."  That is of course a relative term.  In a technical paper published on the ShotSpotter website, the location accuracy was tabulated in a simulated test in a typical environment, with the results cited above (2 to 8 meters, typically).  With regard to false positives (saying there was a gunshot when there was actually some more benign sound such as a car backfiring) and false negatives (missing a true gunshot), the company claims that typically 96% of gunshots are detected correctly.  So although no system is perfect, ShotSpotter engineers seem to have achieved a remarkable success rate in a highly challenging acoustic environment by using advanced signal-processing techniques to enhance the accuracy of what is basically a time-of-flight location system. 

 

Another accusation leveled against the system as typically deployed in an urban setting is that it is racially biased.  A survey by Wired Magazine based on a leaked document giving the secret physical locations of about 25,000 ShotSpotter sensors backs up this accusation.  Wired found that about three-fourths of the neighborhoods where at least one ShotSpotter sensor was deployed were non-white, with an average income of about $50,000 a year.

 

When confronted with these results, SoundThinking senior vice president of forensic services Tom Chittum said that given a limited number of sensors, the company chooses to deploy them in areas that are "likely disproportionately impacted by gun violence."  In other words, they place sensors where they are most likely to pick up gunshot sounds.  For reasons that have nothing to do with ShotSpotter but are deeply rooted in historical and cultural factors, these neighborhoods tend to be poorer and where minority groups live. 

 

The third accusation is harder to refute:  that law-enforcement personnel "misuse" the data provided by ShotSpotter.  Critics cite cases in which police officers are deployed to a Shotspotter-indicated location and find bystanders who they then arrest and charge with violations unrelated to gun use.  Sometimes this leads to cases such as a Chicago grandfather arrested after a ShotSpotter location led officers to him, in which the accused was later released after a judge found insufficient evidence to convict him.

 

Undoubtedly, ShotSpotter has also assisted in the capture and conviction of real criminals.  Otherwise it seems hard to believe that police forces all over the country would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on it, unless they are all playing keep-up-with-the-Jonesville-police-department and making sure they have the latest technology just because it's there. 

 

In the case of Mayor Johnson dumping Chicago's ShotSpotter system, there has been no love lost between the mayor and the police force in general.  In April, Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police—their union—endorsed a drive to recall Mayor Johnson.  And in numerous ways, Mayor Johnson has made it no secret that he is highly critical of how the police do their job.

 

Not everyone in a neighborhood plagued by drug abuse, crime, and violence dislikes the police.  Lots of ordinary citizens would like to see more of the police than they do, and they are probably in favor of anything which helps the police do their job of fighting crime, including ShotSpotter.  After all, most of the sensors are on private property, and the owner's permission has to be granted for the sensor to be installed.  If there was a groundswell of opposition to ShotSpotter, you would think the company would have problems installing their sensors.

 

One of the most basic functions of a city's government is law enforcement.  But over the past few years, especially during the George Floyd riots of 2020, we have been treated to the spectacle of supposedly responsible officials proposing to defund entire police departments.  In the cities where movements in that direction actually gained headway, the results were in keeping with what common sense would predict:  soaring rates of crime and an exodus of both residents and businesses. 

 

District attorneys who make blanket announcements that certain types of crime will no longer be prosecuted find that those exact kinds of crimes proliferate.  How this policy is supposed to benefit society (unless you consider "society" to be restricted to the class of petty criminals) is not clear.

 

As a technology, ShotSpotter works about as well as the state of the art permits, given the challenging environment it works in.  But technology is always about more than technology.  The social environment and the way ShotSpotter results are used has led to a perception in some circles that it is just another way to beat down black people and other persecuted minorities.  Many police personnel are of the same race and culture of the people they are sworn to defend.  It is profoundly demoralizing to be told that a dangerous, tedious job which you do to the best of your ability is not only not appreciated by the highest official of the city, but actively criticized.  With regard to law enforcement and the use of ShotSpotter, Chicago is clearly a house divided.  And we know what happens to a house divided sooner or later:  it cannot stand.

 

Sources:  The Wired report on ShotSpotter sensor locations was published on Feb. 22, 2024 at https://www.wired.com/story/shotspotter-secret-sensor-locations-leak/.  I also referred to the Associated Press article "Chicago to stop using controversial gunshot detection technology this year" at https://apnews.com/article/shotspotter-chicago-gunshot-technology-mayor-f9a1b24d97a1f1efb80296dbe9aff1ed.  I referred to ShotSpotter Inc.'s technical note TN-098, "Precision and accuracy of acoustic gunshot location in an urban environment," dated Jan. 2020.

 

Synthesia: A Skateboard or a Crutch?

 

Last week, my wife and I joined some friends for supper at an unpretentious cafe in a nearby town.  It's the kind of place where the waitresses learn the customer's names and most people don't need to look at the menu before they order.  We've eaten there numerous times, and the food was good, as usual.

 

But since the last time we visited the place, something new had been added:  a small white electronic piano taking up a few feet of lunch-counter space, just as you came in the main door.  Seated at the piano was a teenage boy, and he was playing pop tunes.  I regret to say I can't remember what any of them were, but as we sat down close by, we had no trouble at all hearing what he was playing.

 

There was something off about his style, but I couldn't put my finger on it.  The base line sounded rather mechanical, and while there was a melody there wasn't much harmony with it, if any.  Still, you could recognize the tune, and while I didn't think this particular live music was much of an addition to the atmosphere, it wasn't cringingly bad, either.

 

Halfway through the meal, my wife, who was seated with a better view of the pianist, told me he wasn't using sheet music.  There was something on his smartphone that he was using instead.  I turned around to look.

 

On the kid's screen was a pattern of vertical dashes moving upward, and below the dashes was a small video of two hands moving around on a keyboard, playing the tune he was playing.  Older readers may be familiar with the concept of a player piano.  Before the days of high-quality sound recording, mechanical self-playing pianos were developed that used wide stiff-paper rolls with holes punched in them, and a device called a trackerbar read the hole patterns pneumatically as the roll unwound past the bar and the piano played in accordance with the pattern. 

 

Here was a piano roll, in digital form.  But instead of a player piano, there was a human piano player playing the part of a player piano trackerbar. 

 

After we finished the meal, I went up to him, dropped some money in his tip jar (which was already well stocked), and asked him what was on his smartphone.

 

"It's a YouTube video.  See, all I have to do is follow the keys.  I've taught myself.  It's easy."

Keeping up with the moving dots seemed like an impossible task to me, but then again, I was a little older than he was (he told me he was 16). 

 

A little research shows that the program which produces the piano-roll patterns is a video game called Synthesia.  I found a long Reddit thread in which various people chimed in on whether using Synthesia to play piano music was good, harmful, a waste of time, or what.

 

As is usually the case with these kinds of Internet debates, opinions are divided.  Most of the commenters came down on the negative side of using Synthesia exclusively.  One said, " . . . you probably won't find anyone using them if they're really good at piano, because learning from synthesia gets significantly harder the harder the songs get." 

 

On the other hand, one enthusiast said, "I'm very pro [synthesia].  I have memorized Maple Leaf Rag, Fur Elise, and currently working on a very advanced piece.  I'm an adult beginner and piano is not a huge priority in my life.  I don't really want to learn to play the 'right' way.  I just want to go straight to playing cool pieces."

 

The fact that conventional musical notation is essentially a foreign language that one has to learn came up a lot.  A person who could read music and also uses Synthesia-based videos says that he picks up non-classical music with Synthesia, although he usually knows the piece already from having learned it from sheet music.

 

While I was secretly hoping to find some manifesto by the Piano Teachers' Guild coming out with guns blazing to condemn Synthesia, there is apparently no such document.  Instead, several online commenters say it can be good for beginners, but definitely no substitute for learning to read sheet music the old-fashioned way. 

 

It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that back when player pianos became available around 1900, some people taught themselves to play by watching the holes pass over the trackerbar.  But the only role player pianos played in the life histories of famous musicians I'm aware of, were as ways of preserving their playing at a higher quality than old sound-recording technology could achieve.  For example, George Gershwin produced a set of reproducing-piano rolls which preserve dynamics of playing as well as timing and sequence.  He was even known to go over the rolls after he had recorded them to touch up mistakes and otherwise enhance his own performances.

 

So are the piano teachers of the world doomed by the advent of Synthesia and its spawn of YouTube videos?  It doesn't look that way. 

 

For people who either can't afford piano lessons or aren't that committed to learning, but would like to do something musical with an inexpensive keyboard and a smartphone, Synthesia seems to be a good way to fool around with the basics.  In that sense, it's kind of like using a skateboard instead of walking.  It's fun, it will get you some places faster, but nobody skateboards from Nashville to Chicago.  And for people who simply can't imagine trying to learn to read musical notation but want to make music with a keyboard, it's a crutch that might enable you to do what you otherwise couldn't do at all.

 

Sources:  The Reddit thread from which I excerpted comments can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/11j3u6o/i_dont_understand_how_people_learn_a_song_using/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Synthesia.