The Case for Nuclear Power

 

In the fall 2022 issue of the technology-and-society journal The New Atlantis, authors Thomas and Nate Hochman examine the pros and cons of building new nuclear power plants in the U. S.  The case of nuclear power is fraught with political issues that are inextricably tied up with technical issues, but the Hochmans do a good job of laying out the problems facing nuclear power and some possible solutions.

 

If nuclear power had not been invented until 2010, say, it would probably be welcomed as the keystone in our society's answer to climate change.  Imagine a source of the most fungible type of energy—electricity—that takes teaspoons of nuclear fuel compared to carloads or pipelines full of fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases, and when properly engineered runs more reliably than wind, solar, hydro, or sometimes even natural gas, as the misadventure of Texas's Great Freeze of February 2021 showed.  What's to oppose?  Well, a lot, as the Hochmans admit.

 

It is perhaps unfortunate that the first major use of nuclear technology was in the closing days of World War II, when the U. S. became the only nation so far to employ nuclear weapons in wartime, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The long shadow of nuclear war has cast a darkness over the technology of nuclear power ever since, despite optimistic but misguided attempts to promote peaceful uses in the 1950s. 

 

The Hochmans describe the golden era of U. S. nuclear power plant construction, which ran roughly from 1967 to 1987, as a period in which the two major U. S. manufacturers—GE and Westinghouse—offered "turn-key" plants that were priced competitively with coal-fired units.  The utilities snapped them up, and the vast majority of existing plants were built in those two decades.

 

The turn-key pricing turned out to be a big mistake, however.  Manufacturers expected the cost per plant to decline as economies of scale kicked in, but for a variety of reasons both technical and regulatory, the hoped-for economies never materialized.  The particular pressurized-water technology that was used was adapted from early nuclear submarines, and in retrospect may not have been the best choice for domestic power plants.  By the time the companies realized their mistake and switched to cost-plus contracts, they had lost a billion dollars, and utilities became much less enthusiastic when they had to pay the true costs of building the plants.

 

In the meantime, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970, making it much harder to obtain permits to build complicated things like nuclear plants.  In the pre-Act days, permitting a plant sometimes took less than a year, but once NEPA passed, such speediness (and the resulting economies of fast construction) was a thing of the past. 

 

Then came the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl plant fire and disaster in 1986, further blackening the reputation of nuclear power in the public mind.  Add to that the not-in-my-back-yard problems faced by attempts to find permanent storage locations for nuclear waste, and by 1990 the U. S. nuclear industry was in a kind of coma from which it has not yet recovered. 

 

The Hochmans point to France as a counterexample of a nation that made a conscious decision to go primarily nuclear for its electric power, and even today about 70% of France's power is nuclear.  But even France is having problems maintaining their aging plants, and French nuclear promoters face the same sorts of political headwinds that prevail in the U. S.

 

Now that climate change is an urgent priority for millions of people and dozens of governments, the strictly technical appeal of nuclear power is still valid.  It really does make zero greenhouse gases in operation, and when properly engineered, it can be the most reliable form of power, providing the essential base-load capacity that is needed to stabilize grids that will draw an increasing amount of energy from highly intermittent solar and wind sources in the future.  Eventually, energy-storage technology may make it possible to store enough energy to smooth out the fluctuations of renewables, but we simply don't have that now, and it may not come for years or decades.

 

In the meantime, there are plans on drawing boards for so-called "modular" plants.  If every single automobile was a custom design from the ground up, including a from-scratch engine and body, only the likes of Elon Musk could afford to drive.  But that was how nuclear plants were made back in the day:  each design was customized to the particular site and customer specifications.

 

If manufacturers had the prospects of sales and freedom to develop a modular one-size-fits-all design, they could turn the process into something similar to the way mobile homes are made today:  in factories, and then shipped out in pieces to be simply assembled on site.  And newer designs favoring gravity feeds over powered pumps can be made much safer so that if anything goes wrong, the operators simply walk away and the plant safely shuts itself down.

 

Standing in the way of these innovations are (1) the prevailing negative political winds against nuclear power, enforced with more emotion than logic by environmental groups and major political parties, and (2) the need to change regulations to allow such technical innovations, which currently are all but blocked by existing laws and rules. 

 

In the Hochmans' best-case scenario, the U. S. begins importing modular plants from countries where an existing base of nuclear know-how allows efficient manufacturing, which these days means places like China.  Even if the U. S. nuclear industry turned on full-speed today, it would take a decade or more to recover the expertise base that was lost a generation ago when the industry collapsed.  Regulations and regulatory agencies would change from merely obstructing progress to reasoned cooperation with nuclear-plant manufacturing and installation.  And we would derive an increasing proportion of our energy from a source that has always made a lot of technical sense. 

 

On the other hand, things may just go on as they are now, with old plants closing and no new ones to take their place. That would be bad for a number of reasons, but reason hasn't been the only consideration in the history of nuclear energy up to now.

 

Sources:  Thomas Hochman and Nate Hochman's "Nuclear Power Comeback?" appeared on pp. 3-19 of the Fall 2022 issue of The New Atlantis.

Social Media Faces the Supreme Court

 

In an insightful article in National Review, Dan McLaughlin lays out the spectrum of how discussion platforms, online video, search engines, and the whole social-media megillah are regulated by a 1994 law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and why the U. S. Supreme Court is probably going to weigh in soon on some apparently irreconcilable lower-court decisions.  While at first glance this may seem to be an obscure matter for legal specialists, it has the potential to affect everything from childrens' mental health to the survival of democracy.

 

When the Act was passed in 1994, there was no Google, Facebook, or YouTube, and legislators felt that the infant web-based communications industry needed some special protections to keep it from being nipped in the bud by lawsuits.  So they passed the two parts of Section 230 which now receive intense attention, because they do complementary things.

 

The first part protects providers of interactive computer services (e. g. Google, Facebook, etc.) from being treated as though they originated stuff that a third party came up with.  This sharply distinguishes them from conventional print publishers, for example.  National Review itself was the target of a costly lawsuit by climate scientist Michael Mann, who claimed the magazine and its writer Mark Steyn defamed him.  If Steyn had instead posted his article as a blog in online-only form, it's possible that the magazine could have claimed Section 230 immunity.

 

The second part of Section 230 more or less exempts private companies operating interactive computer services from being liable for consequences of their own censorship actions.  This almost makes it seem like the services can have their cake and eat it too.  If someone objects to a third party's content on a company's site, the firm can claim they aren't publishers and they're protected under the first part of Section 230.  But if the firm squashes a client organization's posts, as for example banning Donald Trump from Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021 riots, the company can claim it can't be held liable because of its protection under the second part of Section 230. 

 

In general, organizations such as Facebook have tried to steer a middle ground between the two extremes of letting absolutely anything show up (protected by the first part of Sec. 230) and being the Mrs. Grundy of the Internet (protected by the second part of Sec. 230).  As there isn't much profit in censoring salacious material, the main abuses of censorship that have been most widely objected to concern political speech or postings on controversial topics such as abortion. 

 

Compared to the pre-Internet days when anyone could print nearly anything they wanted, but distribution was a difficult and expensive proposition, the Internet has reduced the cost of distributing speech to nearly zero (or even negative numbers, if you consider monetizing).  And a feature of social media which is not really addressed by Section 230 at all is the fact that in order to increase hits and thus advertising revenue, social media companies have developed sophisticated and exquisitely tuned algorithms to make using their platforms as habit-forming as possible.

 

As with other habit-forming enterprises such as alcohol and tobacco, users of social media form a spectrum.  Some like me rarely deal with it, and others spend eight or ten hours a day on it.  With the exception of Prohibition, now conceded by all hands to be a failure, society has chosen to deal with such habit-forming enterprises by restricting their use to adults and by taxation which is not prohibitive, but definitely inhibitory. 

 

Most of the commerce in the form of advertising and data sales that goes on in social media avoids direct taxation, and although some voices have been raised in favor of restricting the use of social media to those over 18, it's hardly a groundswell of opinion.  So for the time being, social media will continue on its merry way doing unknown but tremendous things to the democratic process and exerting incalculable powers to mold public opinion.

 

While it is probably a good thing that the Supreme Court will finally get to pass judgment on some issues regarding Section 230, the two extremes that the law regulates are more like guard rails than they are like lane markers.  By the time someone is either kicked off a social-media platform or decides to sue one for something online, some pretty serious damage has been done, at least in the eyes of the person getting censored or suing.  It's unlikely that the Court will turn the steering wheel violently toward one or the other guard rail.  I don't think anybody wants to see a completely unrestricted social-media world, although the type of restrictions that are currently imposed have huge blind spots influenced by profits (I'm thinking especially of online porn).  And it's just as obvious that we aren't likely to see companies clamping down on all sorts of questionable content, because it would cut into their revenues.

 

The problems caused by social media today are real.  Teen suicides, the polarization of political speech and resultant paralysis of government functions, online bullying, and many other abuses cry out for some sort of solution, or at least a mollifying influence.  Unfortunately, given the choices that the Court will face, its response will probably amount to tinkering with technical legal details, rather than making any wholesale revolutionary changes to Section 230 or how it is enforced. 

 

In any event, the Court—or any court, for that matter—is not where we should look first for improvements in human behavior.  As G. K. Chesterton responded to a question posed by a newspaper:

 

"The answer to the question, 'What is Wrong?' is, or should be, 'I am wrong.'  Until a man can give that answer, his idealism is only a hobby.  But this original sin belongs to all ages, and is the business of religion."  (from The Daily News, Aug. 16, 1905)

 

Neither the Supreme Court nor Google nor Facebook can do anything about original sin.  But they can make it easier for people to avoid sinning, and let's hope for some progress in that direction.

 

Sources:  Dan McLaughlin's article "The Supreme Court Joins the Section 230 Fight—Halfway" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-supreme-court-joins-the-section-230-fight-halfway/.  I also referred to an article about the true origin of the Chesterton quote, which is often misquoted, at https://www.jordanmposs.com/blog/2019/2/27/whats-wrong-chesterton.

Artemis versus Apollo: An Invidious Comparison?

 

In Greek mythology, the sun god Apollo and the moon god Artemis were twins born to Leto after she had an extramarital affair with Zeus.  As the main point of  NASA's Apollo program of the 1960s was to land men on the moon, not the sun, Artemis would have been a better name for it. 

 

There's an old saying in engineering that if there's not enough time to do it right, there's somehow always enough time to do it over.  I'm not sure that applies to NASA's Artemis program, which is currently aimed at what looks to me like an Apollo do-over, but it all depends on your point of view.

 

One point of view that's very popular in some circles these days is what might be called the Original Sin of the White Male.  In the dark ages preceding the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and second-wave feminism of the 1970s, if you were not a white male you were out of luck.  Most doors to professions were slammed in your face, and these injustices tainted any cultural or national achievements with racism and sexism, including the successful landing on the moon in July of 1969 by—you guessed it—white males.

 

In many historical religions, people tried to make up for their past sins by sacrifices designed to please the gods.  If you look at the main webpage for NASA's Artemis program, the first sentence you will see is this:  "With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before." 

 

When I read somewhere that one of the main goals of the Artemis program was to remedy the white-males-only record of lunar flights, I didn't want to believe it.  But there it is, in—pardon the expression—black and white, right on their webpage.  When you look into the history of the program, it's a little more complicated than just wanting to make up for Apollo by sending women and people of color to the Moon.  But obviously, NASA has chosen to make that feature a big selling point to the public.

 

The problem that democracies have with any large-scale program that lasts longer than four years is to keep them going despite the winds of political change that blow through Washington at least that often.  In the early 2000s, NASA conceived something called Constellation, which was its effort to put people back in space after the end of the Space Shuttle, which wound down in 2011.  The Obama administration cancelled Constellation except for the Orion spacecraft, which was then folded into something called the Space Launch System (SLS).  One way or another, with various name changes (the name was changed to Artemis during the Trump administration), the program has limped along with funding that is, relatively speaking, a pittance in fraction-of-GNP terms compared to Apollo. 

 

Well, not that much of a pittance, actually.  One estimate places the total cost of Artemis, assuming it actually gets off the ground by 2025, at $93 billion.  If expressed in 2020 dollars, the 1960s Apollo program cost $257 billion, not quite three times as much.  So Artemis isn't that much of a bargain.  And we still haven't got a single person—of any color or sex—off the ground under its auspices, while Apollo spent most of the 1960s in rehearsals of various kinds.

 

Until Hurricane Ian came along, NASA was planning to launch Artemis 1, the first shot in the Artemis series, on Sept. 23.  Problems with fuel tanks on Sept. 12 led launch officials to postpone the scheduled launch, and then concerns about Hurricane Ian pushed the next tentative launch date to November of this year. 

 

Artemis 1 will not be a manned (womaned?) flight.  Only some satellites and flight-test dummies will be aboard.  The SLS rocket is attributed to (I kid you not) the Aerojet Rocketdyne Northrop Grumman Boeing United Launch Alliance.  If that isn't a creature of politics, I don't know what is.  The newer private-rocket company SpaceX is prime contractor for the Human Landing System (HLS), which is planned to get people from lunar orbit down to the moon.  But that won't be an active part of the Artemis 1 launch, which is mainly to see if the launch rocket works.

 

After a certain point, large organizations develop a kind of default mode that they will operate in unless strong external forces are brought to bear on them.  NASA's default mode, for the last decade at least, has been to seek funding for projects that have a political appeal wide enough to motivate enough federal support to provide contracts for as many contractors as possible, while keeping one eye on a goal that can be achieved if NASA only had about twice as much funding as it ever gets. 

 

For a time, around 2010, several of my undergraduate engineering students spoke admiringly of space programs and expressed a desire to get involved in them.  One of them, the smartest undergraduate woman I've had in my electromagnetics class in twenty years, even ended up working for Blue Origin.  But lately, the bloom has come off the space-exploration rose, and the highest ambitions many students have these days is just to land a job that will let them pay off their student loans before they retire. 

 

When Neil Armstrong uttered his first words on the moon—"one giant leap for mankind"—I wasn't aware of any women or girls who felt excluded because he said "mankind" and not "humanity."  He couldn't get away with that today, because the original sin of the white male plays such a prominent role in the public's consciousness these days.  It's an open question as to whether redressing this wrong at a cost of $92 billion is worth it.  Of course, a lot of other good and useful things may be done by returning to the moon with an eye toward using it as a base for wider-ranging exploration of space.  But can't we concentrate on the job at hand, and take integration of people of color and women and other minorities in stride, rather than making it the main focus, which is what NASA seems to want it to be?  The problem with that is that we'd have to decide what the main job is, and the answer to that question is far from clear.

 

Sources:  NASA's Artemis webpage is at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/. 

The Artemis project cost estimate is from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/years-late-and-billions-over-budget-nasas-most-powerful-rocket-finally-set-for-takeoff, the Apollo cost estimate is from https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo, and I also referred to the Wikipedia pages on the Artemis program and the Artemis HLS development program. 

TikTok and the Chinese Connection

 

One of the newest stars in the social-media constellations is TikTok, a free video-sharing app that is very popular among young users.  Ostensibly, you have to be at least 13 to join TikTok, but such age limits are notoriously easy to evade.  Like other social-media apps, the TikTok app has various ways of making money, including advertising, contests, and in-app purchases.  It was the first non-Meta app (e. g. not Facebook or its ilk) to reach the threshold of three billion downloads worldwide, even with the handicap of being banned in India.

 

The reason India banned TikTok in 2019, only two years after it went global, was that an Indian court viewed it as a source of pornographic content and a medium likely to be used by sexual predators.  In 2020, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a permanent ban, citing national security concerns.  Although there have been efforts to ban TikTok in the U. S., they have been unsuccessful so far.

 

TikTok is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ByteDance, a company based in China.  The U. S. division of TikTok recently made the news when five executives resigned after facing interference by ByteDance into the U. S. organization's internal workings. According to an article originally published in National Review, one executive complained that "A lot of our guidance came from HQ, and we weren't necessarily part of strategy building. . . . I don't want to be told what to do."  Coming after earlier reports of a leaked strategy document from ByteDance that ordered subsidiaries to "play down the China connection," one wonders just how tight a rein ByteDance holds on its foreign TikTok operations.

 

Nothing major goes on in China without at least the passive acquiescence of the government.  So we can be sure that Chinese government leaders are aware of what ByteDance is doing.  This is one reason that the TikTok app itself is not available in China.  Instead, a modified version called Douyin is available there.  But the leaked document urges PR people to respond to questions about Chinese control of TikTok by saying that "TikTok is not available in China."  It's the truth, it's nothing but the truth, but it's not the whole truth.

 

The question of how much control a central ownership hub should exert over foreign subsidiaries is nothing new.  Dodgy things were done during World War II with regard to American-owned properties in Nazi Germany, at least up to the point when Germany blocked American assets there once the U. S. declared war on Germany. 

 

The U. S. isn't at war with China.  But one could be pardoned for wondering why China is exporting tons of fentanyl for illegal consumption in the U. S.  Perhaps it's in revenge for the Opium Wars, a sordid episode in the relationship between China and the West that forced China to open its doors to opium imported from British-colonized India in the 1800s.  Whatever the reason, some people doubt that China has the best interests of the U. S. at heart, and look with suspicion on the way ByteDance is consolidating control of TikTok in China.

 

Starting in the 1990s, globalizing free trade became a worldwide goal and, just as Adam Smith would have predicted, raised the living standards of billions of people around the globe.  Most of these were in the developing world, but Walmart wouldn't be able to sell most of its stuff as cheaply as it does if it weren't for China, so to that extent the U. S. benefited as well. 

 

But lately, we are seeing a variety of ways in which the pernicious effects of social media are becoming increasingly obvious—in the toxicity of political discourse, in the soaring rates of depression and suicide among young people, and in the general distractedness of the U. S. population.  A purely U. S. version of TikTok might not be much better than the one we have, but the fact that its strings are being pulled by Chinese masters adds a sinister look to an already fraught situation.

 

If sovereignty means anything, it means that a sovereign government can control the kind of activities and commerce that foreign-owned and foreign-operated enterprises conduct.  So as a theoretical matter, the U. S. would be entirely in its rights to ban TikTok outright, as India in fact has.  Yes, there would be a howl, but people would get over it.  And probably something similar to TikTok would spring up overnight and try to evade the ban. 

 

But that presumes a unity and coherence of action on the part of government which is notably absent today.  As with everything else, a serious movement to ban TikTok would become politicized, with Republicans (probably) favoring it and Democrats (probably) opposing the ban on account of free speech, or possibly even just because the Republicans favor it and we're opposed to whatever Republicans are in favor of.  And then the outcome would depend on which party controls the levers of power, unless there is a stalemate. 

 

That is the good old small-d democratic way, but social media itself has thrown numerous monkey wrenches in the formerly smooth operations of democratic governance.  I have never viewed TikTok, but by its reputation it doesn't seem that political.  (I wouldn't put it past the Beto for Texas Governor campaign to put an ad on it, though—he reportedly joined TikTok in March of 2020, just in time for COVID-19.) 

 

I begin to wonder whether we are ever going to get back to the former compromising and horse-trading that went on when U. S. politicians knew both how to condemn the other side in fiery speeches, and then join their opposite-aisle colleagues at the bar after work for a friendly chat about how to wrangle out legislation that would leave most parties at least partly satisfied.  The current style of take-no-prisoners scorched-earth politics may make for entertaining sound bites, but it doesn't get much done.  Including banning TikTok, if in fact that is what we ought to do.

 

Sources:  The article "TikTok Execs Resign After Being Asked to Take Orders from Parent Company" originally appeared in National Review, but was republished at https://www.yahoo.com/video/tiktok-execs-resign-being-asked-143812196.html.  I also referred to an article at Gizmodo at https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-master-messaging-pr-playbook-china-music-1849334736, the website GoBankingRates at https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/business/how-does-tiktok-make-money/, and the Wikipedia articles "TikTok" and "Censorship of TikTok." 

Is Nowhere Going Somewhere?

 

Back in August, I blogged on the reportedly poor esthetics of Meta's metaverse, the enterprise that Mark Zuckerberg has poured billions into.  Unlike most of my blogs, it attracted the attention of several people, including one Katie Rosin, who works as a publicist for an alternative metaverse company called Nowhere.  She offered me a chance to try out their platform, so last week I spent half an hour Nowhere in particular—literally. 

 

According to Rosin, Nowhere began when the event developer firm Windmill Factory faced a crisis caused by COVID-19.  "Event developer" is my phrase for describing an organization that, in their words, "manufactures sublime experiences."  For a younger generation that values experiences over objects, that's probably a good business to be in going forward.  Judging by the list of experiences on their website, they specialize in getting people together in a defined space to do something cool—hear a concert, maybe, or experience some sort of light-show-assisted event.  Without actually attending one of their events, I can't say what it's like, but I assume they don't use the word "sublime" lightly. 

 

Anyway, the Windmill people were planning their next big effort for April 2020 when you-know-what happened, and they faced the problem of doing events without people.  Thus was born the idea that ultimately became Nowhere.

 

The goal of Nowhere is to create interpersonal connections in a safe space.  Regarding safety, everybody who enters Nowhere has to be identifiable at least by a legitimate email and a password.  And your real name is available to anybody who happens to meet you in Nowhere. 

 

What does it take to get into Nowhere—special VR goggles?  No.  My middle-aged Macbook Pro running Chrome and a pair of headphones was all it took.  That's a big plus in my book already.

 

What do you see when you get there?  First there's a black screen with moving stars on it, sort of like the old Star Wars titles.  This is a screensaver to give the software time to boot up.  Then one of the stars gets bigger and you enter one of their many spaces. 

 

The first one I got to wasn't that impressive.  It was totally black except for things around a square perimeter that looked like electronic billboards.  I could move my point of view around with some simple key commands or mouse movements. 

 

When Katie showed up, she took the form of a "nonagram" (nine-sided roundish screen) inside of which I had a view like you would see on Zoom, just a real video of her seated at a desk.  But the way she entered the space reminded me of how Glinda the Good Witch arrives in Oz to rescue Dorothy—her nonagram zoomed in from a tiny spot and showed up in front of me.  What took MGM thousands of dollars of optical-printer equipment and hours of time can now be yours for free. 

 

A nonagram viewed from the side is shaped like a thin slice of a sphere, as if you cut the end off a tomato.  The flat part holds the screen and the back is just a black surface.  It floats above the—ground—or whatever is beneath it, and its position (in technical terms, four degrees of freedom—x, y, z, and yaw) are under the control of whoever's nonagram it is. 

 

One thing I wish they'd install is a mirror, so you could see your own nonagram.  Maybe there is one, but I didn't get to it.

 

Katie took me to a couple of spaces that were a lot nicer than the black one with the billboards.  One had what looked like a grassy hill with a giant apple on it, surrounded by blue skies.  She informed me it was supposed to be a cherry, not an apple.  Then we went to a forest (there was a selection of about six or eight such places on a pop-up panel at the bottom of the screen), which had a sort of wooden platform that she guided me on to.  The background there was very peaceful—trees in a fog, and bird sounds.

 

What that place reminded me of was the old video game Myst, which is somewhat legendary among persons of a certain age (it came out around 1993).  Myst consisted almost entirely of static scenes that the user could move through in a limited way—but what scenes!  The whole thing was a work of art that portrayed a kind of heightened reality that was the product of much study of how the real world really looks and sounds. 

 

To the extent that Nowhere's developers have followed that principle, they have my vote.  It's rather exciting being in on the early stages of yet another medium, if metaverses can be called that.  Zuckerberg obviously wants to dominate the new medium, but we may see a kind of PC-versus-Mac thing happen, in that the old, existing dominant platform may not be agile enough to come up with innovative approaches that lots of people prefer. 

 

I would much rather show up to other people as a kind of videoscreen on a tomato slice than as some crude animated caricature of myself.  And I'd also like to know who it is I'm talking with—really—rather than taking my chances on some wacko pretending to be a CEO or what have you. 

 

It's vitally important to get certain things right when an enterprise is small and starting out, and doesn't yet have a ton of legacy issues to deal with.  In principle, I suppose, we could redesign the Internet so that everybody on it could be tracked down instantly.  But such a redesign is a practical impossibility, now that the huge infrastructure is in place that allows anonymity at such a large scale. 

 

I wish the developers of Nowhere well, and hope that their good ideas about beauty, if not their actual platform, will positively influence whatever the metaverse becomes for most people most of the time.  Beauty is one of the three transcendentals, the other two being truth and goodness.  Anyone who ignores it in making something that could be beautiful is going against the design of the universe, and will face the consequences. 

 

Sources:  The website of Nowhere is urnowhere.com, and the looping video on that site gives you a good idea of what it's all about.  I also referred to the website of the Windmill Factory at https://www.thewindmillfactory.com/.

 

You Don't Compute—Or Do You?

 

Technology leaders from Bill Gates to Elon Musk and others have warned us in recent years that one of the biggest threats to humanity is uncontrolled domination by artificial intelligence (AI).  In 2017, Musk said at a conference, "I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it."  And in 2019, Bill Gates stated that while we will see mainly advantages from AI initially, ". . . a few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern."  And the transhumanist camp, led by such zealots as Ray Kurzweil, seems to think that the future takeover of the universe by AI is not only inevitable, but a good thing, because it will leave our old-fashioned mortal meat computers (otherwise known as brains) in the junkpile where they belong. 

 

So in a way, it's refreshing to see a book come out whose author stands up and, in effect, says "Baloney" to all that.  The book is Non-Computable You:  What You Do that Artificial Intelligence Never Will, and the author is Robert J. Marks II. 

 

Marks is a practicing electrical engineer who has made fundamental contributions in the areas of signal processing and computational intelligence.  After spending most of his career at the University of Washington, he moved to Baylor University in 2003, where he now directs the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.  His book was published by the Discovery Institute, which is an organization that has historically promoted the concept of intelligent design. 

 

That is neither here nor there, at least to judge by the book's contents.  Those looking for a philosophically nuanced and extended argument in favor of the uniqueness of the human mind as compared to present or future computational realizations of what might be called intelligence, had best look elsewhere.   In Marks's view, the question of whether AI will ever match or supersede the general-intelligence abilities of the human mind has a simple answer:  it won't. 

 

He bases his claim on the fact that all computers do nothing more than execute algorithms.  Simply put, algorithms are step-by-step instructions that tell a machine what to do.  Any activity that can be expressed as an algorithm can in principle be performed by a computer.  Just as important, any activity or function that cannot be put into the form of an algorithm cannot be done by a computer, whether it's a pile of vacuum tubes, a bunch of transistors on chips, quantum "qubits," or any conceivable future form of computing machine. 

 

Some examples Marks gives of things that can't be done algorithmically are feeling pain, writing a poem that you and other people truly understand, and inventing a new technology.  These are things that human beings do, but according to Marks, AI will never do. 

 

What about the software we have right now behind conveniences such as Alexa, which gives the fairly strong impression of being intelligent?  Alexa certainly seems to "know" a lot more facts than any particular human being does. 

 

Marks dismisses this claim to intelligence by saying that extensive memory and recall doesn't make something intelligent any more than a well-organized library is intelligent.  Sure, there are lots of facts that Alexa has access to.  But it's what you do with the facts that counts, and AI doesn't understand anything.  It just imitates what it's been told to imitate without knowing what it's doing. 

 

The heart of Marks's book is really the first chapter entitled "The Non-Computable Human." Once he gets clear the difference between algorithmic tasks and non-algorithmic tasks, it's just a matter of sorting.  Yes, computers can do this better than humans, but computers will never do that. 

 

There are lots of other interesting things in the book:  a short history of AI, an extensive critique of the different kinds of AI hype and how not to be fooled by them, and numerous war stories from Marks's work in fields as different as medical care and the stabilization of power grids.  But these other matters are mostly a lot of icing on a rather small cake, because Marks is not inclined to delve into the deeper philosophical waters of what intelligence is and whether we understand it quite as well as Marks thinks we do.

 

As a Christian, Marks is well aware of the dangers posed to both Christians and non-Christians by a thing called idolatry.  Worshipping idols—things made by one's own hands and substituted for the true God—was what got the Hebrews into trouble time and again in the Old Testament, and it continues to be a problem today.  The problem with an idol is not so much what the idol itself can do—carved wooden images tend not to do much of anything on their own—but what it does to the idol-worshipper.  And here is where Marks could have done more of a service in showing how human beings can turn AI into an idol, and effectively worship it. 

 

While an idol-worshipping pagan might burn incense to a wooden image and figure he'd done everything needed to ensure a good crop, a bureaucracy of the future might take a task formerly done at considerable trouble and expense by humans—deciding on how long a prison sentence should be, for example—and turn it over to an AI program.  Actually, that example is not futuristic at all.  Numerous court systems have resorted to AI algorithms (there's that word again) to predict the risk of recidivism for different individuals, and basing the length of their sentences and parole status on the result. 

 

Needless to say, this particular application has come in for criticism, and not only by the defendants and their lawyers.  Many AI systems are famously opaque, meaning even their designers can't give a good reason for why the results are the way they are.  So I'd say in at least that regard, we have already gone pretty far down the road toward turning AI into an idol.

 

No, Marks is right in the sense that machines are, after all, only machines.  But if we make any machine our god, we are simply asking for trouble.  And that's the real risk we face in the future from AI:  making it our god, putting it in charge, and abandoning our regard for the real God.

 

Sources:  Robert J. Marks II's book Non-Computable You was published in 2022 by the Discovery Institute.  The Musk quote is from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/elon-musk-warned-of-ai-apocalypsenow-hes-building-a-tesla-robot.html, the Gates quote is from https://futurism.com/bill-gates-artificial-intelligence-nuclear-weapons, and a story about AI used for sentencing guidelines is at https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/.  I also referred to Wikipedia for biographical information on Marks. 

The Thin Line of Trust: China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735

 

Back in March, we blogged about the crash of China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, which crashed on March 21 during a flight from Kunming to Guangzhou, killing all 132 people on board.  At the time, it was too early to draw any conclusions, as the investigations had just begun and the flight data recorders had not yet been recovered.  Within days, however, the voice and data recorders were found, and the data recorders were sent to the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for analysis.

 

In April, rumors began to circulate in China that the crash was caused deliberately by someone on the flight deck.  These rumors were substantiated when several U. S. news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and ABC News, reported in May that U. S. officials had determined that someone in the cockpit had pushed the control stick forward to initiate the dive from 29,000 feet that led to the crash.  The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has neither confirmed nor denied these reports, while grumbling that "unofficial speculation" can interfere with the ongoing investigation.  Nevertheless, until further official information is made available, it looks like deliberate action on the part of someone in the cockpit may well have caused the crash.

 

The Wikipedia article on the crash lists the three members of the flight crew:  Captain Yang Hongda, who had been a Boeing 737 pilot since 2018; First Officer Zhang Zhengping, an award-winning commercial pilot with more than a decade of experience, including the training of 100 other pilots; and Ni Gongtao, a trainee with less than 600 hours of flight experience whose official duties were simply to observe the more experienced pilots. 

 

The psychology of a flight crew is a somewhat neglected but vital aspect of the smooth functioning of the team, who must cooperate effectively under both routine and emergency conditions.  Any time there is more than one person involved in a situation, there will be questions of authority and precedence.  That is why the very titles of the flight crew indicate a precedence of authority, the captain being in charge of both first and second officers. 

 

An excessively rigorous adherence to the priorities of rank can be detrimental, as the 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801 illustrates.  Despite errors the captain of that flight made in his approach to the Guam airport, he was not challenged by the other two members of the flight crew until six seconds before the crash, by which time it was far too late to do anything.  Since that time, Korean Air and other flight organizations have emphasized that the authority of the captain is not absolute, and if the other members of the flight crew see that the captain has made a mistake, they should take positive action to correct it.

 

But in the case of Flight 5735, it would be hard to believe that deliberate action to crash the plane would be taken by more than one of the three flight-crew members.  If we assume that only one of the three men on the flight deck decided to crash the plane, that raises several hard questions.

 

First, one would think that two men determined to save themselves and the passengers could overpower one man bent on destroying the plane.  While I have no details of how a 737 cockpit is arranged, it's hard to imagine a way that one man could impose his will on the others and remain at the controls, if the other two were determined to stop him.

 

As long as we're imagining things, suppose the suicide pilot, let's call him, somehow smuggled a firearm along with him, and threatened to shoot anyone who interfered with him?  That would be awkward, but conceivable.  And it's not clear whether pilots go through the same security checks that passengers do, and if they do, how easy it would be to evade them in order to carry a gun on board.

 

Neither of those scenarios seem too credible.  An interesting fact from the record of the flight before the crash is that it briefly leveled off around 8,000 feet before continuing its plunge into the mountains.  This might indicate a temporary turn for the better in the cockpit battle for the controls. 

 

Another possibility is that the suicide pilot shot or otherwise disabled the other two crew members before implementing his flight to doom.  This almost makes more sense, but it still leaves open the question of how he was able to disable them:  a gun?  Some kind of spray?  A struggle would still have to take place.

 

A second question is, which of the three flight crew members may have done it?  The award-winning Zhang Zhengping would seem least likely, having invested his life in his career.  The CAAC investigated the backgrounds of all three of the crew and found nothing unusual such as outstanding debt or personal troubles that would obviously account for suicidal intent. 

 

A third possibility is that someone from the passenger area broke into the cockpit and forced the plane to the ground.  This involves the question of how mechanically difficult such a feat might be. 

 

A cursory Internet search reveals that there are no private bathrooms in airliner cockpits, meaning that the door to the passenger area has to be open to allow pilots to answer calls of nature.  Updated regulations after 9/11 mandate that at least two crew members must be in the cockpit at all times, so for example, only one pilot on Flight 5735 could leave the cockpit at a time.  A patient terrorist with a first-class seat having a view of the cockpit door could therefore wait until the door opened and make a threatening move, perhaps holding a flight attendant hostage at knifepoint (assuming he could smuggle a knife on board).  But he would still have to overpower three determined flight crew members to do the dastardly deed.

 

Well, I think we've had enough of these dismal speculations for one column.  Suffice it to say that deliberate human action looks like the most likely explanation for the fate of Flight 5735.  We may never know much more than that, unless there are clues in the cockpit voice recorders that remain to be unveiled.  Despite all the modern technology that is deployed to ensure air safety, as long as people fly the planes, we have to trust those people.  And once in a very great while, someone decides to betray that trust.

 

Sources:  I referred to the article "Flight data suggests China Eastern plane deliberately crashed:  Wall Street Journal report" posted on May 18, 2022 at https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/18/china/china-eastern-crash-wsj-report-inlt-hnk/index.html.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Flight 5735.   

Tesla Service Is In a Fix

 

A recent article from Vox.com reports that about a fifth of Tesla owners who took their vehicles in for servicing were unhappy with how long the process took.  And investigative reporters at Vox have perused over a thousand complaints about Tesla to the Federal Trade Commission, revealing a variety of problems with a type of vehicle that was supposed to all but do away with automotive repair shops.

 

The Better Business Bureau has received over 9,000 reports on Tesla, many having to do with faulty or delayed service, inadequate supplies of spare parts, poor communication with the customer, and poor manufacturing quality in the first place. 

 

One mitigating factor in making bad service less bad overall is that electric vehicles (EVs) supposedly need a lot less service than internal-combustion (IC) cars do.  And while that may be the case eventually, Vox quotes a representative of the consumer-research firm J. D. Power as saying Tesla owners need service about as frequently as owners of conventional cars do.  So it looks like even Tesla owners need to go to the shop about as often as the rest of us do, which doesn't help if the experience with Tesla service is a bad one.

 

In Tesla's defense, their service-center count may not include their mobile units that schedule appointments at the customer's home or business.  And because so much of the Tesla functionality is computerized, remote software upgrades, diagnosis, and repairs are often done without any need to bring the physical car into a shop.  Even so, there are enough purely mechanical or electrical problems that necessitate a trip to the service center to warrant many times the number of locations that Tesla presently operates.

 

Some independent garages are starting to work on Teslas, but this can cause problems with the car's warranty, and Elon Musk has gone on record as opposing the right-to-repair movement that seeks to break up manufacturers' monopolies on service.

 

As every general knows, maintenance and repair are a vital part of any mechanized military effort.  A lack of spare parts can defeat an army as effectively as enemy fire.  Tesla is in a unique and transient situation, as they have exploited a cultural trend against fossil fuels that is especially popular among the upper classes who can afford electric cars, and done an end run around the established automakers by reinventing carmaking from scratch and dominating the U. S. EV market. 

 

But people who wear Rolexes and drive Teslas are not happy when they have to wait a month for a service appointment and then find it's canceled at the last minute.  At the present time and for some time in the future, most people will look at the prospect of an all-electric car and decide the questionable advantages are not worth the extra cost and the other problems:  limited range, scarcity of charging stations, and now, unreliable service.  So while Tesla has done a good job exploiting the low-hanging market fruit of relatively wealthy and environmentally-conscious customers, that market may be close to saturation.

 

To people who simply want a reliable and economical means of transportation, service is at least as important as features.  And no matter how well-built a machine is initially, sooner or later something will go wrong and a qualified person will have to get their hands on the car to fix it. 

 

I will confess to some feeling of nostalgia as I take my seventeen-year-old Element in to the independent shop that is used to seeing me every few months as yet another piece of it reaches the end of its service life, and thinking, "Gee, with the coming of EVs, all these garages will go the way of the village blacksmith before the Model T."  Now I'm not so sure. 

 

For one thing, electric vehicles are really hard on tires.  The sudden torque strains and the added battery weight will destroy ordinary car tires in short order, so EV tires have to be specially designed to take the added punishment.  And most Teslas don't have spare tires—don't ask me why, but they don't.  Maybe the car's too heavy to safely change a tire on the road. 

 

While the electronics industry has gotten us used to the concept—for good or ill—of using it and throwing it away when it breaks or a software upgrade renders it useless, a $45,000 investment can't be treated like that.  Lots of people out there keep their cars for five, ten, or fifteen years, and a century's worth of progress in auto manufacturing has made that kind of longevity possible. 

 

Even if everything else on a Tesla worked perfectly forever, the battery has a known and limited lifetime.  So far, the relative scarcity and prestige of Teslas make it economical to replace worn-out batteries, but this may not always be the case.  Life-cycle engineering takes a holistic view of a product from inception to end-of-life disposal or preferably recycling.  With Tesla's current focus on getting cars out the door, it looks like the company has neglected the maintenance part of the cycle.  This may well be a temporary condition, though.

 

If I were a young gearhead wanting to open my own automotive service center, I might well choose to specialize in Teslas and take my chances that Tesla wouldn't shut me down.  Because the demand is certainly there, and it doesn't sound like Tesla is anywhere close to meeting it with their own service centers.

 

Sources:  The Vox article "Missing parts, long waits, and a dead mouse:  the perils of getting a Tesla fixed" by Rebecca Heilweil appeared on Aug. 24, 2022 at https://www.vox.com/recode/23318725/tesla-repair-mechanic-delay-electric-vehicles-ev.  

Averse to the Metaverse

 

The company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, sparked some criticism after it opened its keynote "Horizon Worlds" virtual-reality (VR) platform to France and Spain last week.  According to an article in Slate, new European users were disappointed in the graphics, to say the least.  And judging by the screen shots provided in the article, they have a point.  Adjectives like "bland," "cartoonish," and "slightly weird" come to mind.  In common with many VR systems, only the upper bodies of human avatars appear.  I've never understood the reason for this myself, but one user speculated that it was so that nobody online can have sex. 

 

At any rate, it doesn't sound like the French are going to start holding meetings of the Académie Française in Horizon Worlds any time soon.  But Mark Zuckerberg can live without the Academy's forty members if he can get several million mere mortals to join.

 

Meta has put a huge chunk of its colossal resources into its metaverse venture, some $13 billion, and you can be sure the firm is not doing that for fun.  Its vision is that as Internet bandwidth and access increase, you will be able to don a VR headset and basically live life online:  working, playing, even exercising (I suppose, but this might present problems unless you're doing it on some physical treadmill tied to your VR system).  As for sex, there's plenty of that on the Internet already, so maybe Meta is staying out of that area purely for business reasons. 

 

There is a theory in the history-of-technology field called "technological determinism."  It basically says that technology has its own built-in direction, and once a technology develops into a feasible, marketable form, there's no stopping it.  Its development path and growth are intrinsic to the nature of the technology, and human factors and influences count for nothing.  The term was invented mainly by people who didn't believe in it to criticize those who appeared to support it, but I've never encountered a pure card-carrying technological determinist. 

 

Nevertheless, a lot of stories of how technologies developed tend to make it seem inevitable in retrospect.  I think this betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the storyteller, and some of the best histories of technology I have encountered look at failed technologies that might have succeeded if certain almost random factors had gone the other way. 

 

With "Horizon Worlds" we are witnessing the first baby steps of a new technology which Meta, at least, hopes will inevitably dominate the Internet and become as much a part of our lives as mobile phones—and all they can do—have become today.  And, as any good public corporation will try to do, Meta intends to turn this into cash—lots of cash.

 

The Slate article quotes a University of Virginia professor's dark prophecy that Meta hopes to "monitor, monetize, and manage everything about our lives."  While this is no doubt an exaggeration, it's hard to deny that the picture conjured up by proponents of VR, especially the Meta-style of VR, seems to aspire toward a kind of totalizing, all-inclusive situation in which people would take off their VR headsets only to attend to physical needs, like eating, going to the bathroom, and (maybe) sex.  And sleep, unless we manage to genetic-engineer our way out of that little necessity.

 

In promulgating his Meta vision, Zuckerberg and his colleagues suffer from a problem that they has in common with many tech-savvy leaders who combine awesome technical and business skills with the philosophical understanding of ten-year-old boys.  There are various answers to the question, "What are humans for?"  Different cultures and religions come up with different answers, but the worst response of all to that question is to ignore it altogether. 

 

Any entity whose business operations affect millions or even billions of people, as Facebook/Meta's does, should consider seriously what its model for human flourishing is.  And the bigger the firm is, the more seriously it should consider that question. 

 

Unfortunately, this rarely happens.  Instead, a business like Meta is in practice avoiding two guardrails on opposite sides of a wide road.  One guardrail is profits:  if the firm ceases to make money going forward, something has to be done to avoid the guardrail of losses that kill the firm.  The other guardrail is a combination of law and public criticism.  Even a profitable business can go out of existence if its leaders end up in jail or become social pariahs, as the Weinstein Company did when its head Harvey Weinstein was accused (and eventually convicted) of sexual misdeeds.  As long as a firm avoids hitting these two guardrails, its leaders will consider it a success, and will keep doing whatever they feel is necessary to keep going, regardless of the firm's effects on the souls of its millions of customers.

 

Aesthetics are more than just a thing that has to meet minimum standards in order for people to use a platform like "Horizon Worlds."  Aesthetics is another word for beauty.  In the past, advances in technology have led to the creation of beautiful things that make the world a better place.  Advances in building technology led to artistic creations such as Chartres in France and Burgos in Spain.  Cathedrals were designed for the ordinary human, just like "Horizon Worlds" is.  But those who built the cathedrals of the Middle Ages were guided by a very specific vision of human purpose:  to encounter, and eventually to love, the Divine.  Their creations gained thereby a timelessness that motivates even a secular culture such as that of France's today to reconstruct Notre Dame after its disastrous fire, at a cost of millions of dollars.

 

The metaverse can be a place of truth, beauty, and goodness.  But those values can be achieved only if those designing it make these values intentional goals.  On the other hand, if their guides are only the two guardrails of profit and avoiding jail or pariah status, they are likely to forge an erratic path that may lead millions of people to places they wish they hadn't gone to.

 

Sources:  The article "Why the Metaverse Has to Look So Stupid" by Nitish Pahwa appeared on Slate's website on Aug. 19, 2022 at https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-horizon-worlds-facebook-looks-crappy-explained.html.