Are we ready for the rise of the robots?

I have recently read in different journals the rise of robots, and how they can actually be our substitutes in our jobs. In a society in which we need to work in order to have money to live, this can come as a scary prospect. Robots will do the things we can do and we no longer will have the minimum income necessary to live. 

It shouldn’t be so. The initial idea behind giving the work to robots was for humans not to have to do it. For us to be freer. But our society is not ready for that. 

I have also read about some proposals for giving basic income to everyone. I completely agree with that. In the case where no work would be necessary, other than creative work, I would even go further. Not only basic income, but equal income. A world where technology could do the basic things for our survival, inequality would only make a few to be the masters and the rest just slaves. Well, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In Chomsky’s “Requiem for the American Dream” we can see how inequality is increasing in our modern world, in particular in US. US, a country where the health system is private. Of course, I’m talking about a first world society. The rest of the world are just slaves of the first world’s countries. But even to think that our health is a matter of profit and not of basic rights in a supposedly first world country makes you think how our society works. 

A world with only creative works is a world where each individual is free to choose their path. The structure of the society has to be in such a way that each one can achieve their maximum potential. But also it must be a society that allows laziness. It should be oneself who decides to do a meaningful job or not. But then, those who contribute more to society would feel the need to take more and create inequality. 

Our ethics towards work has to change then. Education is a key factor: how to educate people to be free? Foucault rises the problem of our education being tailored to the goal of maintaining the same structures of power. If the structure of power is based on a work-based society, we won’t be free from this vicious circle. 

My opinion is that the more the knowledge, the freer one is. Education comes in all ways, not only knowledge, but also on values and behavior. We need cultivate but also compassionate people. It is not important to contribute, but at least not to destroy others peoples opportunities. Unfortunately, that’s we always have been doing since we are known to be in this planet. 

A technological advanced society needs an ethics based on science, I think. And it is not about the scientific method, but about the values that make science advance: honesty and curiosity. First of all, being honest with yourself. And that means a great level of self-knowledge and retrospection. Being critical about what other people say or believe, so that we are not slaves of other people’s ideas, and, thus, being vulnerable against power gathering in elites. 

The existentialists, even though their lives were not exemplar, got it right. Be free, try to experience as much as possible, be responsible of your own acts, be an active part of your life, not a passive being. We have to have a more advanced society, far from sin culture, and towards individualism, but, at the same time, towards a social-communist structure. Otherwise, we would be either slaves from the rich people, or be eliminated by robots. 

Yes, being eliminated by robots could be another outcome of the rise of robots. We have to give human-like ethics to our robots, otherwise they will arrive to the right conclusion that we are the vermin of the planet. Either that, or become a better society. 

Our society is not ready for non-work society, much less for a society with robots that are conscious. We can wait but, as always, I think we will first get into it, and then adapt on the whim. There will be chaos, and possibly our own destruction. I hope we don’t go that far.

Mind the gap

An international team of researchers have demonstrated that the spectral gap problem is algorithmically undecidable. The spectral gap, or the difference between the energy of the ground state and the first excited state, is fundamental to understanding the properties of a quantum many-body system. The question posed in their paper is: given a quantum many-body system, is it gapped or gapless? And they find out that that question is undecidable in the same form encountered in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

An important consequence of this study is that it has been demonstrated that there exists a physical problem where the reductionist approach is not possible, that is, the macroscopic properties of a system cannot be derived from its detailed microscopic description.  Even if we can perfectly describe all the parts, the properties of the whole cannot be predicted. Nature seems to dodge our immature science.

Emergent properties belong to the realm of complex systems. As Anderson puts it, “More is different”. There seems to exist a hierarchy in the description of nature, and that there is not straightforward way of going from one to the other.

This hierarchic structure has been recently found in our brains when we process language. Apparently, we keep track of different abstract linguistic structures (words, phrases and sentences) at different timescales. The authors of the research found thus a basis for Chomsky’s ideas about how we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language.

A similar idea permeates the Schenkerian analysis of a passage of music. This analysis shows the hierarchical relationships among its pitches, drawing conclusions about the structure of the analysed passage. Music is another kind of language, with different compositional time scales. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar kind of analysis for music would led to finding a musical grammar in our heads.

Music, the ultimate abstract language, the one that Kandinsky tried to translate into visual art. To completely disembody lines and colours from their figurative meaning. Just a feast to the eyes.

A complex work of art, created by a complex system, the painter, apprehended by a complex system, us humans. How could ever the beauty of a piece of art be deduced from something so simple as an equation?

Bullshitfulness

This recently published article has pointed out how our XXI century world if full of bullshit, and how a lot of people accept bullshit without a second thought. It is very funny, indeed, to see how randomly generated sentences (here or here) are accepted as profound and deep, and how people is so ready to believe in them. Well, it is funny, but not funny at all, on second thoughts. 

As they point out here, we should follow the rules of “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” to differentiate what is a sound statement from simple bullshit. It all boils down to the poor understanding of science in our society. Skepticism is the core of science, but I think skepticism is not well understood. For most of people, it strips out all the “magic” and wondrousness of the world. And people want to believe. That is the core of human nature, to believe there is a profound meaning in their lives, that everything makes sense, and that we are connected in a special way to the world. We want to feel special. 

I have many friends who believe in all sorts of this new age spiritualism. Even scientists, what I found surprising. I even agreed to perform an experiment on reiki. I did it because this friend was a scientist, and of course the scientist in me would never refuse to perform an experiment. In short, the experiment did not work. But he still believes in it. I think that is one of the things that confuses scientifically illiterate people, that even scientist believe in bullshit. Scientists should know better, right? 

As I said, it is into our human nature to yearn for a meaning, to belong to something much bigger than us. The official religions are so many centuries behind our modern society, that this yearning has created all sorts of new “religions” that aim directly to the spiritual part in us. So we are just cannon fodder for all sorts creators of bullshit. 

Just last night, a friend and me were assaulted by one of these believers, and tried to introduce us into mindfulness and all that nonsense. He was making up words on the way. So, I decided to make up another word: bullshitfulness, or the awareness of our own bullshit and the bullshit around us. 

So, from now on, I will try to perfect the art of bullshitfulness. I know I bullshit too, but I always try to warn beforehand. That is why I created the tag “ramblings”. We all should be aware of our own bullshit, and warn other people about it. We should also try to spot bullshit, and not be ashamed of pointing it out. Even if they are friends. Specially, when they are friends. 

The world is full of wonders. I do not think we need to invent it, just to discover it. Is that bullshit?

His Dark Materials

I recently read a fantasy book, His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it for a light reading. I’m not fan of spoilers, but I need to comment something to make my point in this entry. Sorry… 

So, in his Universe, the Dark Matter is something like particles that give consciousness to intelligent beings. They cluster around our early ancestors, when we discovered how to make tools and all that. Well, it is a fantasy book. Don’t expect it to be accurate. Or not? 

I always find interesting the selection of articles in The Physics arXiv Blog. The article that recently interested me was the one related to the relation between Cosmology and Information Theory (See here). In it, they comment the work by Fields, who proposes a hypothesis of what the discrepancy in the energy density when calculating it from physical principle and when measuring it. 

In his approach, he argues that objects such as stars and planets act in a classical way, that is, they have a specific location in space. This location is measured with respect to the cosmic microwave background. But this knowledge comes with a cost: the cost of information. 

A quantum object such as a photon or an electron are in a superposition of states, and it state is defined only when we measure it. A quantum object has a small amount of information associated to its position. However, if we know the position of an object, the information is much higher. And the point is that information costs energy. 

Fields argues that the discrepancy between theory and measurement for the energy density could be that amount of information. The mechanism for an object to become classical is known as decoherence. The quantum nature of the system (the stars, the planets), “leaks” into the environment. Decoherence means entanglement with the environment, an irreversible process from the system’s point of view. 

As I already mentioned in another post, irreversibility, time, is the arrow of increasing correlations. Decoherence is at the system’s level. The Universe might be in a pure state, but what individual pieces of it see, is something defined with respect to the environment. 

To experience time is to entangle with the other parts of the Universe, to create information. And information is knowledge. We know ourselves by experiencing time, by interacting, by defining ourselves with respect to the others. 

Is dark mater consciousness, knowledge? Sometimes fantasy is not so far from science. Just a little step further.

Some ramblings about Information Theory

Since Claude Shannon gave birth to Information Theory, we have seen how a number of subject has been influenced by his ideas. Information Theory is fundamentally based in the idea of entropy, a very well known, but not always well understood magnitude in Thermodynamics. 

I recently came across two interesting articles where Information Theory is applied: the creation of Maxwell’s Demon and the relation between information and living systems. 

In the first one researchers have confirmed that information comes with a cost, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics cannot be cheated. 

As interesting as confirming that information has an energetic cost, I find the second article more exciting. In it, Christoph Adami at Michigan State University proposes the idea that life is basically a matter of information. Adami’s idea is that a living system is a system that is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, but maintains itself in a state that differs from maximum entropy. This difference is the information that the living system contains. Somehow, the living system keeps this difference while it is alive. In his mathematical model, he found out that in systems close to equilibrium he can find molecules that can replicate themselves (living systems). Whenever the difference between the system and the environment is large, the probability of finding a living system is very small. 

This is not the first attempt to mathematically understand Biological problems. It reminded me of the application of Information Theory to Ecology by Margalef , or the attempts of understanding systems far from equilibrium by Prigogine, for example. 

Can we define life in such an abstract way? Is it so simple? 

Photo from Unicam.

 

Spanish is the happiest language

So it seems that we tend to use more positive words than negative ones in our language. Not only Spanish, as the title of this entry says, but in general. The thing is that Spanish people tend to use more positive words than the rest of people. Or so they say in this article. They say “The words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias”. It seems that Spanish speaking people tend to be more positive than other people. 

It surprised me that the word gift has a negative meaning in German. I guess they are just thinking about giving something and not receiving, or, who knows? What can you expect from people that have the word Schadenfreude, which means the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others? 

So, why is Spanish somewhat biased towards positive words? I have no answer for that, but I guess it has to be with our openness and the good food, wine

and weather. What do you think?

Happy Bloomsday!

In this special day, we celebrate the journey through consciousness that James Joyce wrote in his Ulysses. He wrote that “the soul is the form of forms”. Is it? Is it just the networks what makes our minds, a bunch of information and interconnections? Is it substrate independent, and therefore we can reproduce it someday? Are we simulations? 

I came across this talk, that tells us what we understand so far about our self-awareness, or consciousness: Perhaps we are just “weaving the wind”?

We are us and our circumstances

The first word in the Odyssey is “Andra”, which means man, human. In a previous post I already mentioned Prigogine's Tanner lecture "Only an Illusion" with reference to the problem of time and Homer´s works the Odyssey and the Iliad. 

The Odyssey can be viewed as a big ring composition when first Athena, a goddess, foresees Odysseus´ homecoming. For the gods, past and future are the same, and the two moments are together in Athena´s point of view. It is as if she was remembering Odysseus hardships. The main binary opposition in the poem is between mortality and immortality, how gods and humans see time. This ring composition strengthens the idea of endless time, of atemporality. 

Odysseus starts the poem in an island with the goddess Calypso, in a world that doesn´t change, apart from the human world, with no connections with it. In another previous post I mentioned the link between time and quantum entanglement, and I concluded that “time has no meaning outside the universe, and it is embedded in the relationship between its elements”. The relationships we establish with our environment determine what life is. We are us and our circumstances, as Ortega y Gasset said. 

Today I came across with an article where they explain how “The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations”, as Seth Lloyd pointed out about 30 years ago. 

In another post I also mentioned how it has been proven that by using a definition of information stating which properties it should have, quantum mechanics can be derived from said properties. Seth Lloyd , by using an approach to quantum mechanics where information units are treated as the basic building blocks, ended up realizing that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. The particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing. 

As Lloyd says, “the universe as a whole is in a pure state, but individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures.” So, does it mean that the Universe knows everything?

It is very interesting to see how physics slowly gets to the heart of the question of what means to be human. Our experience of time is intimately linked to the relationships we develop along our stay here. Physics is getting to the core of human experience, already sung by poets and philosophers.

Beauty and Truth

I recently read an article in Nature where they find that mathematicians react to what they think as beautiful equations in the same way somebody reacts to visual and musical beauty. It seems that the same region of the brain that is correlated to emotional responses to different kinds of beauty reacts when they see a specially beautiful equation. 

In particular, it seems that the famous Euler's formula is the most beautiful one. It relates the most important numbers in maths, that is, e, i, π, 1 and 0. The simplicity of it, and the whole meaning of this relationship is processed by the trained mind as beautiful. 

Long time ago I read the book "Why Beauty Is Truth: The History of Symmetry". In it, they explain why the sense of beauty (related very often to symmetry), drives mathematicians to find new algorithms and models. 

Maths is thought of as arid for most of the people. But, when you understand the rules, the logic of it, how one thing leads naturally to another, when you are trained in maths, you can experience it as a kind of art. 

Not surprisingly Srinivasa Ramanujan's infinite series for 1/π was found the ugliest. 

I don't find it specially beautiful either. But think about Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician that had no formal training, but an exceptional intuition for numbers. Beauty is somehow correlated not only to the individual components, but to the relationship between them in a piece of art. I guess in the mind of Ramanujan this formula correlated so many different parts of his knowledge that he probably found it very beautiful. 

I think everybody can relate to musical or visual beauty to some extent, but I guess also the trained artists or musicians experience this kind of beauty differently to the rest of the people. I remember I went once to an exhibition of the work by Paul Klee. A friend of mine explained to me a few things, and my whole experience changed, because I understood some things better. 

I think beauty is not only about emotion, but goes somewhere deeper as our understanding increases. As Tagore, another Indian said: "When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty". When we correlate to a stimulus as beautiful, we feel it as truth. For a mathematician, when they see truth in an equation, they experience it as beautiful. 

I think Plato would be very pleased with Zeki and collaborators' findings.

The debate about creationism

I recently came across a debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, via La ciencia y sus demonios. The question posed is "Is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern, scientific era?" Here you have it. 

I found it very surprising, and somehow outrageous. The Earth was created 4500 years ago? Really? Adam and Eve were created only 4500 years ago? I don't know why Bill Nye didn't even point out that there are archaeological settlements much older than that. 

Ken Ham divides science between experimental and historical science to make the point of giving experimental science the credit for all our technology, but to "historical" science basically what the bible says. However, Bill Nye says that science is science. No distinction between them. 

As I said, I found it outrageous. While the honest answer from Bill Nye of not knowing everything (they asked him about the origin of the Universe), Ken Ham answers saying he "knows" what the origin is. That is the main contradiction in calling science to creationism. When they don't know how to explain something, they go to god. God is where they hide their ignorance. 

One stupid question I could ask is: why do they bother to go to the doctor when they are ill? That is science. They should pray and rely on god. That is what their religion says. They believe that the explanation of natural phenomena are better explained by the science of men that lived 4500 years ago. Of course that science was inspired by god, so no mistakes. That is not science. Science is about making an affirmation (an hypothesis), and test it against nature. It is about constantly questioning the natural world. That is how science builds itself. Of course there are many unknowns, but that doesn't mean the method is wrong. They don't question, they just believe. 

He keeps citing scientists that believe in god, some of them even believe in creationism. The question I ask: why don't they publish their believes in science journals? Perhaps because what they publish is not about their beliefs, but about real science? 

I find very unsettling that those people have an increasing power in our society. As a scientist, I am a little bit worried.

The ethics of teleportation

It is late at night, after a long day, and you still have to go home. Wouldn’t be handy to teleport yourself to your, say, bed? I think that everybody has had that thought at least once. 

In sci-fi films it is very easy, and nobody thinks about what happens to their former self after teleportation. You are in one place at some time, and the next instant you are ‘magically’ in another place. Simple. 

Well, not that simple. You have to be destroyed first to be ‘reborn’ in another place. Some people would say that if you teleport your atoms, you would be the same. That´s what happens in everyday life, isn´t it? You drag your atoms to another location in space, and you never wonder where you were before. The time has passed, and you are a different person. But that´s another philosophical debate. I would agree to be teleported in that case. But if you are only atoms, it means that you are only information. 

 If we are only information, it would be easier to just send the information of all our atoms to the destination point and use the available atoms there to reconstruct your person. But for that you have to destroy yourself in the origin. What would happen if you are not destroyed? You could call yourself in both cases, but from that point on you would be different people. That would be clone yourself in the sense we know nowadays. It would be to exactly clone yourself, with or your past experiences and you could both claim to be the same person. 

On one hand, is it ethic to clone yourself and the claim you are the same person? On the other hand, would it be ethic to kill yourself in the origin to claim your unique identity? 

In the movies I don´t see people wondering what is happening to their old self. Would you agree to be teleported knowing you are going to be killed before it? I actually would be afraid. Would it hurt? 

What would you do?

Some thoughts about consciousness

The central point of Hofstadter´s book mentioned in my previous post was to see how an “I” is formed. I read some people found that the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" has no central point, and therefore he wrote “I am a strange loop”, which I haven´t read. As Wikipedia says “He demonstrates how the properties of self-referential systems, demonstrated most famously in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, can be used to describe the unique properties of minds.” 

Now I´m going to be rambling about some things that I´ve been thinking about. I find myself in a strange loop, so feel free to comment if you find them to be just a bunch of disconnected thoughts, with no consistency at all. I´m only human, and I think about the Universe in human terms. 

If you have read some of my previous posts, you will find that I am asking myself if the Universe can be self-computable? In order to be so, it should be complete and consistent. As Gödel´s theorems state, it cannot be proven within itself if the formal system is as complex as arithmetic. One possibility would be the fact that the Universe is an infinite process and can check its self-consistency ad-infinitum. By metathinking, It would reach the conclusion that It can be consistent in a finite amount of time, but It would not know it until reaching infinite time. We humans (or any intelligent being) could be the way the Universe tests its consistency constantly. Could we at some point compute the Universe? That would be the Universe computing itself. And we would be theorems and universal truths.

The Universe would reference itself by means of intelligent beings as us. Perhaps the self-reference is the beginning of All, and that´s why we see it so much in Nature. A way of attaining both finite and infinite. As William Blake would put it:

To see a world in a grain of sand 

And a heaven in a wild flower, 

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 

And eternity in an hour.