Tag Archives: technology

Passions

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During Thanksgiving it’s a time for food, family, and watching copious amounts of TV and movies. This year those movies included “Somm” which is a movie about 4 guys trying to take the Master Sommelier test. Which apparently only about 12% pass each year. Not a super low amount, but also not an easy exam in any way shape or form. It got me thinking about if I could become a Somm (as they are called in the business according to the movie). I think that I do have the right kind of mind for the job, remember flavors of wines the history of region of wine and all of that is right up my alley. I know that, because that’s what I used to do with beer. I used to be able to rattle of several types of beers that if you liked one kind or style that might push your boundaries and give some of the reasoning behind it. I was able to explain why a beer tasted the way it did, etc… That was something I loved and was really passionate about. However, wine just doesn’t hold the same level of interest to me. I don’t know if it’s because beer feels much more close to home, my friends drank beer and avoided wine or what it is. Even now that I cannot drink beer I still haven’t really replaced it with a beverage I’m passionate about. I drink both wine and cider, but I don’t feel a deep down passion for them. Likewise I don’t think I could do that with whiskey, even though I really enjoy drinking whiskey, it just hasn’t captured my imagination as a GREAT drink that I want to learn everything about.

More broadly, the movie has had me thinking about what I’m truly passionate about. I know that a great deal of my interests are reflections of what my friends are interested in. If I’m surrounded by people that love watching football, I’ll watch a lot more football, similarly for college basketball or hockey. I enjoy the games when I watch them, but I rarely will seek them out on my own. I think this is something that is driving my wife crazy, I simply don’t have a lot of things that I’m passionate about that I’ll invest a huge amount of time into. It’s frustrating for me too. I think that is probably the hardest thing about me being Gluten Free I’ve really lost a great passion of mine.

I think many people will agree that I’m passionate about certain things in our political system. I’m all about free speech, investing in science and technology to grow and enable our economy. But I’m also not 100% all in. I’ve been thinking about how to get involved and in what way I’d do this. Ideally, I’d work at a think tank, but there aren’t many around Portland and many of them are either left wing or right wing. I think on many topics I’m a moderate, so neither party truly inspires much confidence.

I’m also passionate about making people’s lives better at work, but I’m not really getting much support at my organization and I’m getting beaten down. It’s one of the most frustrating things you can deal with on a daily basis, knowing there’s a better way to do things, walking your leaders to the kool-aid, but seeing them spit it out and start drinking from the mud instead.

So this leaves in an odd position. The things I’m passionate for I can’t really follow through, which makes me ask What do I have passion for, what should I try to be doing to find things I could become passionate about, how should I act on the topics I do have passion for? I know that there’s something more out there that I could or should be doing, but i have no idea how to get there.

Is AI going to kill or us bore us to death?

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The interwebs are split over the question of if AI is going to evolve into brutal killing machines or if AI will simply be just another tool we use. This isn’t a debate being asked by average Joes like you and me, it’s being asked by some pretty big intellectuals. Elon Musk thinks that dealing with AI is like summoning demons, while techno-optimist Kevin Kelly thinks that AI is only ever going to be a tool and never anything more than that, and finally you have Erik Brynjolfsson an MIT Professor that believes that AI will supplant humanity in many activities but the best results will come with a hybrid approach (Kevin Kelly does use this argument at length in his article).

Personally I think a lot of Kevin Kelly’s position is extremely naive. Believing that AI will ONLY be something that’s boring and never something that can put us at risk is frankly short sighted. Considering that Samsung, yes the company that makes your cell phone, developed a machine gun sentry that could tell the difference between a man and a tree back in 2006. In the intervening 8 years, it’s likely that Samsung has continued to advance this capability. It’s in their national interest as they deployed these sentries at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Furthermore, with drones it’s only a matter of time that we will deploy an AI that will make many of the decisions between bombing and not bombing a given target. Current we have a heuristic, there’s no reason why that couldn’t be developed into a learning heuristic for a piece of software. This software doesn’t have to even be in the driver’s seat at first. It could provide recommendations to the drone pilot and learn from the choices when it is overridden and when it is not. Actually, the pilot doesn’t even have to know what the AI is recommending and the AI could still learn from the pilot’s choices.

AI isn’t going to be some isolated tool, it’s going to be developed in many different circumstances concurrently by many organizations with many different goals. Sure Google’s might be to find better search, but they also acquired Boston Dynamics which has done some interesting work in robotics. They are also working on developing driverless cars, which will need an AI. What’s to say that the driverless AI couldn’t be co-opted by the government and combined with the AI of the drone pilot to drop bombs or to “suicide” whenever it reaches a specific location. These AIs could be completely isolated from each other but still have the capabilities to be totally devastating. What happens when they are combined? They could at some point through a programmer decision or through an intentional attack on Google’s systems. These are the risks of fully autonomous units.

We don’t fully understand how AI will evolve as it learns more. Machine learning is a bit of a Pandora’s box. It is likely that there will be many unintended consequences, similarly to almost any sort of new technology that’s introduced. However, the ramifications could be significantly worse as the AI could have control over many different systems.

It’s likely that both Kevin Kelly and Elon Musk are wrong. However, we should assume that Musk is right while Kelly is wrong. Not because I want Kelly to be wrong and Musk to be right, but because we don’t understand complex systems very well. They very quickly get beyond our capability to understand what’s going on. Think of the stock market. We don’t really know how it will respond to a given quarterly earnings from a company or even across a sector. There are flash crashes and will continue to be as we do not have a strong set of controls over the high frequency traders. If this is extended across a system that has the capability to kill or intentionally damage our economy, we simply couldn’t manage it before it causes catastrophic damage. Therefore, we must intentionally design in fail safes and other control mechanisms to ensure these things do not happen.

We must assume the worst, but rather than hope for the best, we should develop a set of design rules for AI that all programmers must adhere to, to ensure we do not summon those demons.

To Colonize Mars you need Batteries: Elon Musk’s bold vision

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I think I’ve figured Elon Musk’s grand plan. He really only ever wanted to colonize Mars, but to do that he understood that you really need a strong safe source of power to be able to do this. I recently read a book called The Martian, which I highly recommend if you’re a huge nerd and love space, where the main character is assumed dead and left behind on Mars. He knows from the very beginning he’ll have to stay alive for the next 400 Sols or so (Martian days). Two things are of paramount concern to him. Power and food. Food is a little harder than the power because he has solar panels, but that’s not going to be very effective for moving him to where he knows he needs to be in those 400 Sols. (This isn’t much of a spoiler, you learn all of this in the first few pages).

So with that in mind, you know that you need to be able to keep power going during massive sand storms, which is the reason why the main character was left on Mars. These can last hundreds of days and greatly reduce the effectiveness of solar panels. Furthermore, getting to Mars is a huge pain, which if you read The Martian, you’ll really understand the full impact of humans trying to get to Mars.

Elon Musk started 3 companies with the express intent of getting to Mars and enabling a colony to survive. First, Space-X, this solves the getting to Mars portion. It’s an effective private space company that has already landed some pretty massive contracts from NASA. The goal of this company is to continually drive down the cost of launching rockets and building capabilities for space travel. The second company is a battery company, Tesla. Yes, I know it’s a car company, but it’s really a battery company. If you wanted to create a vehicle for forcing higher capabilities in battery technology there’s none better than an electric Car. Musk plans to open the Gigafactory to feed the Tesla, but he already plans on using them in other places. He’s offered Boeing his batteries since they are safer than other companies’ batteries. Finally, his solar panel company, Solar City is a method for continually charging those batteries.

Elon Musk isn’t only trying to take out the car companies with Tesla. For the power grid batteries are effectively required to manage a renewable based power grid because there are times of no power from wind or sun. Musk already is deploying battery changing stations across the US. Right now these are powered by the grid and used to store energy. It’s likely he has designed these stations to be bidirectional so the grid can charge the batteries and power can be sent from the batteries to the grid. It’s likely that these stations will be topped with the best of the solar panels that Solar City is able to buy. Forcing more and more investment into higher capability solar panels.

As more Americans start to use Solar City, it’s likely that they will begin to offer batteries, made by Tesla, to help store excess power, some will go to the grid, some will be stored. This will then be sold to the grid during different hours to help stabilize the grid. Effectively, this could lead to a completely decentralized power grid where power companies only maintain the physical grid without generating any power.

As these various companies mature over time, they will continue to push the capabilities of their respective industries. This will have a positive impact on Musk’s true goal of colonizing Mars. He will continually have better and better solar panels to capture the weaker Martian sun. He’ll have more effective power/weight ratio for batteries that will charge almost in an instant. He’ll have a space ship that will get it there effectively and safely.

Elon Musk is building an empire to save humanity from itself. Overall, it’s pretty amazing.

Phone Encryption

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It’s been announced that both iOS and Android are going to have fully encryptable phones which will be a huge boon for our 4th amendment rights. As well as to protect us from more mundane things like theft or simply losing your phone. Our phones these days contain as much or more personal information as our computers do these days. The average person doesn’t have any sort of two step authentication on their personal accounts on their phones. In most case people do have some sort of password protection to get into the phone, but once in it’s fairly easy to get into many applications.

For end users there’s nothing better than having a stronger security measures as in many cases companies poorly manage their security. This can be highlighted from the past week of exploits and those celebrity pictures. Encrypting phones might not prevented the celebrity leak, but in many cases it could. It’s believed that some of the hacks of Paris Hilton years ago came from hacking her phone through a BlueTooth connection, so a fully encrypted phone may have protected her from that hack.

All these things are good, however, the Washington Post has decided that this encryption is a risk to public safety because it will help criminals. This is the exact same argument that people make against BitCoin and full disk encryption. BitCoin ended up spawning SilkRoad, which has been shut down and it’s more likely that more crime is committed with dollars rather than Bitcoin. Full Disk Encryption has been used by both criminals and the more technical savvy. With the recent changes where the government can simply take your laptop at boarder crossings without any sort of warrant. Which means anyone at anytime that could have been flagged by the NSA could have their computer searched at will.

It’s more likely that encryption will protect an average person from an arbitrary search than protect a criminal. It’s likely that without everyone being encrypted, having your computer or phone encrypted would have been a huge red flag, however, with these recent changes that can’t happen. Meaning the average person will be safer as well as the fully legal with nothing to hide security conscious individuals.

The Washington Post, FBI, and other agencies are wrong. Fully encryption on our phones protects our privacy, improves our fourth amendment, and give us more control over our own devices. If the FBI and the US government is successful in creating a backdoor the encryption will be worthless and the put us more at risk as we’ll have a false sense of security.

Retail and payment intermediaries

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In recent months there have been multiple instances where a major retailer has had their data infrastructure breached. This has resulted in millions of customer’s credit card information being compromised and stolen by some variety of criminal organization. It’s likely that the organization used skilled computer experts to hack into the system in some fashion. I also would not be surprised if some type of social engineering was used to ease their access to the data systems. Furthermore, if their Point of Sales devices were not fully secure that information could be gathered using a credit card that could also read information from the system.

This is the problem that applications like Google Wallet and Paypal are trying to solve. They are trying to position themselves as an intermediary between the customer and the retailer to protect the consumer and provide a common transaction method for many platforms including in person point of sales. I think the fact that I’m just now thinking about this has really shown that companies like Google and Starbucks have failed at showing where the true value in their product is.

I didn’t come to this conclusion without help though. Truthfully, it’s because of PalPal ads that I’ve been seeing on Huluplus. This ad walks through how unsafe we are using our credit cards with online retailers and that they protect your creditcard and bank account information from ever being seen by the retailer. Which, is a really powerful argument to use their services. Of course, that’s if you trust PayPal as an organization.

Personally, I’m concerned about using PayPal as they’ve had their own networks hacked with some account information stolen. They aren’t perfect, and honestly it’s likely going to be impossible to maintain and prevent any data breaches, but a company like PayPal should have that as their goal.

With that in mind, it’s kind of helped me think of the true value of both cash and a BitCoin like solution. At this point, it’s pretty clear that BitCoin has been compromised at least on some level. It’s not truly anonymous any more. Cash is still though. It’s the best way to buy anything from a store. It also reduces the rate that you spend your money compared to buying everything with a card. As you actually see the money disappear. Although, some times it doesn’t feel that way, especially when you’re out drinking at a bar.

I’m not sure I truly trust any of the large companies that offer these intermediary services. PayPal, Google, Apple, Samsung, Starbucks, and etc… all have their own version and all of these companies make money by locking you into their services. Google, Apple, and Samsung have the most incentive and potentially access, as they are selling you the only other thing you’ll have with you besides your cards, your phone. Locking you into not just their device but payment methodology is powerful. Not because it keeps you on their network, but also because it provides them with a huge amount of information about the rest of your life. Google likely will already have a lot of it based on your search history, but they don’t know what you’re actually buying. At this point they don’t have the full data to connect search results to purchases. Using Google Wallet closed that gap and provides a really valuable set of data for their customers.

Intermediaries are going to be really important moving forward because they will help reduce customer risk. It’s going to be important to figure out how to balance the risk of not using an intermediary with using one and providing them with massive amounts of data as well as extremely personal data that if all your eggs in one basket could be devastating.