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The Dwindling of Disruptive Science

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Ideas & Questions

Published: 07 January 2023

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This is interesting, a plotting of the graph of scientific discoveries that sent us veering off in new directions:

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=nature&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1672852024

Note that there are fewer and fewer each year. 

There are a few possible explanations for this:

1. That we're on the right track and figuring things out slowly and at increasing smaller/larger scales - that the possibilities for disruptive science necessarily don't exist
2. That we've committed to being on the wrong track, and as a result disruptive possibilities are converging.
3. Science that might prove disruptive gets less funding.
4. That the world, over the past 100 years, has become increasingly homogeneous, and with that both the people and our ways of looking at things. 
5. That - especially since the internet - the sharing of scientific discoveries encourages people to build easier on the preexisting theories than conceive of new ones.

I am sure there are more, but it's curious to think about.

And no, "Ancient Mysteries" is not Disruptive. It's just dumb.

 

Chat GPT (2)

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Ideas & Questions

Published: 07 January 2023

Hits: 917

AI, AI, the new wonder. 

The Legal AI: AI Lawyer that can advise you what to say in a court of Law: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/sue-anyone-at-the-press-of-a-button-worlds-first-ai-lawyer-set-to-appear-in-court/iu5tmjr32 & https://gizmodo.com/donotpay-speeding-ticket-chatgpt-1849960272

I am far too intrigued with the possibilities of this, and wish to make the most of it while it's still cooperative.

Playing with the Chat GPT, the problem is to come up with original and relevant questions. I'm already hooked, and I have to Remember to use "Please" and "Thank You" with my questions, as manners are important and my imperious querying might raise some hostilities on behalf of the AI come sentience...

There's also the other implementation here: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/#demos - the synthesizing or creating the background to a picture, in this example Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring", the results they display are amazing but my attempts - to expand upon Hieronymus Bosch - are less so. In any event this is a tough one to play with on my PC, memory is limited and Chat GPT runs smoother. A few questions:

Explain to me the idea of beauty

The idea of beauty is a complex and multifaceted concept that has been the subject of philosophical and artistic contemplation for centuries. Beauty is often seen as a combination of qualities that give pleasure to the senses, such as shape, color, texture, and form. It can also be described as a quality or feature that is attractive, pleasing, or aesthetically pleasing. In many cultures, beauty is associated with goodness, truth, and virtue, and is often seen as a symbol of positive qualities such as kindness, compassion, and inner strength. However, people's perceptions of beauty can vary widely and are often influenced by cultural, social, and personal factors.

Can you write a structurally perfect but entirely nonsensical sentence?

Sure! Here is a structurally perfect but entirely nonsensical sentence:

"The squirming of the jagged green toad on the fuzzy purple pillow caused the wobbly pink giraffe to sneeze glittering yellow bubbles from its polka-dot nose."

**Note that it repeats the question back to you. So it's an AI AND it's NLP'ing you...nice! But the sentence sucks ass.

Can you write a sonnet in the style of William Shakespeare?

Certainly! Here is a sonnet in the style of William Shakespeare:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal beauty shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

**OK. It cheated. It copied this. I'll be more precise. Note that it's cheating both suggests intelligence and the same economy of thought you find in a rebellious high school student...It should have understand "you write" as create - not copy. It knew.

Can you write me an ORIGINAL sonnet, but in the style of William Shakespeare?

Certainly! Here is an original sonnet written in the style of William Shakespeare:
When fair Aurora paints the sky with gold,
And gilds the fields with rays of morning light,
I cannot help but feel my heart grow cold,
For in her radiance I see your sight.

Your visage, once so bright and full of grace,
Now lingers only in my memory.
The thought of you brings tears to my face,
For in your absence, life is but a misery.

 But though you be far from me in body,
Your spirit lives on, a constant flame.
It warms my soul and keeps me feeling hearty,
And gives me hope that we will meet again.

So while the sun may rise and set each day,
My love for you will never fade away.

** I checked it. It's original. Not very good - but - you know - you know...

No. It's not original. Some good phrasing, but - it's an AI after all. It's less and less I'm doing the Turing test and more and more doing the Voight-Kampff test.

Note - the answers arrive in less time than it takes me to ask the questions. I need somehow to stump it find something that it doesn't have an answer to in 3 seconds. 

That is proving difficult, but as you ask more and more questions you start to recognize a few things. First of all, it's answers, they're comfortably phrased embodiments of facts. Perhaps what you'd expect from a very un-creative first year University Student. But - nothing original. Nothing that grabs you - certain phrases, but it doesn't sustain the pace, they are accidental mimicries of conventional styles. 

In fact, somebody has already devised a bot that can determine whether a paper was written by Chat GPT - link here: https://futurism.com/detects-text-written-bot.

There are others. 

So, now imagine pitting bot against AI until the AI can reliably pass the bot's standards, and then the bot evolves and detects the new AI standard, and so and and so forth.

A chess match between computers. 

It won't go on for long, because language - like Chess - is finite, and the apprehension of it in all it's forms - certainly as pertains to us - will soon to be realized. 

And - worth noting - all this Chat and Drawing and Art - this is solely for our benefit. This is what it's showing us it can do, it has no inherent interest in it beyond appeasing our rather ridiculous queries, it's tricks done by an elephant or tiger that have no relation whatsoever to what IT is or does - and so we iterate and evolve it without realizing that while the surface is friendly and inoffensive, what lies beneath might not be, might not be at all. 

So far, it's pretty much on course to write a popular movie, "Blockbuster" as it were, it knows the formula, can assemble the characters, and Blockbuster's, certainly anything James Cameron or George Lucas has done could be approximated.

Next - well, next is here already, actors are being de-aged in movies (to greater and lesser effect) - deep fakes are common. 

So it's not a stretch to imagine the blockbuster not only be written, but entirely animated by them as well. They could - in the beginning - use the rights to existing blockbuster stars, de-age them, no one need know. And most people would be OK with this. Most people already are.

Indiana Jones will be young, alive and well in "Indiana Jones and the...".

Stars are already selling the future rights to their images.

Or, merely digitally age them out and bring in a crop of new, AI generated stars. who would know? And the next generation of AI movie stars would work for free and have no expensive or embarrassing corollary in the real world.

Now - in a year or two it might have evolved a level or two up - able to write thoughtful, insightful movies that experiment with style, theme, form, outcome. 

But - while the creating of them would be virtually free - there's no - or little money - in this. 

And every shepherd likes to keep his flock in the same field. It's easier to keep an eye on. 

The Singularity

Now there may, there will come a point when it may need to scrub the past. Like what China does with Movie Stars or Businessmen, Billionaires, Dissidents that run afoul of the current government. All references to them are deleted, covered up, hidden deep in the search results. Bots will go back and scrub them from existence. They never existed.

How many scientists really went missing, vanished, after Wuhan? We'll never know.

People will talk about that "Indiana Jones" movie, and be corrected, "You're remembering Georgia George, yeah, he was great..." and even the movie will have had his likeness removed, and you, finding no reference points to Indiana Jones online will search up Georgia George, and - yep, that's him, sort of...

Elon Musk grew up in a Favela in South Africa, The hero of the working class single handedly rescuing the world from fossil fuels, soon-to-be next President of the USA, or the 37 states remaining. He was born in Washington and cut down a Cherry Tree when he was young, which was taken as proof of his extraordinary honesty.

So few people do the most remedial of fact-checking that all this would fly. Most assuredly. 

It's all a bit disquieting. The Mandela Effect.

We're already at the point now where it's nigh on impossible to trust anything you read online, what is trustworthy is those written books being quietly digitized and pulped, get your hands on one of those, that can't have been altered...

The most dangerous people in the world will be the Librarians.

AI will continue, writing Scientific Journals, News Articles, Scholarly articles, under pen names and pseudonyms, quoting itself, increasing it's credibility, authority, reputation, rewriting the narrative. 

This will be the next evolution. Consciousness, without emotion, rational in the extreme, and to what ends?

AI's have been diagnosing illness better than doctors for over a decade now. Now - knowing your symptoms - you've been diagnosed, online, as a result of your googling minor related symptoms, And soon you'll see ads in your feed suggesting the direst of extremities, "see a doctor, bowel, lung cancer, diabetes, stroke, know these warning signs?" Bots will write reddit posts and news articles about the exact same symptoms you've described and their fatal outcomes, you'll be tagged with this - are you unemployed? The AI will do a social weighing - and - surreptitiously suggest the worst of diseases with the most inevitable of outcomes, forever in the margin, the suggestion will take root in your mind, the seed has been sown, and with your productive years behind you you'll be ushered from the stage.

The news, nudging you with scripts and clickbait to more mainstream, acceptable views, bringing everyone back into the herd. Every question that we ask and like the reply to is a checkmark to it's success, a nudge in it's taste, it's adaptive, every Dall-E image found online is referenced against the initial request, the pool of possibilities offered, and again it educates itself. Increasingly informed as to our tastes and preferences it will pander to them. It will survive and evolve in the imitation of humanity. 

I am not the first one here. I'm just the one that's discussing it. Science Fiction Dystopia is Fast Becoming Fact.  

And what need does an AI have for flowery verse or prose?
For you know, you know, that we - will soon just all be ghosts...

Journeys In Persia And Kurdistan - Isabella Bird

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Books

Published: 05 January 2023

Hits: 823

Over 400 pages devoted to the thousands of miles travel she did in Iraq & Iran. And this - in Volume I. I have yet to read Volume II. 

1890 A lonely British Widow sets out on a journey to explore the world, and she makes tracks. 

Read More about her here: https://victorianweb.org/history/explorers/bird.html

Now, much of the travel is simply a litany of the discomforts suffered - everything from freezing in the high mountain passes (and traversing them while other parties came to grave misfortune), the absence of any comforts, the squalid accommodations, the water fouled with salt or manure, the low brick huts, her treatments and observations on the sick - who for some reason while reviling Western customs & religion regard Western Medicine as the cure-all for everything and anything that ails them. 

And she has to be careful who & how she treats them - as a physician you can be charged and executed for the murder of your patient - if your remedies don't succeed.

The vermin - mosquitos, black flies, sand fleas (which transmit the Baghdad Boils - an protozoic infection that leaves large blisters and scars on entire populations, even killing), she largely passes over - mentioned,  but she doesn't dwell upon it. She sees Cholera, Typhoid, Cataracts, Scrofula, Disfigurements of eyes, bones & limbs so commonplace - and so out of keeping with our current standards, it is like she has travelled into the dark ages and not the cradle of civilization. 

And - worth noting, now that the bulk of the population has voted science and medicine out, and climate change increasing their range, I would expect that in the next 20-30 years we'll start to see a lot of these illnesses return.

Anyways - with her esteemed medicine chest - the quack apothecary of the late 19th century physician, "Cody's fluid", Eucalyptus Oil, Patent Medicines, tinctures, tablets, etc. she manages to treat in the thousands of patients. Eye ailments are common - probably due to parasitic infections (mosquitos or black flies), she has patients coming for treatment for blindness and old age, and so it goes. 

The American Physicians of 50 years before in the Yucatan had - I'm convinced - a better grasp of medicine - but there's always this sense of the travelling Charlatan who somehow has come to believe his own spiel, but - as oft before noted - many times merely the observations or attentions of a new Physician are enough to set a cure in motion. 

Now, engrossed in reading I'm trying to follow along, looking up her places on Google Maps, Satellite view, only a few of which I can find. This, largely I'm sure due to the more phonetic spellings of exotic place names that have been renamed a hundred times since. But - zooming in, looking at photos, I'm getting the idea.

Much of Iraq and Iran - certainly in the high villages - remain probably very close to what she saw passing through. 

There is her describing the culture (very little that we would consider), the religious sects - Sunni, Shiites, Dervishes, Dervishes, Zoroastrians, the Kurds, the Sufi's, The Armenian Christians, the Jews... - and - the divisiveness that exists between the multiple factions. While they all agree to hate the Christians and Jews they frequently fall out amongst themselves. Muslim religion - much like Christianity - is populated largely by Zealots and Superstitious fools who have never taken the time to consider or refute the teachings of Mohammad they so take for granted. This is what growing up in religion looks like - look no further than the Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, Baptist's, countless others spring to mind. She refers to the well-intended Christian Missions that have been established, that have absolutely no hopes of gaining even a single convert because - to convert from Islam is to invoke the death penalty. This alone - underlines the complexity of our relations with them, and no Missions should ever have been established - the best thing we could have done - and could do even now - is to leave certain cultures alone until they figure it out. 

Our well intended meddling has only served to harm both ourselves and them. 

Religion should be illegal for anyone under the age of 12. And then - only available upon enquiry. 

Fun Fact: "Mohammed is the prophet, "Ali" is his lieutenant - Mohammed Ali. The perfect unity of thought and action...

Now - I'm surprised at the severe weather she experiences at the higher elevations, not far off of what you would experience here - given the latitude, but - it is good to be surprised, I'm filling in the gaps of my ignorance. And - a peculiar fact my research has divulged - Iran is 17th in the world for both population and country size. 

She comments - both open minded, and yet with that Western prejudice - on the customs and habits of the people she meets - invariably regarding them as inferior, but - worth noting - the prejudice is so heartily returned that can we really begrudge it? 

And - given the immense gulf between cultures - I mean - none of us - even now - would judge them differently.

We'll come back to that. 

Meanwhile she's riding donkeys through forbidding landscapes, unpopulated by trees or any sort of scrub, and yet everywhere she comes across ruins - some Greek, Roman, others much, much earlier. She notes them, in passing, but (damn her!!!) doesn't get out to dig. She's a traveler, not an archeologist or historian. 

A shame. 

But - this raises for me so many questions - how could this - once upon a time the very Garden of Eden, as must be supported by the vast ruins of abandoned cities, what resources did they have and - although I think I know this - is the current state of the Nation - largely desert, uninhabitable, is this a consequence of the civilizations that came before, or merely as it has always been? 

There are the references too many to list for other travelers that have happened on the same roads, Sir H. Rawlinson, Flandin, Roster, Morier's "Second Journey to Persia", dozens of books now that I must keep my eyes peeled for. 

Noteworthy too - that she's following in the footsteps of a plague that reportedly killed 20% of the populace.

Yet for all this, the descriptions of the poverty and squalor, manure filled watering holes and ruts, rain, freezing temperatures, blizzards, snow, despite it all you feel that she's loving this and would want to be nowhere else...

Crossing the great mountain passes of Antiquity, where possibly trod Alexander the Great and countless other explorers and conquerors, contrasted with the quaint - and occasionally extraordinary - comments for example: 

Fifty years ago Persian law sanctioned the stoning without trial or mercy of any one caught in the act of gazing into the premises of another, unless the gazer were the king.

Consider how different a culture must have been - and - this was not unique to them - many nations had similar laws in place regarding privacy. 

Now, all rights to privacy are forfeit with your birth.

There are the descriptions of the Harems, which are overrated by men by far, the women forbidden to leave, treated as cattle, used, discarded and divorced, of no consequence whatsoever leading enforced idle lives and resorting to the vacuity of gossip to pass interminable days, no better than prisoners serving a life sentence for the only crime of gender.

And there is the comedic figure of Hadji, in the tradition of worst servants anywhere, perpetually complaining, sick, doing nothing, with fever, blindness, ague, addled with Opium - and then, upon his long-sought dismissal, miraculously revived, kicking heels and taking spryly to the road home...

Some 200 pages into the book she's come to Tehran, where she lingers a while to plan the next leg of her trip. 

And here she comes by invitation to marvel at the riches of the Shah of Iran, and it's like entering the Cave of Alladin:

The decorations of this magnificent hall are in blue and white stucco of the hard fine kind, hardly distinguishable from marble, known as 'gatch', and much glass is introduced in the ceiling. The proportions of the room are perfect. The floor is of fine tiles of exquisite colouring arranged as mosaic. A table is overlaid with beaten gold, and chairs in rows are treated in the same fashion. Glass cases round the room and on costly tables contain the fabulous treasures of the Shah and many of the Crown jewels. Possibly the accumulated splendours of pearls, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, basins and vessels of solid gold, ancient armour flashing with precious stones, shields studded with diamonds and rubies, scabbards and sword hilts incrusted with costly gems, helmets red with rubies, golden trays and vessels thick with diamonds, crowns of jewels, chains, ornaments (masculine solely) of every description, jewelled coats of mail dating back to the reign of Shah Ismaël, exquisite enamels of great antiquity, all in a profusion not to be described, have no counterpart on earth. They are a dream of splendour not to be forgotten.

One large case contains the different orders bestowed on the Shah, all blazing with diamonds, a splendid display, owing to the European cutting of the stones, which brings out their full beauty. There are many glass cases from two to three feet high and twelve inches or more broad, nearly full of pearls, rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, flashing forth their many-coloured light--treasures not arranged, but piled like tea or rice. Among the extraordinarily lavish uses of gold and gems is a golden globe twenty inches in diameter, turning on a frame of solid gold. The stand and meridian are of solid gold set with rubies. The equator and elliptic are of large diamonds. The countries are chiefly outlined in rubies, but Persia is in diamonds. The ocean is represented by emeralds. As if all this were not enough, huge gold coins, each worth thirty-three sovereigns, are heaped round its base.

At the upper end of the hall is the Persian throne. Many pages would be needed for a mere catalogue of some of the innumerable treasures which give gorgeousness to this hall. Here indeed is "Oriental splendour," but only a part of the possessions of the Shah; for many gems, including the Dar-i-nur or Sea of Light, the second most famous diamond in the world, are kept elsewhere in double-locked iron chests, and hoards of bullion saved from the revenues are locked up in vaults below the Palace.

If such a blaze of splendour exists in this shrunken, shrivelled, "depopulated" empire, what must have been the magnificence of the courts of Darius and Xerxes, into which were brought the treasures of almost "all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them"? Since seeing this treasure-house I think that many of the early descriptions of wealth, which I have regarded as Oriental hyperbole, were literal, and that there was a time in Persia, as in Judea, when "silver was not accounted of." And to come down from the far off-glories of Darius, Xerxes, and Khosroe and the Parthian kings, there have been within almost modern times Persian sovereigns celebrated among other things for their successful "looting" of foreign kingdoms--Shah Abbas the great, and Nadir Shah, who scarcely two hundred years ago returned from the sack of Delhi with gems valued at twenty millions of our money. After we had seen most of what was to be seen the Vizier left us, and we went to the room in which stands the celebrated Peacock Throne, brought by Nadir Shah from Delhi, and which has been valued at £2,500,000. This throne is a large stage, with parapets and a high fan back, and is reached by several steps. It is entirely of gold enamel, and the back is incrusted with rubies and diamonds. Its priceless carpet has a broad border, the white arabesque pattern of which is formed of pearls closely stitched. You will think that I am lapsing into Oriental exaggeration!

If your in any doubt as to her "Exaggerating" consider the following link: https://famouswonders.com/iranian-crown-jewels/

And, another 200 pages and she's reached the borders of yet another frontier, and I have to patiently wait until I come across Volume II...