My editorial on You Tube
I think I have just put a nice label on all those ideas I have been rummaging in for the last 2 years. The last 4 months, when I have been progressively initiating myself at artificial intelligence, have helped me to put it all in a nice frame. Here is the idea for a book, or rather for THE book, which I have been drafting for some time. « Our artificial intelligence »: this is the general title. The first big chapter, which might very well turn into the first book out of a whole series, will be devoted to energy and technological change. After that, I want to have a go at two other big topics: food and agriculture, then laws and institutions.
I explain. What does it mean « Our artificial intelligence »? As I have been working with an initially simple algorithm of a neural network, and I have been progressively developing it, I understood a few things about the link between what we call, fault of a better word, artificial intelligence, and the way my own brain works. No, not my brain. That would be an overstatement to say that I understand fully my own brain. My mind, this is the right expression. What I call « mind » is an idealized, i.e. linguistic description of what happens in my nervous system. As I have been working with a neural network, I have discovered that artificial intelligence that I make, and use, is a mathematical expression of my mind. I project my way of thinking into a set of mathematical expressions, made into an algorithmic sequence. When I run the sequence, I have the impression of dealing with something clever, yet slightly alien: an artificial intelligence. Still, when I stop staring at the thing, and start thinking about it scientifically (you know: initial observation, assumptions, hypotheses, empirical check, new assumptions and new hypotheses etc.), I become aware that the alien thing in front of me is just a projection of my own way of thinking.
This is important about artificial intelligence: this is our own, human intelligence, just seen from outside and projected into electronics. This particular point is an important piece of theory I want to develop in my book. I want to compile research in neurophysiology, especially in the neurophysiology of meaning, language, and social interactions, in order to give scientific clothes to that idea. When we sometimes ask ourselves whether artificial intelligence can eliminate humans, it boils down to asking: ‘Can human intelligence eliminate humans?’. Well, where I come from, i.e. Central Europe, the answer is certainly ‘yes, it can’. As a matter of fact, when I raise my head and look around, the same answer is true for any part of the world. Human intelligence can eliminate humans, and it can do so because it is human, not because it is ‘artificial’.
When I think about the meaning of the word ‘artificial’, it comes from the Latin ‘artificium’, which, in turn, designates something made with skill and demonstrable craft. Artificium means seasoned skills made into something durable so as to express those skills. Artificial intelligence is a crafty piece of work made with one of the big human inventions: mathematics. Artificial intelligence is mathematics at work. Really at work, i.e. not just as another idealization of reality, but as an actual tool. When I study the working of algorithms in neural networks, I have a vision of an architect in Ancient Greece, where the first mathematics we know seem to be coming from. I have a wall and a roof, and I want them both to hold in balance, so what is the proportion between their respective lengths? I need to learn it by trial and error, as I haven’t any architectural knowledge yet. Although devoid of science, I have common sense, and I make small models of the building I want (have?) to erect, and I test various proportions. Some of those maquettes are more successful than others. I observe, I make my synthesis about the proportions which give the least error, and so I come up with something like the Pythagorean z2 = x2 + y2, something like π = 3,14 etc., or something like the discovery that, for a given angle, the tangent proportion y/x makes always the same number, whatever the empirical lengths of y and x.
This is exactly what artificial intelligence does. It makes small models of itself, tests the error resulting from comparison between those models and something real, and generalizes the observation of those errors. Really: this is what a face recognition piece of software does at an airport, or what Google Ads does. This is human intelligence, just unloaded into a mathematical vessel. This is the first discovery that I have made about AI. Artificial intelligence is actually our own intelligence. Studying the way AI behaves allows seeing, like under a microscope, the workings of human intelligence.
The second discovery is that when I put a neural network to work with empirical data of social sciences, it produces strange, intriguing patterns, something like neighbourhoods of the actual reality. In my root field of research – namely economics – there is a basic concept that we, economists, use a lot and still wonder what it actually means: equilibrium. It is an old observation that networks of exchange in human societies tend to find balance in some precise proportions, for example proportions between demand, supply, price and quantity, or those between labour and capital.
Half of economic sciences is about explaining the equilibriums we can empirically observe. The other half employs itself at discarding what that first half comes up with. Economic equilibriums are something we know that exists, and constantly try to understand its mechanics, but those states of society remain obscure to a large extent. What we know is that networks of exchange are like machines: some designs just work, some others just don’t. One of the most important arguments in economic sciences is whether a given society can find many alternative equilibriums, i.e. whether it can use optimally its resources at many alternative proportions between economic variables, or, conversely, is there just one point of balance in a given place and time. From there on, it is a rabbit hole. What does it mean ‘using our resources optimally’? Is it when we have the lowest unemployment, or when we have just some healthy amount of unemployment? Theories are welcome.
When trying to make predictions about the future, using the apparatus of what can now be called classical statistics, social sciences always face the same dilemma: rigor vs cognitive depth. The most interesting correlations are usually somehow wobbly, and mathematical functions we derive from regression always leave a lot of residual errors.
This is when AI can step in. Neural networks can be used as tools for optimization in digital systems. Still, they have another useful property: observing a neural network at work allows having an insight into how intelligent structures optimize. If I want to understand how economic equilibriums take shape, I can observe a piece of AI producing many alternative combinations of the relevant variables. Here comes my third fundamental discovery about neural networks: with a few, otherwise quite simple assumptions built into the algorithm, AI can produce very different mechanisms of learning, and, consequently, a broad range of those weird, yet intellectually appealing, alternative states of reality. Here is an example: when I make a neural network observe its own numerical properties, such as its own kernel or its own fitness function, its way of learning changes dramatically. Sounds familiar? When you make a human being performing tasks, and you allow them to see the MRI of their own brain when performing those tasks, the actual performance changes.
When I want to talk about applying artificial intelligence, it is a good thing to return to the sources of my own experience with AI, and explain it works. Some sequences of mathematical equations, when run recurrently many times, behave like intelligent entities: they experiment, they make errors, and after many repeated attempts they come up with a logical structure that minimizes the error. I am looking for a good, simple example from real life; a situation which I experienced personally, and which forced me to learn something new. Recently, I went to Marrakech, Morocco, and I had the kind of experience that most European first-timers have there: the Jemaa El Fna market place, its surrounding souks, and its merchants. The experience consists in finding your way out of the maze-like structure of the alleys adjacent to the Jemaa El Fna. You walk down an alley, you turn into another one, then into still another one, and what you notice only after quite a few such turns is that the whole architectural structure doesn’t follow AT ALL the European concept of urban geometry.
Thus, you face the length of an alley. You notice five lateral openings and you see a range of lateral passages. In a European town, most of those lateral passages would lead somewhere. A dead end is an exception, and passages between buildings are passages in the strict sense of the term: from one open space to another open space. At Jemaa El Fna, its different: most of the lateral ways lead into deep, dead-end niches, with more shops and stalls inside, yet some other open up into other alleys, possibly leading to the main square, or at least to a main street.
You pin down a goal: get back to the main square in less than… what? One full day? Just kidding. Let’s peg that goal down at 15 minutes. Fault of having a good-quality drone, equipped with thermovision, flying over the whole structure of the souk, and guiding you, you need to experiment. You need to test various routes out of the maze and to trace those, which allow the x ≤ 15 minutes time. If all the possible routes allowed you to get out to the main square in exactly 15 minutes, experimenting would be useless. There is any point in experimenting only if some from among the possible routes yield a suboptimal outcome. You are facing a paradox: in order not to make (too much) errors in your future strolls across Jemaa El Fna, you need to make some errors when you learn how to stroll through.
Now, imagine a fancy app in your smartphone, simulating the possible errors you can make when trying to find your way through the souk. You could watch an imaginary you, on the screen, wandering through the maze of alleys and dead-ends, learning by trial and error to drive the time of passage down to no more than 15 minutes. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? You could see your possible errors from outside, and you could study the way you can possibly learn from them. Of course, you could always say: ‘it is not the real me, it is just a digital representation of what I could possibly do’. True. Still, I can guarantee you: whatever you say, whatever strong the grip you would try to keep on the actual, here-and-now you, you just couldn’t help being fascinated.
Is there anything more, beyond fascination, in observing ourselves making many possible future mistakes? Let’s think for a moment. I can see, somehow from outside, how a copy of me deals with the things of life. Question: how does the fact of seeing a copy of me trying to find a way through the souk differ from just watching a digital map of said souk, with GPS, such as Google Maps? I tried the latter, and I have two observations. Firstly, in some structures, such as that of maze-like alleys adjacent to Jemaa El Fna, seeing my own position on Google Maps is of very little help. I cannot put my finger on the exact reason, but my impression is that when the environment becomes just too bizarre for my cognitive capacities, having a bird’s eye view of it is virtually no good. Secondly, when I use Google Maps with GPS, I learn very little about my route. I just follow directions on the screen, and ultimately, I get out into the main square, but I know that I couldn’t reproduce that route without the device. Apparently, there is no way around learning stuff by myself: if I really want to learn how to move through the souk, I need to mess around with different possible routes. A device that allows me to see how exactly I can mess around looks like having some potential.
Question: how do I know that what I see, in that imaginary app, is a functional copy of me, and how can I assess the accuracy of that copy? This is, very largely, the rabbit hole I have been diving into for the last 5 months or so. The first path to follow is to look at the variables used. Artificial intelligence works with numerical data, i.e. with local instances of abstract variables. Similarity between the real me, and the me reproduced as artificial intelligence is to find in the variables used. In real life, variables are the kinds of things, which: a) are correlated with my actions, both as outcomes and as determinants b) I care about, and yet I am not bound to be conscious of caring about.
Here comes another discovery I made on my journey through the realm of artificial intelligence: even if, in the simplest possible case, I just make the equations of my neural network so as they represent what I think is the way I think, and I drop some completely random values of the relevant variables into the first round of experimentation, the neural network produces something disquietingly logical and coherent. In other words, if I am even moderately honest in describing, in the form of equations, my way of apprehending reality, the AI I thus created really processes information in the way I would.
Another way of assessing the similarity between a piece of AI and myself is to compare the empirical data we use: I can make a neural network think more or less like me if I feed it with an accurate description of my so-far experience. In this respect, I discovered something that looks like a keystone in my intellectual structure: as I feed my neural network with more and more empirical data, the scope of the possible ways to learning something meaningful narrows down. When I minimise the amount of empirical data fed into the network, the latter can produce interesting, meaningful results via many alternative sequences of equations. As the volume of real-life information swells, some sequences of equations just naturally drop off the game: they drive the neural network into a state of structural error, when it stops performing calculations.
At this point, I can see some similarity between AI and quantum physics. Quantum mechanics have grown as a methodology, as they proved to be exceptionally accurate in predicting the outcomes of experiments in physics. That accuracy was based on the capacity to formulate very precise hypotheses regarding empirical reality, and the capacity to increase the precision of those hypotheses through the addition of empirical data from past experiments.
Those fundamental observations I made about the workings of artificial intelligence have progressively brought me to use AI in social sciences. An analytical tool has become a topic of research for me. Happens all the time in science, mind you. Geometry, way back in the day, was a thoroughly practical set of tools, which served to make good boats, ships and buildings. With time, geometry has become a branch of science on its own rights. In my case, it is artificial intelligence. It is a tool, essentially, invented back in the 1960ies and 1970ies, and developed over the last 20 years, and it serves practical purposes: facial identification, financial investment etc. Still, as I have been working with a very simple neural network for the last 4 months, and as I have been developing the logical structure of that network, I am discovering a completely new opening in my research in social sciences.
I am mildly obsessed with the topic of collective human intelligence. I have that deeply rooted intuition that collective human behaviour is always functional regarding some purpose. I perceive social structures such as financial markets or political institutions as something akin to endocrine systems in a body: complex set of signals with a random component in their distribution, and yet a very coherent outcome. I follow up on that intuition by assuming that we, humans, are most fundamentally, collectively intelligent regarding our food and energy base. We shape our social structures according to the quantity and quality of available food and non-edible energy. For quite a while, I was struggling with the methodological issue of precise hypothesis-making. What states of human society can be posited as coherent hypotheses, possible to check or, fault of checking, to speculate about in an informed way?
The neural network I am experimenting with does precisely this: it produces strange, puzzling, complex states, defined by the quantitative variables I use. As I am working with that network, I have come to redefining the concept of artificial intelligence. A movie-based approach to AI is that it is fundamentally non-human. As I think about it sort of step by step, AI is human, as it has been developed on the grounds of human logic. It is human meaning, and therefore an expression of human neural wiring. It is just selective in its scope. Natural human intelligence has no other way of comprehending but comprehending IT ALL, i.e. the whole of perceived existence. Artificial intelligence is limited in scope: it works just with the data we assign it to work with. AI can really afford not to give a f**k about something otherwise important. AI is focused in the strict sense of the term.
During that recent stay in Marrakech, Morocco, I had been observing people around me and their ways of doing things. As it is my habit, I am patterning human behaviour. I am connecting the dots about the ways of using energy (for the moment I haven’t seen any making of energy, yet) and food. I am patterning the urban structure around me and the way people live in it.
Superbly kept gardens and buildings marked by a sense of instability. Human generosity combined with somehow erratic behaviour in the same humans. Of course, women are fully dressed, from head to toes, but surprisingly enough, men too. With close to 30 degrees Celsius outside, most local dudes are dressed like a Polish guy would dress by 10 degrees Celsius. They dress for the heat as I would dress for noticeable cold. Exquisitely fresh and firm fruit and vegetables are a surprise. After having visited Croatia, on the Southern coast of Europe, I would rather expect those tomatoes to be soft and somehow past due. Still, they are excellent. Loads of sugar in very nearly everything. Meat is scarce and tough. All that has been already described and explained by many a researcher, wannabe researchers included. I think about those things around me as about local instances of a complex logical structure: a collective intelligence able to experiment with itself. I wonder what other, hypothetical forms could this collective intelligence take, close to the actually observable reality, as well as some distance from it.
The idea I can see burgeoning in my mind is that I can understand better the actual reality around me if I use some analytical tool to represent slight hypothetical variations in said reality. Human behaviour first. What exactly makes me perceive Moroccans as erratic in their behaviour, and how can I represent it in the form of artificial intelligence? Subjectively perceived erraticism is a perceived dissonance between sequences. I expect a certain sequence to happen in other people’s behaviour. The sequence that really happens is different, and possibly more differentiated than what I expect to happen. When I perceive the behaviour of Moroccans as erratic, does it connect functionally with their ways of making and using food and energy?
A behavioural sequence is marked by a certain order of actions, and a timing. In a given situation, humans can pick their behaviour from a total basket of Z = {a1, a2, …, az} possible actions. These, in turn, can combine into zPk = z!/(z – k)! = (1*2*…*z) / [1*2*…*(z – k)] possible permutations of k component actions. Each such permutation happens with a certain frequency. The way a human society works can be described as a set of frequencies in the happening of those zPk permutations. Well, that’s exactly what a neural network such as mine can do. It operates with values standardized between 0 and 1, and these can be very easily interpreted as frequencies of happening. I have a variable named ‘energy consumption per capita’. When I use it in the neural network, I routinely standardize each empirical value over the maximum of this variable in the entire empirical dataset. Still, standardization can convey a bit more of a mathematical twist and can be seen as the density of probability under the curve of a statistical distribution.
When I feel like giving such a twist, I can make my neural network stroll down different avenues of intelligence. I can assume that all kinds of things happen, and all those things are sort of densely packed one next to the other, and some of those things are sort of more expected than others, and thus I can standardize my variables under the curve of the normal distribution. Alternatively, I can see each empirical instance of each variable in my database as a rare event in an interval of time, and then I standardize under the curve of the Poisson distribution. A quick check with the database I am using right now brings an important observation: the same empirical data standardized with a Poisson distribution becomes much more disparate as compared to the same data standardized with the normal distribution. When I use Poisson, I lead my empirical network to divide sharply empirical data into important stuff on the one hand, and all the rest, not even worth to bother about, on the other hand.
I am giving an example. Here comes energy consumption per capita in Ecuador (1992) = 629,221 kg of oil equivalent (koe), Slovak Republic (2000) = 3 292,609 koe, and Portugal (2003) = 2 400,766 koe. These are three different states of human society, characterized by a certain level of energy consumption per person per year. They are different. I can choose between three different ways of making sense out of their disparity. I can see them quite simply as ordinals on a scale of magnitude, i.e. I can standardize them as fractions of the greatest energy consumption in the whole sample. When I do so, they become: Ecuador (1992) = 0,066733839, Slovak Republic (2000) = 0,349207223, and Portugal (2003) = 0,254620211.
In an alternative worldview, I can perceive those three different situations as neighbourhoods of an expected average energy consumption, in the presence of an average, standard deviation from that expected value. In other words, I assume that it is normal that countries differ in their energy consumption per capita, as well as it is normal that years of observation differ in that respect. I am thinking normal distribution, and then my three situations come as: Ecuador (1992) = 0,118803134, Slovak Republic (2000) = 0,556341893, and Portugal (2003) = 0,381628627.
I can adopt an even more convoluted approach. I can assume that energy consumption in each given country is the outcome of a unique, hardly reproducible process of local adjustment. Each country, with its energy consumption per capita, is a rare event. Seen from this angle, my three empirical states of energy consumed per capita could occur with the probability of the Poisson distribution, estimated with the whole sample of data. With this specific take on the thing, my three empirical values become: Ecuador (1992) = 0, Slovak Republic (2000) = 0,999999851, and Portugal (2003) = 9,4384E-31.
I come back to Morocco. I perceive some behaviours in Moroccans as erratic. I think I tend to think Poisson distribution. I expect some very tightly defined, rare event of behaviour, and when I see none around, I discard everything else as completely not fitting the bill. As I think about it, I guess most of our human intelligence is Poisson-based. We think ‘good vs bad’, ‘edible vs not food’, ‘friend vs foe’ etc.
I am consistently delivering good, almost new science to my readers, and love doing it, and I am working on crowdfunding this activity of mine. As we talk business plans, I remind you that you can download, from the library of my blog, the business plan I prepared for my semi-scientific project Befund (and you can access the French version as well). You can also get a free e-copy of my book ‘Capitalism and Political Power’ You can support my research by donating directly, any amount you consider appropriate, to my PayPal account. You can also consider going to my Patreon page and become my patron. If you decide so, I will be grateful for suggesting me two things that Patreon suggests me to suggest you. Firstly, what kind of reward would you expect in exchange of supporting me? Secondly, what kind of phases would you like to see in the development of my research, and of the corresponding educational tools?
