Philomeme

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Citizens in Transition

Great events separate the people of the United States into generations. War, prosperity, and social events all contribute to forming citizens in an age. Our parents guide us through childhood to become adults in the culture currents of our times. Events in our lives define us into distinctive generations.

Transitions of citizens.

Those who grew up in the Great Depression and fought in World War II were named by Tom Brokaw to be the “Greatest” generation” for their sacrifice and service.

The Korean War and the start of the economic boom that came after world conflict defined those we know of as the “Silent" Generation.

A huge boom in births lead to a population heavily influenced by Vietnam and the social turmoil created the “Baby Boomers”.

“Generation X” had information technologies like the personal computer and cable television as their bread and butter.

An economic boom and a war on terror heavily influenced the most recent of these generations of citizens, often known as the “Millennial's” or “Generation Y”.

Recently the Pew Research Center released a report highlighting the differences between these groups. Some of the differences between them are startling. They point to large demographic trends that will effect our nation and even the world over the coming decades.

Marriage

One of the largest trends is in the break down of traditional marriage.

Less than half of “Millennial's” are marrying when compared to the “Greatest” generation.

This trend has been going on for many decades. Some of have attributed the decline in marriage to the legal redefinition allowing for no fault divorce.

Population

The huge influx of boomers still dominates the population. Sometimes referred to as the “egg in the snake”, the huge numbers of births in the post World War II has moved the largest populated generation slowly through society.

As they age in the next few decades they will place a large load of support on the less populous generations that followed them.

Education

The Feminist Movement has had a major impact on the educational differences of the generations. The Title IX act of 1972 forced schools to give women equal opportunity in education across the land forcing changes that are apparent today. The country is becoming more highly educated with each generation. Note that the "Millennial's" percentages may be lower than for other generations as they have had less time to finish college.

Income

Along with more education, incomes for the generations have risen.

Considering that the peak earning years are age 40 to 50 for most people, the Millennial's are doing surprisingly better than their parents did at their age.

Factored into median household income, although not shown specifically in the graphs, are that many families have become "two income" with both men and women earning.

Military Service

Lastly is information that should give us pause. With the advent of a volunteer military service, the connection between voters and military members has been shattered.

The number of citizens who are veterans and bear the responsibility for defending liberty has seen a sharp decrease since the 1970's when the draft was ended.

The long term effect to our social contract with each other has yet to play out, but will over the next decades.

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Monday, February 11, 2013

Age of the Brain Tools

In the near future our brain tools (computing machines) will be smarter than we are. These brain tools may not be able to have free will or think like we do. The brain tools capability to do mental type tasks will be huge. Computers, or something like them, will be embedded into everything we use. They will be smart, highly connected and everywhere. Of course, this assumes that we as a species survive into that future. In this post we will examine the basic directions of our calculating machines and try to see what some of the outcomes may be.

Moore's Law

Computing Power Is Increasing

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore described a trend in brain tool power that has held true for over 40 years. He described a trend that components were getting smaller each year. (Click on the images to expand them.)

More Computers than People

The number of computer processors units (CPU) being sold is also increasing. Even a very conservative estimate based on the growth rate of CPUs sold over the last 20 years suggests there will be more computing machines than people soon. If this trend continues, we will be awash in brain tool power with dozens or even hundreds of machines per person.

Bandwidth Usage Exploding

First with modems, later with cable, and more recently with wireless, the global demand for bandwidth connecting these brain tools is growing exponentially. Even if this growth were to begin to level off, our brain tools will have an enormous ability to communicate by the middle of the century.

Multiplying the Human Brain

One abstract measure of the ability of our brain tools to calculate is in millions of instructions per second (MIPS). MIPS are a method of comparing brain power. Current brain tools have about the same capability of processing as a lizard.

If Gordon Moore's trend continues at the same pace, in my life time a single brain tool will have the ability to process at the level of a human brain.

Within my children's lifetime a single brain tool will have the ability to process as much as all the human brains on the planet.

What Will We Become?

Even if these estimates are exaggerated, the world of 2100 will be radically different than today. If we think in terms the age of the earth, thousands or even millions of years, this is a sudden and drastic change in information, computation, and communication power on Earth.

Imagine having a machine that has the ability to process as much information as every human mind alive today does today. All at once, in one little box. In your home. In your car. At your job. On the street lamp. In the police car. In the criminals hand. In the tank. Everywhere.

DARPA pack mule with a lizard brain.

The potential power of these processing machines overwhelms my ability to conceive what will be possible. Even if the tool is limited to just pushing information around, its power will be awesome. As this kind of power becomes wide spread, it will be a boon and a threat to us humans.

Our grandchildren will live in a reality so different from my grandparents that it will be unrecognizable. The ability to make smarter decisions will certainly be present. The amount of information available to us to do what we do will be much greater. As the machines become more capable, they will deliver the information we need more readily. Even if artificial intelligence is never obtained, the shear power of the calculators and communicators that these brain tools become will make us transcend what we humans are today.

The connected-ness of the world is increasing so rapidly as if to make the old barriers of time and place which kept us apart almost irrelevant. This blog alone is read in 20+ countries by many people I would have had no contact with 50 years ago. Our ability to speak with each other and understand each other in real time across the planet will make the Tower of Babel seem like a the dreams of a child.

Decisions At Hand

I do not know if it will be a better world, but hope it to be so. We are at a key point in human history where we have the opportunity to solve many intractable problems by applying our new brain tools. We are also at great peril of losing our freedom to the domination of information. We could rely on these machines as a crutch and even lose our ability to think for ourselves.

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave."

As we move forward into this new age of the mechanical minds, we need to take care as to how we use them. If we just 'let it happen' the world could turn into a dystopia or utopia. The decisions we make in the next decade or so will essentially change what it means to live a human life all across the planet.

While we debate issues about this year's economy, gun control, gay marriage, and immigration; the world of the brain tool is fundamentally transforming us. We hardly discuss the ramifications of these brain tools to our freedom, power, social borders, or economy. We are just letting it happen.

We need to take a step back and consider the longer term issue of what kind of world do we want to build with these tools. We need to give debates about our brain tools a higher priority in our political sphere. What kind of world do you want these brain tools to usher in?

What limits to information should we have?
What information should be free?
Are access to brain tools a human right?
Should nation state boundaries keep information limited?
Should brain tools fight our wars?
What information can others have about us? Government? Business? Church?
Should we automate our government with brain tools?
Should anyone have private control over large data sets?
What information should be kept private?
How do we protect our children from information they are not ready for?
How do we keep dangerous ideas from bad people?

I hope you will consider questions like these. I hope you will vote with these issues in mind. I hope our media will help us focus finding answers to them. If we do not, we are rolling the dice with the whole world's future.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

In God We Vote

In order to be elected to United States Congress, it is still necessary to affiliate oneself with one of the major publicly accepted religions.

Religious composition of the 113th Congress.

Our current crop of Representatives and Senators are still largely Protestant and Catholic with only a small 13% representing all other religions.

A full 97% of elected members self identify within the Judeo-Christian paradigm.

Although specifically ruled out in the U.S. Constitution as a requirement for any appointed or elected office, declaring a faith of some kind is widely known to be a litmus test for elect-ability by individual voters.

In early January of this year The Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life released its latest survey results of congressional members religious identifications.

This years batch, the 113th Congress, had three unique people one each declaring for the first time to be a Buddhist, Hindu and None.

Detail of protestant sects within Congress.

Protestants Highly Divided

Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopal and Methodists still make up the largest group of protestants in both houses.

Many smaller protestant groups such as Adventists, Pentecostals, Quakers, and Christian Scientists have a member or two each compromising the "other" group. A significant number of Senate and House members refused to define which branch of protestants they belong to and remained "unspecified".

Party Affiliation Important

When comparing Democrats and Republicans religious affiliation, there is a startling difference in their composition.

Republicans proclaim themselves to be over two-thirds Protestant while many more Democrats identify as Jewish or Catholic. Further those who do not identify as one of the large Judeo-Christian denominations fall almost exclusively in the Democratic party.

Long Term Trends

Using historical data from similar Congressional surveys, a long term trend away from Protestant faiths toward Catholic and Jewish adherents is small and slow, but clear.

The presidential election of 1961 was when the United States elected its first non-Protestant President in the Catholic John F. Kennedy. Mitt Romney also may be a bell-weather for the small rise of the Mormon faith in U.S. public life, although their impact is still small in comparison to other major faiths.

For a detailed break-down on the religious affiliation of each member of Congress, The Pew Forum as a PDF file available for download here.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

I Gotta Goooo! Free Will?

Daddy.

You do what you
HAVE to do.

Daddy.

I gotta go now, please.

DADDY!

I Gotta GOOOOO!

If you have ever been on a road trip with a young child, words similar to these are familiar. The biological drive to eliminate bodily wastes is one we can control. Kind of. Sometimes. We are able to post pone it for a bit. With age and practice we may be able to 'hold' it longer. Eventually though, we must all heed natures call. When we get even older, our capacity to wait diminishes and the pressure can become greater.

Free will is like this. We have the ability to observe and choose what we do, only to a limited degree.

We do not want to go in our pants. We do not want to go in public. We want to go as soon as we are practicably able. We monitor our condition and suppress our urges when we can. We give into our urges when we must. Our urges and our requirement to eliminate bodily waste is not a choice. They just are.

We follow cultural conventions.

We would like to think, we are in total control of ourselves. Our society expects us to act in certain ways, restrain from doing unacceptable behaviors. Culture and parents teach us do do those things which are considered good and right. If we look closely at what we really are, we find a different case. Free will is often about when we do what we were going to already do. If you don't think this is the case, try to hold back your bladder for a day. Report back on your experience.

Occasionally our decisions, our free will, allows us to make big decisions that change the path of our lives or those around us. Should I marry her? Is that the right job to take? What classes shall I take in school? Some acts of free will have big consequences. We make a choice and it affects our potential futures. Often these acts are only consequences of previous choices. If I did not take that class, I would not have gotten that job and she would not have married me.

These kinds of big free will decisions are rare. The rarity is a good thing. Making life altering decisions every day takes a toll on us emotionally, physically and socially. Changing ourselves in drastic ways tears apart the social infrastructure that makes our lives simple and pleasant to live.

Previous decisions limit us.

Most decisions we make have little or no real impact on the course of our lives. Should I eat an apple or a pear? Do we watch this TV program or that one? Which pair of socks will I put on today? If you could take a step back from your life and observe it, you would find that these decisions are often based on habits of behavior. The trivial decisions are often pre-determined from previous decisions, our environment, or even just who we biologically are.

Free will is only an occasional choice in a particular moment, often with limited consequences. Humility teaches that most of the time, we drift by habit and expectation along an already chosen path.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Mine! All MINE!

I am precioussssss

Do you want a healthier economy? Want to sell your product? Want more equal rights? Getting large groups of people to take action is a messaging problem. How can we best motivate people to take action? It turns out that calls to collective action are not the best. It turns out people respond better to selfishness motivation.

John F. Kennedy's inaugural address got the messaging wrong when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.” His desire may have been to do good. The cry for self sacrificing service was not the best way to deliver the idea. We citizens do not react well to calls to actions for the society at our own expense.

To act together we must be motivated alone. We get more done for the group when given messages of self interest. This paradox is at the heart of our political debate between social responsibility and individual freedom. A new approach to motivation may contain solutions to our most difficult societal problem. Individuals acting freely do best for the group.

Bad messaging?

A new study shows that individual people acting in self interest are more effective at positive social change. Scientists at Stanford have done a series of experiments showing interesting results. Appeals to care, act, and think for a group sap motivation. The studies also show that when people emphasize their independence to be free in their actions they will be more motivated to do good for the group.

United States culture is a reflection of all of us as a group. Often the message from society to individuals is that we should act as a group. Messages like “Everyone should go do <fill-in-the-blank>” act as de-motivators to action and get less done.

A series of experiments were conducted trying to figure out what inspired people to work the hardest at solutions. It focused on the relationship between self action and group action. One experiment tested the persistence of people while another tested to see how motivation effected actions.

The first test examined how long people would persist at a physical challenge when they were thinking about independence versus interdependence. Those who thought about independence (self) worked at the challenging task longer. When primed to think about interdependence, the subjects gave up on the task sooner. Thinking in terms of self interest makes us work harder.

Good messaging!

Another test was designed to have people describe how descriptions of future actions affected their desire to complete the action. In this experiment, when the future tasks involved working together, understanding, and adapting to a group, subjects predicted they would work at it less. When told that the future effort would emphasize self discipline, being unique, and understanding their own viewpoints better, subjects predicted they would work harder. Thinking in terms of self interest makes us more motivated.

The study is about desire, not goals. The suggestion is that if we want effective change in behaviors we need to motivate the individual as a free actor. It is better to appeal to individual effort and self interest to cause changes in how people act.

If we desire to have a better world through politics, business, and morality then we must call on individuals to seek self-interest. Cultural inspirations to better 'me' work better than calls to better 'us'. Call each and every person to action, each to themselves. Mahatma Gandhi got the messaging right when he said “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

Thursday, February 7, 2013

The Weak Suffer What They Must

"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." ~ Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue

Athens was strong.

In 415 BC the Athenian democracy deemed it necessary to subjugate the island of Melos in its struggle with martial Sparta. Famously, the Athenians demanded the Melians to surrender using the threat "the strong do what they will". Melos did not relent. Athens invaded and laid waste to the small town, island, and it's inhabitants. The use of power by Athens in this manner is how governments interact with each other ever since.

Technology has moved far beyond the spear and shield used by Greeks. Today we use drones. Drones are unmanned vehicles that can reign down violence upon the unsuspecting. Drones hover silently over a target for hours, sending image and sound to operators hundreds of miles away, even to bases in the mainland United States. When an enemy is identified, drones can make deathly strikes without warning.

Modern will.

The United States has made more than 400 such attacks in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen in its war on terrorism. More than 3,000 have been killed in covert programs operated by the the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command). Although estimates vary, between one half and one third of those killed using these tools were non-combatants. The lowest estimates are that over 170 of those who died by drone strikes were children. As with Vietnam 'body counts', the U.S. counts any military aged male killed in a drone strike as an 'enemy combatant'.

The Executive Branch argues that international law and the 2001 resolution “Authorization for Use of Military Force” makes legal the right to self defense against individuals linked to al-Qaeda or terrorists. This law includes using drone strikes against both foreigners and U.S. Citizens. Both Bush the younger and Obama have engaged in drone strikes using this legal argument.

Recently Jay Carney, a spokesman for the President, said “first and foremost that is (the Presidents) responsibility to protect the United States and American citizens." He continued "In order to prevent attacks on the United States and to save American lives, we conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats to stop plots, prevent future attacks, and again save American lives." Later Mr. Carney added "These strikes are legal. They are ethical and they are wise. The U.S. government takes great care in deciding to pursue an al-Qaeda terrorist to insure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life."

Some say that the drone strikes are immoral. Use of these weapons erodes the confidence in the government’s commitment to the rule of law and protecting the accused. When targeted killings are against U.S. Citizens, they argue that it denies due process and they are unreasonable seizures of a person's life, violating the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. Using the constitutional framework, it is said that citizens and foreign nationals are protected against violence without trial.

The front line is now often near our homes.

Another popular anti-drone contention comes from the ex-military leader of the U.S. war in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal saying “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes ... is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who've never seen one or seen the effects of one. “

Is it not strange that the murder of 27 plus children and teachers in Sandy Hook has created such outrage, while hundreds of other children killed by our government do not bother us? Our application of morality, our sense of justice even, places the value of our own citizens lives as superior to those of foreigners.

Drone warfare is a clear example of “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” As with Athens of old, the morality of warfare can be perceived as a 'good' to the strong and as an 'evil' to the weak. The perspective of the violence depends upon who has the power to do their will. The points made by both those for and against the use of drones as means to violence upon their fellow man follow along lines laid down those many centuries ago by the Athenians. The language and technology have changed, but the dispute on use of force remains the same.

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