J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 154
July 8, 2019
Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence���The Revolution ...
Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence���The Revolution Hasn���t Happened Yet: "Just as humans built buildings and bridges before there was civil engineering, humans are proceeding with the building of societal-scale, inference-and-decision-making systems that involve machines, humans, and the environment. Just as early buildings and bridges sometimes fell to the ground���in unforeseen ways and with tragic consequences���many of our early societal-scale inference-and-decision-making systems are already exposing serious conceptual flaws. Unfortunately, we are not very good at anticipating what the next emerging serious flaw will be. What we���re missing is an engineering discipline with principles of analysis and design...
Realizing in software and hardware an entity possessing human-level intelligence. I will use the phrase ���human-imitative AI��� to refer to this aspiration, emphasizing the notion that the artificially-intelligent entity should seem to be one of us, if not physically then at least mentally (whatever that might mean).... The famous backpropagation algorithm.... One could simply refer to all of this as AI, and indeed that is what appears to have happened. Such labeling may come as a surprise to optimization or statistics researchers, who find themselves suddenly called AI researchers, but labels aside, the bigger problem is that the use of this single, ill-defined acronym prevents a clear understanding of the range of intellectual and commercial issues at play.
The past two decades have seen major progress���in industry and academia���in a complementary aspiration to human-imitative AI that is often referred to as ���Intelligence Augmentation��� (IA). Here computation and data are used to create services that augment human intelligence and creativity. A search engine can be viewed as an example of IA, as it augments human memory and factual knowledge, as can natural language translation....
Hoping that the reader will tolerate one last acronym, let us conceive broadly of a discipline of ���Intelligent Infrastructure��� (II), whereby a web of computation, data, and physical entities exists that makes human environments more supportive, interesting, and safe. Such infrastructure is beginning to make its appearance in domains such as transportation, medicine, commerce, and finance, with implications for individual humans and societies....
We now come to a critical issue: is working on classical human-imitative AI the best or only way to focus on these larger challenges?... Although one would not know it from reading the newspapers, success in human-imitative AI has in fact been limited.... Second, and more importantly, success in these domains is neither sufficient nor necessary to solve important IA and II problems.... Some say that the human-imitative AI aspiration subsumes IA and II aspirations, because a human-imitative AI system would not only be able to solve the classical problems of AI (e.g., as embodied in the Turing test), but it would also be our best bet for solving IA and II problems. Such an argument has little historical precedent. Did civil engineering develop by envisaging the creation of an artificial carpenter or bricklayer?...
We need to solve IA and II problems on their own merits, not as a mere corollary to a human-imitative AI agenda. It is not hard to pinpoint algorithmic and infrastructure challenges in II systems that are not central themes in human-imitative AI research. II systems require the ability to manage distributed repositories of knowledge that are rapidly changing and are likely to be globally incoherent. Such systems must cope with cloud-edge interactions in making timely, distributed decisions, and they must deal with long-tail phenomena where there is lots of data on some individuals and little data on most individuals. They must address the difficulties of sharing data across administrative and competitive boundaries. Finally, and of particular importance, II systems must bring economic ideas such as incentives and pricing into the realm of the statistical and computational infrastructures that link humans to each other and to valued goods.....
IA will also remain quite essential, because for the foreseeable future, computers will not be able to match humans in their ability to reason abstractly about real-world situations. We will need well-thought-out interactions of humans and computers to solve our most pressing problems. And we will want computers to trigger new levels of human creativity, not replace human creativity (whatever that might mean)....
We need to realize that the current public dialog on AI���which focuses on narrow subsets of both industry and of academia���risks blinding us to the challenges and opportunities that are presented by the full scope of AI, IA, and II. This scope is less about the realization of science-fiction dreams or superhuman nightmares, and more about the need for humans to understand and shape technology as it becomes ever more present and influential...
#noted
July 7, 2019
Annette Gordon-Reed: Some thoughts about Sally Hemings: Weekend Reading
Annette Gordon-Reed: Some thoughts about Sally Hemings: "It makes no sense to think of her life out of the context of her family's story. She was a part of a web of relationships put in place before she was born.Her specific context can only be discerned by garnering details from the archives. Simply looking at a statute book and/or looking at other people's lives, and extrapolating to create a picture of SH's life, will not do. She cannot be taken, nor should any one person be taken, as the embodiment of the system of American slavery...
...SH imparted her vision of her life to her son, Madison Hemings, through a story in which she used the leverage of law to negotiate a particular kind of life for herself and her children. It was not a perfect life; not the life that I, her biographer, would have wished for her. ut my wishes don't count in trying to discover what people long ago thought they were doing. I have had to ask myself in considering her story: What would she have seen of women's lives in the 18th Century?
She experienced a world in which women were, by and large, attached to men whom they could only hope would treat them well and keep whatever promises they made. Neither outcome was ever assured. It is wrong to say that SH could not have negotiated with TJ because the law didn't allow it. Other members of her family (her siblings and their progeny, before and after SH and TJ were in France) negotiated with him to their advantage. Again, these were his wife's relatives. This kind of connection rarely meant anything to other white enslavers, but it means something to TJ.
All the evidence indicates that he saw SH and her siblings through the prism of his feelings about his deceased wife, their older sister. He took his cue for how to deal with the Hemings siblings from her response to them. Many white women whose fathers had children with enslaved women insisted those children be sold or sent away. Martha Jefferson brought her siblings to live closely with her at Monticello. TJ made the eldest of her enslaved siblings, Robert Hemings, his personal valet when he was 12, replacing the adult Jupiter Evans. The Hemings women were at Martha's deathbed, and carried the story of Martha's request that TJ nor remarry and his promise that he would not.
SH's son's recollections presents her as a determined and resourceful person who used the tools at her disposal, law and her knowledge of TJ, to fashion a life for herself that allowed her to be with her family and ensured that her children would leave slavery behind.
Partus sequitur venture would end with her. It did. Only 2 people could have known the details of what happened in France: SH and TJ. Madison Hemings certainly talked to TJ. Some of the information about Williamsburg is pretty detailed. It is more likely that SH told her son.
Whether we like it or not, understand it or not, Madison Hemings clearly saw himself as part of a "family". He uses the word. He calls SH "Mother" and TJ "Father". He draws a circle around the 6 of them. There were family rituals and an important endpoint was always in mind: the emancipation of the children when they became adults. The "treaty" between his parents, as he terms it, was fulfilled.
After the author John Dos Passos brought Madison Hemings's recollections to the attention of scholars in the mid-Twentieth Century,the near uniform response among white historians was to say that he was lying, or that his mother was lying about her life to try to look "good". But the recollections fit with other information from the archives-the description of SH's life from contemporary 3rd parties, information from TJ's records, and from other sources. Whether we like what he is saying or not, it is the best source for SH's vision of her life.
Of course all members of the Hemings family were victims of the system of slavery. But Sally Hemings presented herself as a forceful and knowledgeable actor in her own story; one who accomplished something that was extremely important to her. I cannot ignore that.
...
#weekendreading
Josiah Ober: Fall 2019 Sather Lectures: The Greeks and th...
Josiah Ober: Fall 2019 Sather Lectures: The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason: "September 19... Gyges��� Choice: Rationality and Visibility Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, 7:00pm. September 26... Glaucon���s Dilemma: Origins of Social Order 370 Dwinelle Hall, 5:30pm. October 3... Deioces��� Ultimatum: How to Choose a King.... October 10... Cleisthenes��� Wager: Democratic Rationality.... October 17... Melos��� Prospects: Rational Domination.... October 24... Agamemnon���s Cluelessness: Reason and Eudaimonia...
#noted
Apropos of the Hayekian "the market knows many things tha...
Apropos of the Hayekian "the market knows many things that no individual knows": In the fifth century BC those casting the statue of Athena-Fighting-in-Front in Attica had no clue that the tin from which they made their bronze came from Cornwall; and those mining the tin in Cornwall had no clue that its highest-and-best market use would be to make a giant statue of Athens's patron goddess:
James D. Muhly: Sources of Tin and the Beginnings of Bronze Metallurgy: "Herodotus: 'Of the extreme tracts of Europe towards the west, I cannot speak with any certainty; for I do not... know of any islands called the Tin Islands, whence the tin comes which we use.... I have never been able to get an eye-witness that there is any sea on the further side of Europe. Nevertheless, tin and amber do certainly come to us from the ends of the earth...
...This passage... shows that Herodotus, who seems to have devoted some effort... was unable to learn anything regarding the sources of tin being consumed.... Periclean Athens was importing large amounts of tin. The inscriptions relating to the casting of the Athena Promachos list single purchases of tin as large as 150 talents or almost 4,000 kg. We also learn from these texts that a talent of tin sold for 233 drachmas while the price of copper was just over 35 drachmas per talent.... [yet] Herodotus failed to get beyond the tall stories told by sailors, stories told perhaps more to confuse and to obfuscate than to instruct...
#noted #economicsgoneright #history #teachingeconomichistory
July 6, 2019
Alexander Mishkov: Top 10 Quotes from World War II: "Ribb...
Alexander Mishkov: Top 10 Quotes from World War II: "Ribbentrop (August 1939): 'We no longer demand anything, we want war'...
...Hitler (1938): "It is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is a claim from which I will not recede and which, God willing, I will make good".... Hitler (June 1941): "You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."... Patton (June 5, 1944): "Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I'd shoot a snake!"... Eisenhower (1945): "The world must know what happened, and never forget."... Hitler (July 5th, 1943): "Soldiers of the Reich! This day, you are to take part in an offensive of such importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its outcome."... de Gaulle (1940): "Today we are crushed by the sheer weight of the mechanized forces hurled against us, but we can still look to the future in which even greater mechanized forces will bring us victory. Therein lies the destiny of the world."... Eisenhower (1945): "During the time I have had WACs under my command, they have met every test and task assigned to them.... Their contributions in efficiency, skill, spirit, and determination are immeasurable."... Roosevelt (1943): "The world has never seen greater devotion, determination, and self-sacrifice than have been displayed by the Russian people...under the leadership of Marshal Joseph Stalin. With a nation that in saving itself is thereby helping to save all the world from the Nazi menace, this country of ours should always be glad to be a good neighbor and a sincere friend to the world of the future."... Goebbels: "If we have power, we'll never give it up again unless we're carried out of our offices as corpses."
#noted
David Brooks's declaration that something called ���cultu...
David Brooks's declaration that something called ���cultural Marxism��� directly is now ���the lingua franca of the economy��� was one of the weirdest throwaway lines of the past month. Why is David Brooks today repeating a Lyndon LaRouche talking point���a false talking point���from forty years ago? I know no group who seriously either call themselves or are fairly-described as "cultural Marxists". There are some critical theorists���but they are anti-Marxist. And their speech is in no wise the "lingua franca" of anyplace outside a few enclaves in sociology, rhetoric, and cultural studies departments. Where this came from was unclear to me���until I found Ben Alpers and this guy, a veteran of the Wikipedia edit wars:
Russell Blackford (2015): ���Cultural Marxism��� and Our Current Culture Wars: ���Richard R. Weiner... attributes the actual term ���cultural Marxism��� to Trent Schroyer[���s]... 1973 book The Critique of Domination... as a ���crisis theory��� employed by the Frankfurt School of Marxist intellectuals... [and] other[s], such as Gy��rgy Luk��cs and Henri Lefebvre.... [Today] It is employed by extreme right-wing ideologues, such as Breivik, in grandiose theories that have little credibility, and it is used popularly in ways that show little understanding of its history or its original meaning...
#noted
Michael Spence: The ���Digital Revolution��� of Wellbeing...
Michael Spence: The ���Digital Revolution��� of Wellbeing: "Exponential improvements in the power and utility of digital products can also be achieved at minimal cost. Today���s smartphones are more powerful than the supercomputers of the mid-1980s.... It is certainly possible that a 10,000-fold increase in computing power at negligible additional cost over the past 20 years has yielded minimal consumer benefits; but it is highly unlikely.... None of these gains is captured in national income accounts. That is not to suggest that we should scrap or revise GDP; but we do need to recognize its limitations. The problem with GDP is not that it is a poor measure of material wellbeing (setting aside distributional issues), but that it is incomplete. It does not include the increase in the scope of goods and services delivered at negative incremental cost, nor the non-material side of individual wellbeing or social progress more generally...
#noted
The Advisory Board Daily Briefing: Where the States Stand...
The Advisory Board Daily Briefing: Where the States Stand on Medicaid Expansion: "EXPANSION MAY EXPIRE: Montana.... Voters on Nov. 6 rejected a ballot measure to continue the state's expansion through funding from a higher tax on tobacco. In light of the measure failure, the Montana House in March passed a bill that would continue the expansion.... NOT EXPANDING AT THIS TIME.... Alabama.... Florida.... Kansas.... Mississippi.... Missouri.... North Carolina.... Oklahoma.... South Carolina.... South Dakota.... Tennessee.... Texas.... Wisconsin.... Wyoming.... ACTIVELY CONSIDERING EXPANSION.... Georgia.... Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who took office in 2019, in March signed into law a bill that permits the state to seek federal approval for a partial Medicaid expansion and to impose Medicaid work requirements...
#noted
Barry Eichengreen: How the US Economy���s Luck Runs Out: ...
Barry Eichengreen: How the US Economy���s Luck Runs Out: "The weakness of wage growth is no mystery. Wage inflation is weak because labour-market slack remains��greater than indicated��by a 3.6 per��cent headline official unemployment��rate. Include also individuals with part-time and sporadic employment (���persons marginally attached to the labour force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons���), and unemployment rises to 7.1 per cent. Even now, in other words, not all those who dropped out of the labour force due to the Great Recession and the opioid crisis have dropped back in.... In addition, trade unions no longer force big US corporations to share their profits when the latter rise in expansions.... How might the current expansion end?... A geopolitical shock... the Trump Administration���s erratic foreign policies... a point where the reserve army of the unemployed is finally depleted and wages rise sharply.... What are odds of the expansion ending in the next year? Truth is that no one knows...
#noted
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