Imagining the Singularity in 1965…

John Markoff has written yet another essay on the rise of the machines. This time Markoff is reporting on an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher and president of the association. The conference took place at the Conference Grounds on 2/25, but the report isn’t due out until late 2009. Supposedly they weren’t looking at longer term super-human AIs, but rather near term issues … (emphases mine)

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man - NYTimes.com - John Markoff

… They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed... also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars...

… Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation...

... Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives...

I was pleased to see that Bill Joy isn't being mocked as much, the poor guy took a terrible beating for stating the obvious. (Personally I'm expecting that, while it’s true that we're screwed, the end-times of superhuman intelligence will be pushed out beyond 2100.)

So the conference doesn’t sound terribly interesting, but I was interested in Markoff’s reference to IJ Good. This pushes the basic idea of the Singularity, exponential recursion, back another thirty years. I suspect thought Markoff got the reference from this Wikipedia article (but he didn't, see update) …

… Irving John ("I.J."; "Jack") Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009)^[1][2] was a British statistician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park.

He was born Isidore Jacob Gudak to a Polish-Jewish family in London. He later anglicized his name to Irving John Good and signed his publications "I. J. Good."

An originator of the concept now known as "technological singularity," Good served as consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick, director of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey…

Yes, he was alive until a few months ago. I don’t need to remind any of my readers that the main character of 2001 was an AI named Hal (though Hal came from Arthur C Clarke’s book, not the movie). The article concludes with the story of Good’s Singularity premise …

… In 1965 he originated the concept now known as "technological singularity," which anticipates the eventual advent of superhuman intelligence:

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make…”

Good's authorship of treatises such as "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" and "Logic of Man and Machine" (both 1965)…

I gather he was still in decent shape when Vinge’s “Singularity” materials made news over 10 years ago. He must have read them and recognized the ideas of his earlier papers. The book The spike : how our lives are being transformed by rapidly advancing technologies / Damien Broderick (Amazon) provides some additional historical context …

… Nor is the idea altogether new. The important mathematician Stanislaw Ulam mentioned it in his “Tribute to John von Neumann,” the founding genius of the computer age, in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 1958.13 Another notable scientific gadfly, Dr. I. J. Good, advanced “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” in Advances in Computers, in 1965. Vinge himself hinted at it in a short story, “Bookworm, Run!,” in 1966, as had sf writer Poul Anderson in a 1962 tale, “Kings Must Die.” And in 1970, Polish polymath Stanislaw Lem, in a striking argument, put his finger directly on this almost inevitable prospect of immense discontinuity. Discussing Olaf Stapledon’s magisterial 1930 novel Last and First Men, in which civilizations repeatedly crash and revive for two billion years before humanity is finally snuffed out in the death of the sun, he notes…

It’s a shame Professor Good isn’t around to do an interview, he gave quite an impressive one in 1992 (in which, by the way, he tells us Turing claimed to have only an above-average IQ, which is rather curious).

Update 7/29/09: Per comments, John Markoff tells me he learned about the I. J. Good story from an interview with Eric Horvitz.

Update 8/8/09: Per comments, today a description of the panel's mission is on the AAAI website main page. There's no persistent address, so it won't stay in its current spot. For the record, here's a copy. The official mission is more ambitious than the impression left by John Markoff's article ... (emphases mine)

The AAAI President has commissioned a study to explore and address potential long-term societal influences of AI research and development. The panel will consider the nature and timing of potential AI successes, and will define and address societal challenges and opportunities in light of these potential successes. On reflecting about the long term, panelists will review expectations and uncertainties about the development of increasingly competent machine intelligences, including the prospect that computational systems will achieve "human-level" abilities along a variety of dimensions, or surpass human intelligence in a variety of ways. The panel will appraise societal and technical issues that would likely come to the fore with the rise of competent machine intelligence. For example, how might AI successes in multiple realms and venues lead to significant or perhaps even disruptive societal changes?

The committee's deliberation will include a review and response to concerns about the potential for loss of human control of computer-based intelligences and, more generally, the possibility for foundational changes in the world stemming from developments in AI. Beyond concerns about control, the committee will reflect about potential socioeconomic, legal, and ethical issues that may come with the rise of competent intelligent computation, the changes in perceptions about machine intelligence, and likely changes in human-computer relationships.

In addition to projecting forward and making predictions about outcomes, the panel will deliberate about actions that might be taken proactively over time in the realms of preparatory analysis, practices, or machinery so as to enhance long-term societal outcomes.

On issues of control and, more generally, on the evolving human-computer relationship, writings, such as those by statistician I. J. Good on the prospects of an "intelligence explosion" followed up by mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge's writings on the inevitable march towards an AI "singularity," propose that major changes might flow from the unstoppable rise of powerful computational intelligences. Popular movies have portrayed computer-based intelligence to the public with attention-catching plots centering on the loss of control of intelligent machines. Well-known science fiction stories have included reflections (such as the "Laws of Robotics" described in Asimov's Robot Series) on the need for and value of establishing behavioral rules for autonomous systems. Discussion, media, and anxieties about AI in the public and scientific realms highlight the value of investing more thought as a scientific community on preceptions, expectations, and concerns about long-term futures for AI.

The committee will study and discuss these issues and will address in their report the myths and potential realities of anxieties about long-term futures. Beyond reflection about the validity of such concerns by scientists and lay public about disruptive futures, the panel will reflect about the value of formulating guidelines for guiding research and of creating policies that might constrain or bias the behaviors of autonomous and semiautonomous systems so as to address concerns.

They're taking this seriously. I'm impressed.

How Google can enable iPhone location tracking

I share Google's grumpiness that Latitude will work on a crappy BlackBerry Pearl but not on my iPhone. That's a multitasking limitation but, worse, Apple also blocked Google's Latitude app because it's too much like the bundled Map App (as it should be). So Google's got a useless web app instead. You need to run it to get the iPhone to update its Latitude location, and even I'm not crazy enough to bother with that.

Happily, there's a workaround.

Google can use other people's applications as a Latitude Trojan Horse.

In my case, I use Byline quite frequently. What if Byline, a few seconds after startup, pinged my location to Latitude? What if many of the non-Apple apps I used did this?

It's a rhetorical question of course. The result would be a reasonable approximation of how Latitude should work.

Of course why would Byline and other Apps do this? Because Google would provide the code, and would pay them for their troubles (transactional, flat, whatever -- the key is that it adds up and isn't too easy to game).

The Minneapolis Friday Night Skate

Once or twice a summer the stars align and I get to go on the Minneapolis Friday Night Skate

The Friday Night Skate winds through downtown Minneapolis... For the most part we stay in a pack, stopping every few miles to re-group. The skate lets you hang out with your friends, meet some new friends, see downtown, get some exercise, but most of all... have a great time!

... The skates happen every second and fourth Friday of the month. The skates start promptly at 9:00 PM. In order to get ready we recommend that you get there by 8:30...

The web site is a bit dusty, but it's got the directions. I used to do these skates several times a summer, but it's tricky to protect the time.

Tonight was a beautiful skate. Pleasant breeze, nice paced group, beautiful sites, lots of people watching. We cross the Stone Arch bridge and climb the hill to overlooking the Guthrie, the Mill City Museum and park, the river and the the 35W bridge ...

The wee little iphone picture shows a bit of the Guthrie and a rosy sunset. We skate down the helical ramp of Mt Guthrie and then down to view the 35W bridge. It's a dull bridge in the daylight, but at night the lighting glows a charming green.

We wind around the Metrodome and then up Hennepin. Tonight there were a lot of kids and young adults hanging around, probably doing stuff I don't want my kids to do. One of our group is a compulsive waver, she even got most of the retailers to wave a bit. I caught up with two members of Minneapolis Mad Dads, including the president and founder of the local 13 yo chapter. What might be mildly intimidating on foot seems mostly curious on skates; we amuse the night life and move pretty quickly.

Heading inland towards Loring Park we pass through the downtown theater district -- they were doing a good trade tonight. We got a good number of waves and cheers. The park was dark in the crescent moon, but I know it well. This year the fountain is in good health, first time I've seen it for a while. We head back down Nicollet mall, and of course this time of year there's always some Aquatennial thing going on ...

On skates it's easy to look over the audience.

From there we cut across a building plaza where the security guards are often mildly perturbed (young one tonight), but they rarely bother us if we don't play around the pillars. There's some skating around the fountain there, then a dash across the right lane of the Hennepin bridge -- smooth downhill and good lighting.

It's one of my favorite night time outings. If you're in Minneapolis, and you're a competent and confident urban skater -- give it a try. Helmet and wrist guards are recommended, though tonight only I wore the latter. There's a Facebook group for the Friday Skate and a Page for the related MN Inline Skate Club.

Heath care reform – wake me up when they start talking about the Lexus

Health care reform has gone underground into the realm of dark politics, but I believe Gail Collins when she says Obama isn’t going to let this go easily. It will be back.

In the meantime, I’m not paying much attention. I’m waiting for a sign that we’re getting to something real. For me that sign will be the first time someone starts using the American version of an automotive analogy.

That will be the day someone compares the Lexus and the New York subway …

Gordon's Notes: Healthcare Reform … the One Slide Presentation

versus

If all you care about is getting from point A to point B in Manhattan the smelly, noisy, subway is often a better choice.

If you care about comfort and pleasure the Lexus is almost always a better choice. Money aside, it’s the better choice for most people most of the time. Faster, more comfortable, you can carry more things, it’s simply better.

If you don’t have a lot of money, the subway is your only choice.

Health care is like that. It’s an inexhaustible good. You can always do more things at the margins. You can have nicer waiting rooms, better parking, faster phone call return, multiple messaging systems, better IT support, more elegant tests, more intra-specialists conferences, RNs instead of aides, more convenient medications, better home care, better hospice care .. and I’m not even trying here. Some of these things improve efficiencies, but mostly they just provide a better care experience. Not “better”, better.

The scope to improve health care is limitless. Give me a trillion dollars and I could spend it on US health care. Give me 500 trillion and I could spend it (though at that point I’d be into national exercise programs and dietary revisions!).

Why is the scope limitless? Because you can’t make suffering vanish. We age, we get sick, we die. The only “health care” initiatives that clearly save money involve floating chunks of ice.

It’s not a matter of getting incentives right, as Brad DeLong recently wrote. That would work if there were an end point, and we were seeking the most efficient path. In this game there’s no end point unless you consider incentives that encourage ultra light plane travel. Sorry Brad, but this time I have to disagree.

Health care is largely a compromise between reach and grasp. It’s about buying a Honda Accord rather than a Lexus, or taking the subway rather than a helicopter. It’s always about rationing.

Wake me up when we start talking about taking the subway.

Jon Stewart on the Birthers

I've been ignoring the birther whackos for months, but they do seem to be the face of the modern GOP.

So I figured I should look to Jon Stewart for news on the Birthers.

Poor Jon. On the one hand, great material. On the other hand, watch where he buries his face in the papers. That looked sincere.

Recommended. It tells you all you need to know about where Liz Cheney's GOP is today.

iPhone trouble: Apple rejects Google Latitude, possibly Google Voice

Apple appears to have rejected a long anticipated native iPhone app from Google -- Google Latitude ..

Daring Fireball Linked List: Google Latitude for iPhone, But Only as a Web App:

... Translation: Apple rejected their native iPhone app...

Google has introduced their Google Voice native app for every phone but ... the iPhone.

The worrisome state of the Palm Pre may have emboldened the darker side of Apple. I'm going to be downplaying my iPhone enthusiasms until we get some clarity about where Apple is going with this.

Update: I've got a fix for Google. The problem with Latitude is that it only updates my position when I use it. I don't have that much use for it, so updates will be infrequent. On the other hand, I use apps like Byline a lot.

So all I need is for Byline to "ping" my location to Google Latitude after startup. That should update me reasonably often. Other apps could do the same thing.

Why would they bother? I'm guessing Latitude will have a business model. Google can share revenue on a per ping basis.

Update 7/31/09: AT&T's Location Finder costs $15/month for a family of five. Guess we know why this one was banned.

The organ trade mafia of New Jersey

The mob goes where the money is, though this time it’s not Italian …

Dozens Arrested in New Jersey Corruption Probe - WSJ.com

… The alleged money-laundering operations run by the rabbis laundered about $3 million for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, according to the court documents and a person familiar with the matter. The rabbis used charitable, nonprofit entities connected to their synagogues to "wash" money they understood came from criminal activity, prosecutors alleged.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn was charged separately with conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant, at a cost of $160,000 to the transplant recipient. According to the FBI's complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum said he had been brokering the sale of kidneys for 10 years…

"The rings were international in scope, connected to Deal, N.J., Brooklyn, N.Y., Israel and Switzerland," said Mr. Marra, the U.S. attorney, at the news conference. "They trafficked in the cleaning of dirty money all across the world."

Rabbis doing money laundering in New Jersey is mildly interesting. The organ trade angle is truly interesting.

Update 7/24/09: TPM is tracking the organ trade angle.

Update 9/2/09: I'm getting some creepy comments on this post, of the Protocols of Zion sort. They're all being rejected, so don't bother.

Collins believes - Obama will get a health care bill

I’ve been tuning out the health care reform discussions. It’s gone into a deep pit of politics; I can’t see enough to make sense of it. I’ve no idea whether it will be a complete debacle or a genuine step towards guaranteeing “good enough care” for everyone.

I have to hope Obama knows where he’s going with this.

Gail Collins is convinced he’ll get it done, one way or the other …

Gail Collins - The Health Care Sausage - NYTimes.com:

… The point here is that neither rain nor snow nor Jim DeMint will deter Obama from delivering on health care. Not even if he has to meet with every member of Congress one by one, give an interview to every television reporter in the Northern Hemisphere and hold a press conference every single day for the rest of the year….

Minnesota science scores: bring in the grown-ups

Today’s Strib headliner is wrong like a bad tooth (emphases mine) …

Minnesota students' science test scores take big jump 

Minnesota's students made dramatic gains on state science tests this year...
Overall, 46 percent of students exceeded the expectations the state set out for them, up from 40 percent last year, when the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments-II science exams were given for the first time. Of the three grade levels tested this spring, 45 percent of fifth-graders, 43 percent of eighth-graders and 50 percent of high school students succeeded. 

… increased familiarity with the online test this year probably contributed to the increase. 

The test results come seven months after the state's students were found to be near the top of the world in math and science, based on an international assessment …

Let me count the ways of wrongness.

Firstly, the headline on the dead tree Strib read something like “Science scores absolutely stink” (ok, I’m paraphrasing). The Strib needs to get its spin straight.

Secondly, given that the online test was still fairly new last year, is a 6.7% gain selected from a range of options (they could have chosen to compare the high school grade, etc) really meaningful? I doubt it. Neither journalists nor educators nor physicians nor, really, anyone, seems to have a working grasp of the notion of statistical significance.

Most of all, the entire process is a cosmic waste of time, money, and student psyches. A test with a 50% pass rate means the system has failed. Minnesota needs to stop, fire all the responsible executives, and restart.

Either the test is wrong, or the preparation is wrong, or Minnesota is testing the wrong group or all of the above.

Minnesota needs to take a tiny fraction of the cost wasted on its testing programs and hire a man who now keeps a very low profile – Steve Yelon. Really, I’m sure he’d do the work for a million or two, even if he’s now a “professor emeritus”.

Steve taught me about curriculum and instructional design back around 1991 or so when I was an OMERAD fellow at MSU’s College of Human Medicine (ie. not the famed vet school [1]). He was a good enough teacher that the basics still stick in my head. They’re roughly like this ..

1. Figure out what you want your learners to be able to do. This has to be something they can do.
2. Design a test that measures achievement of the desired skills.
3. Design a course that fits the test.
4. Teach the course.
5. If the results are bad, revise one or more of test, course, and tested group.

It’s really not rocket science.

Hire Professor Yelon Minnesota, and stop wasting my money. There’s a lot less of it than there used to be.

[1] If anyone from OMERAD is link checking, John Gordon is a pseudonym.

Update 9/1/2015: Wow, I had a pretty angry writing style back then. I think I'm mellower now, must be getting old. Anyway, I came across a wallet handout he did in the 90s. Copy here ...

The bidirectional arrows aren't just for symmetry. You start with real world goals, build objectives, and then build tests that demonstrate goal achievement. Each feeds back on the other. From what I remember of his teaching (mutated by time and experience) I'd add another set of arrows that drop from real world performance to terminal objectives to the tests -- illustrating importance of designing test such that "teach to the test" is a fine praise.

Yelon's 1990s book is available used on on Amazon. If copyright allows it ought to be put online.

Happiness - I told you so

"You see", I told my mother, "if you expect the worse you are often pleasantly surprised".

Turns out, I'm Danish at heart ...

Lowered Expectations - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com:

... Mysterious are the ways of human happiness, as anyone who has surveyed the perplexing, often contradictory research findings can attest. But one nugget in particular truly boggles: Denmark is the happiest nation in the world. More than two-thirds of Danes report being “very satisfied with their lives,” according to the Eurobarometer Survey, a figure that has held steady for more than 30 years. True, Danes tend to be healthy, married and active — all contributing factors to happiness. But why, researchers wondered, are Danes happier than Finns and Swedes, who share many of these traits, not to mention a similar culture and climate?

The answer is, in a word, expectations. Danes have low expectations and so “year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find out that not everything is rotten in the state of Denmark,” says James W. Vaupel, a demographer who has investigated Danish bliss...

I have had the common share of the bitter with the sweet, but I'm generally happy. It could be so much worse.

Oh foolish optimists, so ever cruelly disappointed...

How the iPhone has warped our sense of Japan’s mobile market

In the 70s Japan was brilliant. Smarter, faster, stronger than the rest of the world.

Then Japan seemed to lose its way. When I saw this headline I wondered if the story of Japan’s oddball cell phones held a clue ..

Why Japan’s Smartphones Haven’t Gone Global - NYTimes.com

…  Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it,” said Gerhard Fasol, president of the Tokyo-based IT consulting firm, Eurotechnology Japan.

Innovation? Really? It sure doesn’t feel that way. Mr Fasol is a foreign consultant (I’m guessing), so maybe he’s being diplomatic. This description is more plausible …

… Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University…

… This is the kind of phone I wanted to make,” Mr. Natsuno said, playing with his own iPhone 3G…

and

… each handset model is designed with a customized user interface, development is time-consuming and expensive, said Tetsuzo Matsumoto, senior executive vice president at Softbank Mobile, a leading carrier. “Japan’s phones are all ‘handmade’ from scratch,”…

Lots of invention, but no ecosystem. It’s all one-offs, again and again. Does this tell us something unique about Japan?

I thought so, but then I realized that the iPhone has warped my sense of history.

If the iPhone hadn’t come along, we’d all be in the same pointless trap – except Japan and Korea would be at the high end and we’d be stuck at the low end – with “smartphones” like Windows Mobile (ugh), the Blackberry (yuch) and the ailing Palm Classic (sigh). Our pre-iPhone mobile ecosystem was just like Japan’s, only much less interesting.

It’s the iPhone that changed the game, and transformed Japan from the future to an isolated island ecosystem. Whatever may come of the iPhone, even if it should fall to Android or Pre or something else, it was genuinely revolutionary. So revolutionary, it’s warped my sense of recent history.

Japan (or, perhaps more likely, Korea) still has a chance though. In the 1970s Japan made lots of computers – using NEC’s proprietary OS. Japan didn’t surge in the PC hardware marketplace until they went to using PC/MS-DOS. (With a major US setback due to congressional trade restrictions blocking desktop imports from Japan – those were the days the US was terrified of Japan.)

If Japan’s manufacturers were to give up on their solutions and focus on Android …

Cold laughter echoes from Orwell’s grave

Novels are never as absurd as the real world. If they were, nobody would believe them. For example …

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue’s Posts

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for…

… the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price…

… You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

I loved Pogue’s post title.

This is Digital Rights Management in action. Like most everything, DRM can be a good thing, or a bad thing.

As the old saw goes, Bytes don’t burn Books, People burn (or disintegrate) Books.

Apple, for all their myriad sins real and imagined, seems to have found the subtle balance. Apple’s music is no longer DRMd (but your purchase can be traced back to your credit card!), but iPhone software is very subtly and appropriately DRMd.

Amazon blew this one big time.

Update 7/20/09: Nice summary in Slate. Turns out Amazon's been deleting books that were illegally distributed for a while -- this one was just too poetic to ignore. Makes you wonder if the upload was a brilliant setup. I liked this conclusion:

The difference between today's Kindle deletions and yesteryear's banning is that the earlier prohibitions weren't perfectly enforceable. At best, publishers that found their books banned by courts could try to recall all books in circulation. In 2007, Cambridge University Press settled a lawsuit with Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi Arabian banker who sued for libel over a book that alleged he'd funded terrorism. Cambridge agreed to ask libraries across the world to remove books from their shelves. But the libraries were free to refuse. If bin Mahfouz had sued over a Kindle book, on the other hand, he could ask the court not only to stop sales but also to delete all copies that had already been sold. As Zittrain points out, courts might consider such a request a logical way to enforce a ban—if they can order Dish Network to disable your DVR, they can also tell Amazon or Apple to disable a certain book, movie, or song.

But that sets up a terrible precedent. Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely. Zittrain writes: "Imagine a world in which all copies of once-censored books like Candide, The Call of the Wild, and Ulysses had been permanently destroyed at the time of the censoring and could not be studied or enjoyed after subsequent decision-makers lifted the ban." This may sound like an exaggeration; after all, we'll surely always have file-sharing networks and other online repositories for works that have been decreed illegal. But it seems like small comfort to rely on BitTorrent to save banned art. The anonymous underground movements that have long sustained banned works will be a lot harder to keep up in the world of the Kindle and the iPhone.

The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here's one way around this: Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it. (Sony and Interead—makers of rival e-book readers—didn't immediately respond to my inquiries about whether their devices allow the same functions. As far as I can tell, their terms of service don't give the companies the same blanket right to modify their services at will, though.)...

... To solve this problem, what we really need are new laws.

Well said! Congress should pass a law making these terms of service illegal in the United States.

When the market is your deity, there is no such thing as corruption

Paul Krugman picks two examples of the corruption of conservative political institutions …

Opinions for sale - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

… Politico has a scoop: … The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute … For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors….

… Think Tank’s Ideas Shifted as Malaysia Ties Grew: ..The Heritage Foundation sharply criticized … Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad … Heritage’s new, pro-Malaysian outlook emerged at the same time a Hong Kong consulting firm co-founded by Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage’s president, began representing Malaysian business interests…

Similar examples of corruption of left-leaning institutions doubtless exist. I was most struck, however, by his closing comment …

… Despite everything that’s happened, I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become.

During the 1990s and into the Bush era, America confused The Market with The Good, and, in some Protestant groups, with the God. I’ve called this Marketarianism; it’s a kissing cousin of Libertarianism.

In the Marketarian theology they share, the Heritage Foundation and the American Conservative Union are not corrupt. They are merely obeying the Will of the Market. That is right and just.

Few people, other than Paul Krugman and perhaps Frank Rich, have commented on how deeply this corruption has infested our society. We don’t understand what this means. It might help to compare corruption to lawlessness.

You don’t create a lawful society through a police force. Obviously, policing is essential, the police are a last resort. The foundations of a civil society are cultural norms reinforced through everyday examples and interactions.

Similarly, you can’t create a health economic society through regulation. Regulations are as essential as police, but they’re a last resort. A healthy economy requires a cultural foundation of honesty and personal integrity.

We’ve lost that cultural understanding, it’s been eroded by the Marketarian meme. We need to slowly, painfully, resurrect a lost ideal of institutional integrity.

In Our Time - The Sunni-Shia Split

This IOT Program starts slowly ...

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - The Sunni-Shia Split

... In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in the desert. His name was Husayn, and he was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death was a crucial episode in the growing split between two groups of Muslims - who would come to be known as the Sunni and the Shia...

... but it picks up speed after the first ten minutes or so when Melvyn Bragg takes control. I knew only the broadest outlines of the story, and the details are amazing. For an outsider it does add some context to the relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The early (and later) days of the Catholic papacy were pretty rough, but the assassinations and wars of early Islam are right up there. It reminds me also of the assassination eras of the American presidency. The conflicts occur on so many dizzying levels -- personal, family, tribe, relation to the Prophet, and proto-nation (but not, interestingly, theological except in the sense of who rules a theocracy).

The real mystery, which this one programme can't address, is how these squabbling tribes seized and held a vast empire -- before it became a vast and coherent civilization.

It's well worth a listen for anyone with an interest or stake in the Middle East. I do hope Obama gets some moments with IOT.

This is the third from last episode of what must be at least the sixth season (it's curiously hard to find out from the site how many seasons there have been.) Melvyn says he'll be back next year. It's been a great season as always, but listening to this episode I recognize that the past season has felt relatively sluggish.

In retrospect I think Melvyn has mellowed too much. He needs to get a bit tougher on his academics, who are prone to wander and miss the fundamentals. It's a fine road to travel -- some of them are rather nervous and might break down under harder handling, but the show works best when he's riding herd with the occasional flick of the whip.

Writing this post I noticed something new. There's a blog called "After Our Time". Unfortunately it appears to have expired in October 2007. It would be nice to see a revival of that.

Hacked Twitter advises: lie on security questions

Twitter CEO: How Not To Get Hacked Like Us: "...Lie on security questions.."

Tell it to the security idiots at US Bank.

I'm still looking for a Bank security team with a 3 digit IQ.