Category: Briefings

I had an accident when I was young that means that I am more aware than many how useful our hands are and what a nuisance it is when you can’t use them properly. I can’t easily use my right hand to pick up or hold things and often use my left to manoeuvre things into place. I have joked that I am half Primate and half not.

The story of opposable thumbs is often one part of how we explain to ourselves how clever we are. I referred to this habit in another post on Anthropomorphism.

I have recently been taking enlarged videos of the birds in our garden, so I have been looking at them more closely than usual. Birds, as you probably know, are basically evolved dinosaurs and, because of their size, only have little brains. Like with the poor Goldfish, people use terms like ‘bird brain’ as insults. In fact birds can see things that are completely invisible to us, have amazing ability to respond to visual signals with physical action at great speed and pigeons can recognise drawings and photos of trees as trees. Birds have also been shown to recognise themselves in a mirror.

So how do birds relate to opposable thumbs? Well some birds have one of the toe/fingers on each foot facing backwards. This gives them advantages in all sorts of situations related to there particular lifestyle, so we are not alone in that ability. In fact there are several species of animals that have similar adaptations.

Whilst I was staring at my hand thinking about this, I realised that the thumb is not the main problem. It is the fact that I can’t control the fingers either. On my left I can touch any one finger to any other. On my right I can’t do that and the only way I can reliably get fingers to touch their neighbour is by curling the hand up so all four touch. Relating that to watching the birds in the garden, I have watched them pick up a seed, place it between their toes, that are also holding the perch and then use their beak and tongue to remove bits of husk and eat the seed inside. I am just jealous, of the dextrous toes, the very useful beak and the ability to bend that way.

So before calling someone a bird brain (you shouldn’t be so insulting anyway), think of trying to make a birds nest. Look at one and think of the dexterity and skill needed to make it. In many ways it is likely that we have flourished because of our inabilities, that have made us have to find other ways of doing things.

I’ve been reading a book where there is much extended and slightly repetitive musing about our experience of Time. Partly because Ruth is currently in a time zone that is thirteen hours ahead of me, I had a think about it. Without getting too technical, I thought I’d put down some thoughts that might clarify for us.

First, we all experience time differently. Usually I seem to do things faster than many people. It doesn’t feel like that when I am doing something but that is often what happens. When I was a student and I was in a lecture where there were copious notes written on the board the opposite would happen. Because I am left handed, I have always written slowly, so I would constantly be trying to catch up and shaking my hand because it hurt. My experience of time varies for me and it differs from everyone else’s. We are all like that.

Second, our experience of time is different to our attempts to measure it. Measurement, naming, the making of formulae to make predictions are all things that scientists and makers use to add levels of control to our lives. Relating this to time, one unit of measurement we use is the Day. This makes sense, though if you live at the poles it is somewhat less useful. The poles are not only difference though. I live at the top of a hill. For me the sun comes up earlier and goes down later than those who live in the valley below me, so their experience is slightly different. In a hot air balloon hovering above me the difference would be even more marked. A wide open plane changes things again.

Having instinctively chosen the day as a time measure we went on to make up all sorts of different measurement units, partly to give us more understanding and control but also to help with communication. Sadly bad communication often happens when people start dreaming or arguing about those units of measurement.

The more people travelled and the more travel speeded up the more important it seemed to unify measurements a bit. Here we come to the International Date Line. This is the arbitrary point at which one day changes to the next. This is where Ruth being thirteen hours ahead comes in. The date line runs down the pacific and wobbles round the few countries it meets, because there are few countries to meet and thus only sparse populations to upset. It is useful, but is the clearest illustration between the experience of time and the measurement of it. When you add in the fact that New Zealand and the UK both change the clocks twice a year and at slightly different times of year, so that there can be 11,12 or 13 hours between us, the wobbliness of the measurement factor is highlighted.

It is also important to realise that it is still Now wherever you are. When I chat to new Zealand we are still chatting at the same time (apart from slight delays for transmission) even though the time of day is different, as is the season, the weather and whatever other experiences surround our chat.

So whether is day, minutes, years, light years, parsecs or any other measure, they are all just measures. Our experience is different to the measuring. In a similar vane, if someone tells you that a table is not actually solid, just smile wisely and say ‘Actually it is solid and thank goodness for all the random, unpredictable behaviours of those sub atomic particles that make it solid to, solid tomorrow and onwards until something changes it.

I was around 7 or 8 when a teacher showed us how to make a version of an origami dragon head. It has just occurred to me that I did pretty well to make it, as just over a year before I had an accident that has meant that I can’t use my right hand properly. That aside, origami has been with me since and the most frequently made piece has been the water bomb in the picture. Something appeals about a piece of flat folding that you then blow into and make swell.

Another trick I learned at some point in my life was to raise my arm up, bent at the elbow, so that the palm of my hand was facing upwards just behind the line of my ear. I would then balance a pile of coins on the elbow, fling my arm forward and catch all the coins in my hand. Pretty impressive eh? Actually, like most things, all that is involved is a little natural ability, understanding some ‘tricks’, and some practice.

It is tempting to say that these skills have no value whatsoever but I have entertained people (especially very young people) with them a lot. Also I have seen origami used to demonstrate all sorts of things, such as teamwork, production planning and other business practices. In one such session I noticed that someone who was not naturally skilled at the folding still provided an insight that the more speedy of us could use to get even faster. I have even managed to get a large group of flighty drama students to sit quietly working in groups of four to produce origami swans for a performance piece.

Still, when it comes down to it, these skills are still not that useful. Which brings me to the real point of this. Sadly much human reasoning, and the education practices that support it, are bit like origami. It is a set of skills that can be used in a useful way, but can also be used without real purpose and even quite destructively. One example is what I call Angels on the Head of a Pin reasoning. I don’t know if people have actually debated how many angels you can get on a the head of a pin but a lot of intellectual debate has ben underpinned by such questionable starting points. I would argue that the origami also has more value than much of that debate.

I hope that makes sense.

There is a strong tendency in science to disapprove of anthropomorphism, meaning attributing human characteristics to animals. There is good reasoning behind that, but I suspect there is also a great deal of species snobbery involved as well.

It is true that we can’t tell what is going on in animals minds. Sadly that is also true of other people’s minds. With other humans we do have more clues because of shared experiences and the use of language but all sorts of things interfere with the reliability of the inferences that we make from what we observe and what people tell us. Modern technology, such as brain scans, can help in the rigour of our studies, but our understanding is still very fragmentary.

So why do I think the ‘avoid anthropomorphism’ stricture is also snobbish. Well we have a history of believing that we are totally unique and superior. It is even built into many religions. Many more people than now also used to think that women and children were also on some lower level and that reasoning about their behaviour was difficult. Most of us have moved on from that.

Avoiding comparing animals with humans risks missing out on vital clues about behaviours. If an animal looks embarrassed, then it is possible that they are experiencing something similar to our own reactions in a comparable situation. After all a very significant proportion of our own daily behaviour is controlled at a sub-rational level. To assume that animals can’t be reacting like us is just vanity.

Elsewhere I have said that I think that animals have some form of ‘artistic’ impulse. That is a two way assumption: that, in some way, the animal is thinking about what they are making or doing in terms of what it looks like but also that when we make or do things we are operating with impulses that are not entirely unique to us. That is zoomorphism.

I am just reading ‘Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It.’ by Janina Ramirez. Coincidently I am also watching ‘Art that Made Us’ and also ‘Nature and Us: a History Through Art’ on BBC iplayer. All these cover some similar ground, weaving their own story around similar times, people, place and objects.

It is important to remember that all history stories are selective, interpretive and sometimes even polemical. Also that the writers operate within the realm of their own knowledge, beliefs and the paradigms they have inherited from others. In addition they have to operate with the evidence available and this can vary considerably and sometimes speculation is the only real option. It is important that we recognise that speculation and also look for the questions that are not being asked.

In the above histories some time is spent looking at the different tribes and peoples moving through the landscape of the British Isles from the arrival of the Romans to the end of, say, Elizabeth 1’s reign. There are Picts, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and more, all coming into and going out of different parts of the islands, fighting, raiding, settling, mating but also, very importantly, trading. Nobody knows exactly what happened or all the movements from one place to another.

As I was taking all this in, I started to think about language and went off on a trail looking at Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Anglo Saxon English, Norse, Latin, French. When you add in barely mutually understandable dialects, you realise that all of these and more were co-existing and influencing people’s behaviour and interactions. When you listen to the history stories there is a tendency for them to assume that Latin and French, for instance are being used by the ‘educated’ few, or that the fact that Welsh now exists mainly in Wales means that all the Welsh speakers were driven out of England when other groups came in. While this drift is true, it hides a more complicated day-to-day situation. At any one time many people would just have stayed where they were and adapted to the changed circumstances.

One of the glues in this complicated situation is trade. Among the objects found in archaeological digs in these islands are elements that come from all over the then known world. Between their origin and their final resting place there is a continuous chain of more ordinary people exchanging goods, passing on manufacturing techniques, discussing and copying designs and haggling over prices.

These exchanges are not carried out exclusively in mime. Bits of all sorts of languages would be used, drawings might be scribbled on archaeologically useless scraps of whatever was to hand, and different coinages would be assessed and traded. This doesn’t just happen at trading centres, but between ordinary individuals across disputed territories, who are just getting on with their daily lives.

There is no one standard English language to day and there never has been, but we all manage to communicate more or less successfully. When I was young there were no regional accents on radio or TV, so it was often harder for some to understand some others. The irony of the current fusion of accents is that local differences are rapidly disappearing. When I visited family in Cumbria, I would hear broad dialect/accent that I rarely hear today. At the same time, if I watch a Norwegian program with subtitles, I can still hear some of those dialect words used in Norway. Similarly, when I was young a lot of my friends were Jewish. At school they talked the same as me, but at home they would often be surrounded by Yiddish, Hebrew and quite likely at least one other European language. I still have random Yiddish words floating about in my brain. Similarly there were Muslim families who were regularly using at least three languages at home. All people and living languages have always been, and still are, complicated mixes.

I mentioned mating somewhere in there and this clearly has an effect on how people interacted in history, but I think we’ll leave that for another post.

This is just a quick note on how my brain seems to have developed in relation to all the experiences I have had. I hope it might add an insight into brains in general and making the best uses of the human ability to see patterns. Who knows, you might start looking around you and begin to see similarities in things you meet every day.

After a number of below the counter jobs, I started work in a supermarket when I was 14. At the time they were generally small and ‘new fangled’.

As I learnt what to do and how to do it efficiently, my curiosity about the inner working of things started me seeing connections. This in turn led to me gaining the confidence of the management, as they realised I could be trusted with more complex tasks or with adapting to working in another store. I started to understand stock management in the shop in both the public and warehouse areas. Unloading deliveries I became aware that some came from a central supermarket warehouse and others from individual companies and that the delivery vehicles had to be loaded so the that the first delivery was at the back. I was getting my first glance into the world of logistics.

After a brief detour into Fine Arts, I was at Technical College studying, amongst other things, Business Studies and Economics. To earn some money, I worked in turn at a global book distribution company, long before Amazon came into being, and then a company that made and serviced domestic appliances and catering equipment. Both of these gave me insights into an extended range of business organisation problems and I started to see similarities in what is called ‘the problem space’.

Over time I came to work on problems including managing manufacturing processes, running libraries, controlling remote machines, connecting information with geographical locations, managing utility supplies, billing, payrolls, planning bus routes and analysing usage, running chemical works, telephone directory systems, scheduling maintenance in all sorts of situations, credit rating, help line management, managing education and training, emergency planning and on and on.

Each of these situations is different but there are many underlying similarities. As time goes by it is possible to develop the habit of seeing past the jargon and detail of any new area or problem to see these underlying patterns and to use them to speedier understanding of possible solutions and techniques. It is important to do this without failing to pay respect to the differences too.

I won’t go into all the technical jargon or theories but I will give you a couple of examples based on what I have already written here.

The first underlying example is a queue. Queues are everywhere. We all have to deal with queues. In the supermarket where I worked, we had to put orders in early enough to get them before we ran out of stock, because of the suppliers delivery queue. On our side we also had to take into account the queue for space in the warehouse, so that customers weren’t tripping over boxes piled in the store. Managing a production line is a queue problem. Managing staff job lists is a queue problem. Traffic management and logistics involve queues. There are queues in nearly all the job areas I mentioned earlier.

Related to the idea of a queue is the pipeline. A pipeline has a flow capacity it can deal with and, once it reaches that capacity, there can only be problems in trying to exceed that capacity. Interestingly we each are a pipeline and we have all been in a situation where we have felt loaded up to and beyond our capacity. In real world problems the pipe is not just a pipe but a complex network of different sized pipes and their individual performance is dependent on the whole. The internet, all the utility supplies we get, delivery companies, service points and road capacities are just some of the pipelines around us. The electric cables in your house are a pipe system and if you exceed the capacities you are likely to have a fire. Even the way a teacher delivers information to a class can be seen as dealing with different capacities to take on information and the teachers capacity to cope with different speeds of delivery.

That last one is intentionally true but slightly eccentric. It is not clear how useful it is to spot the insight into how that aspect of teaching delivery works. As I said earlier, there is a point at which you have to stop yourself getting carried away with underlying patterns.

I started this piece after I was reading about Bitcoin and its relatives and then the BlockChain technique that underlies it. This in turn was related to a whole set of other underlying techniques that is relies on. One of them goes back to a completely different and surprising area – single track railways. When a single track railway has double track ones at either end a solution is needed to stop trains meeting head on. One method of solving this is to have a box at each end that can hold a token. There is only one token and you can’t set off on the single track if you don’t have the token. The driver at one end can pick up the token and then drop it off at the other end. Systems such as this exist for canal tunnels too.

Those of you that are beginning to join the dots will have spotted the problem with the single token solution. I’ll let you work that out for yourselves but will end with the conclusion that looking for patterns and connections, learnt by a mixture of experience and training, can speed up your appreciation of new problem spaces and help you to see possible improvements and potential pitfalls. Good luck

Ruth asked me try to explain AI briefly, so here goes.

AI is, of course, Artificial Intelligence but, as no-one really knows what intelligence is, that isn’t very helpful. Artificial means that it is intelligence shown by a machine, though if we could engineer soft tissue that would probably count too. You get the idea that an explanation is not easy.

Alan Turing, of code-breaking fame, came up with the basic test, that if you can ask questions and you can’t tell whether the answers are coming from a human or not, then you could be witnessing AI. That is worth holding on to, but it is a bit simplistic to help us with what is going on around us with the sudden rapid growth of AI.

Let’s look at some example tasks.

What age are children before they can add up numbers? That is clearly a task that requires intelligence, but it something you can do with a calculator. A modern calculator is a step up in the scale of development, in that it can carry out a series of instructions, for instance to calculate an average.

What about the computers that we all have in our hands and on our desks and that have been helping with many of our affairs in the background for the last 70 years? Those can carry on doing things speedily, accurately, and repeatedly, without having to be told what to do every step of the way. These machines add very important extras to the calculator that include the word IF (IF Something is True DO Something, Otherwise Do Something Else). The quality of the outcomes of what these machines do is entirely dependent on the quality of the intelligence of their commissioners and developers.

Some tasks, such as playing chess or predicting the weather, are so complicated, that we have to introduce more complex statistics into the decisions and the outcomes become less predictable. This means that the systems can be less reliable. It is worth remembering that they are probably still more reliable than we would be, just as the calculator is better than we are at doing the calculations, providing we give it the right calculations to do. Systems like this have been proven to be better at some medical diagnosis than the average doctor, because they encapsulate the experience of the very best doctors.

What if we know that a task that we want a machine to help with is so complex that we haven’t got the time or ability to work out exactly how to give it the instructions to do the task to our satisfaction? The answer here is that we let the system make its own decisions about the accuracy of the statistical choices used in some of the IF controls. The system keeps a history of its decisions and of the success or failure of the outcomes. It uses this information to adjust its statistical controls. The system is said to be Learning. The developers can give it a training period with lots of practice and then release it into more serious situations when a certain level of competence has been reached. A good example of this is the driverless cars that are being tested on the road. They had their training period off road and are now testing out in real world situations. This is probably what we would call AI.

What About Control?

Going back to Frankenstein’s Monster and beyond, a sensible concern has been the risk of producing something that we can’t control. I have already used two examples where control creates doubt. Giving medical diagnosis to machines seems risky to most people and driverless cars create similar worries. Yet in both these cases it is arguable that the outcomes would be better if we handed over control.

This matter of control is very difficult to understand and discuss. It hits one of the key weaknesses of the brain, the ability to judge probability and risk. At one level we do it all the time and pretty successfully, without consciously thinking about it, but there are lots of situations where we are very bad at it.

Examples of what AI can/could do

An AI controlled tractor can move through a field preparing ground, sowing seed or harvesting crops quicker and more efficiently than a human controlled one. It can take notice of weather and other matters to make choices.

An AI controlled factory can/could control machines, incoming and outgoing stock, transport plans and keep track of what is being done. It can do this based on current orders, past and developing trends.

An AI controlled transport system could alter routes in real time depending on current conditions.

AI can look at vast amounts of data and pick out patterns that we would quite likely never pick out. In this way it can/could, for instance, design medicines much quicker than we ever could.

This brings us back to the amazing Elon Musk. He is looking at examples like those above and thinking how quickly they have become possible and what further possibilities there are. He is not a person suffering too much from doubt.

Is it all AI?

No. Some of the things that computer systems are doing are arguably not AI, but they are still fairly scary.

Holding information on what people and their friends show interest in on social media and using this to target ads and limit offered content, is probably not AI.

There may be some AI involved in flying and targeting weaponised drones, but they are most often human controlled and still dangerous.

What is AI bad at?

There is a long list but a delivery we had today highlights a general trend. The message said that the delivery should come between 10.53 and 11.56. This is an example of what I call spurious acuracy. Generally we would recognise immediately pointlessness of the minutes in those times. A machine of any sort has trouble with our generalisation/rounding habits. On the other hand those habits are quite hard to justify.

Back to the Origami

The picture of a cardboard structure at the top of this piece is a piece of packaging from a vacuum cleaner box. It is extremely clever, coming from a single piece of card as it does. It is strong and easily recyclable. Having all the device pieces in sturdy boxes with sturdy dividers means that they can be stacked higher and moved about more efficiently, probably using automation. Costs can probably be reduced overall. Whether AI played a part in this is in doubt, but computers certainly did in, so many ways. Whether that is a good thing overall is a much more complicated question and its elegance of design still doesn’t enamour me to James Dyson.