Category: Briefings

Early in my life I heard the story that the ancient Chinese worked out how to make a jug spout that didn’t dribble down the side. That may or may not be true but I’ve been amazed how many jugs still get that wrong. I’ve used it as a guiding principle throughout my life to make things that actually work. I also try to help others get the knack too.

Unfortunately we humans keep changing things for change’s sake and often produce ineffective products. A couple of years ago I bought a nearly new electric car. Like all modern cars it has ‘safety’ features that well meaning public bodies impose. I soon realised that the safety features were inadequate. For instance the car might attempt to pull you towards a parked car because it had spotted a white line approaching on the other side of the car. Even if it didn’t actually attempt to steer it would peep at you, unless you indicated your minor manoeuvre. While I am a driver who respects the needs of other road users, there is no need to indicate when there are clearly no other users in the vicinity. Also in some situations indicating is actually more confusing for other users, for instance when you are also coming up to a turn that you are not going to take. The car simply does not have the ability to judge the situation as a whole.

That lack of ability to judge led to other worrying decisions by the car. Both drivers had situations where the car suddenly did an emergency stop, much to the consternation of the driver and following drivers. The car quite simply misjudged the space available round the car.

The car also gets very confused by speed limits and what type of road it is. Again this has led to at least one occasion where the car violently swerved towards a car being overtaken because it thought the driver was was moving onto the opposite carriageway, rather than into an overtaking lane.

The well-meaning public bodies have also decreed that you can’t permanently switch the safety features off. That means that, on a drive with several stops, you have to keep switching them off every time. That would be fine if the switching off worked properly, but on this model of car there are inevitable bugs that mean it either hasn’t actually switched them off or, like ours, it switches one of them back on again when you put your foot on the brake to prepare to move.

So much of this inadequate design now resides in software. and one of the troubles with software is that it is easy to change but less easy to fully test. We have also moved into the age where information is provided to users on the go and in multiple ways. This is used to sell products. Unfortunately, in a car, every moment you are trying to work out what the car is telling you is a moment when you are not concentrating on the job of driving.

In the 1970’s I stumbled into making complex software and also the means of assessing how effective it was. The software I made would look at the roughly formatted information it was given and decide how to analyse it, using other hints from within the information and other guideline information that it had available. It would hand over control to another piece of software when it had satisfied a control limit measuring how well it was doing. If it was not able to solve the problem, it would hand control back to humans, if possible giving them information that would help them sort it out.

When testing the software I would set an arbitrary threshold on how effectively the software would perform and test it against that. If it failed to reach the threshold, I’d look to see if I could make it better but I also did that if it met or exceeded the threshold. Of course I had to set a limit on how long I worked at that before I took it to the other humans to see if that was going to work overall.

This model of software development is just as relevant today as it was back then. The software that controls safety features in a modern car is no different, just more complex and dependent on feedback from more sensors to make decisions. It is particularly important to take this into account when when you are thinking about AI but I’ll get to that another time.

Most mornings I sit in bed with a cup of tea and look at clouds and the trees in our garden. There seem to have been some beautifully different skies in recent times.

This morning I was watching the shape of the clouds move with the wind stream. My child’s brain somehow expected the whole pattern to move in unison but it doesn’t do that does it? What we see as a pattern with some shading, hinting at 3D, is of course multiple clumps of clouds and different heights and distances. They move independently on the air streams where each one is. Everything around us is more complicated than we remember to think.

That’s not all the cloud complications. The sun and air movements change temperatures and clouds can change consistency and even state. A thin whispy cloud might suddenly become transparent and disappear or the opposite. I realised I have spent my life staring at water in all its forms and trying to catch some of its subtleties.

That reminded me of Elif Shafak’s ‘There are Rivers in the Sky’, which uses water in various ways in the imagery of the story. One theme is the amazing strong electrochemical bond in H2O. She plays with the idea of how long water has ‘lived’ and what it might have ‘witnessed’.

Suddenly I was intrigued by how strong that bond is. First the bond is at molecule level, so an individual drop of water has much weaker bonds and molecules can wander off at any time. That molecular bond is magically strong though and people don’t fully understand it. There are many competing theories and we really want to be able to break the bond efficiently, in terms of energy and cost, so we can unlock the hydrogen. We always want to move on to the next solution. There is a lot of water about but we are not good at managing it. From prehistory on, especially when we band together in bigger groups and let some people get too powerful, we have ruined the useful water in one place and moved on to the next. We are doing it with greater frequency every day. Many improvement are made but they are outweighed by selfish and badly thought out decisions.

It pleased me enormously to find that the lower half of my window view does splits the water molecules all the time. The plants there use photosynthesis and the power of the sun to achieve the job. I love finding out just how far behind the world we are in terms of inventiveness. We haven’t made a great job with our power and nosiness so far. There will come a point when nature stops rescuing us.

I should have put Questions in that title but it was getting a bit wordy. Hopefully it will make sense in a minute.

Let’s gets straight to the catchy bit. Like many living things, cuttlefish reproduce by mating and one common tactic in the mating game is for males to try to become dominant or ‘alpha’. Unlike most of us, cuttlefish can change their surface colouring (other than by adding makeup or foolishly sitting too long in the sun). They do this in response to stress and as a way of sending messages, like bird calls.

Now, people who look at evolution too simplistically see the ‘dominant’ word and think that is all that matters. They rush out and buy supplements and sit staring at themselves in gyms. This applies to all genders and sexual preference because dominance applies in a groups.

The cuttlefish is a good example of alternative strategies. The males, especially smaller ones, can adopt female colouring on the side facing the dominant male and a male display pattern on the other side. Clever. Some males also herd females into a hollow and sit over them, getting exclusive access. Other clever males can even adopt full female colouring and sit in the pile under the dominant males quietly mating when the chance comes.

So far so very male minded. The male cuttlefish is either a bulky bully or a sneaky smally. Evolution is way more complicated than that and females instinctively know it (they have evolved that way). The classic male interpretation of the herding into a hollow habit is that the females trade some loss of freedom for protection and access to the dominant gene. How simplistic.

I have said elsewhere that evolution is the survival of those that happen to survive, to try to emphasise this complexity. The statistics will indicate that there is no one way for a single individual to predict what will make their offspring survive. There are options that are simpler to adopt and that also sit higher up in the pile of options but there is also variation in both mating and offspring care adopted. This indicates that the statistics often favour those who adopt each way bets. So females let the dominant male sit there on edge guarding his harem and then sneak off and mate with other males who have shown the resilience not to give up and the wit to appear in the right place for the opportunity to arise. That ensures the most favourable balance of gene survival to deal with the complexities of survival. Females also mate with multiple males to let the sperm and ova do the selection.

So what has all this to do with reasoning? The first stage of reasoning is hinted at above. You only get past the simplistic understanding of evolution if you ask questions. The questions to ask here are ‘how does the male cuttlefish decide which range of colours to adopt?’ and ‘how does it decide that fighting is not the best option but sneaking into the hollow has good chances’? If you think a bit further on from that you can ask how the successful adoption of a tactic get passed on to offspring? Is it a better instinctive colouring ability or a brighter brain?

Of course I don’t know the answers to those questions but the existence of the questions has wider implications for the ways we reason about all sorts of things. Sadly the habit of asking questions seems to have got a bit lost in some of the narrower, results led, approaches to education that we have adopted. We already had a habit of using reasoning to show dominance in various ways, because as well as helping people recruiting others to jobs and courses, exams and qualifications have always been used in that way. I think we are in danger of losing the habit of asking questions about our own reasoning. As with evolution and the cuttlefish we need to keep our options open. We must remember that the ‘fitness’ to purpose of a person can’t simply be measured by exams but also involves adaptability and the ability to ask relevant questions.

And anyone else’s children and grand children

I’ve just been drilling holes through several strips of corrugated roofing at a time. It is a slow and boring job. Hard on old wrists too. That is just one of the many things I now do (as a retiree) to please myself and to help other people.

It made me think about schooling, because I failed (the word they used then) to get into the more academic school that my brother ended up going to. That meant that I went to a school where I did woodwork, metalwork and pottery. All skills I have used in one way or another throughout my life. We also did technical drawing, like an architect or someone designing a machine would use. I was absolutely awful at that and still am.

What I’m writing is not about how useful practical skills are but about how early failure, or failure at some things, does not define you or hopefully limit your chances.

When it came to the exams at age 16, I didn’t do well at those either. I aced maths but not others that I was supposed to be good at and failed several of the nine I was put in for. I didn’t care much because I’d decided to try Art School. It seemed better for me than the hair dressing option anyway.

At school I had been kind of adopted by people for whom art was a normal part of life but when I got to Art School, I realised just how little I knew about it. I also came across my first ‘posh’ people, with different sorts of names, different schooling and assumptions about life that were alien to me. Not everyone of course, but it was an eye opener. I also realised that I could not imagine how I would make a living from art, other than as a teacher and I was still off teachers. Oh well try again.

At Technical College I met again with others from my school who hadn’t flown through it acing everything either. I still couldn’t decide what to do but at least the sandwich course I did gave me work experience beyond stacking shelves and other bits and pieces I’d done for years. The result was that I didn’t ace things again, despite it becoming even more obvious that I could have done better if I’d tried. I was also socially awkward and embarrassed (though I think I hid it well) and often went along with things like heavy drinking that didn’t help anything.

The tale goes on but there is no point here in listing my series of failures to live up to expectations. I never found a course or job that completely felt like what I wanted to do. But I’ve had jobs all my life that keep me going. Indeed I have earned a good living without sacri89ficing my moral sense of public duty. I slowly realised that I could make things better for everyone by using my skills and also that I could explain things clearly to people. I discovered that sticking at things was easier than I thought. I’ve always tried to keep on doing other things that help make me happy too. I ended up with quite a long list of varied qualifications without ever stopping paid work. I even ended up teaching in a University alongside doing non academic work.

I hope you can find a way through all the ups and downs too. Love from a grandad.

Ruth just introduced me to the idea for the need for the Friction given by human interaction and debate for keeping our brains active and developing. Aside from dismissing it as the next fad in brain training circles and Ruth’s understandable need to remind me of of reclusive tendencies, I realised that it gelled with earlier things I have written and said. When calculators started to become compulsory for schooling I saw that students started to trust them too much. They didn’t have the general estimating ability to see that their answer was way too small or large. My own struggles with mental arithmetic have at least schooled me in checking those problems of scale. Those struggles are one form of stimulative friction. I started giving lessons in estimating to counter the calculator tendency.

The huge rise in the trust in AI, at the same time as the rise in doom stories, is another calculator moment. We need to find ways of helping people to see through the mist of AI to recognise what is trustworthy and what is not.

I’ll be mulling over that from now on.

My last AI briefing was https://valleycreations.me/wp-admin/post.php?post=5083&action=edit

Hubris, vanity, ego, whatever you want to call it we are full of it. I certainly have it but try to keep it under control. Weirdly, I came up with the idea for this bit of writing after being irritated by an TV program on cave art. What art is and its role in life is little side interest of mine, and early art is part of that.

The program was about the wonderful and varied cave art at Chauvet. As usual I couldn’t help noticing when the admirable experts and program makers put across messages that were slightly more open to question. We all do that too, making sweeping statements to convey our message more impressively. I went researching and a series of things I came across gelled into something I thought worth saying.

Let’s start with the art. Art is built into all of us. If you make clothing, personal decoration or decor choices that is a form of art. Current research suggest that people have been making art for around 70,000 years. That is not just us, the badly named Homo Sapiens, but also Denisovans and Neanderthals

Art is a form of communication. It is also about display, attraction, entertainment and showing off. Animals of all sorts select objects to show off, make structures to attract, do dances and carry out mimicry to attract interest, sing to draw attention and to ward it off and a whole range of other things of the sorts that underpin all art.

You can discuss forever what makes good art, what conveys more meaning, what is more moral, what is prettier and so on, but it is all art. Likes and dislikes are personal. I really dislike Faberge eggs. I admire skill but there is much in the world that I think of as fashionable rather than admirable and I don’t like fashions and fads in general. Give me a good cave painting any day.

In the Chauvet caves there are a full range of marks and techniques. These seem to start at the front end to the cave, with simpler marks, generally in red ochre pigment and range to further back, generally in charcoal and with more sophisticated representational elements, such as lions and bison.

I have to be careful here of that word ‘representational’. It is a word that people load with hidden meanings of superiority in one way or another. People can dismiss abstract art because they ‘can’t see what it is’ or others can equally dismiss art because they (or more often others) can see what it is and therefore ‘it lacks sophistication’.

In Chauvet the work at the front consists mainly of patterns of marks and sprayed hand prints. These are almost certainly earlier and perhaps show less sophistication of technique. The important word here is ‘technique’. Some can be born with a more natural grasp of technique but all can use practice to develop technique. In addition we can also learn technique from others. Human species are not alone in possessing this range of technique development skills.

Finally we come to the question of who did the cave art. I’m not going to speculate on Chauvet because I don’t know. Looking around statements that people make about cave art and relating it to evidence we have about our own development, highlights the hubris contained in those statements, as mentioned in the title here.

There is suggestive evidence that we lived in the same timescales as Neanderthals and Denisovans for a very long time and that we almost certainly shared locales with them at the same time. Ancient DNA evidence is hard to find but what there is indicates that we share DNA with Neanderthals. How much sexual activity there was we can only speculate on. It is not impossible that the same is true of other hominids. Their development is not completely clear and classification of them is based on the usual, often tenuous, observation of characteristics that we think can be useful in grouping things together or separating them. Taking those classifications and using them to speculate about behaviours, meanings and who did what can sometimes lead to a narrowing of views and options.

What I’ve written so far hides the thorny question of spirituality, which is often attached to discussions of art, archeology and many other things. Elsewhere I have speculated about dogs sometimes going round in circles before lying down. How do they decide when it feels right to stop the circling? ‘Feeling right’ is not really defined by argued logic. That doesn’t make it superior to argued logic. It can’t be explained in a rational way. Sprituality is just one shade of that internal feeling of right or wrong.  We need to recognise that what feels right or wrong is fundamental to our existence and therefore needs respect alongside logic and reasoning.  As far I can tell philosophical attempts to define right and wrong have always failed to come up with a consistent way of explaining it.

So we are complicated and we are all different mixes of complicated. There is no foolproof way of defining or describing what we do. I suspect the best art contains elements of every aspect of our personalities. It is personal but we can also discuss aspects like the number of layers of meaning in a particular set of work and how well it communicates both layers of meaning and feeling accurately to the rest of us.

Neanderthals definitely made art as I have defined it here. Over time our ancestors developed and passed on all sorts of new ways to make art. I don’t think attempts to judge the sophistication of what our predecessors produced have much value. Trying to use such judgements to artificially categorise and separate us from some predecessor is not very useful. It is the equivalent of colonial assumptions about superiority.

Whether layers of meaning and spirituality have increased alongside the development of technique is another matter. Though I don’t believe in vague ideas of spirituality as something outside of us, I think there is often more value in the work in Chauvet and similar examples, on nearly all levels, than there is the Arnolfini Portrait, which was in one of my first art love affairs. I also think that the questions behind what I’ve set out are a good way of thinking about art: Does it make me smile, Does it uplift or move me, does it give me a message, have I learned something from it?

I hope some of the things I do make some people answer yes to some of those questions and I hope I have helped you in both enjoyment and understanding.

I’ve been asked to see if I can simplify and summarise an article in the Guardian about the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Iran by the US military

The article is both very good and also very bad. As far as I can tell, it tells a detailed and accurate story. Sadly it is absolutely crammed with details and acronyms that are often superfluous to the message. This despite it mocking the constantly changing jargon.

One example is that it prominently refers several times to the acronym LLM without explaining it. The only real reason that LLM is at all relevant is that some commentators thought that the missiles were targeted by a Chatbot. Chatbots use Large Language Models to make sense of the conversations.

As well as cramming too much history and historic factual detail in, the article also cherry picks the detail to take aim at particular targets such as the US and Palantir. The people in those, and other, organisations may well warrant criticism but not as a way of boasting about other’s superiority.

I think the gist of the situation is that there are systems (a combination of technology and people) that provide information to inform decisions about targeting in a combat situation. There are also systems that allow greater accuracy and speed in the delivery of the actual munitions. The technology used in delivery can now be faster, more accurate and can be controlled remotely, either directly by an operator or automatically by a technological system. Some of these systems now include some AI to analyse increasingly greater amounts of data including satellite imagery, mapping and coordinate details, weather and technological capability.

The development argument is that politicians and military high-ups make faulty decisions about strategic developments, often based on ignorance and ego. Even if the actual developers show a conscience about what is proposed, they will simply be by-passed and replaced. I can tell you from personal experience that it takes a lot of resilience, mental agility and a persuasive personality to re-direct strategies in a more valuable direction. The other area of failure in the development of all technologies is that each level of people involved loses interest when it comes to the testing the system against the objectives and also re-examining the objectives to ensure they still make sense.

The usage argument is on several levels. The first is that the more capable a technology appears to be, the less attention those operating it pay to whether it is working properly. The second is that the further away that the operators are from the effects of the technology, i.e. dead bodies and destruction, then the less likely they are to question what they are doing. This distance is even greater for the original strategists and many members of the public. The main crux of the argument is that this situation is not new and people of all sorts fail to pick up the nuances of how it all works and therefore who or what is to blame.

Finally on AI, I have written elsewhere about what it can and can’t do but the main message is that you can’t rely on it in all situations. It is trying to mimic human intelligence capacities while adding much better data processing capability. Donald Trump apparently has some intelligence but, personally, I wouldn’t rely on anything he said or any decision he made.

I hope that is helpful. On a personal level such situations always remind me of the cartoon film ‘Up’. There are some scary dogs and as a pack when one of them thinks they see a squirrel, they all turn their heads in unison and growl ‘Squirrel’. The other thing about those dogs is that, like the ‘wizard’ in the Wizard of Oz, they are really also babies wanting to be cuddled and fussed.