Artificial intelligence, the quantum internet, and life and/or death

The 2021 Baltimore Science Fiction Convention (Balticon) runs this coming weekend. Virtual but real, if you get my drift. Convention is free; the programming looks very strong. Poke around & check off the interesting ones: I had great trouble keeping my choices down to one per time slot.

And, Balticon has recorded all of the talks: I’ve linked each talk to its video.

For my Balticon talk I’m doing:

Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, and Futures: Saturday, 2:30pm

From neural nets and genetic algorithms to facial recognition and deep fakes, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. What exactly do we mean by AI and how did it get where it is today? What are the benefits and risks of AI and how should we manage it going forwards?

Fast moving & fun topic!

Ethics and Robotics: Friday, 4pm

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws formed one of the earliest ethics systems for robots and artificially-created beings, but aren’t necessarily accurate or complete. A hundred years after Asimov’s birth, what approaches are being taken in the practical development of robots? What is “real AI” and how far away are we from it?

With Anne Gray aka netmouse (moderator), Aaron M. Roth and Marie Vibbert

The Quantum Internet: Hype or the Next Step? Saturday, 7pm

What do we mean by the quantum internet? What are quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, quantum sensors, and linked quantum computers? What are the advantages and key problems? Who will get to use it? And do we have just a bunch of interesting tech that all have quantum in their name or can the whole be more than the sum of the parts?

I’m moderating this one with Anne Gray and Kevin Roche (who is the quantum computing evangelist at IBM).

From “Mostly Dead” to Alive and Back Again: Sunday, 10pm

How is it that something like the coronavirus can be completely inert one moment and then spawning millions of copies of itself the next? How did intracellular obligate parasites — organisms that can’t survive without a host — manage to evolve into existence in the first place? What of transposons (jumping genes), viroids (the smallest infectious pathogens known), and the dreaded “giant” viruses? Join us as we dart back and forth across the line that separates life & death in biology!

I’m moderating this one as well, with the panelists: Dr. Jim Prego, Doug Dluzen, Anna Kashina, Pam Garrettson.

Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle apply along the time dimension?

Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP) apply along the time dimension in the same way it applies along the three space dimensions? Relativity says it should; current practice says no. With recent advances in measurement at the attosecond scale it is now possible to decide this question experimentally. The most direct test is to measure the time-of-arrival of a quantum particle: if the HUP applies in time, then the dispersion in the time-of-arrival will be measurably increased. We develop an appropriate metric of time-of-arrival in the standard case; extend this to include the case where there is uncertainty in time; then compare. There is — as expected — increased uncertainty in the time-of-arrival if the HUP applies along the time axis. The results are fully constrained by Lorentz covariance, therefore uniquely defined, therefore falsifiable. And therefore we have an experimental question on our hands. Any definite resolution would have significant implications with respect to the role of time in quantum mechanics and relativity. A positive result would also have significant practical applications in the areas of quantum communication, attosecond physics (e.g. protein folding), and quantum computing.

Presented as a talk at International Association for Relativistic Dynamics 2020 Conference; currently in submission to the associated Journal of Physics: Conference Series: Proceedings of IARD 2020. 31 pages, 5 figures, 87 references

Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, & Futures

My Philcon artificial intelligence talk is at 1pm tomorrow at Virtual Philcon 2020. You can register for it here.

I’ve uploaded a PDF of the talk to slideshare. The Obama Deep Fake movie was too large to uploaded, so I just used a still for that. The PDF has the references as well as the sources of all the images in the splash page above.

There are 22 images, 3 “real”, the rest from various films & so on.

• Talos — Jason & the Argonauts
• The Mechanical Turk — popular chess playing fake (18th century)
• Tik-Tok — Wizard of Oz
• Robot Maria — Metropolis
• Joe (transparent robot) — The Proud Robot
• Roy Batty (replicant) – Bladerunner
• R2-D2 & C-3PO — Star Wars
• Terminator — Terminator
• Rommie (ship avatar) — Andromeda
• Android Gunslinger — West World
• Commander Data — Star Trek Next Generation
• Mecha — AI
• Sonny — I, Robot
• BB-8 — Star Wars
• Eve & Wall-E — Wall-E
• Asimo — Honda robot
• Johnny 5 – Short Circuit
• Sophia — The First Robot Declared a Citizen by Saudi Arabia (2016)
• Janet — The Good Place
• Ava — Ex Machina
• Samantha — Her
• Denise Virtual Assistant — NextOS (now Realbotix)

And I have a number of references. These should be useful starting points. One of the striking things about these is that all are from the last five years; and all but two from the two years. The field is moving that fast!

• Miller 2019 – The Artist in the Machine
• Mitchell 2019 – Artificial Intelligence
• O’Neil 2016 – Weapons of Math Destruction
• Pickover 2019 – Artificial Intelligence
• Scharre 2018 – Army of None
• Shane 2019 – You look like a thing and I love you
• Tamboli 2019 – Keeping Your AI under Control
• Trask 2019 – Grokking Algorithms

2020 Philadelphia Science Fiction aka Philcon

Philcon runs from about noon this coming Friday (11/20/2020) till early evening Sunday (11/22/2020). It is, inevitably, virtual this year. With that said, they are going to a lot of trouble to make it as live & immediate as possible. And are clearly much helped by the benefit of earlier virtual conferences this year. For instance, the program participants were invited to training sessions to check out their setups & make sure they knew how to present on Zoom & Discord. I found mine helpful. Thanks Syd Weinstein & crew!

I have my schedule as well:

Remembering our sparks of inspiration. Recountings and tall tales of our best discoveries and why they continue to inspire us. With Carl Fink (moderator), John Skylar (the invariably intelligent!), Tom Purdam (always witty & knowledgable), and myself.

From Oz’s Tik-Tok to the Mechanical Turk, from Neural Nets & Genetic Algorithms to Chess & StarCraft, from fighting the Coronavirus to flying Killer Drones, from Facial Recognition to Fakes, Deep Fakes, & Anti-Fakes, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. How did it start? What do we mean by AI? What are the basic AI techniques? How is it being used? What are the benefits? 

What can be done with current technology? Are we going to be piloting mechs with our minds before the decade is out? With the ever charming & erudite Catherine Asaro, Rebecca Robare (one of the filk), and myself (as moderator). For me, a nice follow-on to my Arificial Intelligence talk!

 The practical considerations of building a city on Mars, from the habitat to the technology of living on an inhospitable world. I’m moderating based on my talk of a few years back, Mars or Bust! And have Robert Hranek (who has already scared me with his level of preparation), Premee Mohammed (who has scared me with her Lovecraftian Beneath the Rising and who is basically the advance team for Mars), and Tobias Cabral (who I’ve shared many panels with & who is not at all scary — meaning no offense!) to put questions to!

Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, & Futures

I will be presenting a talk on Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, & Futures at the 2020 Capclave (virtual). That’s this coming Sunday from 1:30 to 2:25. Capclave is running Saturday & Sunday.

Virtual, yes, but they have rather a good line up of former guests of honor, kaffleklatsches, talks, panels, and so on. I’m looking forward. As to my talk:

Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, Futures (Ends at: 2:25 pm)
Participants: John Ashmead (M)
From Oz’s Tik-Tok to the Mechanical Turk, from Neural Nets & Genetic Algorithms to Chess & StarCraft, from fighting the Coronavirus to flying Killer Drones, from Facial Recognition to Fakes, Deep Fakes, & Anti-Fakes, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. How did it start? What do we mean by AI? What are the basic AI techniques? How is it being used? What are the benefits? risks? and how should we manage AI going forwards?

The Elephant Versus the Bug

Depending on the project, debugging can take 50 to 90% of development time. But it usually gets less than 10% of the press. PostgreSQL has great tools for debugging, but they are most effective when deployed as part of an overall strategy.

Ten days from now I’m doing a webinar on how best to do this. That’s 1pm, July 29th, 2020. You can register here.

It’s a fun talk: I focus on the key ideas, give a few good examples, have a quick quiz “There are three bugs on this slide: you have the next two slides to find them!” and then finish with some of my favorite debugging references: selected as particularly readable & practical.

[Update: the talk was given as planned. Thanks to Lindsay Hooper for great support! Video is online. And the audience of invisible Zoomers upped the number of bugs on the quiz slide from three to five!]

Last time I did this talk, my favorite piece of feedback was from Bruce Momjian, a founder of PostgreSQL and a member of the core team: Bruce said there was stuff he knew but hadn’t heard put into words, and stuff he just hadn’t seen yet.

And that’s how I hope this will be for you!

We will look at strategies for debugging PostgreSQL: how to find bugs, how to fix them, and how to keep them from happening in the first place.

We’ll look at root causes, technical tricks, and scientific strategies, and why — even if you can’t always write perfect code — it is usually a good idea to try.

We’ll hear from Bjarne Stroustrup, Sherlock Holmes, Kernighan and Ritchie, Pogo, & the experts of the PostgreSQL community.

Goal: less time debugging, more time building great tools and apps that stay up & get the job done.

If you can’t wait or just can’t make it, I have the latest version here: PDF, KeyNote, and PowerPoint, name your poison.

Update

Talk went off smoothly, about 65 or 70 attendees. The invisible Zoomers found two more bugs on the “quiz” slide! The event organizer, Lindsay Hooper of the PostgreSQL conference, did a great job setting every thing up, watching over a dry run, and giving feedback during. And she recorded and edited the webinar, so if you are interested in see the video “live”, herewith.

Time dispersion in time-of-arrival measurements

I will be presenting a paper “Time dispersion in time-of-arrival measurements” at the International Assocation for Relativistic Dynamics this coming Wednesday (6/3/2010). The conference was originally scheduled to be held in Prague but has been moved online because of COVID-19. It may still be held as a physical conference as well, we will see.

My own paper is a follow up to my “Time dispersion in quantum mechanics“, published last year as part of the Institute of Physics Conference Series. That took the hypothesis: the quantum wave function should extend in time as it does in space & worked out the implications. The new paper is about experimental tests of the hypothesis: how would we determine if this hypothesis is true. Since it is real science however I turned the question around & made it “how do we prove that the wave function does not extend in time”.

In the new paper I shift focus to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP), specifically to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in time and energy. Einstein & Bohr both held it was true, in fact essential if quantum mechanics was to be consistent with relativity. Bohr’s demonstration that it was was the end of Einstein’s direct attempts to falsify quantum mechanics.

Note that the formulation “the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to time/energy as it does to space/momentum” is loosely equivalent to “the wave function extends in time as it does in space”. If the wave function extends in time, then we would get the HUP in time/energy as a side-effect. And the most direct tests of the wave function extending in time are really tests of the HUP in time/energy.

The test I primarily focus on is that if the wave function extends in time all measurements in the time dimension would be just a bit fuzzier. In particular, if you are measuring when a particle is detected, if you are measuring the time-of-arrival, then if the wave function is extended in time you expect to see it both sooner & later than otherwise expected.

The advantage of this as a test is that the additional fuzziness if present at all must be present everywhen. Any time-varying experimental setup can potentially serve as a test.

The main problem — somewhat to my surprise — was that we really don’t know how to predict the time-of-arrival in standard quantum mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics with time in play as well! I’m trying to make a pincer attack on time: left jaw — standard quantum mechanics (SQM), right jaw — quantum mechanics with time (TQM). I was focused on the right jaw, but found that actually it was the left jaw that was weak. So I had to backtrack & deal with this problem. Interesting. And this turned out to be the single trickiest bit in the paper.

After getting the left jaw in better shape, good enough to take a punch anyway, I did a recap of TQM. This was probably the 2nd trickiest bit of the paper: how do you describe a hypothesis that took over a hundred pages and nearly five hundred equations to work out in a just a few pages? I found the core ideas coming a bit clearer in my own head at least. That’s gotta be worth something.

Then the payoff bit, the actual tests, is only the last quarter of the paper. And after working out how the additional fuzziness in time plays out, I got to my favorite test: the single slit in time. This is the single cleanest test of the idea. Not an easy experiment however.

Really the best part of tests of TQM is that if it is proved true, great. But if it proved false it will be taking down one or two of its neighbors with it. TQM is built by applying the quantum rules to relativity (or applying relativity to the quantum rules). If it is false, one (or both) of those two has a problem. And that in turn means there are really no null experiments.

And if I know my experimentalists, there is nothing they like more than proving a bunch of theorists wrong. If I have setup the arguments correctly — we’ll see — then they are sure to break something. As the well-known quantum experimentalist Nicholas Gisin said to me a long time ago (I paraphrase, it was quite a long time ago) “Look, I don’t care what your theory of time is. Just give me something I can prove wrong!”

Physical Balticon Cancelled — Virtual Balticon on

Due to the Covid-19, the physical 2020 Baltimore Science Fiction Convention — Balticon — has been cancelled.

The organizers, nothing if not game, are putting on a virtual Balticon. Looks pretty good. And free (tho they ask for a donation to a GoFundMe for new writers and to help Baltimore’s disadvantaged youth).

Unfortunately I had already made other commitments, after the physical Balticon was cancelled and before I knew it was being replaced by a virtual one, so will not be able to speak at the virtual event.

But I hope to catch a number of the events this coming Memorial Day weekend and hope you will be able to do so as well.

The Past, Present, and Futures of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is in the news, no question. The last few science fiction conventions I’ve been at, panels on AI have been getting filled rooms & lots of questions. It’s all over the news as well. And it’s a subject I find interesting: and — being a professional programmer — an area where I may be able to contribute, perhaps looking at the use of AI techniques to generate physics experiments.

What is meant by AI is one problem: is it anything that uses AI techniques, as Neural Nets or Genetic Algorithms? Or do you need to be pointing in the direction of some kind of sentience for it to be true AI? Will it replace us? Should it? The hype/content ratio sometimes hits near Trumpian levels.

So good subject for a talk. But what line of attack to take? Last week I caught a great talk at DataPhilly on the use of AI for sports betting (and other things). The formal title was:

Practical Scaling: How to Use Simple Tools to Create and Implement Complex Modeling Systems — James Piette

For “complex modeling systems” think practical AI. My personal favorite of his slides cited three principles:

• Moravec’s Paradox: AI and humans are good at opposite things. So use AI for what it is good at (crunching) and let the humans do what they are good at (intuiting).
• Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 rule. 20% of the work gets you 80% of the value, so focus on the high value parts of the problem.
• The Scientific method: observe, hypothesize, test, repeat. This works for science — and it works for software debugging (another favorite topic of mine), startups, and AI.

And this strikes me as the kind of no-nonsense, practical, even scientific approach that a subject like AI needs. (Thanks James!) So for my 2020 SF Convention talk:

The Past, Present, and Futures of Artificial Intelligence. — From Oz’s Tik-Tok to the Mechanical Turk, from Neural Nets & Genetic Algorithms to Chess & StarCraft, from Medical Diagnosis to Robot Frogs, from Facial Recognition to Fakes, Deep Fakes, & Anti-Fakes, AI is everywhere today. How did it start? What do we mean by AI? What are the basic AI techniques? How is it being used? What are the benefits? risks? and how should we manage AI going forwards?

Be seeing you:

• Balticon May 23rd, 2020
• Capclave October 17th, 2020
• Philcon November 9th, 2020

Philcon 2019 — Recap

Got some great questions during my talk at Philcon: lots of stuff I had not considered before. If quarks are high-energy beasts, and if high-energy means short time, and if short time means increased effects of time dispersion, shouldn’t you look at impacts on quark calculations. Should & will! And what of quantum computing: would dispersion in time provide additional bandwidth for quantum computing? Very probably! Not to mention additional insight into the bugaboo of the quantum computing, decoherence.

I also liked that the audience really picked up on why I centered the investigation on falsifiability: I wasn’t trying to prove that there is dispersion in time, I have presented a way to prove there is not. Falsifiability is what makes science science.

I have uploaded the Keynote, PowerPoint, and PDF versions of the talk.

My panels were, as usual, interesting.

Hildy Silverman did a great job moderating Dystopia Now! she kept the discussion focused & moving. Fellow panelist Hakirah D’Almah, a journalist with a focus on the Middle East, was particularly trenchant. Hard to find the bright side of Dystopia, but I think we did. 1984 is a deeply optimistic work: by writing it (Orwell’s last, he died shortly after completing it) Orwell helped us avoid it.

I will admit the Evolution of Mars panel, while interesting, drifted a bit (Wild Marses I Have Known would have been a more accurate description).

I was happy to be the moderator on Looking for Life in our Solar System: the great thing about being a moderator — especially when you are the least qualified person the panel — sit back & let your fellow panelists — Earl Bennett, Dr. H. Paul Shuch, John Skylar — do the heavy lifting. Which they did very well!

And I was also moderator on The Blurry Line between Cutting Edge and Pseudoscience. The panel was right after my talk, so made a nice seque. The best question came from an audience member: how do I tell, when I see stuff on the web, what level of credibility to give it? Just asking that question is the first step. The panelists suggested credentials of the author, links to it, and my personal favorite: does the author find the good in his/her opponent’s arguments, recognize the weak spots in his/her own?