Wonder and Doubt: Solved by Machines

Reading about how IBM's Watson computer is learning to make pastries on NYTimes.   If we had the right Bayesian statistics, the right DNA code (to predict likelihood of gene X "liking" taste Y), and the supercomputer to put them all together... theoretically you'd have a Utopia where everyone always got precisely what they ordered in life.  The right taste, the optimum number of calories.  Maybe Watson can even do Kosher...

Taking the hypothesis of ultra intelligence to its next step, what if we really know the absolute outcome of every recipe we make in life?    Not fake, not "The Truman Show".  What if our experience and judgement and data and correct premises were increased a thousand-fold, or by a million?   If we could almost intuitively anticipate the "butterfly effect?"

It might make life incredibly boring.   Would we be like cattle or ants, grazing?   Grazing on lots of different ideas and information, but all predictable, and it would pass through us like cud.

Or we might replace the "risk" and uncertainty by expanding our horizons geographically, taking what we know and are certain of, and placing ourselves in new frontiers.  "Star Trek" or "Dr. Who" is a way we can always imagine shaking things up, going to other solar systems, to seek out new worlds and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.

Trying new foods is good.  Eat the same thing, every time, is like ... eating grass.

What if we actually make ourselves feel more in command of all information by reducing the amount of information?  What if we limit our geography so much that we really do know and can anticipate an extremely high percentage of what we encounter?  Instead of a hypothesis where we increase our intellect a million-fold, and then reach outside the solar system, why don't we shrink our system so that the intellect, intelligence, and data we have is preponderant.

If we put our butterflies in fishbowls, or vacuum tubes, their effects will be easier to predict.

When an African really wants to buy something from me... not everything, not all assorted junk, not 75% of the "e-waste", but something rather specific - say a 17" display screen (which will light up in a slum with electric current too weak for a 27"), I may have to admit I don't know what will "ultimately" happen to it.  Perhaps I cannot predict the fate of the monitor in our custody.

If we shred it together with the 32" TVs and obsolete printers and clickety keyboards, and spit out a stream of shredded plastic, shredded copper, aluminum, and steel, drawn by magnets, optical sorters, and eddy currents, then I don't really need Watson to make the decision what to sell anymore.   Everything is now a commodity, a stream of raw material.

Moo.

Student Aid Increases Tuition?

Interrupted by articles this week in Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, on the cost of college and the federal Pell Grant program.   I wrote an editorial for the Carleton College newspaper in 1983 which made the point that we shouldn't blame Reagan for cutting the Pell Grant program, we should blame the colleges, whose tuition increased NOT in proportion to any inflation, but in DIRECT proportion to the federal grant dollars.

When the same point is made, 25 years later, and no one has done anything about it, it makes me wonder about "playing the system".

• College is expensive.
• Federal dollars offset expense.
• Colleges mark up tuition.

• People are told to "eat local"
• Supermarkets see demand for local goods increase.
• Supermarkets mark up local products.

It still makes sense to use consumer demand to improve the sustainability of production which we consume.  I'm not against advocating for environmentally sustainable purchasing, and still stand behind the boycott of countries which won't sign treaties protecting whales.

But entering my 4th decade of environmental activism, I'm really impatient with the way corporations play the  system.  I'm not anti-corporation... I think that it's human beings inside the corporation who make decisions to play the system.

If low-carb diets look promising, someone will sell you "low carb version" of mineral water.  That doesn't mean it's bad mineral water.  But it means that if we are willing to be stupid, people will sell to us as if we are stupid.

Will the call for ethical recycling make recycling better?  I hope so.  But just saying that another company is bad comes quite naturally to many competitors, and if there is a way to say it through an NGO, expect sponsorship dollars to flow that way.