Sunday Round-Up - January 26, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the Congressional threat to the Iran nuclear deal.  We also look at, in brief, the Geneva II peace talks, the Affordable Care Act's lost voter registration opportunity, the impending age of robots and Ferrari's new Formula 1 design.

Iran Nuclear Deal
In a January 21st Op-Ed at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website, CEIP President Jessica Tuchman Mathews writes that after a decade long impasse on Iran's nuclear program, world powers and Iran are on the verge of a solution.  "Yet the US Congress, acting reflexively against Iran, and under intense pressure from Israel, seems ready to shatter the agreement with a bill that takes no account of Iranian political developments, misunderstands proliferation realities, and ignores the dire national security consequences for the United States."  Mathews notes that the US's unilateral sanctions did nothing to stop Iran's uranium enrichment since the sanctions had little support in the international community.  Other world powers looked at the sanctions as an attempt to stop Iran from enriching nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes as was its right as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  The situation changed in 2009 when President Obama stated that he was willing to engage in a serious dialogue to allay growing concerns over Iran's nuclear enrichment.  The sanctions gained  international community support and seriously impacted Iran's economy.  "No outsider can say for certain that Iran ever definitively chose to become a nuclear weapons state. On the one hand, it has spent billions of dollars pursuing activities that can be rationally explained only if the regime seeks the ability to produce weapons....Yet Tehran has also said that it does not want nuclear weapons. It has argued that nuclear weapons would not be appropriate for an effective military strategy and that they would violate the principles of the Islamic Republic."

One thing that is clear is that "Iran has been unambiguous in insisting on its right to uranium enrichment...Those like [Israeli] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who insist that the only acceptable level is zero enrichment in Iran know, or should know, that they are using code for 'no deal would be acceptable.' "  Attacks on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities would delay but not stop its program and it would cause the international consensus on sanctions to collapse.  "Countries like Russia, China, Turkey, India, and Japan that have adopted the oil and financial sanctions against Iran with varying degrees of reluctance are unlikely to sustain them to support a war against enrichment"  Such illegitimate attacks would also strengthen the hand of Iranian hard-liners, make it impossible to have inspections, and, if Iran then chose to actually develop nuclear weapons, cause another round of proliferation in an already unstable region. 

As to the terms of the nuclear deal, "Iran agreed to eliminate its existing stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium either by diluting it down to low enrichment or converting it to an oxide form that is not adaptable for further enrichment,...[to stop] the operation or the installation of additional advanced centrifuges,...halt progress on the [plutonium] reactor under construction at Arak", and limit its stock of low-enriched uranium.  Finally "To reduce the possibility that Iran could be running covert, hidden fuel cycles, it extends monitoring for the first time to uranium mines and mills and to centrifuge production and assembly facilities. These inspections are unprecedented in both frequency and extent."  In return Iran has $7 billion in sanctions lifted.

All this is now in jeopardy if the new Iran sanctions bill is approved by congress - the Senate is eight or nine votes shy of  a veto-proof bill.  "Its passage, as an act of bad faith on the US’s part after having just agreed not to impose new sanctions during the term of the six-month deal, would probably cause Iran to walk away from the negotiations." Mathews concludes: "A final agreement is by no means assured, but the opportunity is assuredly here. The price of an agreement will be accepting a thoroughly monitored, appropriately sized enrichment program in Iran that does not rise over 5 percent. The alternatives are war or a nuclear-armed Iran. Should this be a hard choice? Astonishingly, too many members of Congress seem to think so."
(Mathews article was originally published in The New York Review of Books.)

Let's hope that Harry Reid can keep the bill from reaching the Senate floor and that no other Senators  sign on to this ill-thought-out and dangerous piece of legislation.

In Brief (Links)
[Mother Jones, January 23] Is the HHS running from a voter registration fight with Republicans?  The health insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare, as agencies providing public assistance, are required by federal law to help millions of uninsured Americans register to vote. But the Obama administration is refusing to fully comply with that law.

[La Repubblica. January 24]   "F14-T will be the new Maranello red."  The new Formula 1 race car from Ferrari will try to win the 2014 F1 World Cup.  The car was named after an online vote of Ferrari fans worldwide.  [Official photos]

 

[Mother Jones, January 23] Unlimited incomes in a world run by artificial intelligences?  These speculative ideas appear in a working paper by, believe it or not, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.  Kevin Drum, commenting on a James Pethokoukis post, writes that the general idea that robots and AI are...going to have a huge economic impact in the medium term future...is something that seems so obvious to me that I'm a little puzzled that there's anyone left who still doesn't see it."  [Pethokoukis' post is even more mind-boggling in its discussion of the AI singularity.]

With 130,000 dead and 9.5 million displaced, the Syrian Civil War is approaching the end of its third year.  Amidst low expectations, the Geneva II Conference got underway this past Wednesday.  The first face-to-face meetings between the opposing parties were held Saturday with only UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi speaking and no agreements made.  [The Guardian, January 25] Al Jazeera has a number of articles and opinion pieces about the conference: Randa Slim in a January 23 op-ed notes that first peace initiatives rarely produce agreements to end conflict and Syria is not likely to be an exception.  She points to two successful conferences as models - the "Dayton accords which in the 1990s brought an end to the civil war in Bosnia...and the Bonn 2001 Conference in which the international community enabled an interim government to come to power in Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban regime."  Rami Khouri explains in another op-ed post why Iran's presence in Geneva II is critical for any progress.

Self-Driving Cars and Downloaded Minds - Part II

And now for the fantastical...

"I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it's theoretically possible to copy the brain on to a computer and so provide a form of life after death." Not a believer in the conventional concept of an afterlife, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was speaking during an appearance at the Cambridge Film Festival in late September.

Hawking has long suffered from motor neuron disease. When diagnosed fifty years ago at the age of 21, he was told he had three years to live. His primary means of communication with the outside world now is through a computer interface. Hawking's comments at the film festival take the concept of artificial intelligence to a level previously explored primarily in works of science fiction.

 

Artificial intelligence has been around for a while. The Turing test, a test of a computing machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human, goes back to 1950. The term artificial intelligence was first used in 1955.  I worked on one form of artificial intelligence, the development of an "expert system", for a brief period back in the mid-80's - not quite the vacuum tube era but almost 30 years ago. The objective was to capture in a computer program the knowledge base and decision-making ability of an expert.  The computer program could then be used, for example, to help in the response to a plant emergency or to anticipate and correct potential manufacturing problems.

The increase in computing power has been literally exponential, but  some experts say that Moore's Law ("computing power doubles every two years") will soon be coming to the end of its usefulness .  We are reaching the physical limits of manufacturing silicon chips. Not to worry. The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two quantum computing pioneers - Serge Harocheand David Wineland. Quantum computing, still in its early developmental stages, will make the billion-fold increase in digital computing power since the mid-1950's seem like the step from finger-counting to the abacus.

Ten years ago, a National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce sponsored paper noted that "Four transforming tools have emerged: nanotechnology for hardware, biotechnology for dealing with living systems, information technology for communication and control, and cognition-based technologies to enhance human abilities and collective behavior."  The continuing advances in computing capability and these other areas have led to speculation as to what the future holds.

 

Computers are everywhere and are already enhancing human capabilities in areas such as communications, medicine and vehicle safety. Robots are already capable of mowing lawns and cleaning houses. They soon will be, or already are, predicting monster storms, mapping vineyards for better wine production, clearing jellyfish blooms, fighting brain tumors, taking over exhausting and dangerous mining activities, teaching Japanese calligraphy, watching over sleeping patients in nursing homes, and, of course, in the form of superstar robot the Mars Rover, exploring space.

 

Science fiction has envisioned even more amazing scenarios - computing machines achieving self-sufficiency, a technological singularity, and, to Hawking's comments, personalities downloaded into computers.  Each of these poses some interesting philosophical questions. 

 

If computers or robots achieve self-sufficiency, to what degree should they be controlled and what rights should they have?  Science fiction (and science) writer Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics addresses the question: 

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. 

Scientists are taking the possibility of self-sufficiency seriously.  A February 2009 meeting under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) discussed the "extent to which computers and robots might be able to acquire autonomy, and to what degree they could use such abilities to pose threats or hazards". [Ref. 1]

 

The technological singularity is that "theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence that will "radically change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself." [Ref. 1]  Asimov predicated a Zeroth Law of Robotics for the situation where robots had taken responsibility for government of whole planets and human civilizations: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." 

We have no way of predicting what a super-intelligence might actually mean for humanity and whether they would bother at all with the Zeroth Law.  Commentators have noted that evolution "has no inherent tendency to produce outcomes valued by humans, and there is little reason to expect an arbitrary optimisation process to promote an outcome desired by mankind."  Some have gone so far as to say that one result of a super-intelligent entity might be the extinction of humanity.  [Ref. 1]

Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga and his Void Trilogy - five books set in the same fictional universe - present a world with faster than light travel, advanced post-physical civilizations, genocidal aliens, galaxy-devouring anomalies, and downloaded personalities.  The novels relate events over a span of more than a thousand years and many of the main characters are present throughout this time.  The lynchpins in this capability for extended life are the "memory cell" and advanced bioengineering.  Every so often, an individual's memories are downloaded into a memory cell.  When it's time to get young again or if the individual suffers a physical death, the memory cell is loaded into a re-fashioned body. 

There are several important questions to be asked when considering these examples of advanced artificial intelligence.  "Can computers or robots achieve enough self-sufficiency to become sentient?"  "How would we know if they do?" "Can an individual human personality be completely downloaded into a computer?"  "Would that downloaded personality be the individual?"

Which brings us to the crux of the matter - consciousness.  Consciousness is one of our great unanswered questions.  It is at the core of the human person and experience - I am aware that is I who am experiencing the external world. But no experiment has ever located it within the physical brain. It seems, to me at least, that to expect consciousness to spontaneously arise in a physical object when it attains a certain amount of intelligence is an extraordinarily long shot. As to the question of downloading a human personality into a computer, historian and philosopher of science John S. Wilkins writes: "Physical differences make a difference, and ahead of time we can’t predict what will have an effect on whether silico-me will behave the same way vivo-me does. While I am sure that we will manage to simulate “me” or somebody like me (more likely Stephen Hawking than me), the simulate won’t be “me” in any deep sense. It’s either going to be a representation of me that has some dynamical properties in common with me but not all, or it’s going to be a deep simulation of me that lives a day every so many months of realtime. And even then it won’t be exactly like me..."

Nevertheless, concepts such as robot sentience, machine super-intelligences, and near immortality make for great entertainment.  Science fiction, like all fiction, depends on the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief."  While reading science fiction may not increase our empathy as much as reading literary fiction (Science, October 3; Slate, October 28), it does exercise our imaginations and sense of wonder.  Occasionally, in the best of the genre, it allows us to think about some of the deeper questions of the universe. 



Reference and Images
Ref.1 is the ask.com's wiki entry on technological singularity.  Futurist Ray Kurtz predicts a date of 2045 for the singularity event.
Robot image is from Popular Science website.
Peter F. Hamilton collage is from his website.

Interesting Reading
For a unique look at consciousness, read neuroscientist Giulio Tononi's Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul.  From the Goodreads review: "Not since Gödel, Escher, Bach has there been a book that interweaves science, art, and the imagination with such originality. This beautiful and arresting narrative will transform the way we think of ourselves and the world."