Palestine: The End Game

The situation as I see it:

Israel and continually gone against prior agreements and keep taking more and more Palestinian land, because they think God said it was theirs.

Palestinians rightly are angry, not just about the land but by effectively being in a prison (Gaza) and a substantial number of them have lives that hinge on absolute hate of the Israelis (the Jewish ones).

Israel don’t want a two-state solution with an enemy right next door, who will continue (with the support of Iran) to keep attacking and terrorising them. Israel (half of the population) loves the expansion into the West Bank by “settlers”.

This is what Israel will bring to the table, and a future Palestinian leadership will agree to:

West Bank continues as normal. Any land without houses is free for Israelis to build on, and the West Bank will effectively be a part of Israel, and existing Palestinians can continue to live there, as they do now.

Gaza becomes its own state. It will have full access to the outside world, via the sea and air. Land connections and workers crossing the border will continue as before. However, terrorism needs to end. An international task force will be there – potentially forever – to run democratic elections, co-ordinate aid, and to shut down any terrorism. No anti-Israeli sentiment is allowed. No murals of martyrs. All history taught in schools is carefully worded and monitored. The end result is peace and freedom with hate for their neighbours snuffed out. Any rebels are deported, somewhere.

Per Person Apps

We have many ways of communicating with one person – email, SMS, calls, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and so on. I have several annoying friends who use multiple forms of chat to reach me, often one a few minutes after the other if I don’t respond obediently.

If all of these apps shared a common protocol, and gave permissions to the OS, then the OS could aggregate the communications on a per person basis.

On my phone screen I could see an app named Barry, and clicking on it will show all my communications with Barry in a single, uniform interface. Replying to any of Barry’s messages would default to the app it came via, but that can be changed if I want.

Most of us would have less than 10 people that need a per person app. For business folk, they could perhaps be in folders of type, like potential client, existing client, exec team

Where It Came From: Attribution 2.0

Deep fakes and the like are a growing problem:

Of course it will get worse, and new angles will emerge that are unheard of. Regulation could be the solution, although nobody will be a fan. If you want to have a platform where you are immune from having wrong content on it (as long as you police the content to a reasonable level), then you must also follow this one simple rule. All content has to have an origin, and that origin is posted with the content.

  • Music comes from the artist’s home page
  • Memes have an origin
  • Photos come from the page of who took the photo

Any authorisations, all types of rights, are stored at the source.

So, if I want to share a meme I found online, I have to go to the source, and maybe agree to something, and maybe get a link back to the source with my auth ID in it… and so on. We are talking Creative Commons for everything.

To post something from a particular source, the platform must have registered it. So to post a picture of King Charles, it must come from a news source, or his own website, or a registered source that will take the fall if they have acquired it or used it wrongly or illegally.

There are some downsides to this approach, obviously!

Posting content in social media will take longer, sometimes. Sharing a link from a registered source won’t take any longer. Reposting something that already cites a source, won’t take longer. Banging out a funny meme using content that is not yours, will take longer, and can only improve things for everyone – it will be a good opportunity to be a bit more serious, especially for topics that warrant it, like politics and anti-woke.

It is anti-freedom of speech. Er, no, it isn’t, but it will be seen that way. People misunderstand what those freedoms actually entail. Never mind though, because attribution regulations will only apply to social networks of a certain large size. Your anarcho-mischief collective will fly under the radar, although they will need to have a prominent message stating that they are non-regulated.

Off Season Boycott Club

An online community spends 3 months discussing and eventually voting on which nasty corporation (or country?) is worthy of a boycott.

Members then, individually, by choice, pledge to not use their products or services for the 3 months of the next season of Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall. You go off them for a season 😉

If you cannot bear to be without them beyond the 3 months, that is sad, but OK.

The idea is to use the timeliness for publicity – who will be boycotted next? At scale.

To incentivise the boycott, direct competitors can be canvassed, seeing what they might offer to any member who switches allegiance. Such offers need to be above and beyond anything else they otherwise offer others.

Canvassing members first on whether they use particular brands is critical – it means the boycott can be meaningful and measurable.

Imagine the dread faced by corporations who are in the shortlist each quarter!

5figz – Amazon Bestsellers Go Rogue

Every merchant wants to go off on Amazon. But when they do, Amazon probably makes more profit from the success than they do.

I’m imagining a platform where you can buy the verified hits of Amazon – products that have sold 10K+

  • Amazon hits are rarely rip-offs, the review system (mostly) looks after that.
  • People trust a successful Amazon product
  • Amazon cannot stop you stating a fact about your success on their platform

While Amazon has put superhuman effort into getting products to people quicker, price tends to trump speed. So the 5figz fulfilment system doesn’t need absolute speed. However, the nature of the products – high-volume – lends itself to efficiency.

I figure that the game plan is to out-Amazon Amazon. Run at a loss with their most successful products, until the public learn that 5figz is where to get the best products without Amazon taking a crazy cut of proceeds.

And it scales scarily well. Start with the most expensive products with 10K sales. And as the business grows, fold in lower price items. Obviously selling 10K execycles is better all round than selling 10K hairbands.

Drone drug delivery

Illicit drugs are physical and require delivery, so al sorts of means have been deployed over the years. Most recently tunnels, submarines and drones.

Getting 1kg across the border in a retail drone is quite easy, and presumably it is done a lot.

But what about the last mile? How long before the end user gets their delivery by drone? We all know that drugs are often sold by the ounce, and a drone that can carry an ounce might be too small to notice.

A network of such drones could network drug delivery across a city. The transfer of the payload is what is needed, automation, no humans.

And less likely to get caught by the feds, if you start each drone journey and end it at a random place.

Dear Everyone

Advice app. Primarily romantic and social issues

Maximum 10 questions per day are sent out. Randomly chosen. Vetted by the developers..

Submitted question expires after 1 week if not chosen. Prompted to resubmit if still relevant. Max 1 question per month for anyone

Get points for giving advice. Points increase your chance of being chosen.

Questions have up to five answers, multiple can be selected

Questioner selects the advice they have taken.

Questioner is prompted to let the result be known, happy or otherwise. With commentary. Bonus points for those whose advice helped. Negative for bad advice that was taken.

Comments allowed but heavily vetted. Comments cost points.

The best questions/ results can appear on a chat video to promote the app.

Monetized later >>> One of the questions is a short 2 min survey. Many Points for answering.

Dual-Battery Phones

I was slightly disturbed to read that Emirates are switching to digital-only boarding passes. What if your phone dies?

Which got me thinking – your phone is becoming more and more necessary for everyday life, and everyone has battery issues. Yet your phone’s functions can be divided into essential (paying for things, being an actual phone, messages) and non-essential (games, Tik-Tok).

Whether actually having two different batteries and perhaps even operating systems, or whether virtually doing so, I think splitting the two types of function could become necessary.

Very simplistically, when your battery gets down to 30%, games and so on cannot be run, and only essentials will. It won’t be told to you like that – you will be told that your gaming battery is empty.

The other option could be two phones, an essential phone, and a game/social/camera device. They could even be joined together, two different sides of the one device, with screens front and back.

Next: Digital Twins of Self

Digital Twins are a growing phenomena in business, for example a digital map of a city or building or car that is used for controlling or monitoring it. Those digital twins do not think…

A Digital Twin of yourself can be non-thinking – say a scan of your body used for diagnostics or to determine how a particular drug will interact with it. Or an avatar in the metaverse.

But a thinking twin, a cognitive digital twin of a human, can be immensely useful. It won’t be a physical representation but a mental one.

Just like Microsoft now lets corporations train an AI instance via corporate documents and communications, a twin of a human brain will need similar access. They cannot read our mind, so they will have to ride along with us and capture the inputs and outputs of our brain:

  • the music we listen to
  • the things we see
  • conversations
  • what we read and write
  • the participants in our lives
  • the work we do

And especially important, how we feel during all aspects of our days.

The obvious solution is AR glasses that record everything, tethered to a powerful phone. It will start out relatively simplistically, being used to say record where it sees items were last used to help you find them.

Smarter systems will capture everything and be able to mimic how you respond, and be able to replicate you.

The best will be when they can tune in to your emotions. I have no idea what tech will be required, but we already measure heart rate and so on with smart watches. AR glasses can read what our eyes are doing (pupil dilation, directions we look – which can be giveaways), and subtle changes in our voice. Those alone, combined, maybe with some basic initial training (the tech actually asks you how you felt), might be sufficient.

What I don’t anticipate is a clone of us being us and interacting with the world. But the uses could be wonderful, especially entertainment.

A digital twin of self could surf the web, watch movies, listen to music, and then make suggestions around what you might like. It can go shopping for you, and, again, make suggestions.

It could – having been sufficiently trained – go on dating sites and find the one.

We could also go a bit crazy and let our digital twins hang out with each other. They could have conversations in seconds that would take hours in the real world.

The twins of musicians could meet up and make music together.

And of course, not a new idea, we could leave a twin behind when we die.

But the key is training, and for that we need a device, and the tech company that does that will become immensely successful.

Posted in AI

Methodology for Robot-Driven Artificial General Intelligence

Training computers on 2D images and what can be found online is cheap and convenient, but it is not how a human learns and in my opinion not part of what will achieve AGI.

We need to emulate a human as much as possible, with an android robot, and let it try/fail/learn in the real world, to achieve what humans do. In 3D, like humans do.

Uniformity and Mass Adoption

There needs to be a lot of robots, because the more we have, the quicker they can learn collectively. 10,000 is a starting guess.

For the SMAL described below, the robots need to be highly consistent, physically, for the whole duration, possibly decades. That means waiting until robots of the required specifications can be made in bulk (battery and fine mechanics will be key), making a lot of them, and never upgrading them if that at all changes their physical dimensions, including weight and weight distribution.

Hive Mind

Having 10,000 robots means that in one day of 10,000 attempt the same task, but in different environments, then they will collectively have enough knowledge to nail it in the future.

They will share knowledge, especially of objects they encounter in the world, and how those objects (including machines and people) tend to operate.

Training

Aside from some fundamentals which can be hard-coded, the robots begin their training from small children who are at age where they can talk and play and teach. Perhaps starting at age 3. The robots will operate with a vocabulary that fits who they are interacting with.

At age 3, all the robots will do is play with the child, with everything led by the child. Not dissimilar to how a child plays with toys and dolls, except they can tell the robot what to do, and it will try.

The robot will also observe and attempt to mimic what the child does, and the child knows that is what is happening, that it is trying to learn to be a person. After attempting to mimic something, the child will tell the robot if it succeeded or not, and what it got right or wrong, especially the latter.

SMAL

Once the attempt to mimic is completed, the robot will store the details. This will require a custom-made programming language, which stores details of the environment, what it observed, and the actions taken when attempting to mimic them.

Scaled Memory of Actions Language (SMAL) is called scaled because scaling things is easier, more efficient, and easier for AI to work with. For example, the speed the robot moved at can be described as part of a scale from 1 to 10, where say 4 is anywhere between 3 and 4 kms per hour. Things like lighting, time of day, how crowded it was, how it thinks it was feeling (pressured, for example), and the relative distances of all the relevant objects are from it, can be captured in scale form.

I moved at speed 3, in direction 22, my arms were in position 4 and 8, visibility was 6, I felt a 2 of pressure to perform, and the cat was a distance of 7 away. After 4 seconds I was closer to the cat which was at distance 6 now.

After the attempt, the child or instructor will tell them what was a key factor in what they did wrong. AI can later spot factors that might not have been explained, like failure happening more in poor visibility.

Enter AI

Then we add AI, similar to the chatbots of 2023, to the mix. That type of programming is good for coming up with an averaged, approximate response based on thousands of reports, separated into success and failure. Once learned sufficiently, a robot should be able to achieve a task, according to the environment, based on the collective past efforts.

Types of learning

It’s unlimited, but primarily will be the same as what children do and learn every day. They move around and interact, try their best, fail sometimes, and learn.

Graduating

After spending sufficient time, collectively at one year of childhood (years are approximate, children mature at different rates, one year increments should be fine), they all move to the next year, with the same child or someone new.

Once they reach adulthood, half of the robots are no longer needed. They know enough about the 3D aspects of the world to switch in AR, and be built into AR spectacles. Those ones observe and ask questions. Who is that? Why did you respond like that? There will still need to be many robots that are physical, to properly interact with the world, but at that stage they can take any form, they no longer need to be all the same dimensions. They will still need to learn some physicality, primarily things like hugs and shaking hands, and all the subtleties within.

Posted in AI