Checkers, Chess & Go

A quaint observation often made in analysis writing is A is playing checkers, and B is playing chess.

Very Good AND Not So Good — Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) worth talking about? It seems people are obsessed by the topic and everyone has a hot take. Generated art, generated emails, generated code. I decided I wouldn’t talk about it unless I thought I could add something to the conversation. I’m hoping I pull that off today.

Checkers is fun — no AI required. Chess (or something like it) has been played for 15 centuries. Go is thought to be 4000 years old! It kinda sucks that in the last twenty years, they’ve become the bastion of AI/ML — while I’m not a betting man I would imagine a small implantable is going to be the next big challenge for Vegas and betting.

What Is Worth Reading & Talking About?

Only one topic today. It’s broad. It’s a bit longer than usual. I am a johnny come lately to the party. Everyone seems to have taken their shot in the batter’s box and sometimes mansplained AI. I hope this is nothing like that.

What, Exactly is AI, and Should I Be Scared?

As a long-time observer of the topic and aware of its constant redefinition, I am a fan of Artificial Intelligence. I just see it as an inspired-by-nature attempt to improve our lot on this planet. There seems to be a lot of fear and resentment toward AI. Taking the time to understand why you believe something is one way to avoid the pitchfork movement emerging around AI and its partner (Machine Learning) ML.

Definitions Always Help

Newborns, by almost any objective measure are not very smart. All sorts of creatures beyond humans teach their offspring important skills. How do living things learn? It seems to me, they are stimulated, observe, and for many tasks work through better and better ways through trial and error. It is also true the child who is neglected and not nurtured, will be challenged in their progression. The trial and error stuff (nurturing) is the machine learning side of artificial intelligence. The more trials, the fewer errors, and that magic feeling we often call insight.

My title today is three popular games. Checkers can be fun. There are a limited number of rules and a limited number of options. I think a person if they commit themselves to the task, can become proficient pretty easily. There are reasons there are not a lot of people playing a lot of tic-tac-toe into adulthood. It doesn't require many insights to get to the point where every single game played ends in a tie. Not a necessarily interesting game. This is probably why there isn’t much fear about an AI-trained tic-tac-toe game.

A while ago I wrote a really fun essay titled “It Starts in Your Head”. I especially enjoyed the subtitle “Donald Rumsfeld, Blaise Pascal & The 3rd Base Coach”. It was inspired by considering some conversations I had with a first cousin and some subsequent reading I did just that — based upon his recommendations. As of the writing of this essay, I have not gotten any feedback from my cousin. I’m guessing he didn’t like it. The way thought can cascade through us is amazing. I think our greatest breakthroughs in the workings of thought are in the near future. I believe the look inward popularized in the advancing interest in neurology will zero in on thought as we pay closer attention to watching it unfold inside ourselves.

My sense is thought, is merely a sensory signal from our primitive brain and its hard-wired senses, COUPLED with the special capacities of our frontal brain and its ability to take the same inputs and do novel things. Why do I believe this? Who knows, it’s just my current best idea I think. I haven’t, as yet, figured out a way to reject it wholesale so the pinball is still alive and accruing points. I imagine the higher the score, the less likely my brain is gonna dispose of it. If the score gets high enough I might start repeating it a lot and irritating the people around me. As with most things, I never discount the magic. So basically, beyond our five primary senses with hard-wired functions in our brain (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) I think that special second brain of our is a special MULTI-FUNCTION sensor. Viewed this way, in the same way, I am not sorry we improved on our eyeballs and made telescopes, using the inspiration of biology to model thought seems exciting and a great step forward.

Impulsive & Primitive Thought

Phones and politics seem to have a lot in common. We seem to take them both seriously and have balkanized ourselves into A or B only. I am not sure if an ‘us or them’ mentality has always been a thing. Nowadays, the veracity wherein people align their identity to their phones is striking. I don’t remember people driving a Buick vociferously attacking Fords. This is what makes our world of phones interesting to me. I believe, similarly, alignment with team has become more extreme in the world of politics. Not unlike our phones, when we staff the House of Representatives we end up with (1) a Somali refugee who might have married her brother — Ilhan Omar, and (2) a high school dropout 36-year-old grandmother who came to fame wearing a short skirt and a pistol in a restaurant — Lauren Boebert. This is not about the veracity with which people love or hate them. It is TOTALLY about how few people remain who can acknowledge the absurdity of both. By virtue of the team, our judgment seems to be checked at the door.

It is striking to me not that people are satisfied with their iPhone or Pixel. What shocks me whenever I see it is the strident need for owners of phones to add “I hate Google” or “Apple sucks”.

Be Not Afraid

AI in the wild (it’s been there for a while) doesn’t deserve venom or love. It is merely a matter of context. The phone bigot analogy begins now. Our email has become an easy-to-riff bane of our existence. Many advise they get too many emails. Many advise it is so hard to keep up with the churn. Here are some fun facts. If you happen to be a one or the other type when it comes to a phone, take a deep breath.

The world is awash in email. We get it from all sorts of addresses (Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, Gmail, etc). About 40% of all the EMAIL ON EARTH routes through Gmail. Why is that? It is simply better and the modern world depends upon the AI that makes it possible. A mere human cannot manage an inbox on their own — they need the assistance of artificial intelligence. They merely wish to not acknowledge it. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) hitched its trailer to AI long before it was fashionable over a decade ago. AI has been an INHERENT part of Gmail and Google Search for over a decade. The filtering of spam, the automated identification of phishing, and the automated, now continuous updating of their browser Google Chrome depends upon it. The modern world doesn’t exist without it. There is no controversy over this, there are no hot takes. It is, in fact, so ubiquitous, the iPhone good, Google bad crowd likely uses Gmail and just manages to park the dichotomy in a settled portion of their brain and avoid it as part of their thought process by design! This may sound like bias. I decided to just sample my subscribers. I believe Substack happens to be a very NICE DEMOGRAPHIC to evaluate — people who like to write and like to read. At least in my subscriber list, north of 60% of my subscribers use Gmail and no other service bends the needle beyond single digits. I am confident a subset of the iPhone users on Substack (who use Gmail) might readily say I hate Google. Self-loathing? The angry crowd is blissfully unaware and simply pivots to AI-generated art, resumes, and the like as their new target. Why don’t people haul in gallows ala January 6th for those evil AI-overlords keeping their inbox safe and manageable? AI, as it exists in these products is invisible and just works. So much more difficult to be worried about and feign anger or belligerence.

So where does the phone bigot/advocate fit into all of this? My small, albeit unscientific observations of the Substacks I enjoy reveal an amazing number of possible iPhone (I hate Google) users who simultaneously manage the largest source of digital in their lives with good old Gmail and their trusty iPhone. An interesting dichotomy. I strongly believe most people manage to just buy a phone and not attach a religious-like commitment to their choice. Last football season, this was one of my favorite commercials that ran regularly. The woman captured the edgy feeling of being in the herd or even a cult.

OH WELL, THE ORIGINAL VIDEO WAS REMOVED FROM YOUTUBE — NOW YOU MUST IMAGINE IT.

One of the Newsletters I happen to read is Both Are True. I wonder what the interplay is inside the heads of folks for the subset who hates or distrusts Google except when wanting to get around in the world, manage their email or answer their questions. Both are True I guess :) For me the most important observation is there are still a lot of settled minds who just make choices that work for them without a need to lecture the rest. While I think the universe is small I imagine there are some people who have settled to be uncomfortable with Omar & Boebert. My guess is that the cross-section is small. I wonder if some people who have an Android phone become anxious at the thought of watching AppleTV. I hope not!!!

AI in the Wild

My sense of what is going on with people who are animated about AI is in some fashion, as AI matures, it might begin to interact with our own favorite activity. A Substacker might be unnerved by an AI that writes. An actor might be unnerved by an AI with animation that plays a role. My take on all of this is AI is inspired by us. Its imperfection is mostly due to bad biomimicry. Humans are quite proud of what they have achieved. It even calls it an invention. I think almost everything is merely inspired by nature. The assistance of machines will make us better at it.

The theme I try to carry in this Newsletter is optimism and the best time ever to be alive. I am inspired that the AI/ML boosts we are receiving will be transformative in a positive way. Google is in a unique position at this point in the history of AI. The three primary forces that likely placed them there are authoritarianism, narcissism, and chance. The recent competitive positions vis-a-vis China and their PRC response to trim their information technology superstars in the name of maintaining a police state have positioned the United States at this pivot point in history. I think the future will identify this period as a PRC's own goal (yes a soccer reference). I think that Google abandoned the PRC market (the largest in the world) over a decade ago, leaving it mostly to Microsoft and Apple who have found an uneasy co-existence (and lots of revenue!!!). The PRC became their growth focus and a police state doesn’t want its firms to know more than it does.

I believe, especially with the economic slowdown, the era of AI/ML has begun and will only accelerate. Google has amassed the two most highly thought-of AI collectives under one roof. In the Cloud space, Amazon and Microsoft moved to early dominant positions focused on yesterday’s war while other key players chose not to play (Apple & Meta). They focused on remote servers to replace onsite machines at a business. Google was an also-ran in the space and focused on what they saw as the future, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. That part of cloud computing was a rounding error in the beginning. They have been at it for a while and built SPECIALIZED COMPUTING servers for AI/ML for rental and modeling in the cloud. They advanced so far that they have now added small instances of AI/ML unique and proprietary to their branded phones. It is how a branded phone can take better pictures than another phone with a much higher-resolution camera. A person, like myself, who has been taking night sky photos for nearly five years now does not fear AI, but appreciates the assistance in seamlessly outperforming my eyeball, optic nerve, and visual processing inside my head.

A Positive Finish — What AI Can Change

One of those two dominant organizations in the AI space operated by Google is DeepMind. Meanwhile — Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are racing to realign their resources away from blue vs green bubbles, VR headsets, or locking in corporate customers to use Powerpoint. Microsoft is UNDOUBTEDLY the best positioned of the competitors with its earlier alignment with ChatGPT. While I am an amateur and an outsider, based upon the need for specialized hardware like Tensor/Flow it seems only companies with an independent, enormous cloud computing infrastructure can become synonymous with AI.

What comes next? ChatGPT is cool and I have enjoyed playing around with it. Are we about to be enslaved by our AI overlords? I think we are safe for now. I think it best to remain tethered to intelligence as we define it. Our brains have evolved over millions of years. Like MOST BRAINS on the planet, the old section is hard-wired senses to help us react quickly, and remain alive and fed. These sensory brains we have in common across the animal kingdom. Some of our relatives even have senses that didn’t make the cut with us humans. These primitive (I call them lizard) brains are not what separate us from our relatives. The frontal bump and neocortex are in some ways our second brain thanks to that broad forehead we sport. I think of this whenever I see a porpoise or a dolphin. They got something going also.

Why do I think ChatGPT is interesting but meh? We are at the beginning of this journey and this is merely a large language model (LLM). Searching and piecing together a large sampling of writing is interesting — maybe. Alas, we have five senses and it seems AI that begins to tie together hearing, sight, verbalization, taste and smell will come next. Context, nurture, and example make us the people we are.

Board Games

We can finally wrap up and return to the story of checkers, chess, and Go. Checkers was simple enough that it could just be programmed. IBM about fifteen years ago shattered the myth of one of our beloved (makes us human) games, Chess. DeepMind conquered the game of Go in the last five years or so, a grand scale difference beyond chess. None of this scared us. I think we just rejiggered what uniquely makes us human that other primates and machines can never replicate. Recently, DeepMind with its AlphaFold AI managed to document how the most fundamental of all things work. We, humans, have a recipe book for about 25000+ proteins from a bunch of amino acids. It is these proteins that make us human. Each of them plays a role in how we thrive and survive. We are a very small BLIP amongst the range of life on the planet. Estimates of the proteins across the animal and plant kingdom hovered around 200 million. When pharmacology researchers and botanists evaluate the intervention in our lives be it weed-resistance or curing sickle-cell anemia, the operative thing is proteins. DeepMind, in its earth-shattering program AlphaFold decided to train to understand why molecules as they string themselves together, fold inward, fold outward, make a 180 in three dimensions. We need to understand their shape to mold our world. AlphaFold created a library of how this planet’s proteins fold and appear in three dimensions. Like their past efforts, be they books, maps, earth, search, scholarly research, patents, arts & culture, translation — the parent company instinct was NOT TO HIDE IT BEHIND A WALL AND DOLE IT OUT FOR THE CHOSEN FEW. It was gifted to the world and has already begun transforming it for the better. Almost all of this is because of AI.

The next time someone rants about AI, think about its indispensability in uncovering myths and making the world a better-understood place. I will finish with how we choose to let disruption and angst reign. I have been following a couple of amazing technology marches. There are Luddites at the ready in both cases. One is around the saving of books and the other is about making the ubiquitous human endeavor of driving a safer experience. It is the confluence of the two that interests me and helps me navigate good AI versus bad.

LIDAR

The US Navy has been using LIDAR as an advanced means to identify the world around a submarine. The technology was expensive and rare. Google started a few moonshot projects over a decade ago (while others considered AI just a waste of resources). The Google Books project endeavors to scan and save for posterity ALL OF THE BOOKS ever printed. The books are valuable and in some cases irreplaceable. The books cannot be unbound. The books are distributed all over the world. Librarians stand between commerce and books and protect them. Google funded the development of equipment that put the book first. Never bend the spine. Protect the pages and be delicate as you traverse them. Ensure the image of the page is EASY & ACCURATE to read. Guess what? Google leverages LIDAR and AI to make it happen. They are estimated to have scanned 50M of the 130M books ever printed. They have built thousands of machines suitable to bring to the books. This project is about accessing and saving knowledge. We all get to decide who we will be. The homepage for this effort is books.google.com. The link is to a novel feature (AI-based) talk to the books. I LOVE THIS AI EXPERIMENT. Ask me anything said the big bookstore. We all get a chance to visualize the world as we wish it to be rather than the world that is. For me, it is exciting that long-lost or forgotten books stand at the wait for some heretofore unknown person to seek, find, be inspired, and maybe change the world.

Confluence & Carnival Barkers

The word that guides these paragraphs is confluence. Self-driving is a thing and is being refined in real-time. One of the more high visibility (via the carnival barker Elon Musk) is ‘full self-driving’ at Tesla. This has been a thing for years and has always been a shill for something it can never be. Musk was sure it could be accomplished with cameras and no radar (or lidar). It seems mostly because of an abject need to be the smartest guy in the room. After years of deception, fatal collisions, and ignoring NHTSA oversight, he has relented and radar/lidar is coming to a Tesla near you. BTW that company some love to hate and fear (Alphabet) has a little-known moonshot division named Waymo. They have pioneered the use of LIDAR to make self-driving a reality. Each night, every trip a Waymo driverless vehicle makes is added to a machine learning list and the software is crossed versus every single trip to date. No carnival barker required. A conservative and cautious step forward to make driving a little safer. A different face for AI perhaps? This is what machine learning means. Imagine, each time you learned a lesson via a close call while driving, your behavior could be evaluated and you could be inspired to do something different the next time. This is just another example of learning. Celebrate what we have learned. This is AI/ML in action. One of the side benefits of these moonshots is LIDAR is now part of everyday life. What was once reserved for nuclear attack submarines has hopped on a learning curve. Beyond scanning the world’s books and driving without a driver, there are even robot vacuums with LIDAR built in.

The Impossible In Our Pockets

So finally we come to confluence with a bit of AI/ML mixed in. The phone I happen to use has a specialized AI/ML chip in it called Tensor. It is the SAME technology used by AI experiments the world over in a phone-sized chip. AI/ML in action makes the picture better than it could ever have been before. We are no longer tethered to “how big is the lens and how much light do we have”. We now can take pictures that need the eye of an eagle or an octopus. Welcome to the wonderful world of AI. It operates quite capably at translating speech and conversation from one language to another. Hang on and enjoy the ride. It was never about whether we could run as fast as a cheetah or see at a distance like an eagle or sniff out a morsel like a dog. We got a second brain, we struggled to walk upright freeing our hands to wield tools. We didn’t lament when we built a car that was faster than walking or running. We didn’t fret when we realized our Old Testament commitment to 7th Heaven was a mirage thanks to telescopes. Even in an example of our world gone awry, we build explosives detectors that can smell what a human never could. Building tools is our destiny. Tools that emulate and maybe someday surpass our thought is an achievement is an achievement and not to be feared by default. It will transform life. Enjoy the ride.

So what does this all have to do with Checkers, Chess, and Go? Artificial Intelligence may be encouraging us to choose another game.

The Poll & Music

The devoted reader of this Newsletter knows I love music and try to tie it together with my post. Here’s a link to make all of us who love music feel better. These were supposedly inspired by band styles and written by an AI-Bot. These are cheesy, there is hope for us! As for inspiration, it is remarkable how the music of our teens can remain with us. This is from a studio album inspired by interviews with Isaac Asimov. Even then, people were getting antsy about robots and AI.

---

What’s Next

While I won’t share the title, next week will be lighter and shorter. Hope to see you next time.