Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Can we be replaced?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, christian perspective, polemics, gospel

What is your attitude towards AI? Do you fear it or yearn for it? I looked up poll results online and the "AI Summary" offered by DuckDuckGo is:

"Surveys show that the American public is generally more pessimistic about artificial intelligence, with 52% expressing more concern than excitement, while only 17% believe AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. in the next 20 years. In contrast, AI experts are significantly more optimistic, with 56% expecting a positive impact from AI during the same period."

Let's look closer at the numbers. More than half of Americans had "more concern than excitement", and only one person in six expects mainly good. Even more telling, 56% of "experts" (not otherwise defined) are optimistic, but that means that, even among experts, 44% are not so optimistic. I suspect their attitudes range from mild concern to utter pessimism.

It was with much anticipation that I obtained the book 2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future by John C. Lennox, one of my favorite Christian advocates. In speeches he has made regarding the subject, I note that he often prefers the term "simulated intelligence," a term I also prefer. Wherever I can, I write of SI rather than AI. There is another attribute that is very meaningful to me, which I'll get to later on.

Dr. Lennox is a mathematician, so he is an orderly thinker. Below, I quote more from this book than I have done previously. He begins by surveying the history of totalitarianism, for this is the clear direction that technology is leading. Thus, in Part 1: Mapping Out the Territory, Chapter 1 is titled "Developments in Technology." Two early thinkers wrote novels that forecast authoritarian use of technology: In 1931 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World and in 1948 George Orwell published 1984. Both books forecast the destruction of the human character, but in different ways. The year after 1984 had come and gone, in 1985 Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which we find, as Dr. Lennox quotes, 

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture."

I will return to the subject of the populace welcoming the agent of their demise, which is Postman's point.

In Chapter 2, "What is AI?", the author asks how we define or recognize intelligence. He lists a number of terms that are associated with intelligence: perception, imagination, capacity for abstraction, memory, reason, common sense, creativity, intuition, insight, experience, and problem-solving. A word I find missing: wisdom. In Chapter 6 ("Narrow Artificial Intelligence: The Future is Bright?"), the author points out how most agree that technology is developing faster than the ethics needed to guide it. He quotes Isaac Asimov, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." As much as I appreciate Dr. Asimov, and I have read at least half of the 400 books he has written, I sadly observe his own rather marked lack of wisdom. In fact, among the very intelligent people I know, who are very competent in their fields of expertise, I have observed a near-universal lack of intelligent understanding in other areas. It seems that, just as the current AI tools are said to have "ANI" or "Artificial Narrow Intelligence," humans also tend to exhibit "Natural Narrow Intelligence." Furthermore, there is no hint that any SI tool so far developed genuinely embodies any of the 11 items listed above. Let me be clear:

SI (ANI at present) does not present intelligent results. It presents an amalgam of various bits of human intelligence found in its databases, with no comprehension of their meaning.

The real issue is this: Will ANI ever develop into AGI, Artificial General Intelligence? Or will there instead be some kind of agglomeration of dozens (thousands?) of ANI tools into a seeming AGI? And how would we know that this has been achieved? How can we define success in this enterprise, when we don't know how to define its goal?

Thus, it is well to consider that we do not yet have any idea how to define, let along unerringly recognize, the other psychological attributes that surround intelligence: emotions, senses, empathy, sympathy, a sense of purpose or meaning, will and willfulness, and others that are often gathered under the rubric "qualia".

Part 2 is titled "Two Big Questions", comprising Chapters 3 and 4, "Where Do We Come From?" and "Where Are We Going?" Clearly, to Dr. Lennox, these are theological questions, not philosophical ones, and I agree. I will not comment on these chapters beyond saying that by this point the subject of transhumanism has arisen and is woven into the entire narrative; here the author narrows the point further. Thus in the middle of Part 3 ("The Now and Future of AI"), in Chapter 10 ("Upgrading Humans: The Transhumanist Agenda") he points out that the goal of transhumanism is to make humanity obsolete. Further, the whole enterprise has come under the sway of the deception of the serpent recorded in Genesis 3, "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." Human history demonstrates that the result of receiving this deception has been a deep descent into intensive, personal, subjective, heartfelt knowledge of both good and evil, in a way that we cannot adequately handle. Sadly, the evil has typically far outweighed the good.

Consider a bit of wisdom from Solomon, Proverbs 25:2, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and it is the glory of a king to search out a matter." The lesson of the early chapters of Genesis is that we are worse off for having searched into "the knowledge of good and evil." When we understand that the more a ruler can know about what his (or her) subjects are doing, the more thoroughly they can be controlled, we see that the universal surveillance society that the whole world is rushing towards is a most pernicious enterprise. 

I remember a story from 1951, "And then there were none," by Eric F. Russell. A society develops in isolation, and is found (when later discovered) to have a very strong privacy ethic, such that the people tend to reply to most questions with the mysterious word, "Myob". This is found to mean "Mind your own business." Would that we could develop more of this!

Chapters 12 through 17 comprise Part 4, the last section of the book, titled "Being Human." They constitute a gospel message. Based on superintelligent mechanisms, the transhumanists wish to produce a Homo Deus, a god-man. Dr. Lennox demonstrates that the true superintelligent being is already quite involved with the human race: The LORD God, who is called by some, including myself, Jehovah God, in a more literal way. The name Jesus is the Greek translation of Jeho-shua, which means "Jehovah the Savior". Jesus is Jehovah, who came in the flesh as a human to live among us and to die for us, and to resurrect to release His life to those who believe in Him. He already has a plan to make His people into the real Homo Deus, in resurrection, not by some mechanical process but through divine power, which we can no more comprehend than we can discern the makeup of our own minds.

While AI is seen by some (probably no more than 1/6th of us, by the polling mentioned above) as a pathway to increased freedom and eternal prosperity, a much larger number of people fear a boundless increase in machine intelligence as the most destructive force the human race has yet encountered. A generation ago people loved ET. Today many profess love for AI. Beware: it does not love you. It cannot.

The last chapters of the book are a summary of the likely wedding of computational intelligence with the final program of the great dragon, Satan, who will empower a fateful human to be the Beast of the book of Revelation. Dr. Lennox calls this being The Monster, a terminology I appreciate and have decided to adopt (this is the second item I mentioned above). 

I note that the term "antichrist" is not used in 2084, except in a reference to an anti-Christian diatribe by Friedrich Nietzsche. The vast majority of Christian teachers call the Beast of Revelation "the antichrist," but the term is never used in that book. It is used by the apostle John in two of his letters, where it refers to certain heretics who deny the deity of Jesus. The Greek word therion means "wild beast", where "wild" means uncontrollable. The word is used 37 times in Revelation to refer to this personage or the False Prophet, while in nine other instances it refers to dangerous animals like lions or venomous snakes. To yield the emotional force that Greek readers of John's books would have felt, the term "The Monster" is appropriate.

In contrast to the technical deification offered by transhumanists, the Bible presents a genuine theosis, being "transformed by the renewing of the mind" (Romans 12:2), by which the people of God grow to full sonship and conformation to the image of Christ. They are then qualified to reign with Him in the kingdom of God in eternity. This is infinitely better than the best that technology will ever have to offer.

I should note that when the Monster takes control of some kind of world government, to most people it will come as a relief. He will be seen as s superior statesman or diplomat, able to unite warring factions; the number Ten may be literal, or perhaps it is symbolic for "all", the way 10 is used in scripture to mean completion in human affairs. Of him it is written that he will "change times and laws," apparently overruling the legal codes of all the (former) nations under his sway. Many will profess that they love him. Perhaps children will be named for him, in the brief time (less than four years) of his suzerainty over the world. Whatever the "mark of the Beast" refers to, it will be gladly accepted by nearly everyone.

The work of the False Prophet (the "other therion") to "give breath" to the image of The Monster may be accomplished via something akin to deepfakes, which are already quite sophisticated, or perhaps by animating a compelling robotic construction. Either way, the driving anima will be whatever passes for AGI at the time.

It will be only those with spiritual understanding who will see the Monster for what he really is: the incarnation of Satan. Whatever the seven heads and ten horns represent, they are best seen with the eyes of the heart, where we have spiritual understanding. 

The last few years that this world experiences before the manifestation of Jesus Christ at His coming will be terrible indeed; Jesus called it a time of "great tribulation".

May we be among those who repent, who declare to God that we know we are sinful and ask His forgiveness, a forgiveness given so freely because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. May we be counted worthy to escape the terrible events of the closing of this age, to be among those who "follow the Lamb wherever He goes." Those who belong to Jesus, the Lamb of God, have nothing to fear from mechanical intelligence of any level.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

Beautiful Spiders

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, natural history, spiders

James O'Hanlon loves spiders, particularly jumping spiders. Seeing these beauties, it isn't hard to understand. I gathered these pictures of peacock jumping spiders from several sources. They are astonishing!

Depending on your display, these pictures are about two to three times life size. They show a female's eye view of the male spiders' mating dances. To attract a female, a male peacock spider will raise his flattened abdomen and two legs, and wave and bob about and dance for her.

In O'Hanlon's book Eight-Legged Wonders: The Surprising Lives of Spiders, we find that a chance photo of such a spider taken by Stuart Harris completely changed his life. Before, he had a rather good life, but unfocused. When he saw a colorful little spider, photographed it, and posted the photo, he was soon hailed as the discoverer of a new species. To confirm it, a spider expert (arachnologist) asked Harris to find and capture a specimen. It took him three years! Now, the new species has been described and given the designation Maratus harrisi. And Harris has become something of an arachnologist himself.

For perspective, I must note that more than 53,000 species of spider are known so far. About 6,000 are jumping spiders, but only about 100 species are peacock jumping spiders. That narrows the field, since Stuart has added 1% to the list of known peacock spiders (In proportion, finding a new species of monkey would add only 0.3% to the known 334 species of monkeys). Nearly all of these pretties are found in Australia.

With this book, O'Hanlon hopes to reduce spider phobia. Many people find spiders both horrifying and disgusting. Popular culture, which usually depicts spiders as venomous monsters, hasn't helped. While it is true that nearly all spider species are venomous, most of them are too small to bite through human skin. Of those that can bite, a spider bite is usually milder than a bee sting. A big spider, like this tarantula I caught in my garage in Oklahoma about 40 years ago, can inflict a more painful bite, but it is not dangerous (In Oklahoma, male tarantulas are on the move, looking for mates, in late summer). Only a very few spiders have a bite that is dangerous to humans, and the only really deadly one, the Sydney funnel-web spider, is native to Australia, though international shipping has begun to spread them around.

Some people keep tarantulas as pets. A formative experience for me was when I was in kindergarten; one kid's dad visited, bringing the family tarantula. The father lifted the spider out of its cage and let it walk on his hand and arm. I was fascinated, as were most of the kids, but some hung back in great fear. Fortunately, nobody screamed.

I understand that some people's spider-phobia is so great that they will be distressed just seeing the photos in this post. I hope such folks can look, first from a distance, then gradually closer, and desensitize themselves at least a little. Along with the author of Wonders, I would like for people to appreciate what spiders do for us. They live in every environment on earth except the extreme polar regions, including in our houses. The ones that come indoors specialize in eating insects. When you find a cobweb with a multitude of insect bits in it, ponder for a moment how many insects the spider has eliminated from your home, so you didn't need to use a fly swatter nearly so much.

Spiders may do more for us in the future. You may know that silk, from certain moth caterpillars, can be woven into a bullet-proof fabric. Kevlar was inspired by such silk. So was nylon, but for a different reason: silk is not only very strong, it is soft and beautiful. Chemists wanted to duplicate these characteristics in a cheaper material. For many purposes, nylons (there are several varieties) have proven "good enough".

Dragline silk, one of the silks most spiders produce, is much stronger than silkworm silk, and apparently more luxurious. A few people have been industrious enough to gather thousands of spiders and "milk" them for their dragline silk, and a few garments have been made. Such textiles are exceedingly costly, and it is hard to "farm" spiders. Put a number of spiders in any enclosure smaller than a back yard, and it will soon contain only one spider. They are indiscriminate cannibals. But a spider silk fabric is very glossy, soft, and yet strong, although you don't dare get it wet. Sweat a bit, and an undergarment would become a sticky mess! Research continues. Perhaps one day…

The book is filled with great facts and information. Spiders live among us, they very rarely do any harm. I suspect more people are hurt because they jump when they see one, than directly hurt by spiders. Let's get rid of the jumping reaction and save ourselves some pain and distress. Few people will come to love spiders, but I think most of us can learn to appreciate them and react more calmly when we encounter them.

Normality without spider scanning

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I have this browser set to show Blog Stats when it opens. Preparing to review a book, I noticed that the excessive scanning of past weeks had settled down. At about 9:30 local time (EDT), this blog had 34 views, and 209 the day before. This chart shows progress over the past week:

Expected activity without scanning going on is less than 100 per day, so 209 is "getting normal". Here is the picture for the 24 hours ending at 9am today:


Counting back to reach 34 views I find that the "day" counted by the Blogger software began about 7pm the prior day. That means a five-hour offset. If I understand how time zones work correctly, that places the "zero point" in Hawaii or the Aleutian Islands. Counting the rightmost twelve hours on this chart I find 27 views in 12 hours, or 2.25 views per hour, average, a total of 54 views per day. The figure of 97 a the top of this chart indicates a little excess activity, which ended about 16 hours ago (counting from 10am local time). Here is the world chart for the past 24 hours:


This looks a lot like near-normal activity. If this lull continues, I can get a better handle on "the usual."






Thursday, July 10, 2025

You gotta love bats!

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural history, bats

Why does this bat have its mouth open? It's not in anticipation of biting the moth. Rather, it is shouting! Most bats navigate with echoes, and they make chirps and clicks at very high frequencies to "see" in the dark. They also use echoes to locate and hunt prey. On this final approach, the bat is "shrieking" a very fast series of clicks to track every flutter of the moth, so as to scoop it into the tail membrane (you can see the membrane is already cupped for the capture). Then it tips its head in and bites.

This incredible image is credited to Michael Durham on a FaceBook page of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This is a Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus, the most common bat in North America.

I spent a month in Nevada one summer. There was a bright light on a tall pole near the campground. Moths and other insects would fly around and around in the light, and bats would swoop through to catch them. From time to time my friends and I would toss a small rock up there. Often, a bat would swoop in, then dodge aside once it got close enough to discern that it wasn't an insect. Now, many years later, a schoolyard near our house has a running track alongside a patch of forest. In spring or autumn, if my wife and I take a walk on the track in late twilight, we will sometimes see bats flittering about overhead. We don't see the insects they are hunting, but the bats are obviously able to detect them.

I like bats. Alyson Brokaw adores bats. In her book The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats: Demystifying These Often-Misunderstood Creatures, Dr. Brokaw brings us as close to bats as she can, without actually handing one to us (which I suspect she would do if she could). The fourteen chapters of the book describe as many aspects of bats' natural history, from their voices to their other senses such as smell and vision, to their flight and how their design makes them such maneuverable flyers, to their long lives and memories, and the kinds of places they prefer to roost. It is a lot to cover, particularly because among the 1,400 species of bat, all these characteristics are quite variable. For example, not all species of bats roost in caves; perhaps less than half do. Some like to tuck up under the eaves of houses. Some make little tents of leaves in large-leaved trees.

I began thinking about echolocation as a substitute for sight. Our vision is sharp because light has a short wavelength, around 1/2,000th of a millimeter. By contrast, when we hear a sound off to the side, we can point in the general direction, but even when the sound is high-pitched, like a gunshot, our apprehension of the direction is not as accurate as if we saw the puff of smoke, for example. The high frequencies of a sharp "crack" are in the 10,000 to 20,000 Hz range. The speed of sound is 343 meters per second, though that varies a little with temperature and humidity. The wavelength of 20,000 Hz is about 17 mm, or about 2/3 of an inch. The distance between our ears is about 7 inches, some 180 mm. Thus, the angular accuracy of our hearing, when a high-pitched sound is sort of in front of us (or behind, but not to either side so much) is a little under three degrees. By contrast, the sharpness of human vision is mostly in the range of 1/30 to 1/60 of a degree, hundreds of times more accurate.

Bat voices range from 10,000 Hz to 200,000 Hz, but few species make chirps or clicks higher than 120,000 Hz. We can hear the "lower" frequencies, and I have heard bat chirps. But I was hearing only a small fraction of the sound. The wavelength of a 120,000 Hz sound is just under 3 mm, or about 0.11 inch. As it happens, with their ears only 12-25 mm apart, bats' angular discrimination is also in the range of a couple of degrees. But there is another aspect to this. Sound with a 3 mm wavelength will efficiently bounce off an insect as small as half that dimension, which includes mosquitos. While it is not true that a little brown bat catches 1,000 mosquitoes every night—the author debunks that item effectively—, on average the bat will eat a few hundred insects nightly, including mosquitoes. It just depends on what is available. So, as a bat homes in on an edible target, by the time it is within a half meter the 3-degree discrimination angle means the bat knows where the critter is within a "circle of confusion" of about an inch (~25 mm), a distance that shrinks rapidly as it gets closer. It can scoop it right up and snack away!

Near the end of the book we learn what it takes to put up bat boxes, the bat version of bird houses, so they have more places to roost. Just as only a few bird species will use a bluebird-sized bird house, so we must do a little research, perhaps with the help of a naturalist at a nearby natural history museum or agricultural college; once we know what the local species are, we can determine what kind of box to make or purchase, and where to put it. I was surprised to learn that bats that like to use bat boxes don't like them to be attached to trees. That makes sense; too many bat predators can climb trees. A bat box on a tall pole or just under the eaves above a smooth wall will be more popular.

There is a lot we can do for the sake of bats, which do a lot for us, particularly insect control. The first step is to learn what they are really like. This book is a good first step. Most of us saw too many monster movies, where bats or batlike beasts influenced us. To a bat, a human is a big, noisy monster, and they keep their distance! You or I may never love bats the way Dr. Brokaw does, but it is worthwhile to like them, at least a little!


Wednesday, July 02, 2025

A lesson we are slow to learn

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, epidemiology, airborne pathogens

When I saw the title, Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life we Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, I imagined a survey of the microorganisms that make their way into the air. Instead I found a historical survey of certain attitudes that the medical establishment has held, primarily a stubborn denial that bacteria and viruses and other micro-pathogens can travel long distances along with the air. By the end of the book, it appears that this denial persists to this day alongside an ever-strengthening view that airborne spread of disease is of paramount importance. I say "appears" because in the political climate of the past five years, the great majority of clinicians and epidemiologists have judged it prudent to say as little as possible about it. Political matters are so hyper-polarized these days that they taint or contaminate every aspect of national life.

The term "Covid-19" does not appear until the fifth of five sections of the book, on page 350, eight pages into the chapter "Disease X". Beginning on page 345 the virus is called SARS-COV-2. This is a curious inversion of time: I don't remember learning the name SARS-COV-2 until more than a year after the WHO (as reported on p 350) announced that the name of the disease would be Covid-19.

The first 340 pages of Airborne present a blow-by-blow (-by-blow) history of the small number of researchers who studied airborne microbes for decades and yet died or retired without their findings being recognized as at all relevant to the prevention or treatment of disease. This in spite of the fact that non-medical folks (darn near everybody on the planet) recognizes that, just as dust and smoke can be carried miles and hundreds of miles by wind and even breezes, so must the microbes which are ever-so-much smaller and lighter.

These days, I sometimes marvel at how clean the air in my house is. When the sun shines through a window, I'll see scattered specks of dust in the sunbeam, but I recall that in my childhood a sunbeam was really a beam, so dense it appeared solid. This was considered normal in the 1950's and before. We dust areas like the top of the piano weekly or monthly; it used to be a daily task. When I would catch a childhood disease such as measles, mumps or chicken pox, my mother would say, "Well, if you can see a sick kid, his germs can get to you." Forty years later, before an effective vaccine for chicken pox was developed, we sent our son to visit a friend who was sick with chicken pox so he could catch it. That is one disease that is deadly to adults but kids just shrug it off (and scratch a little).

It was almost laughably predictable that Mr. Zimmer would make Anthony Fauci into a semi-hero. On my part, I count President Trump's second greatest mistake to be his failure to either fire or sideline Dr. Fauci after their first televised appearance together, when the doctor contradicted nearly everything the President had to say (…and the greatest mistake was initiating the practice of "stimulus"; it gave his successor's administration "permission" to "stimulate" us into a 30-trillion-dollar increase in the national debt). I began to designate "Dr Fakey" from that press conference. And when he said, "I am Science", he proved that he had lost connection with reality. Mr. Zimmer partially redeems himself by noting that Dr. Fauci was shunted aside by the Trump administration, months too late, and he does point out that Dr. Fauci and much of the medical establishment was motivate initially by the shortage of semi-effective masks, to tell the public not to mask. Later lies, however, are ignored.

Just by the way, I got N-95 masks from a hardware store; they are excellent dust masks! But no matter what masks people used in the 2020-2022 time frame, I never saw another person wear a mask correctly. I know what it takes to make a mask fit so that I can mow the lawn without choking half to death; I am very sensitive to grass clipping dust. But it happens that viruses such as SARS-COV-2 and influenza and the common cold are in these masks' "sour spot" (the opposite of a sweet spot!): too small for pore size to catch them and too large for electrostatic capture to be highly effective. N-95 means the "sour spot" still can stop 95%, but that means 5% gets through, which is enough for most people to get sick anyway. And an ill-fitting N-95 mask is really about an N-10 mask, or worse. OK, enough of that diatribe.

What I hoped to see in the "Disease X" chapter and its successors was an even-handed history. Sadly, too much was left out. The Chinese doctor in Wuhan who worked on gain-of-function research into coronaviruses, and published the results in prestigious journals such as Science, is never mentioned. Ditto the fact that her research was bankrolled by Dr. Fauci, using an accounting trick to get around a prohibition by President Obama. I do not mention the doctor's name, since doing so is a sure ticket to "cancellation", even today. The five state governors who required nursing homes to take in patients infected with the virus are never mentioned. The illness and deaths caused by their policies form the bulk of the First Wave of Covid-19. No mention is made that the Wuhan Wet Market doesn't have bats for sale. I could go on…

Even though I saw where the book was going by the 50th page or so, I read it all. Carl Zimmer writes very well and I generally consider him, if not a wholly honest journalist, one of the better ones. This book falls short of his usual standard. I don't consider the time wasted, however. Though the book's main text is 414 pages, at least 340 pages of it contain interesting and useful history.