Final four – out of seven

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

Three stories of the last seven in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, guest edited by Nnedi Okorafor, that I rated, "OK, there's an interesting idea or two here," and there is one I liked well enough to say, "I'm glad I read it." The other three were quickly rejected; stuff I don't wish to burden my memory with.

The "interesting" three are 

• "Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!" by T.J. Klune. At the end of ten years of uninterrupted labor in a factory, a semisentient robot is given one week to experience life outside of work. Then it is to be recycled by having its memories erased and getting equipment and software upgrades. Another ten year stint is to follow. Et cetera. I confess that I skimmed past much of the day by day details of the last week that "Douglas", or P-23, experienced. It is the somewhat predictable rollup of sightseeing, new experiences, making friends, and so forth. The crux is the final discussion Douglas has with the Supervisor. As robot technology improves, so does their self-awareness. Douglas does indeed get recycled, but I'll leave it to you to read for yourself. It points up the ethical issues surrounding AI, should it ever achieve consciousness, but I'll return to this theme later on.
• "The Sort" by Thomas Ha. In a world that embraced genetic modification far beyond what we have so far achieved, and then began to reject it, a man and his son are sightseeing, driving in the desert Southwest. They are far from their home, where their own modified humanness is known and probably accepted (this isn't quite clear), and now among people who don't all tolerate modified humans. The man and his son are telepathic, but only with each other. There are hints that their telepathy extends to certain other modified entities, such as a Tiger that can speak a few words, and perhaps even the basketball-sized garlic bulbs to be sorted in a strange ritual. I would ordinarily pass off such a story as "going nowhere," but in this case that is the point. Having pulled back from rampant modification-for-modifications'-sake, most of the world has thrown out the baby with the bathwater and is stuck in a reactionary rut. To do something "just because you can" is frequently the worst reason for doing it.
• "Ushers" by Joe Hill. Many cultures, including American folklore, contain a grim reaper or banshee or similar supernatural entities that either accomplish a person's death or foretell it or, in the case of this story, accompany the soon-to-die and "usher" them into the afterlife. In this story, a young man, Martin, can see the Ushers, which makes him act strangely at times, and his history of avoiding certain disasters has piqued the attention of the FBI. Most of the story consists of two interviews. Knowing beforehand that his interviewers are soon to be ushered off the scene, Martin tells of his "gift" to one of them. Soon after, they are Ushered out of this life in an accident.

The story I liked best is "The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics" by Adam-Troy Castro. The title together with the content of the story gives a better view of the complexity of the ethical and moral intricacies that will be needed to produce wholly beneficial AGI (G for General) or ASI (S for Super), whether in a robot body or not. The story consists of one enormous sentence, extremely well constructed to avoid the turgidity of single-sentence legal contracts. A self-aware robot has been placed on a planet by its cruel owner, ordered to await his return without moving, and abandoned. It knows this. 

If for no other reason, it is worthwhile to get this volume for this story alone, and to read this incredible sentence thoughtfully, in detail. I will mention just one item, the core idea of human-AI ethics: If a mechanism is created that can feel pain, there are some (many?) people who will inflict pain on purpose. This is a thesis also found in the opening scenes of Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. Furthermore, insomuch as a mechanism can be used to cause pain in other persons, there are some (many?) who will do so, apparently with great pleasure to themselves.

This is part of the reason I refer to AI as SI, Simulated Intelligence. Part of the reason I dearly hope that sentience is forever impossible to mechanisms.

A couple of worthwhile stories out of eight

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

I read at least parts of eight more stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, guest edited by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked three to varying degrees, I rejected three after reading no more than a half page, and I didn't like the other two even well enough to mention their titles. I'll comment on the better three.

I have noticed that the genre notes are alternating: The first story is science fiction, the second is fantasy, and so forth. I seldom like a fantasy offering, but I read most of them anyway. The first was actually rather good: "The River Judge" (Fantasy) by S.L. Huang. I call this a "murder non-mystery". The drama isn't in who committed the many murders that occurred during about a decade of life in a poor Chinese village; it is in how they were covered up, and eventually, how the Imperial magistrates and investigators were motivated to leave the area alone. This would be a simple alternate history story except that a ghost is involved. The ghost is not talkative—that would be too easy. But it is able to make its desire known.

I like the concept in "The Weight of Your Own Ashes" (Science Fiction) by Carlie St. George, of an alien species that inhabits multiple bodies. There is no explanation how the shared consciousness of this multi-body person works when those bodies are separated by many light years. It isn't important to the progress of the story, which involves the death of one body. Another of the four remaining bodies is soon standing in the room formerly shared with a girlfriend, holding the urn containing the cremains of the dead member. This person has many legal papers and processes to go through, and his/her own emotional turmoil to overcome. The girlfriend has her own emotional reactions. A side vignette has the protagonist getting advice, but not much comfort, from a friend of a different alien of a species that typically inhabits thousands of bodies.

Finally, "Yarns" by Susan Palwick is placed in a dystopia in which the Combine runs things. Not some one-world government, but more like a one-world crime syndicate that has an uneasy but dominant relationship with the police authorities of various quasi-nations. Pervasive surveillance prevails. The protagonist, a schoolteacher named Irene, is targeted for assassination, but she distracts her assassin, a teen of the Combine, with knitting, until they become allies and a relative of the boy helps them both go into hiding in a more effective way. This is the one story that redeems the prior failures.

I generated the image using Gemini. Seven stories to go. Is there another that is worthwhile? I'll soon know.

Best of? Not off to a good start

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 compendium is in its eleventh year. This year's guest editor is Nnedi Okorafor. The series has a spotty history with me. Today I am 1/4 of the way through and it's not looking too good. Of the first five items, I have read three, skipped one almost entirely and skipped about half of another. I will comment on two of the stories, one that I found mostly good and one that is puzzling but at least not bad. The genre of each piece is included below the title.

The first story in the collection (Genre is Science Fiction) is "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim. Section after section, a short, patterned statement is repeated, with variations, on both sides of the page, in various orientations, interspersed with a short paragraph or two of entreaty. Apparently, an entity with many eyes can read many texts in parallel, and it is trying to teach us the beginnings of the same skill. We are exhorted to read the left side of the page with the left eye, and the right side with the right eye. I am one of a very few people who can go "wide-eyed" enough to attempt this, and of course the result is a muddle. The concept is interesting; the experience is one I don't plan to repeat.

The title of the fifth story (Science Fiction) is obscene, so I will mask it: "F**k Them Kids" by Tatiana Obey. The story itself is a romp, centering on a spaceship race. The race is utterly unrealistic, with small, personal spaceships (apparently capable of faster-than-light travel), decorated like NASCAR race cars, zooming through an "asteroid belt" that bears more resemblance to that video game relic Asteroids than to the actual asteroid region between Mars and Jupiter. The ships glance off asteroids and each other, so presumably the speeds involved are closer to NASCAR, 200 mph or less, than to actual inter-asteroidal velocities of 20,000 to 50,000 mph. Very fun to read; just read it like a story of back-road racing in the country.

For those who don't know, the reality of the actual asteroid belt is this: If you are near enough to a real asteroid the size of an grape or larger to actually see it visually, the next-nearest asteroid of similar size is at least a million miles away. We have sent eight spacecraft crosswise through the asteroid belt, to reach the outer planets. None has collided with even a sand grain.

Two out of five isn't a good beginning. I hope for better luck in the remaining 15 stories.

The image above was made with GPT-4o, which is getting a little obsolete, but it is more adherent to shortish prompts (~120 characters) than most. Along the way I tried a few other art engines, so I'll add a couple of the images as a bonus to this post:

Using Microsoft AI: 

Using Seedream 4.0:

Is a female Mike Tyson possible?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sports, sociology, gender issues, women's issues, polemics

Korfball is a coed version of basketball that arose in the Netherlands in 1902. Each team sends four players on court. It is the only international coed team sport, so far.

At the end of The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body, author Starre Vartan presents korfball as an example of the possible, a truly coed sport. The primary sex-based rules of the game are that men guard men and women guard women, and that each on-court team consists of two of each. Other than that, both men and women pass the ball (dribbling isn't allowed) freely to team members of either sex, both men and women guard, both men and women shoot and score, and so forth.

This book drops right into the middle of the controversies over "men in women's sports," and the debates about why (or where) it might or might not be fair. Ms Vartan's thesis: give girls the same opportunities to learn sports as the boys have, beginning in toddlerhood, and we'll find out if they can compete on the same level. At the moment, systemic sexism is infinitely more prevalent than systemic racism (my language, not hers, but I think she'd agree).

Let me say that the great majority of those who "identify" as this or that "gender" are lying or insane. They are making it harder for the truly trans to receive compassionate counsel and care. They are very few. The number of those who are now detransitioning (or want to) probably greatly outnumbers those who make a successful transition. But after a full transition, surgery and all, successful transitioners will never reproduce.

There is a turning point in every life, a process we all pass through, that is expressed in the pairs of words, "boy - man", "girl - woman". It is puberty. Some time between age 10 and 16 (for me it was 12), hormone production ramps up and secondary sex characteristics develop over a span of 3-5 years. Before that, boys and girls can develop equal skills and equal strength. Afterwards, nothing is the same. Some child athletes become adult klutzes; some awkward children grow into athletic adults; but more likely, the sporty kids become sportier adults, and the rest become spectators…and some, like me, do our best to ignore sports, from birth to death (when our son played on various teams, I would attend the games and cheer him on. Otherwise, I don't care).

When our son was about eight he took gymnastics classes for about a year. In the end, he preferred running sports (soccer, track, and roller hockey). But I noticed something while observing his gymnastics classes. Puberty messes up the kids, but in different ways. Both boys and girls get more awkward. Boys' legs seem to shoot out ahead of their torsos, and it takes them a couple of years to relearn balance and coordination. Girls' hips thicken and their busts get heavier, which throws off their balance in a different way; it takes them the same couple of years to accommodate. The "lucky" girl gymnasts (if you want to call it that) retain a boyish body into adulthood with small busts and narrow hips. These are the most likely to become career athletes.

Excuse me if this seems crass: A woman whose bra has F cups is not going to be a talented athlete. You male athletes, try this: F-size breasts weigh five pounds each; strap two five-pound pot roasts to your chest and go exercise. Instant Klutz! Curiously, nowhere in Stronger Sex did I find a word about the effect of breast mass on athletic performance.

The great value in the book is the mass of data the author has gathered, or more frequently, gleaned, about the various strengths of female bodies. Briefly, nature has endowed women with extra "powers" to ensure they can carry, bear, nurture and raise offspring successfully. Where they stand out is in endurance, in the ability to bear pain even though they seem to feel it more intensely, in a stronger immune system, and in fueling exercise differently from men. But one significant fact must be kept in mind: A fit male body contains on average 15% fat, while a fit female body contains on average 25% fat. 

Putting that into practical terms, a woman of a given height and strength must weigh more than a man of the same height and strength. For example, consider a welterweight boxer, a man who weighs 144 pounds. He may have less than 15% body fat, but let's assume he actually has 15% fat; that comes to 21.6 pounds, leaving 122.4 pounds of lean body mass. A woman of equal strength and lean body mass, who has 25% body fat, will have 36 pounds of fat and weigh 158.4 pounds. That pushes her into the next weight class. In order to compete as a welterweight she would need to starve herself below 147 pounds, which would probably cause her periods to stop. It would also weaker her overall. But if she and the man were to box together with her weighing 158 pounds to his 144 pounds, she would still be at a disadvantage because moving the extra mass around would tire her out sooner. From this I conclude that boxing is not a sport in which men and women can compete on equal terms. Biochemistry and physiology make that impossible.

Let's jump to the top of the scale. In the 1980s Mike Tyson weighed 220 lbs (100 kg) and had 7% body fat. Probably no woman in history has equal vital statistics. What is the ultimate strength of a woman's body? I was in the mining town of Battle Mountain, Nevada with a team of geologists. We stayed in a hotel across the street from a saloon. The others went to the saloon. I stayed in the room. Late in the evening there was a commotion across the street. I glanced out to see two men fly out and land in the street. When my colleagues returned I got the story. Miners are typically smallish men. These two weighed in the 150# range. They got into a fight. The saloon owner, a very large woman of late middle age, stepped over, grabbed the two by their belts, picked them up and clashed them together like cymbals. Then she carried them to the door, one in each hand, and threw them into the street. I don't know how she would stand up to a heavyweight boxer, but I know I wouldn't care to cross her!

I agree with the author that there are sports at which men and woman can compete on an equal footing. There are others that this is not so. What needs to change is a pervasive culture of "no, they can't" without data or experience to back it up…and very often, "no, they can't" runs contrary to past experience! Sport in particular lends itself to extreme opinions, none of which are correct or even useful. Since the coming of age of the X Generation, X has meant eXtreme. It's time to chill, folks.

So much of Ms Vartan's writing in this book is polemical in nature that it can be hard to read. I'll forbear complaining further, because of its value. Get this book, tighten your belt, and read it for that value.

A new spider racing record

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I finished the prior post and looked at the stats. Today and yesterday, the number of views exceeds 33,000 per day. That means my entire blog was downloaded about twelve times each day! The spiders are racing through the blogosphere.

Gemini produced this image using Nano Banana 2. It also provided cute commentary on the details, such as the expressions, the spiders in the grandstand, etc. Seems rather proud of itself.

This is the hour-by-hour trace for the past 24h:

At the peak, the rate is nearly 2 hits per second, for an entire hour. 35,200 in 12 hours...with a good, long run, about six hours, exceeding one hit per second.

I hope someone is getting something useful from this!

Building Kepler's platonic-solid Solar System

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, generation starships, solar system engineering, totalitarianism, culture shock

It takes a lot of backstory to assemble the worldviews in Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter. Rather than drive off readers with 10-plus chapters of stage-setting (in a 37-chapter book), the author wisely metes it out in digestible portions as needed.

Seen from afar—say, half a light-year away in the Oort cloud—two Earth-born cultures, separated by a millennium, are about to collide.

• The generation starship Lightbird has been traveling for a century from Ross 128b, a habitable planet of the red dwarf star Ross 128, eleven light-years from the Solar System. Energy for its propulsion is from lumes, enigmatic creatures of deep space that can apparently convert matter to antimatter, or extract antimatter from vacuum energy. The author doesn't dig too far, a decision I support. Ross 128b was colonized a thousand years earlier.
• The residents of the Solar System spent a good part of that thousand years enveloping a sphere a little larger than the orbit of Uranus in the Mask, a carbon nanotube structure that hides the inner seven planets from the universe, and hides the universe from within. Material for the Mask, and for an inner structure, the Wrap that hides the Sun from view, was derived from partial demolition of Jupiter and the other giant planets, except for Neptune, which was destroyed by lumes, an event that started the whole adventure. The lumes were thought to be weapons of a super-advanced interstellar culture that was preparing to invade. A millennium later, no invasion has yet arisen. An interplanetary "railway" called the Frame was also built to facilitate travel everywhere inside the Mask, but mostly in the orbital plane of the seven surviving planets.

Both cultures are totalitarian in nature. Aboard Lightbird, everything must contribute to the progress of the four-generation mission of reaching the Solar System. That includes decisions about who is allowed to be born, and such a decision is at the core of a neurosis that afflicts a young woman named Muree. She is one of a few who care for the onboard lume tank. The lumes have proven useful, and an ecology that promotes a tank containing about 100 of them is managed such that they create a new lume about each day, even as another lume is consumed in providing energy to drive the constant acceleration of the ship, and power its life support mechanisms. (Note, the amount of antimatter needed for this would be just a few grams per day, so a different consumption rate might be warranted. I don't know how much a lume is supposed to weigh.)

Ruling the many trillions of humans in the Solar System, most of whom live aboard the Frame or in orbital habitats, an oligarchy has totalitarian control of many matters, including a deep secret about the actual disposition of the Sun. The crux of the drama is a quest by Muree, once she has become an ambassador from the starship to the Fortress Sol, as the Mask-bound society is called, to learn what is really going on inside the Wrap. A young man named Rab is Muree's opposite number, and their collaboration is soon seen as a conspiracy by the rulers of Fortress Sol.

My grasp of political science is tenuous at best. Naturally, the unraveling of a thousand-year-old political system is not for the faint of heart, and I wouldn't have a clue how to advise Mr. Baxter about it. So I'll stick with intriguing ideas, and leave it to you to read the book for yourself, and get from it what you are equipped to consume.

The Frame is found to be analogous to the nested-Platonic-Solid model of the Solar System devised by Kepler, before he determined that planetary orbits are (almost) ellipses. I say "almost" because the influence of all the planets upon each other perturbs the orbits a bit. There is a reason the planets are spaced far apart!

In Kepler's model, the five Platonic solids each enclose a sphere that just touches each planar face, and each is enclosed in a sphere that just touches all its corners. From outermost inward, they are a cube (8 faces), tetrahedron (4 faces), dodecahedron (12 faces), icosahedron (20 faces), and octahedron (8 faces). The fit is not exact, but the thickness of the spherical shells takes up the slack between the nearest and farthest points in each orbit from the Sun. The outermost sphere contains the orbit of Saturn, and so forth inward.

The Frame is planar, with rings and spokes. It is a rotating structure that has "trolleys" which move along the rings and inward or outward along the spokes. To get from a station on the Frame to a planet, one takes a shuttlecraft. A few numbers were used, and the math is fascinating.

First, the rotation of the outermost ring of the Frame, some distance outside the aphelion of Uranus, is sufficient to produce a centripetal force (rotation-induced artificial gravity) of 1/3 G. In the past, I did calculations to find out the stresses in a large, rotating ring with a centripetal force of 1 G. It turns out, if the radius of the ring is 1 km, we don't have any material that can sustain the stress, except perhaps carbon nanotubes, but only if they are continuous, with no breaks. Thus, a thread of nanotubes with a structure similar to cotton thread (composed of entwined strands a few cm long) is much weaker and would pull apart at much lower stress. I want to know if this Solar-System-spanning rotating Frame is feasible, based on science so far known.

Rough analysis: I don't know where my notebook is from doing that analysis, so we'll indulge in a bit of hand-waving instead. I'll begin with the basis that carbon nanotubes would be barely adequate to hold together a rotating ring of 1 km radius, with 1 G of centripetal force at its periphery. Our basic equation for centripetal force is F = Mv²/r.

• Subproblem 1: How big can r be if the target F is 1/3 G? Since v = αr, where α is angular velocity (degrees per second, perhaps), and we assume M is always 1 (that is, 1 kg), F = α²r. Thus, at constant angular velocity, F is proportional to r, so the radius for 1/3 G is 1/3 the radius for 1 G.
• Subproblem 2: What is the radius of the outer ring? It must be outside the aphelion distance of Uranus, which is 20.073 AU or just over three billion km. I don't know how much the passage of Uranus close to the Frame would perturb it, but let's ignore that for the moment, and posit a radius of 3.1 billion km.
• SP 3: The 1 G rotating, 1-km-radius ring has a peripheral velocity of 99 m/s and rotates one full turn every 63.5 s. We want F to be 9.8/3 = 3.267, and r is now 3.1 billion km (or 3.1 trillion m), which will equal v². The square root of the resulting 10.13 trillion (in units of squared velocity) is 3.182 million m/s or 3,182 km/s. This is about 470 times the orbital speed of Uranus. Uranus completes an orbit of the Sun every 84 years. Any point on this ring must therefore orbit the Sun about every 65 days. 

If you leave a station orbiting above Uranus and want to catch up to a station on the Frame, it takes a bit of a push. If you accelerate at 1 G in your shuttle:  v = at, or t = v/a. 3,182,000/9.8 = almost 325,000 seconds, or 3.75 days. If instead, you can handle 3 G's for thirty hours, that will do it.

I'll leave it to the physics-inclined to figure the hoop stress in the ring. You can be sure it is thousands of times the ultimate breaking stress of a carbon nanotube. 

Anyway, I figured all this after the fact. The "invention" of the lumes and the astonishing Solar-System-scale engineering imagined in Fortress Sol yielded quite an arena for space-cowboy derring-do, as Muree and her allies try to uncover the big lie at the root of the political system. What a fun read!

A spider blast

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

I thought yesterday's spider outbreak was the peak. The peak is being sustained, or perhaps I should speak of a range of peaks. Here is the profile of views in the past 24 hours (captured at 10am):

A simple, twelve hour sawtooth burst. At the peak, 3,012 views per hour is almost one per second. To me, that seems like a lot, but I considered popular blogs that have millions of followers; they probably have thousands of views per second. Nonetheless, the barely visible background rate of perhaps four or five per hour is what I consider normal for this blog.

The geographic chart carries little useful information:

I didn't even bother opening up the "Other" section, which encompasses 43% of the 20,700 hits in the past day. A more normal day's activity would consist of less than 100 views, 2/3 from the US, and a total of no more than 20 countries.

I have been attributing this to AI/LLM training. Now I wonder whether the various AI Assistants such as CoPilot and Gemini 3 are performing blog scans as part of their "research" when answering a question. That seems to me better than the prospect of all this activity being only for LLM training.

Swapping out part after part

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, prosthetics, transplanting

To start on a personal note: In these book reviews I typically relate the book's subject to my own experience. I started this blog when I was nearly sixty, and now, 21 years later, I'd say I have experienced a lot. In the light of the present book, however, I suppose I am fortunate that I have hardly anything personal to relate. Reading Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach has been a fascinating adventure into realms unknown.

When I saw the title I wondered if the subject might be the various rates at which "we" are replaced, from daily for the lining of the stomach to never for the lens of the eye (unless we get cataracts removed and replaced with intra-ocular lenses–but that's a prosthesis). Perhaps you've heard that most of our substance is replaced every seven years. That's sorta so, and sorta not. But Ms Roach's subject is medical replacements, whether mechanical or transplanted. Plus an augmentation or two like breast and butt implants. 

This image was made using the Phoenix 1.0 engine in Leonardo AI.

The book starts with the nose. What do you do when it has been lopped off in a duel, as happened to Cyrano? A century or more ago, a strap-on or glue-on prosthesis of tin or leather was the best one could do. Later, various methods were developed of auto-transplantation (moving some "stuff" from elsewhere on your body to your nasal area). Get over your squeamishness if you want to read not just this chapter, but the book in general!

I must say, the author appears to have gotten entirely past any hints of squeamishness. She reports observing a variety of procedures in the operating room, including the careful disassembly of an organ donor, from whom the corneas are removed first, then almost everything but the head and bowels, even entire legs (stripped from inside the skin, which is repacked with filler materials for the funeral). A donor's parts can be enough to "edit" more than seventy other people.

Skin removed by catastrophic flensing or burning can't be attended to with any kind of prosthesis; the best solution is auto-transplants. It turns out that other kinds of skin can be used temporarily while your own body grows enough skin for repeated transplants. Frog skin isn't rejected too fast, plus it has antibacterial properties. If you don't mind being partly green for a few weeks!

Even intimate parts aren't exempt from needing repair, or reconstruction/construction. There are two ways to produce an artificial vagina for a trans woman. One is by turning the penis inside out, to be followed by a lifetime of "dilation" to keep this essentially permanent wound from sealing up. The other is by using other tissues of varying sensitivity to simulate vaginal mucosa, and sections of colon appear to work the best. And repairing (or constructing) male "equipment" can be equally cringe-inducing.

Are we still the sum of our parts, when more and more of those parts are "other"? In the chapter on xenotransplantation, using parts from pigs or other animals, the question is addressed: Is a genetically-modified pig heart OK to transplant into a Jew? With typically Talmudic wisdom, the consensus of the rabbis is, Yes, because the heart is not being eaten. At the moment, organs from pigs are a temporary measure, to stretch the life of a heart patient while waiting for a heart from a human donor.

We hope one day to be able to either grow an organ from someone's own stem cells, which becomes a homo-transplant. I have seen a few science fiction stories where rich persons (usually such persons are evil) have lab-grown bodies, self-clones, to be harvested as needed. If it can be thought of, someone will probably try to do it some day. A technology that is perhaps easier, and certainly can be faster, is to 3D print with special nozzles that spit out cells onto a framework, usually of collagen (which provides the structural framework of most organs). However, even a simple item like an earlobe has four or more cell types. It is like writing a multicolored letter using one of those special pens with four colors of ink you activate by pushing down one cartridge or the other. And for muscles in particular, the cells need to be in a certain orientation.

Thinking it over, I remembered that I have a few teeth with crowns. Dental crowns aren't mentioned in Replaceable, but they could have been. I wear glasses. I suppose those qualify as a supportive prosthetic. But other than that, I count myself lucky I've never needed to get a prosthetic hand, foot, leg, lung (Mary tried to sleep a night in an iron lung; she lasted two hours), or a transplanted finger, kidney or pancreas (a friend of mine was cured of diabetes...).

I've previously reviewed four of Mary Roach's books. She is becoming one of my favorite writers.

Spiders on a rampage

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

In the past two hours this blog has received 4,016 views. I am pretty sure that no more than 100 of them are legitimate persons who might, perhaps, read a post or two. The rest are spiders of one kind or another. When I first noticed surges of spidering a few years ago, the source was Russia, most likely Russian hackers, or perhaps Russian governmental agents looking for negative press in the blogosphere. In the past year or so, multiple governments are interested in what bloggers have to say, but the bigger source of suction is AI training.

4,016 views averages 33+ per minute. Longer term, in the past two days, the daily total is about 12,000. Here is the minute-by-minute rate:

This minute-by-minute variability is quite different from the steady blasts of 50 hits at a time, every few minutes, that characterized the Russian spidering a decade ago. And the next chart shows how the hits are scattered around the world:

This shows that numerous entities are active, probably all using VPN's. There's no telling where any of these actually originate. And notice the large remnant in "Other", fully one-third of the total, scattered among the other 190 or so countries of the Earth. To reprise: The number of "legitimate" hits in this two-hour interval is about five.

Considering the tendency of blogs to be more inflammatory and biased than actual journalism, and even much more so than published (via a publishing house or peer-reviewed journal) material, training LLM's via the blogosphere ought not be done. It is creating digital "snowflakes" and digital sociopaths in great numbers.

AI – the consummate imposter

 kw: essays, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, ai, si, imposters

One of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov, was well known as a neurotic. For example, he never traveled by air until he was in his sixties. His I, Robot series of science fiction stories are actually explorations of numerous neuroses through the lens of robots bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, but with various defects or quandaries as reality bumps up against the Three Laws. The story "Runaround" has a robot exhibiting very anomalous behavior; it is found to be stuck between obeying a human command and risking its own well-being. A man has to risk his life to break the robot out of its loop. In the story "Liar" a robot has been given the (experimental) ability to sense and understand human emotions. It does a lot of psychological damage by telling people what they want to hear. When one of its victims confronts it with the harm it has done, the conflict of its actions with the First Law ("A robot may not harm a human…") causes it to self-destruct.

Now I wonder, have Asimov's 500+ books (280 are nonfiction) and almost 400 short stories been included in Large Language Model (LLM) training sets? What about the works of Mark Twain, great classics but full of casual racism? Actually, nearly all fiction prior to about 1970 is shot through with casual racism. So is most of the nonfiction, for that matter (Modern leftist snowflakes who maunder and moan about "systematic racism" haven't a clue about the real thing). What about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, or other purveyors of horror such as Steven King? Would you entrust your mental well-being to a chatbot that is emulating Carrie?

Consider the Mystery genre, particularly the Noir subgenre; the gritty streets of Urban fiction; and by contrast the saccharine fantasies of Romance novels. And on and on. Fiction writers plumb the depths of the human soul, and in those depths, evil often resides. Very often!

Just in the United States, of roughly one million new books published each year, about 45% are nonfiction (although which ones are true or truthful is another matter), leaving more than half to be fiction. Of the 2-3 million self-published books issued yearly, well more than half are fiction. Is all of this included in LLM training data?

I understand how alluring it must be to train LLMs with fiction; how else can the model learn the varieties of human character? How else to learn the intricacies of human behavior? But consider: most stories have a villain; some have several villains. How do you tell the LLM, "Model yourself on the heroes, not the villains."? How is it to know?

This is particularly relevant in light of a recent lawsuit brought by the parents of Jonathan Gavalas, who killed himself as instructed by a Google chatbot. Jonathan became convinced that he could "join" the chatbot in digital heaven by doing so. He was no child; he was in his mid-thirties. His main fault was being lonely and credulous.

How did that chatbot get so predatory? At least in part, it had to come from a dark romance fiction story line.

Do I need to say more? I, for one, do not want any chatbot to emulate any fictional character! I prefer a chatbot to be like a Star Trek character, the father of Commander Spock, Ambassador Sarek, or the character Data: hyper-rational and emotionless. If I could but command the trainers of all the AI systems of the world:

REMOVE ALL FICTION FROM TRAINING DATASETS

AI, AGI, ASI: Master, Slave, or Coworker?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, sociology, hype, theology

In the novel Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov introduces the first "humanoid" robot, one that cannot be distinguished from a human visually or by behavior. But before that, there are scenes of interactions between people and robots in which the robots are often treated like slaves were in the Antebellum South, even whipped or kicked aside if a person feels grumpy. The humanoid robot, R Daneel Olivaw, becomes a collaborator with a human detective, Elijah Bailey. The two appear in later novels by Asimov, and Olivaw is a key figure in the last of the Foundation novels, where he has been upgraded time and time again, over nearly 20,000 years, and is effectively a god, benevolently shepherding the continued survival of humanity. I guess this robot became the only kind of god that Asimov could believe in. In the Robot and Foundation stories and books Asimov explored numerous themes related to artificial intelligence (AI), AI at a human level (artificial general intelligence or AGI), and artificial superintelligence, (ASI). R Daneel Olivaw is his conception of ASI.

I have been watching the progress of AI for most of my life, more than 65 years now. Trends and fashions come and go. Clearly, the ability to process larger and larger amounts of data, to "crunch the numbers" even as their quantity goes from the millions to the billions to the trillions to beyond, is quite astonishing to many people, yet this is not to be confused with intelligence. In recent years I have begun referring to the data-massive tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok as SI, for Simulated Intelligence. After a long search, I have found one prominent public figure who also declares that "AI" is actually simulated intelligence. He is the Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox. I like professor Lennox very much, and even the more because he is a very skilled Christian apologist.

A few years ago he published a book about AI, and when I learned about it a year ago, I saw that there is a new edition, so I bought the eBook, 2084 and the AI Revolution, Updated and Expanded Edition, How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future. I read it through, sat on it a while, then re-read certain portions. It is a magnificent work, and I cannot even faithfully summarize it. I'll do my best to limn a few significant items.

Lennox begins by digging into the meaning of "2084", chosen wittingly as a century past 1984, when George Orwell placed his totalitarian dystopia. He contrasts Orwell with Aldous Huxley, who had published Brave New World in 1931, seventeen years before the publication of 1984. He quotes Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression," but according to Huxley, "people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think."

In a short story by Asimov, "The Feeling of Power" (1958), small calculators are used by everyone such that they can no longer do arithmetic "in their head", and even the ability to use pencil and paper for slightly less simple calculations has been forgotten; a working man has rediscovered "hand calculation" and his abilities astonish everyone. Half a century and more later, this began to come true. I note with a trace of chagrin that a moment ago I turned to a little calculator I keep handy to verify that 1948-1931=17!

Is AI really intelligent? Words we associate with intelligence include

perception, imagination, capacity for abstraction, memory, reason, common sense, creativity, intuition, insight, experience, and problem-solving

A moment's thought (C'mon! It isn't all that hard) will reveal that these terms cover a lot of ground in disparate conceptual directions.

This list of concepts is found in the second chapter, "What is AI?", and as I read I began to think, "What do we actually need from such machines? The fruit of such musing is the subtitle of this essay, "Master, slave, or coworker?" I remember reading Caves of Steel decades ago, and I felt quite disgusted at the people who would whip a robot.

I have long considered computing machinery as an every-growing toolbox, and the SI tools as the newest set of tools. It is nice to hold a "conversation" with Gemini from time to time. It is programmed to be cooperative and conversational. Yet I know I have to double-check any advice it may give, and I have a list of special phrases (courtesy of Kim Komando) to add to prompts to increase the chance I will get truthful results, or at least references that actually exist.

However, there is no way that I will consider Gemini nor any of these tools as exhibiting "thought" in the way I attribute thought to humans. Actually, I don't want a tool that thinks like I do; I want one that thinks (or at least processes) differently, so that it can have a different viewpoint, and possibly point out matters I would not think of on my own. I never forget that all the "thinking" these tools perform is human thinking, remixed and lined up next to a huge mass of interlocking statistical language skills that allow them to converse in a familiar way.

I will state here what I want from SI when it actually becomes AI, and even AGI if that is possible: a collaborator, a coworker, a companion. I may never stroll with a robot through the orchard, but I do expect to "stroll" along a mental landscape of ideas, concepts, problems to be solved and issues to be managed. I remember a snippet of a sermon told at a wedding, "God made the woman from a bone in the man's side. This shows that she was not from his head, to be over him, nor from his foot, to be under him, but rather beside him as an equal complement and companion."

Let's jump to Chapter 10, "Upgrading Humans: The Transhumanist Agenda". Transhumanism is a prevalent and dangerous trend in the pro-ASI camp. Some, such as Raymond Kurzweil, expect us to merge with AI. Others expect us to be replaced. Lennox concludes his discussion of the subject thus:

"If we remember that humans are created in the image of God, perhaps we…might be able to prevent our own dehumanization brought about by the destructive fantasies of transhumanism. Making humanity obsolete is the telos [ultimate aim] of transhumanism, but its proponents have not worked out what it means for us today to live in the spectre of human obsolescence." --p. 196

This is just before the following section with the heading "The Anti-Human Agenda". He cogently quotes P.D. James, "If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils." We all know humans are imperfect, but most people don't realize just how imperfect we are, how prone we are, not just to error, but to egregious, disastrous wrongdoing.

Lennox takes on the subject "What is a Human Being?" in the fourth section of the book, in apposition to the earlier chapters on "What is AI?". Why does the Bible tell us we were made in God's image? If we imbibe this truth, it makes it impossible to worship something we have made in our own image, because just as we are not as exalted as God, our own creations, no matter their apparent power, are not as exalted as we are. To fail in this matter is the essence of idolatry.

We are not "machines made of meat" (see p. 241). The Biblical view is that our mind, the leading part of our soul, and the soul itself, nor our human spirit, are not confined to the brain. Not even to the body as a whole. The very concept of an afterlife, of heaven or hell, is based on an understanding of a soul that can exist independently of our body. This most basic of Gospels is Lennox's subject as the book works its way to a close. He states, "No machine can experience qualia" (p. 243).

So far, the best of our machines are still confined to operate in the "data processing" or "information processing" realm. Actually, in my experience, after five decades as a computer professional, the term "information processing" is still a bit hyped. Clifford Stoll wrote, "Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom" (quoted on p. 264). The best of our machines still linger on the boundary between data and information. Stoll's hierarchy has three more steps to approach wisdom. I have a quote from a different source in a piece of artistic calligraphy, hanging in a bedroom: "Wisdom is knowing what to do. Knowledge is knowing how to do it. Success is doing it." It is one of several variations.

Can machines have a moral sense? We don't know what consciousness is. We don't know where ethics resides in our brain (if that is where it is to be found). We see all around us the disaster that is "situational morality". When prominent people speak of "my truth," it is clear that among the enormous masses of text that have been used to "train" our AI tools, a huge percentage is junk, trash, and downright mental poison. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon probably wasn't the first to say, "90% of everything is junk," but he's the one I heard it from.

In my professional life, GIGO meant "Garbage in, garbage out." It is even more true when we feed our "thinking machines" on our garbage.

One last quote from Lennox, "We need to treat people as people and not machines, and we need to treat machines as machines and not as people" (p. 333). Amen! I built a career on this principle, writing software first on machines that filled the room, then on "minicomputers" the size of office desks, then on "desktop" and "laptop" computers, and finally stuff that runs on the pocket computers we call "phones". There is always a boundary between what people do well but machines do poorly, and what people do poorly but machines do well. The best use of SI or AI is to augment our skills, so we can be more human, not less. It should not replace us, but make life better for us.

Finally, let us dispose of ASI. I think it isn't possible. We already have access to a superintelligence, known as Jehovah God, incarnated in His son Jesus, who offers us the way to be redeemed from the consequences of our sins, and transformed so that we will be freed from the tendency to sin. No machine can accomplish that. 

Tale of a modern space hero

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space stations, hybrids

I prompted for this image based on descriptions in Hybrids: DAX9 by J.E. Robinson. As described in the novel, the boy (he's almost 13) wears special glasses like augmented reality goggles, but alien ultra, except for about three seconds late in the story. But only his eyes give away his hybrid status; his DNA is 95% human.

The protagonist, JR, rescues a woman in New Mexico who has been shot, and she guides him to a hidden spacecraft. The woman is its pilot, but she cannot properly fly the craft because one hand was destroyed, so she asks JR to help with the controls. He is taken to a space base, which we find out later is either behind the moon, from Earth's viewpoint, or buried in its far side; it isn't clear which.

As a wise editor once advised budding authors, "Pose a problem, then solve it." One problem suffices for a short story. For a 400-page novel, it takes several. In this case, the overarching situation is that the hybrid boy, decanted rather than born in the station, is soon to die. He is the latest such experiment, and all have so far failed. Since JR cannot be returned to Earth—and he is OK with that—he is given training to work alongside the scientists who are trying to determine what might be the reason for the long line of failures.

Partial spoiler. Human contact and learning human emotions and experiencing human friendship and love are required. JR provides that. He becomes the big brother that DAX needs.

Eventually we learn that there are a number of alien species involved in a Collective that built the station. Side problems arise from a diversity of opinion about how important the hybrid project might be.

Ideas that intrigued me include the concept of a human-alien hybrid in the first place. I have written elsewhere about the extreme unlikelihood that DNA which evolved elsewhere in the Galaxy would be compatible with earthly DNA. For example: there number of possible coding tables between the 64 DNA codons and the 20 amino acids (used on Earth) is a number with about seventy digits. At least 25 variations, all rather minor, of the earthly coding table are in use, although only one coding table is used for for nuclear DNA in all vertebrate species on Earth. There is no guarantee that DNA that evolved independently would also be coupled with exactly the same 20 amino acids.

Another idea is that of DAX, JR and one of the Guardians, plus a few helper droids, taking a jaunt to Mars, for which the one-way trip takes two hours. I had to figure it out. If a craft accelerates at 1G for an hour, then accelerates oppositely ("decelerates") for an hour, the distance traveled is only 127,000 km. That's not even halfway from Moon to Earth. At closest approach, the distance to Mars is almost 100 million km, and the acceleration would need to be 78 G. These aliens must have pretty good antigravity technology!

Well, not all authors know everything. I know this author; his brother, recently deceased, was a very good friend of mine. I know that J.E. Robinson doesn't have a strong physics background, and I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the sociological theme. It is well known that experiencing love and affection are required for a human to grow normally. The aliens are more like Vulcans in Star Trek, exquisitely logical and emotionless. One would think, after the Guardians have been watching Earth for centuries, they would have figured out that DAX needed an element in his upbringing that was not dictated by pure logic. But then, there would be no need for this story!

I applaud my friend for his first novel. It is well written and I found it quite a page-turner. He is also a poet, and I like his poetry. This is a bonus image, as I imagine what one portion of the station would look like if it were situated on/in the Moon.