Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Oct 27 2023

AI As Legal Entities

Published by under Technology

Should an artificial intelligence (AI) be treated like a legal “subject” or agent? That is the question discussed in a new paper by legal scholars. They recognize that this question is a bit ahead of the technology, but argue that we should work out the legal ramifications before it’s absolutely necessary. They also argue – it might become necessary sooner than we think.

One of their primary arguments is that it is technically possible for this to happen today. In the US a corporation can be considered a legal agent, or “artificial persons”, within the legal system. Corporations can have rights, because corporations are composed of people exerting their collective will. But, in some states it is not explicitly required that a corporation be headed by a human. You could, theoretically, run a corporation entirely by an AI. That AI would then have the legal rights of an artificial person, just like any other corporation. At least that’s the idea – one that can use discussion and perhaps require new legislation to deal with.

This legal conundrum, they argue, will only get greater as AI advances. We don’t even need to fully resolve the issue of narrow AI vs general AI for this to be a problem. An AI does not have to be truly sentient to behave in such a way that it creates both legal and ethical implications. They argue:

Rather than attempt to ban development of powerful AI, wrapping of AI in legal form could reduce undesired AI behavior by defining targets for legal action and by providing a research agenda to improve AI governance, by embedding law into AI agents, and by training AI compliance agents.

Basically we need a well thought-out legal framework to deal with increasingly sophisticated and powerful AIs, to make sure they can be properly controlled and regulated. It’s hard to argue with that.

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Oct 26 2023

Tandem Perovskite Silicon Solar Panels Are Coming

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It’s pretty clear that we are at an inflection point with adoption of solar power. For the last 18 years in a row, solar PV electricity capacity has increased more (as a percentage increase) than any power source. Solar now accounts for 4.5% of global power generation. Wind generation is at 7.5%, which means wind and solar combined are at 12%. By comparison nuclear is at about 10% generation globally.

Solar PV is currently the cheapest power capacity to add to the grid. Extrapolating gets more complicated as solar penetration increases because we increasingly need to consider the costs of upgrading electrical grids and adding grid storage. But wind and solar still have a long way to go. Adopting these renewable energy source as quickly as possible is helped by technological improvements that make their installation and maintenance less expensive (and material and power hungry) and increase their efficiency. Part of the reason for the steep curves of wind and solar adoption is the fact that these technologies have been steadily improving.

There are numerous research programs looking at various methods for improving on the current silicon PV cells which dominate the market. The current range of energy conversion efficiencies for the top silicon solar cells on the market range from 18.7%–22.8%. Those are great numbers – when I started following the PV solar cell industry closely in the aughts efficiencies were around 15%. The theoretical upper limit for silicon is about 29%, so the technology has some head room. Increased efficiency, of course, means more energy per dollar invested, and fewer panels needed on any specific install.

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Oct 20 2023

The Hardware Demands of AI

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I am of the generation that essentially lived through the introduction and evolution of the personal computer. I have decades of experience as an active user and enthusiast, so I have been able to notice some patterns. One pattern is the relationship between the power of computing hardware and the demands of computing software. For the first couple of decades of personal computers, the capacity and speed of the hardware was definitely the limiting factor in terms of the end-user experience. Software was essentially fit into the available hardware, and as hardware continually improved, software power expanded to fill the available space. The same was true for hard drive capacity – each new drive seemed like a bottomless pit at first, but quickly file size increased to take advantage of the new capacity.

During these days my friends and I would intimately know every stat of our current hardware – RAM, hard drive capacity, processor speed, then the number of cores – and we engaged in a friendly arms race as we perpetually leap-frogged each other. The pattern shifted, however, sometime after 2000. For personal computers, hardware power seemed to finally get to the point where it was way more than enough for anything we might want to do. We stopped obsessing with things like processor speed – except, that is, for our gaming computer. Video games were the only everyday application that really stressed the power of our hardware. Suddenly, the stats of your graphics card became the most important stat.

That is beginning to wane also. I know there are gaming jockeys who still build sick rigs, pushing the limits of consumer computing, but for me, as long as my computer is basically up to date, I don’t have to worry about running the latest game. I still pay attention to my gaming card stats, however, especially when VR became a thing. There is always some new application that makes you want a hardware upgrade.

Today that new thing is artificial intelligence (AI), although this is not so much for the consumer as the big data centers. The latest crop of AI, like Chat GPT, which uses pretrained transformer technology, is hardware hungry. Interestingly, they mostly rely on graphics cards, which are the fastest mass-produced processors out there. The same is true for crypto mining, which led to a shortage of graphics cards and a spike in the price (damn crypto miners). Video games really are an important driver of computing hardware.

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Oct 17 2023

Update on Self-Driving Cars

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The story has become a classic of failed futurism – driverless or self-driving cars were supposed start taking over the roads as early as 2020. But that didn’t happen – it turned that the last 5% of capability was about as difficult to develop as the first 95%. Around 2015 I visited Google and they were excited about the progress they were making with their self-driving car. They told us, clearly proud of their progress, that they used to measure their technology’s performance in terms of interventions per mile – how many times does the human driver have to grab the wheel to keep on the road. But now their metric was miles per intervention. It seemed plausible at the time that we would get to full self-driving capability by 2020. This is common when trying to predict future technology. We tend to overestimate short term progress, mostly because we extrapolate linearly into the future. But problems are often not linear to solve. Initial rapid progress in self-driving technology turned out to be misleading, and it is taking longer to make it over the final hurdle than originally thought (or at least hyped).

Despite not meeting early hype, self-driving technology has continued to progress – so where are we now? The Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE) has developed a system for noting the level of autonomous driving, from L0 to L5. Levels 0-2 require a human driver to be behind the wheel, ready to take control when necessary. These levels are more accurately considered “driver assist” technology, than autonomous or self-driving. Level three can control the steering wheel and brake, can provide lane centering and adaptive cruise control. This level is currently available in Tesla’s and other vehicles.

Level 3 is the first level where the human driver can fully surrender control to the autonomous vehicle, and is not required to pay attention. Level 3 and 4 can fully drive the car but only in limited conditions, whereas level 5 can fully drive the car in all conditions. Right now we are at level 2 and cautiously transitioning to level 3. However, the difference between level 2 and 3 is often a legal rather than a technical one. Even when vehicles might theoretically be capable of level 3, the car manufacturers may not get approval and market them as level 3, because when the vehicle is in full control the manufacturer is legally responsible at that point for whatever happens, not the driver.  Many self-driving cars, therefore, will remain paused at level 2, even as the technology improves, until the manufacturer is confident enough to get level 3 approval. Some market themselves as “level 2+” to reflect this.

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Oct 13 2023

Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers as Fuel

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The press release for a recent study declares: “New catalyst could provide liquid hydrogen fuel of the future.” But don’t get excited – the optimism is more than a bit gratuitous. I have written about hydrogen fuel before, and the reasons I am not optimistic about hydrogen as a fuel for extensive use in transportation. Nothing in the new research changes any of this – most hydrogen production today uses fossil fuels and is worse than just burning the fossil fuel, hydrogen does not have very good energy density, and requires an infrastructure not only for manufacture but storage and transportation. It’s also a very leaky and reactive molecule, so challenging to deal with. It may see a future in some niche applications, but for cars it is progressively losing the competition with battery electric vehicles.

This new study does not alter the basic situation. But it does raise the potential of one way to deal with hydrogen, potentially for one of those niche applications. The biggest challenge for “the coming hydrogen economy” (which never came) is storage. There are basically three choices for storing hydrogen for use in a hydrogen fuel cell. You can cool it to liquid temperatures, you can compress it as a gas, or you can bind it up in some other material.

Hydrogen is the lightest element, and it contains a lot of potential energy, and for those reasons is an excellent fuel. It is the best fuel, arguably, for rockets, because it has the greatest specific energy (energy per mass), and for the rocket equation, energy per mass is everything. We may never do better than pure hydrogen as rocket fuel. Liquid hydrogen has about three times the energy per mass as gasoline. So theoretically it might seem like a good fuel. But – it has only one third the energy density (energy per volume) of gasoline. This is a limiting factor for small mobile applications like cars. Imagine a 50 gallon tank of liquid hydrogen to go as far as a 17 gallon tank of gasoline. Also, liquid hydrogen has to be kept very cold.

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Oct 02 2023

Tong Test for Artificial General Intelligence

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Most readers are probably familiar with the Turing Test – a concept proposed by early computing expert Alan Turing in 1950, and originally called “The Imitation Game”. The original paper is enlightening to read. Turing was not trying to answer the question “can machines think”. He rejected this question as too vague, and instead substituted an operational question which has come to be known as the Turing Test. This involves an evaluator and two subjects who cannot see each other but communicate only by text. The evaluator knows that one of the two subjects is a machine and the other is a human, and they can ask whatever questions they like in order to determine which is which. A machine is considered to have passed the test if it fools a certain threshold of evaluators a percentage of the time.

But Turing did appear to believe that the Turing Test would be a reasonable test of whether or not a computer could think like a human. He systematically addresses a number of potential objections to this conclusion. For example, he quotes Professor Jefferson from a speech from 1949:

“Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.”

Turning then rejects this argument as solipsist – that we can  only know that we ourselves are conscious because we are conscious. As an aside, I disagree with that. People can know that other people are conscious because we all have similar brains. But an artificial intelligence (AI) would be fundamentally different, and the question is – how is the AI creating its output? Turing gives as an example of how his test would be sufficient a sonnet writer defending the creative choices of their own sonnet:

What would Professor Jefferson say if the sonnet-writing machine was able to answer like this in the viva voce? I do not know whether he would regard the machine as “merely artificially signalling” these answers, but if the answers were as satisfactory and sustained as in the above passage I do not think he would describe it as “an easy contrivance.” This phrase is, I think, intended to cover such devices as the inclusion in the machine of a record of someone reading a sonnet, with appropriate switching to turn it on from time to time. In short then, I think that most of those who support the argument from consciousness could be persuaded to abandon it rather than be forced into the solipsist position. They will then probably be willing to accept our test.

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Sep 29 2023

Passive Solar Water Desalination

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I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water:

“We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth and economic development, but of having mismanaged water globally for decades. As the science and evidence show, we now face a systemic crisis that is both local and global.”

Sounds about right. We are not very good at this sort of large-scale management. Everyone just does their thing, oblivious to the big picture, until we have a crisis. Then experts point out the looming crisis which everyone at first ignores. Then we have meetings, summits, and a lot of hand-wringing but next to nothing gets done. Eventually we mostly technology our way out of the problem, but not after significant negative consequences, especially for the world’s poor. The water crisis seems to be following the same playbook.

Now experts are predicting that by 2030 world demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40%. This shortage will affect everyone, including people in wealthy developed nations. So now it’s a real crisis. To be clear, I am not trying to minimize this problem at all. The Commission outlines a seven-point plan for properly and fairly managing the world’s fresh water supply, and it all sound very reasonable. It feels like we are in a phase of human history when we are collectively realizing that billions of people have a global effect on the entire planet, and we need to seriously start transitioning from a local focus on securing resources, to globally managing those limited resources.

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Aug 29 2023

ChatGPT Performs At University Level

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We are still sorting out the strengths and weaknesses of the new crop of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, the poster-child of which is ChatGPT. This is a so-called large language model application using a “generative pre-trained transformer”. Essentially these types of AI are trained on very large sets of data and are able to generate human-sounding text by predicting the most likely next word segment in a sequence. The results are surprisingly good.

There have been a slew of studies seeing how well ChatGPT or a similar AI performs on standardized tests. On any knowledge-based exam, it does very well. ChatGPT has passed the medical board exams, for example, and even many (but not all) subspecialty boards. If the information is out there on the internet, ChatGPT can generate this knowledge.

All of this has teachers in a well-deserved panic. Students can essentially use ChatGPT to write their essays and do their homework. Essays are a bit different than straight-forward knowledge-based exams. They might require analysis and creativity. How would ChatGPT perform at university-level course essay tasks? That was the focus of a recent study. I already gave the answer away in the headline to this blog post – it did very well.

They directly compared the work of students with ChatGPT in 32 different courses, assessed blindly by multiple graders. They found ChatGPT was equal to or superior than the students in 9 of 32 courses. For most of the rest they were with the range of acceptable if outperformed by the students. There were several areas where ChatGPT did not perform well, and these were predictable based on the known weaknesses of the application – mathematics, economics, and coding. ChatGPT is not good at math, so any course work that heavily relied upon math, it faltered. But overall, ChatGPT is performing within the range of university students in terms of completing essay and homework assignments.

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Aug 28 2023

What Policies Affect Climate Change?

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What is the potential for climate change policy to affect climate change? I often discuss, here and on the SGU, the science of climate change, and specifically focus on what we can do about it, mostly by reducing our CO2 emissions. Often I get push back explicitly promoting the position that there is nothing we can really do about, so we should just let technology and economics play themselves out. This is the position of the fossil fuel industry, whose opinion on climate change may vary but always concludes with – do nothing. This may take various forms – climate change isn’t real, climate change won’t be bad, it may be happening but it’s not because of human activity, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway, or whatabout China. The one thing all these positions have in common is the ultimate result – do nothing. It’s almost as if some people are starting with that conclusion and then working backward to whatever justification they can defend at the moment.

But often I get questions that reflect genuine confusion about climate change policy – is there anything “we” can really do? The “we” may be us as individuals, or our country, or the world. I do believe the most important thing we can do as individuals, those of us living in democracies, is to be knowledgeable about climate policy and vote for politicians who support good climate policy. If we don’t make it a priority why should we expect our elected leaders to? In a recent Pew survey, 71% of Americans said they thought that policy to address climate change is either a top or important priority. In the same survey 74% of Amercians support US involvement in international efforts to address climate change.

But what is good climate policy? For most people who raise the issue for me the first thing that comes up is subsidies for electric vehicles, almost as if this one policy is the poster-child for climate change action. But this is arguably the least effective and least important climate policy. Subsidies may have been useful a decade ago to kickstart a new industry, but I think we are past that point. Here are some of the policies that can have a significant, even dramatic effect, on future CO2 release. Continue Reading »

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Aug 21 2023

Gradient Nanostructured Steel

Published by under Technology

Science fiction writers, who have to think deeply about the possible nature of future technology, often invent new sci-fi materials in order to make their future technology seem plausible. They seem to understand the critical role that material science plays in advancing technology. This is why sci-fi is full of fictional materials such as unobtainium, vibranium, adamantium, and carbonite (to name just some of the most famous ones). New materials change the limits of what’s possible. There is only so much that technology can do within the limits of existing materials.

In fact the early stages of human technology are defined by the materials they used, from the stone age to the iron age. Today we live in the steel age, more than 3,000 years after steel production came into existence. There are many advanced materials with different applications, but in many ways steel still defines the limits of our technology. This is why research looking for ways to improve the characteristics of modern steel is still going on. A recent study might be pointing the way to one method of pushing the limits of steel.

Steel is simply an alloy of iron combined with a small percentage of carbon. Carbon atoms bind with the iron atoms to make crystals of steel that are harder and stronger than iron by itself. The properties of steel can be adjusted by the percentage of carbon in the alloy. The properties of the resulting steel can also be altered by alloying other metals with the steel as well- molybdenum, manganese, nickel, chromium, vanadium, silicon, and boron, for example. These can make the steel stronger, tougher, more ductile, heat resistant, or rust resistant.

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